Fractional DOT Safety Manager

Terry Shipman

Safety Accountability
CLASS A CDL · TANKER  //  OSHA 30  //  ACCIDENT INVESTIGATION  //  24 YRS

I ran DOT safety and compliance for a 380-driver fleet inside a 1,300-employee distribution division. Before that I drove for it — seventeen years, Class A, clean. Now I do that job for fleets too small to hire someone full time.

Get a free file review

Why bring in an outsider

Accountability doesn't survive the org chart

Most fleets already know which supervisors run loose. The data usually says so plainly. What stops anything from happening isn't the data — it's that the person holding it has to work alongside the people it indicts, and has a career sitting in the same building.

Internal safety manager

Reports into the problem

  • Scores supervisors who outrank his boss
  • Ten years of history with everyone on the list
  • "He's a good guy" quietly beats the number
  • Escalating costs him relationships he needs Monday
  • Findings get softened before they're presented
Outside safety manager

Reports to the owner

  • No history with anyone on the list
  • Nothing to lose by naming a number out loud
  • Findings go to you unfiltered, in writing
  • Same standard applied to every supervisor
  • You decide what happens — I just make it visible

A supervisor scorecard is easy to build. Getting it to change behavior is the hard part, and it fails inside far more often than it fails on the math.

What I've actually built

Not theory. Systems that ran daily.

Every one of these was built from nothing, because nobody asked for it and nobody else was going to.

Risk scoring

Telematics behavior tied to real crashes

Pulled behavior events against actual incident history to find which ones predicted a wreck and which ones were noise. Harsh turns and following distance separated the incident drivers from everyone else by a wide margin. Coaching went where the loss was, instead of where the alert volume was.

Accountability

Supervisor scorecards

Incident rate broken out by supervisor, not just by driver. The spread between the best and worst teams was enormous and had been invisible for years. Safety stopped being one person's department and became a number each leader owned.

Loss analysis

Preventability trending at scale

Every incident classified, sourced, and trended — then turned into written recommendations and corrective action plans for senior leadership. The point was never the report. The point was which three things to fix first.

Compliance

The whole DOT file, end to end

Driver qualification files, Hours of Service and ELD records, post-accident and random testing, drug and alcohol program, FMCSA Clearinghouse. The paperwork that decides how an audit goes before the auditor ever shows up.

Investigation

Defensible records from first notice

Root cause worked from telematics, video, and the driver's own account — documented the way it needs to read two years later when a plaintiff's attorney is holding it.

How it works

A safety department you rent

A full-time safety manager runs $95,000–$115,000 loaded. That math doesn't work until you're somewhere north of forty trucks. Below that it's the owner, the owner's wife, or nobody — and "nobody" is who most fleets have.

Compliance Watch

$299 / month

I watch your CSA scores, flag what's moving the wrong direction, and tell you what to fix before it becomes an inspection problem. Monthly review call.

5–15 power units

Fractional Safety Manager

$850 / month + $25 per unit over 15

The real thing. DQ file management, HOS review, incident investigation, driver coaching documentation, supervisor accountability reporting, and audit prep. You get a safety department without a salary line.

10–45 power units

Projects

$1,950 – $7,500 flat

New entrant audit prep. Post-audit corrective action. DQ file rebuild from scratch. Fixed scope, fixed price, defined end date.

Any size

Who you're hiring

I held the CDL before I ran the department

Twenty-four years in commercial food distribution, all of it at one company, working up from the driver's seat.

17 yrs
Route Delivery DriverClass A, clean record, full Hours-of-Service compliance
<1 yr
Driver Trainer & DOT SupervisorNew-driver training on FMCSA regs, inspections, defensive driving
3 yrs
Shuttle Site ManagerSite operations, driver oversight, DOT compliance
3 yrs
Branch Safety ManagerAll fleet and warehouse safety for a 1,300-employee division running 380 drivers

Most people selling fleet safety are ex-enforcement, attorneys, or a call center reading from a script. That's a different job than the one your drivers do. I know what a fourteen-hour day actually looks like, why a driver skips the pre-trip when he's already late, and which rules get broken quietly. Recommendations from someone who's been in the seat land differently — with your drivers and with an auditor.

Start here

Send me one driver file

Pick your messiest driver qualification file and email it to me. I'll go through it against the FMCSA requirements and walk you through what's missing on a call this week. No charge, no obligation. If you never call me again, you still end up with one clean file.

tship79@gmail.com

817-692-4664