A former What Van? Award-winning fleet manager has started a new business aiming to make the benefits enjoyed by larger operators available to SME fleets.
Sean Hewings, who is What Van?’s reigning Fleet Risk Manager of the Year, has established Just Fleets to pass on expertise he acquired during previous fleet roles with the AA, and most recently Cardo (formerly LCB Group).
His new company works with partners including the AA, Auto Windscreens, 1link, Fleetmaxx, and Kwik Fit, from which it can obtain services for customers at discounted rates.
Hewings said: “With Just Fleets, what we’ve created is a fleet management service for SMEs. We’re not interested in the big fleets, because they should have a fleet manager in place, or a supplier in place to manage their fleet.
“What we want to focus on is the smaller companies, the 10-50 vehicles, for whom hiring a full-time fleet manager is not cost effective, because there’s not enough day-to-day work to manage that amount of vehicles.
“I’ve already procured the discounts that a high-level fleet would get. Suppliers have followed me from the AA, to Cardo, to my new business, all national suppliers – they see what I’m trying to do, so they’ve provided the discounts up front, so we can pass them on to these smaller companies.
“What I’m trying to create is a sort of ‘mega fleet’ of small SMEs all combined, where we pass on the discounts that we’ve procured. Whether they’ve got five vans, two vans, 50 vans, they are getting the same deals as a big fleet would get.”
As well as offering supplier cost savings, Just Fleets is able to help customers improve the behaviour of their drivers through the application of Trakm8 telematics data and camera footage.
Hewings said that he developed this approach at Cardo, where on taking over the fleet he discovered a high accident rate.
He said: “I looked at the statistics of our accidents over the past 12 months – 84% of the drivers involved were scoring D and below on a grading metric from A-G. I thought ‘If I can get these drivers to C and above, theoretically we should get less accidents’.
“I did a course with the worst drivers every month, and the idea was not to teach them how to drive, but [to explain] what these telematics devices were telling us in terms of their driving.
“What we also did at the same time was go through the live footage of their driving. The cameras were very good at sending information through the Trakm8 portal, every time there was an accident, or a bit of sharp acceleration or sharp braking.
“We did that over a six-to-nine-month period and we reduced accidents from 12 to 14 a month and a write-off a month, to one or two accidents and no write-offs over a 12-month period. So, the results were really telling.”
Hewings is now applying this approach to Just Fleets customers, who all also have Trakm8 systems.
He said: “Most of the companies [initially] are scoring G and below – drivers don’t care because nobody’s really monitoring them. You see those drivers go from a G to a C, B, and A, because they know they’re being watched.
“There’s always a handful of drivers out there who don’t actually know where they are going wrong, and they are the ones who need the education.
“We break down where the drivers are going wrong, and if they continue to drive poorly we then offer a driver behaviour course where we can do bespoke [training] online.”
As well as developing his driver training approach, Hewings says his time with Cardo also persuaded him of the demand for the service offered by Just Fleets.
He explained: “It was a very acquisition-based company, Every time they made an acquisition, the fleet they absorbed was in the same mess that our fleet was 12 months prior.
“I sat back and realised ‘Actually, I think there’s a bigger problem here’, because I think there were six acquisitions in a 12-18 month period and every single company was in the same position.
“I thought if there’s this degree of businesses which are in trouble with their fleets, how many companies are setting up and trying to grow, but are being held back because they’re only focused on what’s going on at the front end, not the back – how much risk is this business putting themselves in, how many accidents are they having?
“All this unnecessary risk, when if you had a bit of expertise given to them, [they] could set things up in a way so they focus on their business and let [us] focus on where they’re heading, so if they did decide they want to operate in a different area of the country, they’ve got suppliers which are national which they can switch on straight away.”
Hewings added that on establishing Just Fleets, he was surprised by the main motivation of customers signing up.
He said: “I thought customers would be all over the supplier savings [we offer], but the most important thing for our customers is time.
“Companies have no idea about fleets – they’re on the phone trying to find a repairer or a breakdown service. Now we’ve streamlined that, so all that headache goes away for these companies.”
Just Fleets is also rolling out an app which will guide drivers through vehicle inspections, and also guide them through gathering and reporting the relevant information should they have an accident. It will also allow them to directly contact maintenance suppliers and make bookings, monitored in the background by Just Fleets.
The company currently has 12 customer fleets, totalling 350 vehicles, in the South Wales area, but is planning to expand nationally by the end of this year.
Hewings added: “We’re set up to go national, so if this article went out and somebody approached us from Nottingham, for example, we’ve got all the suppliers there, we can do that.”
