Episode 146: How Available Is Your Fleet? A Conversation with Steve Saltzgiver

All right, welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. Now I'm your host, Josh Turley, and joined again by wonderful co-host Steve Saltskiver. Which, if you've been a longtime listener to the show, Steve was one of our regulars for a long time, one of our co-hosts, and, uh, back in studio today.

Yeah, it's actually been a while. Glad to be back.

Hey, last time you were in here, the walls weren't black. We, uh, you know, we were probably still using lapel mics and everything, and it's vastly different. Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, um, you know, glad to have you back in office. I know you and the consultants, you guys are doing your, your offsite this week, uh, doing some planning for, for the next trimester. But, um, I wanted to kind of talk through— you were just on a pretty massive study, a long-term engagement we had right, uh, with a client. And one of the big things that I saw come out of that, you know, as Mark and I talk about all the time, number one metric is availability. Um, and you know, I— one of the things that you did was you were constantly sending us reports about, hey, here's where we're at, and kind of CCing us on some of the metrics you were tracking. It was really cool from afar to see those metrics improve. Um, and it convinced me of, you know, because Mark and I would have debates about, well, what is the great metric? What's the number one? And seeing you do it real time, it convinced me, you know, availability is it.

Well, I think availability— I mean, what else is there if your vehicle's not available, right? Or a piece of equipment?

I mean, you don't really have a fleet. You have a park.

You're not successful. You can't get your mission accomplished. So it is the granddaddy of all metrics. Yeah, there may be some preceding metrics, probably, for that. There's definitely— but generally speaking, that, that is the big metric.

Yeah.

And, uh, and that, that particular gig was— it was a good reminder for me, you know, to, uh, to really realize how important availability was. When I got there and I was on the ground— and I worked there for about 6 months on the ground— and, uh, when I got there, availability was somewhere around, oh, probably low 80s, um, which, you know, 80/20 rule, people think, oh, that's great, yeah, terrific. But availability is not good unless you're in the high 90s.

What would you shoot for?

I would always shoot for over 95%.

Okay.

That would be my— probably my, my benchmark, my target. And then this gig that we were on, this consulting thing, we got up to 97%. So from the low 80s to 97% just in 6 months is a pretty good tell.

That's a nice, you know, so—

but there were some things that had to go into that. I mean, we had to revamp the preventive maintenance program. We had to educate the team, make them aware of, you know, how important this was and why this is important. We corralled all of the stakeholders that we talk about here on the Fleet Success Show. I had to go out and meet every one of the customers personally, one-on-one, started asking them questions, you know, how are your vehicles? What's, what's good? What's bad? You know, and I really get a lot of feedback from them to really learn their operation and what their problems were. Yeah, because a lot of them have challenges, but they didn't really voice their challenges, you know, to the fleet department. Actually, you know, so you kind of have to go out and solicit that and pull that out of them. Once I understood that, then it was very apparent that availability was the number one issue. Yeah, I probably could have backed into that knowing that just by looking out in the yard and seeing how many extra vehicles there was, you know, so a spare fleet, there's a lot of red flags, some telltale signs. Yeah. About spares. But after I, after I really got the feedback from the customers, and then I knew that was the issue we had to start working on. And so, um, we, we put together a, a weekly report. We called it, um, you know, the availability weekly report, essentially. Um, and then I sent that to every customer, every stakeholder. They saw what their availability was by their division, you know, when they started, when they, you know, what they were, the current.

So you wouldn't just send a full roll-up, you would send every customer their own individualized—

well, it was kind of full roll-up, but they were listed in the roll-up.

Okay.

Yeah.

So everybody saw each other's at the same time. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

So that, that really helped. I've always been a big advocate in all my career. If you can see it, you can improve it.

Yeah.

You know, and I think that's, that's really what the premise of that report was, is to see it so we could improve it. And then every time we would get one milestone, make it go up, you know, we'd have a little celebration. We, we had little lunches and things for the team. And it's really remarkable to see how the team responds when they start seeing continued success. Yeah. You know, I think one of the problems that was with this client is they'd had so many fleet managers that they didn't have a sustained goal or objective there, and nobody ever saw any improvement.

Yeah.

You know, and or they didn't have leadership that would take them from point A to point B, which is really important. If you're a fleet manager, you have to exhibit that leadership.

Yeah.

And so once they started seeing everything start to track up, you know, that they were accomplishing something and they were being recognized for something, and even upper management, we would send the report to them and they would obviously comment, this is awesome, you know, this is happening. And at the same time, we're getting rid of vehicles.

Yeah.

So we're, you know, those spares that we saw in the yard, they're starting to diminish. Later on with the same client, we actually did what we call a Gazzard Report is a zero asset-based thing.

It's kind of like a zero-based budget, but for your fleet size, right?

We actually take every single asset and we ask the user how it's being used and whether it's essential or necessary. It's quite a process to do that. So by it. And so by the time you get done with that, because they had about— they had roughly 1,500 vehicles there. Yeah, probably about 1,200 vehicles. So we had to go through all the questions for all those vehicles. And the same with, you know, utilization and the same with availability. But all in all, you know, we saved millions of dollars essentially, you know, going through that. And at the same time, we elevated the, the attitude and the culture and team. The team, when you start getting successful.

Yeah.

The whole, the whole dynamic changes. Yeah.

Well, John Maxwell talks about that a lot, right? It's, you know, you can go from having a title to having relationships, to having, you know, like to asking performance. But at some point people follow you not because of what you say, which you know, or who you are, but what you've done for them and for the company. Right. And when you can show results, all of a sudden it's, you know, like, oh yeah, well, I want to be on the Patriots. They win.

Yeah.

You know, I don't even care what it's like there. I want to be on that team, you know, and that it starts carrying momentum and you start believing in yourself. It's, it's incredible.

That is the other tangent metric that we had that kind of coupled with availability was preventive maintenance compliance.

Yeah.

And when I got on time compliance, on time compliance, that means if you have 100 due in one, in like the 30-day period, did you get all 100 done? If you did, you're 100%. Yeah. When I— when we got there, we were— I actually use our fleet success scorecard at RTA. Yeah. Because when I got there, that scorecard was showing them around 29%, 30% compliant in PMs. Yeah. Which is really deplorable HPC standard-wise. I don't think I've ever had a fleet that low in my career. I think I've managed 6 fleets now.

I've seen fleets that low, but yeah, that's— and now a quick break to talk about the fleet success event of the year, RTA Connect.

Where can you find insightful keynotes from fleet industry experts, live hands-on training classes, and the chance to network with fleet professionals from across the country? Only at the fleet event of the year, RTA Connect 2024. Join us October 7th to 11th in Atlanta, Georgia, and get the tips, tricks, and tools you need to take your fleet to the next level. Visit www.rtafleet.com/connect to learn more.

So that one concerned me greatly as I got into that. But by the time we left there, I'd got it up to 70% in 6 months. So that's a pretty remarkable improvement. I just actually reached out to them a couple of weeks ago just to ask how they were. Yeah, over 90 now.

Look at that.

So they're, they're actually almost world-class sustainable trajectory.

That's awesome. Yeah. So, well, and that's such an important, you know, because I think it's a feeder and like you said, a precedent, like a preceding metric, because if your PM compliance isn't any good, you're going to have a lot more breakdowns, which means a lot more availability issues, which means you got to have more spares. So now you're not right-sized. There's just so many cascading effects of not getting your vehicles in on time.

And then coupled with the, you know, the preventive maintenance, they didn't have even checklists. Yeah. You know, so they, they had tasked the mechanic with doing a preventive maintenance inspection and just had him eyeball it, you know, with no series, you know, like usually you have like a checklist. So yeah, check the oil, check the body, check, you know, what was Grandpa's big thing, where it's a circle inspection.

Exactly. It's like there's 5 or 6 items in this 3-foot radius, you gotta check it. Yeah.

So it's always been a great deal of time, you know, drafting up checklists and helping them with that.

Yeah.

Getting those put into the RTA system and—

well, you probably start tracking, you know, how much was PM repair versus PM, you know, scheduled and unscheduled.

Yeah, we went through all of that. You know, it was pretty— I really felt pretty good about what we accomplished in the short time I was there, you know, and the fact that as I reached out to them, they're still doing that. You know, I think that's speaks volumes about what they've done to that culture. Yeah.

So when somebody came in, you know, that was part of our engagement there too, was to help hire the next fleet manager. But they've come in and they've sustained the practice, right? Instead of trying to, oh, well, I don't want to do it all that way. You know, they took that and they ran with it, which is awesome to see.

Yeah, that's a good point. We actually had went through a recruiting process, hired a top-notch fleet manager.

Yeah.

Came from the States here and, and moved over where they were at. You know, it really worked out well for them.

Well, and that's got to be a challenge too, right? I mean, this is, you know, we're not going to name them where the client's at, but it's, it's a Pacific island, right? So you immediately have supply chain issues. You know, I remember talking to the guys up near Whidbey Island in Washington and they had to have excess inventory just because it took an extra 2 or 3 days to get there. But I can't imagine, you know, being out in Pacific Islands.

We had 60 Teslas And which, which where we were, it was a remote.

That's probably where we were.

That was actually a really good application.

Low maintenance. Yeah.

Low.

Yeah.

Problem was is you couldn't get Tesla on the island. The Tesla wouldn't let you work on them. So, so you had to barge back and forth. You had to order extra, extra quantities. You had all kinds of things because you're right, the supply chain was kind of a nightmare. Yeah. And that was coupled with, you know, just after COVID anyway, just supply chain was a problem anyway.

So, and they wouldn't come to the island to work on them. You'd have to show—

you literally had to fly them there. Oh wow. At our dime. Wow.

That's, that's an expensive—

really expensive. Yeah. Yeah, it was.

It's, uh, like the inverse. Yeah, come work in our shop. But, you know, that's an outsourced mechanic, I guess.

Interesting. Do the same thing with others too. I mean, we had to bring Jeep over. Yeah, we had to bring Sprinter over, you know, Mercedes-Benz. So There was occasions where, you know, when you're kind of remote like that, things happen and it's very challenging.

We just call it island time. Everything moves on island time, right?

Oh yeah. And there is really that too. Yeah. You know, the one thing that was funny about being there is you can't just get up and go and leave the island. No, I got a little island fever there for a while because I was like, because usually United States, you know, you could just hop in a car, drive somewhere, right? Well, here you drive 10 miles down to the other side, right?

So it was kind of funny. And this is one of the smaller islands too, right? It's not like, you know, because I've driven around, it takes about a day if you want to drive around, you know, like, let's say in Hawaii, the Big Island, but like in Fiji, Samoa, some of those are very small.

Yeah. Over there, I think it was in the Pelago area, there's like hundreds of islands.

Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. What would you say to, you know, new fleet manager coming into a gig and they're— they know that their availability is an issue? What would be your first thing, you know, as you think about your time at this, this place, what would be your first thing that you looked at?

The first thing I did is use the system to find out, you know, exactly where we were. Yeah. So I wanted to get a data set in front of me that I could start to work on. Once I found out the data, then I started, like I said earlier, corralling the customers and getting the fleet department involved and then getting them all to talk to each other.

Yeah.

And then we set goals, you know, okay, where do we want to be in 30 days? Where do you want to be in 60 days? Where do we want to be in 6 months? Yeah. And then we just started making progress to that. And I mean, there were setbacks on days.

Yeah.

On weeks there was some.

I remember a couple of the reports that came through and it's like, hey, this slipped a little bit this week. Yeah.

Oh, then we, we had to sit down and talk about it and do some root cause analysis and say, okay, what happened here? Why did this happen? And You know, and then we would solve those, those problems and then we would move forward and we'd, we'd do another measure. And, you know, each week everything would either go up or down. It mostly went up. There were some setbacks occasionally. And sleep managers need to be aware of that.

It's going to be expected.

It's inevitable.

Yeah. And don't get too disappointed in you or your team. Think about the problem and you solve for the problem.

Exactly.

I guess probably one of my favorite scenes. You ever watch The Martian with Matt Damon? Yeah. It was one of my favorite scenes. He's just like, well, I'm just gonna have to math the shit out of this thing. Essentially, you're a fleet manager, you're just gonna have to math it, right? And figure out, you know, look at the data. The data will tell you where the problem's at. Look around, talk to the people. The people will tell you where the problem's at. When you were making this push for availability, you talked about the stakeholders. And how important was it getting them bought into what you were trying to do? Way did they play a role in it? How did they help you succeed?

I think the main thing is they wanted to see the data.

Okay.

They knew there was a problem, but nobody ever communicated, you know, where their vehicles were, how long their vehicles are going to be in the shop. So, you know, we said those are some of the other peripheral targets, is we tried to not allow anything to be in the shop more than 24, 48 hours. Yeah. You know, and so we would communicate that back to them, you know, so that we would track that information and And I think that helped them a lot because I think that they felt like Fleet— when I got there, they felt like Fleet was like a big black hole. You know, things went in but didn't come out. Right.

So I think we've got a lot of customers that have seen that before.

Right.

You know, it is just like—

but I think once they started seeing progressive improvement, yeah, I think that really changed their attitude as well. And they became more amenable to talking to. Yeah, there was a few customers that didn't want to talk to me. Because they have such a bad experience. I won't be here long. And, you know, and so, you know, other things we did too, you know, we wrote specifications for them and we, we helped them get the right vehicles in place. The right vehicle helps for availability. Yeah. You know, a lot of times people just throw something there that may not be suited for that operation.

Yeah. Well, you're telling me like for their landscaping truck, they had a big old like Komatsu truck.

Yeah.

Or something like that. It's just massive.

Yeah. We had to do all kinds of stuff like that. They had food trucks without shelves in them. I don't even know how they put the food in there. They had all kinds of stack it very gracefully. Yeah. So we made a concerted effort to actually try and get them the right equipment. Yeah. And some of the right equipment was actually there, you know, in, in some other operation that didn't need that equipment, you know, and essentially just shift it one development earlier.

Yeah.

Or we could just simply buy a rack. Yeah. Put it in. There was—

sometimes it's the simplest solution, you know. Oh, cool. Well, uh, any advice for, you know, young fleet managers starting out? They, they're looking up this mountain you know, you've been there, you've seen fleets, you came in, you obviously kind of knew what to do. How do they know what to do?

You know, one thing I always tell you, take your time, you know, take it, take your time to investigate and look at all the data, talk to your stakeholders and find out where exactly you are, kind of get a lay of the land, so to speak, because I think a lot of people want to make improvements very fast and very quick and they don't really understand exactly what needs to be improved first.

Right.

I always tell people it takes— if you've got a really defunct fleet, it takes about 3 to 5 years to get that up to top notch.

Well, just a replacement cycle alone. Yeah.

I mean, so don't, don't, you know, don't get discouraged if things aren't happening fast. One of the things that I learned early on in my career is doing weekly reports. The reason I do that was never for the stakeholders. It was always for me.

Okay.

Selfish endeavor for me. And the reason I did that is because I could see incremental improvements. And one of the things I've talked about this before, maybe I talked about on the podcast, but one thing I remember from my master's program is the Ziegarnik effect. Look that up on Wikipedia.

All right.

What that was is they did a study on New York servers, and these servers were giving out food in a restaurant and they could have a table of 15 to 20 people. That ordered food. And if you ask the server what Josh had or Joe had on the end of the table, they could tell you verbatim what that guy had ordered until they dropped the food off, and then their mind forgot it because they didn't have to do the task. Yeah, that's the Ziegarnik effect. That's what we do as individuals. Sometimes we'll get bogged down like, man, I'm not accomplishing squat. But if you keep a weekly report you can figure out what you did, what you need to do, you know. And I had 3 simple things in my report: what I accomplished, what I need to accomplish, and who's in my way. That's it. Those 3, those are my 3 top sub-bullets. Yeah. And so I would every week I'd say, okay, I accomplished this. Next week I've got to accomplish this list. And to accomplish this list, this guy might be in my way, which I call that clear the path. Yeah, it's an old Covey thing.

Yeah.

And so I would— and then I have to go talk to that stakeholder or that fleet person or whoever was involved or that parts person or whoever it was.

Right. You know, get that resolved.

Exactly. The other thing, too, is we had a— we had a vendor, very common vendor, did our parts and parts availability was a huge problem.

Yeah.

So I tracked their availability and I tracked all the vehicles down for maintenance, down for parts, and I made them compete with each other. Because the parts people didn't want to have more down for parts than the maintenance people had down for maintenance. And so there was another couple of things we did as well.

Yeah. What I like too, you mentioned, you know, it's just this A, then B, then C. And I think sometimes we get like, oh, well, I got to get my availability from 80% to 95%. And we forget that that's like A to Z and there's 26 other steps that you got to take in between there to get there. Yeah, it's just small incremental improvements every day. And so I like that you were, you know, reporting to yourself weekly to kind of just see what was going on. You always say something else too, which is, you know, about what gets measured gets managed. What's the rest of that sentence?

That's pretty much it. What gets measured gets managed.

But then what gets measured, managed, and reported improves, right?

Yeah, improves. Yeah.

I swear I'm missing— there's one more in there, but that's essentially the gist of it is that you can measure it and manage it. But if you're publicly reporting that, I thought that was a stroke of genius too, is that you were managing up through that report a little bit of public accountability.

And we had TV screens with all the metrics on. We had graphs. I mean, we made it very, very visible.

Yeah.

You know, so anybody that walked into the shop area could see the improvements.

Yeah.

Or the unimprovements if we're not improving. Yeah. Fortunately, we improved. So, and we did that on a number of key critical metrics. We had about 4 or 5 metrics that we're tracking. I mentioned 2 of them, which is availability and PMT. Clients.

It wasn't 20.

I know you can't, you can't manage that many. You and I have talked about that on this podcast. I mean, if you get over 5 metrics, then you're a loser.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, Steve, it's always been a pleasure having you back in studio. I always feel, you know, like I'm sitting at the feet of the master listening to you talk sometimes. I love learning from you. And, you know, we're going to get this Riverside thing figured out and get you back on more podcasts.

I appreciate it. Yeah, I enjoy it. Yeah. All right.

Well, everybody, if you have any questions for Steve, for any of our other consultants or subject matter experts like Facundo or Nathan, shoot us over questions. podcast@rtfleet.com. Love to hear from you. You know that we love hearing from customers, anybody in the fleet industry, really. This podcast is for you. So until next time, thank you very much.