(Photo: Kevin Clark, Interim Vice President of Sales at Fleet Services by Cox Automotive)
By Fleet Management Weekly Staff
March 12, 2025
Fleet maintenance is crucial for maintaining a profitable and efficient operation. It’s essential to collaborate with trusted technicians for routine maintenance and emergency repairs to minimize downtime and keep vehicles on the road. However, a recent shortage of technicians has made it more challenging for fleets to secure reliable maintenance when and where needed. Companies like Cox Automotive are stepping in to address this gap.
Fleet Services by Cox Automotive manages a team of thousands of the industry’s top technicians, performing 24/7 emergency mobile service for fleets of all sizes. Not only do they seek out the best and the brightest to add to their team of trained technicians, but their FleeTec Academy is buffering the technician shortage by training new technicians and providing them with the tools they need to succeed.
Cox Automotive offers a One Cox solution to handle any fleet issue, from emergency roadside service to in-fleeting and de-fleeting. To learn more about Fleet Services and what they can offer both fleets and technicians alike, we spoke with Kevin Clark, Interim Vice President of Sales at Fleet Services by Cox Automotive:
Cox Automotive first acquired Dickinson in 2020. How has the business grown in these first years? What can the fleet industry expect from the brand over the long haul?
At the time of acquisition, Dickinson Fleet Services had a team of about 700 mobile technicians who primarily did preventive maintenance and mobile emergency road service. If you include the 800 repair and maintenance technicians in the shop, today there are more than 1500 technicians, roughly 1200 of whom are mobile. Last year, those techs completed over 900,000 repairs and serviced over 13,000 customers.
We’ve done well in the first couple of years to grow our business organically and through M&A. We’ve added some great product lines and business names like Trudell and Northeast Great Dane, the largest Great Dane dealer in the country. We also added MobiCare, a regional in Florida, and CMS in Houston. They service all sorts of clients, but their main client is a major home improvement retailer. We’re always looking for opportunities to invest not just in the organic growth of our business but also in opportunities to bring in other good teammates from around the industry.
Do you see any more significant mobile maintenance trends?
Our clients and the industry we serve genuinely appreciate the mobile product offering. It saves the fleet operator a lot of time when getting vehicles to and from a location for preventative and corrective maintenance. So, one trend I’ve seen is how mobile maintenance continues to grow. Customers keep asking for mobile service when their vehicles are down because they focus on asset uptime. More sophisticated operators are tuning into how that asset contributes to their bottom line, so they want to get that vehicle on the road as quickly as possible.
Another trend I’ve seen is the demand for project work, such as large-scale telematics installations, cameras, and other upfits. Our clients appreciate how our mobile solution and skilled technicians can efficiently install those products rather than parking them on a fence and using a checklist to handle upgrades later.
One last trend is that the industry is slowly adopting EVs and other new technologies. It won’t stop entirely, but it has slowed down a bit. At Cox, we want to help every industry we work with become more sustainable, so we’ll keep that as a priority as we react to this industry trend.
What are your top three business goals for this year?
I have a lot of goals for my sales team in 2025, but I would divide them into two groups: relentless customer focus and tactical activity improvement. When I say relentless customer focus, I mean giving our clients maintenance solutions that work for them. We want to improve our service delivery, build deeper relationships, and assemble systems that communicate quickly and efficiently. When our clients work with us, we want them to know we have their back and will look out for them and their assets. Choosing us should be the best career decision they’ll ever make.
On the tactical side, I want to ensure we’re thinking outside the box whenever opportunities arise. I know that’s cliche, but we don’t want to be so rigid in our thought process that we fail to build a solution that works for our client. I’m also making sure our sales and operations teams are tightly aligned. When our sales team brings in a new partner, we want our operations team to understand what the client needs, their pain points, the methodology of engagement, and how we work together. Our operations team will ensure we’re servicing the client by providing them with the information, data, technicians, and schedule they need.
The technician shortage remains a challenge for the broader industry. How is your company’s FleeTec Academy helping the brand buffer those effects while investing in the new generation of technicians?
I started my career as a technician right out of the Marine Corps. They trained me and prepared me to build my career. At Cox Automotive, we’ve built a place where our technicians can have a career path. They can come in as a technician servicing clients and decide to become a mobile technical leader, general manager, or a sales leader like me. By leveraging Cox’s resources and our specific abilities, these technicians have a place to come and grow in our FleeTec Academy.
We’re looking for people who want to learn this trade and are interested in technical work. One kind of candidate we look for is someone whom we train from scratch. Another kind of candidate we’re focused on is our veterans. Some veterans may have been trained like I was and already have a good understanding of being a technician, but perhaps this understanding doesn’t translate easily to the civilian sector.
Our FleeTec Academy takes both kinds of candidates and teaches them the right way to go about vehicle maintenance and repairs. We give them training both in our academy and on the job with our mentors, GMs, and MTLs, most of whom are former technicians. One of the hardest things about starting in our industry is that it requires a lot of tool investment. We remove that barrier. When you come out of our FleeTec Academy, you have the knowledge you need to be successful, the support of a great organization, and your tools.
Our reaction to the technician shortage is to build new technicians and employ folks who already have the necessary skills and tools. We have a large recruiting team focused solely on filling our fleet service job openings and requisitions and building a pipeline. So if they reach out to someone who either isn’t ready to move or the opportunity isn’t the right fit, they’ll remember them for the future and put them to work when the right opportunity arises.
Can you share a recent success story?
I want the industry to understand the sheer number of resources our organization provides to help you with your business and provide a One Cox solution. During a meeting at our corporate office, we brought together multiple teams–Fleet Services, FleetNet (which handles managed care), Manheim, and even our consulting team–to discuss solutions for one of our carriers in Pennsylvania.
Through that meeting, as we introduced all our skills and capabilities, our carrier realized how many ways we could support them. We were already managing their fleet maintenance and emergency road service. Still, through our discussion, we took on even more opportunities to handle their in-fleeting, de-fleeting, and selling 100 trailers for them through one of our auctions. This is all part of the One Cox solution I’m focused on providing our customers this year.
