Maximizing Fleet Efficiency: Insights from Industry Experts with Renee Millum

We know from all the data we collect about over half a million vehicles, a gas engine, the right time to get out is 100K.

There's about a 36% probability that something catastrophic is going to happen after that.

Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business.

Now, your host, the Home Service Millionaire, Tommy Mellow.

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Now, let's go back into the interview.

All right, guys, today's going to be a killer podcast.

I'm sitting here with Renee Milam,

and she's been helping me for the last decade just on how we handle our fleet here at A1 Garage Door Service.

She's an expert in sales business, fleet management, fleet administration.

She's based here in Goodyear

and

lots of vast knowledge.

She's spent the last 11 years learning and training in the commercial fleet industry,

knows everything there is to know about fleet strategy and management, fleet wellness, fleet goals and priorities and fleet administration.

And I thought I'd have you on because everybody always calls me and says, what do I do?

Do I buy new?

Do I buy used?

Do I go to kick charge?

Do I get it branded?

Do I depreciate it?

how How does the gas cards work like WEX

when do I sell it all these questions so I'm just going to start out first and foremost you want to tell the audience a little bit about you and how what you've been up to the last few years sure yeah thanks Tommy I appreciate you inviting me here to talk about leasing and fleet management definitely been a career move for me like you said over the last decade and I'm excited and I'm passionate about it so moved here with my family.

Again, actually, I was trained and worked for one of the largest fleet management companies here in Arizona.

It's where I met you, actually, to begin with.

And if anybody doesn't know it,

Tommy is quite the acrobat.

First time I met him, he did a full cartwheel on hole nine of the Scotsdale TPC course.

Oh, yeah.

So that's not surprising.

There's probably beer involved.

I don't think you can do that right now.

It looks like you got a bum foot.

But

if anybody hasn't seen it, it's quite the site.

But yeah, so I'm currently working in the commercial fleet industry, met you, partnered up with you, and wanted to, you know, hopefully share some benefits about, you know, why does it make sense to lease versus buy?

Yeah, in 2015, I think it was 2015, I met a guy named Daryl.

I knew him for a long time.

I knew him for, knew him for 10 years before that.

But he's like, why do you buy all these used pieces of crap?

Have you ever heard about depreciation?

Do you know what it's like?

for your team to have a broken down truck and do you understand the perception of the clients on the road that see those used pieces of crap?

And he told me straight up like it is.

He told me that and he told me buy a building.

I've made more buying and selling buildings as I grew than I made entirely in the garage door business.

So those two pieces of advice, I always thought, man, I'm getting a better deal.

My dad's a mechanic.

I've got hoists.

I could just fix these things, take care of them, and I'm saving a bunch of money.

Yeah, and that comes up a lot.

I still talk to

clients, especially in the home service industry every day, right?

They're like, why would I pay all that interest?

Interest rates are so high.

Interest rates are only about 5% of your total cost of ownership when it comes to a vehicle.

And if you do have the cash flow and say, I can afford it, why wouldn't you put that somewhere else in the business to help you make more money?

Or if you don't need it in the business, why wouldn't you put it into a money market?

Putting cash into a depreciating

asset makes absolutely no good business sense.

Yes, you can depreciate it all up front, but once that depreciation is gone, what do you have?

At least if you're paying interest, that's a tax deduction.

It's a tax write-off anyway.

And the thing that I learned about fleets is they got kind of a shelf life.

Usually there's an automotive warranty on everything, the tranny and the engine, and there's a good time to turn it back in to you to get maximum amount of money when you turn it in versus running it till it falls apart.

Can you talk a little bit about like fleet strategy?

Yeah.

What are some of the bigger clients you've worked with?

Some of the bigger clients I work with,

Gettle.

I can't think of any off the top of my head.

There's like massive ones that aren't even in the home service space, but

does anybody, does Amazon buy their own trucks?

Absolutely not.

No, no.

None of these companies do.

The Red Cross, UPS, FedEx, like they all lease.

Absolutely.

498 companies out of the 500 fortune companies lease.

498 out of the top 500.

That's a fact.

Yep.

I mean, my CFO is a wizard of doing this to where it would never make sense to buy a vehicle.

Absolutely.

Like I said, once you buy it and you depreciate it, it's done.

At least when you lease it, you can still use your 179 tax advantage because it qualifies.

You're using it 50% for business.

You're owning it like it's your own.

You're maintenancing it.

You're insurancing it.

And then there's a buyout at the end of this lease.

This is an open-ended equity lease.

We're not talking about your typical retail lease where you're going to pay a little bit of money.

You're going to turn it at the end.

You're going to get dinged for mileage and wear and tear.

This type of lease was made for commercial businesses because home service business can put on lots of mileage.

You never know if you're going to do 15 or 30,000 miles a year, right?

And let me ask you, so

usually is it like five bucks you own it at the end of five years?

Is that like it's like you get through the five-year lease and it's like a super low bio?

It's flexible.

We can do it down to a dollar.

Or typically we like to do it to 10 to 15%.

Okay.

Because that way you're still going to be in an equity position after 12 months, right?

You don't want to be upside down in this vehicle, especially if we have to sell them at 36 months or 24 months or 48, whatever it may be.

So we're going to make that residual very small.

And then that way you're not paying interest on that portion of the vehicle that you're not utilizing anyway.

I love that.

You know, I think.

I fell in love with the Dodges.

They've got a great warranty.

They've been very dependable.

I went down to Cisalantis in Mexico, and then I went and saw UtiloMaster.

And everybody's kind of like, how do we get your type of deal?

That's why we started JumpSpark.

But what I love about your programs is they don't just pay for the vehicle.

You'll outfit the whole vehicle and you'll wrap it.

And that's all included.

So I'm not out the 6,000 to wrap it and then the 10,000 to outfit it.

It's all rolled up into one.

How does that work?

Yeah, it's all encompassing.

So another thing, you know, people say, oh, I'm just going to continue to finance it because my payment's less.

Well, truly, are you comparing apples to apples?

You're not going to, the dealership is not going to pay for your wrap.

If you're full wrapping that, that's anywhere to $4,000 to $5,000.

They may, they may not include the outfit that you need in there, right?

So, with this program, it's turnkey.

We assource the vehicle, we dial in the outfit just the way whatever that department is, it may be service, it may be install, and then we take it logistically to the graphics person, get it wrapped, deliver it turnkey, and we include that all-encompassed in the lease.

So, if you qualify for no money down, you're not paying out of pocket for the outfit or maybe 10% down to the dealership or whatever it may be to the graphics dealer.

And when is the best time,

like a FedEx Amazon gettle, when is the best time to turn that in?

Is it right before it ends on the 100,000 miles or is it a time thing or both?

It's both, Tommy.

I mean, the time to get out of vehicle is really a moving target, to be honest.

You know, during COVID, for example, if you could get out of your vehicle sooner and if you could replace it, it was a good thing because used vehicles were more expensive than new vehicles, right?

But it all depends on the appreciation.

You know, what is a vehicle worth at that point in time of that mileage?

We know from all the data we collected about over half a million vehicles, a gas engine, the right time to get out is 100K.

Before that, even better because you're going to make more money.

Dealerships will pay more money for a vehicle that's got less than 100K.

But there's also, after that 100K mark, there's about a 36% probability that something catastrophic is going to happen after that on a gas engine, okay?

Right.

So that's where you want to be.

You really want to start looking at getting out at around 80K after warranty's up and before it gets that 100K mark.

You know what we started doing too is it used to bug the heck out of me because we take openers and we shove them in the back and the van started to get all dented up.

And so now we run plastic, like that covering, even, and I never did it to the back of them till about five years ago.

Now we do plastic sheets.

It's pretty thick.

It's about a quarter of an inch.

And now there's no dents.

So you're turning in this vehicle that's like flawless.

Once you pull the wrap off, it looks like it's new almost.

Is that what most companies are doing now?

A lot of them are going.

Yeah, absolutely.

They're requesting to have that put in there.

And lots of times, too, I'm finding that we can, well, if you factory order something, Tommy, we can order it just the way you need it, right?

That's where you're going to get your best pricing.

It's about being proactive.

And that takes time, right?

Most people just can't step into it because they've been replacing and buying vehicles reactively.

I have a new tech starting or right or had an accident.

So if you can get into sitting down, which is what part of JumpSpark is all about, is sitting down and being proactive, looking at your vehicles, kind of anticipating what that mileage is going to be in the next three to four months so we can factory order the vehicle.

We can get those wall panels in there.

We're going to pay the less for the partition, right?

We're going to pay less money overall for this vehicle.

Get it upfitted and delivered and turnkey ready to go to save yourself some money too.

So is that what it is about three to four months proactively most of the time?

Depending on the manufacturer,

the times have gotten a lot better now that COVID's kind of over.

So Ram is definitely probably the quickest three to four months.

Ford's a little bit longer than that.

Chevy is probably right around the same time frame.

You know, what we do is at every market other than Phoenix, we carry an extra vehicle.

I think because me not having a guy in the field with capacity planning doesn't make any sense.

I think there's certain markets we have a couple extra.

And I think it's important to do that.

So time three to four months.

And tell me, talk, what if like to do business with my local dealer?

Isn't there a process that you guys could actually negotiate better through?

Yeah, absolutely.

I don't know if you've ever, when the last time you've actually went to the dealership and tried to purchase a vehicle, but I'm sure everybody has been through that process.

And it's no fun, right?

You get there, you get there, you negotiate, you go back and forth.

And before you know it, you've been there three or four hours and you still don't have a vehicle.

We handled that process for you, right?

And it is my fiduciary duty to kind of play dealerships against each other.

It's my job to get you the best price.

I have dealerships in place to do that, and I will go to them first.

And if I have to, like I have clients say, hey, I have a great relationship with so-and-so.

I've been working with them for 10 years.

Can you really do business with them?

I'll be like, absolutely.

Are you willing to pay more for your vehicle, though, for me to do business with them?

Yeah.

So you're going to go out there, even if you're used to buying locally.

Let's say I need a vehicle in two weeks, you're able to source it through a local dealer at a better price.

At a a better price.

Yep.

What have you learned?

You're a big piece of enterprise.

You understand the fleet game.

You're the best of the best.

What are some of the common mistakes you see?

People buying used vehicles, like you said, right?

Hey, they're going to save a little bit on the front end, but they're not going to save it on the back end.

Right.

So they think by buying that used vehicle, they're going to pay less.

They're going to have a more affordable payment.

But in actuality, they don't know what that vehicle has gone through through that first year or two that before they even bought it.

At least, right?

At least if you bought something new, you know, you have that warranty.

You know, you're the only one that's been driving it.

So that's probably one of the biggest mistakes.

And then two, just holding on to their vehicles until they need new transmission.

And then they go in to find out that the transmission may be less than a new vehicle, but the vehicle is so old.

It's going to have more issues.

Radiators.

Exactly.

It doesn't make financial sense to replace that transmission.

Now, it's been a while since I really dug dug into the fleet department, but I think we've got a program that covers almost everything that we pay a little extra for.

The oil changes and if it needs a radiator.

I'm not sure exactly.

I think we pay a little, like it's in like an insurance plan or something, or it handles the maintenance.

Well, what you know, A1 is with a different fleet management provider, but with JumpSpark, we have an overall discount program.

And how that works, it is a monthly fee.

It's a little bit.

It's like $10 per vehicle, depending on the size of your fleet.

But it allows you to use any of our nationwide vendors.

So you could save 20 to 30% as the goal overall.

So you get discounted on preventative maintenance.

You get ASC-certified technicians that are reviewing non-preventative maintenance, right?

Because they're incentivized to save you money.

They make more if they can save you money on labor and parts, right?

And they're, you know, if you have a mechanic that goes in or a driver that goes in and it's too soon, the service isn't going to get done.

If a vehicle goes in and we negotiate a better price for you, but we still don't think it's going to help improve the vehicle because it's so old, we're going to let you know that too.

Right.

So, you know, when we bought the Don's Garage Doors in Denver, there was about 15 guys.

And the only question they asked, literally, was, are you going to give us new trucks?

They were so used to getting broke down, getting 500 bucks for the week.

The morale was horrible.

All they cared about, do we get a new vehicle?

And there's like pride of ownership when they, that's their, that's their office.

They drive around that.

That's how your company's getting showed.

Like when we started showing up in brand new vehicles, the ticket average doubled.

People were like, we know you're not the cheapest.

You're the best.

We don't want this to break again.

Just do whatever it takes to fix this story the right way.

You guys are the professionals.

And then you get like the old truck.

I see a lot of the guys in like the tile business, and they're especially in Arizona, you know what I mean?

And they just, they put everything on the side.

Like they do all the stuff they do.

You don't really know.

And it's like, I've used those guys.

Everybody that shows up to our house now has a new truck.

Like, I want it done right.

I want the best warranty.

I want them to be safe for all my family.

And I think it's just

not a status thing, but just like, oh, they're professional.

It's about brand image.

Absolutely.

Like,

I don't know how many times you walk coming, you know, your parents told you, or my parents told me, you know, first impressions count.

Yeah.

You walk into an interview.

It's the same thing.

When you show up with your, your truck at a customer's house, it's first impressions, right?

And something else you were talking about with the drivers.

I get texts almost every other day from new clients that have come on board and said, oh my gosh, you should see the grin on my technician's face when they got their new vehicle.

You should see the smile.

Oh my gosh, when I, he's so excited.

They're so excited.

They're so happy.

You know, and I'll hear it from owners that are like, oh, it doesn't matter what.

type of vehicle they drive.

They don't care about the vehicle.

They're just going to beat it up.

They don't care.

They don't care because you gave them a piece of crap in the first place, right?

So give them the benefit of the doubt.

If you're hiring the right people, you give them something new, they're going to treat it respectfully because they're going to feel proud, right?

Driving around in it.

It's like when you go to a nice house, like a pristine house, like if I get water on the sink, like I'm cleaning it up versus like being in a nasty baseball game where you're just like, if you missed it.

You drop a cup or no big deal.

Exactly.

It's 100% true.

That's a good analogy.

Yeah.

So what KPIs should I be paying attention to with the fleet?

I mean, obviously there's oil changes.

I think we've got stuff plugged into the OB2 sensor that alerts us about everything.

But what are the technologies?

What are like KPIs that you look at in a fleet?

Like operating expenses are the two main key things, honestly, right?

That's your two, the biggest part of total cost of ownership.

And then just like I said, depreciation.

When's the right time to get out of there?

There's the three main things that are going to cost you the most.

And then also downtime.

A lot of people don't know how to track downtime.

Yeah.

Right.

A lot of people say, oh, I have a spare.

I don't have any downtime.

But you do.

You still have downtime.

You have downtime when the vehicle goes in for just preventative maintenance.

So that is definitely a KPI that's definitely not tracked by most companies out there because it's very hard to track.

Is AI changing the game at all, shaping how fleet's maintained?

Is there anything with AI?

I mean, there is some stuff coming up.

Definitely, I need to find out more information on that, but you're going to be seeing a lot more new stuff in the future when it comes to AI and how that helps.

It's going to help, you know, point out KPIs for your fleet.

And when to like turn it in, what makes it

like, especially with that, like we've got the camera systems, it's a dual camera.

It listens.

We run to make sure if a guy looks down, looks away, rolls through a stop sign, is speeding.

We know about it.

And those are like,

unfortunately, we've had a lot of accidents.

We've had a couple trucks flip.

We've had, like, we know every time a guy looks at his phone.

And those are learning opportunities.

And we're very strict on that.

And I think, man, you get in a couple bad accidents.

It could put a small business out of business.

Absolutely.

Your insurance rates will crush you.

Yep, your loss runs

will make that very difficult.

No, so having cameras, if you, yeah, absolutely.

Front facing, back facing, if someone knows they're being watched and they

want to stay in their position.

It definitely makes a big difference.

I even had a company who called and told me that they didn't have the camera, but with the GPS, they had a call from someone that said, hey, a tool fell out of the back of of your truck.

I was driving behind it, right?

And it, you know, damaged my vehicle.

They were able to pull that up and find out that that vehicle wasn't anywhere in that vicinity on that day and time.

So

whether you have a camera or not, having a GPS can make a huge amount of difference, can save you on your insurance and can keep you out of hot water in situations like that.

I like, too, the OB2 sensor tells you the codes, and you know the codes, like you know exactly what's going on.

Like right away, it pops up.

This is what it was an air filter issue or it's a major issue, right?

I think that's a big advantage to understand how long the car is going to be out.

I had a guy reach out the other day.

He's like, How do you track your gas?

He's like, I think my guys are filling up their wife's tanks.

I know there's a there's wax and there's other things.

Can you explain how that works?

Sir, so you can get a WEX card, but the only way for you can really tell if you know a true theft is you have to use it in conjunction with a GPS tracker of some sort.

It can be Geotab, it can be one of the Sam Sera, something out there, but they they work in conjunction.

So yeah, so if like my truck, I've got the TRX.

It's actually a vehicle in the fleet because I got a company car and I get the special card and then I got to put in the odometer reading every time.

Right.

And so it's tracking the miles, the gas per mile against the odometer reading.

Yeah, even if you just have a card like that and you don't have GPS, if the mileage is input incorrectly, you're going to get a report that's alerting you to that, right?

So it could be the fact that, yeah, they were at, say, 60,000 miles, and all of a sudden they're filling up something at 30,000 miles.

Is it their really vehicle?

Is it somebody else's vehicle?

You don't know for sure, but you would get alerts, you know, giving you a heads up regarding that.

Hey, guys, hope you're enjoying today's episode.

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All right, back to the episode.

I probably get this question, what should I do with my vehicles?

They don't want to go to a company like Kick Charge.

Their vehicles look like crap.

They're driving billboards, is what they are.

And one of my buddies, Cameron Harold's like, if you start parking on the two days off in the right areas, like the right Costco's, they're well lit up at night.

He's like, that literally grew 800 got junk to over a thousand locations.

All we, we call it parketing.

They park at the right spots, but it's got to be a beautiful.

It's not just stencils and like just, we do garage doors.

It's like, it's a billboard and it's got to look beautiful and easy to clean.

And memorable.

Memorable.

Like, I don't have BBB and all my vendors and Yelp.

Well, it's just simply A1 garage door service.

And it's just, it's memorable in the colors, you know.

And you're on there.

You're memorable.

My mask.

Yeah, my

whatever it's called.

Yeah.

No, I mean, yeah,

a good rebranding can do amazing things for

the business and for advertising.

So if you guys are thinking about it, considering it, don't hold back.

It's another one of those things that maybe you're thinking too much at this point in time but it'll it'll pay back dividends in the end so you know one thing we looked into and i think this is ending in a year but electric vehicles had a huge opportunity to get uh

credits and all kinds of stuff what what are your thoughts on electric vehicle fleets credits are still out there don't get me wrong um it's just like if the government still has to do or just the states still have to do more when it comes to infrastructure everybody's scared you know manufacturers are putting electric vehicles out there and they're saying oh they're going to go this far or they're capable of this.

But what hasn't been taken into account for is weather, payloads, all that kind of stuff.

So,

you know, companies are scared, right?

They don't want to send their driver out and have them get stuck somewhere and don't have a charge or maybe they've run out of.

you know, charge before they anticipate it happening and they're in the middle of their, whatever they're doing, right?

Service or install.

So I think that's the biggest thing.

I think once we figure out that infrastructure problem, we get better.

The vehicles get better when it comes to distance and charging.

Because here in Arizona, heat does affect it, but not as bad as, let's say, cold weather.

Right.

Like cold weather below 30 degrees temperatures will really zap your distance on a vehicle.

How many miles does a typical bigger van get electric vehicle?

Well, I guess empty?

170?

170.

That's empty, right?

How many vans are driving empty out there?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I've always thought we could do it.

We'd get all these credits and we just, but then I'm like, man, if you run out of charge and that truck's down, I guess we're not there yet, but in the next few years, we might be there.

Absolutely.

What else are you thinking the people should know?

So we talked about gas cards, maintenance, making sure, like.

The Sam Sarah and these things, they tell you when the truck needs an oil change.

If you keep that stuff going,

like when you're leasing it, do you get penalized for not maintaining it?

Like if the oil, if you don't get it done in time, you don't get penalized because it's technically still your vehicle.

So if something breaks down because you've been neglectful, it's your responsibility.

Well, like if a tranny goes and it's got a hundred thousand mile hard part warranty.

I remember I had a truck that had way too many miles before the oil changes and we had to go to war.

With you guys, this was years and years ago.

Yeah.

But it had a tranny and they're like, this is your fault.

Like,

or the oil might have been an engine, but it was like, it was bad because it didn't have enough oil in it.

So how do you find the right fleet manager?

Well, that's a difficult question.

You probably would know better than I do.

You've been through, right?

Somebody with experience that understands vehicles and just understands how to care for them, I guess.

Absolutely.

What haven't I asked you yet?

Well, what I wanted to talk about, maybe a little bit more in depth about is, like I said, leasing is very similar to a finance, but what a lot of people don't realize is there's so many more financial benefits to doing it, right?

A lot of people say, oh, you know what?

I'm just going to stay at the dealership.

It's the same.

It's the finance, right?

I got a line of credit.

Like, what's wrong with the way I'm doing it this way?

Well, instead of financing it in almost every single state, if you lease a vehicle, there's no sales tax.

There's a monthly sales tax.

So you don't pay interest on that.

If you roll it into the finance, you're paying interest on it or you're paying out of pocket for it.

And here in Arizona, there's even an additional benefit that some people are aware of and some people are not.

And maybe you know, maybe you don't, but I don't think I do.

Vehicle that's 12,000 gross vehicle weight or more, you don't have to pay any sales tax on it.

If you lease it.

Is it 12,000?

12,000.

12,000 pounds.

12,000 GVW.

Yeah.

Okay.

So if you lease a vehicle, like even

so it's usually like a 350 or up.

Sometimes the 250s, the half tons even can qualify for it.

But if it's registered properly that way, you save all of that sales tax.

You don't even have to pay a monthly sales tax.

I heard some of the smartest people in the world, they buy

Breeze got one, the Mercedes,

because they weigh so much and it can be depreciated.

Like people are like, that's the only vehicle you should buy or lease because you got to be over £6,000 to get the benefits, right?

For it's at $179, yes.

For the $179.

But this is just purely sales tax benefits.

So right now, if you go out and buy a vehicle, anybody goes out and buys a vehicle, it doesn't matter how much it weighs.

If you're not leasing it, you're paying whatever, what is it, 8.1, 8.2, Press Cut, 9.3% sales tax on a $50,000 vehicle.

That's a lot of money.

That's a lot of money.

When you lease it, you don't have to pay that here in Arizona at all.

But across the U.S., you still have to, you just pay a small monthly.

You pay that percentage of sales tax on the monthly lease payment.

I love it.

What do you, so people are probably wondering, what's my next steps?

You know, how do I learn how to do this stuff?

Because there's certain stuff that go into the accounting side of it.

And small businesses, sometimes it's hard to realize those things.

Do they just reach out to you, tell them,

I need five vehicles in the next year, and you'd work with them and just help them understand the tax benefits?

Yeah, absolutely.

Initially, I set up a 30-minute discovery meeting with whoever it may be, whether you have two vehicles or 500 vehicles, right, to really learn out, learn about, you know, what is your next goal for the 12 months?

What are your heartburns, right?

And then just explain, you know, if you're, some people are familiar with leasing, some are not, right?

We'll talk about leasing in depth because there's, like I said, more than just sales tax benefits, more than just lower payments, more than just no credit reporting.

There you go.

I just had a meeting with a guy today.

He's got eight vehicles on his personal credit.

For his business, for his business.

So right now, now he wants to go out and he wants to get a nicer house.

And they're saying, well,

you have $500,000 worth of debt risk on your

that is something I never even thought about.

So by leasing, the line of credit stays with the leasing company.

They're the leasore.

You become the leaseee.

Do I need like two years of business credit?

You don't need two years of business credit, right?

So we help everybody that is a startup, you know, over three years.

It's just, it's a little bit more difficult.

Underwriting is going to want more paperwork if it's less than two years because that three-year mark is kind of the aha where you know what?

They've made it three years, they've proven that they can be successful in this business.

So the bank's a little bit more lenient, right?

But if you come in under two years, more than likely, there is going to be, you know, they're going to want some money down.

And that's just to keep you in that equitable position.

Because if something happens in another year and you need to sell all your vehicles,

last thing you want to do is have to hand us a check over once we sell those vehicles.

If you sell us, you owe us more money.

So

I remember I had this idea just because I've had hundreds and hundreds of people.

I'm like, if I I could use A1's buying power, and this was hard because we had to get so many people together to make this opportunity happen, which we call JumpSpark.

Where do they reach out to you

to jump on a phone call?

They can simply go on the jumpspark.com website.

There's a place where they can fill out a form and it comes directly to me.

And then I'll send you out my calendar and you can schedule something that works for you and I both.

How many clients do you think, if they reached out to you, that you could actually add value, like save them money and explain things?

I mean, is there really anybody out there that shouldn't be reaching out?

The only toughest ones, I mean, everybody should reach out.

Absolutely.

I would say I'd help 99% of the people out there that reach out to me.

There's a small 1% that, you know what, they're so brand new and they didn't realize what the payment was going to be on a van with $50,000 van with $8,000.

$1,500.

$1,500.

less than that less than that but still they weren't they weren't prepared right so

well it makes a lot of sense it frees up cash flow a lot of people are burying money great money that they could use on marketing hiring innovation technology and they're tying it up into their fleet right this is like the first thing i learned with the great cfo is like keep the cash flow use the money for growth uh what else am i leaving out The only other thing I really kind of wanted to mention is what makes JumpSpark different than other fleet management companies, right?

So first of all, we specialize in the home service home improvement industry, right?

There's tons of different industries out there.

There's municipalities, right?

There's nonprofits, right?

We want to focus on and hone our expertise to home service.

We feel that we can really benefit them the most because of how they utilize their vehicles.

So and two, you know, what I did prior to, you know,

getting a career in fleet, I spent, I got a degree in hospitality management.

I've spent 20 plus years in customer service.

And so I can tell you what, if you decide to become a client with us, a partner, your number goes in my phone.

If you call me and if I'm not in a meeting, I answer your call.

If you text me at 6 a.m.

or 10 p.m.,

I'm getting you an answer, right?

If I'm keeping you there through the entire process.

From sourcing to the time it gets delivered to your door, you know what's going on, even though you don't have to do it.

You have an idea.

So you can prepare with your team.

So I just want to say, I guess what makes us different is the fact that we, like I said, we're focusing in.

Our expertise is for our home service industry.

Our customer service is number one.

I just think we can save people a ton of money.

I really believe that people, my cousin just called me.

I think you're working with Michael.

Mike, yeah.

And I'm like, dude, you got to go through this.

I'm going to save you a bunch of money.

Like, I believe in this because people ask me all the time.

And they don't understand their credit card.

They don't understand depreciation.

They don't understand like just morale.

There's so many things of how you look

we get a better buy because of our fleet buying power we're gonna get them the best buy we're gonna save them the upfront sales tax sales tax on graphics sales tax on the upfit they don't have to pay any sales tax on that right we are gonna save them a ton of money i spent four years perfecting my upfit to make sure that the guys are organized it's easy to do inventory and they have everything when they show up to the home and it's efficient right yeah and it's quick you can look at it there's the right bins there's the tubes up top We got five tubes for struts

and torsion tubes and angle iron.

It's just super dialed in.

And I think if people understood the organization, how you function, the only time you're making money is at a customer's house.

So having all the stuff staying organized, you know, many of my guys take the client to the trucks and they look at them and they go, we're going to do business with you.

Like we've never seen a truck this organized.

And that's their personal office.

So I just think people,

it doesn't hurt.

You don't charge for a consultation.

Absolutely not.

So they call you up.

They go on jump spark, j-u-m-p-s-p-a-r-k dot com.

You'll talk to them.

You'll see where they're at.

I think it does take, like reach out right away because it does take a few months.

So you got to have a plan.

And I, you know, it's going, we're going into budget season.

And what we do is look at how many techs do we need to hire.

Sure.

And we've got a pretty big fleet.

So there's certain times we run the trucks a little longer because we need to hire a bunch.

So we've got to take those new ones.

And there's certain times we want, I'd love to turn them in at the perfect time.

It's just for a company that's growing like ours 30% a year, it's hard because there's certain, look, people have accidents, people quit, people have weddings.

Fleets are, it's a, thank God we got the right woman in the fleet department finally.

She is so good.

She comes with a vast knowledge, much bigger company.

And managing a fleet of ours, I think we got 500 guys in the field now.

So, and then you got my Dodge TRX that I don't even drive.

But

part of my deal going into the next time I sell the company is they pay off the truck.

I get to keep it and they give me a new one.

There you go.

So what's your favorite book?

Elevate.

Yeah, Elevate.

There you go.

I love it.

Oh, there's another one too, The Art of Closing.

The Art of Closing.

Antonelle.

Yep.

What do you like about it?

You know, when I first started in the fleet industry,

It was a book.

We called it like a book club at the office.

And we would read certain

chapters each time and come back and say, Hey, what was the aha part?

What you really took away with it.

He just made it, you know, I wasn't used to reaching out to sweet people, right?

I was used to reaching out to the operations team, right, to get things done.

And so he just had a lot of really good information about how to get in front of people, how to talk to like CEOs, CEOs, presidents, right, who make those kind of decisions because they are on a different level and they have a different

talk path.

So that book really helped me out

my career rise career for that.

So,

you know, there's a good book.

It's like the best salesman in the world by

what's his last name?

He, I think he sold, he's the record setter for selling all the, the most cars.

Have you ever heard of that book?

No, huh?

Yeah, it's, it's, he's long since passed away and retired, but he was in the 60s and 70s.

He used to sell seven cars a day.

His record was like 14 in a day.

That's a lot.

And he just said, I build relationships.

I get to know the families.

I give them a good shake.

I treat them right.

I send them birthday cards.

You know, I make it an experience.

I'm looking out for them.

It's not pressure tactics.

About trust.

I think that's the deal with you is like, if nothing else, people could get some information and understand this is what it would look like.

And planning is key here, guys.

Like

you call up Renee and you need to figure out when you need the vehicles.

Going and buying them at the last minute is going to cost an extra 10 grand.

I mean, it just doesn't make sense.

You're going to get what's on the lot.

It may be a

low trim level.

It may not, right?

You may have options on there that you don't need.

You might need a vehicle.

Yeah, like four-wheel drive when you don't need it, or not a four-wheel drive if you're in, like, for me, flagstaff, right?

Right.

Or you're getting an XL instead of an XL, you know, an XLT, which you don't need.

You need all the extra bells and whistles.

It's a fleet vehicle, right?

Because all of them are come with the same safety anyway.

It's minimum safety stuff.

So proactively is definitely, yeah, there's never too early to schedule a time to talk to me.

It may not, you may not be ready to go after we talk, and that's okay.

I have lots of clients who are like, Renee, I still need to do this.

Touch back with me in two months, whatever it may be.

But what are some reasons people wouldn't want to work with you right away?

What are they waiting on?

They're probably waiting to figure out how many vehicles they're going to need or hiring or whatnot.

And they want to talk to their CPA.

They're looking at their budgets.

How often do you get on a phone with a CPA?

Very rarely does a CPA call me.

I mean,

I do have clients who come back to me and say, my CPA said this or my CPA said that.

That's the biggest thing is understanding these write-offs and cash flow.

I mean, it's really a product of controller, CPA, CFO that understand.

I don't know anybody.

I don't know Gettle, my buddy Eco Plumber, like all these guys all over the country that buy their vehicles.

You always lease.

It's the right thing to do.

The smartest companies are doing this.

You might think you got to figure it out.

Why would I pay this payment?

I always talking about cost versus value.

Like, yeah, did you find a better price?

But what's going to happen when we got to show up every six months to come fix it because it broke and you missed another day at work?

And you might be paying less upfront, but when the, it's always in the shop and the morale.

And people quit because of this.

I didn't know the number one question I was going to get is, do I get a new vehicle?

It's for real.

And all of a sudden, your tickets go up, conversion rate goes up, happier clients.

You look amazing on the road.

So,

well, I appreciate you, Renee.

Let's just close this out.

Maybe we didn't talk about something.

Maybe there's something

you just wanted to say to the audience to get us.

I just want to say it doesn't matter whether you need one vehicle or you need a hundred.

Our goal is to make it a seamless and easy process for you.

And you're going to get the same level of customer service, whether it's one or a hundred.

So.

So go to jumpspark.com and book an appointment with Renee.

Thank you.

I just want to say one other thing.

Freedom 25.

That's where it's at.

Freedom 25.

I'll be there.

I will be there.

If anybody comes in and sees me and mentions that you heard the podcast, you're going to get a special prize.

Special prize, Freedom, September in Vegas.

Thanks, Renee.

Thanks, Tommy.

All right.

Hey there, thanks for tuning into the podcast today.

Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy.

I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states.

The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization.

It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service.

So, if you want to learn the secrets to help me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700-plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast and grab a copy of the book.

Thanks again for listening, and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.