Ep. 531 Training Your Landscape Fleet Drivers with Rancho Mesa
Rancho Mesa's Alyssa Burley and Vice President of the Landscape and Tree Care Group, Drew Garcia, talk about the importance of training landscape fleet drivers.
Show Notes: https: Subscribe to Rancho Mesa's Newsletter
Director/Host: Alyssa Burley
Guest: Drew Garcia
Producer/Editor: Jadyn Brandt
Music: "Home" by JHS Pedals, “Breaking News Intro” by nem0production
© Copyright 2025. Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc. All rights reserved.
Transcript
Alyssa Burley: You're listening to Rancho Mesa’s StudioOne™ podcast, where each week we break down complex insurance and safety topics to help your business thrive. I'm your host, Alyssa Burley, and today I'm joined by Drew Garcia, Vice President of the Landscape and Trade Care Group with Rancho Mesa. And we're going to talk about the training landscape fleet drivers today. So Drew welcome to the show.
Drew Garcia: Alyssa thanks for having me.
AB: Now we know that the auto insurance market is hardening and many companies are trying to mitigate their risks. Will you briefly explain the risks associated with landscapers driving vehicles in the course of their daily jobs?
DG: Yes, yeah yeah let's talk about that and you know you mentioned the hardening insurance market when it comes to particularly commercial auto. And when you think of landscape maintenance, that's a very fleet heavy, it's a very fleet heavy industry, so they got a lot of vehicles. And as they scale, that's only going to continue to grow. So what we're seeing kind of in the market when it comes to landscape maintenance is this is more of a transportation risk than it is a landscaping risk at this point. And when you look at premiums at landscape businesses are paying, it's really lopsided on the amount they pay for auto and then you've got like general liability and property and their equipment coverage. It ends up being you know heavy on the auto and for a reason because the carriers are experiencing a lot of high claim costs that come with these types of, this type of exposure.
And for landscaping I think we can make just being in this industry for 10 years and we got a little over 100 landscaping tree care customers now, I feel like we can make the points as to why this industry is safe and the routes that they take and the times of day that they're driving and the speeds that they're traveling at where we feel like they generally are making more of a safer risk than they might look on paper with the amount of vehicles.
But the exposures that we see and the types of claims that are pretty consistent are the low speed rear end where maybe somebody was looking down right before they were pulling up to a stoplight and they're bumping into somebody. A lot of turning claims where you got the trailer on the back and you're not giving enough room for the turn and your side swiping somebody. And then stuff down to kind of parking at job sites and identifying good safe areas to park the vehicles, which might not directly line up with the best spot to like load and unload that could be a zone that's not supposed to be parked in. So identifying key areas so that you're not obstructing view or you're in anyone's way where they got to move around the vehicle to try to continue to drive or walk. Because a lot of our landscape customers work within community associations and they're there during the day. And as we know now, though you know, past COVID, a lot of homeowners are there during the day working remote. So there could just be an influx of people in and around their work. So making sure they identify, you know, good areas to park the vehicles.
A lot of this is the normal what you would expect with driving exposure. What you and I face driving to work each day is what they face as well. It's just bigger vehicles and with trailers, they got a lot of heavy equipment in the back. You got to think about the driver themselves. They're driving to work probably in a sedan or, you know, a normal vehicle. And now they've got to kind of put their mind frame into, okay, I've got to get into a half ton, three quarter ton pickup. I've got a big long trailer attached to the back with some heavy equipment. So your driving habits need to make that change and that shift. You've got to be able to make those transitions as you get to work and get into a fleet vehicle. And those are some of the things that we're going to get in today in terms of how to help those employees be trained for that type of work.
AB: Yeah. So how can landscape companies ensure their drivers are properly trained for situations like that and those larger vehicles?
DG: What I was surprised in when we kind of set out and trying to find more content for our customers in terms of how to train their drivers appropriately, what we found was most of the fleet driver training is geared towards the CDL driver, the DOT-regulated drivers that are driving the 18 wheelers and we need a lot of, you know, education and training out there for that type of a professional driver. But for the light duty daily fleet driver that we would call a landscape because, you know, they're not under CDL restrictions, they're just a normal driver like you and I getting into these vehicles. We felt like we wanted to find something more specific to what they face, you know, so we're excited that we now have some trainings available for that type of a driver.
But, you know, it starts beyond just the ongoing training. When you hire a driver, I think traditionally what we normally see people do is they send the driver's license to get an MVR pull from their insurance broker just for insurability purposes. Do they have a clean MVR that the insurance company would be okay with to allow them to drive for our company? And I think that taking that to the next level and having your own internal MVR requirements--and you can work with your insurance broker or carrier to help put those guidelines in place--is a better place to start. Because now you're managing your drivers based on your own internal guidelines as opposed to using the insurance carrier as the buffer for insurability. And so that would be a good place to start. So running those MVRs.
And then formal onboarding. You know, I know a lot of companies are already doing it, but are we making sure that the new employee knows how to drive a truck with a trailer? Is there some, you know, some drive with, where your manager is with you driving and making sure that you can handle that kind of a setup?
And I know a lot of companies have some videos that they'll run their employees through maybe on an annual basis, which is a good idea for kind of a formal annual driver training. And then in between that, I think is where we're trying to fill in the gaps with what we've got going on now. And kind of having those refreshers, just like think of a tailgate style training where the landscape crews are talking about heat illness, job site safety, they're talking about using the blowers and the tremors and how to use them safely and keep themselves safe. We wanted those types of refreshers for the fleet driver so that they're constantly thinking of the exposures that they face as a driver in more of that tailgate style setup. So we think some recurring training associated with that would be, would be a good idea.
And then, you know, a lot of companies are starting to use GPS and telematics and dash-cams, which we think are great risk tools and they're using them for efficiencies as well. But you need to make sure you're paying attention to the information that you're getting and you're, and you're acting on that information. So if you're, if you see somebody speeding, harsh breaking, or having some kind of behavioral driver issues we got to make sure that we're addressing those with trainings, formally, and you're documenting that, otherwise you know you could be opening yourselves up to more liability just because you're not acting on information that you probably should have because now you know about it through the telematics systems and the GPS and dash-cams.
So those would be good ways to kind of continue to train and outside that I think for the most part, the industry is really shifting in a way where that's becoming more standard. But I think looking for the content is where people are struggling and that's where we're happy to help.
AB: Yeah, absolutely. So we offer online driver trainings through our SafetyOne platform. And we have courses that can be used as preventative trainings, as well as refreshers, right? So if somebody gets into an auto accident and we see that maybe there's a training that could help them understand what went wrong, they can be used that way. But then you also alluded to the toolbox talks and we recently have released a library of 52 driver-specific toolbox talks in English and Spanish and they are built into our safety one app so any of those clients that are using it they can access that library directly from the app.
But then we also are offering them to the industry for free with a subscription. So it's available on our website. They can sign up to receive those every single week and they are driver specific. And they're going to talk about everything that a company driver would need to know. There's quite a few different, you know, there's 52 of them. So if you do have a fleet of drivers, consider subscribing to this because even if you don't use every single one it's a really good refresher every single week to just talk about safety and there's so many different things that a driver needs to be aware of especially if they're driving a larger vehicle, especially if they have a utility trailer behind them or equipment behind them. So it is really important that that information is out there so like I said it is available to the history, you don't have to be a Rancho Mesa client to get it. Just go to our website and we'll put a link in the episode notes where people can subscribe to get those emails.
DG: That's awesome Alyssa, we really appreciate it. I know I've had a chance to talk to a few customers of ours about, they knew that this was coming and you guys were working on that and getting it done. And for that to be out now in English and in Spanish is a huge benefit. We've had some really good reactions from a lot of our customers and they appreciate that.
And I think the really cool part is that you don't have to be working with Rancho Mesa to directly get that benefit. Like you said, you can sign up for that email and get it once a week. And then obviously for our customers, they can use the SafetyOne application to track those trainings and go into that system to pick whichever one they want. Yeah, I really like how you guys set that up and I know the industry appreciates it as well.
AB: Yeah, absolutely. So Drew, if listeners have questions about their commercial insurance or maybe their driver training program, what's the best way to get in touch with you?
DG: I would say email so they can email me at drewgarcia@ranchomesa.com.
AB: All right, well Drew, thanks for joining me in StudioOne.
DG: Thank you for having me.
AB: Thanks for tuning in to our latest episode produced by StudioOne. If you enjoyed what you heard, please share this episode and subscribe. For more insights like this, visit us at ranchomesa.com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter.