The Big Problem with Old Fleet Trucks

It is reported that home services have grown to $500 billion dollar industry in the US. And that means a whole lot of fleet vehicles.

If you’re a business looking to scale, the question becomes:

How do you handle your fleet? Buy? Lease? Old? New? Brand? Size?

It can be a lot to handle in a hurry, especially if you’re coming out of an acquisition.

Time to talk today about what to keep in mind when it comes to your fleet, the struggle of older trucks, and leasing versus owning.

Let’s do it.

• Big Trouble—Acquisition and the fleet that came with it.
• Old vehicles are more than just repair costs.
• The strategy: Cycling Your Fleet.

Building Up The Home Service Fleet

Do you have a bunch of old trucks sitting around your business? Sounds like you aren’t using those capital expenditures.

I was asked recently by a member of my plumbing, HVAC, & electrical business growth Facebook group about post-acquisition and what to do when it comes to the fleet of trucks that comes along with that move.

Their (new) old trucks are out of date and high in miles.

Should they replace this fleet?

I found myself in the same situation in 2018 after buying a company—around the same amount of vehicles.

This ended up being the thing that pushed us towards a move to enterprise.

Here’s the thing: The cost of an old truck is a lot more than maintenance or downtime. It’s lost sales and opportunities and potentially affects things like drive time.

Another thing it harms? Morale. It sucks being in an old truck all day. Branding suffers because you’ve got guys running around in old hoopties.

An old-looking truck does more harm than you think.

It’s going to suck but replace those trucks as fast as you can. We learned that lesson hard as we started swapping vehicles between techs, left and right.

Why? Repairs.

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Vehicle repairs are going to happen. It’s a fact of life. Our guys drive long miles and those trucks see a lot of road.

And that’s something you have to prepare for if you’re working with a smaller fleet. Dozens of hours a week are going to be eaten up by the sheer act of taking trucks in for fixes.

Think about the avalanche of issues that come from something as simple as a truck being down.

It changes schedules, forces customer callbacks, and can even begin to harm that customer experience.

If you’re in the position of needing to fix those trucks then be aware of what happens to the rest of your operation.

Or maybe you need a strategy for keeping that from happening. Here is our fix.

Cycle And Lease

The sooner you can start talking to a fleet manager, the better. That’s when you can start setting up a plan for cycling trucks and planning for a miles limit via your lease.

Ideally, we get 100,000-150,000 miles out of each of our trucks. That can be about five years.

Regardless, we cycle those beaters out at either of those milestones.

Don’t be in a position where you’re looking at end-of-life care for your trucks. Vehicle hospice costs big-time dollars.

These five-year enterprise deals are the way to go. Be consistent, stay new, and show off the best your company can offer.

It makes a big difference when your team is driving something fresh and not a clunker with layers of paint from multiple branding re-wraps and smelling like a fuel leak.

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