Episode 150: The Baby Boomers Are Taking Their Knowledge with Them

This is the Fleet Success Show dedicated to helping you and your fleet succeed using the experience of fleet professionals and Hall of Fame fleet legends. The show that explores how the pillars of stakeholder satisfaction, intentional culture, resource efficiency, and risk management all combine to lead your fleet to success. We're glad you're here. Now let's get into the show. Hey, welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm your host, Josh Turley, with my co-host, my trusty partner in crime, Mark Canton. How are you, Mark?

Hey everybody, I'm good. Thanks, Josh. How are you?

Good. Obviously missing not having you in studio here today, but got you coming all the way from Long Island.

So, yep.

And I realized, yeah, visiting family. Yeah, visiting family. That's always the most important thing. And I realized, you know, some people don't necessarily know who we are. So I was, you know, going to get in the practice of doing a quick little intro for new listeners. That are coming on. But those of you don't know Mark, you know, brief one sentence intro. Mark, ready, go.

One sentence.

If you guys don't know Mark, this is his number one challenge is brevity. So we always like to give him a hard time. You want me to give you your one sentence summary?

Sure.

All right. So very long decorated fleet management consultant who used to be, you know, Fordham University fleet manager and honestly one of the smartest brains in fleet, probably I would say second only to Paul Lauria. I don't know, you might be smarter than he is sometimes. But, you know, let's— Paul, if you're listening, you know, I definitely consider you one of the smartest brains in fleet. So.

Amen. Well, thank you. I appreciate that, Josh.

Yeah. And those who don't know me, I'm the CEO over at RTA Fleet. We're a fleet management software company and I've been doing this 20-some-odd years now. It's been crazy. But yeah, so that's a little bit about us. Today we had a fun little, you know, whenever we sit down, we try to figure out what we're going to talk about today. I always like to think about what's going on in my life, what's going on in the lives of fleets, what is it that a fleet manager needs to hear today? And yet 150 episodes in, and sometimes you're like, we've already talked about that. And then I remember that sometimes we have to repeat ourselves. But this one, this one's new, I think. And I usually will look at what's going on, you know, what do I see in the industry? Talking to Tony, talking to you, what are some things that, that happen in this space? And this one's recent. This is from one of our clients. And they're going through some pains right now. And some of you might relate to this. But they've had some recent turnover. And they've had some recent challenges with processes that have been in place for years and decades. And all of a sudden, 1, 2, 3, their 2-deep, 3-deep knowledge of those systems is completely gone. Where somebody who wrote the process, they moved on to another job, their replacement moved on to another job, the person that they trained ended up getting let go. And so it was like, very quickly, within a span of about 6 months, they went from having 2 or 3 people who knew this process inside and out, and, you know, exactly how it would work and how it wouldn't work, you know, what broke, uh, to not having this at all, right? And this is actually a very critical process for them. This is an end-of-period process. And I thought about that, you know, we just came back from our offsite, and one of the things that we've been talking a lot about is, you know, you never can really scale, you can never really grow beyond your systems and processes. You know, but there's, there's also a balance is because your systems and processes, if you're doing it right, they should be constantly in flux and changing and adapting to the times. And so I wanted to go through and talk about that, you know, the process of processes. One, why they're important, why you should do them, you know, and how far should you go. And then, you know, the, I guess the second or third thing to talk about would be How do you make sure that they're still relevant? You know, and so Marcus, you've gone through it and you've looked at really well-run fleets. Where would you put processes as far as a strength of theirs or as a priority? How important is it for fleets to have really solid process documentation?

Yeah, it's something that always stands out amongst the highest performing fleets. Their attention to detail, with their processes and the high level of documentation of those processes. So policies, procedures are obviously a buzzword right now with all of the baby boomer exodus and all of the folks leaving, to your point, the brain drain. And folks are recognizing, you know, they don't have that documentation. So that's kind of the first piece. But then even boiling down to work instructions, right? How do we do this? And training against those policies, procedures, right, and against those work instructions so that we repeat the same thing every time in every case. And we have all that documented with cross-references to every form with the whole RACI accounted for, right, who's responsible, who's accountable, who needs to be informed, and so forth and so on. And the entire piece is trained to and documented Specifically for the process that makes the most sense. And then the other thing that really stands out, in addition to the focus on it and the documentation of it, is these documents are living, breathing things. Yeah, they're not, you know, they were written once and put away and now they're being dusted off 20 years later. There are organizations who have robust policies and procedures but who've never dusted them off the shelf, and it shows immediately. Yeah, they're truly the truly excellent fleets, you will notice that the policy and procedures on some sort of live platform, like a webpage or like a Google Doc or something like that, where folks can access it. And it's part of their annual review is to actually go back and update policies and procedures as necessary. In fact, they talk about it in their fleet advisory boards. And those sorts of things. So that's another key element that I see for the truly excellent fleets. They're alive. So to your point, they're constantly changing. They're constantly evolving as technology changes, as personnel changes, as decision— business decisions are made. What's in-sourced and what's outsourced can change, right? And how do we do that? New problems that evolve or need to be addressed. So That's really the key piece. I will tell you, in my experience, it's the minority of folks who have this. And I will also tell you, it's my experience that it's very easy to become complacent. Folks kind of get the ball rolling, it's going all right. And because it's going all right, you start to forget to keep it this living thing. And then you come back 5 years later and there's been some step backwards. It's very hard to do. It takes a lot of discipline. And a lot of focused attention, focused effort on.

Well, I think because it's, it's such a heavy lift up front, right? Especially if you're starting at ground zero, you know, and that's usually the impetus to change is it's such a heavy lift that people don't want to get started. It's inertia in at rest, right? Like things at rest tend to stay at rest. And this is one of those cases. It's business inertia. And because it's such a heavy lift to sit there and document and figure out, okay, well, I'm going to change this or do that. But now that process isn't relevant anymore and they've been burned because it creates what we call— it's not financial debt, it's business debt, right? As soon as that thing gets documented, it also becomes obsolete, right? Is that now you have a debt that you have to service and you have to maintain it just like making interest payments on a financial loan. As you now have to make it, like you said, it's got to be part of your annual process. It's got to be part of your rhythms to keep that a living, breathing document. Now, And so a lot of people resist it, they don't do it because, you know, it's such a lift upfront and then it's such a lift to maintain it and keep it updated. One of the things that I've seen is a lot of fleets will go too far, they'll try it and the reason why they fail is because they try to bite off more than they're actually capable of doing and they try to document everything.

Good point.

And so one of my recommendations is don't do everything, start small, figure out the most valuable processes. What are the ones you do most often? Or what are the ones that have the biggest impact on your organization when you forget how to do them? Sometimes you think, well, if I do it the most often, that's probably the process you need to document least because it's ingrained in your brain. But you gotta be thinking about the person who comes behind you and how will they know what to do? How will they know how to take in and fill in for you when you're gone? And I think even further than that, maybe this is the selfish piece, is, oh, I don't want to teach somebody how to do my job because they're going to steal it. And right. Yes, I'm like, so you must— you must not go on a vacation then, right? And the way I think about documentation sometimes is that's a vacation policy right there, right? Like, that's your ticket to be able to go out and, you know, take some time off work and go enjoy a vacation without getting a phone call. Could you imagine that? Like, you know, back in your days running a fleet? Being able to go on vacation and not get a phone call. You know, like, that's the sign of—

I could not imagine that.

Right? But I think a lot of us get into that trap of thinking, oh, I don't want to do this because, you know, somebody else is going to learn how to do my job. I don't want to do this because it's going to be too hard or too difficult. And they don't realize that by doing it, you know, even for the stuff that's routine or mundane, and focus on the high-value things, that it'll free you up later. It frees you up to take more time off. It frees you up to train somebody else how to do that so you can go focus on maybe a more high-value operation. But don't try to do everything. Pick the high-value stuff, the stuff that's going to kill you if you forget how to do it, or the stuff that you do so often that you could honestly delegate to somebody else to take over for you.

Yeah, and I'm all for being comprehensive. In fact, we'll tell you that. We believe strongly having— comprehensive policy and procedure manual is really important because it governs every aspect of the fleet and your interactions with your stakeholders and so forth and so on. But I agree with what your point is. Your point is if you try to do it all at once, you know, you feel like the ant at the bottom of Mount Everest looking up and then you get to nothing. So you got to start somewhere. And, you know, like Steve always talks about, Steve's all critical few, right?

Burrito principle.

Yeah. Like you said, go. Go with those high-value ones, get them settled in, and then you can grow from there. Same thing we talk about with KPIs, right? Don't try to tackle every KPI in one shot. Get the most critical, and then you can grow your— essentially, it's like growing your toolset from there, or growing your— if you're a big golfer, growing your quiver. If you're a skier or you're an archery, whatever it may be, and you can just continue to add to it and add to it and add to it. I couldn't agree with you more. And the other thing about it though is you make a great point about the vacation policy, uh, and I think you also alluded to the succession plan. Yeah. Um, but the thing is, there's, there's something in, in stopping to document it that forces you to think through it. And so there's almost— there's, there's an embedded, uh, efficiency that you tend to generate simply by thinking through these processes. You know, hey, we've been doing this so long, do we really need to still Do we really even need this process at all, etc., etc.

We talk about the rhythm. You'll find, you know, and it's that rhythm of reviewing the process. And by making sure, is this still relevant, you actually, one, you vet the process, you make sure it's still accurate. But two, you can ask that question along the way is, wait a minute, is this step still necessary anymore? You know, we were looking through this EOP process. They'd written this process, you know, back almost 11 years ago. And there were steps in this process that they were doing that were like, you know, that's not needed anymore. We got rid of that entire utility. You know, how are you doing this? And it turns out because they did, they'd written it and they hadn't updated it in 11 years. They never dusted it off. Right. And so part of the training, you know, I like you do the review for accuracy, but you're also, as you're reviewing it, you're training the next generation on how the process works at the same time. Because they have a hand in figuring out how to make that better and how to improve it.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's funny. I mean, I've seen the same thing, you know. I remember when, you know, when really information systems were sort of new to the fleet world. And, you know, you did everything, and then you printed a copy, and then you stapled the copy, and then you put it in the filing cabinet somewhere. And then you just like, wait a minute, what do I need the information system for if I'm gonna have, you know, rooms and rooms of filing cabinets of paper? Yeah. So No, so you hit the nail on the head there. And, you know, again, I think if you do it right, it helps keep you on your toes, keeps your knife sharp as far as efficiency. It gives you really the background again for the training. And like you said, you know, it puts you in a good position, not only for succession planning, but, you know, like, you know, someone gets sick, someone gets hurt unexpectedly.

They go on medical leave, right? Somebody gets cancer and they're gone for 6 months. You better hope they've got their processes documented, you know, and that's from a business continuity standpoint, you know, that should be part of your disaster recovery plan. You know, as we call it, there's two ways you can think about it. What happens if that person gets hit by a bus or, you know, better yet, what happens if that person wins the lottery and they just turn in their notice and they're gone? You know, what's your insurance policy? Your documentation becomes your insurance policy. I mean, it's, it's really critical. Yeah.

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If we're being honest, You know, one of the things we talk about all the time is the, the lack of resources in the industry, and there are a lot of single point of failures. Yeah, you know, this is like a reality that every fleet faces every day. I would say the majority of fleets have at least a handful of single point of failures in their operation, uh, and so it just makes it all the more critical, right? Um, to your point, it's completely dependent on one person who happens to know it, and everything stops while they're on vacation. So It's actually even more critical at this time, perhaps, than maybe even in the past where we had that overlay of people sharing work, you know, in a different way at a higher volume. So, sorry to interrupt your thought there.

Yeah, no, I was just going to say, you know, and if you're struggling to figure out, well, how do I do this? Do I need 3-ring binders and all that? Keep it simple. You know, if you're using Teams or, you know, SharePoint or something like that, create folder structures in SharePoint for the fleet operation. Make sure other people have access to it. You said something about Google Docs, and I thought this is one of my favorite pieces is— and SharePoint does this too— but the collaboration, right? Having more than just your input and your voice in those documents, you know, and assign it out and have other people document their processes too. And that way, like, it becomes part of the muscle of the organization as the, hey, we document, we don't do it all, don't, you know, and we want comprehensive, but Focus on the 20% that's going to get you 80% of the value. And then with that 20%, you know, get it to the level of detail that it's helpful, but leave out, you know, the in-between steps. I like explaining why I do things in a document so that way the next person coming behind me isn't just following the routine. They actually can evaluate that step to see if it's still necessary. The problem, if you get way too detailed and you're too into the weeds, You know, like, let's say you're taking screenshots of your application. Well, if the application changes, now the screenshots are out of date. So I try to get it just to that level of ambiguity that I can understand what this is trying to tell me to do. But I don't necessarily have to have step-by-step specific instructions because then I end up having more business debt and I have to go back and re-edit those documents more often. So it gets more costly. It's like having a higher interest rate on your loan. The more detail you get, the more debt you have.

So yeah, exactly. That's, that's kind of what we talk about, the difference between a procedure and a work instruction, right? Yeah. Procedure should not really need to change all that much unless there's some critical new piece of information or change in our business model or change in our practice. You know, the, the idea of entering, uh, something into a work order, right? That concept stays the same. If you hit the enter button or the tab button because your software changed, that's a work instruction detail that really isn't necessary at the level that we're talking about right now, right? That's something that can be handled, you know, in a different forum and when you're doing your work instructions. So yeah, I think it's important. I think people also often ask, you know, well, how do I know if my procedure is right? How do I know if it's a good one, right? And I encourage folks to kind of think two things about that. One is, well, that's step two, right? Step one is if it's working, get it, like, to your point, get it documented, get it rolling. It's at least you're getting through the day, you're getting your business done. Step 2, step 2 is okay, you want, you want to evaluate, is this the best way to do this? Is this a best practice? Is this best in class? That's a, that's a kind of another conversation that, you know, we can have another day. Obviously, that's the kind of thing we do a lot of.

Yeah, happy to help people with, you know, but one, I think that's exactly what you would do in that case is if you don't know, you know, there's resources out there. I would absolutely recommend getting in touch with the consulting team, you know, at FleetConsulting.com, right? Just go Google it and you'll find us. But if you, if you really aren't sure, you know, and you would, you know, maybe you don't have budget or whatever to go out and get a team of consultants to help you with that. We're very good at it, so we can do it a lot faster than you can. But if you're going to do that, like I start with the stakeholders, begin with the end in mind. You know, I'm looking at this in this particular case, I'm looking at this document and I'm sitting here asking, who uses this? Who needs the output of this? Needs this program, right? Right. Who needs the outputs of this procedure? And that will tell you if the procedure is a good procedure or not, right? Because if it's getting to that output and, you know, the worst thing you could do is go through all this trouble, run a bunch of reports, and like you said, I'm going to go file them in a filing cabinet and then nobody ever uses them. You know, that's beyond—

what's the point?

You can't even make that efficient because it's not effective, right? It's completely a waste of time. And so eliminating that type of activity is one of my favorite things to do. Do is making sure that everything you do actually provides value. And then the second thing is, is there a faster way to do this? Right? Is this the most efficient way? And that's why you have to ask questions. We talk about stakeholder satisfaction and asking the question behind the question, asking why 5 times. What's the real thing? What's the job they're trying to do? You know, instead of trying to sell and, you know, here's this report that gives you what you're asking for, ask them why they need that thing. You know, you're not trying to go and buy a drill bit. You're trying to buy a quarter-inch hole. So what is it that they're really trying to achieve? And instead of coming in with a solution in mind, come in with questions about what's the actual end goal here that will help you decide if a process is even needed, let alone if it's efficient or not.

Yeah, I love that analogy, Josh. I absolutely love that analogy because it's a great point and folks don't think about it that way, right? You need that quarter-inch hole. Not the drill bit. So the other thing I'll also mention is one thing I love about our industry is folks will share. I'm sure— I mean, I know you've experienced this as well, right? You get on the boards of the various conferences, uh, and you, you know, I see it all the time, right? Hey, does anybody have a policy around take-home vehicles and EV charging, right? You know, those sorts of things. And people will share, and they'll— or if they can't share the precise policy, they'll give you their thoughts. And then, as you point out, now you can then Take that information, think about what you need to accomplish, what do your stakeholders need from you, and tweak it and improve it based on what you need. So, you know, like Josh said, if you just have absolutely no idea where to start to even develop a procedure, let alone document it, you know, then you might be in the dark and it might be time for some consultant to come in.

Expert help.

Yeah.

Yeah. Call the doctor.

Yeah.

The fleet doctor.

Yeah, call the doctor. Yeah, call the Fleet Whisperer, right? But there are tons of resources out there. And it's the kind of thing that never feels pressing until it's too late, you know. And so we— I encourage people, stop. And it's something we've been saying for a while now, honestly, on the circuit, but maybe not on the podcast. You know, stop, go out, do this now, start tomorrow, one by one. Every— you know, you know, one of, one of the folks we work with, work with your brother Jacob, one of the things he's really great at is every time he realizes he's doing something for the first time where he hasn't done in a while, after he does it, he sits down and writes up what he just did. Yeah, right. What a brilliant idea. It only takes 5 to 15 minutes to just write up, just write up what you just did.

It's brilliant, especially if you have the fourth hour.

Big effort.

In his case, he always thinks about, am I gonna have to do this again, right? And in that case, he's like, oh yeah, no, I'm definitely gonna have to do this again. Okay, I'm going to type this up because somebody else is honestly probably going to have to do it instead of me. Right. And so he's documenting it for his future self. So he's being kind to himself, but he's also documenting it for whoever the future person is behind him so that he doesn't have to do it again.

And to your point earlier, it breaks this huge lift into nice little bite-sized chunks. Right. So just, just a great idea. If there's something you're going to have to do again and you haven't done in a while or you've never done it before, just, just pause. You know, most of us have two screens these days, or you can do the split screen, open up the Word document on the side and just make notes as you go. It's not, it's not a huge lift really, uh, when you, when you think about that, you know.

Yeah. So, well, I've even seen, um, so two of my favorite things, and I remember I think I said this, I was doing a presentation for NAFA about this very topic probably about a year ago. And this is why I love what we do in the podcast. That's why I love what we do as a company, because we think about things from a different perspective. And we bring in tools and technology that we know about as a software company, uh, that a lot of fleets don't know about or they're not using. One of our favorite tools is, uh, a tool called Loom, which basically you can record yourself walking through a process, right? So you can record yourself, uh, walking through, you know, maybe it's a, like, how do I go run these 5 reports that finance needs or whatever? And then you can feed that video, you know, through AI capabilities and things of that nature. You can actually have it AI generate a step-by-step process from your Loom video, work you're already doing anyways, right? And then you just go through and you edit. And we have a saying which is 80% done by somebody else is 100% freaking awesome, right? So if you can Loom yourself doing it and then have AI or ChatGPT, you know, like there's a couple different tools out there for it, generate the process for you and then you just have to go through and edit. I've seen it where it'll automatically from the Loom video, take the screenshots and snippet and create little GIFs inside your documentation so that, you know, so cool. And we love this, like Confluence does this for us, but you could use— I think Teams has an integration. Loom has a built-in tool that does this. There's a couple of different options, but it'll take those screenshots, it'll take the step-by-step, it'll take the words. And so you just narrate while you're sitting here like, okay, now I'm going to go click on this menu. I'm going to type in these and here's why. You know, within 10 minutes you're going to have a process documented, right? So that's one of the— one of my favorite ways to do it is have something else dictate for you instead of you like, oh, I need to go type this up step by step and then you just edit at the end of it.

So I really love that.

Yeah. But if you're stuck with something like that, honestly, just start there, start uploading stuff. So and then review it. You know, I think as you mentioned, you know, the death knell of any process is it's not part of a regular process, right? There's not a process around process. Review it annually, you know, train. We love it using our process documentation as part of our onboarding because that also helps us keep it relevant. Does this still matter? Is this still effective? Oh, you know, we actually need to record— rerecord that because the process document was confusing or we missed a critical step. Okay, you just go and edit it real quick instead of having— well, but the process is the process, you know. No, that's there to help you, not the other way around. So otherwise you're going to end up like this fleet 11 years later and, you know, having it 3 or 4 months without being able to close out month end. Now you're at fiscal year end and you can't bill and, you know, the accounting department's breathing down your neck because they can't move balances from one GL to another. And now you're holding up the entire fiscal year end for your entity. Nobody wants that kind of heat, right? And it all comes down to that insurance policy of having good processes.

Hey, real quick, you know, you made a really good point too on one other benefit of using it for onboarding and training. Like, you get fresh eyes on it. You get people asking you why. Yeah, why do you do this? And who do you do that for? And man, it could be nothing better than going through that gauntlet and having to be able to explain that and make sure it's reasonable is wonderful. That's a way to keep a sharp edge on that knife, you know. Yeah. So yeah, it's a great, it's a great example. That's a great practice. Yeah.

Look at that.

I encourage folks to do that.

Yeah. So again, we always like to sit down and try to figure out what's timely, what's relevant. You know, this one felt pretty timely since we're, we're helping a client through that right now. But yeah, if you're stuck, anything like that, you know, just email us podcast@rtfleet.com. If you want to get in touch with the consultants, you can go to fleetconsulting.com. That'll put you onto our website with RTA. and you'll get to see, you know, Mark's lovely face and Tony and Steve and Scott, the whole team. They've done this, they've seen it, you know, and it's not they've just seen it once, you know, like some other fleet managers, they've like Tony, you know, in our, one of our podcast episodes talked about he's seen one fleet, you know, but he's seen 400 one fleets. And so it's, you know, he's seen it done 400 different ways and he knows what works, what doesn't work, when should it work. Um, and he can help, you know, significantly with some of your process and documentation. And really that Fleet Whisperer aspect just to help you get started and frankly, maybe help you enjoy some vacation and time off with your kids, you know?

Yeah, right.

Mark doesn't know what that's about, right?

Exactly.

Well, all right.

Well, not as a fleet manager, I didn't. Yeah, I know, right?

That's going to wrap it up for us for this episode. I really appreciate all of our listeners. And as always, you know, if you want to hear more content like this, you want to come out and speak with Mark and I, We're going to be at RTA Connect October 7th through 11th in Atlanta, Georgia this year. We would love to have you there. You can go to rtafleet.com/events and honestly, leadership, business lessons like this, fleet best practices, how-to. If you want to see more of the RTA product in action, you know, because it's really what the product is, just a manifestation of our beliefs around how fleets should be run. But if you just want to talk to the minds behind that, we're all going to be there. The whole team, all of our new Fleet Success Ambassadors, which I've got a couple new team members that I get to introduce in some upcoming episodes. I'm excited about.

Yeah, looking forward to that. Yeah.

But, you know, come out, meet us, come, come learn more about how to better run your fleet. It doesn't matter if you're an RTA customer or not. We would love to see you there. And I guarantee you will walk away with a different perspective. You'll walk away improved. Like there's something for everybody at this conference. You do not have to be an RTA customer to come enjoy and get something out of it. It's a lot like Fleet Success Summit was, but it's just married up with our user conference. And so it's going to be a much larger crowd. It's going to be a lot of fun. You know, we're planning somewhere between 200 and 300 people this year again. So really look forward to seeing you all out there.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're just going to— we're going to have some also some cool elements. If you want to pick brains of consultants, we're going to have plenty of opportunities to sit down and talk and have conversations and, you know, essentially get plenty of one-on-one time with some of the folks that you've seen on this podcast. And as Josh said, the minds behind some of the software and the products. So just hope to see you all out there. Really excited for that event.

Again, that's rtafleet.com/events and that'll take you right to the page. We'll have the schedule up there. You'll be able to register. And it's just, it's honestly, it's going to be an amazing time. You will, you will walk away changed. And different. So with that, we're going to sign off for today. Until next time.

Take care, everybody.

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