Fleet Advantage CEO receives award

September 12, 2011

John J. Flynn, CEO of Fleet Advantage, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., received in June the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2011 Award in the “Emerging” category. The program recognizes entrepreneurs who demonstrate excellence and extraordinary success in such areas as innovation, financial performance, and personal commitment to their businesses and communities. Flynn now is eligible for consideration for the Entrepreneur Of The Year National Award, to be announced at a Palm Springs, Calif., ceremony in November.

Fleet Advantage manages equipment assets so that customers operating private fleets continually reduce costs. Traditional leasing products require the lessee to retain equipment for long-term, fixed annual periods. This format enables the lessor to benefit from the low booked residual value and to realize a windfall profit upon resale at lease expiration.

The counterintuitive business model of Fleet Advantage allows the lessee to realize gains on equipment sales through shorter lifecycles. Flynn’s strategy is to monitor all-in costs constantly and to offer a flexible leasing format that allows customers to acquire newer, more fuel-efficient trucks as new technologies become available in the market, thereby reducing fuel consumption and maintenance and repair costs and improving safety and environmental performance.

Fleet Advantage uses proprietary software and real-time data to track the total cost of ownership (including actual cost-per-mile, depreciation, interest, fuel, maintenance and repair expenses, and used-truck resale values) to establish a tipping point at which the cost to operate an existing asset exceeds the cost of replacing the asset. The adjustment of the lifecycle is governed by data-driven decisions of real-time costs rather than anecdotal or inaccurate historical information.

Fleet Advantage services the leasing needs of FORTUNE 500 companies and private truck fleets in North America.