Episode 144: Training is the Remedy for Your Fleet’s Ails

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

How you doing?

You know, one day I'm gonna flip the order and I'm gonna introduce you first, or I'm gonna let you introduce us. All right. We keep doing this enough, it's become a thing. So today we wanted to talk about a subject near and dear to our hearts, which is training. There's one thing I know Grandpa was always big on is that shops never got enough training. I'm a huge believer in that, is that most managers don't get enough training, right? Uh, and your technicians certainly, you know, have training options available that go underutilized. Um, so as we were kind of talking about this topic in particular, one of the things that came up was, you know, what does a good training program look like? Why should you invest in training? How do you know what to train? Those kinds of things. Yep. So take it away for our listeners.

Yeah. So, I mean, I believe and I think we believe, right, you— if you're going to have a successful fleet program, you need a successful training program. And it's, you know, in our consulting and other engagements, as we talk to folks here, when we're doing success work with them, we regularly find that it's just not there. Right.

Yeah.

You know, one number I'll throw right off the top of my back, if your techs are not getting 40 hours of training a year, technical training, Okay, you're undertraining them. And if you think about it, we'll start with techs because that's the obvious one where everybody goes to first, right? Like, just look at the pace of new technology on vehicles, right? It's just so fast. If you're not training them and updating them on the various things that are working even from year to year, there's just no way they're keeping up, right? And so the jobs are going to be— take longer to diagnose, take longer to execute on, take longer to figure out the parts, slower to actually do the fixing. But also, and this is we're seeing, I mean, this is, you know, any speak to any fleet manager in the industry and they'll tell you their subletting is their outsourcing is way up. Right. There's just things they can't fix or they can't fix quickly enough. So, you know, you're seeing that go way up. There's other factors to that, to be fair. Right. But that's, that's a major factor in it. Right. So if you want to keep up with all the new technologies, the EVs and the driver assist and the, you know, accident prevention and all that jazz and I can go on and on on the various things. You just, you got to be doing training. You got to get them up. And then there's the other aspect of it, which is retaining and moving them on, right? I mean, mechanics, most of them anyway, if they're career-oriented, they want to be trained, right? They want opportunities. So, you know, you have your in-house training, but yeah, well, here's what I'm going to say is that you need a full-fledged training program. This should be part of your staff development program, part of your retention program, right? Part of really your whole management program, right? And it should include training. It should include sort of in-house training, so to speak. It should include incentives for them going out and getting their own training, whether it's ASC or other things. And it should include writing specifications when you order a vehicle or an asset that include that that manufacturer is going to provide training on that asset when it first comes delivered. That should be a standard part of your specification.

A lot of people don't know you can do that either. It's amazing. Yeah. I remember who we were talking to I want to say it was somebody at GFX. Now they were worried. They're like, well, doesn't that— isn't that improper? Doesn't that violate like ethical bargaining and all that stuff? And I was like, no, not as part of the RFP.

Yeah, it's absolutely—

you know, it doesn't benefit you personally, right? It's not like you're taking something off on the side or it's a bribe. You put it out there for all the vendors to include, right? That's as fair as it gets. Really what you're doing is you're asking for incentives to be a part of the RFP process.

Absolutely.

And so—

and you're not asking for it for free. No, it's part of the bid. They can include that in the cost or not. Right. So totally ethical practice and one that's underutilized. It should be absolutely part of what you're doing, especially when you're going to a new manufacturer or getting a new model or something that your folks are not working with all the time. And you don't, you know, you have the ability to know, is this a refresh? Is this or is a complete redesign? If there's a redesign in the model, even if it's a model you've used for hundreds of years, you should be getting this stuff on there, right? And it should be included. So you certainly want, like we said, incentive programs. You want, you know, we highly recommend things like minor bumps in pay for reaching various stages of, let's say, an ASC or an EVT certification. And there should be a path to that, right? Like if you're going to have a senior or a lead mechanic, they should have to hit certain of these training standards and, and maintain them. And this is in addition to whatever your government or your company's overall training, right? Like your HR training and all that jazz that needs to be happened to. So, so that's one piece and we'll stay high level and if there's interest we can get further and further into what that looks like. But the big piece though that we also wanted to talk about today, there's a couple of them, but one of them is parts that get neglected. You know, it's like parts folks, since I use the word parts, are virtually never trained. And it's ironic because There's an ASE certification.

Yep.

NAPA and a few other vendors will offer their own training for automotive technicians. And it's a big need. What I find is you usually get, you know, warehousing folks who maybe know a little thing about inventorying and distribution, right? Don't know a darn thing about automotive technology. Right. So you need this. You know, maybe you get— people ask me, how do you find good parts people? It's hard, but maybe you get you know, a mechanic who just doesn't want to get underneath anymore and all that goes along with that, right? But has some good automotive technology, go out and teach them how to do inventory and warehousing. That's a bit easier to pick up, frankly, than, you know, than the sign.

You have to invest in them to teach them how to invest, not just like something they pick up.

Correct.

I think a lot of people don't realize this about Grandpa's story, right? When he went to UPS, he started as that driver, you know, did his crazy thing with the efficiency. But it wasn't like he became a shop manager overnight, right? And he didn't all of a sudden, you know, figure out how to save UPS $100 million overnight.

Right.

He did that because they invested in his training. They sent him out to California to their— basically their business management school and put him through a ton of training around, you know, shop management, you know, efficiencies, best practices, Lean Six Sigma kind of stuff.

Right.

And then his application of that training is what ended up saving them $100 million.

Right.

But it wasn't Without that investment.

That's important.

It never would have happened.

It's so important, though, right? Like, let's pause on that a second because he gained some basic knowledge. He shows hunger. Yeah, right. They, they are, to their credit, recognize the hunger, reward the hunger with, hey, go learn some more. He comes back and rewards their investment and saves them $100 million. Yeah. You know, this didn't happen in 30 seconds, but you get the point. And that's exactly why a great fleet management program has a great training program. Absolutely. And then I'll hear, well, but I spend all this time and money in training them and they leave. And okay, but suppose you didn't train them. What happens to the work that they're doing while they're there?

And they stay.

And they stay, right? It's really bad work you get. And, you know, one of the things shops don't measure well or often at all is comebacks and other quality assurance measures. I mean, we're constantly finding ourselves trying to help groups implement QA processes and programs. So the truth is, if you're not doing QA and you're not measuring comeback, and don't get me wrong, I know it's hard to measure comeback rates for a lot of folks, but if you're not doing any sort of QA process, you don't even recognize that you're having these flaws in your program, right? Hopefully you're hearing it from your customers and you're paying attention to that. But, but yeah, you know, so, so, you know, parts is one of them. I mean, I've never heard of or seen anyone other than frankly one of our existing or former clients do anything around service writing, shop supervision, right? You know, so it just doesn't exist, right? So you have to develop your own and maybe contract with, with us or someone like us who could help you do those kinds of things. You know, obviously there's some fleet manager certifications out there.

CAFM, CPFP, right? CDME.

Right, exactly. But to your point, I'm stealing from you here, but, you know, are those folks getting true management training? Are they getting leadership training? Or do we just, we toss them in the fire and say, go get your CAFM and now you know, you know, that's really about sort of the ABCs, right? And the basic formulas of fleet is what you get at CAFM.

And you and I can debate too about like the business certification inside the CFM is not really business-oriented, right? The legal side is not like— the personal professional development one is not like— that's not what I would put in that type of curriculum. You know, there's— there is a gap in leadership training for fleet for sure, period, right? We just— we know that, which is why we put such an emphasis on it, right? Right, exactly. I'm sorry, the podcast and the book is about as best as we can do right now, right?

Exactly. More to come, but with more to come. Yeah. But so that's key. I mean, you know, having that training again in the, in the, in the end, it's, it's really kind of simple, right? Train folks. They will generally perform better. If they don't, that's a different issue you have to deal with. But they will perform better, they will improve, and your operation will improve. Yeah. And you create a culture, right? And then people want to come to your organization too.

And you really hit on that piece. Yeah, we kind of skipped around a little bit.

Yeah.

But, and I remember listening to Kelly Reagan talk about this not during his keynote, but at the, at another session. And all of his techs, like, they made it a deal to go out and get, you know, Blue Seal certified, right, as a shop. So they, you know, they want to make sure that everybody had access to that. And there was pay spiffs that they put in. As you achieve certain levels of ASE certification, you would bump up your hourly rate by so much. Right. We've done this with the CAFM certification. Right. And the idea is that, hey, you know, with that investment, but you're also showing them that you care.

Right, right.

Because yes, they can, they can take that job and they can go somewhere else. But what are their employers doing that for them right now? Right, right. What are their employer actually cares about them and their career and their development? You know, we didn't really talk about this in the last episode, but, you know, this idea of, you know, making sure you've got really effective one-on-ones and a key piece of that is good training, right? You know, to make sure you know what they want to be trained on. What are their dreams and aspirations?

Right.

Do you even know where they want to go?

Right.

How do you set up a training program? Well, ask your techs. What do they want to be trained on?

Right.

Are they lacking? Yeah, we'll probably do another episode on this, but you look at the data too and it'll tell you where, what type of training you should be bringing in.

That's right.

Maybe you've got an issue like your brakes and, you know, you look at the VMRS codes and that'll tell you where you're spending the most time, where the biggest delta is between SRT and your time.

Right.

And that'll show you what you need to invest in training.

Absolutely. It'll show you what you're doing a lot of, like you said, And also you can analyze what are the big ticket items, what are these items cost more?

Yeah.

You know what, maybe we should be outsourcing because we're just not putting in a lot of time in it or it doesn't cost us very much.

Right. Right. Or it's going to take us forever to get there. Right. And this is where I love the 80/20 rule, right? Is if you can go look at your training budget and look at your gap, you know, basically a skill gap analysis, you can go figure out, wow, we could cover, you know, if I just did 2 hours of training on this one topic, we'd knock out 50% of the cost, right? That's 80/20 rule in action. You just have to look at the data to figure out, oh, there's a big lemon right there. We can get a lot of juice out of that squeeze.

That's right. It's funny, I walked into a shop and they bought themselves a brand new alignment machine.

Mm-hmm.

They never did any alignment.

Never used it, right? Because they never got the training on how to do it.

Correct. Exactly.

And yet I bet you if they had put that in the RFP when they bought the alignment machine, they could have said, and includes free training, right? It's one of the reasons why we offer free training as part of the product, right? Is because we know that in order for you to be successful, you got to know how to use the tool.

Exactly.

Does me no good to sell you a tool and then not teach you how to use it, right?

Does nobody any good. Doesn't do you any good. Doesn't do us any good.

Yeah, because long term you won't stay with me, right? And so it's in both of our interests for you to get trained to use this application.

Exactly.

And the OEMs are the same way. They want to train you on their product because that means you'll keep buying their product, right? Think about that. If you, you know, when they switched over the Explorer, they offered, you know, it's a brand new platform. It's in my best interest as Ford to make sure that you know how to maintain that Explorer because that's going to be the model year, that design for the next 3 to 5 years.

Right.

And if you don't get trained on it now, you're not going to want to buy it in years 3, 4, and 5. Right. Right.

And if it starts breaking down all the time, perception is going to be, oh, that thing sucks. Right.

And it's not going to be because you lack training.

Right. No one's going to say that. Exactly. Right. That's exactly it.

And that's usually what happens to, you know, from a software perspective, we'll walk in and actually this is from a consulting perspective because you and I had this conversation most of the time. The problem, I'm going to say even 90% of the time, the problem is not the FMIS.

That's right.

They, you know, we're usually the ones to get blamed.

Correct.

Oh, well, you just need to go get a new system. It's like, timeout. That's rarely the problem. And I don't care if you're using FastTrack, AssetWorks, Express, right?

Yeah.

It's rarely ever the problem with your system. Now, you want to talk budgets, you want to talk about other things. Yeah, sure. We could have that. Yeah.

And for sure there might be one system that's better or, you know, but that's not the issue really.

Right.

If you have a system, you're there. You're there.

Right. You can become a leading fleet with a system. Right. As long as it's not Excel. Please, let's get off of Excel.

Right. Or some other— well, yeah, there are maybe. Okay, let's— it's a, it's a legit custom It's a legit off-the-shelf, right?

Yeah. Or just say it's one of the big three.

It's one of the—

yes, one of the big three.

Okay.

Right. We can go with that.

Yeah.

Okay. Um, yeah, it's not the—

so you let an add-on to your ERP or something like that.

Amen. That's not an SAP or Oracle, right?

Exactly.

But the idea is that it's usually not the problem, it's training, right? It's you didn't invest the time to get trained on this product, right? And guess what's going to happen? You're going to switch providers.

Yep.

And you're gonna have to get trained on that product.

Yep.

And so you're really just kicking the can down the road instead of biting the bullet now. Yeah, right. Now I will say, if you're using FastRow or AssetWorks, come check us out. We offer free training, and my goal is to design something that you never need training for, right? But I know that's never going to happen, so yeah, we do as best as we can try. But the idea is that you should be investing in yourself, investing in your team, you know, and training is where it starts, right? I, you know, I've often talked about the law of the lid. Right. And this idea that your fleet can't outgrow you.

Right.

Well, your fleet can't outgrow the people beneath you either.

Right.

Right. So you can raise your lid, but you also have to raise their lid too.

And training is the key to that.

That's where it starts.

And just to kind of, you know, totally circle around on the data piece, because yes, you should be using data to identify what training you need and should be, you know, focused on. But you should also be using your data to check out the return on investment for that training. You should be able to benchmark it. That that training helped your system. And if it didn't help, well, then something's going on. And that also let you know which trainings were, you know, really worthwhile and you should double down on and which ones, hey, maybe this— we don't need this anymore. Let's try something else, right?

Well, and that's so critical too, because, you know, like get a baseline today and then measure after the training, 6 months after the training, whatever.

Right.

Because you are going to need that data to go back to management to justify more training expenditure. You're going to be able to show that in a presentation, a slide deck, whatever, a document. And showcase we invested our team this much and this is what we got because of it.

Exactly.

I know Kelly Reagan did that when they were outsourcing, you know, somewhere between like $2 to $6 million outsourced labor. So we went and got trained and we were able to bring that all back in-house. And because of that, we were able to fight for a higher wage or we were able to fight for improvements to the shop and to the floor. And it was very easy to justify those decisions because they could showcase, well, we save this money and reduce cost here. Let's reallocate that over here.

Right.

That's a no-brainer for people.

Absolutely.

And now these technicians are just like, yeah, I know I want to keep working here because this guy cares about me, right? Right. Like, he's fighting the good fight for me and he's investing in me and my career and my future, right? Not just like, hey, I need you to turn that wrench faster today, right? You know, it's— you're more than a number now.

Yep, that's exactly it. So, and let's be clear, now is the time. We say this in other, you know, circumstances as well, but The fact of the matter is the EV thing is triggering a lot. There's more focus on fleet than there ever was. There's more willingness to put resources into fleet than there ever was. And an element of that has to be the training because there's no way to take care of those vehicles without it. So, you know, now's the time. Now's the time to look at your program. Now's the time to determine what are my needs today? What are my future needs going to be? And again, you should be thinking of this as not a single one-off thing where it's just, hey, go do that training. Think of it in terms of a training program that fits inside a staff development program that fits inside of an overall staff management program, right?

Well, and it really should become part of the DNA and like part of your schedule, right? We talked about like budgeting your time. One of the things that we're really big on here is we think about training— it's because it's really not just the instructor-led training, right? It's right. It's more than just the instruction. It's the practice, right? Getting the hands-on time, the follow-through, right? And that when you say it's got to be part of a comprehensive package, that's what we're talking about, right? Is it's not enough just to come in and go through school one time, right? You get your training, it's got to be ongoing, it has to be reinforced, right? And the best way I've always seen to reinforce training is hands-on practice, right? Right. Uh, you practice in a safe environment, a guided environment with an instructor with you. Yes. Um, you practice, you know, and you do that, and you look at like the best teams in the NFL, What are they doing day in and day out?

They're practicing all week long.

Practicing, right? They, they practice 5 days a week for 2 to 4 hours and then they play a 2-hour game on Sunday. Right, right. They spend 90% of their time practicing and 10% of their time playing.

That's right.

Now, in the business world, that's not really feasible.

We don't have that luxury.

Yeah, but I would be damn sure that nobody is spending 10% on training and 90% on productivity. Right. Like that ratio is not even reversed. It's like we might be spending 1 or 2%, right? And that's the issue is we need to be, you know, at least I would say 10% of your time needs to be spent practicing, training, or doing some type of personal development, right, to help grow our teams.

And even the facility should reflect that, right? Like one of the things Tony talks about when he does his facility assessments or he does designs for groups— yeah, you know, they're going to build something new— he talks about a training bay. And sometimes people look at him like he's got two heads, you know?

What do you mean, you're going to give up a whole bay just for training? And it's like, Yeah, yeah, because we need to be able to pull in either a dummy vehicle or a vehicle that, you know, we're okay messing up on.

Right.

It's a safe space.

Right.

But we need to be able to train people and show people and practice and park. You know, we're going to do— we've got this brand new Cat motor coming out. Well, Cat has offered to give us a, you know, a live working version of their motor. Right.

Roll them in here.

Yeah, we're going to roll into the training bay.

Right.

Need to have a space for that.

Exactly.

Because otherwise what will happen is you'll just never have space and it'll sit out or it won't. Right. You won't be able to take advantage of that opportunity when it comes. Exactly.

Exactly. And you won't, you won't do it or you hurt your own productivity, right? So yeah.

Yeah. Well, and I like having too, because I've seen a lot of shop, you know, architecture diagrams, things like that, and they have a nice little break room, but then they don't have a dedicated training room. Right, right. There's nowhere for us to like do a staff meeting or like bring everybody together and do instructor-led training at all. Right, right. We have to do that either at the conference room in City Hall or it's like—

it's a great point—

something in the shop that we can— it's not the break room. right? Some people will combine the two, and that's okay, um, but there's no dedicated space for training and learning, right? And there needs to be that.

That's a great point too. Yeah, you absolutely need it. It's set up for it, right? Uh, you got the technology in place that you need instead of like the days of rolling in an overhead projector. It's just not going to work, you know? So that's a great point. It's a really good point actually. And you can do a lot with it, right? Because there's a lot that you can train on in that room with your software. They can Maybe you can allow them to do some of that self-guided education or some of the things that maybe you're incentivizing for them to do outside of work. A lot of guys and gals don't have a place to go do that stuff. They don't have a place to study for a certification test or something like that. So you give them that space for it. I think that's actually a really important piece too.

Yeah. Give them a room to go take the CAFM because you got to have a proctored room essentially, no distractions.

Exactly.

So they need a space. Yeah. All right. Well, I think that's going to do it for us for this episode. Invest in your people, right? In fact, this is a famous saying that I love and we implement it here. So this is your takeaway. If you build the people, the people will build the business, right? Or in this case, if you build the people, the people will build the fleet. If you want to build a leading fleet, you have to build leading people.

Absolutely.

And that's where it starts. So invest in your training programs, invest in your training budget, showcase, you know, get your baselines and showcase the ROI on it.

Right.

You will not be disappointed.

That's right.

With that, as always, any questions, comments, send them over to podcast@rtafleet.com. We look forward to seeing you guys on the next episode. And before I forget too, we've got our RTA Connect coming up in October.

That's right.

This is a hybrid event with Fleet Success Summit and our traditional Connect. If you want to send people for training either on an FMIS or if they want to get training on how to be better fleet people, right, how to be better leaders.

Right.

That's what this thing's all about.

Please send them. And you don't have to be an RTA customer.

—not welcome.

All are welcome. We want to, we want to help. We want to help fleets succeed and help fleet professionals succeed. Yeah.

In fact, if I'm looking at the agenda, only about 30% of the agenda is dedicated to RTA, the product. Right. The other 60% is either general fleet best practices or leadership. Exactly. 70%, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. So it's, it's pretty heavy lean towards the fleet professional that wants to grow and get better. Exactly. And I will tell you, you're not going to find better speakers. You're not going to find better content. and I love going to NAAFA and GFX. They're awesome, but I just operate at a different level. I just— I'm going to say that with all the honesty in my heart. Like, I truly have a different take on how we do events and how we focus on the education of our, of our customers and people. So again, open to everybody. Anybody who's a fleet professional, like, this is our investment in you. So if you want to learn more about that, go to rtafleet.com/events. And you can go register for that or request more information. Happy to give it to you.

Yeah, really excited about it.

Yeah, it's coming up fast. Yeah, it always does. Yeah. So that's October, by the way. First week of October 7th through 11th in Atlanta. Cool. This year. Yeah. So until next time, everybody. Take care, everyone.