Headlight uses cookies to improve your website experience. Read more

Headlight in 2024: Our Clear Transition to a Fleet Management Software Company

Headlight in 2024: Our Clear Transition to a Fleet Management Software Company - Headlight

Headlight, a fleet management software company that started with Strategy Consulting by “let it fleet”

In 2021, the federal government published the law of 25 November 2021 on the ‘Tax and social greening of mobility’. The new law implied that for company cars ordered from 01/07/2023, the tax deduction percentage would gradually drop year by year before finally being completely extinguished in tax year 2029 (financial year from 01/01/2028 onwards).

As a result, a sense of urgency emerged for companies to accelerate their efforts to electrify their fleet. A lot of companies had been starting with introducing electrical vehicles, but were struggling with the transition. Based on the experience in the sector, the founding team behind Headlight (back then, active as “let it fleet”) offered companies to help them with auditing, designing and implementing their future fleet and mobility policies. Our differentiator in the market was the software-driven approach in our strategic exercises, in which we simulated and forecasted different policies in terms of costs, TCO and emissions.

During the period 2021-2022, we helped well-know Belgian companies with their transition to an electric fleet. Examples include projects we did at Accenture, P&V, Attentia and Volvo Group. From the beginning, we also started building dedicated fleet management software, with front-end tooling that helped us doing a better job in our projects. As of early 2022, several of these clients started using our “Policy Analysis” tool, a module developed to let organisations play with different policy/TCO parameters themselves, to see the impact on the available offering of vehicles in their policy.

founding team

Founding Team Headlight, back in 2021

From administrative burden to “the seamless organisation of corporate mobility”

By talking with clients and prospects, it early on became clear that the struggles with the transition to electric were also due to the fact that the administrative burden for the fleet manager was already very high. Implementing a new strategy seemed to be a challenge: existing fleet processes would have to change, (data from) new suppliers integrated, and more.

We made it our mission to “bring about the seamless organisation of corporate mobility“, convinced that the Fleet & Mobility manager should be able to work on value-added tasks, such as drafting new strategic plans, analysing strategy compliance, or benchmark and challenge suppliers – because the manual, repetitive tasks are automated via dedicated fleet management software. We allocated a large part of our resources to developing a flexible fleet management software product we envisioned would tremendously help fleet managers in their day-to-day job.

Market validation

Late 2022, we had reached a first version of the Headlight platform, and launched a campaign to present our tool to fleet managers. During these months, we talked with dozens and dozens of fleet manager about their challenges and how Headlight could help them with that. We identified which key aspects were resonating well, en which were still missing, and iterated on our product – fast.

By the beginning of 2023, we officially launched our Headlight fleet management software product as stand-alone offering in the market. By summer, first fleet customers signed up. As were are a bootstrapped company, the team still took on strategic consulting projects to be able to fund our software activities. In 2023, for instance, we helped companies such as GSK (3200 vehicles) and Alstom (850 vehicles), with their fleet & mobility project.

In the second half of 2023, more organisations signed up. Our platform was quickly growing more mature, with new features and major improvements in every release. We closed 2023 with close to 1,000 vehicles contracted to be managed via Headlight, and already around 20% of total turnover stemmed from our Headlight product.

transition to fleet management software

Transition of turnover to fleet management software

2024: all-in on fleet management software

Since we noticed a growing adoption of our Headlight platform, we made a drastic decision: we would no longer take on new consulting projects outside the context of a software license. To show the market that Headlight is our primary offering, we shifted our principal commercial brand name to Headlight. As a result of these actions, our strategy consulting revenue dropped from ~80% to <2% of total turnover in 2024 YTD.

As the visual of our turnover shows, 2024 became the year in which we made the hard transition from a consulting company to a software company. In the mean time, new and large fleets started using our platform, totalling close to 5,000 vehicles in management by 2024Q4. As some of our customers ask for dedicated support during the go-live, we offer a range of Headlight Services in addition to our software product. As close to all of our clients are starting to use our product in 2024, the services still make up a large part of the turnover, and it should decline over time.

 

Looking ahead

In coming quarters, we intend to keep growing in Belgium, but also abroad, with neighbouring countries as primary focus. We have a huge focus on In terms of product development, the capabilities of our fleet management platform will be further expanded, with support for flexible mobility options. Furthermore, employees will be able to use our Headlight mobile application.

The Headlight Team (2024)