Episode 033: Attributes of an Ideal Fleet Manager: Hungry (Part 2 of 3)

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. Welcome back to another episode of the Fleet Success Show. Glad to have you guys with us again. Joining me as always, Steve Saltzgiver.

Good to be back.

Jeff Jenkins.

Yo, what up?

And I'm your other host, Josh Turley. Uh, thanks for listening. Thanks for tuning in. Uh, we started a series last week talking about the ideal attributes of a fleet manager and really like the, the team player, you know, what are the things that make up a great team player? Um, and we've started talking really about our core values and how we define the those things, you know, talking about humble, what it means to be selfless, confident, entitlement-free, vulnerable, assuming positive intent, genuine, real, no job beneath us. And we wanted to keep going with that thought and shift it into the next thing that we really think is critical. Well, humble, I believe, is the most important one. This next one is also one that you can't be taught. It's very difficult. You have to drive this. You have to come up with this attitude and this belief. Yourself. And that's all around hunger and being hungry. So the way we define being hungry is it's about being— the first way we do it was we talk about being driven. Like, you're just driven to do more, be more, learn more, and you just are like, you're constantly hungry, you know. Like, I think about You know, we just had Thanksgiving recently, and somebody was talking about, you know, how they prepare for Thanksgiving. And I mentioned, I think Steve, you and I were talking about this, and I said, you know what I do is the night before I actually stop eating. Like, I eat an early dinner, and then I stop eating and drinking the night before, and I skip breakfast. It's almost like I'm going in for a medical procedure, right? Which might happen, you just never know, right? But you're going in and you're getting prepared because you want to make sure that you've got enough room because there's just so much. But by the time Thanksgiving dinner rolls around, you were so hungry that you're like loading up your plate and you could just never— you're always wanting more, right? And I like that attitude. It's like if you imagine how you feel when you haven't eaten in a lot a while and you're, you're just super hungry, but imagine eating something and then still feeling super hungry, like never satisfied. And I think that's that driven mentality that we look for.

Yeah, it's funny because like when I think about hunger, right, I try to equate it to like work terms, um, work ethic or, uh, something along those lines. And so work ethic is not the same as hunger because work ethic is like, hey, I'm going to go into work, I'm going to stay focused, I'm going to do my tasks, but it can stop right there. You don't have to have that beyond, right? But when we're talking about hunger, yeah, you've got that good work ethic where you're focused and you're always doing at work, but what are you doing that's beyond that to either improve yourself or improve those around you, right?

And it's not something that somebody else is telling you to do. And this is why hunger is so difficult to teach is because it comes from within. Yes. You know, like it's not something that's been put in front of you or it's not something that like, oh no, you have to do this. It's you have a natural desire and yearning. You know, like, I think about that, like, that's a really good word for this, is a yearning, like a thirst. You just, you want it.

You know, it's something that is hard to turn off too, for me. I've always been kind of hungry. You know, I've gone to all kinds of training and all kinds of school classes, and at night I've got like a pad next to my bed where if I wake up with a flash, I'm going, okay, writing that down, you know. And I And I've always done that most of my life. I've always set goals, personal goals, work goals, because I just, I know the power of that mentally.

Just to keep pushing yourself.

Right, just push, push, push. I mean, even on my workout goals now, I'm pushing myself to get over 250 on the bench press. And it's taken me a good 6 months to get close to 200, but I'm gonna get there because that's where I wanna be. And that's the kind of that innate driven ability And you see that in certain people, right? Some people just turn their brain off and stop if it's the end of the day.

Well, like, I don't care about work, or I don't care about, like, improving myself. I don't care about doing better or being better. And sometimes I don't have any hobbies or something like that, and it's, well, I'm just gonna go watch TV for a little while.

I've kind of kidded myself over the years. I always wanted to be that guy that just stopped at 5 o'clock and went and had a beer and be done. And I never could do that. I could never do that.

You know, never beer 30 for you.

Well, well, it's, it's so, it's funny because we talk about hunger, and you can always tell if you made the right hire when it comes to hunger during their training, because someone who is so not necessarily uncomfortable but dissatisfied in the training process and wanting to get in there and learn more and to do more Right? So when I have someone, they put them through training, I always ask them, well, it's gonna depend on you and your learning curve. Like, how bad do you want it? What effort are you gonna put into learning this job? Right? And if someone— we say the standard training time is, let's say, 4 weeks— and that person in 2 weeks comes at me and says, hey, I think I'm good to go, can I just get on the phones, or can I do this? You know that person's got that hunger, right? They're bored out of their mind and they need more to do. They have what you're looking for, trying to achieve and do more and learn more, right?

Well, I remember this goes back to Grandpa's days, you know, on that note, is when he— this is 1961— and he saw an ad in the paper to go be a driver for UPS. And, you know, back then he was, uh, the driver over like the Casa Grande area here in Arizona, and they'd give him basically enough packages that should fill up most people's 8-hour day. But for Grandpa, like, it wasn't enough for him. It was like this drive. He wanted to be the most efficient person he could be. And so he figured out different ways, and it was just this continuous improvement cycle of, well, what if I put my keys in my left pocket instead of my right pocket? Or like, it's just random things. How many steps do I want to take between here and the doorway? How many steps can I take between here and the truck? What's the least amount of time that I can go from point A to point B? How many— what's the fewest amount of trips I can go? And then obviously there's the hustle side of it. All right, so he was just hustling, so he made it a personal goal that I want to get done in 6 hours. You know, I basically want to reduce my, you know, my work time by 25%. I get paid no matter what the same amount, so I'm going to do it as little time as possible and get the job done. And that type of hunger, like, you just can't teach that. That's got to be something that you you have and you're just driven to be better.

You know what's funny about that? I had the opportunity a few years back to go to Annapolis, Maryland and visit the UPS Logistics Center.

Yeah.

And that's exactly what they do there now. Everything you just described your grandpa doing.

Yeah.

They've made that into an art. You know, and so that's, I don't know if he was the catalyst behind that, but the way they do it, I mean, everything is built on how they can get that achieved quicker. And make all their people hungry.

Did you watch the movie The Founder?

Yes.

Did you remember the scene where he's on the basketball court and they're drawing off the schematics of what the inside of a McDonald's looks like?

Yes.

To make it more efficient, right? He had that hunger. Hey, we got to do this quicker. We're going to serve more people, yada, yada. So he would actually step out what they were supposed to do. No, no, no, you don't go to the fries this way. You go to the fries this way. You turn around, you do— I mean, it was just so methodical.

Yeah, the way— and then every little thing. Well, what if we did this instead? Is like, you guys actually turned at the same time, right? And that like little improvements that even though, hey, we're doing this faster than anybody else can do it.

Yep.

It wasn't fast enough. And he was like, we could get another 5 seconds out of that.

Even the amount of mustard and ketchup they put on the burger was exactly scripted out.

Oh yeah.

Squirt, squirt, squirt.

Nope. Too big of a squirt, right? Just single script.

But you know, you think about that in a fleet sense though. I mean, that's how you should be managing your shops. That's how you should be managing your employees. Yep. You know, I mean, that's how you truly get savings is through that kind of hunger.

Well, and I think for, especially for fleet managers, 'cause there's so much changing in the industry, it's not getting complacent. And you, for the ideal fleet manager, one of the things that we talk about is that leaders are readers and you should always be learning, you know, attending trade shows, going to conferences like NAPA, GFX, things like that. Reading new books that come out that talk about the industry or talk about being a better leader. Jeff and Steve will tell you that, you know, like, I'm a huge reader. You come in, you look at my bookshelf, and there are books upon books, and I've read almost every one of them because it's just that natural desire. Like, I haven't found my answer yet. I found tons of answers, but like, I know there's always something else that I could be doing differently or could be doing better, and I haven't been— I'm not perfect yet. And so I just keep chasing It's totally unattainable, but you just keep going. Like, what's next? What's the next thing?

My wife— I've always been a book junkie, but my, uh, I told my wife when I retire I'm going to bequeath all my, uh, books to the RTA because she's always after me. Can you get rid of that? No, I don't.

We need to donate all these.

I might, I might have to look something up someday, right?

Right. We just never know. We got books that are like technical books from 20 years ago. Yeah, I don't think we need that anymore, guys.

I got some old C++ books I'm still hanging on to.

Oh no, that's started right there. You're good.

So we should address a topic then, because you started off saying this isn't something that necessarily you can teach, you got to be born with it. So if there's someone—

no, no, no, not born with it, but it has to come from within.

Okay.

You have to develop it yourself.

Yes. Right. So how do people go about developing that hunger, or how do you help inspire or push people for that hunger? Right? Because it's, it's very difficult to do. I've always said when I'm hiring someone, I don't really care if you have all the skills necessary that you need, as long as you have the desire, which I would also call hunger.

Yep.

As long as you have the desire, I can give you what you need. But if you don't have the desire, it's gonna be very difficult for me to be able to help you progress.

Yeah. I, I don't think there's anything— if you have people on your team that aren't hungry, and you're trying to get them to be hungry, sure, you can throw money at them, right? Like, you can throw incentives and things like that out there. There's a book called Drive by Daniel Pink. He actually has a really good TED Talk if you don't want to read a book, but it's all about how money demotivates. And at some point, when you get to a point— like, money is a, what we call, a dissatisfier, and you can't throw more money at the problem. You won't get any more output. Even though you're throwing more money at it. Um, and so like, that's the thing is the drive has to come from within. It has to be intrinsic is what we call that, an intrinsic motivator. Somebody has to find whatever that is for themselves. So if you don't have that hunger but you want it, well, right there you've actually just shown the first spark. I'll call it the pilot light of hunger. It is a desire to be hungrier, and that alone It says, okay, well, how do I develop this? And once you start going, it's like a little bit like a snowball, whereas it starts gathering momentum, it starts going faster, and you start getting like this, this appetite for more information, more knowledge, more experimentation, learning, growing, doing. And it's a cycle, and you almost get like addicted to it the same way you get addicted to like working out or eating healthier. Nobody can make you do those things. You have to do it yourself, but it has a lot of the same dopamine hits that working out and things like that do. You know, as you learn things, like, you have that natural chemical reaction that happens. We're diving really deep on this.

Yeah, I'm just thinking, I mean, I look at myself and I'm trying to wonder, why do I have drive when I've got a brother that doesn't have any drive? Or I've got a son that doesn't have any drive. And I, you know, especially my son, I mean, what did he not learn from me? You know, maybe he didn't want, I mean, I was gone a lot and I worked hard and I, you know, and I never could turn my brain off. I'm always asking, what if, what if I do this? What if I change that? What if I streamline this process? And you know, that was my constant life, you know, growing up. And some, it does have to come innately internally to you, but Why don't some people have that?

Well, so why don't some people have it? But I also think if I'm a leader, how could I help somebody discover that in themselves? One of the things that we can do as leaders is paint a picture, is set the vision. And sometimes people don't have a hunger, desire to do more because they don't see it. They can't see their own potential. And so sometimes I think we can tap into it just by helping them see like what you could become and who the best version of yourself is. I think when people see that, that touches something in them that says, I want to be that. Now, not everybody has that, and it doesn't come all the time, but you do have the ability, and you have to try at least, to say like, you guys could be different, you could be better. Sometimes you have to throw something out there like we do with our CAFM certifications and the VMRS bounties and things like that to kind of help get people off the fence. But once they get going, like, I can't keep reminding them about it, or I can't keep motivating them to do that. They have to find that within themselves and imagine themselves in that situation 5 years down the road, having achieved something really great. And that picture, if they can feel that and internalize it, then that picture can help develop some of that hunger to grow, develop, and improve.

Yeah, they've got to have that You have to have at least some self-motivation though. You can't give someone self-motivation. You hear, hey, if you want something bad enough, you can do it. You can achieve it. Here's the problem is most people don't because they don't want it bad enough. And let me give you a great example. I've got someone who works for me that is always complaining about, I don't want pictures taken of me because I look too big. I look fat. I'm gaining weight. I've never been this big, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? And my response is, okay, well, what can you do to change that? Well, I gotta start eating better. I gotta get out and exercise. Well, why don't you do that? Ah, I'm just too tired. I don't feel like it. You obviously don't want it bad enough then. If you really wanted something bad enough, you would put in the effort to actually, uh, try and achieve what you're doing. And that doesn't mean you're gonna achieve whatever goal you have, right? I had a goal for myself that I was gonna be a CEO and make six figures by the time I was 30 years old. I missed both those goals, but I worked my ass off to get 'em. And guess what? 6 years later I was a CEO and I think it was 3 months later I hit, I hit 6 figures for the very first time, right? I busted my ass to do that. But you know, I had that desire. I wanted those things for myself after I had it.

Don't necessarily want it as much anymore, but I, isn't that funny how that works?

But I worked to be able to get to that place and to be able to do that. Right.

Because you could see yourself in that position.

I could.

And that picture, like it created a motivation for you. Like, that's what I want to do.

Yeah.

And everything you want to do, like, ends up feeding into that, that image. Um, so I think it can be, it can be taught in a way, like, it could be touched, but you can't— like, nobody— if somebody, if your wife had come to you or your mom had come to you and says, hey, I want you to be a CEO, or like, my favorite is whenever I hear somebody say, oh, I just want my son to be a doctor. Yeah, but does your son want to be a doctor? Because that's 7, 8 years of schooling. That like they're just going to burn out if they want to— don't want to do it.

Yep.

You know, I remember seeing that with, uh, with friends who played high school football. They were really good and everybody just— they wanted to go pro. So what do they do? They were doing all their time in clubs and they're spending all their time at the gym, and then if by the time they get to their senior year, they just burn out.

Why?

Well, because they didn't have that same picture. Like, they didn't want to be the 24-year-old playing college football.

Let me, let me tell you something that— because that's a good— it brings up a story, right? So sorry to interrupt you, but when I was in elementary school, I was in 7th grade, the elementary school we went to, it was brand new, it was the first year. So a guy moved into town and his name was DJ. DJ was a phenomenal athlete, just amazing. He was more developed than everybody else. He was quick as all get out, like very quick, very mobile. And so he excelled in sports. And when we were in 7th and 8th grade, did great, went to high school. Freshman year, excelled. Number one running back in the state, you know, the most valuable player, the whole nine yards. This guy was lazy as shit though. He was hurt every Monday for practice. Game time, he was in perfect health and he'd go out there and he'd kick ass, right? But when it came time to practice, he didn't ever do it. And he wanted to be a pro athlete. You know what happened? He ended up getting cut his senior year because of how lazy he was and he refused to practice. He actually spent time in prison because of some stupid decisions he's made. But if he would've had that hunger in himself, he had all the God-given talent that was available and he squandered it.

That's why you see the difference between somebody like a Michael Jordan and not a Michael Jordan, right? Is like the difference between the hustle players. Sorry, I totally blanked on who any good player in the '90s was that wasn't really that good.

That's because they, they were—

you never remember. No, right? You don't remember anything.

There's a Michael Jordan, there's a Dwight Howard. Dwight Howard, ah yeah, all kinds of talent, size, the whole nine yards.

This guy's lazy as shit, naturally, right? And it just doesn't work for him, right?

So he would never get to Michael Jordan. Hey, the same LeBron, all the natural talent and work ethic in the world, but he quits, right? He'll never be Michael Jordan because he quits on his teammates.

Yeah, that was, that was amazing to see that. Last year. It was, uh, because you wouldn't have ever seen that happen with Michael or Kobe, right? Like, just because the drive is so different. You can't teach it. It has to come from within. All right, well, I think we've hit this one pretty heavy.

Yeah.

Uh, the next one that we talk about with hunger is taking initiative. Um, we have a thing around here is like, if you see a problem, like, don't wait for somebody to go tell you to do something. You know, like, in fact, we actually say that is you never say, well, nobody told me to do that.

If—

but you saw it, right? Like, you saw there was a problem there and you just watched it happen. You're like, take initiative, take the first step. Don't wait for somebody to come and say, hey, you know, I need you to go do this and do that and do this. Like, you take initiative.

Simple stuff like pick up a piece of paper. Yeah, put another roll of toilet paper in the bathroom, empty the trash. It's just stuff that's just there. You don't have to say, you have to, if you, as soon as you tell somebody, then you've blown it, right? You didn't take any initiative.

Can you imagine if people took that, that mindset? Well, no one told me to fill out, fill up my gas tank, so of course I ran outta gas.

Right.

I was waiting for someone to tell me to do it.

Right.

Unfortunately, there's people like that.

I know.

Well, but that's just like, that's the initiative is take initiative, take that first step, take, Action, you know, like it'd be, uh, I like how Jocko Willink and Leif Babin talk about it, is default aggressive. You know, it's just like we're, we're going to default towards an action bias. We're going to think about things, we're going to do it the right way, but when it comes down to it, we're going to push forward. We're just going to move. And just having a bias towards action.

This is something that I've been trying to teach my grandkids, you know. I failed on my own kids, but when I grew up, my dad always said You don't leave anywhere unless you make it better. So, I mean, if I got toothpaste in the sink, I'd clean it up. I had to make sure everything was better than I found it. And so I've always kind of gone that way through my life, but trying to teach some people to do that, I failed miserably. And I don't know if that's part of that drive or hunger, but, or maybe there's a bit of entitlement that's the opposite of hunger, where people just don't think they need to do that. Yeah.

That one really dovetails into the next one on hunger for us, which is extreme ownership. And these two, I think, really do go hand in hand because a lot of the reason why people don't take initiative is because they don't take ownership. Speaking of Jocko and Leif, as they came up with this term extreme ownership where you don't wait again for people to tell you things, but you also don't blame other people for your problems. Gandhi had a quote, right? Be the change in the world that you wish to see. And the gist of that was, is that if you see something and you want it to be different, then make it different. Take ownership of that problem and stop blaming other people. Well, that'll never change because they— and it's always a nebulous, nebulous they, they, right?

Love they.

We had one guy, one of my clients, he was up in, uh, up Whidbey Island area in Washington. They run a transit up there. And he comes down, you know, former military guy, and he comes down into the shop and he's like, I keep hearing this 'they' word. Well, guess what? I am they. So what can I do for you? You know, like, it's always they— well, they don't understand, or they don't get it. I am they, right? And I loved that phrase of just, there is no other they. Like, I am they.

That's— that was a— reminds me of a book I read years ago, um, The 13 Things you shouldn't do in business, basically. And that's called pronoun disease. And a lot of people get into that pronoun disease. They said it. It's them that won't let us, you know, and it's always somebody else's problem. I mean, that's the first thing you need to recognize in yourself. Don't say that.

Well, as long as you can deflect blame, you can deflect what we call responsibility, right? I don't— and accountability. As long as it's somebody else's fault, it's not my fault. And as long as it's not my fault, I don't have to do anything about it.

We have a culture right now, particularly in the political arena, that does that, right?

It's always— it's ever— always somebody else.

It's their fault and they take ownership, that could be the end of their career.

Yeah.

But sometimes, you know, you have to take ownership. And if it is the end of your career, you'll be better for it in the long run.

Well, that dovetails into our humble, right? This is why you need all three of these things that we're talking about. But taking ownership does require admitting mistakes.

Yep.

Which means you have to swallow your ego. But it also means looking in your area for problems and looking, you know, like we have different areas that we're over. You know, Jeff, you're over sales marketing. Steve, you're over product development. And there's a certain level of ownership that you have to have over your area of operation. I can't come in as a CEO and tell you, hey, you need to go do this and do that and do this. Like, that's the micromanager that everybody hates. Instead, I have to give you ownership and say, this is what I need from you. Now you go take that. And because now you have accountability, you have responsibility. And I really like breaking those words down as like you can count the things and you are, you can respond to the things, right? You have an ability to respond and an ability to count because you have those. Now you have the ownership to go out and make a difference in your world that will ultimately deliver what your goals are for that. Deliver on the mission. Having seen a lot of people, like you've mentioned in politics, there's a lot of people that, "I won't take blame for things that are going wrong.

It was my predecessor's fault." Yeah, every administration blames the previous one.

Everyone, even the ones that say we're not politicians do the same thing, right? Because it's politics. And as long as you can keep everybody upset at the other guy, then they're not going to look at you. We see that a lot in the business place, in the workplace, is blame and shame. You know, this is all your fault. As long as it's somebody else's fault, you'll never take ownership and you'll never fix the actual problems. So you kind of went through, you implemented a little bit of Extreme Ownership at your last job.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

What were, what were some of the things that, that you struggled with, with helping people understand ownership?

I mean, typically it, it's really people are programmed to blame others like we just talked about.

It's a defense mechanism.

It's a very big defense mechanism. And that's the hardest thing, right? And it's like, guys, listen, I mean, it's juvenile, but you know, you're pointing a finger at someone else. You got those other 3 pointing back at you. Like, do— and I hate the blame game. I mean, and it's always— and that was always been my biggest struggle. It's like, well, the driver was late on a load. Well, it's the driver's fault because he overslept. Well, no, it wasn't my fault, the driver said, because my dispatcher never told me what time I really had to be there. The dispatcher says, well, customer service didn't enter in the time on when it was actually supposed to be delivered because the customer never got back to them. And so you have this perpetual cycle of people blaming each other. And hey, guess what, driver? If you would have called in and said, hey, I'm not sure what time I'm supposed to be there, you could have solved that problem. Dispatcher, if you would have called CS and said, hey, there's not a time in here, what time are you there? You could have solved that problem. If customer service would have looked at their order and saw that there wasn't a time in there or remembered it, they could have gotten with the customer. So everyone's to blame. Usually when something goes wrong, it's never just one person.

It comes right down to this: that wasn't my job. Well, exactly right.

And it just takes someone doing a little, you know, more, having that initiative and saying, even though it was actually part of all of their jobs to do, it wasn't my fault, it was his fault, it was his fault. Come on, guys. It's always been my struggle is having people not point the finger at each other else, take that accountability and say, you know, you're right, I'll do this.

So one of the things that I love in reading Extreme Ownership is how Jocko combated that, was rather than have the blame game, he said, you guys, you know whose fault it is. It's my fault. I'm the leader. Like, you know, people even tried taking responsibility, which was like, that's cool. You guys are stepping up and trying to say, hey, like, I really fell down on the job here. Like, that's awesome. You want that in your culture. But in a culture like you described where everybody else is blaming each other, sometimes you as a leader have to make the sacrifice and say, you know what, you're right, that was my fault. It was my fault that I let you do this. It's my fault that I let you think that this was okay, and that stops now.

Yep.

You know, and so like in a position like that where everybody's like, okay, as a leader you have the responsibility to take that ownership and say, okay, this stops now. This is how we're not going to blame each other. It's every one of us is responsible and every one of us is accountable.

You know, it's funny is you get different responses when you say that because I did do that. I'd read the book. Yeah, right. So I did do that. And so I said to the customer service person, It's probably my fault for not telling you more emphatically that your job was to make appointments and make sure the customer did it, right? And that person was like, well, no, I knew that was a part of my job. Oh, okay, but it's still my fault, you know, it's not yours.

You know what, it's my fault is that I didn't come down on you hard enough when you didn't do your job, right?

Or the— or the— it's funny because like, or that you're still here. And, and taking that approach to all of them, the driver is the only one that said No, it's not your fault, it's mine. I should have double-checked on what it was supposed to deliver, right? So you like, you take that approach and people actually, they don't want you looking like an idiot either, right? Because obviously it reflects you what they're doing. So they'll actually reverse that course and sometimes take ownership in their mindset. No, no, you're right, it really was my fault. It doesn't mean they're going to change going forward, but at least reversing it that way does have a positive effect.

But though, you know, an internal look though helps, I think. It does when you turn it to them, because then they'll think about it twice next time.

Yeah, I know I've had conversations like that with executive team members, and I'm like it— and I, you know, I don't say it even facetiously. It comes out a little bit facetiously, like you're just being sarcastic. You don't really mean this is your fault, you know, when you say it. But I've had that conversation where I'm like, you know what, this is my fault, and this is why, right? It's because I have allowed this to keep going I knew it was a problem, but I didn't say anything and I should have said something. And I had one executive kind of retort back, "Well, no, now you're just trying to fall on your sword and you're trying to take this away from me." And I'm like, "Why don't you just take it in the first place?" But I'm not going to tolerate this any further. And so that's why, because it's my fault, it stops here. It stops now. We're changing things today, you know, and that's that level of ownership that you have to do. Last two things that we look at, these ones are fun for me, is aim high with courage. I think a lot of times we stay in our comfort zone, and hungry people don't want to be in their comfort zone. You have to step out of your comfort zone. We like to aim high with courage. We aim high knowing that we'll probably fail. We have an OKR framework that we like to follow that really kind of pushes for about a 70% success rate. And, you know, it just means that you have to take courage, be okay with failure, and push hard. But don't be afraid of setting a high ambitious goal just because you're afraid of failing. Like, setting the goal itself will drive you to do things that you've never done before and think outside the box and push you in ways that you've never been pushed. But the only way you do that is if you do set that high goal. So we always like to do that, is encourage people that take courage, aim high, don't be afraid of missing it, don't be afraid of coming in short.

Doing the opposite of that is setting a goal that's easily attainable, and what do you really accomplish? Right, right.

I mean, you don't grow incremental growth. Yeah, that's what we call it, incremental. Uh, you know, you grow 10% a year or something like that, like that's just incremental growth. You know, Google always had a thing is how do we 10x this idea? Yep. How do we grow 10 times bigger than what it is today? Which means, like, it's a totally different set of problems. You know, you imagine what if you had maybe your 400-vehicle fleet? What would you have to do different if you were 10 times as big? What would you have to do different if you had 10 times as many issues, right?

And there's a lot— there's actually a lot of our clients facing that kind of an issue now. Yeah, they got to be really rethinking that whole issue.

What if you could, you know, they're asking you for 1% What if I could 10x that? Like, what would it take to get 10%?

Yep.

And odds are, is like a lot of people, if you're thinking about budget cuts, 1%, oh my gosh, like, where am I gonna go find that? I've already cut this budget as much as I can. But if you were to go that next step and say, okay, what if you were to cut it 10%? Odds are is you're not going to get to 10, but imagine if you could get to 5 or 6. Well, that's 5 or 6 times bigger than your initial outlay of 1%. And that's the kind of mindset, like, you have to aim high with courage Being okay with failure, but not letting the failure deter you from trying your best. The last one's one of my favorites. This comes from Dave Ramsey, and he talks about how, you know, we don't sit back and wait for people to feed us. You know, if we want something, we leave the cave, we kill it, we drag it back, and we eat. You know, this kind of goes back to taking initiative, but we're hunters. We go out and we go out and we look for things. We hunt for things.

You go out and you read and you learn and you find things. You look at the industry and you see how it's progressing. You don't sit back and do nothing, right? You don't let our lax attitude drive what we do.

Yeah, the moment you stop your progression, you stop your learning, you're stagnant. You're not going to advance anymore as an individual.

I always like that saying, "If you fall flat on your face, at least you're moving forward." You know? So that's something.

Just keep falling forward, right?

Just keep falling forward.

Yeah, so we always like to just remind everybody is, hey, nobody's here to spoon-feed you. You're all adults. You're up. Leave the cave, kill it, drag it back, bring it, and then eat. Don't wait for somebody to come and give it to you. Never wait for somebody to give you a gift of a new job or a new promotion. And we're really saying a lot of the same things. This is one of the reasons why we do this is just to kind of help illustrate when we say hunger, This is what it means. And a lot of them all kind of overlap and they talk about the same thing. But, you know, leaving the cave, killing a dragon in the back. Well, it's really about taking ownership of your next meal. It's taking initiative. It's being driven to go do something. And so we, you know, it sounds a little bit repetitive when you put them all together, but the idea is that we're really trying to drive home that point of this is what hunger means at RTA. So I think that'll wrap it up for us today. Just a reminder, we have the Fleet Success Summit coming up April 20th, 21st out here in Mesa, Arizona. You can go to fleetsuccesssummit.com. Tell your friends, tell your coworkers. We're going to have some awesome speakers lined up for that event, you know, talking all about leadership, tech, everything we talk about here in the podcast. We're going to have some other thought leaders that are in the space that we listen to, that we know, bringing them all together. One stage, one room for two days. It's going to be awesome. And then obviously subscribe to the Fleet Success Show wherever you listen to podcasts and let your friends know about the show. Until next time, we're gone.

Stay hungry, my friends.

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