Yolande McLean: The Strategic Translator and Change Agent.

In today's market, there's a fast-growing delta between what a platform can do today versus what customers expect tomorrow. Closing that gap requires a particular kind of person, someone who can operate at the executive level and translate complex operational realities into product requirements, to drive the internal change needed to make it all work.

That person at FleetGuru is Yolande McLean. 

The Role: Strategic Translator and Acceleration Engine

Yolande’s title is General Manager of Partner Enablement. Still, the best description of what she actually does is this: she makes the relationship between FleetGuru and its Fleet Management Organisation (FMO) and automotive group partners work at every level, from executive strategy to day-to-day operational reality.

She is the strategic manager for our largest FMO and group partners, which means she’s the person in the room when the conversations that matter most are happening. Her career began at Westrac, one of the world’s largest authorised Caterpillar (Cat®) equipment dealers, before she spent 11 years inside an FMO, giving her the kind of industry depth that makes those conversations credible. She understands the pressures fleet managers face, the compliance obligations FMOs carry, and the operational complexity of managing large, distributed vehicle populations.

But there’s something else that sets Yolande apart, and it’s a credential that matters deeply in a role built around operational precision: she is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. That’s not a background detail. It’s the lens through which she approaches every process, every workflow, every gap between what exists and what should exist. Six Sigma Black Belts are trained to find the root causes of problems, quantify waste, and build systems that perform consistently at scale. In a business growing as fast as FleetGuru, that discipline isn’t just useful, it’s essential.

"The fleet industry is at an inflection point. The partners who will lead the next decade aren't just looking for technology; they're looking for a relationship that helps them see around corners. That's what I'm here to build."

— Yolande McLean, General Manager of Partner Enablement

Building a Team to Match the Ambition

When Yolande joined FleetGuru, the partner function was largely a solo endeavour. That has changed. Recognising that the scale of the portfolio demands dedicated expertise, Yolande has been building a team, and two new additions reflect the seriousness of that investment.

Dean brings deep operational knowledge, with over a decade in relationship management, which will play a critical role in ensuring that our largest partners have the day-to-day support and proactive engagement they need to get the most out of the platform. His understanding of how fleet operations work on the ground makes him an invaluable bridge between partner needs and FleetGuru’s delivery.

Jodie rounds out the team, focusing on process, communication, and fleet partner experience. Her attention to detail and commitment to getting the fundamentals right mean that partners experience consistency at every touchpoint, whether that’s an onboarding conversation, a feature briefing, or an issue escalation.

Together, Dean, Jodie, and Yolande form the nucleus of a Partner Enablement function that is built to scale. As the portfolio grows, the team will grow with it. This is a function being built for where FleetGuru is going, not just where it is today.

The Maintenance Portal: From Launch to National Adoption

One of the most significant product milestones in FleetGuru’s recent history has been the launch of the Maintenance Portal, and Yolande has been at the centre of bringing it to market with partners.

The portal provides FMO clients with a dedicated, purpose-built environment for managing maintenance workflows across their entire vehicle fleets. With more than 70,000 Customer Connected Vehicles now on the platform, the appetite for this capability has been significant. FMO clients who have come live on the portal are already active users, engaging with the system, exploring its functionality, and, critically, requesting features.

That last point matters. Feature requests from active portal users aren’t noise, they’re a signal. They tell us that partners are invested in the platform, that they’re using it deeply enough to know what’s missing, and that they trust FleetGuru to respond. Yolande’s role in this cycle is to ensure that the signal is heard clearly inside the organisation, that it reaches product and engineering with the context and priority weighting it deserves.

This is the Customer Voice function in practice. And as the Maintenance Portal continues to mature, it’s becoming one of the clearest examples of what a genuine technology partnership looks like.

The Change Agent Inside the Organisation

Internally, Yolande operates as a change agent. As the FleetGuru platform evolves quickly, ensuring that partners keep pace with it is one of the most critical yet underappreciated challenges in the business. New features don't deliver value if they aren't adopted. Process improvements don't stick if they aren't managed carefully. Yolande leads the external change management required to bring partners along on that journey.

The Customer Voice in the Room

One of Yolande's most important functions is often invisible from the outside: ensuring that partners have a genuine advocate within FleetGuru's product and technology landscape. It's easy for technology roadmaps to drift away from the operational reality of the people who depend on the platform. Yolande is there to prevent that drift, sitting with the product and engineering teams, bringing the partner's perspective into prioritisation discussions, and ensuring that what gets built actually solves the problems that fleet managers face.

She calls this the 'Customer Voice' function, and it's embedded in everything she does. Whether she's contributing to discovery sessions, shaping user stories, or providing industry context to the Head of Product, her north star is always the partner's experience.

On the Road: Representing FleetGuru Nationally

If you’ve seen Yolande at an industry event in the past twelve months, you’re not imagining it; she’s been everywhere. As the sponsor of the AfMA Professional Development Series, FleetGuru has made a deliberate commitment to showing up for the fleet management community, not just as a technology provider, but as an industry partner.

Yolande has been the face of that commitment. Travelling across the country to attend events, speak at sessions, and engage directly with fleet managers and suppliers, she has invested in the relationships that don’t happen over Zoom. These conversations, at dinner tables, in workshop breaks, at roundtables, are where the real intelligence lives. What’s keeping fleet managers up at night? What are suppliers seeing in their customers that technology companies aren’t hearing? What does ‘excellent’ look like in practice?

That intelligence feeds directly back into how FleetGuru approaches its roadmap, partner strategy, and product development. The sponsorship of the Professional Development Series isn’t a marketing exercise, it’s a research investment.

What Excellence Looks Like

Yolande is also responsible for designing and leading FleetGuru's Customer Excellence Strategy, defining what it means to be an exceptional partner for our FMOs and groups, and then building the systems, processes, and culture to deliver it consistently. This includes how we communicate, how we escalate and resolve issues, how we prepare partners for platform changes, and how we measure whether the relationship is working.

She also drives continuous improvement within our own workflows. Her mandate includes auditing and overhauling the processes governing how FMOs interact with FleetGuru, identifying friction points, removing them, and building scalable systems that scale with the business. This is unglamorous work that has an outsized impact on the partner experience and on our ability to operate at scale.

"We didn't build FleetGuru to be just another vendor on a partner's list. We built it to be the platform to help FMOs innovate and leverage AI and data to scale. When our partners grow, we grow; that's our operating model, and Yolande embodies that ambition."

— Eden Shirley, Founder & MD, FleetGuru

Yolande's appointment twelve months ago reflects a broader commitment at FleetGuru: that technology partnerships only work when they're built on deep trust, strong communication, and a genuine understanding of what partners need. We're proud to have her leading that function, and we're looking forward to continuing to strengthen our FMO relationships under her leadership.

Connect at AFMA

If you're attending the 2026 AfMA Summit, don't miss the opportunity to hear Yolande speak in person, alongside Chris Martin from Geotab.

On Day 2, she will be taking the stage to present Accelerate Brainstorming to Executive Pitch with AI, a session exploring how to transform Ideation sessions into persuasive, executive-ready documents and infographics using AI.

The session will be held at 1:45 pm. Whether you're a fleet manager, an FMO leader, or a technology professional working at the intersection of operations and partnerships, this is a conversation worth joining.

Yolande brings the same directness and industry depth to every partner relationship, and you can expect honest perspectives, practical takeaways, and plenty of opportunity to ask the questions that don't always get asked in vendor meetings.

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