Episode 058: The Problem That Fleet Success Solves

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 for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm your host, Josh Turley, joined today by Steve Saltskiver.

I'm glad to be back.

Hey, welcome back, Steve.

Good to have you, Steve.

Thank you.

And my other host, Jeff Jenkins.

Howdy, howdy.

Howdy, howdy. It's another great day out in Arizona. We're hitting 100 solidly.

Uh, we are.

Summer is here, which means it's pool season.

It is pool season. You know what the temperature in my pool is right now?

What?

86 degrees.

Oh, that's warm.

It's really warm.

What happened?

You gotta get that thing circulating or something. Oh my gosh, that pool used to be so nice. This would be like the perfect time to go swimming all through June. July and August, it's terrible, but right now, perfect time.

I don't know what happened. It's warm though.

Yeah, 86 would be good for me.

No, that's bath water. Yes, you may as well just go like soak in your own sweat. That's gross. As soon as you get out, that's just gross.

Just cool off.

I mean, here in Arizona, yes, that's true. You get out like— but that's what you almost have to do. Like, you have to get in, get out, get in, get out, get in, get out. But right now it's supposed to be like 60, 70 degrees, so it's actually cool and refreshing when you get in. And then come July, August, that's when you have to do the get in, get out.

Yeah.

I don't know what's going on this weekend in Arizona, but it is busy here.

Yeah.

I can't believe how many people are here.

It's not for the Suns game, I'll tell you that.

It's not for the 100-degree weather.

Listen, that's a sore subject.

Still sore even after this many weeks.

Dumb.

All right. So today we want to talk about the problem. What is the problem that Fleet Success is solving? And— you know, why is it that we needed to come out and talk about fleet success as a whole versus anything else that was out there? Like, why did we feel compelled to speak on fleet success?

Well, I think one of the reasons is because everybody has little snippets, but they don't have the full picture, right? You can pull out things and, you know, they didn't name them what we've named them, the 4 pillars. But everyone has something like, oh, you know, well, I've got to get— save money, or I've got to be more efficient with my time, or I've got to be safe, or I've got to make sure that all my people are trained. I mean, there's different aspects of it, but nobody's actually bundled it all together and said, hey, here's a problem.

And it's interesting, even last week we talked about the CAFM and all the 8 disciplines that go into that. And even in those 8 disciplines, we still felt they missed some categories. Yeah. Because there's definitely things that we talk about, especially around culture and people management, that they don't even touch. And, you know, like they get into it a little bit in the professional development category in that discipline, but not really, you know, like I think they miss an opportunity in that category.

Well, the most valuable resource is people, so why wouldn't that be a core function?

Or several cores, right? Instead of— you've got asset management, maintenance management, fuel management, finance, business, professional development, risk. Risk was the other one, right? But You've got 8 disciplines and only one of them is about the people instead of 3 or 4 of them.

Yeah, and that's just the professional development, and that's just talking about like a specific job function.

Yeah. So I think overall, like, that's what we kind of saw in the industry. And it's not just, you know, like we're kind of beating up on the CAFM, but it's because we, we see a lot of value in that cert, but we felt like there was a lot of material that just wasn't being delivered to fleet managers. There's a lot of things in education that they are looking for and craving that just wasn't coming out. Education and resources that we've all had access to in our professional careers, but just didn't seem to be coming through. So I think the one thing we were really trying to get was clarity. Like we were trying to just define once and for all, hey, this is what fleet success really is. This is what it looks like. This is how you achieve it. And that's like really getting clear about what to do and how to do it.

I think bits and pieces were already there.

That's exactly it.

But I think people, unless you define it and go after the goal and the objective, I don't think you ever get there. 'Cause it has to be, I've always said it has to be written down somewhere.

Well, it's like you've got a bunch of Lego blocks with no instructions. So you kind of have to put together your own little creation and hopefully you get it right. But in the end of the day, you almost need instructions if you want to create something the right way or do something. You need an instruction manual that teaches you how to put all those blocks together in a cohesive manner that actually does something.

Well, I think everybody knows hiring is important, but what does that mean?

And where do you get resources to teach you?

Where's the questions? What questions do you ask? Where do you— how do you evaluate people? I mean, there's a lot of process involved there.

Yeah. So, and so I think that was one of the biggest things we talked about when we wrote the book for the Fleet Success Playbook was how do we introduce all these elements and bring them together in one cohesive pattern? Like, how do they all fit? How do you put this Lego block with that one to create something really unique and special?

I think we need— we tried to set up— it's one of those areas where it's all soft skills if you're not involved like we did. We've tried to put some hard skills to it, little playbooks and plays that we're running and things like that, so that people could actually say, oh yeah, that makes sense. Let's do that, do it this way. Otherwise, it's just a pie-in-the-sky thing, right?

Yeah. So I think as you're kind of looking at that too, like what the overall clarity that we are trying to create, right, that this really isn't just fleet management. You know, we're trying to kind of create alignment almost within the industry. And I think one of the biggest things that we're really talking about when you talk about fleet success, it's about creating organizational health in your fleet. You know, it's a term that Patrick Lencioni talks about all the time is how do you have a healthy organization, not just a smart organization, you know, an organization that's good at its job, but one that's also healthy, that does work that matters, that motivates people, that fulfills people. And how— I think that's honestly like the biggest thing that Fleet Success is bringing in. Let's say if I were to say like, hey, here's a bin of Legos that wasn't in the industry before. We're going to take all the Legos that they had and we're going to add in our own specialty Legos. Like, that would be it. Here's organizational health Legos. Now we're going to show you how this fits together with all the building blocks from NAFA and from APWA and from NTEA, you know, all the, all the things that they try to teach you and put it together in one. I'm going to use this word a lot. This is going to be like the word of the episode is cohesive because it really is. I mean, like, you talk about cohesion as like a almost like a blending or a glue. You know, it adheres, it's adhesive. Cohesive is just a different form of that same root.

When you're talking about that, it makes me think that maybe organizational health is like the Swiss Army knife of a Lego block, right? It can fit anywhere if you apply it the right way.

Yeah, I was thinking like an engine firing on all cylinders. You know, if you got one that's not working right, and maybe it's my fleet background, engines, you know, but You know, I mean, if you don't have it tuned up right, and if you're not putting the necessary preventative maintenance into it, then you're going to be dysfunctional and you're not going to be able to work. The engine won't work, it'll just fail.

This is a terrible story, but as you're telling me about an engine misfiring, right? So this is a total segue, but when my sister got married, we went out and switched the spark plug wires in their car, which is terrible to do to an engine, but we did that, right? Just to, you know, play a little prank on them as they tried driving off from the reception. And, you know, he— I totally, like, I regret doing this because it totally flustered the groom, my future brother-in-law. It totally set them off on the wrong foot before their honeymoon. And anyway, but it did, it totally made the car run terribly. And like, if something was just not right because it was misfiring, it was just running really rough. And so we finally met up with him and switched the wires back, but he had no idea what was happening. And so, but it does, if you don't have that, like, it really makes it—

yeah.

Difficult to operate that vehicle. It makes it difficult to operate your organization when it's not firing on all cylinders. We talk about that all the time here, is that you have one person that it's like you spend 80 to 90% of your time managing the bottom 20% of your people. Yep. And it's like 80% of your energy and your frustration comes from that. And what could you do if you had organizational health where it was built around, you know, recruiting and hiring and teaching people how to do this kind of thing? And I think that's why we felt so passionate about teaching fleet managers this crucial skill that nobody was really talking about. And it was just, hey, good luck, you go figure it out, right? We're going to promote you and it's up to you to try to figure out where you're going to learn to be a leader.

You know, sorry, keep going.

And a lot of the fleet managers we've seen, they used to be former technicians. They were brought up in the school of how do I turn a wrench. And like, I can be a really good technician and I might be able to teach other people how to be a good tech, but now I got to deal with all these other peers and I got to manage like a whole team of people that aren't technicians and You know, like they just aren't given any of that education on how to really run an operation because it just comes back to people, and that's really what it's all about.

Well, there's no leadership development at all, right? And that's, that's part of it. And the reason why when we first started talking about this, why it resonated with me, and you know, you talk about the organizational health, is I look back my very first job in trucking and very, very good when profitability, right? Learned how to run trucks, you learn how to do all that. And we checked all the marks on being successful except for on the people side. I mean, turnover was being there a year, a year and a half, and that was it. Because it was all you thought about was just get as much as you can out of someone for a short period of time, bring in fresh meat, do the same thing, right? And just burn them out. And people on the outside look in and say, oh my gosh, this company's kicking ass, right? They're killing their numbers, right? It's a public company, so stock is doing great. But when you actually are there and you look at the internal and you see how many people are coming and going, you realize yourself that it's not healthy. Even though at the time, you know, our mindset was, oh man, they just, they just can't handle it. They just can't hack it. They're not, you know, good employees. When in reality, it wasn't necessarily the employee, it was the organization overall and that the way that they treated those people.

I think one of the things that it does is it infuses discipline into your process. I mean, especially right now, I mean, you look at all the— well, maybe it's changing a little bit— all the openings out there and people moving from job to job. That's become such an issue now. And so a lot of people are just— they pull the trigger too quickly to hire somebody, you know, if they can fog a mirror, rather than— what we're telling people is, no, take the time. If you can't find anybody right away, just take the time to find the right person.

As soon as possible, but as long as it takes. Yes. Yeah, I think the— what I'm hearing too is like the great resignation, it's turning into the forever resignation. Companies that aren't figuring out how to really attract and retain people are going to keep losing people and they're going to have a hard time. They're going to do the churn and burn method, you know, it's just they're going to bring people in but they won't be able to keep them because it will just turn into this, you know, like employees have a lot of power right now.

Yep.

You know, maybe it won't ever always be that way. I mean, we see ebbs and flows in the economy, but I don't see it going back a ton either.

Well, there's been a lot of like layoffs announced recently.

There has been.

So I think that you're starting to see that pendulum.

Yeah.

Do a little bit of a switch to where the employee is not going to have the power that they've had the past 18 months.

There is that coming. Plus, but you also got the generational issues.

You do. Anytime.

And that's where some of the turnover is from, is people aren't interested. They want life balance now. They want to have families and, you know, time and everything.

You didn't have that with the boomers.

My generation was not that way.

No, but you definitely have that with the millennials.

Yes.

You know, there was definitely an element of that to Gen X. Gen X, yep. And people are telling me like, oh man, Gen Z, like, you don't even want to know how bad it's going to be with Gen Z. I'm like, it can't be that bad. I was a millennial. Like, we got through that phase. Like, we're okay.

They want 4 hours a day.

Yeah.

10 weeks of vacation.

Go live in Europe, I guess. But I think that's honestly what it really for us comes down to and figuring out how to manage the Gen Zs and learning how to be leaders and how to create clarity for your organization and achieving the results that you need to achieve. And not just, okay, well, here's 5 Lego blocks, you figure out how to put together. Fleet Success is really about painting the picture of what it can look like. I mean, you still have to put it together. You still have to do the work, but giving you some templates and models about, okay, well, you can put it together in 4 or 5 different ways, but these are the core building blocks that you need to use when you do it.

Well, and you've got to follow those, right? And that's the key is we talk about fleet success and, hey, here's this initiative and this can help you with your overall organizational health. And people will still go and they'll just pick one area of stakeholder satisfaction or one area of risk management.

Sure, you pick a—

and be like, you know, I'm going to implement these and it's going to help my organization. The problem is if you're going to half-ass it, as with anything, yep, if you don't prepare, then you're not going to achieve the goals that you want to set for yourself.

Yep. It's just like any kind of diet or discipline, right? Like, if you're not disciplined with it, it's just gonna, you know, you'll end up putting the weight back on, you'll end up doing all that, you'll go back to what we call your lowest level of preparation. You know, it's It's honestly like it just goes back to the lowest common energy level. How— what's your, your default cruise setting? You know, it takes work. It takes a lot of hard effort to do it. And it's sustained effort. Like, that's the thing that it's not enough just to do one play. You do one play from each topic and then you come back and do another play from each topic and you just keep iterating, continuously improving. And that's honestly what it's all about is continuous improvement.

It is.

And it's a lifestyle. You know, the pens that we gave away at the Fleet Success Summit, I put on there, Fleet Success is a lifestyle because it is a lifestyle, right? It has things that you can take and that resonate to personal lives as well.

Yeah.

And you can implement those things throughout all of your life.

That just reminded me, it was like, you could totally do this. You go home and interview your spouse and be like, hey, how am I doing on my stakeholder satisfaction? Right? Like, am I meeting your needs? You know, what are you expecting from me? Are we, you know, like, How are we doing? I've, you know, Angie and I talked about like our weekly dinners that we do. That's a big part of that, you know, is having some of those inventory discussions. You could totally figure out, you know, do an intentional culture at home. We've done that at my house. You know, we've got core values. It's all about, you know, genuine, resilient, and compassionate. We have a mission statement. You totally could implement a lot of this stuff at home.

I'd wonder what like my kids would say. Okay, I need you to tell me how I'm doing as a father.

Right?

Well, let me tell you my allowance.

But would that be any different like the employees, you know, hey, how am I doing as your boss? Well, you know, of course, your kids are probably going to be a lot more honest with you. So maybe it'd be better to practice with your kids first. Just, you know, take the body-blouse and then come in and talk to your employees and they're going to be a lot nicer than your kids were.

I think it makes everybody better though. I've even seen that here, you know, where we're practicing this. And it is a practice. I mean, until you— you're never going to be perfect. But when you ask an employee, you know, for their opinion and stuff, and they really look at you like, really? You really want my opinion? You know, I mean, I've worked in places where they ask that, but they don't really want it.

Right.

You know, it's just a question on a questionnaire.

Yeah, exactly.

Just a survey or something.

But well, that goes back to discipline, though, because if you sat down with your kids and you said, hey, well, how am I doing as a dad? And they said, well, you know, let me tell you, and then you don't do anything with it, the next time they're gonna be like, yeah, whatever, you don't care. And so the discipline then comes in the follow-through is, okay, now what are you gonna do about it? You know, you read a book, now what are you gonna do about it, right? Like, if we wrote this book and you read it and you didn't change anything in your life, I feel terrible. Like, I may as well not have written the book. That's— and that's what I feel like.

And they may not have read it, right? They wasted their time.

Yeah.

I actually think what we've started here has actually made me a better person.

Yeah.

Dude, I was thinking, when you were talking earlier about that, I thought that exact same thing. I think that through this initiative, I'm a better person than I was before.

I agree.

Well then, if nothing else, we at least got that out of it.

Yeah.

We can just close it up right now. Like, hey, we did good.

Like, people can tolerate me more.

Even my wife. I mean, I even listen better to her.

Hey, how about that?

She actually came out and complimented me the other day. I thought, wow. 'Cause I'm usually cutting her off or doing something dumb that I'm not aware of.

Yeah, it's increased your self-awareness.

It has, it's increased my self-awareness totally.

Well, I think that's a good note to end on right there.

Drop the mic.

Drop the mic. So thank you guys all for joining us for this episode. As a reminder, we do have the Fleet Success Playbook out. You can learn all about the 4 pillars, stakeholder satisfaction, intentional culture, resource efficiency, and risk management. How they all blend together, the different LEGO building blocks. If you want a copy of that book, go ahead and email us. Just include your shipping address, podcast@rtfleet.com. We're giving away some of the first few copies and then look for it on Amazon in the future.

And I will say that I love seeing the people that have received it posting on LinkedIn.

How cool is that?

I mean, it is amazing. They got a picture of the book saying, you know, thank you for sending it to me. I can't wait to dig into it. It's fantastic.

It's so cool. Yeah. I don't see any of anybody doing that with like, hey, here I am with Patrick Lencioni's latest book. I mean, I've seen some of that, but maybe it's just my connections are all reading my books.

I was going to say, because we're LinkedIn, all Fleet people.

We're in an echo chamber, I guess. But it's still really cool.

It is cool.

So thank you to all of our readers as you guys have listened to this and are reading the book. We'd love to hear your feedback. If you go to fleetsuccessplaybook.com, you can go submit your information there, your reviews there as well. We'd love to hear like, hey, if we did a part 2 on this, what you'd want to see in part 2. I'm already thinking about, you know, the next 2 or 3 books I want to write because it was so much fun writing this first one. Mostly.

It was cathartic for me.

It was a lot of hard work, I'll tell you that.

I'm glad I got that out because there's a lot of things I had to learn going through this.

Yeah.

In my own career. So I'm glad I can, you know, help somebody else maybe avoid some of those pitfalls.

Yeah, absolutely.

It was really cool. Kind of carry on a legacy. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. So, well, until next time, thank you guys very much.

All right. Lots of love, guys. Thanks.

Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Fleet Success Show. If you liked our show, we'd appreciate your 5-star review. Be sure to subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and come hang out with us anywhere on social media @FleetSuccess. See you next time.