001: Introducing the Fleet Success Show

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show.

All right. Well, welcome to the Fleet Success Show. My name is Josh Turley, and I'm going to be one of your hosts each week on the Fleet Success Show. With me in the room, I've got Jeff Jenkins and Steve Saltskiver, along with our engineer, James Ricks. So real quick, just, you know, an introduction about who we are. I'm the CEO of RTA Fleet Management, been with the company over 16 years, but been in the fleet industry for quite a while. One of the NFA chairs here in Arizona. And we're here today to talk about what it means to be successful. But before we get into that, I just wanted to get some quick introductions about who, you know, Jeff and Steve, a little bit about your background and what fleet success means to you guys. So, Jeff, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Yeah.

So Jeff Jenkins, I'm the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at RTA, and I've got a pretty extensive background actually in the trucking environment. So I was in trucking for 20 years. Started just as a regular old dispatcher working at Knight Transportation. Was there for almost a decade where, you know, I worked my way up from whether it was driver management to customer service to sales. I ran their largest terminal in California for several years, and then I've kind of gone around the country doing a bunch of different things. I worked at Schneider National, I worked at Sears T. Malone, I worked at a trucking company in Texas, uh, was the CEO there for almost 6 years. And also worked at a company in Illinois where I was Chief Operating Officer of several, several companies that the gentleman that owned it had, Sharky Transportation and its subsidiaries. So I'm going to be a little bit more experienced when you talk about trucking and, you know, kind of about the fleets in that area, not so much in some of the other industries, but I think that they can all be pretty applicable.

And you've kind of run the gamut, you know, from For as far as trucking jobs go, in the operations, you've done it all.

I've done everything. When it came to operations and trucking, I've done everything. I mean, being CEO for 6 years, obviously I oversaw every aspect of the company, but operations was my bread and butter, and it's what I know very well, and it's really what I excelled at. And a lot of it has to do with kind of that fast-paced environment that happens in trucking. That there was never a dull moment and things were always different. You always had different problems and whatnot to solve. So yeah, I mean, I've done it all.

All right. So, Steve.

Yeah.

A little bit about you.

Well, I'm kind of the veteran here. I've been in fleet management for over 40 years now. I actually started out when I was a teenager building trucks and that just kind of propelled me forward. Then I became a mechanic and a diesel technician and then Got tired of working on the floor, so then I— what I ended up doing is going to school and getting my master's degree. But as I did that, I kind of worked up through the different levels. So I've been, you know, on the floor mechanic, a supervisor, a manager, a director, a group director, and then a vice president. As I've kind of gone up through the chain, I, I worked at two, two big fleets, State of Utah, State of Georgia. Managed a city fleet, actually 3 city fleets. And then I worked at Coca-Cola and managed their North America fleet, which was US and Canada. There we had, you know, 50,000 assets. And then I moved from there and went to Republic Services where we had 52,000 assets, vice president. So I've kind of gone— I think I've, I've managed every kind of fleet there is. From school buses to transit to trucking. So I've got kind of the jack of all trades background. And in fact, one of the things that I guess is most memorable to me is when I was put into the Hall of Fame for government fleet, they coined me as the fixer of fleets and wrote an article about that. And I guess that's true because I stay somewhere 5 years. I know how long it takes to turn a fleet around. Fleet around now.

So yeah, you got it down to a science. So in the room, we've got a lot of trucking experience. We have, you know, both government and corporate experience. We have a lot of, you know, the software and seeing it from a vendor experience, right? It just kind of this overall business sense that we kind of bring to the equation. And we thought, you know, we've been trying to think about, you ways that we could take some of this knowledge that we have and, and get it out. And we were talking to our clients and we're trying to figure out what makes them successful, right? Like, how do they measure success in their operations? Right. We were talking to our client advisory board. You know, we talked to several people on LinkedIn. Steve had a couple of posts on LinkedIn, and there's not really a very industry standard definition anyway of what fleet success means. How do I measure whether or not I'm doing a good job in fleet? In business, at least, you know, and Jeff, I don't know if you guys did this in any of the trucking companies, but in software and SaaS, one of the biggest things they look at is like client satisfaction, customer success, right? That's a business term that they coined for SaaS companies especially. You know, we're not really successful until our clients are successful. We thought, well, it's really weird is that nobody really talks about fleet in that same way, right? We talk about it with software and IT, but fleet being another utility of an organization, nobody really talks about it that way.

Yes, so it's funny because the only measurement really you have on the customer side, right, is your customer service, basically your delivery and pickup numbers on the trucking, and that's how you would quantify how you do for really your customers. right? When you take that over and you move it to the fleet side and you talk about success specifically in the trucking industry when it comes to fleet, it's how are you minimizing your downtime, right? What are your overall costs, right? You've got two main things and it's your time and then how much money are you spending to be successful. So, you know, business in general, you're usually graded off of your profitability and how much money you're giving back to your shareholders. right? And it's different when you talk about SaaS or software on really what that measurement is. Obviously we're all here to make money, right? I mean, that's what business is in general, but it's the purpose behind, you know, what's driving you, right? And it's to help other people be successful really in this space.

You know, when I was at Coca-Cola, we had an NPS score, same with Republic Services, so we actually did gauge our customer success, but that was more corporate-wide. It wasn't really fleet-wide, you know. And as you said about LinkedIn, you know, I actually did a couple posts in a number of forums and basically got crickets, you know. No, everybody's going, you know, saying, well, that's a really good question. Well, yeah, but give me an answer, you know. And I think that's part of the issue and why we're doing this podcast is because nobody had an answer. You know, and we're gonna hopefully define that.

One of the other things that really stood out to me, you know, we were talking to, you know, this past couple years ago at conference, we started teaching our clients, you know, leadership principles, you know, things that we take for granted in business, right? That like, Jeff, you and I, as we've studied and try to become better leaders, you know, there's a lot of material out there and training and education around becoming a better leader, right? And growing ourselves. And I didn't see a ton of that in the fleet world, right? You know, a lot of us, especially in fleet, and Steve, you could speak to this at the government level especially, is that there's not a lot of budget and resources available for people to say, you know, how do I uplevel myself as a leader? How do I really create a world-class fleet organization within the broader scope of the the mission, right? You know, from a city, what's my role as a fleet in the city, right? And so we just kind of saw this lack of, you know, availability, and we knew these things are awesome. You know, we've been to seminars, we've seen, you know, I read a ton of books, just as a full disclaimer, but there's a lot of lessons that we get in business that I felt like fleet just didn't get access to.

I think we're all self- book junkies. I think I've been reading— I've got management books hanging out of the closet at home. But, you know, I think that's part of it. I mean, maybe that was because of my background in government, because the first things they cut if you're in a tough year, the two T's, I always called it the travel and training, you know. And so they never really send you anywhere. So you're kind of on your own to get your own education, you know. And So that's what I've done most of my life. A little bit different than when I was in corporate where they sent me to, you know, think tanks and off-campus and strategic planning meetings and certifications and things like that, which have been beneficial. But government's a tough one even now, you know.

So, so, you know, we all kind of sat down and we said, look, we've got enough experience in this room, right? We've seen it all. We've done it all.

We've lived it.

Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. And we kind of figured out, well, what would it take if we defined fleet success, right? We couldn't get a definition out of anybody online, so let's just define it. Let's figure out for, based on our experience, what the right definition would be and how do we help others achieve that, right? And so that's kind of where this podcast started, right, is this idea of, well, let's define it and let's talk about it and let's get it out there and and start having this be a part of the conversation. So with that, this week we're going to introduce you guys to what fleet success is, how we're going to define it, and then kind of walk through each of the components of fleet success and kind of give an overview of the model that we've come up with. So without any further ado, fleet success for us is how— this is the definition that we're using. Right, is that we're achieving a balanced mastery of stakeholder satisfaction, intentional culture, resource efficiency, and risk management in your fleet operation. And it's those 4 things together that when they're in balance and when we really kind of master each of those 4 things, that's fleet success, right? It's achieving that balanced mastery. So we're going to go through each of those 4 things. Again, those 4 things, we've got stakeholder satisfaction, intentional culture, resource efficiency, and risk management, and how those 4 blend together, what they mean, and kind of what they've meant to us, right, in our, in our experience as fleet professionals. So let's start with the first one, stakeholder satisfaction.

Right.

So as we kind of thought about, well, what is really the purpose of fleet? You know, Steve at Republic, right? Like, you know, well, we wanted to make sure we had, you know, there's garbage to go pick up, keep the streets clean. Yeah, right. But we wanted to keep the company profitable. I mean, there's a lot of elements as to whether or not you're doing a good job as a fleet. We thought the first, though, had to be, you know, it's your higher-ups. It's the organization that you serve. Right. And so stakeholder satisfaction, from our perspective, it's really about living up to the expectations of those who depend on the job you do. Right.

I actually think that's the one thing people can probably agree on. If you know, if you're asking about fleet success, some of the— I think I got a total of 4 pieces of feedback when I was asking those questions. That's the first thing they said, except for they put it in the context of, you know, no customer complaints. Right.

So that's kind of more the absence of negatives must be a positive, right?

Exactly.

It's such a broad word to use when you say stakeholder, right? Because you look at everyone that has a stake when you have a fleet and you've got a very large gamut of people involved in that, right? You've got your drivers, you've got your technicians, you've got your managers, you've got people that are on the road, right, that depend on you to be safety. You've obviously got the other employees that are at that organization. I mean, really any living, breathing thing has a stake when it comes to that satisfaction because if you're not safe, you're endangering those people around you. So we need to make sure we look at it as a holistic view when you talk about that satisfaction and not just, "Hey, I have a specific personal stake in this organization, in this fleet." because it's a lot more encompassing than that.

There's a broad community that you impact, right? I think that was one of the fun things as we were going through this. We even were identifying like, hey, here's primary stakeholders, secondary stakeholders, and then what we would probably call like tertiary, right? They're often the peripheral of stakeholders. They're third or fourth down the line of getting impacted by decisions you make running your fleet. Right. But I think about, you know, like in a city fleet, I think about the police officers, I think about the fire department, I think about Public Works and Parks and Rec. Right. It's, you know, those departments, can they do their jobs? Right. Do they have the equipment they need to do their jobs? Is it well kept?

Right. And then you think about if that fire truck doesn't roll or that police officer doesn't go out, then the public at large is in danger.

Right.

So it's a tremendous responsibility to keep those vehicles up and successful. Yeah.

And keep them safe. Yeah, exactly. You know, we thought about that too, is, well, what happens if that driver, you know, there's an unsafe vehicle and that driver gets in an accident? Now you have a police officer who doesn't get home to the family, right? There's another stakeholder added to the mix, you know, and keeping them satisfied, keeping them happy with the job you're doing has got to be paramount. So the next one we had was intentional culture, right? And intentional culture is really about— it's being purposeful. It's purposely deciding that type of environment that you want for your fleet and then taking the ownership to shape that identity, right? It's all about being intentional and creating the type of culture that you want in your fleet and not just letting it get created for you.

We're talking about this last night, right, when we have these pillars and we're deciding what we want to use as definitions. And the great thing— listen, a lot of people aren't going to know Josh, but one of the great things about Josh is in his, in his business and what he does, he's extremely intentional on his culture, right? It's not just something that you put on a whiteboard or on a poster and then it's there and you may accidentally hit one of those things. Right? It's very, very purposefully done on the type of environment that you want to create and that you want to be a part of, right? Culture is a very general word, and every company out there, right, or organization has a different culture that they have.

And they're all great too. Yeah, we got a great company culture.

We got a great company culture, right? But a lot of things that happen inside of a culture is accidental. It's not really living and thriving for that culture. It's like, hey, we've got these different standards we're gonna go by and, you know, "Yeah, you know, we'll live this one, you know, here and there, just depending on what it's gonna be." But the word intentional is there because it's something that you're doing on purpose. It's not an accident. And we're really driving that, "Hey, to be successful when it comes to fleet, you have to intentionally mean to do something. You have to intentionally live your values in order to have that as one of your pillars." You know, a lot of people talk about it, but they don't really manifest or example it.

You know, and that's one of the problems that you have is I've worked for a lot of people that thought they had great cultures, but it didn't translate down to the, you know, the rank and file. You know, they'd say things like, you know, enjoy your day off, and then 5 minutes later they're calling you for something, right? Yeah, because they really didn't take that culture serious. You know, and that gives mixed messages to all the workers. You know, wait a minute, I'm supposed to be, you know, having a good time off, but now I'm working, right? So it's, it's really, it really is something important, you know, that every, every culture should be that way, right?

And for something that's so important to you, I mean, we spend so much of our times working that it should be somewhere that we, we enjoy working, that we should attract the kind of people that enjoy working in that type of environment. You know, life's too short to waste it on something that's not intentional, right? And I, you know, you hear all the time, you know, I'll talk to customers and they're kind of at the whims of whatever happens. Oh, well, we can't change that or we can't do that. It's about taking ownership and really figuring out, well, what do I have in my purview of control, right? What is under my thumb that I can make an impact on? And going out and shaping it with your control, right? With the things that you can do, using those things and using that power to make a difference.

Well, what you're talking about is empowering your employees.

Yep.

You know, I was just working on a project where a fleet gives each one of their employees up to $1,000 to solve any kind of customer issue. You know, I mean, so they're basically telling them, yeah, we want that solved and you have this latitude. Yeah, that could be quite, quite expensive if you have a lot of bad culture or bad customer service. Yeah, but they're allowing you to do that because they believe in it.

I think Nordstrom had a lot of that same thing, right? It was, you know, that's how they empowered the employees. There was a story I heard the other day. The Nordstrom employee was asked, hey, do you guys have this thing? And they're like, well, actually we don't, but I do know where I can go get it. Left the store, went and bought it, brought it back, sold it to the customer for the exact amount that they bought it for. Nordstrom didn't make a cent on it, but they got a customer for life, right? And that's intentional. They do not do that by accident, right? That's an intentional piece of culture that they created to empower that employee. That employee felt safe to do that.

I was sitting in a restaurant in Indianapolis at a fleet conference, and they knew I worked for Coca-Cola because that came up in the conversation. They were serving RC Cola or Pepsi at that restaurant and the waitress got up, walked across the street and bought me a Diet Coke. Now what's the— I mean, they understood who their stakeholder was. You know, I've never forgotten that. It was awesome. They would do that.

So intentional culture, that's the second pillar that we think is really critical for a great, successful fleet operation. The third one is resource efficiency. This is probably the simplest definition that we have, right? And it's really just about making the best use of your two most finite resources: time and money. That's it, right? Like, you know, making the best use of your time and making the best use of the money that you have, you know, because money, we know it doesn't grow on trees, right? You just can't will it to existence. You have to work for that.

Unless you're the federal government.

Well, right. And even then, right? Like, someday that bill is going to come due. You know, but you have to— you can't will it to existence. You've got constraints. You know, you can't just go out and buy 1,000 vehicles and you need 100, right? You have constraints that you have to work in. And time, even if you had all the money in the world, you can't buy a second more of time. Like, once that time is spent, like, it is the great equalizer. Everybody has the same amount of currency. I like to think of it like the currency of life, you know. You can't get that time back. So, you know, taking the steps to make sure that you're not wasting time on things that don't matter, to make sure that you're not wasting money in areas that you shouldn't be spending money in, right? It's about being the most efficient you can with the resources that you're given stewardship over.

I was going to say a good example of that is, you know, you see a lot of fleet managers out there, they have 200 metrics that they're tracking. Well, how important is that? How can you track 200 metrics? Maybe you need to get it down to the critical few that really drive the business or drive time and money, and forget about all those extraneous ones. Get to the critical stuff. But some of them don't seem to do that. So I think that's one of the pillars of success is doing things easier. Simpler. Things that make, you know, I've always said, you know, the 3 things that drive money and time are basically assets and people and, you know, then the operational costs, right? So you need to really focus on that.

And it's one of the things as a, you know, as a software provider, right, our big focus is about automating some of those things, right? And that's been our huge focus. It's actually a little bit why we thought we needed, you know, like we needed a podcast about this. We need to talk about fleet success more generally because as vendors, especially as software vendors in this space, it's almost always about just automation, efficiency, right? We don't talk about this other stuff at all. And so we really felt like there was a gap, you know, that fleet success really is bigger than just automate, efficiency, you know, save time, save money. but it is a huge part of the overall success of an operation still. So last one is risk management, and this is really— it's, it's the proactive process identifying, assessing, and controlling the threats to your organization and the stakeholders. So I'll say that again, right? This is a proactive process of identifying, assessing, and controlling threats to your organization and its stakeholders. You can't operate a business, you can't operate a fleet without taking some amount of risk. And the idea is that you don't do anything without at least identifying, okay, what could go wrong here, right? Like, what are the contingency plans that we might need to have around this? How do we stop that from becoming a risk? Things like safety are going to be involved in this. You know, are we wearing the proper equipment? I was thinking about this last night. You know, there's so many times I'd be working on my Jeep and I would not wear eye protection, right? That was, you know, 20-year-old kid, thought I was invincible. And I sit there, just be wrenching on it, right? You know, you get mud and metal flakes and stuff like that falls down in your face and you're spitting and trying to get it out of your mouth. Should have been a really good clue, like, hey, your eyes are just 2 inches north of that, right? You know, very quickly that can turn south, you know.

Well, if you've ever had a piece of metal taken out of your eye, then you know it's not pleasant. No, it's not.

Every time you do an MRI, they ask you, have you ever had metal in your eye? You know, that probably is a very serious thing.

I dread those MRIs because I used to do grinding in a shop and all those metal flakes got into my arm. Oh yeah, burn like heck when I'm in those.

Yeah, so yeah, using the cutoff wheel and sparks are flying everywhere, you're welding, right? The same thing, you know, you're not wearing proper protection, then You know, that's just one element of it, right? But, uh, well, trucking, this is huge.

Well, it is huge, and it's, it's amazing, right, that the second word on that definition is proactive, because most people don't use that and it's all reactive, right? I mean, it's a very archaic way to think about it because it's like, hey, let's just go ahead and let's react to everything that's happening, right? I can tell you in trucking You know, we try to be proactive. Obviously, you couldn't get ahead of everything, but throughout your day, it's reactionary to everything that's happening, right? Because things change and things move, and you sit back and you think about, well, what could I have done to prevent this from happening, right? What steps can we take to make it so these problems don't exist? And you're never going to be able to eliminate every single issue that comes up. right? And we used to always sit there and have conversations, and one of the common things that I always say is, this is so unmeasurable because you don't know what, what accident you're gonna prevent, right? You don't know what would prevent, but guess what? If you do prevent one thing, even if you don't know about it, you end up way above where you would have been. So by taking those proactive steps, by assessing, by identifying, by taking action to hopefully eliminate issues that may come from a safety or risk management side. You can't afford not to do that.

Yeah, I mean, Jeff and I have both been in trucking, and, you know, we're not going to divulge any secrets or anything, but we've been in situations where, you know, operations are being shut down. You get in the newspaper for bad, you know, bad accidents.

I mean, there's bad publicity.

There's a lot of bad publicity that can happen if you're not being proactive proactive about it. Well, on the—

and the potential too for when you— when this really goes wrong, right? You're talking about the loss of life.

Yes.

Right.

And, and you can't— you know, somebody could sue you for millions of dollars, right? And you can, you can find ways to overcome that, but you just can't do anything to restitute a loss of a life. There's nothing. And so, you know, like, this is something you have to take really seriously. And that proactive measure— if you're reacting to loss of life, it's too late. Right. And so taking the, taking the steps that you need to make sure that your stakeholders are taken care of, the organization is protected. And that's why I love the definition of stakeholders too, is it's not just about you and it's not your, even your, just your company, right? Yeah. You want to protect them. They're the primary stakeholders, but it's about protecting the community at large, you know, and throwing an unsafe vehicle out there, you know, putting an unsafe driver out there. It all comes back and it's, you know, it can be a really big mess.

You know, it's all about taking ownership. You know, we talk a lot about that. I remember once in my career when I was a diesel mechanic, I left— it was a union job— I left the shift, I told the guy that followed me, just tighten the tie rod and torque it. Well, the next day I got called into the office because the bus went out on the road and the wheel fell off. Because guess what? The The guy didn't torque the tie rod. So I mean, you need to take that kind of ownership. I never did that again. I mean, I was lucky I kept my job in that case, but I always made sure I finished every job. I didn't care if I went past the shift because we've got, that's just such a risk. And there's 40 people that could have been impacted by that or more if you look at the public at large.

And that's, that is, that's that proactive, you know, it's identifying, assessing, and then controlling. Again, you can't control everything, but you can take steps to mitigate, to slow it down, to lessen the impact, right? You know, and reduce the chance that it could happen. So, you know, I know these are, these are 4 broad pillars, right? And we've kind of gone back and forth and figuring out, you know, what are they? What are the 4 big pillars? And each week we're going to kind of take these 4 pillars and we're going to talk about ways to use them, to implement them. Today was a good broad overview, and next week we'll be talking about specifically stakeholder satisfaction, ways you can measure it, ways you can improve it. But these are broad topics, right? And I know one of the questions that comes up for me is, well, how did you decide just on these 4? There's so many others that impact this. What about sustainability? Right? Like, Steve, you know, sustainability is huge right now, especially in government fleets.

Exactly.

Where would you put that in these 4 categories?

Well, right off the bat, it probably crosses just about all of them if you think about it.

Yeah.

But probably, you know, time and money, resources, certainly risk. You know, I mean, I've been in companies where we've had CNG tanks explode.

Right.

So I mean, it covers the gamut of all that.

So.

Well, it does. And sustainability, right? You look at all the companies that are going that direction, like you've got in trucking, you got the SmartWay program. Right? A lot of people treat it as a badge of honor, but it's an intentional culture thing, right? You're intentionally planning on the sustainability piece, on what am I doing for the environment? What am I doing for, you know, the public at large? You have to be intentional on that. You can't accidentally decide to be sustainable.

And you have to be a good citizen.

Yeah, right.

I mean, that's the point of all that, right?

And that goes to stakeholder satisfaction, talking about the community at large. You know, if your city wants to be seen, right? There's a public image that they want to have as being a green city. Well, then you as a fleet probably need to get very invested in figuring out how to be a green fleet because that matters to them, even though it's, you know, it's gonna— and this is where that balance— I think that's what's such a critical word— but you can't go all green. You might have to figure out how to balance because you don't have unlimited money, right, an unlimited budget just to electrify your entire fleet. Put in the infrastructure. I mean, that's a huge cost.

Sometimes the biggest thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint is renew your fleet.

Just as simple as that sometimes, right?

That's it.

But that idea of, you know, you have to find out the blend. You have to find out what's important. What do you have the budget for? What can you do?

Right.

And try to figure out where all 4 of these can intersect and overlap. You know, but we kind of looked at all those, right? Like reliability, right? That's preventive maintenance. That's what types of vehicles are you buying? Procurement replacement, that's going to touch resource, that's going to, you know, resource efficiency, that's going to touch stakeholder satisfaction. You know, how do we not talk about safety, electrification, right? I mean, these are some of the things that we really do feel like these topics, they're independent of each other, but the overlap, they just cover so many areas. And so putting it together in a digestible format like this, defining it finally for the industry and being able to talk about it. This is a great honor. Like, this is a great privilege. I'm excited about the next, you know, the show really, right? Like, and going through the show and being able to talk about each of these things and talking to some of our fleet customers.

We're not— we're obviously— we've got a lot of experience in this room. There's going to be things we miss, right?

Oh yeah.

There's going to be— Listen, I'll talk about myself from experience, right? I'm going to say some stuff that probably can seem pretty stupid, right? And maybe a little bit out of bounds, right? I'm not the most politically correct person, but we all have different experiences. And the whole point of us doing this podcast is to try and help other people, one, not make the same mistakes we did, right? Two, but also help educate, right? There's a lot of those things we talked about how the things that go away, Steve said it's training and travel. Well, not everyone has the benefit of having had training, right? Because it's never on the forefront and they haven't had the same experiences. So we want to help other people, right, become more successful and to have a much better, I guess, I don't know if I call it working environment, but a much better experience when it comes to fleet and being able to make those improvements, right? This isn't about us. This isn't about our company that we work in right now. It's about helping other people, right? That's the whole point of this Fleet Success podcast.

Yeah, that's a great point. Like, you're not going to hear us pitching RTA on this. You know, it's— we're going to talk about it in general terms, but this isn't— this won't be a sales pitch. I think that's the best thing about this. That's what I'm actually most excited about, is just talking about the industry and what matters to the industry.

Well, Jeff makes a good point. We're not all flawless. I can tell you, being in this business for 40 years, I've made plenty of mistakes. You know, and I've learned from every one of them, either in a good way or a bad way. So, you know, that's just inevitable, you know, when you're doing a job like we do.

Well, Steve, you talk about too, a lot, right, in some of the sessions that I've been at, that you've spoken at, is this brain drain that we're faced with in fleet right now, right? As we have a lot of generation that's retiring and, you know, there's not a huge line of talent coming back into the fleet market. And so, you know, we're having to tap outside resources that may have not grown up in fleet and they've never experienced anything like this before.

Yeah, a lot of the conditions, the environment have changed. I mean, when I grew up 40 years ago, got into this business, there was corner gas stations or my father was working on his car in the driveway or, you know, we just grew up in a more perfunctory kind of mode where we had hands-on. Now there's not a lot of that unless you specifically go to, you know, like a a school to get that knowledge, right?

You know, now they're going to train you on how to be a great mechanic and technician. Yeah, not necessarily how to be a great analyst and fleet manager.

Well, but that is one thing that the new generation is bringing is all the software and all the, uh, the apps and everything like that, that, that's more hands-on and more analytical now. So they have the analytical, but they lack the perfunctory. So it's kind of an opposite.

So the idea with this podcast then is to bridge the gap, right? Is to, is to help the people on the one side who might be very tech savvy and might have been like I was exposed to a lot of these business best practices and business philosophies. And then on the other side is to help, you know, we've got these technicians that are coming up that are being placed into leadership roles that they haven't ever received training on. Well, how do I manage and how do I lead a team of peers? Right. And being able to help them on the other side of it. Right. And how do I run my fleet like a business? So talking about the whole gamut and helping these people as they come up And hopefully, you know, for some of the old-time fleet managers as well, there'll be something that they can come away with and say, oh, that's a really good point. I'm going to do something like that in my fleet, you know. And I'll tell you, just from sitting in the room with Jeff and Steve, you know, there's plenty of experience for that to come out. Right. And there's going to be a lot of those moments. And so I'm really excited about that. Well, I think we're pretty much wrapped up. Jeff, Steve, you guys have any final thoughts?

No, I just— Just final thought is I'm kind of excited to do this, and I think it's going to be interesting as we go through talking about these things together.

All right.

Yeah, listen, and this is going to be a great education for all of us. I can think for myself as well, right? Just learning from Steve, learning from Josh, and being able to take some things away myself. It'll be beneficial, and I hope it's beneficial for everybody else.

Agreed.

So last thoughts, tell your friends, tell your coworkers, right? Let them know about this new podcast that's coming out, the Fleet Success Show. Tag us on social media @fleetsuccess and then go subscribe to it wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm a Spotify guy, but it's on Google Podcasts, Apple iTunes. Shoot, there's a number of podcast generators and curators out there, but, you know, go find the Fleet Success Show wherever you listen to podcasts and Join us next week. We're going to talk about stakeholder satisfaction and what it means and how you, how you use it. Thanks.

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