A cheap oil change is the most expensive thing on your schedule.
Every fleet manager compares the price on the invoice. Almost nobody adds up what it cost to get the truck there. Put your own numbers in and see.
Your fleet
Starting figures are a 40-van fleet serviced monthly, one hour off the road each time. Change anything to match your operation. None of this includes the price of the service itself.
| Hours off the road per year | 480 |
| Work those hours would have done | $45,600 |
| Wages you pay across those hours | $16,800 |
These two are not added together. You pay the driver whether the truck is earning or waiting, so the cost of the downtime is the work that did not get done. The wage is shown because it is real money leaving the account either way.
Get a quote for this fleetRegardless what it says, it’s going to be minimum an hour that that guy is off the road. So besides the cost of the service, you’re paying that technician for that hour, and that’s also an hour out of the day that you’re not billing. If you have 40 vehicles on the road multiplied by all that time, you wouldn’t imagine what your basic oil changes are costing you.
The second number nobody budgets for
It has got worse, and not because shops stopped caring. The vocational schools closed, shop class is gone, and fewer mechanics enter the trade every year. Every shop is short-staffed, so every queue is longer.
“A simple brake job that may have been a day in and out, now for a lot of cases it’s a week. And that means the company has to rent another truck.”
A week in a dealer queue is a rental truck, a missed schedule, and a driver you are paying either way. None of it appears on the repair invoice.
What we do differently
We come to the vehicle
Seven days a week, including nights. At your yard, at the job site, or at the dock while your vehicles are being loaded. If a driver takes the truck home, we will go to his house on his day off.
The technician can finish the job
Every one of ours is a full mechanic, not a lube tech. If the inspection finds brakes at the wear limit, he fixes them on that visit. No second appointment, no second day down.
The big jobs have somewhere to go
When something needs a lift or a week of work, it comes to our 30,000 square foot shop on three and a half acres. You do not have to find a second vendor.
Run your real numbers with us.
Tell us how many vehicles you have and how often they get serviced. We will show you what the current arrangement is costing you, and what we would charge to take it over. No contract, and we have never used one in thirty-six years.