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.

Then the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, hit, the economy went soft, and the company's investors wanted out, Sokolis said. U.S. Fleet was sold to nine buyers throughout the country.

While he was in that business, Sokolis said, he was struck by how little attention companies paid to fuel management. He described instances in which drivers had left companies and were still using the fuel cards issued during their employment.

To help businesses combat such misconduct and come up with more cost-effective ways to handle their fueling needs, Sokolis opened his consulting business, where his father, John, now works as a salesman.

Fees can run from $500 to several thousand dollars a month, depending on the client's size.

As a business motivator, fuel prices didn't exactly help at first. When Sokolis Group opened for business, diesel fuel was selling for $1.50 a gallon, gasoline for $1.56.

Eventually, gas and diesel prices around $4 a gallon made fuel economics a priority at companies of all sizes.

That was the case at AAA Mid-Atlantic, whose fleet of 230 trucks uses 50,000 gallons of fuel a month, mostly diesel, to aid motorists in need from New Jersey to Virginia.

"We needed a better solution for buying fuel with a credit card," said business manager Michajlo Matijkiw.

Sokolis convinced AAA that the ideal answer was having fuel delivered to its trucks overnight, so drivers didn't have to start their days spending 15 to 20 minutes driving to stations to fill up. That has resulted in thousands of dollars a month in savings, Matijkiw said.

At Aqua America Inc., the Bryn Mawr water utility, savings resulting from a fuel-buying deal Sokolis arranged with a supplier in Atlanta have totaled $64,000 a year since 2009, said Charlie Stevenson, manager of fleet and materials management. Aqua has 400 vehicles on the road in Southeastern Pennsylvania, burning 450,000 gallons of fuel a year on repair, installation, and meter-reading jobs.

As part of the contract with Sokolis, Aqua America receives reports that help it identify any inefficiencies in vehicle fueling or use, as well as any mistaken overbilling by vendors.

Though his company has, in general, "had a good handle" on such things, "it's still good to have another set of eyes looking at it," Stevenson said.

What Sokolis finds himself doing often is dispelling beliefs that he has some special soothsaying ability as far as fuel prices go. But he is comfortable in making one prediction, based on the oil markets being down more than 6 percent last week:

"In the next few weeks, we should see gas prices and diesel-fuel prices coming down by 20 more cents."

Road trip, anyone?

Go to www.philly.com/business to hear Glen Sokolis talk about the fuel thieves in our midst and about uncovering other ways that companies are losing money by not monitoring fuel use.

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