Episode 133: The Bloodflow of Any Fleet

Hey, welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show with your hosts, Mark Canton, Josh Turley.

Hey guys, good to see you again.

I feel like we were just here. Yeah. Hey, uh, so I know last time we talked about NTEA, uh, some of the questions you got from the crowd as you were doing your fleet management. What was the name of the course?

Uh, was Getting Started with Fleet.

Okay, so intro to fleet. Some of these are very new fleet managers or have been around a little while and just wanted to kind of see maybe something they missed along the way.

Right.

I know one of the things we talked about was this idea of how much time should you spend investing in the culture, right, given all the obstacles to it. But one of the things you had mentioned was kind of what started this conversation and walk us into that.

Yeah. So, you know, we were going through the various pillars and so forth, like you said, and you know, we were just kind of relating to the crowd for a little bit, you know, common things people go through and that sort of a thing. And I think it's a— for whatever reason, it's a common character trait, I think, with many fleet managers to have hero complex, right? And want to solve all problems for the whole world all the time.

Shoulders, the Atlas, right? Carry the weight of the world.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, always putting out fires. And I always— one of my running jokes is, you know, we should buy fleet managers fire fire helmets, you know, that kind of a thing. So, but one of the things that, you know, I've really learned a lot, you know, I try to keep learning in my life. And one of the things that's kind of come out of the last few years, certainly working with you and the team here, and it's becoming more and more applicable in the world of fleet is this concept of blood flow. And, you know, we don't really think of it in that term, but, you know, we took the time to point out to fleet managers, you know, well, how many of you are having to check the work orders because they're not all right? And get all the hands come up, right? And we're talking some folks, C-suite people, folks, right? And, you know, checking in on PM schedules and having to call somebody who's late and, and just all of the kinds of things that are really kind of in the weeds, you know, that many fleet managers are either having to do themselves or they're having to really monitor very closely in that sort of a thing. Right. And you get it. And as you recall from the last episode, we were talking a lot about team building and the importance of team building and and that sort of a thing. And so it kind of flowed into this idea that I think is kind of foreign to the world of fleet, quite frankly. It certainly was foreign to me. And we talk a lot about it in management practices. That was actually one of my themes. Just a quick little tangent there. One of my themes for our talking points and Steve and Tony as well was really we're teaching you about management and we're applying it to fleet. Right. And we're trying to kind of help get Fleet Manage up to the world and a lot of strategies and tactics that have already been proven to be very successful in other industries for quite some time. And so we talked about, you know, well, hey, if you're doing the PM scheduling yourself, what is it that you're not doing?

Right.

Right. And this concept that, yeah, you can put in 12-hour days and 14-hour days and 16-hour days, you'll run yourself to death eventually. Everybody knows that. Everybody's either been the burnout or knows the burnout or, you know, that sort of a thing. But even then, even if you work the 16 hours, everything you choose to do, it means necessarily you're choosing not to do something else. Right. And, and it was just kind of like, it's something that's so obvious. We all know that, but you don't think about it in those terms. And, you know, and I, and I stole the line from you, quite frankly. I said, you know, my, my boss, Josh, he likes to think about it in terms of blood flow. You know, if you get an injury, your blood's going to go to that injury point, or if you get sick, it's going to want to go to the immune system. It means it can't go. Someplace else, right? And so you have to decide where do you want the blood flow to go. And sometimes, you know, there's really good competing things where you wish you could have the blood flow everywhere, and you, but you just can't do it. And so that tied into, you know, some of the other concepts you've, you know, you're very familiar with, the critical few and, and so forth and so on, you know. And people always want to know, Marc, what's the top 10 metrics? And I always say, 10's too many, right? And they go look at me like I'm crazy because I'm supposed to be the data analytics guy, but So, this concept of really putting your time and your energy into the things that are most important for you to be doing. And what are those? What are, you know, the concept of return on investment? What are we getting out of the activity and the effort that we're doing? The concept of opportunity costs, right, which is the same concept of blood flow, which is, hey, yeah, you know, Investors and finance folks, they were very familiar with that, right? We had a few of them in the room volunteer, tell us what that's about. You know, yeah, well, if you make an investment in A, it means you can't use the money to invest in B. So, that's an opportunity cost. Very simple. And we kind of translated that into, well, what does that mean in terms of your time? If you're checking the PM schedule, what are you not doing that maybe you ought be doing or you could be doing or you should be doing that might be a better return on investment, right? And that's not to say that PM scheduling is not important. It is to say that hopefully you have some team members you can count on to do that kind of a thing, right? And so, it was just amazing, first the faces I got because it was like you could see light bulbs going off, you know, and people naturally understand the concept, I think, and yet they just haven't paused and thought about it in that way, you know? And it was almost magical. Honestly, it was a wonderful experience for me. Because I had never really, you know, I've been teaching at NTEA and other places and doing one-on-one style classes and for quite some time. And in fact, we did a second class this year. The second day we did an advanced class and but kind of bringing it into— this is the first time I've really tried to bring it in those sorts of terms to folks. And we got really good reaction to it. It was like light bulbs went off. People got it. They were just like, yeah, that's a really good point. You know, that's— I always say I can never get to the thing that I want to do or I need to do. And it's You know, what is it you guys say to me?

Articulate that, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So, so I wanted to bring it up with you here, you know, and kind of get, you know, you know, let you tell the audience a little bit about the concept and kind of break it down for folks. Because I think it's something that after having that experience, I think more fleet managers need to hear about that and kind of, you know, try to apply that concept to their both their everyday, but even their strategic thinking, right? Like, what are we going to put time and energy into this year? right? As opposed to something else. So it's really a neat concept because it's both way up high, you know, on a strategic, but it's also on a day-to-day tactical level, right?

Yeah.

So I was going to ask you, you know, give me your breakdown of how do you, you know, how this concept works and how do you apply it?

Yeah. So this is a concept I got from somebody named Tyler Norton, who was a coach that we brought in for a little while. He's coached several other, you know, businesses and he's a business owner himself. And he came in and it was this concept. And I think what makes this work, right? And I think what makes any kind of model work is when you can take something complex and turn it into something that's like the light bulb moment, as you said, comes from how simple it is when you understand it.

Right.

Right. And can I take a really complex, you know, idea and boil it down to a very simple illustration? Right. I, you know me, I love a good analogy.

Yeah.

I love a good You know, like, I don't even remember what the word is, but the idea that I can take something and relate it to the physical world, right? It's a metaphor. There's something— there's another word for it. But, and so what I like to do is kind of find those concepts and then explain them. And Bliss Blood Flow concept is one of those. And the way that it works is essentially your body has a finite amount of blood in it, right? It can produce more, but really you can't hold more. Blood capacity unless you really work to expand your blood flow, right? But even that, even then, you know, there's an upper limit. There's an upper limit to how much blood your body can hold, right? Right. And if you think about, you know, when your body is injured or when it's growing, right, your body will send blood flow to where it needs to go. If there's no injuries, what it does is it sends blood flow to your growth plates, to the muscles, right, so that they can grow and expand and operate as normal, but it's a, it's a strategic decision your body is making to send blood to those growth plates. What ends up happening though is when you get injured, let's say you break your arm or you get a cut. In fact, I love, you know, this idea of like breaking an arm or getting like a bonk on your head, right? What's the first thing that happens to your body, right? It swells, right? Well, what's it swelling with? Blood, blood, right? It's literally what your body does is it pulls blood from from other areas in your body and it sends it to the area of injury, right? That's why one of the first things they teach you in first aid is stop the bleed, right? Right. Doesn't matter what else is going on with the patient. You have to stop the bleeding, right? If they're bleeding, they will bleed out and they will lose their blood flow because the body will pull the blood from all the other areas and push it to the injury, right? That's why people go into shock, right? Is because they literally are losing blood flow from their critical areas and it's going to the injury. When you're hypothermic, what does it do? It pulls it in from the extremities and it centers it in critical mass to protect itself.

Right.

Right.

Trying to keep you warm.

All it's doing is moving blood from one part of your body to another.

Right.

And the concept goes is that your business is no different. The difference is that blood in business is time and money.

Right.

Which is one of our four pillars is resource efficiency is how do I make the most of the time and money that I'm given? And the concept then is you can either send blood, a.k.a. time or money, into growth plates, which are like, you know, strategically, what am I going to do to intentionally grow my fleet if I'm going to, you know, improve an operation or do something like that? It's something new. It's innovative. It might be a new initiative that's coming down, EVs, whatever.

Right.

Or I can send blood flow, a.k.a. Time and money into injuries, like issues, inefficiencies, things that are stopping me from operating at peak health, right? And so for managers, I think the concept that a lot of us struggle with is this idea of what we call opportunity cost, right? And the blood flow analogy illustrates that really well. Opportunity cost is basically there's the cost of doing something, you know, how much does it actually cost you to go out and buy, you know, a movie ticket, right? Right. But then there's the opportunity cost, which is what could you have spent that money on and what could you have spent that time on instead?

Right.

And we usually don't account for what we could have done instead with that resource.

Right. Right.

When you think about it in the blood flow analogy, it forces you to recognize that there are tradeoffs. Every decision you make, there's a tradeoff that you're deciding not to do something else. And it forces you to think about what am I not doing because I'm choosing this?

Right. Right.

And so for managers, as we talk about strategic thinking, it's to recognize what are the opportunity costs, what are the things you're literally saying no to, and getting really clear about that. Because honestly, the most powerful piece of this is that you're intentionally saying no to something else in order to say yes to this, right? For a lot of us, it's too easy to try to say yes to everything, right? And then we end up overtaxed, right? And you can imagine that if like if we demanded our body to send blood flow to everything, we would literally faint and pass out. We go into shock. And our businesses are no different. It will overwhelm us. It'll overwhelm our people, our teams. And so we have to be very strategic about focusing on the vital few, right? Like you don't have an unlimited number of growth plates. There's only a few. Hopefully you don't have an unlimited number of injuries, otherwise you bleed out.

Right, exactly.

And so you have to focus on what's most important. And as we think about that, if we can intentionally set aside time You know, and this is what we talk about, like our meeting rhythms and all that. If we can essentially set aside time to think about what are we working on, what are all the things that we could work on, identify those, right? Whether that's a growth plate, you know, somewhere where we can improve an operation, or if it's an injury somewhere where it's like hurting us by not addressing it. If we can get all those listed out, then we can make a very calculated decision about where do we want to send the blood flow to, how much time do we really have? And let's be honest, time is usually the most limiting resource, right? You know, there's money, there's funding, there's grants, there's things like that. You can always make more money at some point, right? Time is almost always the most limiting resource, right? And when we can recognize that we only have bandwidth for a few things right here at RTA, we really try to keep our focus to like 3, maybe 4 key initiatives. We found when we do 4, often that 4th one suffers and fails, right? Unless somebody really like just wants to own it and make sure it gets across the finish line. But 4 is just— it distracts you too much. You're still saying yes to too many things, right? You get that down to 3. I've seen people try to focus on just 1. And in my opinion, if you send all of your blood flow into one item, you usually neglect too much of the other areas of the business, right? You know, in this case, you might— maybe you send everything into PM compliance and then you start neglecting other things like availability and, you know, technician productivity. The idea is that you need to kind of focus on what are your top 3. Don't tell me top 10, right? What are your top 3 metrics? And just 3 at a time until you get them to a point that they're stable, almost running themselves. Exactly. Then you can shift. And that's why we do this every trimester, every quarter, is because you want to keep working on those things with sustained focused intensity until you're done with it, or it's at least a point where it's kind of operating on autopilot, maybe with minimal effort and input, and it just becomes part of your DNA. Mm-hmm. Right? Like you've already grown that muscle and now you don't necessarily need to bulk it up. Now you need to kind of shift focus and say, okay, I've been working out my chest a lot. Now I need to go work on my back, right? So that I can kind of counteract some of that stuff. You don't stop working out on your chest. It just isn't the focus anymore.

Right.

And so you start with your first top 3, work through those, then you move on to your next set of 3, right? Or maybe it's okay, well, one of these is done. Let's keep working on 2 and add a third, right? And then that becomes like the fourth thing you work on, and you just slowly cycle it out until you get through 10 different things and each piece just starts building on the other, right? So that's kind of the concept of blood flow. I just, just, yeah, rambled on for another 10 minutes.

I love it. But yeah, I want, I want to kind of— so you make some good points, and I want to kind of like try to attach it a little bit for folks. Like, so when you talk about the point you made with the back and the chest, I love that analogy, right? For the folks listening, right, we're not necessarily talking about only you, the person, though it could be you, right? You're getting good at what skills and things that you're trying to get good at. But in often case, we're talking about the fleet organization to your point, right? It's like, hey, you know, you mentioned PM compliance. Hey, we got the stakeholders, they're bought in. We're good, right? Folks are showing up. We're getting PM compliance. I don't need to be on the same level of effort, rah-rahing, rattling chains, saying, hey, you need to be on time because now as a culture, we've hopefully created that. And now the whole org is in on that. All right. What's the next thing we need to tackle? So, so we're talking organizationally and it does, you know, it does play into what your team is and who you— sometimes that might mean passing it off to another member of the team to truly own it or lead it. And maybe you're just checking in.

Ideally, it means passing it off to another, right? Like if you really want to build your muscles, right? Recognize that the brain is not the only thing going on in an organ, right? Like it needs a heart, it needs lungs, it needs everything working together in synergy.

Right.

Which means you've got to enable your team and empower them.

Right. So here's some parts that I think, you know, kind of having— feeling like I've kind of gone through this myself in some ways very, very recently, right? I'm going to kind of make some comments here and get your feedback for our audience. Like, the first thing that strikes me is it takes a lot of discipline, right? It's— discipline is a key aspect here. And tied to that discipline, again, when you think about people in terms of the hero complex, right? There's almost like the guilt. I don't know, maybe I'm just too Catholic. I don't know. But you almost feel guilty, right? You feel like, "I'm supposed to be doing all of this, right? And I need to do it. And if I don't do it, who's going to do it? And what's in the whole world is going to fall apart if I don't do it, right?" And so, you need to overcome that somehow and kind of be honest with yourself. You can't. You just simply can't do it all. Part of that is being able to take the gut punch of, "Yep, all of those things I can't get to, they're going to be losses for a while." They're going to keep punching me in the face and I'm just going to have to accept it until I can get to it. Right. And then that's the other piece. Like, those are the 3 things that, you know, it's like just because it's not the thing you chose to be most important doesn't mean we're saying it's not important.

Exactly.

It's just first things first, so to speak. Right. Like the old saying goes, first things first.

So there's a, you know, like, I don't remember if you've ever watched The Incredibles.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Great.

The villain there, right. He has a great line, which is basically, hey, when everybody's super, then no one will be.

Right.

And the same thing's true about priorities. If it's all important, then none of it's important, right? And I think that's the dilemma that we run into is this concept of like, oh my gosh, I'm overwhelmed. There's too many things to focus on. And Mark, you're out of your mind if you think I can stop focusing on, you know, whatever, insert your metric here, right? Because our first thing, anytime we go into a fleet is number one, availability.

Availability.

Number two, driving availability, PM compliance, right? Like how's your EPM program?

That's right.

A third, then we're going to start looking at technician efficiency or some other parts availability, whatever is driving the disability.

Right, exactly right.

Unavailability.

It's almost, yeah, right. It's like a pyramid of metrics, right? Exactly right.

But I think that's, when we think about that, yeah, that means that some of this other stuff isn't going to get done. But here's the truth of it, right? And this is going to be hard to hear. It's already not getting done, right? Because you're not delivering on the thing that matters most. And, you know, I go back to this concept of like blood flow, right? And when you think about it's already not getting done and if you're trying to do it all at once, you're going to kill the body at some point, right? You're going to kill the organization. If it's all important, then it's— then none of it is right. And I forget what the original question was that you had asked, but it really comes back down to being willing to say no to things.

You know, that's the discipline part, right?

So one of my big challenges whenever I've tried doing this right is I have a focus issue because I get distracted by shiny objects, right? And we call this shiny object syndrome, right?

It's very human.

It's very human. And as an entrepreneur, I'm always thinking, I'm always inventing, and I always want to move on to the next thing.

Right.

And so part of this is why we have a team. It's why I delegate to other team members, because it frees me up to be thinking big picture. But it also gives me a framework that I know that in 4 months' time, we're going to have a chance to pick another set of things to work on.

Right.

Right. And within that 4 months, I know that, okay, for right now, like, yeah, this is what we all agreed to. We all committed to it and we're all on board. We're holding each other accountable. If I come in, you know, way out of right field with a haymaker and like, hey, team, we're doing this instead, the team pushes back and says, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's not one of the priorities. That's not what we're working on right now. Right. The system is what ends up enabling us to stay focused. Right. And that's why it's so important that you have good meeting rhythms, that you have, you know, a good goal setting system, that you have a good accountability system within the team.

Right.

So that we can get really clear. No, this is what we agreed on. And then we're reviewing those every single week. And if something else bubbles up, because there's always something else that bubbles up. That's why we're firefighters.

Exactly.

There's always a hot—

there's always something. Yeah.

We can always sit and ask ourselves, is this more important than anything else that we've already agreed to as being the most important?

Right.

And Covey has a really interesting model, right, where it's— it measures the importance of something versus the urgency of something, right? And I think a lot of times we get distracted by things that are urgent but not important.

I'll raise my hand, I'm guilty of it, right? It's hard to distinguish between those two.

Yeah. But if you take the time and you think about it and then you compare it against, hey, we decided here's our top 3 for the trimester, top 3 for the quarter, when those shiny objects do come up, you can evaluate, is this really critically important and is it urgent and is it more important and urgent than what we've already agreed to?

Right.

Right. Because you already had the list. You had a list of 9 things that you picked from, at least when we go through our planning process.

Yeah, we have tons of them.

Right. We eliminate half the list. We eliminate, you know, two-thirds of the list in order to pick those top 3. And we have to ask ourselves all the time, is this more important than either one of the 3 things we picked? And then we also ask ourselves, is it more important than any of the 6 we didn't?

Right.

Right. Because if it's not even in the top 10, why do we do it?

Right. Right. We're doing the thing we want to do, not the thing we need to do. Right. Our priority failed.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's a really good point. You know, my big brother used to say to me when I was a, you know, tweener and teenager, he used to say, Mark, you're always confusing what you want with what you want right now. Yeah. Right. And that's kind of what that shiny object syndrome is a little bit about. It's like, I want it. I want it right now.

Well, and you fixate on it, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, so I just think that's a really interesting concept. I think that it's pervasive in the industry, this challenge, you know? And so, I really wanted to, you know, I'm really happy to talk to you a little bit about it today and kind of bring it down to earth. Let me ask you then as well, and again, every organization's unique. And so, what Josh is going to say has worked well for us and for him. Maybe it's going to be slightly different for you. But to kind of give a parameter, I'll ask you a couple of those too. Like for example, you're mentioning 4 months, right? Talk a little bit about, you know, give folks the insight into that, right? We're talking like 4 months is generally how we're doing trimesters and we give ourselves, we call them OKRs. Folks can think of them as like goals, right? And for those 4 months, we have these goals, we have these objectives, and we're trying to achieve them. How do folks go about figuring out things like how long should I give this before You know what? We're just not good at that and we need to take another route, right? You know, because that happens in fleet. I mean, really on a very boots-on-the-ground level. Hey, we're not good at alignments. Let's outsource it, you know, and kind of so number one, talk a little bit about the timing and how to feel that cadence out. Yeah. And then also number two, how to recognize when, okay, you know, we need to change directions on this somehow, right? Kind of a thing.

Yeah. So I'll speak to the first one, which is, you know, picking a timing. And there really isn't a right answer as long as you pick one. Okay. So that's the very simple piece. If you already have quarterly goals from, you know, like, you know, maybe your city council has quarterly goals or a quarterly plan, it's easier to align with a structure that's already in place. So align with it. We found that as we were going through, we were doing quarterly at first. It's kind of the normal business thing, right?

That is.

Publish quarterly reports every 3 months. What we found was that the amount of time we were taking to prepare for our offsite, the amount of time that we were preparing, you know, using then, okay, we've decided on our goals, now we've got to disseminate that information to the rest of the team, roll it out. They all have to set their own department goals. Then each person sets their own individual goals. That takes time to cascade down through an organization. The bigger the org, the longer it takes. And what we found was that you know, we were losing almost an entire month just to planning and rollout, right? Um, you know, and like, you think about it, I think there's a— there's teams that are doing their offsites this week, right? 2 weeks into the next trimester, right? And we did our planning 3, 4 weeks ago, right? So it does— it takes anywhere from 3 to 4 weeks for us to kind of like make the— get going. Yeah, because we have to spend a week ahead of time deciding on what we're going to work on, right? What is— what's most important, collecting the information from the team Yeah, and our meeting is actually kind of right in the middle of the whole thing. It's kind of the apex, if you will, of the journey, right? Um, and so what we found was if we're losing a whole month to that, that means we only had 2 months to actually affect any kind of change or, you know, strategic thing that we wanted to work on. Um, and for me, I'd like to see more sustained momentum behind something. If it's really important, it can be important for 4 months, right? And so we, you know, we basically added an extra month to to the cycle by doing that. And it just gave us more of a, you know, I said this word before, which was sustained intensity. It's much— this is something Grandpa was really famous for talking about, was context switching, right? There's a penalty, a time penalty, every time you switch context. You think about this if you're a technician on a job. Every time that he gets interrupted, right, that's a— there's a time penalty for him to get started back up again, right? Right. And so they lose productivity, they lose efficiency by doing that. And the same concept, that's something we all feel every day. Every day.

If you go to an office or even if you don't, if you work from home, someone knocks on the door, right? Every day people should relate to that concept.

Interruptions, it just doesn't work, right? Right. And you think about this, you know, these weekly, these weekly meetings that we do, it's kind of an interruption. It's intentionally an interrupt in your thought pattern and your working pattern. The quarterly meetings were an interrupt to keep things from just like— because otherwise status quo seeps in. And you will just keep— it's like inertia, right? Things in motion tend to stay in motion. And the same thing is true for fleet. The same thing is true for management.

Right.

And so these rhythms are there to kind of help, A, keep the momentum where it's supposed to be and redirect momentum where it needs to go.

Right.

And so for this case, the quarterly rhythms, they were interrupting that momentum a little bit too frequently. And we just— we weren't getting as far as we wanted. We have ambitious goals. And we were noticing that we weren't achieving, right? You know, like we'd set 3 goals and we might achieve 1 of them and the other 2 we made good progress on, but we needed more time. So that's where we decided, hey, like, let's switch this up. Let's go to trimesters. And that actually worked really, really well for us. We could do quarterly. I would just suggest, you know, keeping them focused and remember that you're going to lose time just in the, you know, in the preparing. The planning, and then the rollout of whatever you decide on.

Right.

And I forget what your second question was.

Well, just if we pause on that for just a second, though, I just want to stress something you said at the beginning. Right. The most important part is that you pick a timeframe. Yeah. If you, you know, it's okay to say 6 months or even a year, maybe it's an annual goal.

Yeah.

But it is important to keep that time because if not, then it just, it's just a goal that lingers on forever. Like you said about inertia, it never really becomes.

Yeah. So that's the other side. I think there is a too long time period. 6 months is probably it.

Right.

You could probably do 6-month goals, um, as long as in between you're kind of doing like a gut check and evaluating where we're at. We do that for ourselves at the 2-month mark. We're going to evaluate, okay, how is it going so far? Do we need to adjust anything? Do we need to adjust key results? Do we need to, you know, rip an OKR out? Do we need to swap one? Uh, maybe this just isn't working. I will tell you is anytime we've swapped one, it's inevitably been a failure anyways, and so we may as well keep going. But it helps us eliminate what I call sunk cost fallacy, which is just because you've spent 2 months on something and it's the wrong thing doesn't mean you need to invest 2 more months in the wrong thing. You can stop what you're doing and then either redirect that to the remaining OKRs or put the right thing in place and get what you can done in the next 2 months. Right.

And it stinks to feel like maybe you wasted there, but there's some good even that comes out of that if you can recognize those sunks. Yeah. Yeah.

So as far as a year, and the reason I say it's too long is because what happens, we're humans, we procrastinate.

Yeah.

And the sense of urgency is not there. Right. And that's why I think you have to— why, you know, the world operates off of quarters.

Right.

And trimesters probably stretches that just a little bit is because it creates a sense of urgency that you have to kind of get moving. Otherwise it will go a year. And what'll happen is you'll wait until, you know, probably about September, you know, if you're running on a calendar year, and then all of a sudden the momentum will come in.

Right.

So it's like, well, so the first 9 months were wasted in the back 4, right? 9 and 4 is 13. But you get what I'm saying?

Yeah.

That's where all of a sudden all the work happens, right? And it's 80/20 rule in reverse, right? Right. Is that, you know, 80% of the progress is made in 20% of the time. Right. And it just happens to be the back 20% because we're massive procrastinators.

Yeah. But that's a good point, though, because, you know, a lot of folks are getting from, you know, the organization above them, annual goals and things of that nature, or sometimes even it's like a 5-year plan now with a lot of the sustainability projects and that going on. And being able to flip that on its head, right? So how do I take that big, huge goal and turn it into chunks that are a quarter or a trimester, as you say? Number one, remove some of the overwhelm. But number two, it makes it doable, right? Like, and to your point, it really helps to ensure progress because you've turned it into, well, if I got to get to 1,000 by the end of the year, well, how many do I need to get to by the end of the month to make that happen, right? And you think in those terms. And I think that's something that, um, I do think that's something we, you know, I like the way we try to do it there and it does help. It makes it very real, you know.

Well, I think the other side of this too is that, yeah, we might have 5-year plans, we might have a 1-year plan, but if you get too specific in a 1-year plan, um, what ends up happening is that throughout the year there's different things that pop up and all of a sudden what you thought was gonna be important and urgent in January, by May it's like, oh, this actually doesn't matter anymore, right? And I think the ability to change direction is actually a bit of a superpower we have, is, okay, we're going to make a sustained effort for 4 months and we're going to burn hot, and then we're going to take a step back and say, do we need to keep investing here? Or, okay, that feels right, let's go ahead and shift the blood flow to a different area of the body, right? Um, if we spend an entire year working on that one area, you know, we're going to be like— you ever see an arm wrestler? Yeah. Right. You walk in and they're like, that right arm is just massive. And the left arm's like this little tiny stick. Right. And you're like, okay. You know, it's cuz they spend all their time on one area of the body.

That's where the blood flow went.

Exactly. Right. Or you, you watch like the big bodybuilder, you're like, I can tell who skips leg day. Right.

Yeah.

Yeah. And that's exactly the issue is that they're putting too much blood into one area of the body and not spreading it out. Right. And that if you go for a year or a 5-year plan and you don't do these smaller chunks, that's, you know, kind of distributes the weight. You'll end up looking like that where you're out of balance. One area is really strong and another area is so weak that it's actually hurting the rest of your foundation.

Right, right. So I think that flows perfectly into what my other question was. And so you've kind of touched it there and I think you touched it earlier as well about when you have to cut off something. But how do we recognize that? Right. We have these goals where we're important. We've decided we're important. Hopefully we've done that with the team. And so, you know, and again, human is for most folks, especially in this industry, we're not going to give up on it all that easily, right? Like, there's this thing inside of us, we don't want to give up, we want to go down fighting.

We want to win.

Yeah, right, you know. So, what are some signs? Like, how do you recognize when it's, nope, we're circuit breaking this thing and, you know, let's redirect that blood flow?

Well, so another one of my sayings, I have a lot of sayings, anybody who works with me knows that I have, I just like throw them off. Where did that come from? All right, it's always, is the juice worth the squeeze?

Right.

And the second that the juice stops it's not being worth the squeeze, we have to like circuit break it as, you know, terminology that we use too, is that we have to stop working on that thing. Sunk cost. Don't keep throwing good money after bad.

Right.

Once you recognize that it's okay to call it. Mm-hmm. Um, but let's say that it's still a good idea, right? And you're just not making the progress that you wanna make on it. And that's why we kind of put these checks in. We do this weekly. Um, and then you go in and we push each other to get better about this. But the idea is that because we have that weekly rhythm, we check in on it, you know, at least, uh, every 2 months we'll kind of get really deep about something and make sure, are we still making progress on this? Um, is to reflect and reallocate and say, you know, we, we were saying that this was the most important thing, but in reality we didn't make it a priority, right?

We didn't behave that way.

Um, somebody always used to tell me, you know, show me your calendar and I'll show you your priorities, right? Show me your budget and I'll show you your priorities, right? And that's the thing I would go back and reflect on. If we're not making progress that I'd go back and say, well, are we spending time in meetings talking about these issues? Are we making the decisions we need to make? How much time have we spent actually investing in this area of the business, right? And somebody will ask, well, how much time should I spend on goals versus just day-to-day operations? And again, the 80/20 rule works magically. Google does this, we do this, there's a lot of companies that do this, but like the 20% rule is that, you know, at least be dedicating 20% of your budget 20% of your time towards those initiatives, right? If they're, if they're not getting the attention they need, they're not getting the time they need, and yes, again, that means saying no to other stuff, right? Then, you know, the non-important urgent stuff will pop in and will rob from the strategic issue.

You've almost created a sunk, right? Because it could be well worth it and important, but if you're not giving it at least that 20%, you've almost doomed it to fail before it started, right?

Exactly.

Kind of a thing. Yeah.

So that's how I know, like, if we're not making progress on something, it's almost always because we haven't spent the time on it that it deserves. And for us, what does that look like? It's, uh, it's our strategic ad hoc meetings we do, uh, where once a month, you know, we'll meet. Actually, we do this 2 or 3 times a month, and we pick, you know, 90-minute hour or 90-minute sessions, 2-hour sessions, and we pick a topic. We say, this is what we have to decide on this month, right? And we prioritize it. We say, okay, what's next? What's next? And if we're not spending enough time talking about those issues, then stuff doesn't get done, right? Um, some of it's tactical, it's not strategic. Is just, are we meeting enough? Are we working enough on that specific, you know, deliverable?

Right.

And again, go back and look at your calendar. Go back and look at your budget. If those aren't geared or they're not showing you that this is a priority, then you have to make a change.

Right.

And either you change the priority, you know, to reflect reality, or you change reality to reflect the priority.

Right.

And that's the piece I think we all struggle with is, okay, like, I need to make a change. I need to make a sacrifice. You know, I'm overweight. That means I need to stop eating so much.

Right.

And we have to be willing to change something in our, you know, I'm going to call it our time diet so that we're focusing on eating healthy in our calendar and eating healthy in our budget.

Right. Right. Yeah. So that's a great point. So that's a good way to kind of sort of self-evaluate. Is this one I really need to cut off because it's just not going to— it's not going to be there versus, as Josh said, we're not really giving it the time and the dedication that it should have had. And that'll help you to kind of evaluate. Did we pick a good goal or not? Did we pick a good goal?

And if you're not giving it the time and it really is the priority, then change.

Change, right?

You know, just think of it like the lightship clappers.

Right.

Change.

Right.

You know, just make the change. It's as simple as that, is you have the control and take the ownership to recognize that it's up to you.

Right.

Right. And yeah, you have a team and you've got to get them all on board with you. But, you know, there's another saying is where there is no vision, the people perish. And it's up to you to consistently set that vision. Right.

Right.

What's the purpose? What are the values? What's the mission? And the mission is these OKRs. It's the goal. What are you working towards?

Right. So I'm going to throw another one out that your strategic meeting comments remind me of is, you know, indecision is worse than the wrong decision in most cases.

Yeah.

So that's an important little side tidbit for folks. Take time to be thinking about what are the strategic things we need to be doing, what are the decisions, and talk with your team about it and be active about it. Stop leaving them on a whiteboard or somewhere up there in your head. Or, you know, I know for me, I spent years as a fleet manager coming up with all my greatest thoughts in the shower. And by the time I sat down at my desk, they were long gone, you know? So you have to purposefully and willingly— willfully, I should say— make the time to work on that stuff. That's the only way. The status quo will not change by you getting through the day every day. You have to actively change it. And that does mean that on some days you're not going to feel like you got through the day because some things are going to get left behind. Right.

Well, and I think that's something you have to do for yourself no matter what, is evaluate your energy level at the end of the day. And if you're not walking away fulfilled and you feel drained and you ask yourself, did I actually accomplish anything today? It's because you're probably not being very strategic with your time.

Right.

You know, and that's the challenge is that we're letting— we're being reactive instead of proactive.

Right.

Which is a great way to not make any progress on anything.

Exactly. Yeah. So we feel you fleet managers, right?

We're there. Yeah. Every day. Yeah. But yeah, try to be as intentional as possible. So with that, I think that's going to wrap up our episode today.

Sounds good.

A lot of nuggets in this episode. As always, if you know a friend that hasn't heard of the Fleet Success Show, send them our way. Right. We'd love to hear from you. If you have questions you want us to answer on the podcast, you want to hear from any of our fleet experts, right? Tony, Mark, Nathan, Facundo, Steve, not so much me, but anytime you want a management leadership thing, I'll throw that at you too. Although I've been known to get into the availability PM discussion quite a bit as well.

He's looked at a lot of data in his time, folks.

Send it over to podcast@rtafleet.com. We'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear your comments. If you just love listening to the show, send that over too. Sometimes Mark and I just need a little pick-me-up.

Yep.

So with that, that's going to do it for today's episode. As always, thank you again.

Take care, everyone.