Episode 223: Outsourcing in Fleet: How to Know What to Sublet, When, and Why

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.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm Mark Canson, your host. I am the VP of Product and Consulting here at RTA Fleet, the Fleet Success Company. And I am joined by my buddy and new colleague, relatively speaking, Jake Johnson. Jake, how you doing?

I'm doing good, doing really well.

Good to have you here, my friend. You know, we were— we had Connect back in October, so a few months ago, and you made, you know, quite a few, I thought, really insightful comments on a number of topics. And one of the things I kind of wanted to maybe bring you in to talk about today was you know, outsourcing and sublet work, because you have a unique experience in, in that, in particular industries. But before we do that, give folks some, you know, kind of the flyby overview. Tell us, you know, a little bit about how you got into fleet and your fleet career here.

Started in the driveway with Dad, right? That's, that's, that's how we all, that's how we all kind of fall into this. So, you know, tinkering with cars and helping Dad in the driveway, you know, just kind of sparked interest and, and put this passion in me. So Soon as I was legally allowed to work on equipment, I went and applied and I joined an international truck dealership. Spent several years there, got my master certification, and from there I wanted to try out the fleet business. So I moved over to another company, grew my way from turning wrenches to running the shop to service manager. You know, had a lot of fun doing that and then wanted to see what, you know, that particular company did some leasing and some rentals and, you know, I wanted to see what fleet alone was all about. So I went over to standalone fleet and it was amazing. So yeah, about 20 years in all and love every one of them.

Dude, you're old school, man. We don't see as many of the guys who worked their way up from wrenching, you know, all the way through. And, and I think that's cool because it gives you an insight, a technical background. You know what, some of the old fogies— some, not all, I mean, we got— we've got some of the great ones here— lack is that, that sort of, that quantitative piece, that sort of aversion to tech, which, you know, generally speaking, the younger generations are the other side of that. But then they don't have the technical skills, right? They don't really You know, I got a quick, quick little funny story I've told maybe once or twice before, but when I was a fleet management consultant on my very first study, I'm sitting down with the fleet manager, never turned a wrench in his life. And as I'm talking to him, a mechanic walks by, says, hey, you called for me? He goes, yeah. He goes, I need to know what's going on with that Camry. You know, executive so-and-so is really pushing me on it. I need it out the door today, man. We're not going to be able to get it out the door. Why not? Well, we're still waiting on the air brakes to come in. And then, you know, the mechanic walks away and I can hear him giggling. And I go— and he goes, 'Oh, okay, thanks.' Yeah. And the fleet manager was serious. He really believed that this Camry was waiting on air brakes, right? So just tell that story to kind of illustrate kind of the challenges, you know. If you— there's such a diverse set of skills, it's really hard to master them all unless you've done them all. And you've done them all. And that to me is super cool.

Yeah, yeah.

And I love that part of it because you're a quantitative guy too. You're a big data guy.

I like both sides of it and I think that's what really turned me on to where I'm at now is, you know, I love the hands-on. I like to go out and get dirty and have fun with the guys in the shop. I can relate to that. But I also can sit behind the computer and do some analytics with some reporting and things to understand where things are going awry. And I think that's kind of what drove me to where I'm at.

And so for folks listening, just getting to know you, most of your career has been in the trucking industry. Is that fair? Like in logistics, you know, what kind of fleets have you managed, generally speaking?

Yeah, yeah. So all of it's trucking. Like I said, I started at an international dealer. I went to a commercial truck fleet that also did lease and rental. So we, we did contracted, uh, leases where we would work on contract customers and, and rental equipment as well. And then I went to a local grocer where we did trucking and refrigerated grocery.

So closed route.

Yeah, it's all been trucking.

Yep, cool.

Yeah, yep, closed route.

Okay, so inevitably, obviously you're working in places that have, generally speaking, their own in-house shops. But all of that, you know, I'm sure that like there's a portion of that work, predominantly specialty work, that you guys were outsourcing. Is that a fair assumption?

You could try to do 100% in-house, and I, I do we manage fleets today that, that can do that. But I think it's pretty fair to say that most fleets are going to have some degree of outsourcing, and we did, we did our fair share.

Yeah. So like, how do you— so let's talk with, you know, the audience. Maybe they're kind of new to fleet and they're trying to figure it out. I mean, obviously there's some fleets out there that are purely outsourced, right? But let's talk to that person who's got the in-house shop or shops, and, you know, whether it's because they're going through a technician shortage or they're trying to optimize, you know, what are some things you look for? How do you decide what should be outsourced, what shouldn't be outsourced? You know, let's start there. What are some, some pointers you might give to someone to try to figure that out?

One of the things that determined what I would send out, in my experience, is technician training. Do we have the training to tackle this task? Do we have the tooling to tackle this task? Those two immediately, I mean, if either one of those are no, it probably needs to go out. The other thing is, like you mentioned, labor shortage. How long do I want this piece of equipment to be down? Can the vendor do it quicker? It may not be cheaper, but can they do it quicker? Which, you know, what's the value? What am I trying to accomplish? Does it make sense for this to go out? So those are kind of some of the basic questions that I would ask myself to determine on sending equipment.

So that's good because there's a mix there. The, some of that strategy and some of it is like, you know, in-the-moment decision-making, right? Which is cool. So yeah, obviously, like you mentioned, the one that's off the top of my head is if I don't got trained techs for it, um, you know, or, you know, that's like a— that's a big one. You mentioned tooling, and I want to come back to tooling for a second, uh, you know, because tooling is interesting for me. Because if you just don't have that tool and it's a one-off thing, well then clearly you need to send it out, right? But then there's the question of, well, should I have the tooling, right? And that's where it gets a little bit tricky. Like, I've seen fleets spend, you know, a lot of money on, let's say, alignment machines, and it's like, really? You know, there's, there's an alignment specialist down the block. Why did you do that?

Yeah, how, how often do you— yeah, exactly. How Yeah, and that's a good point. Yeah, you know, if alignment machines, they're not cheap. We know, you know, the setup, everything that goes into it. If you're not doing them every day, especially on fleet, I mean, resale shops make sense, right? They're able to capture the ROI for that piece of equipment. Now fleet shop, maybe a different story. However, to your point, you know, if we're doing repetitive jobs, and the tool's, you know, $100, $200, are we gonna send this out rather than grabbing the tool to where we, you know, can do it in-house? That's, yeah, that's a great, a great point.

So, so if it boils down to something we talk a lot about on the show, which is cost analysis, right? You know, kind of figure, but I, I, you know, how does, how will someone get there? You know, how do you get to kind of figuring that out, I guess, is part of where my mind goes to. And I don't know about you, I mean, again, you lived this more than I did, but my mind goes straight to VMRS codes. You know, I'm pulling my work, like if I'm trying to think about planning for next year, I'm grabbing my VMRS codes and I'm looking at, this is how much work we did in each one of these categories. This is how much money we spent, hours we spent, including the outsource and the in-house. And I don't know about you, but that tells me a lot. I mean, it's so underutilized. People use it purely to track and enter. But I mean, there's all sorts of things you can learn from that.

No, that's exactly how— and, and in my mind, that's the only way to do it. Okay, so I mean, you know, what, what do I need to focus on? We talked about technician training. How do you know what to focus on, right? You know, let's pull the VMRS, see where we're spending our time. Okay, let's get them trained in that area. Same with tooling. You know, if we're spending a lot of time on, on a certain area, maybe it's, maybe it's disc brakes, air disc brakes at that, you know, maybe we need some tooling around that. Yeah, pulling, pulling your, your work history by VMRS to understand what we need to focus on in the coming years. Maybe, you know, EV is a big topic, maybe it's, you know, around batteries, maybe we need to send folks to understand high charge or low charge or You know, maybe, maybe there's training that needs to be done around that, and it's all driven off of VMware.

And see, here's the, here's the part that I love is the inverse of it. And this is what I felt so rarely see people do, but I encourage folks to consider it. You know, that same data is also, if you do choose to outsource it, well, now you know exactly how much of it you're going to outsource and you need to outsource, right? Uh, you know, and that's powerful information right now. You can go to the negotiating table with This is how much business I'm talking here, man. This is, this is how many jobs this is going to be. What's that going to cost me? You can price it, you can quote it, how frequently it's happening, you know, etc., etc., you know. And so it goes both ways. It tells you what you need to train, what tooling you need to buy, but it also tells you what kind of vendors I need, you know, and, and, and how much of it exactly I'm doing. So that VMRS, man, coding your work, man, it's so important to code your work properly, isn't it?

Yeah, for sure. And I love that, I love that point you made because we, so one of the things we used to do is we would have supervisors, you know, shop foremen come to us and say, hey, this needs to go out. It's a large job. We just can't get to it. You know, whatever the case might be. And it's like, well, hold on a second. What do you think about sending out these lower costing jobs? Get these off of our plate so we can do it in-house. Because that large job's being sent out is going to cost us twice as much sending out as it would to send these lower-paying jobs off and get those completed and tackle this one in-house to save money. So we— yeah, there's many ways to, to cut that up and look at it.

Cool. Yeah, that's— and that's it. And that's a great— and obviously all of this, one of the things that's been implicit in almost every comment you've made, which I love, is you're you're always thinking about downtime. You're always thinking about keeping that truck available. What is the fastest way— it costs and speed, right? What is the fastest way to get that truck back up and what's it going to cost us?

Exactly.

So that should always be part of this calculus somewhere, right? And going back to that alignment, that's why it may not make sense for the average fleet to go out and buy an alignment machine and get an alignment specialist, just because of the pace. You know, it's, it's hard to meet that economy of scale, that, that alignment shop, that's all they do, you know, uh, balance tires and alignments and that sort of a thing. And so you see that, like, what are some common things you see as what, you know, like— so first of all, let me take a step back. Like, I do think each fleet has its own set of circumstances, right? You mentioned the skills and the, you know, the tool, but, you know, geography. Like, I remember, remember the first time I did a gig with a shop in Alaska, you know, I was like, well, tell me, you know, just asking, going down my list, you know, such a smart guy. This is why people laugh at consultants, you know. Hey, yeah, so tell me what kind of work you outsource. And they, you know, they did one of these and they're like, do you have any effing clue where we are, man?

Who are we outsourcing to? Yeah, yeah, there's no one, there's no one that's gonna help me here. I'm by myself, I'm on this ship.

Exactly. Whereas, you know, when I ran my fleet in the heart of New York City We outsourced everything. It really didn't make sense. I could leverage different shops against each other. I had so many shops within 5 minutes of me that it didn't make sense, you know, to take up the, the, the value of the real estate was too important that it literally didn't make sense to have a shop. So, so each fleet is going to have its own set of circumstances. So let me start by kind of acknowledging that. With that in mind, sort of what are some general or rule of thumbs? What are the kinds of jobs that in your experience are ones that if you— if someone's doing it in-house, you might say to that fleet manager, all right, maybe take a peek at that one. That might be one that you want to explore a little further to go ahead and outsource, that, that you see maybe folks doing in-house that maybe they should be thinking about outsourcing. And then after you answer that, answer the reverse, like what are some things that you see maybe people— and it may not exist any, but you know, is there anything that people kind of tend to outsource that maybe they shouldn't, in your opinion?

I'm going to revert back because kind of the comment I made earlier, like, we're gonna, we're gonna look at right now in this situation today what makes sense, because today might not make sense tomorrow. It just depends on what's on our plate. So that's going to be number one. Like you said, speed and cost is going to be the first thing I look at. The, the things that really make sense to send out are specialty items. I mean, we're a maintenance shop. We should be able to maintain our equipment. If, if we're not doing that, we probably need to look at the training, right? So, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna say specialty, like the alignments. I'm not gonna buy alignment machine in a, in a fleet shop because I have no ROI on that besides the, the little bit I get from tire wear and etc. So, you know, the alignments are going to be sent out. Transmission repairs, I, I'm not going to have a trained technician necessarily on transmission repairs because we just don't see them often enough. So if I'm not seeing it repetitively all the time, I'm not going to spend the time and tooling to train and, and have that ability to do it in-house. Um, so just, just kind of specialty items really is, is what's probably going to go out the door for the most part. And then again, we're always reverting back to that time and cost. You know, if it's, if it's time sensitive and, and the shop's just not got the ability, let's get it to someone that can. And I love the comment you made about having so many vendors that you can kind of pin them against each other. Um, obviously we could drive the cost down when we can do that.

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Yeah, cost, service, right? Who can drop off, who can pick up and drop off for me instead of making me having to go run it? Yeah, that's a good call. Let me ask you a couple of ones that I've seen along my career that always kind of make me scratch my head, right? Like, I have very rarely seen, but I've come across occasion where I've seen people with in-house body shops, and they weren't in Alaska. Let's just say it that way. What do you think about that? I'm not sure. I'm, I'm permanently developing an opinion around that one. It's specialty to me because you're not doing accident repair all the time, and yet, hey, maybe if you got a, a really aggressive law enforcement department, maybe you are doing— yeah, yeah. What are your thoughts there?

Here's— I kind of— I'm on the line here, and you, you might— you said you're forming an opinion, so let's see, let's see if this drives you one way or another. So bodywork panel replacement or repair is one side of bodywork, right? And then you got this liability side, which is a paint booth with exhaust and ventilation. So how much are you doing can you justify the cost of that setup? If you can justify the cost of the, the setup of the, the ventilation and exhaust systems needed for a booth, I think you should absolutely do it in-house. You're gonna absolutely save money in the long run. If you can't justify the cost behind that because you're not doing quite enough of it, then I'm probably gonna lean toward outsource.

Okay, and but, you know, when we talk about the 4 pillars, right, one of the pillars is risk management, right? You know, and I know not every fleet manager out there is also the risk manager, but they work with their risk management departments, right? And so to your point about if you're doing enough of it, it's like, if you're doing enough of it— and this is why I struggle with this one, right— if you're doing enough of it, don't you have another problem that you need to solve first? So that you're not doing enough of it. You see where I'm going here?

Yeah, yeah, I do. Uh, we, you know, we always— we called that job security where I'm from, but we love our drivers.

Amen, brother. All right, all right, I won't get us in too much more, more, more trouble on that one. Here, here's another one. Okay, this is one that's probably a little more let's say widespread, is upfitting. You know, I'm, I'm surprised today. I mean, back in the day, I got, you know, you did a ton of upfitting in-house. And I also think there's a job security element to why so much upfitting is done, right? There's not enough work to do, you know, that sort of thing. But that's one that, with today's specialty, there's so many specialty outfitters out there, and more and more of them are certified by the OEM. I mean, if I, I would want an OEM-certified upfitter. I want, first off, I want to move the the liability piece that, you know, over to them, right? I don't want my OEM bitching to me— excuse the French— about, you know, that's not on the warranty anymore because somebody touched something. There's another element. I mean, and, and also, this is what these folks do, you know. You may think, oh, putting on a light bar is nothing, and it is nothing, but these folks spend all day, every day putting on light bars, you know, and, and wiring and fishing wires through here. They're the pros at it. Let, let them do it the same way you're the pro at fleet, you know.

The other side of that is the fact that they do spend all day doing that They know the little niches. They understand, hey, I can't run this wire through this channel, I have to run it this way. Or we, we've had issues with rubs at this spot. Or, you know, if we mount it here, the vibration, it comes loose and flies off, and then we got a whole other liability. So a big one on the trucking side is, is deer guards or brush guards, you know, the, you know, if they're not mounted properly, torqued properly, and you, you have something come off, That's, that's, that's a potential liability. And, and frankly, someone's getting hurt if that comes off on the highway. So yeah, to your point, yeah, to have a certified third party that can take that liability off of doing it in-house, that's, that's a huge, that's a huge factor these days.

Yeah, that's, that's the one that's got me scratching my head. I think there's probably a little bit more upfitting going on in most fleets. Not every fleet, but in most fleet There's more of it going on than should be if you just kind of took the industry as a whole. I think more of that should be getting outsourced. You know, some of the radio stuff I understand if there's law enforcement involved and all that jazz. You know, the area where you do see it is, is safe emergency vehicle inspections. I mean, that's almost entirely outsourced. And again, that's, that's a risk management decision at this point.

Absolutely.

So you, you can, you can, you kind of see that. All right. I want to kind of— we're staying on outsourcing here, but I want to kind of like turn the page and, and talk about a different piece of it. So now you've, you've, you've figured out what you need to outsource. You know what it is, at least strategically for the year. As you point out, you still need to make a tactical decision each and every time. We're with you. You should give yourself some parameters around how you're going to make that tactical decision. You mentioned some of them. The basics are cost and time and availability. But you also have this strategic plan, right? Okay, and these are the ones that I already know as soon as they walk through the door. I'm sending my alignment out. Um, so now you got to go do that, right? You got to go kind of figure out how am I going to make this work. Um, what are some best practices or some good practices and things that have worked well for you as far as, you know, creating a good and solid and strong out, you know, outsourcing program for whatever it is you're going to sublet?

First and foremost, and I'm a huge believer, and, and we've not talked about this, so I'm not sure where your mind is here, but Vendor relationships. I'm a firm believer in having a solid relationship with your vendors. And at that point, outsourcing should be very simple. You're going to have good communication around that, and there's a lot more that falls in line there. Having the vendor relationship is key for the beginning of what I'm outsourcing. Outside of that, How are you tracking it? What are you— what's from start, you know, once we make that decision that it's leaving my location, I gotta have a way to understand from cradle to grave, how am I tracking that?

Exactly.

Um, do you know, let's get a work order. We should already have a work order created. We should be making documentation on that work order. Understanding, okay, this is the decision made and why. We should have a status update of whether it's waiting to go to vendor, at the vendor, you know, waiting on estimates, whatever, whatever that is. We want to make sure we're tracking that. Without a doubt, if someone's never even heard of the asset we're discussing, they should be able to punch that into your FMIS system and understand exactly where it is and how it got there all the way through the process, right?

Yeah. So you— so, so yeah, so kind of steel-manning that back to you, you got to use your FMIS because that's what you're saying. You got to track it. You should have your statuses set up so that you can follow along essentially with whether it's your work order status or your asset status, or really it's both. It's out to dealers, you're maybe your asset or out of service, and then your work order status. You want to key in all that. I think one of the things most people do, I think I mentioned at the top, is you know, they see outsourced work is just outsourced work, and they just put in— they have like a generic work code for outsource, and they're not tracking the data about the nature of that work that's going. I, I think the effort of putting in the, you know, the labor and the parts is worth it in the long run.

Absolutely, absolutely.

And that's how you can also later on fast forward, and now you're evaluating, am I getting good deals? Am I getting— you know, you're going to want to look at that of that data. And then I would argue, but that you want to treat your vendor almost like you treat your tech. How many comebacks am I having? What's my turn time? Am I getting this thing, you know, am I getting 80% of this back within, you know, 24 hours and 90% within 4? The same way you would treat a tech, right? If you're getting a lot of comebacks, if you're getting a lot of, you know, what, what's going on there? If people fixate on, did I get the best price for labor and parts And I'm not saying that's not true, it's true. It's just, so what if they're— if you're having to bring it back 4 times?

Well, and I, I used to say it all the time, I, I pay for great service, right? I can get treated poorly anyway. I pay for great service, right?

So exactly, exactly. So what, so what are things people can do? Like you mentioned vendor relationship, right? And, and that, that doesn't happen overnight. And if you get the great service, it's going to lend itself to a great relationship. And you know, what do you say to someone who's new? Or worse, you know, like, I can't tell you how many times I've seen a fleet and it's like, well, who do you use? Well, we use this vendor. Why? Because we've always used that vendor. Well, because they're down the block. And you might have a great relationship with them and they may still not be best for you. So that's kind of difficult to navigate. You got to be careful of that. I mean, before we even get down the path of fraud and all that, because And that's a reality that maybe we can talk about another day. But in the end, you got to treat your vendor like your employee almost and hold them to the same standards, right? Essentially. Is that fair?

Yep.

Yeah, yeah. I think one of the best ways to do that is if you have enough volume of that. We're going back to that VMRS and understanding your volume. Now, you're not going to have enough volume on everything you do, but on those heavy volume ones, man, I would, I would suggest going out to bid.

You know, yeah, yeah, go out to bid. Definitely like you, like you mentioned before, having several folks that you can go to.

Very good call.

Good call.

Yes.

Yeah, not, not just, not just, hey, this guy's convenient or he's down the road, or no, let's, let's talk to several folks and, and really get to understand. Same way we bid equipment or anything else, it's no different. So go, go out and figure out who can do what for how much and see if you can better that process while you're having those discussions. My biggest thing with any vendor that I've ever had relationship with is honesty. We may not tell each other what we want to hear at any point, but let's— I'm going to give it to you straight so we know where we're at and you can get better.

And, and that's why I'm going to advocate— I know Steve Salsky was a big advocate for this, and I will tell you, it really helped me move things, move the needle, you know, years ago. Service level agreements. I think SLAs are important. Some people don't like them because they feel like it hurts, you know, it's, it's like, what do you call it, it's like a prenup, you know. Yeah, I've heard it compared to a prenup. Like, do you really want to sign a prenup before you get married? It feels like a bad omen, right? And, you know, I'll leave the marriage piece out, but as far as an SLA, the answer is yes, you do. And the reason I think it's important is it may feel mean or distrusting, but actually what it is is it creates clarity.

Yeah, it does. And, and here's the thing with the SLA, or prenup in that case, you, you don't need it until you do.

Yeah, bingo.

Right. So if we're, if we're, if we're doing our job if we're, if we're taking care of each other like we're supposed to, it'll never come up. So let's, let's, let's get an agreement here, and as long as you meet or exceed that, we'll never have to touch it.

That's a great point. That's a really great point. Yeah, I think it's important. I think it's fair, and, and it's fair both ways, by the way, because, you know, you can't expect great service from your vendor if you can't keep your commitments to your vendor, you know, especially the more, the more dependent you are on outsourcing, the more that, that the nature of the relationship becomes just about your performance as it does around theirs, right? But you got to be able to hold people's feet to the fire. And if you don't document it, you can't hold their feet to the fire. That's just the bottom line. And the minute you do that, like you said, usually that's all you need to not have to address it if it's a really great relationship and it's a great vendor. Um, but it also gives you the framework by which you're going to measure their performance.

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, if we've got, if we've got an agreement that, you know, 80% is going to be turned in 24 hours and we're, we're sitting around 50%, hey, what's going on? Okay, yeah, it's not personal. Yeah, you've run into some labor shortages, I get it. What are we, what are we looking at? I mean, this is a partnership at this point. Are you got, you got leads? You gotta get back on track, like We've got, we've got a fleet to run here. So yeah, there's— and again, that's, that's where the honesty comes in. We should be able to have those honest conversations without having escalated conversations.

It helps you to keep politics out. And I'll tell you what I mean. I've seen this on the corporate side with like, you know, charities and things like that. I see this a lot in education and higher education. Why do we, why do we use Jim Bob's service shop on, you know, University Lane. Well, Jim Bob's, you know, he donates to this and he's been a member of that council and he's a real great friend of the university. Yeah, but the SLA said 80% and he's got 50%, like you said, right? That, that helps you a lot to have those conversations, you know. Yeah. And, and they can be challenging and you don't want to be accusatory and And you don't want to be, but, um, this is the area where things get dicey for a lot of fleet managers. And those SLAs, they make it— they, they really are a great tool to help keep it clean.

Absolutely. Yeah, I couldn't agree with that more.

All right, man, what else you got? Any other tips or tricks that you would put out into the, to the world for our, you know, especially maybe our newer folks, newer to the industry, or folks who maybe feel like they got this, you know, giant gorilla that they got to tackle when it comes to outsourcing? Any other thoughts that come to mind that are tips or tricks for how to manage that program better?

No, I mean, I'll just recap kind of what we've discussed, you know, the decision-making, whether it's going to be outsourced or not. Specialty items, upfits, you know, liability items. From a company standpoint, liability, we don't want that liability on us, so we're going to want to get those outsourced. So once that decision's made, just really having a tool, you know, back in the day, I don't know if you can relate to this, but we used to be paper and pen, you know, paper would get lost. You wouldn't know where a piece of equipment was for a week until someone called and said, hey, I got an update. And it's like, man, I forgot that was even over there. So, you know, then you, then, you know, that gives you kind of time tracking on your downtime and stuff. So you know, get away from the pen and paper, the Excel sheets. Like, there's tools out there now, really good tools, whether it's us or someone else. There's FMIS out there that will give you the tracking ability. And just make sure you are tracking that cradle to grave. Again, the best way to look at it is if, if Mark was a new employee and he was asked, where is this piece of equipment at? You should be able to punch that thing in. See where it's at and everything that got it there. Uh, so every status change, every update, progress update, estimates, approvals, all the way through the process until that invoice is received, that equipment's back. You just want to make sure you really got a good tracking mechanism there.

Yeah, I'm trying to think of pieces we maybe didn't hit, and you know, I think this falls under the umbrella of treat them like your technicians, but You gotta have a QA/QC process, I would argue. You know, if you are not doing the running, then put on that work order 30 minutes for your own tech to give it a test drive or someone who's got the appropriate skills. Like in your case, you know, you would be qualified to do that test drive even if you weren't a mechanic on hand, right? And then I think the other one that, this one I do think you see commonly out there, but you probably wanna establish in that SLA cost thresholds. Than a guess, right? Like, you know, under this amount, just go do it because it's not worth the time to fight, and I trust you and I have that relationship. Over this amount, give me a call before you do it. And that's usually tied to some, you know, to some other number that you would again treat your in-house the same way. Hey, don't do that repair yet.

Yeah.

So yeah, I think that's probably the theme of it. SLAs. Um, so VMRS codes, know what it is you need and want to outsource strategically. Always make a tactical decision. Don't just rely on— like, those are guidelines, those aren't rules. Context over control, I think, was one of your points early on, right? Make a good decision for what the situation is right now.

Absolutely.

SLAs are important, and measure them the same way you'd measure your techs, you know. Expect the same kinds of KPIs, generally speaking. Turnaround— that— those are the big things I think I heard you say today. Um, You think that's about right? We'll call it— we'll call it a show.

Yeah.

So with that, thank you, my friend. Really appreciate having you on here. It was an absolute pleasure talking to you. I hope you enjoyed yourself.

Yeah, yeah, I did. I appreciate you having me jump on and hope to do it again soon.

Jake is a super, super extraordinaire Fleet Success Manager here at RTA. We love him. He's, he's, he's been awesome. And for any customer who's gotten to work with him, You know that already. So if you have any questions for us, for me, for Jake, please don't hesitate to email us at podcast@rtafleet.com. Or if you have suggestions for the show or other topics you want to hit or share some ideas that maybe you think we missed, uh, by all means, reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you. And with that, have a great day, everybody.

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