Episode 202: Fleet Management 101: The Critical Metrics That Separate Good Fleets From Great Ones

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Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm Facundo Tesara. I'm joined here today by Bill Griffiths. He is the director, fleet director for the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C., if anybody doesn't happen to know where this is. Bill, thanks for joining.

Thanks for having me, Facundo. I appreciate it.

So the first thing, before we get into you telling me who you are and me telling the people who they are, I always remember one thing in particular that always makes me chuckle. When you were standing on stage and you were saying a thermal event. I want you to explain to the folks watching and/or listening what a thermal event is.

So I believe Scott Conlon works at RTA now, right? Like, so he knows what a thermal event is, too. And those aren't good things. So in the transit industry, when you have anything that's fire-related on a bus or a train, when the NTSB comes in, it is labeled as a thermal event. When I got hired to be the fleet director at Montgomery County, which is just up the road here, I inherited a fleet that had undergone multiple thermal events and we had to— and we actually— NTSB actually like was heavily involved in that, right? Because, you know, it's transit, we're moving people and we had to work with— there was multiple problems, right? We had OEM engineering problems, right? So we were working with the OEM to fix some of the challenges we had there. But we actually had some maintenance problems too with how we were doing brakes and how we were doing maintenance on vehicles. And so it took us a few, it took us a little bit. We ended up getting rid of all of those buses and got some new buses in to replace it. But that was, that was actually a challenging time for us because when we were at Montgomery County, we went through a couple different things. We also, when I was at Montgomery County, we found, we found the steering disconnect problem that was happening on Ford Crown Victoria police cars where the steering coupling was actually coming loose and police cars were crashing. We took, I want to say it was like 800 police cars out of service in one day.

Ouch.

And brought them through. I know it was, it was painful. And brought them through and inspected them and then worked with Ford, worked with Ford for them to come out and figure out what that solution was and getting those and replacing all those. And we actually had that incorporated into our PM checklist, you know, because we had police cars coming in with the mileage that we had in the county. Police cars were coming in for service every 4 weeks. And so every time they came in, we had to do an inspection on that steering coupler to see if it had you know, it was in a position that it needed to be replaced. They were like national backorder. I remember we had like stocks of them in our parts room.

I always remember that. So, okay, so if you— this is the first time you're listening to the show, I'm Facundo Tesoro. I'm the Fleet Success Ambassador here at RTA. I've been in fleet for 25 years. I've been a government fleet manager. I've gone to tech startup and helped launch a couple of companies. And now here I am at RTA doing some fun stuff here. So, Bill, tell us a little bit about you.

I have been in the fleet business for 34 years now. It seems like just yesterday. I started out in the military. I was a heavy equipment mechanic working on all sorts of specialized equipment, had some really great assignments during my tenure there. About 11 years into my career, I got my first fleet job. I worked for the Forest Service. I was a regional fleet manager out in Colorado. And during a presentation, I got on a national committee during a presentation. I ran into a friend of mine that said, hey, the Smithsonian is hiring for their very first fleet director. And I remember thinking to myself, like, how cool would that— like, how cool of a job would that be? And I was hired and I was the first fleet director for, for the Smithsonian. I did that for about 5 years, and that was a global fleet. We had the fleet all over the world to include all of the Marine vessels that we, that we managed. I got to travel and see— I got to go to Africa and Panama and, you know, like all the different sites, not just what you know about most people know about on the mall. And then I got the opportunity from there to go to Montgomery County. I was the fleet director in Montgomery County for 5 years, got to work with Scott Conlon, who's a great intelligent mind. He's one of the best in the business. And then from there, I went up to Boston where I'm originally from. I'm from South Boston, and I worked for the MBTA, which is the Metropolitan Bay Transportation Authority, and I was the fleet and engineering strategy officer. So I was responsible for all the buses and the trains the trains and the commuter rails and the strategy and the maintenance behind all of how that worked. And from there I did consulting for a little bit that I realized that that's not for me. I love the operational tempo too much and I got a job, I got offered a job from private equity and I was the senior vice president of fleet for a company called Beacon Mobility. They're the third largest student transportation company in the world, in the country, excuse me, in the country. Managing 17,000 school buses in 23 states. And then I retired. And then I retired. And then, and then I retired to Virginia Beach and I got a call about an opportunity up here in the district and from a friend. And I said, sure, I'll take a look at it. And I met with the director at the time and You know, a year later, I ended up coming to here. And so I've been here for a year and a half now. And I think I told you this when last I saw you. This is the best job I've ever had. This is like by far the best job I've ever had.

Yeah, that's awesome to hear that. So, okay, so what we're talking about today is something I'm actually kicking off this series with, with our podcast. You know, kind of talking about Fleet Management 101. And the reason that I wanted to talk to you about this, because we connected over this when we first met. And so what we've noticed is that when we go to trade shows or even our own event, you know, we'll have folks on stage or, you know, we'll be attending an event where we're just sitting in the crowd and watching a fleet professional on stage and sharing stories and talking about things. And then you're looking out in the crowd and people are like, whoa, like, what are they talking about? Right? Pretty, you know, it's over their head. And so there's a lot of opportunities to bridge the gap, whether it's a rookie fleet person coming on, you know, starting, whether it's been some— it's somebody that's been cruising along but really getting serious about learning stuff, or maybe even people that have been doing this for a long time and they're making it way too complicated for themselves. So I think there's a lot of benefit of talking about Fleet Management 101. So I'll kind of set the stage a little bit here and I'll go back to Whenever that was, I think it was like 2015 or something like that.

I think so.

When, when we first met. So I was the fleet manager for the city of Norfolk in Virginia. I was in my third year or so in fleet management, and I had come— I'd come from the city of Ormond Beach, smaller fleet, great location, had like 700 assets, took this new job in the city of Norfolk. And one thing that I think you and I have in common is that we often take jobs either at places that are building something or don't have the greatest fleet in the world. They've got some challenges, so we want to go in there and fix it.

Right.

And so that's the reason that I took this job in the city of Norfolk. And so when I took this job, I noticed I was like, wow, like, this is definitely— I got my work cut out for me and I've got some ideas. I don't really know what to do. And I went to this presentation in Virginia Beach at the convention center or something there. And you were speaking at the event and you were talking about this monthly report that you were creating and you were talking about the importance of the basics, the fundamentals of fleet, and how sometimes not talking about those things gets lost. And so that's the way that we, you know, we kind of connected. And in that moment, I felt like I was the only person in the room, like you were speaking directly to me, like, this guy is reading my mind right now. And so I remember you sent me a copy of what you were doing and I basically started modeling exactly that. So anyway, so I want to hear from your perspective the importance of these fundamentals or these basics. I think you said that it's not the— it's not the basics, it's the knowledge. It's the lack of knowledge of the basics that get people in trouble.

I think I've seen it a lot, you know, like it would be so easy for me to be like, oh, I came from the maintenance background. Right? And so like, I've got that down on lock, and I've got that down on lock, and I've only got to focus on the fleet management piece or the fuel management piece. I, I don't really think people comprehend how complex fleet management is. I've listened to a couple of your guys' podcasts. Like, I know your folks know, but you think about like all the things that you have to be knowledgeable in. You need to be knowledgeable in maintenance, knowledgeable in fleet management, fuel management, budget, right? Like you've got to have all of these kind of competencies, right? And I always said that like you really have to focus on the basics because that's what's going to get you in trouble. What do I mean by that? You're in the role that you're in, chances are you're going to have to or you're going to run into someone with authority, your boss, right? Your boss, because maybe your boss is your conduit to a city council member. Maybe you have to present to city council. Maybe you get into— maybe your office is on a different floor. And when you get on that elevator every day, You know, you get in the elevator and the mayor is in the elevator with you or a city council member is in there and they say, hey, Bill, how are you doing? I'm great. Hey, did you know that we installed 25 DC fast chargers last week? If you have an opportunity, why don't you come right down to the shop? It's again understanding that there's a perception and there's a reality. And your job as a fleet manager or whatever your role is, is to bridge the gap between perception and reality so the people who are decision makers completely understand what you're doing. And I used to say this was foundation of success. What do I mean by that? Vehicle types. When I was a consultant, one of the first things I found that people, their hierarchies were a mess. Like, what do I mean by hierarchy, right? Hierarchy, like in an organization from like with a district, like from the mayor's office. And then there's the deputy of like operations, deputy of public safety, and then they have suborganizations all the way down, right? If vehicles aren't properly put into the right category, right, or if it's not aligned with a financial category, that becomes problems with billing, with capital planning, all of that stuff. So that needs to be right. Vehicle classifications, whether you use NAFSA, APWA, I've seen homemade, literally I've seen homemade class codes where sedans are 1, light duty pickup trucks are 2, you know, and it doesn't matter what you use, but be consistent about it because you'll see I've been in many fleets when you go in there and you run a fleet report and you see half your fleet is not characterized properly. So that's foundational stuff, right? Foundational stuff, right? Make sure you're, you know, make sure your accounting codes are right, make sure your vehicle classes are right. And then the next thing that I would say is, is like, how do you do maintenance, right? Like, how are you capturing maintenance? You know, do you use VRMS codes? Are you using ATA codes? Are you using like a, like a repair code system like FASTR or however you're using it? Is that up to date? Does that need to be updated? Because one of the things you're going to need to look at is how you're performing at a very basic level. And you want to know where your hours of work are going. It was one of the first things I did here was look at like, okay, I know that I spend 18,000 hours of maintenance hours, right? Where do I spend those 18,000 hours? Well, I can tell you I found a lot of them were in Breakdowns, road calls, tows, failure and service items. So I immediately knew that my PM program was in problem. And then so I could talk about this for hours, man. Like we— it's— that's the basic stuff at a very foundational level. You probably saw that I created like a little, like foundational chart where I say at your foundation, these are the things that you need to be able to do. Your class codes, like your replacement cycles. Like all that basic stuff. And then in between is what I used to call transactional data. And that's like your work order data, your mileage, your fuel transactions, all of that stuff. But it starts at that basic level. So knowing how many vehicles you have, that should be in your pocket all the time. Not only how many vehicles you have, how many, how many types of alternative fuel vehicles that you have, right? And if that's, especially if that's a big thing with council or, you know, committees that have an influence on the city, you know, hey, we have 3,900 vehicles and 37% of my fleet are, you know, are alternative fuel. And that 37%, I've got 342 electric vehicles. I've got, you know, 245 CNG. Like, you need to, you need to have that information. You shouldn't have to say, hold on, I got to run a report. Like, you should have that stuff like on the regular.

Well, it's like you said at that, at that presentation, and I I'm pretty sure I told you this, but I— so one of the things is like, so when I noticed that the city of Norfolk, like, obviously the shop was on the other side of town, there was a city hall. The city hall's— I mean, the city manager's office was on the 11th floor. And so I knew that we didn't have the best relationship or Fleet didn't have the best relationship with other folks. And so, and so I knew that I was like, look, if the 11th floor, anybody on the 11th floor, city manager, deputy city manager, anybody needs anything from fleet, I'm going to personally go down there and be like, hey, what do you need?

Right?

If they need a vehicle picked up, hey, what do you need? And so it was not that long after I attended that, you know, event in 2015 where I had put together this, you know, fleet elevator pitch. And ironically, I was, what I was trying to do was bring in alternative fuel vehicles into the city at the time, 2015, fairly early at that time. And so I had dropped off an electric vehicle for the, the city manager to ride, to, to drive around for a couple weeks. And I finally went to go pick it up to see what he thought and whatever. Um, picked it up and he's like, oh, you know, I was on the, I went up to his office. He comes out and he's like, oh shoot, I forgot. I left some stuff in the car. Let's go right down. You know, we'll go down together. I'll grab the stuff. You just take it from there. Perfect. So as I'm walking with him, I'm like, here's my opportunity to tell him. And as right as I'm thinking this, I'm like, in we go to the elevator, right? My elevator pitch, 11 floors, walk out. And I'm giving him these basic things that we're doing. And, you know, I, I noticed at the time that, you know, I was kind of touching on some things. I was like, he doesn't care about my challenges particularly. He wants to know about the solutions to my chall— or like, what am I doing about my challenges? He knows I'm gonna have a problem, or he knows I'm gonna have goals. What am I doing about them? And so that's when I started, you know, really creating this elevator pitch. I had those basic things, those fundamental things that you talked about. I knew 'em. I started throwing those things at him. He's like, oh cool, this is great. You know, perfect.

When I got here last May, I literally spent the first literally 60 days meeting with every customer because I was getting feedback from leadership and from like the OPM, which is the Budget Office, and what they call OCA, which is the City Administrator's Office, that, you know, we were slow to get things done. Things were constantly breaking down. So I spent, I spent the first 2 months meeting with customers. I pulled their data before I went there and like put on my bulletproof vest and was like ready to take it. And for someone like me, I just literally had to just shut up and kind of call her, right? Like I needed to shut up and listen because I needed to get that feedback about, hey, you know, like, can we schedule? Why don't we have an online scheduler? Like, and when we drop something off, we, they don't look at all the problems. Why do I have this many breakdowns? And so we took all that back from all our customers. And one of the first things we did was, especially with the, with the customers that had the most problems, is I started daily calls. So we have to this day, we have some weekly calls and we have daily calls. We've toned them down because our progress has gotten a lot better. But I have a daily call with DPW. I have a daily call with DDOT. I have a weekly call with DGS. And they get, you know, they're all— they all get the daily out-of-service report, which was one of the first things we put together, which was a daily out-of-service report. And with their fleet, you know, basically their fleet availability, and then what is their ETAs on what's in the shop? That was a quick way to kind of start tamping down, kind of like, you know, getting ahead of the problem, right? But that's a basic thing. Your customer is, is, is it for you, right? Like, you've got to make sure that they are happy because if they're not, they're going to be very vocal to their director, to their council member, and then that's going to come up and then you're going to end up getting questions about, you know, like, Hey, how do we purchase vehicles? Why? Why is, you know, the DDGS is like they've had their vehicles on order for 6, 7 months. Why are they still on order? Because no one from fleet told them that we were still dealing with the back end of supply chain problems and those specific vehicles were customized and they were like 18-month windows for order. Right. Which is still ridiculous. But like, but again, it was, it was because we did not communicate that to the customer. Then it got to the CA's office and the CA was like, So tell me, how do you buy vehicles? Why do you have so many problems? We didn't have problems. We had like 2 problems, but everything gets blown up. But you get ahead of that, your customer is very happy. And then I see the city administrator or I see somebody else and they're like, hey, I was talking to the director of so-and-so the other day. They're really pleased with the level of service that they get when they go to see you. So you see, you need to get ahead of that. Like, you know, like to me, customer service is like at the very top.

Along with communication availability. Yeah, I mean, the communication. But I think so, like, I mean, talk a little bit about like— so I remember, you know, it's been a while since I've actually looked at it. I was actually telling somebody about this the other day that I was going to share a copy of the one that I had. And so I remember it was like, you know, the logo, the monthly report that, you know, a description of Fleet, some information about Fleet. Then you get into the first metric and, you know, maybe Asset availability, we, you know, we think it's the most important one, 'cause if your vehicles aren't available, then what are we doing here? And it was a description of industry benchmarks with information and trends, and then you had some charts and stuff. So talk a little bit about those and some of the things that you had in those.

Yeah, so, so I've, I've gotten better at this. I will tell you, my old age has gotten me significantly better. I used to want to measure a lot of things, and then I realized that I only really need to manage like a few.

Yeah, because a critical few.

Um, and I, I, you know, and I will, and I'll talk about what I think those few are, right? Uh, we just moved to a different iterate— we just moved to a different iteration. That report at Montgomery County, uh, stemmed from where we were dealing with, um, what we call thermal events. We had actually experienced— I got hired at a very difficult time at Montgomery County as the director there. Uh, they were experiencing bus fires, multiple bus fires. And we were under investigation from the NTSB. We had the OEMs on site, like we had a whole host of things. And then right after we solved that, we had an issue with our Crown Vic interceptors where the steering were just coupling, decoupling. And we had NHTSA in for that. We had NHTSA in for that. We had like, you know, we had Ford in for that and we had to down 800 Crown Vics for one day and go through and inspect to make sure that we could put them back in service. The police chief was not happy. You know, when you've got like 2,600 cruisers and you're taking down more than a third of the fleet, like that's a very difficult thing. So that stemmed from like really looking at performance and we were not a well-performing fleet. We had problems with our preventive maintenance and buses. We— our turnaround time in our heavy equipment shop was not great. Like, you know, we had some parts of our business that was outsourced. Like we really needed to work. And I started putting together this report and we hired a fleet analyst for this. As a matter of fact, I hired a bunch. I hired what I think is I hired one of the first fleet GIS people that did nothing but work on the telematics data to help us.

I remember that. Yeah, yeah, I remember that.

We did. We had, we had 3, 2 analysts, 2 full-time analysts doing nothing but like looking at it. And that helped with— it brought us back. Look, we, we went from a fleet fund that was in the red into the black. We got out of those challenges we had. We had to report out to council every month because of the bushfires. We got our replacement fund back. We, we were on the watch list for the FTA, which means we were in danger of losing our money.

Yeah, it can't be a good thing.

So like I will tell you, so I've been here a year and a half. I got here right in the middle of budget season. And so when we were looking at maintenance, so the things that I look at, we started looking at about 5 core things and we made everybody and taught everybody those 5 things, right? And then created an automated report. The 5 things were first fleet availability. We don't do it available. We call it availability, but internally we call it out of service. It's the out of service report. And our goal, our goal was, the city goal was 8. I made our internal goal 5, right? Like, so we had that and we went, we literally went from, we literally went from a 21% out-of-service rate to September, we were at 5%. We've been at 5% for about 6 months now.

So plus, so it was above 90% availability, 95% availability.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, 95, we were sitting at 95 availability.

Right.

We looked at, we looked at comebacks, comebacks and TOEs. Comebacks were at over 10% last May. They're down at 2% now, which 2% our work orders are way down too as well. We were averaging like almost 2,000 work orders a month. We average about 1,300 now, so we don't do as much work. So the percentages are normalized. I looked at PM compliance when I got here last May, it was at 74%. We revamped our PM program. And took back. We were actually outsourcing a little bit of our work and our PM compliance now is 98%. So like that's a huge piece. I looked at absenteeism because that kind of was a problem because we were dealing with some issues and those were kind of like the 4 things. And then we generated a report every day that gets automated out, right? I have a, I have an analyst and he would create this report and he created it for me. I was actually doing it in Excel by myself and then he automated it and it pushes that out every day by shop. They see that. Well, we're entering, as you know, we're in a new fiscal year that started a couple of weeks ago and now we're publishing. Now we've just went and I'll show you a copy of this, but we just published our very first. Now we do— we moved from that 5 KPIs to now we've got about 12 and we run a scorecard. I can send this to you, right?

Yeah, yeah.

A scorecard, right? And what this looks at is out of service, turnaround rate, work order cost, percentage of parts in labor, right? So you're looking at like, because we're an internal service fund, so how much we're charging, our scheduled versus unscheduled, our failures in service, our comebacks. We implemented QA/QC, what our QA/QC rate was and what our failure rate was, and then our technician efficiency. And then they are now responsible for their parts and overtime budget every month, right? So we've given them a budget.

So when you say they, you mean individual shops?

The individual shops. And then so they get that at the start of the month and then they have a week to fill this out. So and what this is, is this, this is their performance review for the month. And the first question is, what were the factors that contributed to your shop's performance?

So a reflection of how they've performed, right?

How they performed. What factors restricted shop performance? What actions are you taking to improve performance? And then they have an option. So they had to fill all this out. And then we go around the room. We have a weekly maintenance meeting, but this one once a month is 2 hours. And we go through it. I bring snacks and stuff, right? And then we go through. Perfect. And we go through and they're not allowed to use like, oh, I'm missing 2 guys. We call a lot of BS on some of that stuff. But at the end of the day, they go through that. And by doing that, Right. We've, we started up with foundational data. They had a year under that foundational data. We're starting this new process and now they're understanding. And it's great when you hear a guy say, he goes, yeah, my, my, my, my scheduled, my unscheduled work went up last month and I noticed that, that my failures in service had an uptick and my comebacks were directly related to that. So like, it's, it's, it's good now that they're seeing, because we took the time to show them all this and they get all that, right. Hey, I was at, you know, 70, 67% on my tech efficiency this month. And I can tell you why, right? Like, you know, and he was able to walk through some of that. So I think I'm proud of that, right? I am proud of the fact because I think that's the kind of stuff. Start small. It doesn't have to be like those 9 metrics that we look at. You can start with 5, but make sure they're the 5 that matter, right? You know, and to me that is fleet accountability, you know, looking at your reliability, your failures in service, your comebacks, right? Um, PM compliance, um, and then, you know, technician efficiency, right? You know, what, you know, are you getting, are you getting what you're expecting out of your, out of your technicians, right? And if you can do all that, if you can do all that, then you can really start to better understand your business. Because no one goes to school for fleet management, chances are you were never formally trained on how to successfully lead a fleet? That's where the Fleet Success Playbook comes in. The Fleet Success Playbook is your guide to building a safe, reliable, and efficient fleet that provides exceptional service. Learn all about the 4 pillars of fleet success: stakeholder satisfaction, intentional culture, resource efficiency, and risk management. Get nearly 100 years of combined advice on common challenges, practical solutions, actionable tips, and real examples from fleet industry experts who have been there and done that. Visit www.fleetsuccessplaybook.com to request your free copy today.

I'm going in a million different directions. I'm going to try to focus and just try to stay focused on one thing right now. So it's so important when you're doing like that fleet pitch, right? When you're talking to these people in an elevator, that need to know about how their fleet is performing because they're the city manager or whatever. They have an important role and they got to, you know, talk to council and the, the citizens and all that. So what's interesting is that there's so many times where people pick up the phone and call their buddy and be like, hey, you know, tell me what you're doing for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, these metrics that I think I want to track. And so let's say you're calling from the district and you're calling your buddy in West Virginia, right? Like those are two totally different things like I love the fact that you're measuring absenteeism, right? Because for some reason that's obviously important and it's impacting— obviously makes total sense to me of why that would be significant. But I think that's what's really important is that, you know, I think the, the, the— there is these ties to one another. The— I like to call them like the feeder metrics. So you have fleet availability doesn't just live by itself. There's reasons why the fleet isn't available. Well, what are they? Absenteeism, parts availability, whatever. It could go on and on and on.

Right.

I love that.

So it's funny. So it's funny. So I think that's also— you brought up a really good point. I just pulled it up.

Right.

So you should want to know what's comparable because you're going to get asked. You're going to get asked, how do we perform? I know I got— they asked me this like 6 months into being here. They were like, Bill, how do we perform against all the municipalities around us? And I'm like, well, that's a real unfair assessment, sir. And he goes, well, what do you mean? I said, We're 61 square miles, right? So our utilization on our vehicles is not going to be the same as Montgomery County, which is 491 square miles, which is just north of us. You know, Baltimore would be the closest at 80 square miles, right? So like that kind of stuff. And then you want to manage fleet sizes, right? So I put together for them and I did this like I laid it out in a little chart for them. I showed all the local fleets what their square mileage was, what the population is that they served, and then what the size of their fleet was. Compared to that. And then I showed, hey, we really should be looking at like Seattle, Boston, Milwaukee, Baltimore. Those are our comps, right? Because they're all within that, you know, 50 to 90 square miles. They all have that 4,000 vehicle fleet like we do, and they all serve between, you know, 580,000 and 1 million people, right?

Like, which is like, you know, you know, in the population densities, it's not, it's not 60 square miles of cornfields.

Exactly. And so, and we were able then to then say, I can now reach out to Baltimore. I can— I, I know the fleet manager because I used to live up in Boston. I can reach out to the fleet manager in Boston, right? Like, these are things where I can say, hey, look, but here's the thing. We started this thing out talking about, do you have your basics right? Because it's one thing what you might call something, what you might call something, another fleet might have it characterized something differently. So you need to be very careful that you're, you're kind of engaging apples to apples when you're trying to do, you know, fleet comparisons because they might use— I mean, they might not use NAPFA codes, they might use something else and it might be different. Like, so you need to be careful at that and that'll help you as you're gauging kind of like how, how well do you rank versus, you know, a comparable, a comparable municipality.

Shame on me for not asking this at the beginning. We— you shared who you were and everything, you know, and the fleets you were at. Describe your fleet a little bit.

How big is it?

Like the kinds of craziness that you have in there?

So I've got 4,000 vehicles, both vehicles and rolling stock, everything from police cars. I do— I don't take care of the school buses and I don't take care of the fire trucks. They do their— they kind of do their own thing. We've got all the services, utilities, trash, right? Roads, you know, public safety. We've— so we've got, we've got all of that. So we've got a very diverse fleet. that we're, that we're managing here. So $4,000 just rolling stock or, uh, no, rolling stock is $30,000, $34,000 and change, $34,000 and change. And like, I got 600 like loaders and dump trucks and backhoes and—

Got it. So all in you're $4,000-ish.

Yeah, $4,000. Yep.

Got it.

We are fueling, we fuel $6,000. We fuel $6,000.

Interesting.

So I'm responsible for all the fuel sites in the district. And although we have—

oh yes, how many fuel sites? Like, uh, 13.

And then I also have, um, I also have 252 Level 2 charging, and I have, um, soon to be now 12 DC fast chargers that support, um, 357, um, EVs.

So shame on me for not asking you that.

Oh, you're fine.

Okay, so, all right, so we talked about the importance of the, the fundamentals, the basics. You were sharing a little bit about— you shared your scorecards, right? Is that what you were talking about?

Yeah, this is awesome to see. But yeah, if I could screen share, I could show it better. But yeah, it's basically— so this side is just a summary of what the stats are and their KPIs. And then this is just where they've been. So we roll in quarters. So every month this just get— we update it monthly, but this is the the last 4 months and the general categories. You've got the general categories and they're all the thing. Yeah. And they get this so that they get this with the backup, right? Like, so they get a file that shows where all this was like built from, right? They stay, get that file so they can go back and look at their comebacks, look at all that. And we send that to them on a weekly basis. So it's not at the end of the month and they're just like catching it at the end of the month.

I like that little plug for, you know, we don't do this. This is not the point of the podcast, but the plug for something in RTA. We have role-based ones. So, uh, dashboards based on role-based, right? Because it's like, well, what is the— the technician doesn't want to see the same thing you're looking at. So that's, that's pretty important. I like the fact that, that you did that right, because you didn't just throw everything together. Okay, so elevator pitch, the scorecards, the feeder metrics you were talking about, the, the, the metrics that are specific to your fleet. I think that's super important because, you know, your buddy with— in Loudoun County, right? I used to live in Fairfax County and Loudoun County. Those are two— Fairfax County is much different than its right next to it, Loudoun County. I don't know how similar they are in size, but they're much different. So anyway, what else? Did we miss anything? Any final thoughts that you just got to share with folks?

Yeah. So let's talk about— let's talk about— I mean, I know we're— I know we've been talking for a little bit, but—

No, no, we're good. We're good.

You know, when you think about all the work that you're doing to like, maybe it's revamping your, your PM process, make sure you have a solid standard operating procedure, a checklist. Make sure you have a policy that supports that and make sure that you, you, your people know about it, like that they understand it. We had to do this here and it wasn't very popular. I've done this in other places, not, you know, successfully, but not successfully. But here was a little challenging. We did not, we did not have checklists for things.

For like PMs.

Oh yeah. Yeah. No, no, no, no. It was however, for Kundo here, let me show you. I'm gonna show you how to do this PM, right? Like that's how you learned. Um, we have checklists now. We've got checklists for packers and tow trucks and sweepers and dump trucks and LA cars. Like we've got all that now. And that took a little bit of time to kind of like do. We did them in segments. We didn't just roll it all out. We had to do it in segments. Because we had to kind of reset expectations. And so make sure whatever it is, whether it's PMs, you know, how you process a work order, like from the time a customer drops it off to the time they pick it up, what does that process look like? Who touches it? And sit in a room and say, what's the minimal amount of people that need to touch this? Does your system help automate some of that? Right. You know what I'm saying? Right. I'm not a big person like Maybe I want to go back to the checklist. I'm not a big paper person, but we needed it. We wanted them to look at it and check it, and we need to replace our system. So like, this is one of those things where we would say, hey, we need to have automated checklists as part of our process. You know, how do you in-service a vehicle? How do you dispose of a vehicle? You know, do you—

let me pause you there for just a second. I want to— because you were touching on something And you were talking about the process and like that, like a PM, right? So like a PM, like it's your worst nightmare. It's like, okay, check the front left tire. Now walk around the car 3 times and check the rear right tire and then walk back to the front and check the lights.

Like ours is clocked, dude. Okay. So we, so, um, so I, I, I saw a presentation by Steve Salzgaber, like way back in the day, exactly what I was saying, way back in the day. Right. Where he pulled up this diagram when he was at, I think, like Utah Transit or something. Right. And, and you could see the whole process. I was like, are you kidding me? Do you know how many times I've done that as a technician where I've just walked around, you know, whatever, nothing about it, right?

Yeah.

So, you know, the checklist and then you can like do it yourself to then have somebody actually say, we're going to make sure that like, because we did packers first because they're our highest cost center, right? Like, We did the packers first and we did it from when you're pulling it in, when you pull it in, what do you do when it's on the ground? What do you do when it's in the air? What do you do when it's back down again? Right. Like we— that was the way that it was cycled. So we clocked the PM to minimize that. And you'll hate me for saying this. We don't allow the parts on the shop floor because I had parts issues when I got here. We'll get back to that. But until we do, we actually pull the parts for PMs and they're in there and they're getting— we have people that give them to them, but So how do you in-source a vehicle? How do you dispose of a vehicle? How do you determine, how do you determine when a vehicle comes in for repairs? Like if it's meet, if it's met the criterion or does the shop supervisor or the manager have to say to say, no, we're going to get rid of this vehicle? You know, like what's the process? I think that needs to be documented. And then inspections, you know, if you have a QA/QC program, I would say this. I think one, you need to have them because it adds credibility to your maintenance program and it does point out opportunities for improvement. But then two, you need to have a process to determine who decides, who's the decider, right? You know, is the inspector empowered at a level where they can go back to the technician or does the supervisor get involved in things like that? I think all that, I think all that, it doesn't seem like it matters, but it really does because some people get in their feelings about, hey, why did my vehicle fail?

Well, yeah, I mean, the importance of building the— you mentioned this earlier, the importance of building the process, right? I think forgive me if I get this wrong, but I think it's Jim Collins that says building clocks versus telling time, right? So it's like the building clocks is the process that you have, because when you leave, if you're not there to tell them, hey, let me go show you how to do this PM, right? If you've built that process right, everybody knows how to do it. And then the next people that work there and the next people that work there will know because you've built this process, you've built the clock. I think that's a huge piece. So nobody gets their feelings hurt.

This is the process. The last thing I'll leave you with is that something that I hold kind of near and dear, right? Are you working on the business or are you working in the business?

Whole podcast episode. Yes. Go ahead.

Right. Yes, that is a whole podcast. And I'll tell you this, as a fleet manager, that or director or whatever it is, your job is to be working on the business.

Yes.

Right. And you need to be teaching, mentoring, empowering those below you to work in the business and helping them work on the business, right, as well. Like that, if you're going to help them grow and take your position. I've got two young executives here that are just incredible. My fleet officer and my maintenance officer are just two incredible young men that are like, if I leave, this place is safe. But all seriousness, it took me a few years in my life to figure out, like, on the business, right, you need to be thinking about, like, what you're doing next, and not just next in 6 months. What are you doing a year from now? What are you doing 2 years from now, 3, 4, 5 years from now? And how are you going to get there? You know, like, you need to be thinking about how EVs are going to affect your fleet. You need to be thinking about how it might be hydrogen. You know, you need to, you need to be thinking about, like, what does the next generation of technician look like, and how does that technician interact with what you're doing for business? Like, I think working on that business strategically? How are you modeling for replacements? You know, like, you know, how are you taking care of preventive maintenance? How are you taking care of preventive maintenance? And what does that look like in an EV world or an advanced vehicle world? That's the stuff that you need to be working on constantly. We're dealing with a lot of technology. We're looking at transitioning. We have telematics in 3,300 vehicles. We're looking at transitioning to full onboard video safety telematics to go along with that. So because, because to manage that kind of that piece, we're working with the Office of Risk Management here with the city. We're doing the ISAs, which is the Speed Assistant, which is essentially like a real-time governor based off of satellites and GPS. We have over 300 of those devices installed in vehicles across the district. How do those vehicles— are you using like Pitstop? We're about to pilot Pitstop with our Geotab interface. Like, how do all of these things play into your business? That's what you should be working on. That's what you should be working on. And make sure you're focusing on the business and you're bringing your leadership along with you for that ride and involving them every step of the way.

I love it. I mean, I think the analogy or the example that you gave of, and I remember, so the difference, and again, this is a whole podcast episode, but the difference of working in the business and on the business. And very simply, like you said, with EVs, like EVs isn't a thing where it's just like, we need EVs. And then the next day you're like, here you go, EVs all over the city, chargers are there, let's go, boom, right? It's, you can't, you got, do buildings have enough power? Can they support them? Where are they going to go? How difficult is it to install? Like, how's it going to impact, you know, do I need to bring a new feed? Like so many different things.

But think about how budget cycles work, right? Like this This is why you always have to be working on the business, right? Like, so I am submitting my '27 budget now. I just submitted it. It's all done, right? For next October, right? You don't— I don't know if I'm going to get any money, right, until the spring, early, like June. I'm not going to know till June if I'm going to get money. And then I got to start writing contracts or whatever for what I don't already have already. And procurement is difficult enough in government, right? Like, it's already difficult enough. You need to be thinking 2 and 3 budget cycles ahead to where you want to be, to prepare yourself, defend what you're asking for. So when it comes time for it, you're ready to go and you're not going, oh, they gave me money for EVs, but I didn't get enough money for charging stations. Or, hey, I'm being, I'm being asked by council, I'm being asked by council, how come we don't have electric trash trucks? Well, we're exploring that. You can't just exploring it. You should have already known about it, right? Like that's when you're working on the business. Empower your leaders to work in the business and be managing maintenance and compliance and efficiencies and all that. Like you should be looking at it, but that question from you should be, why are we here? And then not only because you're down, but hey guys, why did we have 2 good months in a row? You know, I'm not saying this, but tell me how we got there. What did we do differently that we had 2 good months in a row?

Right. Yeah, I think this is probably, I mean, we could probably have the world's longest podcast. I'm sorry. Sorry.

Yes.

No, no, no. It's fine. I mean, cuz you know, I mean, uh, folks that don't know, like I, I, we talked about this during the beginning of the episode. We met, you became a mentor, you became a friend, and we talk all the time, whether we're texting about this or like, hey, what do you think? And what should I do? Or how does this work? So I definitely will definitely have you back on to talk about, I love the subject of working on the business versus in the business. Such a huge thing. All right. So. I'm going to cut both of us off because I know that we can go for a while. Bill, thank you so much. Thank you for hopping on here. And that's it. We'll see you next time. Thanks.

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