Managing Your Company Cars Expert Opinion - Foreword

I had been mulling over a question for some time: What do we mean by the term best practice?

When I wrote Managing Your Company Cars I had a very clear objective in mind; I wanted to write a textbook for people who run car fleets. A textbook is something quite specific; a source of reference that someone can go to when they want to understand something, or perhaps to look up the definition of an expression they have just heard for the first time. A reference book needs to be comprehensive, leave no stone unturned, and explain things very thoroughly.

Managing Your Company Cars was published in 2003 and the feedback was so positive that I wrote the 2nd edition in 2005.

In early 2008 I began thinking about writing the 3rd edition but held back because it was clear that the company car tax rules were about to change and I didn’t want to produce something that would be out-of-date as soon as it hit the bookshelves.

In the event I took a different approach and produced a much shorter book, Managing Your Company Cars in Nine Easy Steps, a basic primer in fleet management. This was published in May 2008.

Come the autumn of 2008 the new tax rules had been clarified and I started to think again about writing the 3rd edition. But my mind kept wandering back to that expression, best practice.

Managing Your Company Cars sets out to explain things but it doesn't describe what the best people in the fleet world are doing right now, and what they are planning for the future. If I was a fleet manager I would want to know these things. Ideally, I would love the opportunity to meet real experts from every corner of the fleet world, get them all into one room and quiz them about their specialist topic:What exactly is such-and-such? How does it work?What benefits does it give? How can I cut my costs when buying such-and-such? How can I reduce my risks?What recent developments have there been in your part of the fleet market?What are the best fleets doing? How are things changing?

I wondered if I could write a book that answered all those questions. I have been in this market for almost 30 years but there is an awful lot I don't know about. No-one knows everything about the fleet market. To write this book I wouldn't be able to sit at a keyboard and just start typing, I'd have to get out there and talk to experts across the fleet world to find out what they were doing. Best Practice is certainly out there but I would have to go out and look for it.

I began to make a list of the people I wanted to talk to. The list was remarkably long. There are many specialist areas in this sector.

I certainly needed to talk to fleet suppliers – contract hire companies, manufacturers, daily hire companies and so on. I also wanted to talk to fleet managers. There are some great things going on out there in Fleet Manager Land but too often these stories don't get heard. And the government is increasingly active in encouraging fleets to go green, reduce accidents and so on, so I would need to talk to those people too. I soon realised that if I was going to do this project justice I would have to talk to an awful lot of people before I could feel sufficiently confident to start on the book.

There are aspects of the recession that are nebulous but one thing is very clear; everybody seems to be incredibly busy. It seems we are all having to work harder to achieve things that – in retrospect – were a little bit easier to achieve a couple of years ago.

This most definitely applies to me so, whilst I was really keen to research best practice, I had to concede that I just didn't have the time to do the project justice. I didn’t think my consultancy clients would be happy if I told them I was about to take a couple of months off to write a book.

And, at that point, the penny dropped. Rather than writing this new book from scratch, would it be possible to persuade a group of experts to write a chapter each on their area of expertise? My role would be to recruit them, ask them questions, edit their responses and arrange publication. I had enough time to do that but surely these people wouldn't have enough time in the run-up to Christmas to devote to this exercise?

I tentatively started approaching fleet experts and, to my amazement and delight, they were all enthusiastic and they all said yes.

I set out the ground rules from the start:

This is going to be a serious book, giving best practice advice to fleet managers. I want it to contain real insights that fleet managers will find valuable. I am going to ask you a series of questions – the sort of questions I think fleet managers would want to ask. I would like you to provide the answers. These questions and answers will form an interview and the interview will form the chapter

And when setting the ground-rules for organisations that provide services for fleets, I added:

Please remember that you are the representative of your sector of the fleet market; so don't focus exclusively on your company, tell us about your sector.

I approached highly-experienced professionals and organisations – the sort of people I would approach if I wanted expert advice on a fleet issue.

The contributors and I have aimed to produce a book that encapsulates the very best of contemporary fleet management. Have we succeeded? That's for you to decide. I would be very interested to hear your views so please email me via www.tourick.com with your thoughts and observations.

My thanks to everyone who has been involved in this project. There have been a number of nights – when I was still working away at my PC at 4am, thinking of good questions to ask a contributor; providing someone else with the specification of the images to go in their chapter; reading and editing and re-reading and re-editing the chapters (250,000 words in all) – when I might have decided to give up on this gargantuan task. But everyone's enthusiasm for this project has kept me going.

Thank you to Jon Moore of Eyelevel Books, the publisher. This is the fourth book we have produced together and I always find his help, experience and insights to be utterly invaluable. Thank you too to Rachel Mills for her organisational skills and to Hilary Davis for her encouragement.

I must say a special thanks to Paul Harrop of Daimler Fleet Management, Ashley Martin of Ashley Martin Communications and James Langley of the Institute of Car Fleet Management, who kindly threw open their address books and made some important introductions.

And finally I must warmly thank all of the people who have written chapters, many of whom were no doubt bashing away at their PCs at the same time of night as I was, wondering how on earth they had committed themselves to such a major undertaking.

Colin Tourick