The Critical Few: How Steve Saltzgiver Turns Around Broken Fleets in Months, Not Years

Steve Saltzgiver is a four-decade veteran of fleet operations whose career has touched nearly every corner of the industry — from mechanic and transit operator to executive leadership roles at the State of Utah, the State of Georgia, Coca-Cola, Republic Services, Mercury Associates, and RTA Fleet Management. Along the way he became a firefighter to better spec fire trucks, turned around fleets on remote islands, and built a reputation as the person organizations call when operations have drifted beyond what internal leadership can fix. He is a NAFA Hall of Fame inductee and recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the fleet profession.

Steve Saltzgiver is a NAFA Hall of Fame inductee and four-decade fleet industry veteran. He has led turnarounds at the State of Utah, the State of Georgia, Coca-Cola, Republic Services, Mercury Associates, and RTA Fleet Management — deploying a repeatable framework built on people-first leadership, the critical few metrics, and data precision over data volume.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [1:49] How building yard tugs and riding in his father’s car launched a four-decade fleet career
• [7:28] What the first 30 days in a struggling fleet actually looks like — and why you talk to people before you touch the data
• [9:50] The three BHAGs Steve uses to turn asset availability from 80% to 97%
• [15:45] Why most fleets track data that doesn’t matter — and how to find the critical few that do
• [19:03] The two things every fleet must manage to be financially successful: life cycle analysis and cost chargeback
• [20:51] Public vs. private fleet: what transfers, what doesn’t, and why 95% is the same
• [27:07] Why AI will likely eliminate traditional fleet management information systems within 10 years
• [31:28] The leadership failure behind every underperforming employee
• [35:00] What the next generation of fleet managers needs to start and stop doing right now

In this episode…

Most fleet turnarounds fail not because the problems are too complex to fix, but because the people trying to fix them take on too much at once. Steve Saltzgiver has turned around more than half a dozen fleets over four decades and the pattern is consistent: a struggling operation has ten things wrong, the incoming leader tries to fix all ten simultaneously, and eighteen months later nothing has meaningfully changed.

Steve’s approach is the opposite. Walk the floor. Talk to the users. Find the two or three metrics that are the root of everything else. Make those visible. Rally the team around them. And don’t move on until they’re resolved.

In this RoadRageous episode, Steve covers the full arc of that philosophy — from his first fleet role building yard tugs to a 2023 interim assignment in Hawaii where he drove PM compliance from the 30s to 75% and asset availability from 80% to 97% in under four months. Along the way, he addresses the data overload problem, the public-versus-private myth, what AI is actually going to do to fleet management systems, and the leadership mistake that sits behind every underperforming employee.

Start With the People, Not the Dashboard

The instinct when walking into a broken fleet is to open the data. Steve does the opposite. The first thing he does is talk to every department head and operator who depends on the fleet to do their job. The questions are simple — how is the fleet doing, what could be better, what do you need this vehicle for — and the answers are almost always more diagnostic than any report.

“Immediately when I came aboard in this particular role, I’ve got people asking me, where’s my truck? I haven’t seen it for months. It’s been in the shop. So you start gathering information like that and you find out that a couple of things are awry, like in this case, nobody’s tracking fleet availability — which in my opinion is the granddaddy of all fleet metrics.”

Asset availability — the percentage of the fleet that is ready to deploy when a department needs it — is Steve’s starting point because it is the metric that connects fleet performance directly to mission delivery. A truck that has been in the shop for three months is not a maintenance statistic. It is a service failure that every department head in the building already knows about and that fleet management has not yet connected to a number.

Once that number is surfaced, the root causes become traceable: PM compliance that has slipped, parts sourcing that is unreliable, technician training gaps, or data that is simply wrong. Each one is solvable. But you cannot solve any of them without first knowing which one is actually causing the availability problem — and you find that out by asking, not by downloading a report.

The Critical Few: Why Focus Is the Real Turnaround Tool

Steve has a term for the metrics that actually move a fleet: the critical few. Not the 100 data points a telematics system can generate, not the full list of things that are broken, but the two or three numbers that, if improved, will cascade into everything else getting better.

“You can get overwhelmed very quickly because there’s a myriad of different things that probably need to be fixed or solved. That’s why you have to find out what the real problems are and start from there. You’ll never run out of problems. You’ll be solving things for the next five years. But you work on the critical few.”

In the Hawaii assignment, the critical few were asset availability, parts availability, and PM compliance. Each one had a specific root cause — a vendor not sourcing parts on time, a maintenance program that had been allowed to slide, mechanics who needed training. Once those three were visible on a chart and the team could see the numbers moving, everything else began to align.

The turnaround was not slow. PM compliance moved from the 30s to 75%. Asset availability climbed from 80% to nearly 97%. Both happened in roughly three to four months — not because the problems were easy, but because the focus was narrow enough that the team could actually make progress without losing momentum.

“As long as you start putting numbers up and showing people where they’re at, visually, like in a graph or chart, people don’t want to be unsuccessful. They start moving along.”

The Data That Actually Matters — And the Data That Doesn’t

Steve is direct about the data overload problem: most fleets track things that do not help them make decisions. Telematics implementations in particular tend to generate far more metrics than any team can act on, and the instinct to measure everything produces paralysis rather than insight.

“Your highest cost in fleet is always depreciation. It’s always the asset. And then your second highest cost typically is fuel. And then it goes down into maintenance costs — tires and brakes. You just segment those costs. You don’t want to work on something that’s really low down the list that’s not going to give you an economy of scale.”

At Coca-Cola, Steve and his team reduced 100 available telematics metrics down to fewer than 10 — and then further to the top two or three. The result: $10 million saved from asset utilization alone, plus a 2% lift in driver productivity that, at nationwide scale, represented a material financial gain. The power of the penny, as Steve calls it — one cent per mile across a large fleet is a very large number.

Alongside data focus, Steve names two structural tools that every fleet must have to be financially accountable: a life cycle replacement program built on real cost data, and a cost chargeback system that makes fleet costs visible to the departments that drive them. Without chargeback, internal users have no financial incentive to care about how their vehicles are operated or maintained. With it, the competitive pressure of a real invoice changes behavior at every level.

People, Process, Technology — In That Order

At Coca-Cola, Steve worked inside a framework he has carried ever since: two Ps and a T — people, process, and technology. The order is intentional. Technology that lands on top of broken processes and disengaged people does not fix anything. It adds cost and complexity to problems that were already there.

“Ultimately, the most important thing is your culture, your people. You have to rally around them and get them to see your vision, and you have to be able to articulate that vision. Fleet managers really lack a little bit in not understanding how important it is to communicate and show people along the way how they’re progressing.”

Steve’s approach to culture is practical rather than abstract. Regular one-on-ones with every direct report. Questions about career trajectory, not just task completion. A genuine interest in whether the person in front of him actually wants to be doing the job they are doing.

He recounts a performance conversation with an employee who was about to go on a personal improvement plan. He asked a direct question: do you actually like your job? The answer was no. That conversation shifted from discipline to career development — and the employee, who had an accounting background and had been placed in reception, eventually moved into a role where she could use it.

“No one comes to work to sabotage or do a bad job. Most people have pride in what they do. If they get to the point where they do want to do a bad job, I look at that as a leadership failure — not an employee failure.”

What’s Coming — And How to Prepare

Steve has watched fleet technology evolve across four decades — from manual records to telematics to cameras to AI — and his read on the next wave is unambiguous. AI is not a feature being added to existing systems. It is a replacement for the category of systems fleet managers have relied on for twenty years.

“I was looking at AI just in fleet management information systems — we’ll be lucky to even have fleet information systems in five to 10 years. You’ll put everything into an AI portal and all these integrations will feed into one single portal. You’ll start seeing the relationships between all the data so you can start making good decisions on how to reduce costs and increase productivity.”

His advice for the next generation of fleet leaders is two things: embrace technology before it forces itself on you, and work on communication skills with the same urgency. The data tools are improving faster than ever. The ability to explain what the data means — to a city council, a CFO, a department head — is the skill that will separate the leaders who drive change from the ones who simply report it.

Quotable Moments:

• Asset availability is the granddaddy of all fleet metrics. If you don’t have assets that are available, people can’t perform their mission.
• You’ll never run out of problems. You’ll be solving things for the next five years. But you work on the critical few.
• People don’t want to be unsuccessful. As long as you start putting numbers up and showing them where they’re at, they start moving along.
• No one comes to work to sabotage or do a bad job. If they get to the point where they do, I look at that as a leadership failure — not an employee failure.
• Stop staying in your office. Get out on the work floor and make sure you’re talking to people.
• We’ll be lucky to even have fleet information systems in five to 10 years. Everything will feed into one AI portal.
• Embrace technology and increase your communication skills. Those two things will drive you in the future.

Action Steps:

• Talk to users before touching the data. Before opening a single report, talk to every department head who depends on the fleet. Ask how the fleet is doing, what they need, and what they can’t get. The answers will tell you more than any dashboard.
• Identify the critical few metrics and make them visible. Pick two or three metrics that connect fleet performance to mission delivery — asset availability, PM compliance, parts availability. Make them visible on a chart. Build everything else around moving those numbers.
• Segment costs before chasing data. Map your top three cost categories — depreciation, fuel, maintenance — and focus improvement efforts there first. Don’t optimize a metric that sits at the bottom of the cost hierarchy.
• Implement cost chargeback to make fleet costs visible. If you don’t have a cost chargeback system, build one. Users who see an invoice for their fleet costs behave differently than users who don’t. Visibility drives accountability.
• Invest in one-on-ones focused on career trajectory. Hold regular one-on-ones. Ask where your people want to be in five years. Find out if they are in the right role. A person doing a job they do not want is a leadership problem waiting to happen.
• Start using AI for data analysis today. Start learning how AI tools can accelerate your data analysis now. Use it to surface red flags in fleet reports, identify cost outliers, and speed up work that currently takes hours.

Key Takeaways

• Asset availability — the percentage of the fleet ready to deploy when needed — is the root metric that connects fleet performance to organizational mission.
• Turnarounds fail when leaders try to fix everything at once. The critical few — two or three metrics that cascade into everything else — is where all focus should start.
• Fleet data overload is real. Narrowing 100 telematics metrics to fewer than 10 actionable ones produced $10 million in savings at Coca-Cola.
• Life cycle management and cost chargeback are the two structural tools that make fleet financially accountable to the organization it serves.
• Public and private fleet operations are 95% the same. The primary difference is the speed of capital decision-making.
• AI will likely replace traditional fleet management information systems within a decade — integrating all data into a single portal that surfaces relationships and recommendations automatically.
• Communication skills are eroding in the next generation of fleet professionals — and they will matter more, not less, as technology complexity increases.

Conclusion

Steve Saltzgiver did not plan to spend 40 years in fleet. He started building yard tugs, got married young, needed a job, and found that once fleet gets in your blood it tends to stay there. Four decades, a Hall of Fame induction, a Lifetime Achievement Award, and more than a half-dozen fleet turnarounds later, the core of his approach has not changed: find the critical few, make the numbers visible, get the right people in the right roles, and never confuse data volume with data clarity.

For fleet professionals at any stage — whether they are inheriting a broken operation or trying to take a functioning one to the next level — Steve’s framework is a practical roadmap. The tools will keep changing. The discipline of focus, the investment in people, and the ability to communicate what the data actually means will remain the difference between a fleet that drifts and one that leads.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Steve Saltzgiver on LinkedInn
• NAFA Fleet Management Association — nafa.org
• RTA Fleet Management — rtafleet.com
• SPIDER Driver Training by IMPROV Learning — improvlearning.com
• Chat Lindholm on LinkedIn

About Steve Saltzgiver

Steve Saltzgiver is a four-decade fleet industry veteran whose career has spanned mechanic, transit operator, firefighter, and executive leadership roles at the State of Utah, the State of Georgia, Coca-Cola, Republic Services, Mercury Associates, and RTA Fleet Management. He is a NAFA Hall of Fame inductee and Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, known for turning around underperforming fleets by focusing on the critical few metrics, building intentional cultures, and applying data with precision rather than volume. He holds a master’s degree and continues to consult and speak across the fleet industry.

Sponsor

IMPROVLearning — At IMPROVLearning, we are dedicated to transforming driver education through innovative, research-backed training methods. Our SPIDER Driver Training platform combines humor with proven brain-training techniques to help drivers anticipate and avoid dangers on the road. Steve Saltzgiver’s point is clear: the best data in the world only improves outcomes when the people acting on it are trained to make the right decisions. SPIDER training develops hazard recognition, space management, and split-second decision-making under pressure. Visit improvlearning.com.

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