AAA can change your flat tire, unlock your car when you've left your keys inside or tell you where the cheapest gas station is.
But the agency is not a fuel expert.
So when it came to managing the fuel consumed by its own 250-vehicle fleet, AAA Mid-Atlantic turned to the Sokolis Group, a Warrington-based fuel management company.
Since signing up with Sokolis in 2006, AAA Mid-Atlantic has saved an average of $12,000 a month on fuel and labor, said John Poholsky, the club's fleet director. The program's been so successful that the national automobile club has made Sokolis a recommended vendor for all of its clubs in the U.S. and Canada.
AAA Mid-Atlantic serves Delaware, Maryland, Washington, D.C., and parts of Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
"We buy a lot of fuel each month," Poholsky said. "We buy it in seven different locations in five different states. We realized we needed some help, or we needed to do something different. We know we're not experts in the fuel industry. So we went to look for one."
That someone was Glen Sokolis, who started the Sokolis Group five years ago after 14 years of owning oil companies that provided fleet refueling services.
"A lot of companies ... really didn't understand what they're being charged and what their true costs of fuel were," Sokolis said. "There were a lot of clients that didn't know the true dynamics behind the cost of fuel."
Most consumers, for instance, see a 30-cent jump at the pump and think that's how much the price of the gasoline rose. What they don't know is how much goes into the price of a gallon of gas, including delivery charges, taxes, the station's profit and the cost of the fuel, Sokolis said.
The Sokolis Group uses the Oil Price Information Service, an online pricing service, to track gasoline costs around the country. From there, it helps clients negotiate prices with fueling companies.
"Oil is a dirty business," Sokolis said. "Dirty not just in the sense of the word 'oil.' It's a 'pennies' business. If someone can scratch out an extra penny, it could be worth tens of thousands of dollars to their business."
Most of the company's clients have commercial vehicles that require diesel fuel. They don't often use conventional gas stations to refuel, instead relying on mobile refueling stations that fill the trucks overnight, truck stops or "card locks," which are unattended fuel stations located around the country. Drivers use access cards to activate pumps and pay for the gas.

For AAA Mid-Atlantic, the Sokolis Group set up different fuel-buying programs for each of the club's seven fleet locations. In Philadelphia, the largest location, a company refuels vehicles overnight. That not only saves on gas - the club had bought fuel at retail prices and now negotiates a discount - but on labor, because drivers don't have to wait at gas pumps to fuel up, Poholsky said.
AAA Mid-Atlantic now uses card locks and has its own fueling station in at least one location. The Sokolis Group tracks the club's spending and generates reports to help it better manage the fleet.
As gas prices have risen, Sokolis said his company has gotten busier. The client base has increased by about 25 percent over the past year, he said. Clients typically save between 10 cents and 14 cents a gallon, he said.
For Sokolis, rising gas prices are a supply-and-demand issue. The world's oil consumption is growing faster than the supply.
"As a country, everybody wants to point blame: 'It's all speculation,' " he said. "I don't believe that. There's a little bit of speculation. But there's good reason to speculate. You have a supply and demand issue that's real."
Sokolis described himself as "a regular person" who's not a Republican or a Democrat, a liberal or a conservative. He drives a Honda Accord; his wife has a sport utility vehicle. He supports drilling in Alaska and developing alternative fuel sources, but he believes the country pushed ethanol too fast, and that's behind the rising food prices.
Sokolis said gas prices will keep rising until later this year and won't ever return to the $2-agallon mark.
"I think they'll go up," he said. "Sometime in the third quarter, we'll see them come down. [Then] I think they'll go up again."
To Michael Butler, every little thing his company does to save on fuel adds up. Butler is president of Victory Gardens, a Warminster company that sells and delivers mulch and other landscaping supplies.
Butler said fuel costs have doubled, while the prices he charges customers have gone up by 22 percent.
"We know what our monthly costs are, and we can keep our daily transactions," he said.
"We're getting the best freight price on fuel delivered to us. And they give you a horizon on what to look out [for] ahead."

July 13, 2008 8:25 AM