Finding the Right Fuel Truck Driver Is Harder Than It Looks. Ovante Johnson Told Me Why
A conversation with the operations manager of Pacific States Petroleum on hiring, culture, and what happens after the 90-day mark.
Ovante Johnson knows what it is like to sit in the driver’s seat.
Before he became operations manager at Pacific States Petroleum, he drove fuel trucks himself. He has done the early mornings, the unpredictable hours, the remote delivery sites, the customer calls from the cab. He knows what the job actually requires because he has done the job.
That background matters when you are the person deciding who gets hired to do it next.
I sat down with Ovante recently to talk about something that does not get discussed enough in fuel distribution: how hard it actually is to find and keep the right driver. Not just someone with a CDL and a clean record. Someone who fits the culture, handles the complexity, and is still showing up six months later the same way they showed up on day one.
A note on this piece: this article is based on a real conversation with Ovante Johnson, operations manager at Pacific States Petroleum. Some dialogue has been lightly reconstructed for clarity while preserving the substance of our conversation.
What the resume tells you before you pick up the phone
Ovante is direct about what he looks for on paper before anyone gets a call.
Red flags: multiple roles with three to six month tenures. A pattern of job hopping signals a retention risk before the interview even starts.
“Training a fuel truck driver costs real time and real money,” he said. “If someone has cycled through four companies in two years, I have to ask myself whether it is worth the investment.”
Green lights: longevity at previous companies, an active CDL, and hazmat experience. Fuel distribution experience specifically is not required.
“A driver who spent eight years at a trucking company and never touched fuel is still a strong candidate,” Ovante said. “Long tenure tells me they can commit. We can teach the fuel side. We cannot teach reliability.”
The industry-specific knowledge is learnable. The work ethic and the willingness to show up consistently is much harder to develop after the fact.
The 90-day problem
This is the part of the conversation that stayed with me longest.
I asked Ovante what the biggest challenge in hiring actually is. Not the hardest part of screening. The hardest part of building a driver team that holds together over time.
He did not hesitate.
“The 90-day mark.”
Post-COVID, the CDL pool shifted. A meaningful share of newer drivers have five or six years of experience rather than ten or fifteen. And with that shift came a different set of expectations about what the job looks like day to day.
Ovante tells every candidate upfront: do not schedule appointments on work days. Hours are unpredictable. More hours means more pay, and the company frames that as a positive rather than a burden. But the mindset required to genuinely embrace that reality is harder to screen for than any technical skill.
The interview can reveal a lot. It cannot always reveal how someone will feel about the job three months in when the initial energy has settled and the reality of the schedule sets in.
What Pacific States is actually selling
Pacific States Petroleum is employee-owned. That fact shapes everything about how Ovante talks about the company, how existing employees describe it, and how the culture gets transmitted to new hires.
“If you want to be a number, go elsewhere,” Ovante said. “If you want to be valued, come here.”
The operations manager works alongside drivers and mechanics. There is no practical title hierarchy in the day to day reality of the operation. The president knows the drivers by name. The culture is hard-working and emergency-driven, because fuel distribution does not run on a predictable schedule, but it is also a community.
That community is transmitted peer to peer. Existing drivers, dispatchers, and managers carry the narrative organically. The company does not force a culture deck on new hires. The culture is absorbed by working alongside the people who already live it.
“We do not have to explain our culture in an orientation session,” Ovante said. “New hires figure it out pretty fast just by watching how we operate.”
What this means for the industry
The fuel distribution driver shortage is real but it is not simply a supply problem. There are CDL holders in the market. The challenge is finding the ones whose expectations align with what the job actually requires, and retaining them once they understand what that means in practice.
The operators who figure this out first are not necessarily offering the highest pay. They are offering something harder to replicate: a clear culture, honest expectations, and a team environment where the work feels worth doing.
Pacific States has built that. It did not happen by accident. It happened because people like Ovante, who drove the trucks before they managed the teams, understand what the job actually asks of the people doing it.
The hiring problem in fuel distribution is not that there are no good drivers. It is that finding the ones who will still be there at the 90-day mark, and the year mark, and the five-year mark, requires more than a CDL check and a phone screen.
It requires knowing what you are actually hiring for. And being honest about it before anyone signs an offer letter.
The question worth asking if you hire fuel drivers
What do you tell candidates about the hours before they accept the offer?
And more importantly: do you tell them in a way that actually prepares them for a Tuesday in February, or in a way that sounds manageable until it isn’t?
The 90-day problem is almost always a conversation that did not happen clearly enough in the first three weeks.
Next issue: I went to Denver looking for a dispatch problem. I found an Outlook calendar.
About the author
I’m Dibyesh Giri, founder of Fueleo. I spend my time talking to fuel marketers about the messy handoffs between pricing, dispatch, delivery, BOLs, invoicing, inventory, and accounting. This newsletter is where I write about what I find.