Episode 117 Scariest Financial Mistakes Fleets Make

Welcome to the 117th podcast of the Fleet Success Show. I'm your host this week, Steve Seltzgiver. I'm the senior fleet success senior advisor. Today I'm joined with my good friend, coworker, and industry fleet expert Mark Canton. Today we're going to discuss the topic called scariest financial mistakes that fleets make. This week, I want to give you a quick introduction for those of you that have not seen me for a while as I host the Fleet Podcast. Anyway, I'm a veteran fleet management expert and an experienced fleet manager in the fleet management industry. One of the original Fleet Success Podcast hosts and former director of fleet for, for the state of Georgia, state of Utah, former vice president of fleet for Coca-Cola and Republic Services. Yeah. And I've been in the fleet management business for, gosh, Mark, over 40 years now. So that's, that's, I'm hitting one of those milestones now.

So absolutely.

Tell us a little bit about your background.

Well, I will. But first, you're a very humble guy and I want our listeners to know you're also in a couple of fleet management Hall of Fames. So in our circles, folks, we call Steve Saltzgiver the Fleet Whisperer. Because every time he goes to fix a fleet, he works miracles. But yeah, I've been in the fleet industry for over 26 years myself. Started out mostly in higher ed and transportation and logistics in and around the New York City area. I've spent the last 7 years, well, the last year or so in software really as a product manager helping to design new fleet management information systems. Last 7 years or so in consulting and fleet analytics. And I guess my claim to fame, although it's not the most fun work in the world, is I'll often serve as an expert witness in class action cases that surround vehicle costing and vehicle cost modeling. So that's where a lot of my work and efforts have been, let's say, the last 4 or 5 years is vehicle costing and sustainability efforts, frankly, transition plans. Feasibility studies to convert to EV, CNG, that sort of a thing. But I'm happy to be here. Happy to be with you, Steve. Looking forward to having a nice conversation.

Yeah, absolutely. We're going to talk a little bit about financial— scary financial mistakes that fleet managers make, which really falls in line very carefully with two of our pillars of fleet success, one being resource efficiency and the other one being risk management. So, and As we go through this process today, we'll identify some of those mistakes and you can kind of figure out how that is part of those pillars as you go through and you manage your fleets. Let's talk about some of the scariest mistakes fleet managers make in the financial realm. I always remember my, my old friend mentor always telling me that there's two things a fleet manager can do if they really want to have the most efficient fleet operation that they can have, and that is have a very robust replacement program. That's well thought out and then have a cost recovery and chargeback system. So those two things, I wanted to lay that out there as we start this conversation. Those are two things that you really need to be thinking about if you're a fleet manager. So, Mark, let's take it from there.

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I could not agree more. That's exactly my experience from engaging fleets. You know, to put it in terms of the topic, you know, what are these mistakes? It's I find that fleet organizations, you know, to put a label on it, it's they're screwing up their replacement program, right? They're not getting that right. And I would almost call it a— there's like a fear of capital costs, right? There's this thing inside. Folks feel that they need to drive vehicles to the ground to get the most out of their money. And unfortunately, It's a misnomer. Most fleets keep their vehicles way too long and in doing so cost themselves a lot of money in doing that, right? As vehicles are utilized and age, you know, that drives M&R costs. You talked about in your last podcast with Paul Lauria some of the changes going on in the fleet industry. And one of them is that it's harder and harder to find techs, which along with inflation and other factors is only driving up the cost of maintenance and repair. So the, you know, the marginal cost of keeping those vehicles too long is rising. It's not getting lower, right? So I really think there's like this fear of capital cost, and because it feels like it feels wrong, right? It's like just we all feel that in our personal finances. You don't want to lay out a lot of cash, you know, you don't want to put out $50,000, $100,000 all the time. You'd rather you know, spend it in small increments. But in the long run, if you're spending more money, it's, it's, it's not the way to go. And in fact, I think you and I would agree, Steve, that in most cases, you know, you can improve your replacement practices, uh, and increase capital spending without actually increasing cash outlay, right? And so I think another piece of it is, uh, in addition to sort of fear of capital cost is really a fear of debt financing that pervades most of the industry. And it's, you know, in all of the studies that I've done, you know, almost invariably fleets would have tremendous opportunity to improve their, certainly their cash situation and their budget situation, and really their overall costs, which can be counterintuitive to folks. But by adopting debt financing, we find that fleets actually have generally will have lower total cost of ownership of the ones that are using debt financing.

So, you know, one of the scariest things, scariest things that we see, I know, in our practice and maybe as we visit fleets, as we see these tremendous backlogs of replacement.

Yep.

You know, and a lot of that's caused by that fear of capital you're talking about, right? You know, people will not appropriate the correct amount of money for whatever reason. Could be budget. Impediments. It could be the fear that they have. You know, it could be anything. But all that does is lead to exactly what we're talking about here is higher costs, higher vehicle, larger fleets, more spares, you know, more technicians, bigger shops. I mean, it really just exacerbates itself as you go through the process. And that's why it's so scary.

Right. I mean, yeah, to your point. So a couple of things kind of stick out to me. You know, I don't know if you recall, I won't name names, but we did a large study for a large fleet here in the Northeast, not far from where I am. And they just had outrageous maintenance and repair costs, right? You know, I remember we calculated labor rates in the $300 an hour in a few of their shops. And so, you know, when we presented this to leadership, their first instinctual question was, well, how do we improve the maintenance and repair program, uh, and, and make it more cost efficient? And, you know, it was a tough— it was tough to, to, to have to tell them this, but it was, you can't, right? I mean, you, you can improve that maintenance repair program and get it as close to optimal as you can, but clearly there were cost drivers there, uh, that, you know, even if you got it down to $250, you know, or even $200 at that time, which was maybe, I don't know, 7 years ago, you know, that would have been a great win for the maintenance and repair program. And yet, uh, you know, not the way to address the total costs, uh, issues there, right? They needed to really adopt an aggressive replacement, um, program, uh, and just essentially avoid all of those operational costs, especially maintenance repair costs. So, you know, that's one thing that sticks out to me. People, their, their first thought for fixing maintenance and repair program, sure, I mean if you got a solid program and you're trying to optimize it, you're trying to improve it and get it better around the edges, or if you have a bunch of low-hanging fruit, great. I'm not saying not to do that, but oftentimes if you have some systematic issues or you just have cost drivers that can't be avoided, the way to solve operational cost issues is actually through increasing capital expenditures. Right. And, you know, I think a good example of like an easy example to point to that I think everyone can relate to is the car rental business, right? You know, the Enterprises of the world, the Hertz of the world, you know, pick one, National, whoever you like. You know, they're— granted, they have, they have purchasing power that most fleets don't have. Some might for volume, but nonetheless, you know, they're, they're buying those vehicles, Steve, and what, they keep them 2, 3 years, maybe 3 years, and they're turning them over. I'm not saying that 3 years is the right number for all fleets. By any means, but there is a right number. And, you know, and you really have to be disciplined about it. And that's why we like the debt financing, because it tends to lead to having that discipline right in your replace program. And so, so yeah, we find folks actually have much lower costs there in that regard.

Early on in my career, we did a lot of purchasing, right? And so, I mean, that was something that I always really probably preferred until I got into more of the consulting realm and I saw real data and real life situations because you're exactly right. People don't have that discipline. And when you go turn to a lease, then that becomes an operating cost and not a capital cost moving forward. And so—

Yeah, in many cases.

You essentially allow yourself to budget for that moving forward. And you don't have to wait for the, you know, for management to allocate cash or anything else.

So, right, exactly. I mean, I think, I think so. A couple things also, you know, jump out to me. Like, people think, oh, I spent $50,000 on the truck, and they kind of think of it in those terms, like that money is spent and it's gone. And it's— so I'll ask people, well, what's your capital cost in the truck? And they'll say, well, I spent $50,000 on it. And then I'll say, well, yeah, but what's your capital cost on the truck? And they'll look at me like I have two heads, right? You know, and it's kind of like, well, you don't know till you sell it, right? And so one of the things people I think don't appreciate is that that vehicle or that asset is costing you money simply by existing in your fleet, whether you use it, whether you don't use it. It's depreciating every single day and it's, and it's costing you money. And so you really need to take that into account and make sure that you're you know, in most cases it's going to make a lot of sense to turn over those assets while they still have some value on them. Um, so, you know, that's something that, uh, has really stood out to me. The other thing that stood out to me, Steve, and I'm curious what your thoughts are on this, but I mean, invariably— I'm not going to say 100% because I'm open to the idea that there's always an exception to the rule, but boy, I'd like to say 99.999999, you know, percent of the time Older fleets are almost always oversized fleets, right? Because when they're— when you're keeping vehicles too long, right, you're gonna— they're gonna have need more time in the shop, which is what's driving those M&R costs we're talking about. But if they have more time in the shop, well, that means they're down more. And if they're down more, well, then what do you do about that? You're either renting more, or you generally— most fleets I see will have more fleet assets because they they feel they need a higher spare ratio to account for that extra downtime. So, you know, on the one hand, there is such thing as replacing a vehicle too early or an asset too early. But boy, I'd rather err on that side because then I don't have those downtime costs that go along with it. I'm curious your thoughts. I mean, you know, dealing with trucks and the things you've managed, you know.

Absolutely on point. I think, I mean, you and I both are consultants, have been doing that for a long time. I think it's absolutely the phenomenon that we see when we go into these fleets. They're always old. They've always got backlog. They've always got vehicles sitting on the sideline. I've seen spare ratios as high as 30% in some of these.

Oh, right.

You know, and it's just unbelievable. I mean, think about a third of your fleet just sitting around not making money. I remember years ago, I did analyses on vehicles based on lifecycle. And it was somewhere around $25 to $30 a day depreciation, no matter what the life cycle was or what the asset was. I mean, you think about that's just leaving money on the table. You know, one of the phenomenons I saw recently, which really kind of blew my mind because I've never really worked with a tremendously low utilized fleet. And I found out looking at the numbers that it didn't really matter how old the vehicle was. Or how much it was used, it actually mattered how much it was, or how old it was, excuse me. And so it was kind of a crazy phenomenon. So at 10 years, that vehicle was pretty much used up, even though it had little to no miles on it. Age was more of a factor than utilization, which I would never have thought that in my wildest dreams.

Yeah, I mean, that's certainly been the case in all of the data I analyze, especially, I mean, that is a, sort of a theorem, I would say, or a universal rule in the light-duty realm for sure, and overwhelmingly so in fleet in general, certainly in the medium-duty realm. I have seen some heavy-duty equipment, some yellow iron, where utilization seems to be more of the causative instead of just the correlative variable. But I couldn't agree with you more. I see it regularly in the market, you know, a younger vehicle, 2018, you know, let's say Toyota Camry with, you know, 100,000 miles on it is often gonna be more valuable than a 2010 with 50,000 miles on it, right? And I see that all over the place. Couldn't agree with you more.

But then there's other scary things. I mean, just recently I'm talking to a lot of fleet managers. A lot of the OEMs now, original equipment manufacturers, they're stopping making parts exactly 10 years.

Right.

So I mean, if you're keeping your vehicles, I mean, now you got to depend on a secondary market which may or may not have the part you need because it depends on volume, right, and economics. So that's a scary thing if you start keeping your fleet way too long.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, there, there are some great aftermarket parts manufacturers, but let's be honest, there's also some that just make junk, right? That's why a lot of fleets will only use OEM parts. So Yeah, that's scary too. And then there's other opportunity costs, right? I mean, again, I'll just use the Toyota Camry because it's in my head, but if you take a 2010 and a 2020, right, same class vehicle, and you can do this with all the manufacturers, Ford, Dodge, whoever you like, you know, that 2020 is going to have much better fuel efficiency than the 2010, right? It's going to have much more, many more safety features, generally speaking, better crash test results. So there's all these other secondary things, these indirect things and opportunity costs that kind of go along with that too. And I'll go back real quick to the fuel thing. You know, I know that's not— this is not today's topic, but, you know, one of the things the data shows time and time again, you know, in this world that we're obviously very, very focused on greenhouse gases and carbon footprint and that sort of thing. And certainly all the talk in the industry is about EVs. And I understand that. But one of the things I'll point out is that, you know, most fleets can make dramatic impacts on their carbon footprint simply by renewing the fleet, right? Just like, like for like class replacements because of the way technology works, you know, and, you know, what manufacturers are required to do with regards to carbon emissions. So, you know, great, you know, always look for that, that great step up, that improvement if EVs or CNG or whatever is right for you. But even if there's not a good equivalent, simply renewing the fleet is going to help you pretty dramatically on that. And again, the data bears that out time and again, time and again.

So let's talk a little bit about how fleets should be taking advantage of a reserve fund or sinking fund or maybe their internal service fund, enterprise fund, you know, whatever mechanism they're using to fund. Yeah, we see a lot of people trying to appropriate dollars from like general funds. You know, things like that, which, you know, are always in decay usually.

Right.

You know, they never have enough appropriation. I don't know that I've ever seen a fleet that ever had enough appropriation. That's like the number one issue. That's the scariest thing out there, right? So let's talk about that a little bit.

Well, and just real quick, I mean, sometimes you see the other extreme, Steve. I'm sure you've seen this too, but I've come across fleets that do have a reserve fund and, you know, they have, you know, 3 or 4 times the amount of money that they need in it. And yet they're not spending the money to replace their assets. So it goes back to what I said earlier. It's like this, this scare, this fear of laying out capital, right? And so it's crazy. They got all the money, it's sitting there. They still don't replace their assets. And then it gets raided, right? For some other thing that the city or the, or whatever the organization needs to do, build a new school or whatever it may be. And And now that opportunity is gone. So start at the top. If you do have a reserve fund, use it. Right, exactly. You know, and if you don't, you know, it is hard to get one going. Let's be honest, Steve, if you're starting from scratch, it's tough because essentially you need, you know, you need, you need to make a large deposit. Yeah, exactly right. You need, it's like making a large deposit in your savings account. So you do got to do, get some cash together and you do got to make an infusion. You can actually finance that with debt as well if you'd like.

True.

But once you get that going, reserve funds are great, right? Because they really, they smooth out, you know, they make budgeting very easy or relatively easy because they smooth out via the chargeback, uh, you know, what needs to be charged for folks. And you don't have these major spikes and ebbs and flows, uh, and they, and they give you the funds that you need so that you can stay on time with replacement, right? It's, um, you know, it's, it's, it's pay it forward in a sense, right? You kind of You buy the vehicle and then you're paying for its replacement. There are a lot of mistakes folks make with reserve funds, but yeah, it's much better to have one than to, you know, think about it. If you have to go to your city or your county council, let's say, just for argument's sake, or even in a corporate setting, if you have to go to your board of trustees or the folks in finance who approve budgets requests, every time you need a replacement or every year for the replacements, it's virtually impossible to have a good replacement program, right? Because again, there's always going to be competing initiatives for what we want to spend money on this year. And so you'll never get everything that you should be replacing. Yeah, it's just always so.

Yeah, I mean, people are building buildings.

Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, so the idea behind the reserve fund really is it's protected, right? This is money we have put aside And specifically, I would argue folks should have a reserve fund specifically for replacement. You can have another one for your operating costs. That's great. That's a good practice too. But, you know, you want to— whether it's via good accounting and making solid entries, or if it's actually having two completely separate funds, you need protected replacement funding that you can use that exists only for that purpose. And then that keeps you on task with your vehicle replacements. And in the long run, It will save your organization money. You know, this is the kind of stuff you can learn how to display, you can learn how to show, you know, you can get help, right? We can show you how to do that stuff. But this is stuff that we can tell that story with data clearly and consistently. It's an accepted thing right now at this point, right? It's truth. It's not— what's the word I'm looking for— theory or conjecture of any sort. This is reality. This is the fact of the matter, right? Sure as the sun will rise.

So you said something that made me laugh about people not spending the money in their internal service fund or their sinking fund. And that brought me back to the 3 times I managed public fleets where I was always trying to basically explain and protect the funds because legislators and the city councils always want to raid those funds. And I remember having conversations about that is not cash. Retained earnings is not cash. If you want to take the retained earnings, then you got to sell the fleet because that's what's holding the retained earnings up. Right?

Right.

And a lot of people could never understand that differentiation. They wanted to basically appropriate or exappropriate my retained earnings, which is really the value of the fleet. Right. You know, and so it was always a constant challenge because when they see those reserve balances, they actually think they're cash, right? And they're not necessarily cash.

Right. And real quick, you know, since it's on topic and since that we do have a lot of listeners out there, I think, who do have reserve funds, some quick, you know, off the top of my head mistakes that I see regularly with reserve fund management or replacement management. And please chime in here. Tell me if you see these. The first one that's kind of funny when you stop and think about it, I mean, I could see how this mistake is made, but Folks will buy a vehicle and then the, and then the depreciation chargeback is just that, it's purely depreciation, right? Well, that doesn't make sense because when you go to replace that vehicle or that asset, it's going to cost more than the one you just bought. So if you're just doing depreciation with no surcharge or nothing to account for what the new asset's going to cost, you're missing something, right? You should be constantly updating what the expected replacement cost of that asset's going to be at the end of its life and adjusting the chargeback rates accordingly, you know, to that end. The other thing that I see that's constant— I mean, almost constant— and this one's kind of funny to me too, which is, you know, let's say they'll decide, okay, we're going to depreciate this thing over 10 years. Great. And so they go to depreciate it over 10 years And, uh, and, you know, they kind of oftentimes will choose a number out of thin air. So folks, don't do that. Go do some research. What's a reasonable expected residual value for that asset in the life that you plan for it? All right, and then they'll book that, and then, and then it'll come time to replace, and like we just said, well, it doesn't get replaced. Well, then what happens? It doesn't get charged back because it's past its schedule. And then when the thing finally gets sold, 5 years later, let's say, it's not worth what it was supposed to be worth. And so the correct amount never gets deposited in the reserve fund. And then folks don't, you know, the follow-up doesn't exist. It slips through the cracks. And then folks look up and say, hey, we don't have enough money in our reserve fund to pay for next year's replacements and that sort of a thing. So you really got to stop. And the devil's in the details. But if you are trying to leverage a reserve fund, You know, those, those different things are key, right? You're not, you're not depreciating from the purchase price. You depreciation from the expected future replacement price or replacement costs, including all upfits and make-ready costs. Uh, you know, if you do keep it longer, you have to account for that and continue to charge. And you need a little surcharge in there. You need something in there, uh, to offset, uh, changes in price as well as things pop up, right, Steve? Like, yeah, we're not supposed to I mean, how many times has this happened to you where, you know, you get something that's brand new, supposed to get replaced in 10 years, and 2 years into it, it's in a total, right? And you kind of replace it immediately. And nobody's pausing to make those kinds of adjustments and corrections in the reserve fund. So those are just some examples of things that come off— that's right off the top of my head that I see a lot in reserve fund and replacement management.

So one of the biggest mistakes people make, you know, when they try to have fully burdened chargeback rates is they end up just allocating those rates kind of on an equal basis, right? And they don't really do it, they do it kind of irrespective of the type of consumption that each department has. I can always think about like police and fire, big consumers, right? And if you're not doing exact chargeback rates, then you end up having some people getting cross-subsidized.

Every time.

For someone else's mistakes, yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. If you're not doing direct, if you're doing any kind of all-in rate or you're doing like a class average rate, um, I, I guarantee you there is cross-subsidation going on in your organization. And if you're a government and your fleet includes enterprise fund vehicles, you're in all likelihood in, in violation of, of regulation, your own regulations. And it's, it's, it's ironic, but again, you see it virtually all the time, you know. Uh, so you're absolutely right, you're absolutely cross-subsidizing there. And to your point, like, we're not— you're not saying anything negative when you say law enforcement and fire are, you know, have high consumption. They should, right? Law enforcement should have. That's the nature of the work they do. That's not anything negative. It's just acknowledging what the reality is and suggesting that costs should be, and, you know, should be distributed accordingly, right? They should get the money in the budget to pay for that consumption as appropriate. So that's not the issue. It's that you want to have visibility. You want to have transparency and clarity on what your cost drivers are so that you can make good decisions, right? And, and the only way to do that is to have those costs allocated properly. So I couldn't agree with you more. I think that's, that's the big one. And it's kind of like a chicken and egg thing, you know. We started with replacement, Steve, uh, because that's kind of the one that, that jumps out. That's— but the truth of the matter is I think that some of that Poor judgment and poor decision-making around replacement comes out of not doing cost allocation and chargeback right. Because what you see— and we just did a study, right, of, of, of various groups, some within RTA, some outside— and it's amazing how few organizations actually do use a properly burdened labor rate, for example, right? And so you see labor rates, uh, all over the country, and sometimes crazy things like $35 an hour, but You know, you regularly see things $50 and $75 an hour, and it's like, listen, if you're in the United States, there might be a few areas of this country left where you can still get below $100 per hour for your labor rate. But man, in all likelihood, uh, it's gonna be up there. We did a quick— our colleague, um, Nathan, did a, uh, you know, uh, a review of the top 100 fleets, you know, which you, you help judge for, and he found that the weighted average labor rate was $127 and change, for example. So, you know, so what happens? So you, you have this, you know, you have this $55 labor rate or $75 labor rate. What, what happens? Well, it makes your M&R costs look lower than they really are fundamentally, right? And so yeah, if you're leadership, if you're finance, and they're going, well yeah, but it's not costing us that much to maintain these vehicles, that's keeping them a little longer. Right? And that, that clarity, that visibility doesn't exist. And so it feeds into that, you know, to that, that vicious cycle, uh, of not making good replacement decisions. So you, you gotta get this right. You gotta get your cost allocation right. You gotta get your cost chargeback. I mean, boy, that's like, that really is like, it's like the foundation of a home. If you don't have that right, odds are there, there are issues popping up everywhere. Throughout the rest of the organization. In my experience, I don't know how you feel.

Well, going back to that cross-subsidization, if you've ever been audited by the federal government, your fund, and you're not allocating, you know, consistently or appropriately, they'll take those funds from you. Federal government will.

That's a good point.

They'll exappropriate those funds. I mean, we're all— if you have federal grants or any kind of federal leases, you know, you got both of those at Office of Management and Budget, A-87 for public fleets. An A-21 for university fleets. So you gotta be able to make sure you can provide the correct accounting or they will pilfer from your funds, you know, and they'll ding you.

That's a great point.

You know, so you gotta have it right. So those are things to really think about as you're going through this process. So we're kind of coming to the end of our podcast today. So what are some final thoughts you might have, Mark, on this?

Well, I guess I'll just reiterate some of the things, you know, that we've said. You know, one of the things we talk a lot about, you know, at RTA is the 4 pillars of fleet success. And one of those is resource efficiency. And so I think in my mind, this topic today, this is key to being efficient with your resources, right? If you don't have strong financial management and strong cost management, it's really difficult to be efficient with your resources. And one of the things that, you know, one of our colleagues, Paul Lauria, used to say is, you know, managing budget And managing expenditures is not the same as managing costs. So I think that's a really important thing to remember. And so, you know, with that, I think that, you know, getting this right, getting replacement right, getting the cost allocation and your chargeback right, really is, again, foundational. It's like the foundation of your house. If you don't have it right, odds are there are cracks, you know, appearing all over the house. So absolutely, I know folks are busy. Again, you know, I managed the fleet for over 20 years. You're constantly in firefighter mode, right? Trying to put out fires, trying to keep things afloat. But you got to make time to do, you know, to do cost allocation properly, to do cost chargeback. If your accounting or your finance group currently does it for you, you know, I don't mean this negatively, but it shouldn't be something you just leave up to them. You need to be involved. Data has context. You need to make sure it's being done properly. And certainly, you know, there are avenues to get you help for that if you need it. That's foundational. Has to happen. And then the other thing is, you know, I encourage leaders, really this is maybe even beyond fleet managers depending on the organization. You know, if you're the leader, you can't be scared of replacement. Listen to your fleet managers. They need to replace these vehicles. They need to replace these assets. And don't be scared of debt. Don't be scared of debt. Do the math on it. I know everyone says it's going to cost more because of interest. I encourage you, do the financial modeling. It's going to save you money. I, you know, I guarantee it. So, you know, those, those are kind of like the key takeaways for me and what I've seen when doing these kinds of studies in the past, Steve.

So a couple things in conclusion, you know, to avoid some of these scary mistakes. You know, I would always recommend that you partner with a veteran fleet professional. You know, like, just reach out, ask people like ourselves, you know, who've been in this business a long time. Certainly you can listen to podcasts like this, the Fleet Success Show. And for those of you that want more information, we actually have a Fleet Success Playbook that we can send you for free for those of you that listen to it. And we also have an annual Fleet Success Summit that you're certainly welcome to attend where these kinds of ideas are floated around and talked about. And then certainly, uh, for those of you that are looking to, uh, really become a more, uh, conscientious and educated professional, there's certifications out there that you can take advantage of. So lots, lots of information, good conferences you could attend, you know. So there's a number of ways to really get yourself up to speed, right?

Steve, we'll do sessions where we'll show you how to do the stuff we're talking about today. So at some of these conferences. So that's a really great point. Yeah.

So as we wrap this up, if you guys have additional questions or need additional information about today's discussion, please don't hesitate to reach out to myself or Mark or the Fleet Success Show team. You can also send us an email, the Fleet Success Show, with any questions you might have or any ideas or future ideas on social media. @fleetsuccess or send us an email at podcast@rtafleet.com. We want to hear your opinions. We want to hear your ideas. With that, any final thoughts, Mark?

Well, thank you so much for having me, Steve. I look forward to the next episode. Good to be back.

Absolutely. Thanks for tuning in this week and we'll see you next time.

Take care.