In theory, this makes sense. Still, it doesn’t mean that it’s automatically going to fall into place. In order to be on top of your fleet management, you need to approach each sub-aspect of it individually. You need to be able to work out how to provide several smaller optimal solutions. These can then accumulate into a fleet that is built on rock-solid foundations.
Overseeing Spending
The typical balancing act that you’re likely used to from spending time in all your other areas of business is going to come into play here as well. Your fleet is ultimately something very core to your operations. It’s something that will (ideally) bring in more money, but you need to invest in the fleet, to begin with, to see the kind of return that you’re looking for. This is where the balance comes into play. You don’t want to avoid spending where you need to, as this could come back to bite you, but you need to know how you can spend smartly and precisely to avoid going overboard.
With all that in mind, it can begin to feel like an incredibly tricky needle to thread. You might start by taking a closer look at some of the costs that are going to come up again and again when it comes to the fleet. Fuel is likely going to be quite close to the top of this list. After all, if you imagine one vehicle driving back and forth to various places across vast distances, that’s going to rack up the fuel costs enough, but when you have multiple vehicles doing the same? Quite quickly, you’re going to be looking for ways to minimize this spending, and your best bet might be to equip each of your drivers with a fuel card. The right fuel card can help your business to make spending as efficient as possible while also saving on purchases that use them, taking a prepared approach to a daily cost.
Driver Health
When your drivers are spending a lot of time sitting down in their vehicles, their health suddenly becomes something that might be quietly suffering. This might not even be something that many drivers notice, especially if this is a lifestyle that they feel suits them. However, it’s not just the long hours spent sitting down; it’s also the potential to catch the sun in the same parts of their body, it’s the lack of fresh air that they might be getting, and it’s the ways in which their diet might suffer due to long hours spent on the road. Underpinning each of these, and often because of these reasons, you also have the possibility that their mental health is going to be struggling as well.
The way in which this impacts your business is more varied than it first appears. On the face of it, it might just seem that this is an outcome that you want to avoid because of how it might mean that your drivers become less effective or maybe have to leave to find work elsewhere if they feel as though their health is taking too much of a beating. However, it’s also about employee happiness and how that can affect performance and morale. You want your employees to feel as though they’re being taken care of at work, and that might mean offering incentives that can help to counteract some of the negative aspects of the job. Doing so might be through employee benefits like a gym membership or private healthcare, but it could also include the option for CBT or other mental health outlets.
There is even the option here to market working with your brand as being different from the norm that people might expect from a driving job. Rather than trying to sweep the drawbacks of driving under the rug, you could draw attention to it and showcase how you offset those pitfalls with benefits.
Vehicle Maintenance
While the fuel that your team uses will likely be the most regular cost of your fleet, the largest could come with the vehicles themselves. There are many different ways that you can approach this cost. Some businesses might prefer the security of owning vehicles themselves, and that might be an option that’s more realistic once your brand is more established. However, in the meantime, it’s important to consider that renting could instead be the most viable route to take. Not only does this mean that you might ultimately be spending less and are able to access the vehicles sooner rather than later, but it also means that maintenance is often taken care of by the venue from which you’re renting them. It’s not a blanket situation of one option being better than another – there are pros and cons. It’s just about understanding how those scales fall for your business.
On the Same Page
Every vehicle that goes out into the world under your banner is representing your brand. This means two primary things. First, you want each of these vehicles and their drivers to reflect well on your business, meaning that a consistent pattern of how your services are implemented can help establish a consistent brand image. Secondly, from the overseer’s perspective, the execution of your business operations depends on all of these vehicles flowing to where they need to be like clockwork. That means getting a sense of which routes are fastest, safest and most reliable can help you avoid any situations where vehicles fall behind schedule because they gambled on a new route. Developing a network that enables all of your drivers to communicate while on the road can also help to make them aware of any unexpected or emerging problems.
