How’s this for a fleet manager situation: You join a business that started 10 years ago as a single brand. The company had already grown to 1,600 vehicles across 24 separately branded HVAC, plumbing, and electrical services businesses. 

During your tenure, the fleet grows to 5,000 units with more than 60 distinct upfit configurations across multiple OEMs. Each has its own vehicle selectors, sourcing strategies, safety requirements, and upfit needs. You take on the monumental task of bringing standardization to this loosely connected armada. How do you get there?

Few fleets triple in size in four years. Fewer still do so while absorbing entirely different operating models. But that’s precisely Ron McGuigan’s challenge at Turnpoint Services. The private-equity-owned company isn’t likely to hit pause soon. 

The Hidden Cost of Fleet Fragmentation

The fragmentation driven by multi-location, multi-brand fleets — especially those driven by private equity acquisition strategies — presents one of the thorniest fleet management problems. 

There are higher upfit costs when no vendor can predict your volume, longer install times when specs vary by market, and lost productivity when a tech transfers to a new region and has to relearn where everything lives in the new van. For fleets acquiring 15 to 20 businesses a year, managing that chaos can be a brake on growth. 

The solution is standardization. But getting there takes buy-in, process discipline, and vendor partners willing to plan early and stay aligned through disruption.

How Turnpoint Services Brought Order to 60 Brands

Before McGuigan joined Turnpoint Services, the previous approach had been to accommodate individual brand requests. One company wanted it done this way, another wanted it done that way. “It was, as you could imagine, like trying to herd cats,” McGuigan said.

McGuigan's mission from day one was to change that.

"If a guy can do plumbing in Massachusetts in a van, there's no reason he can't do the same plumbing job in California in the same van with the same setup," McGuigan explained.

Turnpoint's standardization effort became a multi-year, ongoing process that now touches every vehicle acquisition, every upfit build, and every new company integrated into the portfolio.

Building the ‘Gold Standard’ Spec

McGuigan put together an internal upfit advisory team from the highest-performing brands across the company that excelled at employee integration, inventory tracking, and operational execution. 

"When we were building out that team, we asked leadership who has the most influence in your area and who should be involved," McGuigan said. "They took the natural-born leaders and put them in that group. The others that they knew were going to be very persistent on keeping it their way — we knew we'd need to manage that separately."

From there, Turnpoint worked with its FMC, Merchants Fleet, and upfit partner Adrian to develop the build. The process involved structured feedback, 3D CAD drawings, and dimensional layouts, and iterative refinement across stakeholders. 

Safety was part of the base spec from the start, and it included fire extinguishers, first aid kits, document holders, slick locks, iPad holders, A2L refrigerant cabinets for the new refrigerant standards. 

"You're working to translate fleet operational needs, driver feedback, and safety regulations into a spec that meets the day-to-day operations of a business," said Matt St. Peter, associate upfit engineer at Merchants Fleet.

"When you get into the nitty-gritty of the specs, you're making sure weight distributions are properly accounted for, running pilot builds if needed, and partnering with an upfitter who can execute at a larger scale," he said. 

When a vehicle left Adrian, it was ready for a driver to step in and go.

Managing Standard vs. Optional

A primary tension in any standardization effort is between the field’s desire for customization and the operational benefits of uniformity. Turnpoint managed this by distinguishing between what’s standard and what’s optional — and then keeping the optional list short.

Adrian built out separate standard packages for each service line: HVAC, plumbing, and electrical. Every vehicle in each line receives the standard package. Optional items — such as double-drop-down ladder racks, conduit carriers, or specific camera systems — are listed separately in the quote. 

Fleet managers at the brand level can select from that optional list, but they control it rather than the field deciding independently.

"There is some flexibility, but it's up to the fleet manager to decide what that flexibility looks like," said Drew Snow, fleet account executive at Adrian. "What standardization does is it helps alleviate the problem of delays. When there are a lot of optional items, we as the upfitter don't know upfront how many of each piece of equipment you might need — and that makes us nervous."

Snow explained that optional equipment, especially electronics, can carry 30-day or longer lead times. When those items aren't confirmed in advance, they become the single biggest source of install delays. "When it's standardized, we feel much more comfortable with speed," he said.

The optional tier also serves a softer purpose. Charles Mathew, assistant director of order and upfit at

Merchants Fleet, noted that having some flexibility helps secure buy-in from operating brands that might otherwise resist standardization. 

"Here's your standard equipment — this is what everybody's going to have. But if you need something that maybe somebody else doesn't get use out of, here's the optional item," he said. "The standard spec is good. Having options is even better, per brand."

Why ‘Early’ Is the Most Important Word in Fleet Planning

If there’s a single mantra from every expert in this discussion, it’s the importance of acting early — before vehicles are ordered, before order banks close, and before supply chains get squeezed. 

Order banks open and close faster than many fleet managers realize, particularly with new model years. Factory-built vehicles coming from outside the country can spend six or more weeks in transit before they ever reach an upfitter. And once at the upfitter, a backlog can add another six to eight weeks.

"When you're ordering two, three, four hundred vehicles at a time, that timing matters enormously," McGuigan said. "You need to be four to five months out on your orders to make sure order banks are open, availability exists, and shipping — whether you're doing ship-through or ship-to — has enough runway."

Mathew said the Merchants Fleet team approaches order planning as a live, dynamic process. They monitor OEM dealer news bulletins, review production cycles, and consider priority codes, build-out targets, and component constraints. 

"Things can change on a weekly or monthly basis based on geopolitical events and global disruptions," Mathew said. "The best thing to do is include your FMC and your upfit partner in order planning early, and embed that information with your OEM partners to see how you need to execute."

Snow concurs: "Early is, in our preference, months before you've actually placed the order for vehicles. We want to look at lead times on all the different equipment that could be installed, so we have the time needed to make sure we can get everything for you. The best way to do that is for us to have an understanding of what you're going to want, way in advance."

Order-to-Delivery: Where Strategy Meets Reality

For Mathew, the order-to-delivery (OTD) process involves multiple partners in sequence: Turnpoint signals its needs and timing to Merchants Fleet. Merchant's acquisition team leverages OEM relationships to evaluate production schedules, assign appropriate priority codes, and coordinate with Adrian on install timing. Communication flows back to McGuigan about realistic delivery windows. Pivots happen as a group, not in silos.

McGuigan is deliberate about routing everything through Merchants Fleet rather than contacting Adrian directly. "We follow the chain of how we order. Merchants places the order with Adrian — we are the end customer. I don't like to jump the line and have Merchants not know about an issue." 

Snow agrees, noting that keeping that communication flow intact protects all parties and ensures the right information reaches the right people without distortion.

Turnpoint also manages its fleet needs in two distinct channels: replacements and growth. Factory orders for planned replacements flow through the normal ship-through or ship-to process. But for urgent growth or accident replacement, Merchants Fleet helps source vehicles from dealer inventory and routes them to the nearest Adrian facility. This shortens timelines significantly without abandoning the standardized build.

When Plans Change — Because They Always Do

No fleet plan survives without disruption. Chip shortages, manufacturer strikes, geopolitical disruptions, tariffs, and weather events have all forced Turnpoint to pivot in recent years. The most dramatic example came in 2024, when a hailstorm in Mexico destroyed more than 70 vehicles that had already been upfitted by Adrian and were staged for transport to Turnpoint.

"We had to scramble and find 70-plus vehicles off dealer lots through strategic partnerships with our FMC and Adrian," McGuigan recalled. "When you're making a factory order, there are discounts involved. When you're buying off the lot and paying for transport on top of that, because you're not going to find 70 vehicles all close to an Adrian facility — that was a huge cost event for us."

Adrian absorbed some of that pain as well. The company had pre-shipped materials to its Mexico facility in anticipation of those vehicles. When the vehicles were totaled, Adrian shipped the materials elsewhere at a loss, keeping the Turnpoint relationship intact for the next order cycle.

"Things are going to happen. It's going to hurt somebody some way, shape, or form," Snow said. "If you're looking at it as a true partnership, that aspect of it means more than the moment. We just owned it and said, 'Let's make this right so we can go on to bigger and better things.'"

Mathew outlined the cost of pivoting to a faster acquisition channel, the interim interest costs that accumulate when financed vehicles sit idle in the upfit pipeline, and the revenue cost of a technician without a vehicle. "You have to weigh the cost of pivoting against the benefit of getting a revenue-generating asset much sooner," he said. "If the benefit outweighs the cost, implement the change."

Measurable Benefits of Standardization

What metrics should fleet managers track to know whether standardization is working? For Mathew, it’s order-to-delivery time, specifically, the window from vehicle arrival at the upfitter to upfit completion. "That'll give you insight into how quickly things are getting turned around," he said. "If standardization is working, that number (of days) should compress."

Beyond that KPI, Turnpoint has realized additional benefits:

• lower upfit costs overall, 

• faster technician onboarding because new hires already know the vehicle layout regardless of which market they start in, 

• improved safety compliance with standardized safety gear in every build, 

• easier vehicle transfers between markets since every vehicle is identically configured, 

• and simplified inventory management. 

When Turnpoint needs to move vehicles from Tampa to Arizona or Des Moines, Merchants Fleet handles the titling, registration, and rebranding — and the identical spec means no retrofit is required at the destination.

For PE-backed portfolio companies, the most significant benefit may be scalability. Every acquisition that joins Turnpoint transitions to the standard spec. Rather than negotiating each brand's preferences from scratch, the process is repeatable. 

"Don't fear the term 'standard,'" Snow said. "I know there's always some extra need. Our job as the upfitter is to understand and listen to those needs and find flexibility. When you're standardizing, you're really aiming to establish the gold-standard configuration. It's not going to be perfect, but it should serve the entire purpose for your fleet. Standardization truly does speed up the process and limit costs — especially the unrealized costs you typically see later."