Sokolis Group Helps Customers Rev Up Fuel Savings
In a cozy, laid-back office in central Bucks County, where potted plants and framed golf-course scenes share the decor with inspiring statements by Walt Disney, Sam Walton, and Michael Jordan, Glen Sokolis and his staff of nine are on high alert for thieves.
Fuel thieves.
Not the kind who sneak up to cars on neighborhood streets under the cover of darkness, insert the opposite ends of garden hoses into gas tanks and their mouths, and suck.
No, the Sokolis Group’s prey are those people president Glen Sokolis urges any business with a fleet of vehicles and fuel-card accounts – from mom-and-pops to Fortune 500s – to watch closely:
Employees.
“Eighty-one percent of fuel theft is internal fuel theft, meaning it’s your own employee stealing fuel from you,” Sokolis said. “Two to 3 percent of most companies’ fuel budgets is fraud. It’s huge.”
That’s not petty cash, especially in these times of gas and diesel prices sloshing around $4 a gallon.
Also hard on the corporate bottom line are vendor overbilling and drivers stopping for fill-ups where they shouldn’t for the sake of convenience – and, in the process, paying higher rates than their employer has negotiated with another vendor.
Seeing opportunity in all this, Sokolis formed his Warrington-based fuel-management and consulting company in 2003. It advises more than 50 clients – some with fleets as small as 14 trucks, others as large as 6,000.
Because of the number of customers Sokolis Group can assure vendors, it is able to procure discounted fuel prices for its clients. Where the real sleuthing comes in is with the fuel-bill analyses the company performs each month for clients, poring over invoices for double billing by vendors and suspicious activity by fuel-card users.
For Glen Sokolis, a 44-year-old Warminster native and father of three, it was not a dramatic career departure. Since joining the working world at 13 as an employee in his father’s truck-washing business, Mr. Mobile Wash, Sokolis has been earning a living off vehicles.
It was sometime in the 1990s, when Sokolis was still with the family’s we-come-to-you truck-washing business, that he got an idea for a related venture: Delivering fuel to companies with vehicle fleets, to save their drivers from having to go get it.
With $30 million in venture capital, he would buy nine similar companies in 1998, creating U.S. Fleet Services. It rapidly grew to an operation supplying 16 million gallons of fuel a month from 90 locations in 30 states. For More Information Please Visit: www.fuelmanagementsokolisgroup.com
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