(Photo: Diana Holland, Founder and Managing Director of Cavis)
By Fleet Management Weekly Staff
June 11,2025
With the volatility of the modern fleet landscape, it’s grow or go. Emerging technology, changing regulations, and disruptions to the supply chain must be understood and successfully navigated to stay profitable. From fleet operators to suppliers to management companies, there’s more of a need than ever for a trusted partner to get ahead in an ever-evolving market.
Founded by industry veteran Diana Holland, Cavis offers tailored consulting services to manage fleet costs, integrate new technologies, and optimize operations. Cavis serves a diverse portfolio of clients across the industry, helping fleet suppliers fine-tune their sales and go-to-market strategies, fleet operators enhance their fleets’ performance throughout the entire vehicle lifecycle, and FMCs optimize their fleet management strategies while scaling operations. By taking a broader view of the industry to solve the most pressing problems facing fleets, Cavis is driving meaningful transformation across the fleet industry.
To learn more about Cavis and what they have to offer, we interviewed Diana Holland, Founder and Managing Director of Cavis.
Tell us about your history. What is your experience in the fleet industry?
I’ve been in Fleet for 27 years, 26 of which were spent at the fleet management company Merchants Fleet. I consider myself a homegrown talent, having grown up in the industry. I started in an entry-level position before moving on to progressively more senior roles in marketing, product development, sales, and ultimately, strategic pursuits. I also moved into leadership roles during my tenure there.
It was a delightful time and a period of transformational growth, being part of that company’s journey from a small, family-owned regional lessor to becoming the fourth-largest FMC in the country. It provided me with the experience of working with fleets of all shapes and sizes. Almost a year and a half ago, I underwent a significant career overhaul, and now I’m the founder and managing director of Cavis.
What is Cavis? What inspired you to found it?
Cavis is a fleet consulting firm that helps fleet operators, suppliers, and management companies realize their growth, scale, and optimization potential. Cavis stands for Creativity, Ambition, Vision, Innovation, and Strategy – the pillars that my team and I stand for.
The inspiration behind the company arose when I took a fleet sabbatical during my career overhaul. I was spending time with my family and reflecting on what I wanted to do next when I came across a LinkedIn post by an influencer named Daniel Pink. In it, he asked what you cared about so deeply that you would do it without any recognition, applause, urgency, or anyone telling you to do it. I was considering my future, debating whether to become an educator, return to a leadership role in the fleet, or transition into a new industry altogether.
His post was a wake-up call to me that made me realize three things. One, I believe fleet is my industry–it’s my home, it’s in my veins. Two, I’m a solutions hunter. Additionally, I enjoy helping people solve their problems and sharing my knowledge. My answer to Daniel’s question was that I wanted to start my own business. A business that magnifies the real problems facing today’s fleet operators and exploits the available marketplace solutions across the ecosystem without a bias through any particular lens. I wanted to advocate for industry-wide innovations that address these problems and future-proof them. That’s why I decided to start Cavis.
What can Cavis do for fleets?
We help fleet operators achieve three key objectives: optimize their costs, improve productivity, and enhance efficiency. We take a holistic, fresh-eyed look at the fleet category and, using a scoring system that I’ve developed, we introduce some thought-provoking questions that lead to insight into areas of opportunity. We sometimes host sourcing events and support RFPs, RFIs, and RFQs as well. We also examine change management initiatives, helping fleet leaders navigate the implementation of these initiatives and the continuous process improvements that accompany them.
What sorts of fleets do you like to work with?
We have no bias toward the type of fleet, but the fleets that see the most outstanding value in what we do are usually between 250 and 750 units. Fleets that are smaller than that can generally handle the fleet category and don’t need an extra set of eyes. The larger ones have usually been at this for a while, so they already have access to resources that help with what we do. So, we generally concentrate our efforts in the 250-750 unit range.
Fleets that see a lot of value in what we do are going through a growth spurt. They’re in an accelerated growth mode as an organization and are navigating the changes that come with that growth. They’re growing smart and recognizing that they need help with this. Some haven’t reviewed their fleet category in a decade and need help navigating the changing landscape, while others are seeking outside counsel to assist with merger and acquisition activities within their organization. Those are usually the characteristics of the types of fleets we work with and what we do for them.
What can Cavis do for fleet vendors? What are some of your offerings in this space?
For suppliers, we help them reach their growth potential. I’m ambitious, and my team consists of a group of ambitious and visionary individuals who have a deep understanding of fleets. That puts us in a unique position to help fleet suppliers identify how their product differentiates in the marketplace and connect with the segment of the fleet industry that has problems their product can solve. Not all products solve all fleet problems, and not all fleets are alike. We help them get their products to the market faster, find the right segments that need their product’s solution, and amplify their voice in the marketplace.
Working with fleet suppliers through Cavis, I’m discovering companies that have been in the industry for 25-30 years and offer highly specialized services, such as Olis (with which we work). They offer an exceptional breadth of services, providing procurement support and fuel management best practices for specialty fuels, including bulk, mobile, propane, and alternative fuels – those specialty aspects of fuel management that extend beyond just card processing arrangements.
In my prior life at an FMC, we were focused on driving portfolio value. We sought to understand how to monetize arrangements with the supplier ecosystem in a manner that brings mutual benefit to the end user, the entire portfolio, and the FMC holistically. At Cavis, we examine the broad ecosystem with an unbiased perspective. We’re starting to identify suppliers who are underrepresented and underappreciated in the market because they have a niche focus, even though they do exceptional work in that domain.
For the first time, I’m starting to find solutions to problems that have plagued us with clients in the past. They were thorns in our side, but they weren’t deep cuts, so it wasn’t our top priority to find solutions. Today, they’re on my radar in a whole new way. There’s a big difference in my exposure to the fleet ecosystem today compared to my previous life. I’m realizing that there’s always an opportunity to learn, and there are many more viable solutions out there.
Do you have any advice for individuals just starting in the fleet industry?
As an advocate for women in Fleet, that’s a question I get asked a lot. My go-to answer is always to be curious. Fleet can be a very complex space, as it touches every aspect of asset management. You can take a couple of different paths–you can either have a broad, generalist view of all the different domains of fleet, or you could take a specialist approach. In either case, being curious is incredibly important to individual, professional, and personal success.
I say that because it’s been my experience. I’ve had many opportunities to encounter rigid thinking in the fleet industry. I’ve heard countless quotes saying, “That’s the way we’ve always done it, so that’s how we’ll continue to do it.” I don’t want to sound disrespectful to rigid thinking, but it can be an inhibitor to innovation and growth. When you keep an open mind and diversify your trusted circle across a variety of stakeholders, both within and outside your organization, you start to have a more open mind toward solutions.
The most successful fleet leaders I’ve ever encountered tackle problems from multiple angles, which is generally because they’re curious. They take cues from parallel industries, looking at how other industries address problems and macro issues that we’re facing. They do it with curiosity, discipline, and creativity.
How do you expect the fleet industry to change in the next few years?
It’s easy to be troubled by current trends. We hear about volatility, and if we perceive the market as volatile, then we react and respond accordingly. I challenged myself to change the narrative because in the fleet industry, it’s always turbulent and volatile. There’s always something, but we have a playbook for everything. And if we don’t have the playbook, we create it. We’re a group of people willing to tackle any of these challenges because the vehicles that we oversee, support, and provide services to are the ones that get the jobs done.
If we change the narrative from volatility to pulling out the playbook, then we can address any problems. We pull out the inflation playbook and realize we’ve been through this more than once, especially those of us who are dinosaurs. We hear about fluctuating interest rates, but we’ve dealt with this before. It may change our cost of funds structure, but we have a playbook for when the cost of funds goes up or down. We know exactly what levers to pull, and we’ve to remind ourselves that we’ve been through this before.
We’ve dealt with supply chain constraints in pretty intense ways, such as the chip shortage. We even have a playbook for disasters and crises, like the pandemic. We’ve a playbook for everything we’ve encountered in the past, and we’ll create the next one when needed. While we’ll feel some turbulence in the next few years, we already have the answers we need to navigate it.
What about a longer-term outlook?
I find it interesting that, while AI is a very trendy topic right now, it’s been around in Fleet for a long time. We didn’t always call it AI; we usually referred to it as technology adoption or something else. Now, however, we’re experiencing its acceleration at warp speed. I think it’s our responsibility as fleet leaders to consider how it will change the future landscape. I believe supplier rankings will change significantly. I think we’ll see a change in new suppliers entering the marketplace because, historically, barriers to entry in the fleet space have been very high, but that’s not necessarily the case anymore.
I think we’ll see what I call reverse consolidation. Previously, there was a movement to consolidate suppliers under one umbrella to collect and analyze data in a single location. Now we’re in an era where you don’t need to have all your data in one place. You don’t need a single system of record; you could have a system of truth or a hundred systems of truth. Our technology enables us to analyze data with speed and precision that we never could before. As we come to terms with what these changes mean for us, we’ll likely see increased competition as the market shifts from a seller’s market to a more balanced buyer’s market.
In terms of supplier operator dynamics, I think we’ll see the fleet operator being reskilled again. The responsibility of the fleet manager has shifted dynamically over the last few decades, and we can expect another shift in this direction. The job description is likely to be vastly different five years from now, so it’s essential to prepare for that. That means developing skills, training, pursuing professional development, and investing in ourselves. If we don’t do that now, we won’t be ready for the new job description in five to eight years.
In the past, we’ve seen big fleet departments at some companies manage everything in-house. I believe the days of large fleet departments are behind us. Some people disagree, but I believe that the labor demands in field operations, technical services, and convenience services will exacerbate the existing labor shortages. We’re going to have fewer technicians, less availability, smaller fleet departments, and heavier reliance on innovation to solve challenges in the field.
Finally, there’s EV adoption. The prevailing sentiment is that EV adoption has slowed, but I believe the opposite is true. Many significant investments were made in EV infrastructure over the last decade, and we now have some tailwinds to ride. Let’s focus on the tailwinds, not the headwinds. I believe EV adoption will reach its full potential at the pace initially anticipated.
