Last updated: May 2026
🔎In this article: Hear from Autura’s Principle Product Strategist, Dennis McGowan, about how and why attending towing and recovery industry events can positively impact your business.
Tow show season starts early in the year, typically with the Florida Tow Show in Orlando, followed closely by the American Towman ShowPlace in Las Vegas. Attendees are made up of different crowds, mostly.
Florida pulls heavily from the east coast, while Vegas draws a large California group along with many from the west. There’s overlap among the regulars who tend to visit the full circuit of towing and recovery industry events every year. Anyone who goes to either or both shows usually finds themselves pointing across the floor going “wait, you’re here too?”
But each show has its own personality. Catching these two events back-to-back is a pretty good way to take the temperature of the industry early in the year.
I’ve been going to industry events for a long time. First as a towing and recovery professional working for an operation and walking the aisles with a notebook and a healthy skepticism toward whoever had the biggest booth. These days, as a Principal Product Strategist on the Autura team, I’m in the exhibitor booth, on the other side of that skepticism. The view is different from each side. The reason to be there isn’t.
Today’s post shares my view on why you should prioritize going to one of these events in the future. Not in the corporate way, where I tell you it’s “valuable” and “high impact” and you nod and book your flight. Instead, I want to give you some tangible reasons to attend.
Reason to Attend #1: The Towing Industry Runs on People.
Towing, recovery, impound, public safety… these are relationship-based businesses. These relationships inform:
- Police rotation
- Long-term municipal contracts (a paper-based relationship)
- Motor club calls that come to you instead of the company across town
I may sound romantic, but this is a practical view. If you’ve been around this industry for any length of time, you’ve seen what happens when relationships erode. A new person takes over procurement at the city and doesn’t know any of the tow operators by name. This can mean they pick the lowest bidder, and twelve months later the response times are abysmal, and someone must fix it. A vendor is bought, the new ownership has never met any of the customers, and within two years the product is something different than what you purchased. Preventing some of these challenges is about forging and nurturing relationships.
A trade show is one of the few places left where you can do this at scale: You spend multiple days in the same building with the people who work in this industry, allowing you to:
- Read a face when you ask someone how the year has been.
- Learn which vendors believe in what they’re selling, and which are just and which are just selling to meet a quota.
- Assess who’s being straight with you and who’s just looking to close a deal.
In person, with real handshakes and the ability to look others in the eye helps you understand more subtle queues and discover things you cannot through virtual or digital interactions. And you can take what you learn back home to your business after the event.
Reason to Attend #2: A Whole-Industry Snapshot in Just a Few Days
When I was an attendee at events like these, I’d sometimes try to do the math on whether going to a towing show was worth it. Two days off the truck, two nights in a hotel, the cost of the flight, the registration fee… for what? A tote bag and some pens?
I never got the math right, though, because I was measuring the wrong things. What shows give you is a snapshot of where the industry is, all at once. At an industry event, you can learn:
- What insurers are nervous about
- What new equipment is selling versus what’s sitting on the floor with no one around it.
- Which states are about to pass new towing and recovery laws, regulations, or policies that may change your week.
- Top operational challenges and what everyone’s frustrated or loving
You can see trends before they become trends, and you spot problems and potential solutions early, too. That’s harder to put a dollar sign to, but every tow business owner or operator who’s been in this industry for multiple years will tell you that the people who keep their heads down and never go anywhere end up a step behind without knowing why.
As an example, when I walked the floor of this year’s Orlando Tow Show, I could feel where the industry’s focus was. Payments. Lien processing. Roadside safety. And any solution that integrates these elements.
And surprise, surprise, I heard these same topics discussed at the Vegas Tow Show just a few weeks later. That’s part of what makes back-to-back shows useful: you hear the same question asked five different ways, by five different people, and you start to understand what the actual question is.
Reason to Attend #3: Unscheduled, Invaluable Conversations
The most useful part of the show for me are the conversations that don’t always happen on the show floor. I find the ones that matter most are typically ones that happen naturally and sporadically.
Someone wanders up, looking unsure if they’re in the right place, and ask a question that’s a little too specific to be small talk. You realize they’ve been trying to solve the problem they’re asking about for six months. They’re not going to email you about it. They’re not going to fill out a form on your website. But they’ll tell you in person, in two minutes, exactly what’s broken and exactly how it’s costing them.
I think about those conversations all the time when I’m back at my desk. They shape what we build.
If you’re an attendee, the same dynamic works the other way. Walk up to a booth and ask a real question. The good vendors will give you a real answer, including who their product or services is and isn’t for. Either way, you can learn more in three days than you would in a quarter.
Reason to Attended #4: It Broadens Your View
The thing about staying in your own corner of the industry is that you mostly hear the same ideas, slightly remixed, year after year. Step into a recyclers’ conference, or a government tech summit, or an auction industry event, and you’ll see people working through versions of the same problems with completely different tools. I’ve watched recyclers handle title workflows in ways that would change how a tow yard does business if anyone took the time to translate it across. Government IT leaders are adopting accountability practices that the private side is still fumbling. None of that crosses over on its own. You must go get it.
Autura’s roots are in towing and recovery, but the work has spread out a long way from there. We work with state and local government. With law enforcement. With automotive recyclers and dismantlers. With impound lot owners, dealers, scrappers, parking and property folks. So our team ends up at events the average tow operator has never heard of and probably wouldn’t think to attend. And those are worth going to, if you can swing it.
Reason to Attend #5: Year one is different from year four
Another thing I didn’t appreciate as an attendee at towing and recovery events (and am only really understanding as an exhibitor now) is how much of what you learn and get out of these industry shows compounds.
Truth: your first one may be a lot of standing around. But by your third or fourth, you:
- Walk the floor and people you know call you over to join their conversation
- You have peers in other regions that you look forward to catching up with
- There’s a guy from Pennsylvania you only see at one show every year, and you both pretend it’s a coincidence even though it isn’t.
- Vendors remember you and your challenges from last year and want to find out how you solved them.
- Industry veterans, the ones who’ve seen everything, will tell you when something about your business looks off.
My honest opinion is that this networking is worth more than most hardware, software, or services anybody in the towing and recovery industry will buy.
Industry events and tow shows help you build this network in slow, unglamorous ways. Standing in a coffee line. Waiting for a session to start. Sitting next to someone at a banquet who turns out to run a company you’ve been hearing about for a decade.
Conclusion
Trade shows and industry events are a great way to keep up with what’s happening in pockets of your industry that you may not otherwise find out about. They are also a good way to connect and network with people who are doing the same thing you do every day – people that run into the same challenges, face the same obstacles, and may have already figured out their own solutions. So go. Check out an event near you. Shake the hands and have the conversations. You never know what you may learn, or who you might meet!
📆 If you can’t make a show this season, reach out and we’ll find another way to talk.
