Episode 182: From the Shop Floor to the Forest Service: One Fleet Manager’s Epic Ride #podcast

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.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I am Mark Canton here. Hopefully you all know me by now. I am the Vice President of Product and Consulting here at RTA Fleet. and I've been in the industry for just under 30 years, and I'm joined by my good friend and colleague and one of our newest employees, Scott Collins. Scott, how are you?

Great.

Awesome, man. I'm good. I'm good. I'm really happy to hear you. So Scott, you're brand new, so I want to do a little get-to-know-you here for our customers and our listeners, um, because I think you're a tremendous resource for us and for the industry. So let's dive right in. Where are you from?

I am actually from Maryland, where I still live.

All right, what part of Maryland?

Um, Central Maryland, Montgomery County, Maryland, which is, uh, just bordering Washington, D.C. to the northwest. And I live out in the rural areas of the county.

Okay, which airport do you use?

Uh, there are 3 airports that are equally inconvenient. One is, uh, Dulles, uh, BWI, or National down in D.C. are all about an hour drive.

And you have no preference?

Uh, not really. It's just whatever is more convenient. Depends on the time of day and if I want to try to avoid traffic. Um, so, you know, it just depends.

All right, cool. So, uh, so that's where you're born and raised. You're still there, as you said. Uh, when I met you, you were there, of course. Um, let's talk a little bit about, uh, how you got here. So how did you get your start? What— you know, you're— most people don't wake up in the morning— this is a joke I say a lot— like, most people don't wake up in the morning and say, hey Mommy, when I grow up, I want to be a fleet manager.

You know, how did you— uh, maybe you did.

There's a few exceptions, but, you know, let's start from the beginning. How did you first get into fleet?

So I was always interested in vehicles growing up. I actually used to watch a lot of auto racing. And maybe if I had to, you know, tie back to a fleet-related career, I was fascinated by pit stops, you know, like either NASCAR or Indy, those types of things. But I guess my first real job in fleet management was as a bus driver working at the University of Maryland and then moved into maintenance. So we were doing pit stops, but they're slightly slower vehicles on a longer, longer, longer—

longer pit stops.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, growing up, my father was in the automotive industry. He was a service writer at some dealerships back when I was younger. He transitioned out of that. But, but that was where I kind of got my start, was just working with him in the garage, me and my brother and my father working on vehicles, you know, on the weekends, maintaining our own vehicles, that kind of thing. Growing up. And then like I said, first real fleet job was actually at the student-run transit system at the University of Maryland. So bus driver first and then moved into actually maintaining transit buses as a part-time job during college.

That's cool. So you were turning wrenches on those buses?

Absolutely.

Oh, sweet. It's interesting how many folks at RTA have a little bit of that. Even the younger folks, which is less common these days, have some wrench turning. And we were just talking to Tony Bellantuono. And, you know, he had a very similar story. I have a very similar story. First started out as a driver and then got into maintenance. All right. So here you are, you're turning wrenches on these buses. What happens next?

So during that time period, I, I was actually also in the Marine Corps Reserve. So I had a break in there for a deployment to Iraq in 2003, part of an infantry unit, light armored reconnaissance company. So I had some experience there and actually maintaining vehicles while we were deployed over in Iraq. So um, different environment obviously, but, but still important to make sure that things are, you know, well maintained and up and running.

I don't know, they can get more important.

Yeah, hairy situation, like, you know, trying to reattach, you know, something on the side of the road and you can step on a mine any second. Yeah, I mean, it's just a— just, you want to keep your head on a swivel.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, yeah.

So, wow.

Um, came back and, you know, as a reservist I was, uh, entitled to my job back when I came back from deployment. So, so I went back to working in the, in the garage during the rest of the duration of my college years. And, you know, once I graduated, there was actually a lot of other guys that had gotten a degree and then they'd left the Shuttle UM organization and gone and gotten a job at Montgomery County Division of Fleet Management Services, which was you know, there were two guys from the shop that I worked with that over there, they, when I graduated, they were like, hey, come on over, you know.

Nice.

You know, it's a well-paying job. And sure, you know, for somebody starting out, that's, uh, it's like, oh, okay, this is great, you know.

Yeah, exactly. So, and anyway, you get to tell all the other college kids who didn't get a job out of college that you did, right? Right, right. Yeah, you get to hold that against their kids maybe too in the future. Yeah, that's for me anyway. I had a job out of college, you better have one. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

But yeah, so then, you know, I transitioned. Well, one, one, one interim step there was for a while after I graduated, I did work full-time at the University of Maryland, basically managing the parts room. So, oh, cool. So there was some experience there trying to manage inventory, make sure things, you know, were restocked and replenished, dealing with warranty returns, and also trying to manage bulk fuel there as well because we had our on-site fuel tank for refilling the buses every night.

That's cool, man. I gotta ask you, um, how much of that— so, I mean, you're a student there and you're turning wrenches. Like, that is so cool. That's like unheard of these days. How much of that, like, that program was, was run by student versus, like you said, you got a full-time position as a part person later, right?

So it was, it was a majority student program. I mean, there were very few, um, you know, full-time, like, the grown-ups that were kind of supervising us college kids. So in the, in the Maintenance section specifically, there was a career fleet maintenance manager and there was a day shift and a night shift supervisor, both career. So there was out of the maintenance section, really 3 people that were, you know, like mid-career, later career, full-time fleet people overseeing the maintenance program. I can't really speak for all the rest of the organization, but it was, I would say, 90 to 95% of the people of the headcount of the organization were all student-run.

That's awesome. That's cool. Good for you, University of Maryland. Keep that going. I hope that program's still alive, man.

Yeah, it's still there.

That's awesome.

They have transitioned to having a few more headcount that are the permanent full-time, but still very, very strongly a student-run organization.

That is awesome, man. We need more and more of that. That's— it's only— there's only a couple of, you know, universities like that that have a truly student-run fleet or transportation program. Fordham Rams being one of them. But that's, uh, that's, that's pretty sweet, man. We need more of that because, um, you know, we were just talking to Tony and one of his points was we need more young folks entering this industry.

Absolutely.

So, all right, so take me from there. So now you're, you're going over, you're over at Montgomery County. What are you doing for them?

So the job there starting off was equipment maintenance crew chief, which basically meant I was a frontline supervisor working in the transit bus garage. So Transit Garage there was primarily a CNG fleet, compressed natural gas.

Which, that's a little different.

Yeah, '95. Yeah, you know what, actually I thought some of the older guys were messing with me when they said a bus had spark plugs. I'd never seen spark plugs in a bus, but a CNG bus does have spark plugs. But yeah, so out of that fleet, it was about 3/4 CNG and they were kind of transitioning over from diesel to CNG. CNG, sure.

Yeah.

They had a huge— That's cool, man. Huge CNG compressor station, fast fast fill. Wow. Um, so that was a, a new thing that I'd never seen before. Sure. Um, and all the, the CNG issues— I mean, there's some growing pains in the CNG industry for a while in the late '90s, early 2000s, those, you know, and that's the era that those buses were from. Um, so, um, the shop was a 24/7 facility, um, 365, never closed.

Okay. That means the transit service was also 24/7.

Pretty much. Yeah. Transit service was running basically from about 4:30 a.m. until about 1:00, 1:30 in the morning was the last buses coming in. So really there was only about a couple of hours, 3-hour time window at night where everything was off the road.

Cool.

So I worked on the day shift in that shop. A lot of exposure to managing vendors. Sure. You know, each, each shop had it or each shift in the shop had kind of its own role. The night shift is really just trying to get everything off the road, running repairs, turn it around and get it back out. Get it back out the door by, you know, 4:00 AM. Mid-shift was kind of starting the evening maintenance and getting some preventive maintenance done. Day shift was, you know, kind of some of that plus, you know, mixed in with managing vendors and trying to get some of those larger repairs done, big engine overhauls or major accident repairs that were, that were subbed out to vendors, things that we didn't perform internally.

So, but that's interesting because there's some unique pieces. I mean, you mentioned your own, you know, fuel site, but I mean, your shop must have looked different than a lot of the local transit shops, right? Because of that CNG, there's all kinds of different airflow requirements that you don't see elsewhere to prevent a fire. You know, that's interesting, the elements you have to deal with. And I don't know enough about transit buses to say But, you know, in the rest of the automotive world, CNG engines are, are basically gasoline engines that have some components added to it to enable them to run on CNG.

Is that similar in the transit bus world or similar in the transit bus world? But I would say the, the, the basic block of the engine is probably more like a Cummins engine that you would see, the equivalent engine for a diesel bus. So, so they had a C-Series engine you could find in a diesel vocational truck.

Interesting.

You would find a Cummins C-Gas engine in a CNG transit bus. So, you know, but the top end is different, obviously.

Right.

You've got spark plugs, you have different fuel induction system or air induction and fuel injection system. So all of that, all of those pieces are different. Some of the, you know, things you might see also is there's a lot more temperature coming off of those, a lot more heat coming off the CNG. Sure. Big exhaust blankets in there and insulating blankets. So definitely some differences. Yeah.

And the tanks are top-mounted, right, for the most part?

Or on those buses, they were all on the roof.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you needed larger bays, larger roofs, right? So it was— this is interesting.

And another piece is like fall arrest equipment, because now you've got guys that need to, uh, to go up on top of the roof of the bus, and they're, you know, they're pretty high up off the floor. So, uh, we want to make sure that they're working safely when they're up there inspecting tanks or doing things like that, right?

You guys did your own mobile repair, I'm imagining, or Yeah, yeah, we had service trucks.

Yeah, we, we contracted out our towing.

Okay.

Um, because that's a really specialized, you know, skill set, and you don't just want to put any— anybody behind the wheel of a, you know, 40-ton sliding rotator wrecker and then hang another 40 feet and 40,000 pounds of bus off the back end and drive around. So, uh, there can be some danger involved in that if you've got somebody, um, that's not properly trained to, to manage to handle that equipment. So, so, you know, but regular road calls, we would send the two mechanics out to try to make a quick repair and get the bus back, or at least make sure that they were, you know, had a service truck parked behind the bus to, you know, properly, you know, mark it so that it wasn't— control the accident, control the scene basically, and then wait for the service truck or the, the, the tow truck to come out there and actually hook up and take it back to the shop.

Well, we'll keep going here. But one of the things I think I want to bring you back on one of these days is, you know, the folks in the transit world and maybe some of the larger equipment, heavier-duty equipment trucking. There's a dynamic that folks in the light-duty and medium-duty world don't, don't see as much, or in a mixed fleet, which is this concept of two mechanics being assigned. Obviously, our system, our software facilitates that because we have a lot of customers in that realm. But there are fleet managers who spend their whole career, and the concept of assigning two mechanics to a single job line is completely foreign to them, right? So we should do an episode around that, I think, one of these days. Like, what are the nuances there? What are the differences?

Yeah, I mean, just really hitting the high level is just managing shifts and schedules. You've got, you know, and looking for those opportunities where there are jobs where it's conducive to having two mechanics working on it, like having one mechanic working on, you know, you're doing brake jobs all the time in transit. Those buses stop every 0.4 of a mile all day long.

Yeah, you guys must be constantly changing brakes.

So You know, are there days of the week where— or hours of the day where you've got enough workforce to knock out those repairs really quickly by putting one mechanic on the right side of the bus and one on the left and, and tag team them? So there's also a factor of, you know, those components are heavy, the tires are heavy, the brake drums are heavy. So just an extra set of hands there to try to keep the injuries under control.

Sure. Yeah, that's, that's a, that's a, a cool part. We can compare and contrast the logistical issues of that. Um, all right, but let's keep going. So now here you are, you're— it's time to move on from Montgomery for whatever reasons. What made you leave there? It sounds like a pretty—

there's a few more stops.

Oh yeah, give me the stops.

So I think I was in 4 different roles at Montgomery County.

Okay, how long in total were you at Montgomery? 8 years. 8 years. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So, so you were not a fly-by-night guy?

No, no. So I, I started in the transit shop, like I said, frontline supervisor, dealing with technicians on a day-to-day basis. A couple months after I started, there was a lot of vacancies in leadership, and that provided a pretty quick path for me to advance, which was, you know, just fortunate that I had the good timing to be there right at that moment. So, so probably about 6 months after I started, I was promoted to be the shop superintendent. So Here I am, you know, within 2 years out of college and I'm—

Talk about getting thrown right into the fire. Oh, absolutely.

Deep end of the pool, sort of. Managing, you know, now I'm managing 6 shifts of mechanics. So I've got, you know, 36 mechanics, 6 crew chiefs, and, you know, and 2 auto body repairs.

How much training did you get around how to manage those 6 shifts of—

Not too much. I mean, I'll go back to, you know—

I'm not the Mickey Montgomery, but that's something I harp on a lot on this show is That's definitely not an internal training program.

Sure. And there's nothing out there for somebody that early in their career getting that much responsibility. Right. There were things that I was able to, you know, to enroll in later that— that helped.

That supplement that. Yeah, absolutely. But one of the things I kind of harp on and I think one of the reasons we love being the fleet success company is there's this gap in education and training. In our industry, right? You can go become a tech and get a certified tech and yeah, you can get college degrees and things that were going to help you be a fleet manager. But nobody's teaching you how to transition from, let's say, being a tech to being a shop supervisor to being a fleet manager, managing people. That's a skill set that has nothing to do with turning a wrench, right? And how to leverage that and so forth. And so there's this gap and you got great organizations like NAPA and NPMA on the federal side, right, who are— and many others who are giving out certifications and are helping to fill that gap. Thank God. That's a good thing. But it's not like transportation where you can go out and get a degree, right? And, you know, and that sort of a thing. So that's why I paused you there, you know. Well, and I think there's a lot of people who got thrown into the frying pan in the world of fleet, right?

And I think, I think, uh, my military experience probably, you know, just being able to map that over and being able to see what good leadership looked like from a military perspective, and in some cases what it didn't look like. Yeah, what not so good leadership looked like. And it's like, yeah, I don't want to really model myself after that person, but This person over here is somebody that like, they just exude leadership, okay? So you kind of have those personas in your mind and treat people the right way. And that's really, I think, what helped me to be successful in that environment was just, I think in fleet management, it's important, it's such a multidisciplinary career field that you have to pull pieces and parts. You're never gonna find the one-stop shop to get all your training in one spot, right? But you can pull pieces and parts from, from military leadership training, from technical training, just learning stuff from whatever source, and then just mapping it over to how you can apply that in your own day-to-day. If you're looking for fleet experts and former fleet managers sharing their best practices and advice, networking opportunities with hundreds of fleet professionals, and live hands-on training sessions and workshops designed to help you take your fleet to the next level, then you need to register for RTA Connect 2025. It's the fleet event of the year. Join us September 22nd through 26th in Las Vegas and get the tips, tricks, and tools you need to help your fleet succeed. Visit www.rtafleet.com/connect to learn more.

And I think that's brilliant. And you have the wherewithal to to actively seek that and, and try to execute that for yourself, right? And, and which is great, but unfortunately, I think that there's— well, let me not say it that way. Let me say I think it would be in the industry's best interests and in the individual fleet organization's best interests to, uh, stop being reliant on folks like yourselves and others who, you know, we got a lot of great leaders in the industry who essentially took it upon themselves, right? Like, we need more and more of these sort of these these programs, let's say, or these tracks of this, this is how you're going to develop throughout industry. Every other industry has it. Why don't we have it in fleet? It's— I mean, we literally make the world go round. We literally make the world go round.

Why don't we have it?

I feel like we're the— you know, I'd like to make an argument that we're, if not the most, amongst the most important industries on the planet. Quite literally, you know.

Foundational for most organizations. You can't do your job unless you can get from point A to point B. Reliably and correct and at an appropriate level of cost.

Correct. Society literally doesn't exist. Health doesn't, you know, like healthcare doesn't exist. Transportation. I mean, you name it, pick it, right? So, okay, I'm ranting. I do that.

I know.

But, you know, to that end, when you compare that with the reality of the lack of education around it, it's like mind-boggling, right? So good for you. Kudos to you. And you've done this and you've actually taken your own experiences. We'll get to this a little later, but you've applied them and helped develop in your career, you've developed certification programs and so forth. So, um, but you know, somehow we have to figure this out. Come on, higher education, universities of the world, tackle this, man.

Like, this is—

you— when there was a shortage of nurses and healthcare practitioners, uh, in the early 2000s, right, man, all of a sudden every university on the planet was jumping on the bandwagon. Yeah, we got a nursing program, we got this program, right? And you see that throughout, throughout. For some reason, it has time immemorial skipped over our industry. And, you know, so if you're, if you're tied into the education planet and universe out there, heed my call. Right.

You know, well, and it's important, I think, you know, especially in like this job market right now, there's some uncertainty out there. There are a lot of fleet positions that are just vacant right now. I mean, all over the place and all up and down the org chart, you know, from the technician on the shop floor frontline supervisor, and then, you know, even the fleet manager. Lots of vacant positions out there. So definitely if somebody is looking to make a transition into a good industry that's going to be around for a long time, forever. Yeah. Fleet management.

It's a good call. Yeah, that's a good call. And everyone you talk to who are looking for hiring people, they're struggling. There's not enough. There's this— the demand far outweighs supply. So if you got a little bit of talent and a little bit of hustle, Boy, it's a great industry to get into, you know. But all right, I took us away from your track, but I couldn't help but point that out. So let's get back on your career path here. Let's do—

Okay. So next role at Montgomery County was there was an opportunity based on— we had 3 bus fleets there. 2 of them were in-house and 1 of them was outsourced. And So there was a lot of dissatisfaction with the performance of the outsourced fleet to the point that we were tasked with insourcing it back into—

that's always fun. Yeah.

Managed by county employees.

So that was a decision made unilaterally. Was there a study to say we think we can do it more quick, or was it simply a quality control issue? They were unhappy with the quality.

So I think there was a quality control issue there. I think there was a lot of— there were a lot of defects and performance issues, you know, service not being met, things of that nature that were occurring, extensive documentation. A lot of this occurred over on the operations side. We had the operations folks were managing the whole contract and fleet wasn't really directly involved in it.

Right, right. That lack of emphasis. Right.

So basically it was operations coming to the fleet division with an issue and saying like, hey, you guys are, you know, doing a, doing a decent job with the transit bus program. We want to insource this outsourced fleet and we want you guys to take it over. So that created a promotional opportunity for me. So now I was responsible for, you know, so, and remember this is very shortly after college, right? So I'm 25, 26, now I'm 27 years old and I've got two 24/7 transit garages in a major metropolitan area. Yeah. So a little bit of trial by fire.

Yeah.

And, you know, great people on the team. You know, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I can't take all the credit or anything like that.

So you learned a lot.

You learned a lot.

Stop in Montgomery.

Steep learning curve. Yeah, exactly. So I managed those two garages for probably the next, I'd say, 3 years or 4 years. You know, just a lot of process improvements needed to happen. Getting our PM program dialed in, you know, making sure that we are increasing our mean distance between failure, looking at different performance metrics to ensure that we could be successful when we were audited by the Federal Transit Administration. So that's another piece of this.

That's an interesting element. So tell folks who are not in the transit side, tell them about what that's about.

Yeah, so most of your transit bus fleets actually receive some money either directly either directly from the Federal Transit Administration or indirectly through a state transit office, and you become a grant recipient or a subgrant recipient. What does that mean? In exchange for some of those funds to help you recapitalize your fleet, you're agreeing to meet certain conditions and performance metrics, right? So things like you have to have 80% PM completion on time, right? And they actually come out and inspect. You know, they'll send— they'll send—

which is too low, by the way. Should be 95%, but that's okay. Well, right.

Go ahead. Nonetheless, you know, it's a good challenge. It's a good challenge when your vehicles are out on the road 16 hours a day.

It is indeed. So, and money's hard to come by to get enough vehicles and spare ratios. That's why you have this federal program to help you pay for it.

Right.

So that the transit system in the country doesn't fall apart.

Right.

So it's all, it's all a cyclical thing there.

Yeah. So we, you know, When I got there, the fleets were underperforming. Sure. And we really needed to take a hard look at how do we get our numbers up to meet those standards or else—

Or else you risk losing this money.

Exactly.

Got it.

Exactly. Yeah, they'll send you a letter. Well, they won't send you, the fleet manager, a letter. They'll send a letter to the county executive saying, "We're pulling this funding unless you all—" And this does happen.

We've seen this happen. Exactly.

Exactly. So that was kind of a, you know, that was a spur to get a lot of these things under control very quickly. Good. So next role at Montgomery County was we had a new division chief come in, one retire, a new one come in from outside the organization. And, you know, there was a little bit of an organizational restructuring. So now all of maintenance fell under one manager, my peer, and I pivoted to focus on vehicle replacement. Asset management. For the entire fleet. Yeah, asset management piece. For now I'm adding law enforcement heavy equipment into my— You're essentially the county's fleet asset manager. Correct. Correct. Vehicle buying, disposal. Sure. Lifecycle development. Yeah, exactly. Analytics, you know, KPIs, dashboards, reporting, managing the fleet management information system as an administrator. Sure. So those kind of those things kind of fell into my wheelhouse at that point. So it gave me a little bit broader Yeah, not as— I wasn't head down in transit maintenance 100% of the time anymore. So. Right.

So the first part of your career is really zoned in on maintenance and repair. Right. And now, now it's like, okay, let's broaden this here and we're going to manage these assets.

Exactly. Yep. Okay. Okay. So I did that for a while and then had the opportunity. So Mercury Associates was the consulting company that a lot of us— a lot of us. Yeah. Right. So coincidentally, they were on the same— essentially, thanks Paul. Thanks Paul. Yeah, essentially they were down the street from the garage that I was working at, or the headquarters that I was working at.

So they went and did some, some talent poaching over there, huh?

Well, I, I went to, uh, I, I actually think I met Paul at the National Truck Equipment Association conference, right? So the NTEA, again, the importance of networking and going out and seeking out education is You might, you might come home with a job. So. Right. So, so anyways, yeah, the NTA, by the way.

Yeah. Yeah. As far as the, the show for the equipment show is second to none. It's the number one in the industry, in my opinion.

So, so I onboarded with Mercury. I was focused on, you know, more of the local and state government clientele. I was a senior consultant starting out. And there was a recognition just based on geography that I was in the National Capital Region. We had some folks in the company that were about to retire that were focused on Mercury's federal portfolio. Sure. So then they said, okay, from a continuity of operations standpoint, made a lot of sense. Let's move this guy over and start working with—

So now here you go. You did, you head down M&R, right? Just learned quite a bit about asset management, right? Hands-on. And it's, all right, let's throw you into another firepan, which is The nuance of federal government. Right.

So state university, local government, now federal fleet. Yeah. So I worked with—

You've really touched all parts of government in that regard, right? Right, right.

And so I worked with a lot of different agencies, worked with the Marine Corps, worked with the Navy, State Department, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection. I mean, I probably hit half the stops around the cabinet-level positions. Let's go. Different military departments and cabinet departments.

Sure. And all kinds of agencies. And yeah. And what kind of things did you— I mean, I know you did right-sizing studies, right?

Was a big piece. Very big on fleet right-sizing, helping them with training. So again, back to the education and training piece. Right. Also doing a wide variety of stuff for State Department. They had a very complex fleet. Global fleet. I mean, you want to talk about complications of different currencies and units of measure and the logistics around how they ship vehicles from here to overseas or how they source vehicles overseas and use them. Really, really complicated fleet to support.

Yeah, if you want to have fun, do lifecycle analysis for the Department of State. That's not fun. Those poor guys, they do a lot over there. Yeah. So, so yeah. So you also help to place butts in seats for them when they need help, right?

Yeah. Data quality. Data quality and helping them with external reporting. So, you know, again, there's, you know, FTA had this external factor. Now being inside the federal government, they have a requirement to, to report data to a centralized repository every year and it's got to meet certain data cleanliness requirements and they've got all these blocking rules. They won't let you upload bad data.

Bad data, which is a good idea, by the way. Yeah. Tony Belantono was telling us a little bit about this, the FAST system there.

Yeah, exactly. So there was a big push from maybe 2015 and on for a couple years of really getting all of the federal agencies into a fleet management information system so that they could successfully provide that data so that— Do things like this. Right. Congress and the executive branch and even the public could take a look at the data and provide a little bit of oversight.

Have some sense of what's going on over there. Yeah. Which is, which is excellent. So, so here you are, you're doing all essentially kinds of studies and let's say contract services, support services, right, for the federal government. You did that for what, like how long? 5 years? 7 years?

I was at Mercury 6 years. 6 years. Okay.

And then, and then you say, okay, well, I've helped run education fleets, local fleets. I've now learned a lot about the Fed. Let me go dip my toe over there.

Right. Is that what happened? Yeah, essentially. I mean, well, you know, I'll just hit on one of the factors is that, you know, this is 2020 and— oh yeah, right. And a big, you know, COVID. Yeah. And a big piece of our focus was on utilization studies. Sure. Like how, you know, how effectively are federal agencies utilizing their fleets? Sure. Well, in 2020, nobody's utilizing their fleets, right? So what's the value in bringing in, you know, somebody to study the utilization on a fleet that's largely had the pause button hit on it? Right. And it's kind of in this suspended animation waiting for, you know, society to reopen.

Right.

So, so I thought, okay, you know, let me, let me start looking around and see what, what pops up. And, and so I saw, you know, an opportunity to apply for the national fleet manager position at the U.S. Forest Service, which is part of the Department of Agriculture. Right. So, so that's where I've been up until, you know, recently. Till recently. Till you got here.

Now, that's an interesting fleet. One of the comments I think you've made to me is it's— we think it's the largest firefighting organization in the world. That's what sounds like that fleet. Sounds right, right? Uh, so people, like, it's, you know, people are, are used to kind of fire, you know, firefighting fleets, and they think about their local and structure trucks, you know. And if you have a handful of trucks, you're a fairly large fire fleet, right? Right. You know, right. Um, but you had what, thousands? Um, over a thousand.

You're gonna stump me on this, but we had 3,500 of the vehicles out of our fleet were oriented to fire. Now, not all of those are engines, but you've got a lot of command vehicles and patrol vehicles, and you've got small trucks that could go put out a campfire that kind of escapes the ring, or you've got much larger trucks, water tenders and big Class 8 style trucks to go put out larger fires.

Right, which is cool. And then—

And I say put out larger fires, it's maybe a misnomer, is like manage larger fires until there's like a weather-ending event or that helps us out.

Yeah, yeah. And then what's also interesting about it is these fire apparatus are different than like your local neighborhood, right, engines and, and so, and ladders and so forth. I mean, some of these things are capable of doing significant off-road traversing. Absolutely. Yeah, fire truck, which I, I Googled this after our last conversation because I was like, I got to see what one of these things looks like. I mean, it's out of a freaking Transformers cartoon. It's awesome. It's awesome. If you haven't seen this, you got to go look it up. I mean, right. Super cool equipment you got to, right, play with, or at least, you know, manage from a distance at minimum, right? Exactly. So, so what was it like managing a fleet like that? And then, and then also, what other than fire was it? Was it the entire forestry fleet, or was it— were you just focused on fire? Tell us a little bit about that.

The whole— so there's a, you know, multiple missions in the USDA Forest Service. There's obviously a lot of people's exposure to the Forest Service is from a recreation standpoint. Sure. Um, obviously the fire element is what is pretty visible on the news. Yeah. Especially with some of these events, you know, recently, like we saw back in January. Yeah. Yeah. And then you've got other missions. A lot of research and science goes on behind managing the forests. So you've got vehicles to support those missions. You have a lot of trail maintenance and road maintenance. I think it's actually the Forest Service has more miles of road than any other single entity in the world. Is that right? Now, these roads are in varying levels of development, right? We're talking about a road could have been a logging road that was open 20 years ago to go harvest a certain area, and now it's closed, but it's still technically a road. You have to go through and it's grown over anyway. So yeah, yeah, I got you. So those kinds of things. A lot of off-road equipment, uh, in the fleet. So, um, bulldozers, excavators. A big push is to you know, try to, you know, essentially remove a lot of the vegetation that's overgrown in these forests. And that vegetation is now a fuel for fire. That's a risk. So when they say a fuel program in the Forest Service, they're actually talking about dry brush. Right, right. So anyways, so there's a terminology piece there. But, but yeah, so very, very wide-ranging and varied fleet and even You know, we have in the program, we had boats, a huge number of boats up in Alaska in certain areas. Yep. And then I did not manage the aircraft part, but they, they used our fleet management information system, but we weren't managing them within our program.

Right. Yeah. And it was a huge organization, right? Like, right. You had sort of like regional fleet managers or something like that.

Yeah. So just top line numbers, about 35,000 employees. Wow. 18,000 vehicles, 5,000 pieces of equipment. Now, as far as the fleet management workforce, we're probably talking about 175 FTEs. Okay. Full-time equivalents. Wow. That's a huge fleet organization. Yeah. So, and it was a matrix organization. So I had my direct staff, which were focused on key areas, like one person managing the fleet information system. One person managing telematics, one person managing the contracts we would use to buy apparatus for the whole country, right? One person managing heavy equipment acquisitions and fuel and fleet credit cards and things like that. 23,000 fleet credit cards also that I had to manage, right? One for every asset, right? But then you go down to the regional level. They didn't report to me. They report to their own regional leadership, right? They have probably about 15 regional fleet managers. Right. And then you go down to the next layer, which is the fleet manager, more the boots on the ground, the forest fleet manager. And there was about 75 or 80 of those, maybe more. Right. And an assistant foreign fleet manager.

That's a challenging setup for fleet, right? I mean, Steve Salskiver talks about it a lot. He compares and contrasts his time in Republic versus Coca-Cola. Right. And Republic used this sort of matrix system, whereas Coca-Cola, you had this, you know, top-down where fleet folks, they may have been embedded obviously regionally and locally, but it was more of a partner situation and they reported directly to him. And he, in his experience, he talks about it was a lot easier to get stuff done with that top-down, right, fleet or, you know, situation. Because obviously that in this matrix approach they have competing priorities and you're ultimately, you're not their boss in many cases. Correct. Right. So, um, you know, I'm imagining there's some keys to that.

It's really relationship building's got to be huge. Stakeholder engagement.

Yeah, you're right. Yeah, right, exactly. Stakeholder satisfaction. Exactly right. Showing that you're essentially a support service for them. You're here to help them, right, do their jobs better and easier and, you know, that sort of a thing.

Exactly, exactly. So, but yeah, you have the folks at the local level who are— they're both they're evaluated by, uh, the local unit, right? You know, the leadership of the local unit. Um, but we're also trying to say, well, hey, but you need to hold the local unit accountable for how many vehicles they have and utilization. And yes, you know, very challenging things of that nature.

So there's kind of this, this dual purpose economy there, right? Yeah, yeah, that's tough. That sounds challenging. It is. It sounds challenging.

You know, a lot of it, um, you know, you have to really focus on you know, coming at problems in a way where you're demonstrating that you have looked at the issue from all sides, that you're an expert in your field, and that you're providing solid and sound recommendations that you can get everybody to go along with. So there's, you know, I really kind of see a parallel between what we do as consultants. We're not in charge of anything as a consultant, right? Right. We're going in to evaluate and recommend and help with strategy and help with education. I was doing the same thing in my role, you know, even as the national fleet manager at the Forest Service. I was kind of functioning as a consultant within the organization to help, help the local fleets and the regional fleets be successful.

Right. And their operators, obviously. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Which is why they exist.

And then furthering the success of the organization at large. Exactly. Yeah.

That's fascinating stuff. All right. We're going to move on. We're going to go to a different topic. I'm going to— I'm going to hit you with a couple of get-to-know-you questions here. Okay. All right. You clearly love Fleet. I'm not putting words in your mouth. I mean, yeah, is that, is that fair? Fair enough. You've fallen in love. It got you. Yeah, you got the bug, it bit you. Um, if you're not doing Fleet, what, what's that thing that you're doing? What do you love to do? Is it a hobby?

Is it, uh, you know, so I try to— as a fleet manager, you spend a lot of time in front of the computer. Yes. Okay, for sure. So there's a lot of data, you're getting swarmed by it. Notifications, exception reports on a day-to-day basis. So, you know, regularly try to unplug and get away from screens. Okay. So for me, what that looks like is I'm fortunate enough to be pretty close to a national park, C&O Canal Historic Park, and I can just go out, walk along the river, get some, you know, leave the phone in the car and just go decompress. Cool. Get some, get some oxygen coming off those trees, you know, get the like Yeah, it just get away and get into nature. Yeah. Get that airtime. Yeah. Yeah. So other than that, I like to work on, work on my own vehicles. I like to do— you have your own fleet, don't you? I need to right size. Yeah. Doctor, heal. A couple of us here who feel that. Doctor, heal thine self. Right. You know, I need to take a dose of my own medicine sometimes. Yes. I, you know, go into an organization and we just right size, you know, the Forest Service fleet by 1,500 vehicles. And now I've got, I've got probably 2 extra vehicles sitting in my house that need to be sold and I just can't get around to it. So, but I like to, you know, work with my hands. So sure, a lot of the stuff I work on on a day-to-day basis at work is long-range, long timeline, like strategic, intangible result. And sometimes I just want to go fix something or build something so that at the end of the day I can say that's like I have physical evidence that I've accomplished something. Yeah, cool, cool.

Yeah. All right, um, if you could only have one meal for the rest of your life, or food, right, food type, what would it be? In other words, favorite meal.

Oh, I like steak. Steak, plain old steak.

Yep, nothing on it.

Well, you said one thing.

Well, well, you know, okay, well, I said meal, I said meal. Give me some credit here. Okay, yeah, you get a potato with that or is it rice?

I try to stay away from carbs, so I'll go with the veggies.

Veggies? Yeah. Any particular veggies your favorite?

Just the mixed veggies, like squash, you know, sautéed. I like, you know, what do you got, like onions and things like that.

So yeah. Was there a particular cut of steak that you like or you like them all?

I like filet mignon. Who doesn't? Twist my arm. Twist my arm. Good stuff. Ribeye is good. Yeah. All right.

Okay. If you— if you— okay. Favorite music group or performing artists of all time? Who is it? Who is it?

Led Zeppelin. Led Zeppelin. Oh, it didn't hesitate there. Yeah, I— and I say that I used to have, back when, you know, MP3 CDs came out, I had this MP3 player CD boombox, and I had like every one of their albums on one CD. And I would drive the bus and I had that music playing on there. So that's like probably one of the only bands that I've ever sought out every single album and put them on like one disc so I This was Napster time period, right? Napster. That's right. Oh, can I say that?

That's a blast from the past.

Do I need a legal disclaimer on that? I don't think so.

All right, let me, uh, I'm gonna bring it back to Fleet here quick. Okay, last couple of ones here. Um, and maybe you hit some of these already, but if so, that's fine. Um, what, what is like, if you had to pick something right within Fleet, what is, what is your favorite part about being in the industry? Your favorite, it could be as simple as this is my favorite task to do, or you know, this is why I love the industry. If you, you know, you admitted you fell in love with it, right? What's that thing?

So, well, I'm gonna maybe flip the question around a little bit, but, or, or I don't know if this is a non-answer answer, but I like the fact that it is multidisciplinary. I like the fact that any given day I can work on something completely different from the day before. So whether it's, um, you know, something more qualitative like policy and procedure, or just people skills and interacting, leading, supervising, things like that, or transitioning into something more quantitative, uh, data analytics, KPIs, reporting measurements, sure, how the systems operate, organizational, you know, design, trying to make sure that the organization's set up for success. Sure. So I say that to say that it's, um, you know, I want to be able to do something new and interesting every day. Yeah. And I don't want to be stuck doing like one one thing on a day-to-day basis.

No, I think that's a really good answer. I think, I think a lot of us, I mean, I, I, I, that resonates with me, right? Kind of the, the Renaissance person approach, right? Right. Being good at a lot of different things. And that, and that's actually part of the complexity of fleet and why leadership above fleet oftentimes doesn't appreciate just how many disciplines we, you need to be really good at, or you have to have a team around you that facilitates being really good at, right?

If I had to be, you know, painted into a corner on an answer, it'd be, you know, working with a team.

Right. Oh, that's interesting. That's cool. I like that. All right, all right. And now last one for you here, and then we'll call it a day. You know, you've been in the industry a long time. Um, I'm sure there's many answers you can give me for this, but if you have to choose one, what's kind of that thing that the industry needs that's, that it's, that's missing? If you could wave your magic wand and solve this problem for the industry, sort of a thing that, you know, uh, you know, that you would do. What is there anything that kind of jumps out to you?

I think it probably would hinge on professionalizing the industry. And I say that both from the standpoint of like making sure that there's educational opportunity for fleet managers, but also that fleet managers get the respect of, you know, of their organization for that often invisible and behind-the-scenes contribution that they basically, you know, put forward that furthers every program that they touch, right? The police officer doesn't respond to the call without a vehicle. The ambulance doesn't show up and, you know, take your loved one to the hospital without the vehicle. So, you know, that's the credibility and prestige. That's what I would love to, you know, inject into the industry. But we have to work for it. You know, we have to go out and seek the opportunities for education. And, and demonstrate our value on a day-to-day basis.

I love that answer, Scott. I had no idea you were going to answer that. And God, I couldn't, I couldn't wish for a better answer because that's what this show is about, quite frankly. So with that, it was an absolute pleasure talking to you. Likewise. Pleasure, pleasure having you here in studio especially. It's been too long. I can't wait to have you on the show again. And yeah, man, have a great weekend. All right.

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