Ground transportation & fleet advisory
Whether you're growing, tightening margin, or getting ready to sell, it starts the same way — an honest read of the operation and a prioritized list of what to fix first.
I've sat on both sides of the table. Fifteen years as the buyer, running transportation at Meta, parking and transportation at Stanford, and programs at Google, awarding and managing over $1 billion in contracts. Before that, on the operator side, helping grow a ground transportation company roughly 800%.
Transportation & fleet
Vehicle specification, OEM oversight, in-plant inspection, QA/QC, acceptance, commissioning, electrification, and vendor management — with hands-on experience across Gillig, BYD, Van Hool, and MCI.
Twenty years. Both sides.
Hundreds of buses. Tens of thousands of commuters. Complex programs that actually worked. You built massive programs quietly. No parade. No noise. Just execution.
Bill W.
Where this goes
They are not different engagements. They are different destinations for the same underlying work, and knowing which one you're driving toward changes what gets fixed first.
Win more of the work you're already chasing. Add service lines the fleet can absorb without new capital. Expand inside accounts you already hold, which is almost always cheaper than winning new ones.
Growth that outruns the operation is how good companies get into trouble. Sequence matters.
Find the margin that's leaking and stop it. Utilization, driver cost and turnover, maintenance and parts, subcontractor spend, software you're paying for twice, and the contracts you're servicing below cost without knowing it.
Most operations are carrying six figures of recoverable cost. The hard part isn't finding it. It's making the fix stick.
Buyers pay for documented, repeatable earnings — not for what you know is true. That means clean financials, contracts that survive diligence, a management layer that isn't just you, and a fixed retention problem rather than an explained one.
Most owners start twelve months too late. The value gap between a business that's ready and one that's merely for sale is the whole reason to start early.
That's a normal place to start. Plenty of owners know something is wrong with the numbers, or that they're tired, without having decided what the endgame is. The review works the same either way, and it usually makes the answer obvious.
Deciding to sell in three years and deciding to grow for ten produce very different first moves. Better to know which you're making.
Where it usually starts
Ninety days, eight dimensions, one honest picture of the business. Fleet and utilization. Financial structure and margin. Sales and pipeline. Safety and compliance. People and retention. Technology. Customers and contracts. Leadership and process.
Each one scored where it sits today and where it needs to be for the outcome you're driving toward. Every finding priced both ways — what it's costing you now, and what fixing it returns.
You get a prioritized hit list split three ways: fixed, in progress, and longer term. A weekly one-page status so nothing waits until day ninety to surface. And a written record your CFO, your lender, or a buyer can actually read.
Where it fits, part of my fee can be tied to documented savings I identify and you implement. If I don't find money, that portion doesn't get paid.
What I do
I work with charter, motorcoach, shuttle, limousine, paratransit, and contracted transit operators — typically 10 to 500 vehicles — along with the corporate, university, and healthcare programs that hire them.
Bid and RFP strategy. Proposal development and pricing. Positioning against national competitors. Preparing your team for the site visit and the oral presentation.
To be clear about scope: I help you win the opportunities in front of you. I'm not a business development shop and I don't prospect on your behalf.
Operational assessment and cost structure review. Fleet management — utilization, asset lifecycle, preventive maintenance programs, parts inventory, and warranty recovery. Routing, scheduling, and dispatch. Vendor and subcontractor management. Safety and compliance programs that hold up under scrutiny.
Most of what's findable is findable early. The work is making the change stick.
Most operations are running five or six systems that don't talk to each other, and paying for at least one nobody opens. I'll map what you have, identify what's redundant, and run a vendor-neutral evaluation where there's a real gap.
Dispatch and scheduling. Maintenance management and parts. Routing and optimization. Driver apps. Customer-facing tracking. Billing and contract reporting. And the integration work between them, which is usually where the time is actually going.
In-vehicle hardware — cameras, telematics, ELD — sits with FleetSafetyIQ, not here. Keeping those decisions in a separate practice is deliberate: it means the software advice you get from me has no hardware attached to it.
Management and supervisor training. Driver safety training. Customer service training built for transportation, not borrowed from retail. Mission and vision facilitation — developed by your team, in your words.
I facilitate the session. Your people write the values. A mission statement handed down by an outside advisor doesn't survive first contact with a dispatch floor.
New program or service launches. I'll review the plan you've built or build it with you: implementation schedule, staffing and equipment readiness, vendor sequencing, and the go/no-go checks that tell you whether day one is actually day one.
Launches don't fail on strategy. They fail because something wasn't ready and nobody flagged it in time.
Earnings documentation and add-back discipline. Contract assignability review. Customer concentration. Management depth below the owner. Data room assembly. The operational fixes that move a multiple rather than just the year's profit.
I'm not a broker and I don't take a transaction fee. I get the business into the condition where a broker or banker has something to sell.
Vehicle specifications written around how you actually operate — duty cycle, terrain, passenger profile, accessibility requirements, and lifecycle cost — rather than a dealer's stock sheet. Bid packages and build coordination with OEMs and upfitters. Acceptance inspection so what arrives is what you ordered.
On the electric side: route energy modeling, charger sizing and siting, utility interconnection and make-ready timelines, depot layout, and the phasing that keeps service running while the fleet turns over.
I've electrified campus fleets at Stanford and Meta, including campus trams. The vehicles are the easy part. The charging infrastructure and the utility timeline are what decide whether it works.
Hands-on experience with major transit OEMs including Gillig, BYD, Van Hool, and MCI. Full detail, process, and deliverables on the Transportation & Fleet page.
How I work
Every engagement is scoped in phases with a decision point between each one. You're never committed to the next phase until you've seen what the last one produced.
I look at what's actually happening — financials, bid history, incident and maintenance records, and time with the people doing the work. The output is a written picture of where the money and the risk are, and what I'd do about it.
The recommendation, the reasoning, the cost, and what happens if you do nothing. Sequenced by what pays back first. I'll tell you when the answer is don't spend the money.
Where the work gets made: the proposal, the training program, the launch schedule, the operating change. Built with your team so they can run it without me.
I stay through execution. Site visits, adjustments, and the unglamorous follow-through that decides whether a plan becomes an operation. Remote-first, with visits built into the engagement. Clients nationwide.
When your team is running it, I'm done. A handoff, the documentation, and a standing offer to pick up the phone.
The bench
You work with me. I'm on every engagement start to finish, and I don't hand your account to someone junior once the contract is signed.
But twenty years in this industry builds a network, and some problems need a specialist — labor and classification counsel, EV charging infrastructure engineering, insurance and risk, DOT and FMCSA compliance, financial modeling. When your problem needs one of those, I bring in someone I've worked with directly and vouch for personally, scoped to the specific question.
You get senior people on the actual problem. You don't pay for a pyramid.
Confidentiality
Bid strategy, cost structure, driver economics, contract terms — this work sits close to the things that decide whether you win or lose against a competitor. That's not material I put on a website, and it's not material I'd discuss about anyone else either.
If you want references, ask me on the call. I'll arrange them directly, with permission.
How engagements end
The engagement ends. That's the point.
I'm not building a retainer book. We define the problem, we fix it, and when your operation is running the way it should, I step back and watch it work.
A retainer that never ends means the problem was never solved. I'd rather you call me in two years with something new than pay me every month for something we already handled.
Fleet safety
Camera systems, driver behavior monitoring, event review, and safety program design are handled through FleetSafetyIQ — a separate practice built for that work, with its own hardware, pricing, and support.
From the operator side
From operators who held contracts under the programs I ran — including the smaller shops I made room for.
The healthy competition you fostered at Meta pushed me to grow and strive for continuous improvement. What stood out most was how it encouraged vendors to collaborate rather than compete against one another.
Hajime Y.
Thanks for the opportunities and support you gave, and for allowing smaller companies to prove themselves.
Kalpak S.
Get started
Thirty minutes, no deck, no pitch. If I can help, I'll tell you how. If I can't, I'll tell you who can.
I answer every inquiry myself, within one business day.
Not ready for a call? Send me the short version — a few sentences about your operation is all I need.
It comes straight to me. I answer every inquiry myself, within one business day.