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Fuel cards: How general contractor Sports Turf saved money and built efficiencies
Sports Turf Company, a specialty general contractor headquartered near Atlanta has 65 employees and operates in the Southeast. Sports Turf CFO, Helen Albrightson, built a partnership with WEX to create operational efficiencies and improve her company’s bottom line.
What the business of a specialty contractor like Sports Turf entails
Since 1991, Sports Turf Company has been a recognized industry leader in athletic construction for natural grass and artificial turf fields, running tracks, and tennis courts. “Our customer base includes professional sports teams, high schools, municipalities, universities, and colleges,” Albrightson says.
Since 2010 Sports Turf has had an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), which means that employees have an opportunity to participate in ownership of the company. Their ESOP status has solidified employee morale and loyalty, and as a result, Sports Turf’s dedication to customer satisfaction elevates them to a best-in-class organization. “What matters most to our customers is the fact that we are masters of what we do.”
Company growth and the operational impacts
Sports Turf experienced tremendous growth over the last several years doubling revenue to catapult them from a low seven-figure business to a mid seven-figure business in a short period of time. One of the most significant operational impacts they experienced was administrative, and overseeing a fleet of commercial vehicles with that kind of growth quickly became challenging. “I think we’re going to be up somewhere between 15 to 25 percent in 2024 over 2023. You can imagine how busy our fleet became and how quickly our fuel consumption adds up.” Fuel card transactions alone became that much more difficult to oversee with the growth Sports Turf was experiencing. Albrightson described the work her team suddenly found themselves overseeing as laborious and inefficient.
How partnering with a fleet card company helped Sports Turf manage growth
In August of 2023, Albrightson raised the issue with her executive leadership team that Sports Turf had outgrown its current systems and needed to make operational changes to stay ahead of the growth they were experiencing. “We are a small team overseeing a mid-seven figure organization. We needed to create efficiencies, otherwise we were not going to be able to keep up.”
Albrightson was already in conversations with WEX partner Ford Fleet Pro, a fleet management company, who soon introduced Albrightson to the WEX fleet card program. Ford Fleet Pro assured Albrightson that WEX’s fleet card program would help her streamline organizational operations such as fuel card spend and tracking and optimizing routes, increase easy availability of payments data, and improve Sports Turf’s bottom line.
How customer service can impact a business’ adoption of new technology
As soon as Albrightson began work with WEX, the WEX team jumped into implementing WEX’s fleet card program for Sports Turf. Right away Albrightson was impressed with WEX’s responsiveness and care: “From our discovery call with our WEX account manager, Paul Gioia, I could tell right away he was committed to very high levels of service. His responsiveness – wow. In the beginning I sent so many emails and his responses were just as fast as I was pushing them out!”
Albrightson went on to share how WEX’s team quickly and efficiently onboarded and activated Sports Turf, describing her account manager, Paul Gioia, as an expert problem-solver and her advisor throughout the process. “An example of Paul’s problem-solving was the way he helped me understand best practices for using WEX’s tools. Whenever I had a question, he either answered on the spot or worked with his team to quickly create a solution.” Albrightson was also impressed with how quickly WEX was able to issue cards to Sports Turf’s drivers: “WEX got us ready to go and issued our cards very quickly. It was all super simple!”
What had previously felt laborious now felt manageable and efficient to Albrightson. “With WEX, we can easily see all the data.”
Continuous care and customer service giving Sports Turf peace of mind
The customer care Albrightson experienced with WEX extended beyond onboarding and continues to delight her. “WEX delivers the type of excellent service that we do as a company. Working with Paul and his colleague, customer success manager Will Bailey, who are so responsive when I need help, I just know WEX functions in a culture of high customer service. I always like vendors that “get it” the way I get it in terms of high customer service.”
As Sports Turf continued to grow they needed to make adjustments to the way they manage fuel, and WEX was there for Albrightson every step of the way.
Sports Turf was growing so quickly, they soon surpassed the credit limit they’d originally contracted with WEX. “We kept getting busier to the point where the credit card statements were out and we were quickly approaching that credit limit we’d originally agreed to before the bill could be auto-drafted. I reached out to Paul in the morning and within a couple of hours he got back to me saying WEX had it updated. ‘You should see your new credit limit on your profile when you log into WEX.’ Sure enough, that’s what happened. I was relieved and impressed.”
How bringing all your fueling needs into one system lowers administrative costs
Prior to finding a fuel card solution with WEX, Albrightson and her team were manually accounting for things like fuel card spend, itemizing bank statements, checking on payments manually to make sure they’d gone through. It was time-consuming and onerous. The fleet card solution changed that for Sports Turf. “Going from adjudicating 22 separate credit card statements and carving out the fuel costs on each individual card and then coding it to the same fuel accounts for everybody – it was a lot. Now, I’m down to three entries instead of 22. I open up the WEX statement and easily see X thousands of dollars for the fuel, and X amount for sales and the office, and the remaining amount is for miniscule recurring fees. That’s it. And I have access to the data and distribute reports to the leadership team without creating extra reporting.” For Albrightson, the move to a WEX solution gave her quick and easy access to the fuel spend data she needed to do her job. “I can find all of this data inside the WEX system, safely within their hula hoop.”
Finding inspiration from a vendor who delivers the epitome of customer service and support
Albrightson experiences such a high level of support and service from WEX it has led her to contemplate all of her vendor relationships as well as her own team’s ways of providing service. “When I partner with a company like WEX, it just makes me want to raise the bar in the relationships I have with my other vendors. I want to keep implementing systems that make it easier for vendors to want to do business with us. The team at WEX is really an inspiration and talking about it just inspires me to think about other ways to become more efficient. My goal is to come up with ways to do things smarter, faster, and without increasing staff to do the work because you’ve got efficient systems in place.”
Albrightson feels pride in her decision to partner with WEX and in a recent conversation a respected colleague remarked, “Last year, one of our best decisions was going with WEX.”
WEX speaks the language of small business operators. Whether you’re looking to modernize your insight and reporting efforts, save on fuel costs or take advantage of the latest GPS tracking technologies, WEX offers solutions to simplify the business of running a business. To learn more about WEX, a dynamic and nimble global organization, please visit our About WEX page.
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