Best Fleets vs the industry: who was sustaining, streamlining or slashing?

Published on March 25, 2024

As we discussed in a previous blog, it was a tough year in trucking. The freight recession led to all sorts of contraction, and countless businesses ended up on the chopping block. Between the collapse of some big players and the squeezing of just about everyone else, there were a lot of stories of re-trenching, ‘buckling down’ or just plain keeping your head above water. What’s more, those decisions had a direct effect on drivers, from paycheck-to-paycheck reliability right up to job security.

And yet, some of the most interesting stories came out of how companies responded to those economic headwinds. And what’s even more interesting is how Best Fleets winners tended towards certain kinds of responses rather than others. In general, moves that companies were making across the industry fell into three categories: slashing, streamlining and sustaining.

Slashing costs is a reactive move, where a less prepared company is madly looking around, trying to find some way of easing the economic pain. It's not a great strategy, but it’s understandable--if your company is struggling, you want to do whatever you can to keep it going. Note though, that the term used is 'slashing' rather than 'cutting', to emphasize the panicked nature of it. It’s reasonable to look at ways you can cut costs, but in this category, companies are just wildly swinging around, trying to find any place where costs can be reduced. As you might imagine, Best Fleets tended not to fall into this category (but it’s still a reality for a lot of companies elsewhere in the industry).

When revenue drops, running an efficiency analysis makes sense—looking at your processes and assessing how well they are working, and then making decisions about where you need to adjust. This is much more proactive than slashing, but even within this category, there are more and less sophisticated versions of it (maybe a company is just looking at which drivers are working efficiently or which lanes should be dropped, or they're doing something more advanced that gets into the nuts and bolts of the business). In terms of Best Fleets winners, we saw a number of different approaches here, but the successful execution of it was connected to how well a fleet executed the third strategy: sustaining.

This is about companies leaning into their processes: fleets that were well-situated before the real economic heat came were able to rely on the processes they already had in place, and they felt like they could weather what was happening by doing what they were already doing, but methodically. By ‘well-situated’ we don’t mean turning out massive profits year over year—we mean that during the good times, these companies had taken the opportunity to experiment with, refine and engage the processes underlying their business and their relationship to their drivers. Then, when the tough times hit, those companies settled in to focus on simply executing what they already knew was working. So what sorts of things were they doing?

• Safety as a priority
  

  If you ask every single company in the program (winners and non-winners) to say something about safety they will probably all say “it’s a priority,” “it’s our number one concern”, etc. But when we look at the numbers, only certain fleets were reliably executing on that priority. Between the winners and the finalists, there was a 20-point difference in safety scores.

  Quite often when companies are looking at trimming costs or rushing to squeeze out a few more miles just to stay in the game, some critical elements get missed. This isn’t an explanation for why the non-winners had safety scores so much poorer than the winners—there may be 20 different reasons, and different ones for every single company. Whatever the reasons were though, the reality is that the Best Fleets continued to find ways to keep safety in sight reliably and consistently.

• Programs
  

  This year, not only did we see companies sustaining the programs they had, but many of the winners were actually refining them even further! In a year where the downward pressure of economic forces should have translated into a weakening or stalling of programs, why were the Best Fleets winners’ program scores so much higher than those of the non-winners (75%-48%)? And how could they pull that off when belts were tightening?

  Consider this low-cost, high-impact move: mentoring. A lot of fleets in the industry as a whole had informal mentoring programs (which is often just a new recruit getting the phone number of an experienced driver, but that’s about it). Within the Best Fleets program, 67% of competitors had shifted to a more formal program that might involve more regular check-ins (30, 60, 90-day intervals), feedback and guidance—not just on the recruit’s performance but also the mentors—and in some cases even personality matching between recruits and mentors. These kinds of moves take some thought and careful execution, but there doesn’t need to be a lot of spending involved.

  What’s more, although 67% of all the competitors were doing something like this, when you limit it to just the top 20 winners and Hall of Famers, that number moves to 100%. But this is just one example of how the winning companies found ways to refine their businesses even in the midst of trying economic times.

The point here is that while the Best Fleets to Drive For competition celebrates companies that think hard about serving and supporting their drivers with specific programs and practices, there’s something else. One of the best ways to support your drivers (or any employee, for that matter) is to run a stable business especially when times are hard. And given the headwinds the industry has faced this past year in particular, what our Best Fleets winners have shown is an attitude and a level of preparation that has allowed them to avoid panicked reactions like slashing, and instead focus on streamlining and sustaining the systems and processes that were already working for them.