Episode 225: Are Certifications Still Worth It? The Truth About ASE, CAFM & Fleet Leadership

This is the Fleet Success Show dedicated to helping you and your fleet succeed using the experience of fleet professionals and Hall of Fame fleet legends.

The show that explores how the pillars of stakeholder satisfaction, intentional culture, resource efficiency, and risk management all combine to lead your fleet to success.

We're glad you're here. Now let's get into the show. Hey, welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show with your host, Josh Turley, joined today in studio by the one, the only Drew Morrow.

Good morning.

How are you?

Good.

Welcome in for the great Northeast.

Right? Oh goodness.

You're still freezing up there, is it like?

No, actually the snow is leaving fast and furious and that's what it's turning the rivers into as well.

Nice.

The melting is happening real fast.

Everything's just turning into mud right now and just, yeah.

Yeah.

It's in the spring thaw.

And I'm glad I'm on my way out of my visit because it looks like the end of the week it's gonna be really hot around here.

Insanely hot. We're supposed to hit 106 on Friday, 5 on Saturday, which is totally out of the normal. Like, we've never hit 100 degrees in March, and we're gonna have 4 of them in a row.

Yeah, just on the news this morning, they said it's the hottest March on record.

Yep, yep. And we didn't have a great February either. January was super mild. I'm kind of pissed that we didn't get our, like, famous Arizona winter. I feel a little bit shortchanged here.

The Paco was left in the closet this year. I mean, you didn't get a chance to put on the hoodie.

You barely even had a chance to throw those out. Yeah, I was, like, going to work, and I'm still wearing my polos. I was like, man, this doesn't feel right. Like, it just, you know, my poor clothes, they're not getting used.

I think maybe on an episode of Maybe it was a short or something though. I did see you with the stocking cap on once.

I don't know if I'd wear a cap. I definitely wear hats, but I think I probably had one where I was wearing my, uh, my Carhartt jacket.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, went back to Chicago earlier this year, like that was— that definitely warranted it. I think we were down in the teens, you know, low teens, right?

Yeah.

So for this Arizona kid, that's low.

That gets a little tough on you. Did you have to put on the wool socks and stuff too?

I'm never that crazy, although I probably should have, but Yeah, so today we, you know, going through life and obviously if we try to hire people, we're dealing with technician shortages, we're dealing with all kinds of number of weird things in the industry. Something that you noticed, and this is relevant like 'cause I just went through and got my CA-FM, passed it this week.

Congratulations. Thank you.

Super happy about that. But we were talking about this, you know, this idea about are certifications still worth it? And you had an observation which was, you know, about the ASE program. Yeah, yeah.

So share that for our listeners.

You noticed something about this.

Right. So ASE has been doing a great job promoting themselves recently on LinkedIn. I mean, it's getting real hot. They were talking about the shops being Blue Seal certified and all that type of stuff. And a bunch of fleet leaders were jumping on there talking about the ASE bandwagon and just how great of a program it is. But I just went through a huge hiring process, and I think more often than not you hear, oh, I don't have ASEs because the shop that I'm working at doesn't think it's important. And to me, ever since I was in vocational high school, they were promoting it at that level. When I went to UTI, they were promoting it at that level. I know I hired a kid out of a community college program and the instructor, so awesome, he had incentives on the kids. And when you graduated, if you were the first one to get all of your ASEs or a certain number, he gave away a lab scope. So there is still a lot of people promoting it. I know it's a little tough too if you got people that are working at a dealer or something like that because they're going through and getting all the factory certifications. But at that point, the factory certifications, if you move shops, they don't go along with you. The ASEs always stick with you. So why don't people value the ASE as much as you think that they should? Or really the industry should, because it is the greatest way to benchmark yourself against any other technician. And especially if you go to move jobs, You can talk about your skills all the time, but unless you have these specific certifications and right to go down the line even to the EVT certifications that I have, I mean, that's like product-specific stuff. And then you can say, hey, this is what I have compared to the guy that's next to me, and this is why I, um, my value is that much higher than this person.

Yeah. And so, I mean, you talk about like the dealer model too, and these guys as they're going through and they're like, you know, they're getting Ford, uh, what's their program called, Star, the Star, you know, and then you've got GM with theirs, Stellantis has theirs. But then even then, if you just stop with those, now you're kind of locked into the dealer model, right? And we all know like the dealer model is a grind. It's just an absolute— is there to work you down and make money off you, uh, you know, flat rate shops and all that. But if you're pigeonholed like that, it makes it very difficult to— if let's say you want to get in the government fleet, well now you're working on both Chevy and Ford and, you know, have— you probably have some Toyota in there too, right? And now all of a sudden, like, it might be foundationally helpful but you're lacking something as you're dealing with these other vehicles as well.

Yeah.

Whereas the ASE feels like it's more of that generalist, and it's meant for all of it.

Right. And I think when the technician talks about the shop not valuing your continuing education, the shops can use it to promote themselves as well. I mean, they always have stuff outside that says it's a Blue Seal.

For Blue Seal, yeah.

Right. Or they work with certain— like, they put the NAPA sign out front. It's that brand recognition to the consumer that says, hey, this Steve's Automotive has all of these, you know, brand recognized products that they're using, and then Joe's Automotive has nothing. Why don't I just go to Steve's? Because that's something that's familiar to me.

Yeah. But so you're hearing this though, is that like, hey, my— the shops aren't requiring it, and it doesn't sound like they're promoting it as much. Um, but maybe it's just ASE, but I think this is actually more widespread, you know, like they're not really promoting any of those certifications. ASC definitely seems like if you're going to promote one, that feels like the one to do, right? Um, unless you're a dealer, then you would obviously want to promote your own. But I— my theory on this as to like why they're not promoting it or leaning into it is it goes back to this technician shortage, right? And when you're trying to find people, you kind of lower the standard a little bit. You say, hey, we used to require it for everybody, and if you didn't have it, then we'd make you go through it. Uh, but now it's like we're just so desperate to get people in the door that you don't have it, okay, it's not that important. Like, let's lower the standard a little bit just so we can widen the pool and get more people in that are willing to do the work instead of having them be educated. The downside of this is that they're not doing the second piece, which is, hey, okay, so we're going to lower the bar, but then let's make sure that we're raising our labor force. And they're not investing in it after the fact. And I think that also ties back to labor shortage because you have guys that are willing to jump for a dollar, $2, $3 an hour, and you're gonna sit there and invest in them, help them get their ASC, and then they're gonna go leave for the next company because you can't afford to pay them.

I know you really like the 'we just need a warm butt in the seat' type of hiring approach. I know that's something that's really—

I'm real passionate about that. That's my favorite.

And that's tough too, right? Because I think when you're in the need for a technician, you know, similar process that I just went through, you're there doing things by yourself and you just want to say, I'm I'm just going to take, you know, the next guy that walks through the door. But then you think, now I've got to work with this person, my name or the company's name, or what's the risk level of somebody that just doesn't care about what they're doing? And usually these people that are hopping from job to job are the guy that doesn't really have, you know, great foundational skills, doesn't really have high moral standards. Could potentially be cutting corners. And is that somebody that you want to work on an automobile or anything in transportation? And my big thing that I would love to see too is, you know, you need to have a state-regulated electrician's license, plumbing license. I would love to see them do that to the automotive industry. And when I talked to somebody about that at one point, they were like, "Oh God, that's gonna shut everything down and it's gonna make auto repair so much more expensive." I'm like, We deserve that.

I mean, it's expensive already, right? Like, you're just shifting the cost from, say, the insurance carriers to now your technicians, right?

Right.

Consumers, in that case. But at the same time, that's a— it's a risk liability thing.

Yeah.

It's, you know, you're investing in your labor force to make sure that you're putting safe vehicles on the road with your logo on them. And in my mind, that feels like a worthwhile trade-off, right? As you're literally just shifting the cost from the expense of the liability to a preventative measure. Yeah.

And when you talk about labor rates and all that stuff, I just looked at an invoice the other day, $255 an hour from a dealer. I was like, oh my.

And you know how much they're paying that tech? Right. Not that.

No.

Right.

Right. I mean, they're paying them maybe— they're probably in a—

I would say dealers probably pay more than anybody else.

Yeah.

Right. Like we just heard from what, Jim over at Ford, Jim Farley, that they've got, what, 5,000 empty bays. So they've got the money. If they wanted to, they could go out and do it.

They definitely need to restructure that entire flat rate program. I've heard a bunch of different things that they're trying to do, flat rate as an incentive only with an hourly base pay and all kinds of stuff like that. And they need to do something because definitely the dealer has this bad stigmatism on them of nobody wants to work there, they're just going to work you to death, which they kind of do. But how are they going to keep people if, you know, they are really just grinding people right into the ground. And they're going to see very fast that, hey, we can't do this.

Well, and you'll see the shifting in the dealership model too, right, where you have the dealers that because they can't retain their techs, they're going to have longer turnaround times, longer lead times. And people just start going to the dealerships that do care about the technicians, that do staff well, you know, that are able to retain their techs that they've invested into. And do all the things that they're supposed to, they're gonna, like, the customers will end up driving that behavior as well. I'm seeing it here locally, right? Like, I'm done with my local Ford dealership and I'm willing to go drive an extra 20, 30 minutes to the next guy because I've just, I know that they take care of their customers over there. It's just, it's totally insane that I have to do that. And I'm actually like looking right now, Ford has a program, they'll come pick up your vehicle for you and all that. And I'm like, am I in the bubble for this other dealership, right? Can Sanderson take care of my stuff instead of Peoria? Just anything, I'm like, will it make it worth it?

Yeah. And service loses customers big time. So, well, congratulations on the CAFM thing, man. I have been grinding on that for— actually, this is my second go at it. In 2020, when I was unemployed for a bit, I was looking to kind of see, hey, how do I get myself recognized, stuff like that. And I saw the program and I was like, okay, great, I'm going to sign up for it. And then taking on a new fleet and kind of doing all that type of stuff, I lost vision on it for a while and I ended up actually having to buy the course again. So I'm in the second go around on it. I got 2 tests done, asset management and financial. You know, we just kind of were talking a little bit about it before. It's a grind. It's something that you really have to figure out how to keep yourself honest and keep pushing through it because it's not easy. And the material isn't like you're reading something about, oh, Ford Raptors or like you're watching a ball game. No, it's tough.

Well, and it's tough too because it's so disparate, right? There's so many different topics, and the way that they talk about things, like, this isn't written by like an actual educator, right? It's written by fleet people, um, so we don't necessarily have, you know, institutional design knowledge behind our backs to say, hey, this is how we should structure this in a way that makes sense. Um, it's not like a Lynchioni fable either, so you kind of can get into it. Um, and I think the same thing applies to like the ASC certifications and all this, like, it It takes a lot of motivation, a lot of desire to do it. You know, I started the program probably in 2018 and I have extended, right? It's a 3-year deal and then you get to extend. Well, I kept extending and extending and you know what, this final, this last time I got the notice that my access was going to end on March 16th. And so I said, okay, well, I'm not doing this anymore. Like I'm done. And so I sat down, this is a crazy piece. So like, don't hold yourself to this standard. I hadn't been studying at all. I think I had taken the test twice 2 years ago and failed at both times, but I was close. But I was just like, ah, all right, I'm gonna have to actually spend some time reading the material. And I sat down on a Saturday and I don't remember which one I even started with. Probably, I think I started with Information Management because that feels like, I'm like, if I can get one done, it should be that one, even though I failed it my first time.

Right.

It just tells you like, it's not the greatest. It's not easy to just, you know, walk in and do it. You have to, You said something to me about the CFM, and I think this is really smart for people to know. The CFM covers so much that you're not really using this as an educational opportunity. As much as I would love to and tell you that, hey, it's really well-written and you're going to learn a ton by going through the program, there's a lot of stuff in there that like Mark and I would agree is that, you know, you kind of have to unlearn when you get through it. You have to do it, learn what you need to learn to pass the test. but there's just some things in there that are just not the way I would do things, or, um, not how, like, in information management specifically, that's not how we would talk about it as a software company.

Interesting, right?

It's not the technology, like, it's not how we talk about things at tech, right? Um, and so it's just, it, there's some weird things like that. Well, then it just goes back to what you were saying, development, the same thing, right? Oh, I had so many thoughts, you know, like, I'm really passionate about leadership, right? And I was going through that and I was like, oh my gosh, I want to pull my hair out. Um, There's so many things that are just like, this is not, it's not helpful.

Right.

But we do it to pass the test. Right. And they're working through some things, right? There's definitely some quality things that we need to go through and fix. Some questions that aren't worded well, some of the study material, like not just typos, but like it's in the wrong segment. Like they copy and pasted it from financial management and you're like, right, that's not here. But you said the thing, which is you have to make it a priority.

Yes, 100%.

So I'm going to come back to my journey here. I totally segued. So I sat down, I says, okay, I'm gonna start with information management. I should be able to knock that one out. Studied for about 2 hours, took the test, passed it, and I'm like, all right, and what's the next one? Let's go maintenance management. Um, and then I just picked one off, one off, one off. I did 4 tests in the span of 24 hours and passed all those. So I was like super pumped. And then I took the 5th test and failed it. I was like, goddamn it. All right, so let's start this again. Uh, and then over the next 4 weeks, I took all 4 of the rest of the tests, right? So in about a month, I took the, the entire smorgasbord of it.

That's crazy.

The only way to do that though is like I literally had to dedicate time. My wife knew what was going on. She's like, okay, you gotta go do it. Um, so I would like lock myself in a room on a Saturday, and my goal was to try to get at least one test, if not two, done every weekend. And so you do that, like, you should actually be able to do it in about a month.

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.

And I know there's a ton of people in the industry that I've talked about CAFM and passed it in a short period of time, but there's 2 or 3 rock stars that are right here on site that have done it as well. Janelle did it in like no time at all. And I think Shawna did it in pretty much like no time, like just locked themselves in a room and said, hey, I'm getting this done.

It's the best way because you retain it.

Right.

And I don't know, it depends on how well you take tests too. What you, you know, you got to know yourself a little bit, but just taking that test because it's a multiple choice online test, um, you know, as you go through it, you have to figure out is like, what's your studying style and all that. Um, so I just found it really easy to go through the e-learning portion. And as soon as I was done, like I wasn't waiting and I wasn't, there's like science that you go through that says if you study in 20-hour or 20-minute increments, you retain more of it. But I wasn't studying for retention, I was studying for recall, right? And so I think that's the other piece of it too, which was, all right, well then the best way to do that is you blitzkrieg it. You just go hard for, say, 4 or 5 hours, as much as you can stand in a single setting, because your patience will get tested. Uh, and then I would take the test, and if I failed— um, this, this is probably the greatest change that NAFA made, and I will tell you, it's absolute game changer. Is the first time when I failed my test, they made you wait 30 days to take the second one. Shortening that to a 24-hour window, lifesaver. Right, yeah. Because immediately, like, I didn't have to go back and restudy for a month.

Yeah.

And then remember it. It was like, no, it's all still fairly fresh.

Right.

Let me just go find the sections that I missed that I didn't do well on, shore up on those, and then go retake it again 24 hours later.

To go back on the program in general and NAFSA's passion about their certification.

Yeah.

Just right what you said there. They definitely care about CA FM. They're definitely putting time and energy into it. The woman who runs the program is great. If you have some sort of issue with some of the material, I know Michael Vecchione, he had an issue with something the way it was written or something that happened on the test and he challenged it and she was like, oh yep, I'll refund you the cost of that test because there was an issue in there and we thought we fixed that, you know, before you took the test, but, and let him go back in there and take it.

So I think my goal would be having gone through it now, I would love to get access to the full question bank. And then honestly, with the, with AI and what it's doing for us, like me and Claude could go and just run hog on that thing and go figure out like, all right, are all these questions answered in the study material? Because I don't think they are. And are they worded in a way that actually makes sense? Because there's a bunch of them that it's just like, it's worded so weird, right? That you have to try and infer the meaning. It's not just trying to trick you, it's like, actually, I don't know that that they realize, you know, like, wait, what's the answer we're looking for here?

Right.

Because there's multiple answers that work. Yeah.

Yeah.

And there's some of those where I'm like, well, it actually is both of these, but which one's more of this? Yeah. Like, I had to think about that.

And it's crazy too. And that, that's what's so great about the NAFA community. And I think the professional, you know, group of people that I've built, everybody's talking about taking this test and everybody has their own tips and tricks. Some people love Quizlet. I love listening to that bootcamp. Like, I'll listen to it like an audiobook on the way back and forth.

If you're an audible person, that's way helpful. Yeah.

And what I've done recently is I get the study guide questions going, I get the study guide itself and I'm reading that. And then when I see something on the study guide questions, I play the bootcamp and I feel like the bootcamp and the study guide questions then lead me to exactly where the answer is in the reading material. And everybody has their own tips and tricks and things that they do, and none of them really match up. So you're like, man, I wish NAFHA would come up with some better way to help people learn the material.

Yeah.

And it's crazy. Last year at NAFHA, me and Mike and Brenton from Vegas and Pinellas County started this study group and we were just like, hey, we're going to do this study group thing. And Facundo heard and a couple other people. And now there's like 30 people on this like monthly call. Oh, well, and just last— actually, I think it was just Friday on the NFA board, somebody said, hey, can I join the study group? And on the side, I texted Mike and Brent, and I'm like, dude, we gotta figure out like somebody else to run this thing or whatever, because it gets to be a lot, right? It's almost like running your own webinar series or something like that. Like, you just run out of content. And when you're studying one module, like, you kind of get really invested into that one module, and you kind of got the blinders on. So I think we're going to talk to somebody at NFA when we're there and be like, okay, maybe this is something that you need to have a group of people at NFA kind of take over and we'll help. But there's a lot of people that are interested in the study group.

So I mean, isn't that interesting though? We think about, like, we were talking about the ASC first and then we're talking about the CAFM, and you guys have just this ad hoc study group of people that want to get the CAFM, right? And I bet you is that most of them, it's not like RTA where, you know, like, we have a bounty out for this, right? You go out and get it, there's a little, uh, you know, there's— we incentivize our team members to get these. Um, and most companies don't do that. I wish more did, right? But I think some do, but most don't. Whereas the ASC thing, it's kind of the same issue, which is how do you capture this motivation for, well, they didn't require it at my last job. Well, nobody requires you to get your CAFM to be a fleet manager. And yet you've got a study group with 30 people in it.

Yeah.

Right? I probably am not seeing that same thing in the ASC side. It all comes back to motivation, right? It's like, who's motivated to go out and get it on their own and do it for the right reasons, do it because they want to do it and not because they have to do it or because, you know, somebody's paying for it and it's like, hey, it's on their dime.

Yeah.

Right?

You know, you've talked about it from some of the leadership stuff before, you know, are you pushing the top on your professional bottle, right? Are you trying to push the ceiling a little bit just on your own, right? I mean, anybody can be that guy at the shop or fleet leader or whatever that just goes in and, you know, as a fleet leader, I need to run these 3 reports for leadership and that's all they're going to look for each and every week. I got to check people's time cards and I'm going to go home. Or you can be somebody who's getting a CAFM, somebody that's going out and getting these other certifications. Because in the end, CAFM, like you said, maybe doesn't 100% align with what the industry, you know, is trying to do. But at the same time, you're learning something and it's thought-provoking information that then is making you maybe fact-check it. And when you do the fact-checking, then you learn something else. And, you know, the one thing that I hate when people talk about— and not so much with CAFM, but definitely with the ASEs— oh, well, anybody can pass a test. Oh, well, if anybody can pass the test, why don't you go pass the test? You know, like, oh, you know, they call it like, you know, like the— what they call it, like the keyboard tough guy or something like that on like Facebook. And they say that about the ASEs too. They're like, oh, well, you know, any type of mechanic, right? Yeah, exactly. And it's like, well, you can benchmark yourself if you have the ASEs, the CAFM. If you don't have any of these things to benchmark yourself, what are you going to do all of a sudden, just bust your toolbox out on the side of the road or in somebody's office at an interview and be like, yeah, this is what I can do. It's like, no, like the certifications is the easy way to tell the story.

No, and it really does, you know, like you do learn things as you go through it just to get you to think about things differently, right? To elevate your professionalism, right? And no, you know, the CFM is not going to teach you how to become a great fleet manager. It'll help you understand areas that you need to improve in. And, you know, and ultimately it will help. There's some things in there that will drive like, hey, I need to go educate myself on this particular area, like in risk management. I really need to go shore up on insurance I need to understand liability exposures, right? I need to understand human resource law and where that comes into play. You know, the business development side, you know, understanding when you have standing to sue and who the suing parties are. Like, there's some really good stuff in there about lawyer. Was it as good as my business college class? No. Not even close. But if I was like, you know what, I need to understand more about my legal side of things, maybe I need to go spend some time and go, you know, GBE 205 at the community college, right? Yeah, general business legal class.

Yeah.

And you learn a lot of that stuff. Yeah. But then from an actual professor instead of, you know, CAFM curriculum.

Yeah. Yeah.

But I think there's a lot in there. There's definitely— it's— they are still worth it, right? So I think the answer to the question, I think you and I both know, is like the certifications themselves are still worth it, but there's work to be done as an industry to really push them, particularly on the ASC side. Yeah. But even in the CAFM side, to really continue pushing them and pushing people that go get your certification so you can have that standard language, uh, so you can say like, yes, I have done this work and I did put in the time. Because it is— it's not easy, right? If anything else, like when we talk about college degrees, are college degrees still worth it? No. We all—

we've had that conversation 100 times.

But if college costs, you know, let's say 80% less than what it does today, would it be worth it?

Absolutely, right?

Because the breadth of experience you get there is so invaluable, right? The amount of things you get exposed to in a professional setting, you know, in curriculum that's actually very well designed, right? There's a ton of stuff I learned in college that I still use today.

Yeah.

Um, now anybody who's talked to me would tell you, right, like, I, I sit here— do I have them on book? Uh, yes I do, right above me. Um, right, like, I have Lencioni's books up here.

Yeah.

And I bought this set for $250, and those $250 on that book set worth way more than my master's or any of my two bachelor's degrees that I have, right? I probably spent $120,000 on college, $250 for that box set. The value proposition's not even close, right? Um, but at the same time, I think, you know, the cost of the programs— it's what, $2,500, $2,800 to get into the CAFL?

Yeah, I think it's right around there.

I don't know what it is for ASE, but the cost and the value you get out of that is just— it's, it's on the right side, right?

Very cost effective. I want to say you can group take tests, so I want to say they're I don't know, no more than $50 per test. There is a registration fee plus the test fee, which I'm always like, come on, do you really have to pay both?

Like, right?

Like, come on now.

Yeah.

Could you just make it seem like it was a little less weird to me and just juice the price of the test a little bit more and not say that there's a registration fee? But cool thing about ASCs, especially when you're recertifying, there's two things. When you recertify, you can recertify a bunch of tests at once. But once you get over like 5 tests, 6, 7, and 8 don't cost you any more than the first 5. So you might as well sign up for all of them and then take them within a short period of time. ASC is doing a cool thing now too, where you can get a mobile subscription and they send you test questions like once a month. It's only after you pass the test the first time, so it's like a recertification thing, but you never have to go and sit down and do the actual test again. You can just go through the mobile app and answer the questions monthly. So that's pretty cool. But, um, going on the line of, you know, kind of things that you learn from CA FM, it is horrible to pass it the first time. So the cool thing about, uh, CA FM is to have the continuing education because you never— like, you to meet that requirement of continuing education for CA FM. So, you know, you're going to keep learning stuff because you don't ever want to lose the certification.

You never want to go back and retake those tests, right? You're like, oh my gosh, those were, you know, it was. And you think about the amount of time studying. Yeah, you don't want to do that. No, let's just, yeah, let's keep it up over the next 3 years.

I'll just sign up for the con ed, you know. And I think they're pretty good about the con ed. I don't think it's, you know, this heavy lift or whatever. And I think you could probably get a lot of stuff approved for Con Ed. It doesn't have to be NAFSA-specific content or something like that.

Yeah, any webinar you're attending, right? There's a lot of stuff that you can get certified. We even push that too. It's like, hey, if you attend this, like, that's an hour towards your Con Ed credits, right?

Yep.

You know, and so we can, we can authorize that. So that's pretty nice.

It's perfect.

Well, cool.

There we go. Hey, go get your certifications.

That's right, get them, push them, right? If you're in your shop and you're like, oh, I wonder why people aren't doing ASC, ask yourself, am I part of the problem, right? What do you need to do to emphasize getting your ASC? What would you need to do if If you're not doing it right, this might be a question. Email us at podcast@rtafleet.com. We'd love to hear from you. But if you're not doing it, ask yourself why. And if it's because you're afraid of investing in your team because they're, you know, you're going to lose them to the competitor down the street or something like that. I just always love the cartoon, right? And the CFO talks to the CEO and he's like, well, hey, what if you train them and they leave? And the question is, well, what if they don't and they stay? Right, right. Would you rather have an untrained labor force or a trained labor force that decides to go on to bigger and better opportunities? Personally, I sleep better at night knowing I'm in the latter camp.

Yeah, right.

If I've trained somebody and they go on to something better that I couldn't provide them, hey, then they were better off than when I found them, and we're better off than when they found us. That's my bar that I talk to everybody that comes through these doors. That's how I measure it.

And that's a learning experience for you too. You can reflect back on and say, hey, you know, why did this person leave, and how do I—

how do I get better so they don't ever want to?

Right. Yeah, that's awesome.

All right, well, that's going to do it for this time. Drew, thanks for coming in the studio.

Hey man, this is the second time I've been on the show, first time in the studio. So this is great. I love it.

Awesome. With that, we'll see you later. We hope you enjoyed the show.

If you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on LinkedIn, or leave a review. Want to learn more about our fleet management software Fleet 360? Check us out at rtafleet.com. If you want to learn more about having your fleet evaluated by our consulting team, Go to FleetConsulting.com.