To Rick Gerding, a member of our partnership development team, the most important part of his job is the relationships he builds with both our fleet customers and our software partners. Coming up on two years at Booster, he works on the sales side, a role that sends him around the country to help other mobile fuelers and grow Booster’s enterprise network. When you ask him what the job is really about, the answer is straightforward: solving the fueling problems that quietly drain a customer’s business.
That instinct comes from experience. Before Booster, Rick spent nearly a decade in construction as an owner-operator, which means he did not learn about fleet fueling from a sales deck. He learned it at the pump and in his budget ledger every month.
From Owner-Operator to Booster: Seeing Solutions In Real Time
“Why Booster? Really, why not Booster,” Rick says of the decision to join. During his years running construction projects, it was impossible to ignore the time lost to fueling. Crews of three or four people would sit at the pumps for 20 or 30 minutes at a stretch, followed by the inevitable calls to let clients know the day was running behind.
Then there were the fuel cards. Forgotten fuel card pins and lost cards were a daily struggle, so when he discovered gasoline delivery that came straight to his job sites, the appeal was immediate. His only regret was not having it sooner. “I was just sad that I didn’t have that in my tool bag when I was running my own business,” he shared. “It would have been such an easy signup for me.”
The Problems Booster Solves for Fleet Operators
Having sat on the customer side, Rick can rattle off the pain points without pausing. Time at the gas station is an obvious one, while fuel card management is the one that wears on a team day after day.
“You have to manage all the PIN numbers. You have to make sure people can remember them. People get locked out, they go over spending limits, they’re constantly using another person’s card,” he explained. The downstream effect is reporting that no longer accurately reflects reality. “You have 30 cards in a fleet and only one card gets used, so your reporting is wrong.” It’s not that fuel cards inherently cause a problem – it’s that the system itself is too unwieldy to be effective. Removing the card from the equation removes the exposure that comes with it, which is the same logic behind Booster’s fuel theft prevention approach.
Then there are the mistakes that turn into expensive afternoons. Rick has seen drivers cross-fill the wrong fuel into the wrong vehicle, putting diesel in a gas engine or gas in a diesel one. “You’re looking at a tow bill, draining the tank, new filters, all of these things that are just such a pain,” he says. It really adds up. Sometimes to the tune of $35k when you look at equipment replacement in the worst cases.
For Rick, every one of those headaches points back to a single idea. “You want to run your business. You don’t want to manage fuel,” he says. “You save the money, you save time, and most importantly, you just don’t have to think about going to a gas station ever again. That’s the biggest value prop you could ever look at as an operator.”
For Booster, Relationships Come First in the Pacific Northwest
Rick joined Booster just as the company was moving into a new region in the Pacific Northwest, an expansion that landed close to home. Living just down I-5 in Eugene, he got to open up his own backyard and serve the fleets and small companies he’d been driving the roads with for years.
His approach to that work is refreshingly low on jargon. “All sales really is is just relationships,” he says. “Everybody’s just people at the end of the day.” Rather than leading with a product, he leads with a question. “What keeps you up at night? What is the thing that moves the needle the most for you?”
That curiosity is what makes the job rewarding for him, whether he is talking with a parts center, a landscape company, or any of the operators up and down the West Coast. In his experience, no fleet manager loves their current fueling setup. Everyone has something about fuel costs, labor, or card management they wish they could change, and Rick sees his role as finding the one that matters most and solving it.
Scaling Service Nationwide with BoosterOS
Right now, Rick is part of the team expanding Booster’s partnerships across the country through BoosterOS, the platform that runs the company’s day-to-day operations on the West Coast. He is quick to point out why that origin matters to the fuel distributors he now has the opportunity to work with.
“We’ve got one of the largest fleets in the U.S. We’ve got 150 SmartTankers that run every single night,” he says, fueling everyone from mom-and-pops to the biggest players in the industry. “We have a proving ground that really no other tech company has. Our operations run on it every single day, and we have a vested interest in making sure this works. Because if it doesn’t, our operators are calling us.”
That accountability is the part Rick keeps returning to. The technology is built and stress-tested by a team he is happy to credit as “way smarter than I’ll ever be,” but the point of it is service. “We’re all about the customer, making sure they’re taken care of end to end,” he says, “and our technology allows that seamlessly across the network.” It is the same standard reflected in all of Booster’s technology from our SmartTankers to our customer portals.
Rick’s story is a reminder that good fueling is not just about fuel. It’s the time returned to your drivers, and the risk taken off your books. It’s one less thing to think about at the end of the day. If your team is ready to stop managing the gas station and start running your business, reach out to a member of our team or to Rick directly.