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Episode 186 is a conversation with Brad Bonavida and James Dice from Nexus Labs, as well as Leslie Beu from Clockworks Analytics and Reed Powell from MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions.
Episode 186 is a conversation with Brad Bonavida and James Dice from Nexus Labs, as well as Leslie Beu from Clockworks Analytics and Reed Powell from MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions. In this episode of the Nexus Podcast, the Nexus Labs team breaks down the top stories relevant to energy managers, facility managers, IT/OT managers, and workplace managers.
Introduction (0:50)
At the Nexus (5:21)
Digitizing Operations and Maintenance (8:56)
NexusCon (31:00)
Sign off (40:00)
Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S706971-16073.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
James Dice: [00:00:00] Hey friends, if you like the Nexus Podcast, the best way to continue the learning is to join our community. There are three ways to do that. First, you can join the Nexus Pro membership. It's our global community of smart Boeing professionals. We have monthly events, paywall, deep dive content, and a private chat room, and it's just $35 a month.
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The links are below in the show notes, and now let's go on the podcast.
Welcome to the Nexus podcast. It's James. Um, for the full experience with this, we're gonna have some commentary on what we published [00:01:00] and what's going on with Nexus Con. So, um, always our reminder is to sign up for the Nexus newsletter so I don't miss anything. This is more just fun and hanging out with friends, uh, comment, commenting on what's going on with everything going on with Nexus.
So we have, today we have Leslie Bue. And Reid Powell. Can you guys, um, introduce yourselves? Leslie's second time on the podcast. Reid first timer. Leslie, uh, are you excited to be back? Of course. What's your, I'm definitely
Leslie Beu: excited
James Dice: you've had a career change since then. What's going on with you?
Leslie Beu: I have, I, instead of, uh.
Being a partner and utilizing software. Now I have actually joined the joined Clockworks as the director of program management. So now I get to help all of my, uh, previous, if you call 'em competitors, though we were all working together fairly well, um, and actually push the industry forward from, from [00:02:00] this side.
And so I'm really excited to also be here with Reid.
James Dice: Do you feel like this is a sustainable, uh, recruiting, uh, solution for Clockworks to be hiring all of their customers?
Leslie Beu: Oh, they were, they were definitely nervous. Definitely tread lightly. We made sure previous company was, was perfectly fine. Um, it all went really well and we're all still great friends.
James Dice: No, in all seriousness, it's a cool, it's a cool move because you've learned so much from the other side, right? And so you can,
Leslie Beu: you know.
James Dice: Help all the other potential contractors. Exactly. Reed, what about you? First time caller, long time listener.
Reed Powell: Yeah, for sure. I, I typically listen, uh, while I'm riding my road bike.
I go do some little route on some hills that I do and I can do two podcasts and a ride. Um, so yeah, long, long time. Listener for Nexus. Uh, as far as job, job role work for McDon Miller, mechanical Design Build, um, and service provider [00:03:00] in the Pacific Northwest in the us. Um, decently so like maybe a, a core difference for, for folks listening for context is, um, our service and construction businesses are, are pretty much on equal footing as far as like percentage of, of teams and, and revenue that we do just.
Traditionally a little different services, usually much smaller, more to focus on warranty support rather than like a core, core business feature. Um, but we also do major, major constructions as well. Uh, for me personally at the company, been here for 10 years, started, wanted to get into sustainability and saving energy, and that kind of led me right down the path of analytics and measurement and verification.
That's flowed into how are we providing service, but leveraging, leveraging tech to do so. And so my responsibilities are, are that, but also our HVAC service side of the business, um, as well as some controls as well. Cool.
James Dice: And you have a hurt risk right now. So I'm, now I'm making up the story that you were mountain biking, listening to the Nexus [00:04:00] podcast and Brad said something crazy.
And you fell off your bike? Is that, is that
Reed Powell: what happened? It's not like way too far off. I actually only have the mental capacity to listen to a podcast and road bike, which is much, much simpler. But I did hurt my wrist. Mountain biking. August is a classic time you've. You've been riding tacky dirt in the northwest for most of the summer.
It's grippy, it's awesome. August comes, everything turns to dust. You think you can take a turn at the same speed, you can't traction's worse. Um, I don't actually know what happened, but 10 seconds later I was still standing there later on my bike, but 20 feet down the, the trail and my wrist hurt quite badly, so.
Wow. Okay. I think, I think there was some tumbling in there, but that's the benefit of having clipped in shoes. Sometimes you just stay on the bike. Uh.
James Dice: Yeah, I don't mountain bike, but I imagine that we have tacky dirt or dust more of the year than tacky dirt. Yeah.
Reed Powell: Yeah. I was actually kind of just poking Brad a little bit, that he lives in the wrong part of the country [00:05:00] for biking.
Brad Bonavida: It's true. I've lived in both sections and it, it's a fact. Pacific Northwest has better mountain biking. It's just true. Colorado's close. But
James Dice: for the listeners, Brad is also here. Brad, what? What have you been working on?
Brad Bonavida: Hi. Uh, well. What have I been working on? Um, Reid brought us to this podcast a little earlier in the morning than we typically do it, so nothing yet this morning, but, uh, I'll jump into some Nexus updates.
Uh, we had two kind of announcements of things going on that we announced this, uh, week. So first, uh, in our newsletter this week, we announced that we're doing a Nexus Con after party, uh, the second night, Tuesday. Um, last year at Nexus Con the second night, everyone was kinda like, where are you going to dinner?
Like, what's going on? And, you know, we're a little bit outside of downtown Denver, so we kind of just improv, got a bunch of people to go to a place in downtown Denver so that, you know, people could see the city a little bit. We're formalizing that this year. Um, we're going to this [00:06:00] trendy spot called Happy Camper that's in kind of the north side of Denver.
We're gonna have all you can eat food and drinks. Um, they got like this whole section of the outdoor covered patio rented out for us. It's gonna be really cool. Um, and we're selling tickets to that. It's $95, which is what it would cost you to go get food in Denver anyway, but this is just going to be with all of the people that you just did the first two days of Nexus Con with.
So it's gonna be super fun. Um, we will put in the show notes a link to buy your ticket 'cause you gotta buy that ticket in advance so that we know you're coming and can plan for you. Um, but yeah, we're look, looking forward to that one. That's gonna be fun. Um,
James Dice: what do you think, James? And for those of us that live in Denver, it will be the, the, the opportunity to go to Happy Camper when you're over 30 because you know that you don't go there on a, you know, on a normal Tuesday night, those of us over 30 don't go to Happy Camper, but we're taking that place over.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. Exactly, yeah, from the Gen [00:07:00]
James Dice: Zers,
Brad Bonavida: it's typically not the demographic of Nexus Con, but we're taking it so it will be our demographic for the night. So yeah. Cool spot, trendy spot to be. I'll say that. Yeah. Good views of the city and stuff too, and like cool area to walk around and stuff. The other just quick announcement was that we.
Just, uh, sent out our invite to the September Building Owner Meetup. Uh, it's gonna be on September 24th at 9:00 AM Mountain Time. Um, and we're doing this one on constructing the independent data layer, so it's gonna be pretty cool. We're bringing in some of our partners who help build independent data layers, and they're gonna give you kind of a demonstration of what they do.
And then we break out into these discussions where you'll hear from other building owners about. Where they're at in it. Some people are far, some people haven't even started. And like, what, what is a good, what would it do for you to have an independent data layer? So, um, you, if you're a building owner and you listen to our podcast, you probably have an invite to that.
If you don't, we'll also put a link in so that you can get an invite to that if you wanna join. [00:08:00]
James Dice: Okay. A few, few other quick housekeeping items. We're doing, um, a referral program. So read. Reed went skiing with us last year. We're doing a, uh, free ski trip to the person who refers the most people. Um, and I'm looking at the leaderboard right now.
It says I'm gonna win, but, uh, it obviously isn't, isn't gonna happen. Um, um, we have a three-way tie for first place. Um, I'm not gonna lead read out the leaderboard right now, but we're we're, let's just say it's anybody's game still, I think. So Reed and Leslie are both, both in Tide for second right now, let's say that.
So you guys could both win. You guys could both win. So people can basically, uh, refer people and when they register, they can put your name and then we will chalk it up to on the leaderboard and we'll see who wins. Um, let's, let's jump into it. It's a good enough intro for [00:09:00] now. Um, we are talking about tech enabled services.
So, Brad, do you wanna talk about just like where the category came from, because you kind of named this real quick.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah, actually just, this goes back to last year's Nexus con ski trip. Um, you know, we'd been talking with Matt, the Mac Miller team and Reid a bunch. We obviously, you know, James, you've been doing, uh, articles and just explaining fault detection diagnostics, what Clockworks and so many others do forever, but.
When I was with Reid Reid, we were sitting in the lobby of that hotel room and we were talking about how Mac Miller uses fault detection and diagnostics, and how that's a differentiator for a service provider to do something like that. We're trying to describe like how do we name that because we wanted to put in the Nexus marketplace where James and I have been working for more than two years now on categorizing these different things that people can do and these different [00:10:00] services that are there.
So. We went back and forth, and that's kind of the term we landed on for. Just when a service provider, and it doesn't have to necessarily be a control service provider, I think that there can be different versions of this, but when some building service provider is using technologies to improve the service that they're doing to the building, so often we're thinking about all these technologies and we're thinking that the building owner is using them for their own building.
But what about a service provider that services a bunch of different people's buildings
James Dice: and it's really about changing. The service contract to reflect that, we now have this piece of technology that enables you to provide a better service. Right? But it really goes back, so you guys coined this in February or whenever it was, but it really goes back.
So I had. RY com and Bueno on the podcast and Long Leslie, when Leslie was at Long and Clockworks on the podcast and like it, it's stuff that people have been talking, we had sessions about it at Nexus Con [00:11:00] last year. So it's, it's, it's, we're trying to, trying to basically name what other people are, are already doing and saying.
Right. Um, and so we wrote this article, um, Ainsley wrote this article. He is not here today, but, um, he wrote this article basically laying out. The, the transition that a contractor might go through to, um, go from the status quo. So he does a really good job in this article of outlining what the status quo is of a, a normal service contract.
And then based on their interviews with Reed and others, we got this like basically progression, progression of service provider maturity on this, where you're going from the status quo to being tech technologically curious to. Reid helped us see that there's actually an intermittent stage after that, which is basically like recording your, um, customer's information digitally.
So he called that technology enabled record keeping and then going to outcome-based maintenance, which is [00:12:00] basically like. Shifting from time and materials to more like, what, what are we trying to achieve basically? And then getting into condition-based maintenance, which I know is Nick from Clockworks, his favorite, favorite phrase these days.
Um, and then the, and then we have a future state or stage here that really a lot, no, no one's really at it sounds like right now, which is basically getting to where you're actually billing. Based on the outcomes instead of billing based off of your hours. And so, um, let's, let's stop there. That's basically what the article's about.
Um, Leslie, what was your, I know you posted on LinkedIn about this article and said this, this was spot on. I don't remember what you said, but something like that. What were your thoughts? 'cause you weren't involved in the interviews, you just read it after it happened.
Leslie Beu: Right. No, I, I said I couldn't have said it better.
Um, I was really impressed with the article after having lived this for years and years, [00:13:00] um, at multiple different service providers going from the status quo to talking about the, the technology enabled, uh, services. So when I read it, I was marveling at some of the really specific. Um, details about really, really where that transition happens because in my experience, it's, it's easier to say, yes, we want to do this, and yes, we have this technology and we are going to sell a service that has this technology, but.
The transition that was talked about in the article about actually using it for record keeping. So good job read.
Thinking about this outcome-based maintenance and not just saying, we're gonna add on analytics, we're gonna add on some sort of software, and we're just gonna, you know, pass it through. We're just gonna [00:14:00] sell it. But really actually transforming the service and the way it's done is kind of the key I think, in, in those various stages that are listed.
And that's incredibly difficult. It's also what makes this more important and more relevant and actually enables that actual outcome to happen. So you're, I think you're spot on that the full outcome based billing or service. Has not necessarily been achieved yet, but it's getting really close. I think that a lot of service providers are thinking about this.
It's, it's tricky though because it's risky. Um, and when service companies traditionally have, you know, good profits, good growth, it's really. It's really challenging, obviously, to think, well, let's just change all of this up. And so we actually need, [00:15:00] we need the customers to, to be informed by reading articles like this and actually start demanding more of their service providers and seeing what service providers are truly, really doing.
And a lot of that is shown through the contract, through the, the billing or the. Proposal. The agreement really does a good job, I think of, of saying what's happening. And if all it says is, yeah, we use analytics, or yeah, we use technology to do something, but it doesn't say how, how that's measured, what the KPIs are, what the outcome could be, then it's still likely more just traditional service, but.
I think that a lot of those service companies are trying to get there.
Brad Bonavida: I was gonna ask Leslie, just to, to level set at kind of the beginning of this, can you explain what the traditional is, like, the step zero status quo? What does that mean? What, what do most people [00:16:00] do in terms of service?
Leslie Beu: A lot of the good service providers will at least do tasks based on, uh, based on ashrae, um, making sure that the, the task list for service is robust and adequate.
Um, but as we all know, all of the actual preventive maintenance kind of gets pushed by the wayside. I mean, maybe contractually it doesn't. Um, and so therefore. The clients, the, the building owners might be paying a whole lot for it. Um, or maybe, you know, maybe the, the clients agree that certain tasks don't really need to be done, or they're constantly just pushing, okay, yes, I know you have to come and do this service that you promised me you would do.
But actually we have this other emergency over here. So it's a lot of firefighting, it's a lot of, um. A lot of just making sure that the client is comfortable and a [00:17:00] lot of pushing actual service to the back burner. Um, but even with great companies, worked for great companies, um, that do what they say they're going to do, the clients just end up paying, you know, quite a bit of money, um, to get the tasks done that are specified, uh, for each piece of equipment.
And then still pay more for actually fixing the equipment and pay more for actually diagnosing or troubleshooting what's wrong. And so it's just kind of this billing per hour that, that then the service company is really not incentivized to do it faster. Um, and even though there's a lot of good people at the service companies.
Try to do it well and they intend to do it well. And if they have a good training program, they likely are trying to get better. There's really not a whole lot of measurement there because if [00:18:00] they can bill for three hours, why would they want to try to push to do it in one hour? So that's, I guess, the status quo that I, I have experienced in multiple different companies.
James Dice: Yeah, totally. And it feels like. The McDonald Millers of the world are out there saying like we've, we've come across and developed this new way of doing it. But there's almost this chicken of the egg, chicken in the egg thing going on where building owners don't know that this is possible. And then when they look in their market, maybe they're not in the Pacific Northwest, they're not seeing anyone that is offering this service when they go to renew their service contract.
So Reid, when you think about what a building owner's supposed to do. I mean, we have a section in the article about this, but what do you, what do you think they should do about this chicken and the egg thing?
Reed Powell: Well, I, I mean, we're talking about a, a pretty big industry shift, and so I,
James Dice: yeah.
Reed Powell: Something that would be important for any of them to keep in mind is, uh, like what, [00:19:00] what are the controllables for them?
And. I think a lot of that just starts with having the conversation with your service provider who is a partner in your building success, right? Um, of where you would like to go. And there's, there's tons of content in the Nexus sphere of you have to start the conversation with your service provider, um, because in some cases there might be some capital outlay that you have to make depending on what level of detail, of metric that you want within that contract.
So if you want. A certain, if you wanted to go all the way down to a very detailed amount of, number of faults, or even just how often am I in within a certain comfort range, and maybe I don't have the sensing or I want something around IAQ, like what whatever you decide is important within that facility could be energy spend and you want it broken out by tenant, right?
There could be some metering infrastructure, so there is some CapEx, but if you're the. If you're the owner, it [00:20:00] starts that conversation of where you would like to get to. Um, and for a lot of service providers, this will sound similar to something that was very popular 15 years ago, which is full coverage contracts.
So I go with a maintenance provider and I am going to pay them to cover not just the maintenance cost, but also the repair cost, and there will be inclusions and exclusions of what's within those. Repair costs. Usually there's a very rough order of magnitude price increase that they would pay, and that's essentially the building owner saying, I am locking in my price.
I'm gonna have a very low percentage variability so I can base all of my, my financial metrics off of that. Then the onus is onto the service provider for them to manage and do the repairs when they think it's best for the building, but also to make sure they can stay in business and offer these full coverage contracts.
Um. Because there was low availability of building data. Those things kind [00:21:00] of trended out of style because service providers realized, man, this is super hard for me to make any money and not actually lose money and be paying for these assets in these buildings, uh, without lots of insight into them. Okay, so those fade out of popularity, but then the concepts coming back, as you say, can I get metrics within my building?
And building owners need to start maybe taking a little bit of inspiration from the s the technology sphere and talk about SLAs versus maintenance contracts. So, and, and service providers will be used to some version of that, right? It could be response time, there could be an SLA around response time.
It would be very new for someone to say, I need an SLA around a comfort score within my building, or an energy score within my building. Um. And pricing that is, is gonna be different based on the type of facility control system you have, where you're at, at in your [00:22:00] lifecycle renewal phase for capital assets within the building.
And so it's, it's not an easy question, but uh, it, it's in concept, right? That's, that's the direction. There's lots of intangible benefits for the, for the owners.
James Dice: Leslie, I'm curious what you think about the chicken and the egg, because you're. I don't know your new role, but I'm assuming it's something related to creating more McDonald Millers in the market that are able to bring technology into the service contract.
Leslie Beu: Yeah, so I have a comment on both. Um, my role is not necessarily being individually, you know, creating more McDonald Miller's, but certainly Clockworks wants to, to create robust, uh, service providers in the, in the industry and, and come alongside them is really where I'm at. So, as a director of program management, really looking at the different programs that.
Let's say re and his team are requesting like more enablement for better condition-based maintenance, um, [00:23:00] asset planning, really looking at how can we build into the tools, some of the things that otherwise somebody has to do manually so that they can provide a, a better service ultimately. But in terms of the chicken and the egg, uh.
Thought here. Um, a lot of the reads said that pricing, pricing, that kind of model is really difficult. It's, it's a new frontier. Uh, so we need more KPIs, um, but not just all the KPIs, right? We need to understand what impacts the, the various triggers or mechanisms that cause the, the comfort score to, to drop.
And then who's measuring it? Is third party measuring it like an analytics, um. Provider, uh, or, you know, or is the, the individual company like Mac Miller measuring it. Um, but coming back from just talking about the pricing of it, I think the, one of the other huge [00:24:00] challenges and maybe why some service providers don't even necessarily wanna start having the discussion about how to price that is you actually have to kind of.
Tear apart and rebuild the entire structure of how you do the service. So a lot of the, and I think this was mentioned in this article or another, but like if CMMS, uh, work order systems are, are typically used to, uh, you know, to send a.
If you're, if you're using A-C-M-M-S system that doesn't, isn't capable of reacting to, uh, triggers or different changes in the data, then how do you just stop doing that and, and how do you start sending somebody when it's quote needed? You've got to then enable the technology to. Alert, but not over [00:25:00] alert, right?
Because if you just end up with a lot of alarms and a lot of, you know, fires, like you're just gonna be sending everybody everywhere. So you, you start to wonder, can we have a centralized dispatcher? Can we have dispatch the way we normally have? Could we plan for our workforce the same way? And really the answer is no.
You have to change how you're planning your workforce, how you're responding to calls, how you're initiating calls. And I'm sure Reid has lots of thoughts on that. But it's not just how do I price it, but how do I actually even have the tools internally? And what if I have multiple different divisions?
Like what if the controls division is completely separate from the mechanical division? And now this becomes a challenge because. Are they even doing business the same way with the same kind of contract? Or are they, are they really separated inside an organization? And I've experienced both across multiple [00:26:00] organizations where, where those problems are actually the, the challenge that is the hurdle that is so hard to overcome is getting everybody on the same page with what is good for the client.
What is valuable for the client? What is the client actually asking for? And then being willing to say, okay, I know we've done this for years and years and years with success this way. We have to break that in order to actually move forward with this kind of client expecting these kind of data driven or tech, tech enabled service.
James Dice: Yeah. Um, let's look real quick, just end with Reed. You're the one that kind of went on a rant about CMSs, uh, and, and how they're not necessarily capable of enabling this style of service. Can you just explain that a little bit? The way that it stuck in my head was that if you have. Two faults that come out of the building.
It's not necessarily capable of handling the complexity of [00:27:00] when should that happen? Should they be grouped into one work order? Like there's a bunch of stuff that's like not matching up between FDD driven service that's done remotely and scheduling the technician to make that happen is that. Is that, what's your challenge to the CMMS providers in the market right now?
Reed Powell: Yeah, well I think first is conceptually thinking of how you would provide insight to a service provider on SLA forecasting and achievement based on deployment of resources. So, hey, if I go out and I, we, we'll get to the bundling of work orders in a second, but like if I go out and I do these things. Do I think that is gonna put me in a better position to achieve SLA or not?
And where am I at from a remaining budget to spend? Wow. It's even beyond what I thought. Okay. Yeah, keep going. Sorry. So, because you want to be making smart and informed decisions [00:28:00] for the building owner on, should I fix these issues with. The, the budget that we think in agreement with the customer that we, it'll take to hit these SLAs, or should I wait and reserve these for some other potential issues that are coming up in the building.
And so the CMS platform doesn't need to be doing the mechanical analytics, right? There's, there's platforms for that. Bueno Clockworks, like that's gonna be their niche. But the CMS system and contract admin system needs to start enabling. The business side of doing tech enabled services to make some smart decisions and distribute that over someone who hasn't been in the space for 10 years, right?
Right Now, a lot of these decisions you'd have to roll up to probably a. Uh, superintendent in that zone who may, was maybe actually the apprentice within that building who goes like, yes, I inherently know what happened in that facility. And that is a high priority. Um, and so you [00:29:00] want, you want the contract side of the CMS system to help you make some informed decisions.
That's a. Beast of a problem to figure out how to program that into some tech, right? 'cause the workflows aren't all developed, so you're anticipating some potential workflows there. And then the next is just, is just the bundling and like providing that next layer of detail of, well, if companies have been providing services this way for 20 years, they've actually driven lots of efficiency over.
I do these tasks together when I'm there. And it's more effective for the customer for me to do these everything on the first floor all at once, right? So you could get super sideways for a customer. I come out and I only did condition based maintenance on this one item, and then I came out next week and I did that.
And, and there's, there's can be truck fees and just different inefficiencies of access to the site. Um, so maybe I should have done those all at [00:30:00]once. And so you, you need the CMS system too. Be looking at what your KPIs are, and if you're down at the FDD layer, making, helping you identify and bundle things together in a smarter way so that you're not losing some of the efficiency that actually has been driven by prescriptive tasking where someone said, this is the best way to get this done in this sequence.
Um, and so there's, there's potential for you to get sideways and not be as effective for the customer. Um, and so. Hoping those, those software platforms can help enable those things and, um, I, I, I know a couple of them are definitely chipping away at that battle right now.
James Dice: Nice.
Reed Powell: That's good to hear.
James Dice: Okay, great.
Let's close this down, this discussion. People want to dig deeper into this. They can do two things. One is go read the article. We did several interviews about this and packaged them all and together into, uh, a Guide for Building Owners. And really, if you're a service provider, it's probably a good guide for you too.
Um, the second thing you can do is actually come to [00:31:00] Nexus Con, where Reid is a part of a 90 minute session, uh, all on technology enabled services. Reid, can you just tell us real quick, 62nd version of what's going on in that session?
Reed Powell: Uh, yeah. What what's awesome about it is there's going to be a kind of a flow of company who's getting after tech enabled services, but really from the CMMS side, so that, that second bucket we talk about, then there is, uh, a company talking about, um, their journey with deploying FDD, but then realizing that like.
You need smart people in addition to the technology to really to, to drive that change and, and how they're attacking that all the way down to, I think the, the final one is this building owner, and that's where McDon Miller will be speaking, um, in, in support of another building owner, um, as they've taken it from the energy lens.
And it's not, the contracts aren't built out with SLAs around energy, but that's their, their take and, and how they're [00:32:00] supporting that with fault detection. Some of the results and some of the hiccups and things not to do. Um, so, you know, hopefully the result of that session is you could walk away with Cool.
Someone already made a few of those mistakes. I'm gonna bunny hop those, I won't do them. What are some of the cool benefits or maybe how fast or slow should I be moving in this space? Um, but it should be super fun. We'll break out into some table topics afterwards and discussion, and you'll get to, to chat with people who are in different phases of this transition.
James Dice: That's cool. I feel like that's a good advertisement for Nexus Con as a whole. Just like, let's, what, what, what Can I bunny hop that people have already messed up in the past. Um, Leslie, what are you excited about coming back for a year? Two.
Leslie Beu: Well now I'm really excited to go to that session. I'll just say that, um, I am not presenting this year, um, with, you know, moving companies.
That's, that was a little bit difficult of a transition, but, um, I'm excited to. Some of [00:33:00] those breakout discussions were my favorite thing about Nexus Con last year. Um, just really being able to hear other creative ideas, uh, as well as, as you guys are talking about, like what were the mistakes, um, and, and what's coming in the future.
Like how can we help support some of these other companies that. That are moving in that direction. So, and I'm excited now with my new role to really come to listen a whole lot more to what all service providers are, are talking about what those challenges are so that I can figure out how at Clockworks we can meet those needs and we can, uh, propel that into the future for better tech enabled service.
James Dice: Nice. Um, yeah, I'm excited too. I just got the chills thinking about those breakout discussions. 'cause I was walking around, you know, I'd hear one table and they'd be having everybody's so engaged in those discussions last year. So, um, so Brad, there's also a bunch of other FDD sessions [00:34:00] or presentations.
Can you just tell us what else is going on with FDD?
Brad Bonavida: So I feel like if you're listening to this, you know, we're, we're kind of talking about the second level of this problem. Like, first you gotta like understand, does my build, can my building utilize FDD? And then what this conversation has been about is like, are my service providers utilizing that FDD that I have?
But step one is like, does your building have any FDD technology or can you implement that? And so we have two sessions that are just about. Building owners who've got fault detection diagnostics within their buildings. And we've got a ton of different case studies from building owners who've done that in different building types.
We've got Auburn and two sessions, Auburn Universe, two sessions, three hours, by the way.
James Dice: So it's just crazy how much like. Stuff there. Is there?
Brad Bonavida: Yep. And, and Reed's gonna actually mc one of these sessions too, so he's involved in, you know, the technology enabled services one and then one of these FDD case study ones.
But I was gonna just read off this list of building owners 'cause it's cool. Um, Auburn University is gonna talk about how they use FDD. [00:35:00] Glenstone Museum, LinkedIn, Lockheed Martin, Amazon Lincoln Property Company, and the Hyatt Regency, new Orleans. All those people are gonna be there saying, this is how we use it in our building and what it's done for us.
And you can bunny hop all the mistakes and lessons that they've learned by listening to those case studies.
James Dice: I'm excited about the Hyatt one. They're focused on water. So if you think about hotel, uh, like a hotel. Domestic hot water is literally the most important thing. Like can you give someone a hot shower?
And so I'm excited about
Brad Bonavida: that one. And if you, if you watched the Netflix documentary on Hurricane Katrina that just came out, the Hyatt, new Orleans is like featured in that. So I'm sure that there's so much technology that went into that building post Katrina to figure out how to make it, you know, able to sustain more water issues.
James Dice: See everyone there, we will, we'll stop talking about Nexus Con after Nexus Con, but right now it's three weeks away. And if you're listening to this, [00:36:00] it is literally the last minute that you, you, you need to sign up very, very soon. Um, I, I do
Reed Powell: wanna make a plug here, there. FDD we're a huge proponent of it at McDonald Miller, but you could, you could think about being a technology enabled service provider and actually not go to that step.
Be doing outcome-based maintenance and using your CMMS to, to empower that. Couple quick ways would be just looking at your demand, or sorry, your repair to maintenance ratio of dollars spent on a customer basis. Start with that metric. I bet you're already looking at it as a service provider. From a profitability standpoint, you should actually, your repair to maintenance ratio.
How much does a customer send in emergency repairs versus pre-planned work? And there's a golden zone there, right? Where that's acceptable for them to have a little bit of downtime. But pre-planned work is more cost effective than emergency work. Just talk start. Yep. Yep, yep. [00:37:00] For the service provider, it's better.
You want it to go a certain way, but you actually should be in partnership with your client, keeping it within a range and, and being transparent there. You already have that data today if you're a service provider. The next one that's is pretty accessible is EUI, and you could start talking about how am I helping this customer on their EUI journey without going through.
These technology deployments, which sometimes require big capital improvements from a, going from pneumatics to DDC. Um, and so there's, there's a couple ways you could play in this space without maybe the long upfront of getting in into this technology offerings.
James Dice: Totally. And, and I think we've done a good job.
Well, Brad has done a good job putting together these sessions that don't necessarily like the Hyatt Regency one's a good example, NEX a, um, they have installed. Not necessarily a huge capital program. It's just a couple sensors on the domestic hot water program and then integrating that in [00:38:00] with the maintenance processes.
Reed Powell: Perfect.
James Dice: So we're, we're trying to get to where we have case studies that are a little bit more easy to bite off. Not that FTD is super hard, but it's like what are the, what are the first steps for transforming your, your processes? Um, alright, let's close this out with some carve outs. Um, something fun from your personal life that you think people should check out.
I'll go first. Um, I, so Rosie and I, Rosie's not here today, but we like to talk about snacks. We're both huge snackers and I have this snack that I literally texted her about last night. I was like, dude, you have to have to do this. It is. Pretzel crisps, everything. Flavored pretzel crisps. So you know, like the pretzels that are super thin and crunchy with, um.
Bitch and dip. Do you guys ever, have you ever tried bitch and dip? Yep. Buffalo. Buffalo, bitch and dip. So everything preble, flavored pretzel scripts. Chris Re's shaking his head and making me laugh. Um, with buffalo flavored bitch and dip. [00:39:00] Just try it. I'm not even gonna say anything else. Uh, Brad, what's yours?
Brad Bonavida: Uh. I what has been engulfing my free time is that right after Nexus Con, um, a close friend of mine has asked me to pace him in this race called the Moab 240. Oh. So he's running 240 miles, um, which is just absurd. There'll be a lot of walking. It's not all running, but I have to pace him for just 30 miles of that.
But that's a lot for me. Thirty's a ton of. It's 8,000 vertical feet that I have to pace it for, and it's probably gonna be in the middle of the night. So I'm trying to determine how you train to walk with somebody who's 200 miles into a race in the middle of the night, um, that far. Which, uh, yeah. So I've just been walking uphill a lot, which sounds super boring, but somehow I'm enjoying it.
Reed Powell: Yeah.
James Dice: That's cool. Good for this guy that has enough friends that, that can run 30 miles to Yeah, to have eight of them. That's pretty cool. Um, Leslie, well, my wife is pacing it too. Nice. He's a [00:40:00] ragtag group. Yeah. Yeah. Leslie, what's yours?
Leslie Beu: All right, so I was just recently traveling across Kansas. I have a lot of extended family in Kansas and I was visiting people I hadn't seen since I was nine years old.
Uh, but to break up the visit and the drive from Colorado all the way through Kansas, um, if you, if you know, you know, um, that's
James Dice: boring drive ever,
Leslie Beu: right? There's actually this really awesome salt mine in the middle of Kansas under Hutchinson. And they, so we toured the salt mine for like three hours before we drove the rest of the seven hour drive home, and it was fantastic.
First of all, the. The tour program was great. Um, but then I learned a whole lot about salt mining, and two of my favorite facts were, um, Hollywood actually stores a ton of their stuff at the Salt Mine. So there's like costumes on display, like there's Batman there, [00:41:00] there's, there's all sorts of things, um, as well as actual like film and tape because it's just the perfect conditions.
It's always 68 degrees, it's like perfect humidity, et cetera. Um, it's an eighth mile underground. And the other really cool thing, um, about it, I learned that. Um, salt mines close in on themselves over time, and there's a, there's like a close rate that they measure and so there was this company that was looking to bury actually nuclear waste in a salt mine.
So they went to this salt mine to measure how it was closing, but unfortunately it's only closing one inch every 500 years. So they had to choose something in New Mexico instead that was closing one inch every five years so that they can encase their nuclear waste. Wow. So I thought that was really fascinating.
I, I suggest anybody who's driving through Kansas actually take the time to go stop at the salt mine in Hutchinson.
James Dice: That's hilarious. When I moved from St. Louis to Colorado. So [00:42:00] I drove on this, what you're talking about and my famous story is I, it was so boring that I was driving so fast that I got pulled over twice on the trip.
Nice. So like, yeah. Alright, Reid, what's yours?
Reed Powell: Um. Okay. By the way, you were with, I was with you. I have that exact same snack, James, until you said Buffalo. The Chipotle vision sauce done better option. Okay. Um, for, for pretty much anything. But, um, I, I think you can actually for relatively affordable, um, take a picture of your friend that's probably not complimentary.
Go to a website like Sticker Mule. Uh, and create a sticker and get 50 stickers of, of this person for like less than $50. And then when you're hanging out with your friends, you can just start putting these embarrassing stickers on backs of phones, on their bikes. [00:43:00] Um, I might be the best carve out of this, the history of this podcast.
Um, so I, I have started doing it at least annually. I pick a, a new, new person just to absolutely roast with these stickers. Wow, that's awesome. They just start living on people's nalgenes and stuff, so I've been having a hoot with that.
James Dice: You know, what I want to do now is take. Like unflattering screenshots of people on this podcast and bring all those Yeah, you could.
No, no free reign. I'll just have them in my pocket. Ready for you guys? Alright, that's a good place to end off. I'm so excited to see you guys in a couple weeks. It's gonna be great. Uh. And we'll, you'll nerd out on some smart building stuff. All right. Thanks for coming on the show.
Rosy Khalife: Okay, friends, thank you for listening to this episode. As we continue to grow our global community of change makers, we need your help. For the next couple of months, we're challenging our listeners to share a link to their favorite Nexus episode on LinkedIn with a short post about why you listen. It [00:44:00] would really, really help us out.
Make sure to tag us in the post so we can see it. Have a good one.
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Episode 186 is a conversation with Brad Bonavida and James Dice from Nexus Labs, as well as Leslie Beu from Clockworks Analytics and Reed Powell from MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions.
Episode 186 is a conversation with Brad Bonavida and James Dice from Nexus Labs, as well as Leslie Beu from Clockworks Analytics and Reed Powell from MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions. In this episode of the Nexus Podcast, the Nexus Labs team breaks down the top stories relevant to energy managers, facility managers, IT/OT managers, and workplace managers.
Introduction (0:50)
At the Nexus (5:21)
Digitizing Operations and Maintenance (8:56)
NexusCon (31:00)
Sign off (40:00)
Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S706971-16073.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
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Welcome to the Nexus podcast. It's James. Um, for the full experience with this, we're gonna have some commentary on what we published [00:01:00] and what's going on with Nexus Con. So, um, always our reminder is to sign up for the Nexus newsletter so I don't miss anything. This is more just fun and hanging out with friends, uh, comment, commenting on what's going on with everything going on with Nexus.
So we have, today we have Leslie Bue. And Reid Powell. Can you guys, um, introduce yourselves? Leslie's second time on the podcast. Reid first timer. Leslie, uh, are you excited to be back? Of course. What's your, I'm definitely
Leslie Beu: excited
James Dice: you've had a career change since then. What's going on with you?
Leslie Beu: I have, I, instead of, uh.
Being a partner and utilizing software. Now I have actually joined the joined Clockworks as the director of program management. So now I get to help all of my, uh, previous, if you call 'em competitors, though we were all working together fairly well, um, and actually push the industry forward from, from [00:02:00] this side.
And so I'm really excited to also be here with Reid.
James Dice: Do you feel like this is a sustainable, uh, recruiting, uh, solution for Clockworks to be hiring all of their customers?
Leslie Beu: Oh, they were, they were definitely nervous. Definitely tread lightly. We made sure previous company was, was perfectly fine. Um, it all went really well and we're all still great friends.
James Dice: No, in all seriousness, it's a cool, it's a cool move because you've learned so much from the other side, right? And so you can,
Leslie Beu: you know.
James Dice: Help all the other potential contractors. Exactly. Reed, what about you? First time caller, long time listener.
Reed Powell: Yeah, for sure. I, I typically listen, uh, while I'm riding my road bike.
I go do some little route on some hills that I do and I can do two podcasts and a ride. Um, so yeah, long, long time. Listener for Nexus. Uh, as far as job, job role work for McDon Miller, mechanical Design Build, um, and service provider [00:03:00] in the Pacific Northwest in the us. Um, decently so like maybe a, a core difference for, for folks listening for context is, um, our service and construction businesses are, are pretty much on equal footing as far as like percentage of, of teams and, and revenue that we do just.
Traditionally a little different services, usually much smaller, more to focus on warranty support rather than like a core, core business feature. Um, but we also do major, major constructions as well. Uh, for me personally at the company, been here for 10 years, started, wanted to get into sustainability and saving energy, and that kind of led me right down the path of analytics and measurement and verification.
That's flowed into how are we providing service, but leveraging, leveraging tech to do so. And so my responsibilities are, are that, but also our HVAC service side of the business, um, as well as some controls as well. Cool.
James Dice: And you have a hurt risk right now. So I'm, now I'm making up the story that you were mountain biking, listening to the Nexus [00:04:00] podcast and Brad said something crazy.
And you fell off your bike? Is that, is that
Reed Powell: what happened? It's not like way too far off. I actually only have the mental capacity to listen to a podcast and road bike, which is much, much simpler. But I did hurt my wrist. Mountain biking. August is a classic time you've. You've been riding tacky dirt in the northwest for most of the summer.
It's grippy, it's awesome. August comes, everything turns to dust. You think you can take a turn at the same speed, you can't traction's worse. Um, I don't actually know what happened, but 10 seconds later I was still standing there later on my bike, but 20 feet down the, the trail and my wrist hurt quite badly, so.
Wow. Okay. I think, I think there was some tumbling in there, but that's the benefit of having clipped in shoes. Sometimes you just stay on the bike. Uh.
James Dice: Yeah, I don't mountain bike, but I imagine that we have tacky dirt or dust more of the year than tacky dirt. Yeah.
Reed Powell: Yeah. I was actually kind of just poking Brad a little bit, that he lives in the wrong part of the country [00:05:00] for biking.
Brad Bonavida: It's true. I've lived in both sections and it, it's a fact. Pacific Northwest has better mountain biking. It's just true. Colorado's close. But
James Dice: for the listeners, Brad is also here. Brad, what? What have you been working on?
Brad Bonavida: Hi. Uh, well. What have I been working on? Um, Reid brought us to this podcast a little earlier in the morning than we typically do it, so nothing yet this morning, but, uh, I'll jump into some Nexus updates.
Uh, we had two kind of announcements of things going on that we announced this, uh, week. So first, uh, in our newsletter this week, we announced that we're doing a Nexus Con after party, uh, the second night, Tuesday. Um, last year at Nexus Con the second night, everyone was kinda like, where are you going to dinner?
Like, what's going on? And, you know, we're a little bit outside of downtown Denver, so we kind of just improv, got a bunch of people to go to a place in downtown Denver so that, you know, people could see the city a little bit. We're formalizing that this year. Um, we're going to this [00:06:00] trendy spot called Happy Camper that's in kind of the north side of Denver.
We're gonna have all you can eat food and drinks. Um, they got like this whole section of the outdoor covered patio rented out for us. It's gonna be really cool. Um, and we're selling tickets to that. It's $95, which is what it would cost you to go get food in Denver anyway, but this is just going to be with all of the people that you just did the first two days of Nexus Con with.
So it's gonna be super fun. Um, we will put in the show notes a link to buy your ticket 'cause you gotta buy that ticket in advance so that we know you're coming and can plan for you. Um, but yeah, we're look, looking forward to that one. That's gonna be fun. Um,
James Dice: what do you think, James? And for those of us that live in Denver, it will be the, the, the opportunity to go to Happy Camper when you're over 30 because you know that you don't go there on a, you know, on a normal Tuesday night, those of us over 30 don't go to Happy Camper, but we're taking that place over.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah. Exactly, yeah, from the Gen [00:07:00]
James Dice: Zers,
Brad Bonavida: it's typically not the demographic of Nexus Con, but we're taking it so it will be our demographic for the night. So yeah. Cool spot, trendy spot to be. I'll say that. Yeah. Good views of the city and stuff too, and like cool area to walk around and stuff. The other just quick announcement was that we.
Just, uh, sent out our invite to the September Building Owner Meetup. Uh, it's gonna be on September 24th at 9:00 AM Mountain Time. Um, and we're doing this one on constructing the independent data layer, so it's gonna be pretty cool. We're bringing in some of our partners who help build independent data layers, and they're gonna give you kind of a demonstration of what they do.
And then we break out into these discussions where you'll hear from other building owners about. Where they're at in it. Some people are far, some people haven't even started. And like, what, what is a good, what would it do for you to have an independent data layer? So, um, you, if you're a building owner and you listen to our podcast, you probably have an invite to that.
If you don't, we'll also put a link in so that you can get an invite to that if you wanna join. [00:08:00]
James Dice: Okay. A few, few other quick housekeeping items. We're doing, um, a referral program. So read. Reed went skiing with us last year. We're doing a, uh, free ski trip to the person who refers the most people. Um, and I'm looking at the leaderboard right now.
It says I'm gonna win, but, uh, it obviously isn't, isn't gonna happen. Um, um, we have a three-way tie for first place. Um, I'm not gonna lead read out the leaderboard right now, but we're we're, let's just say it's anybody's game still, I think. So Reed and Leslie are both, both in Tide for second right now, let's say that.
So you guys could both win. You guys could both win. So people can basically, uh, refer people and when they register, they can put your name and then we will chalk it up to on the leaderboard and we'll see who wins. Um, let's, let's jump into it. It's a good enough intro for [00:09:00] now. Um, we are talking about tech enabled services.
So, Brad, do you wanna talk about just like where the category came from, because you kind of named this real quick.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah, actually just, this goes back to last year's Nexus con ski trip. Um, you know, we'd been talking with Matt, the Mac Miller team and Reid a bunch. We obviously, you know, James, you've been doing, uh, articles and just explaining fault detection diagnostics, what Clockworks and so many others do forever, but.
When I was with Reid Reid, we were sitting in the lobby of that hotel room and we were talking about how Mac Miller uses fault detection and diagnostics, and how that's a differentiator for a service provider to do something like that. We're trying to describe like how do we name that because we wanted to put in the Nexus marketplace where James and I have been working for more than two years now on categorizing these different things that people can do and these different [00:10:00] services that are there.
So. We went back and forth, and that's kind of the term we landed on for. Just when a service provider, and it doesn't have to necessarily be a control service provider, I think that there can be different versions of this, but when some building service provider is using technologies to improve the service that they're doing to the building, so often we're thinking about all these technologies and we're thinking that the building owner is using them for their own building.
But what about a service provider that services a bunch of different people's buildings
James Dice: and it's really about changing. The service contract to reflect that, we now have this piece of technology that enables you to provide a better service. Right? But it really goes back, so you guys coined this in February or whenever it was, but it really goes back.
So I had. RY com and Bueno on the podcast and Long Leslie, when Leslie was at Long and Clockworks on the podcast and like it, it's stuff that people have been talking, we had sessions about it at Nexus Con [00:11:00] last year. So it's, it's, it's, we're trying to, trying to basically name what other people are, are already doing and saying.
Right. Um, and so we wrote this article, um, Ainsley wrote this article. He is not here today, but, um, he wrote this article basically laying out. The, the transition that a contractor might go through to, um, go from the status quo. So he does a really good job in this article of outlining what the status quo is of a, a normal service contract.
And then based on their interviews with Reed and others, we got this like basically progression, progression of service provider maturity on this, where you're going from the status quo to being tech technologically curious to. Reid helped us see that there's actually an intermittent stage after that, which is basically like recording your, um, customer's information digitally.
So he called that technology enabled record keeping and then going to outcome-based maintenance, which is [00:12:00] basically like. Shifting from time and materials to more like, what, what are we trying to achieve basically? And then getting into condition-based maintenance, which I know is Nick from Clockworks, his favorite, favorite phrase these days.
Um, and then the, and then we have a future state or stage here that really a lot, no, no one's really at it sounds like right now, which is basically getting to where you're actually billing. Based on the outcomes instead of billing based off of your hours. And so, um, let's, let's stop there. That's basically what the article's about.
Um, Leslie, what was your, I know you posted on LinkedIn about this article and said this, this was spot on. I don't remember what you said, but something like that. What were your thoughts? 'cause you weren't involved in the interviews, you just read it after it happened.
Leslie Beu: Right. No, I, I said I couldn't have said it better.
Um, I was really impressed with the article after having lived this for years and years, [00:13:00] um, at multiple different service providers going from the status quo to talking about the, the technology enabled, uh, services. So when I read it, I was marveling at some of the really specific. Um, details about really, really where that transition happens because in my experience, it's, it's easier to say, yes, we want to do this, and yes, we have this technology and we are going to sell a service that has this technology, but.
The transition that was talked about in the article about actually using it for record keeping. So good job read.
Thinking about this outcome-based maintenance and not just saying, we're gonna add on analytics, we're gonna add on some sort of software, and we're just gonna, you know, pass it through. We're just gonna [00:14:00] sell it. But really actually transforming the service and the way it's done is kind of the key I think, in, in those various stages that are listed.
And that's incredibly difficult. It's also what makes this more important and more relevant and actually enables that actual outcome to happen. So you're, I think you're spot on that the full outcome based billing or service. Has not necessarily been achieved yet, but it's getting really close. I think that a lot of service providers are thinking about this.
It's, it's tricky though because it's risky. Um, and when service companies traditionally have, you know, good profits, good growth, it's really. It's really challenging, obviously, to think, well, let's just change all of this up. And so we actually need, [00:15:00] we need the customers to, to be informed by reading articles like this and actually start demanding more of their service providers and seeing what service providers are truly, really doing.
And a lot of that is shown through the contract, through the, the billing or the. Proposal. The agreement really does a good job, I think of, of saying what's happening. And if all it says is, yeah, we use analytics, or yeah, we use technology to do something, but it doesn't say how, how that's measured, what the KPIs are, what the outcome could be, then it's still likely more just traditional service, but.
I think that a lot of those service companies are trying to get there.
Brad Bonavida: I was gonna ask Leslie, just to, to level set at kind of the beginning of this, can you explain what the traditional is, like, the step zero status quo? What does that mean? What, what do most people [00:16:00] do in terms of service?
Leslie Beu: A lot of the good service providers will at least do tasks based on, uh, based on ashrae, um, making sure that the, the task list for service is robust and adequate.
Um, but as we all know, all of the actual preventive maintenance kind of gets pushed by the wayside. I mean, maybe contractually it doesn't. Um, and so therefore. The clients, the, the building owners might be paying a whole lot for it. Um, or maybe, you know, maybe the, the clients agree that certain tasks don't really need to be done, or they're constantly just pushing, okay, yes, I know you have to come and do this service that you promised me you would do.
But actually we have this other emergency over here. So it's a lot of firefighting, it's a lot of, um. A lot of just making sure that the client is comfortable and a [00:17:00] lot of pushing actual service to the back burner. Um, but even with great companies, worked for great companies, um, that do what they say they're going to do, the clients just end up paying, you know, quite a bit of money, um, to get the tasks done that are specified, uh, for each piece of equipment.
And then still pay more for actually fixing the equipment and pay more for actually diagnosing or troubleshooting what's wrong. And so it's just kind of this billing per hour that, that then the service company is really not incentivized to do it faster. Um, and even though there's a lot of good people at the service companies.
Try to do it well and they intend to do it well. And if they have a good training program, they likely are trying to get better. There's really not a whole lot of measurement there because if [00:18:00] they can bill for three hours, why would they want to try to push to do it in one hour? So that's, I guess, the status quo that I, I have experienced in multiple different companies.
James Dice: Yeah, totally. And it feels like. The McDonald Millers of the world are out there saying like we've, we've come across and developed this new way of doing it. But there's almost this chicken of the egg, chicken in the egg thing going on where building owners don't know that this is possible. And then when they look in their market, maybe they're not in the Pacific Northwest, they're not seeing anyone that is offering this service when they go to renew their service contract.
So Reid, when you think about what a building owner's supposed to do. I mean, we have a section in the article about this, but what do you, what do you think they should do about this chicken and the egg thing?
Reed Powell: Well, I, I mean, we're talking about a, a pretty big industry shift, and so I,
James Dice: yeah.
Reed Powell: Something that would be important for any of them to keep in mind is, uh, like what, [00:19:00] what are the controllables for them?
And. I think a lot of that just starts with having the conversation with your service provider who is a partner in your building success, right? Um, of where you would like to go. And there's, there's tons of content in the Nexus sphere of you have to start the conversation with your service provider, um, because in some cases there might be some capital outlay that you have to make depending on what level of detail, of metric that you want within that contract.
So if you want. A certain, if you wanted to go all the way down to a very detailed amount of, number of faults, or even just how often am I in within a certain comfort range, and maybe I don't have the sensing or I want something around IAQ, like what whatever you decide is important within that facility could be energy spend and you want it broken out by tenant, right?
There could be some metering infrastructure, so there is some CapEx, but if you're the. If you're the owner, it [00:20:00] starts that conversation of where you would like to get to. Um, and for a lot of service providers, this will sound similar to something that was very popular 15 years ago, which is full coverage contracts.
So I go with a maintenance provider and I am going to pay them to cover not just the maintenance cost, but also the repair cost, and there will be inclusions and exclusions of what's within those. Repair costs. Usually there's a very rough order of magnitude price increase that they would pay, and that's essentially the building owner saying, I am locking in my price.
I'm gonna have a very low percentage variability so I can base all of my, my financial metrics off of that. Then the onus is onto the service provider for them to manage and do the repairs when they think it's best for the building, but also to make sure they can stay in business and offer these full coverage contracts.
Um. Because there was low availability of building data. Those things kind [00:21:00] of trended out of style because service providers realized, man, this is super hard for me to make any money and not actually lose money and be paying for these assets in these buildings, uh, without lots of insight into them. Okay, so those fade out of popularity, but then the concepts coming back, as you say, can I get metrics within my building?
And building owners need to start maybe taking a little bit of inspiration from the s the technology sphere and talk about SLAs versus maintenance contracts. So, and, and service providers will be used to some version of that, right? It could be response time, there could be an SLA around response time.
It would be very new for someone to say, I need an SLA around a comfort score within my building, or an energy score within my building. Um. And pricing that is, is gonna be different based on the type of facility control system you have, where you're at, at in your [00:22:00] lifecycle renewal phase for capital assets within the building.
And so it's, it's not an easy question, but uh, it, it's in concept, right? That's, that's the direction. There's lots of intangible benefits for the, for the owners.
James Dice: Leslie, I'm curious what you think about the chicken and the egg, because you're. I don't know your new role, but I'm assuming it's something related to creating more McDonald Millers in the market that are able to bring technology into the service contract.
Leslie Beu: Yeah, so I have a comment on both. Um, my role is not necessarily being individually, you know, creating more McDonald Miller's, but certainly Clockworks wants to, to create robust, uh, service providers in the, in the industry and, and come alongside them is really where I'm at. So, as a director of program management, really looking at the different programs that.
Let's say re and his team are requesting like more enablement for better condition-based maintenance, um, [00:23:00] asset planning, really looking at how can we build into the tools, some of the things that otherwise somebody has to do manually so that they can provide a, a better service ultimately. But in terms of the chicken and the egg, uh.
Thought here. Um, a lot of the reads said that pricing, pricing, that kind of model is really difficult. It's, it's a new frontier. Uh, so we need more KPIs, um, but not just all the KPIs, right? We need to understand what impacts the, the various triggers or mechanisms that cause the, the comfort score to, to drop.
And then who's measuring it? Is third party measuring it like an analytics, um. Provider, uh, or, you know, or is the, the individual company like Mac Miller measuring it. Um, but coming back from just talking about the pricing of it, I think the, one of the other huge [00:24:00] challenges and maybe why some service providers don't even necessarily wanna start having the discussion about how to price that is you actually have to kind of.
Tear apart and rebuild the entire structure of how you do the service. So a lot of the, and I think this was mentioned in this article or another, but like if CMMS, uh, work order systems are, are typically used to, uh, you know, to send a.
If you're, if you're using A-C-M-M-S system that doesn't, isn't capable of reacting to, uh, triggers or different changes in the data, then how do you just stop doing that and, and how do you start sending somebody when it's quote needed? You've got to then enable the technology to. Alert, but not over [00:25:00] alert, right?
Because if you just end up with a lot of alarms and a lot of, you know, fires, like you're just gonna be sending everybody everywhere. So you, you start to wonder, can we have a centralized dispatcher? Can we have dispatch the way we normally have? Could we plan for our workforce the same way? And really the answer is no.
You have to change how you're planning your workforce, how you're responding to calls, how you're initiating calls. And I'm sure Reid has lots of thoughts on that. But it's not just how do I price it, but how do I actually even have the tools internally? And what if I have multiple different divisions?
Like what if the controls division is completely separate from the mechanical division? And now this becomes a challenge because. Are they even doing business the same way with the same kind of contract? Or are they, are they really separated inside an organization? And I've experienced both across multiple [00:26:00] organizations where, where those problems are actually the, the challenge that is the hurdle that is so hard to overcome is getting everybody on the same page with what is good for the client.
What is valuable for the client? What is the client actually asking for? And then being willing to say, okay, I know we've done this for years and years and years with success this way. We have to break that in order to actually move forward with this kind of client expecting these kind of data driven or tech, tech enabled service.
James Dice: Yeah. Um, let's look real quick, just end with Reed. You're the one that kind of went on a rant about CMSs, uh, and, and how they're not necessarily capable of enabling this style of service. Can you just explain that a little bit? The way that it stuck in my head was that if you have. Two faults that come out of the building.
It's not necessarily capable of handling the complexity of [00:27:00] when should that happen? Should they be grouped into one work order? Like there's a bunch of stuff that's like not matching up between FDD driven service that's done remotely and scheduling the technician to make that happen is that. Is that, what's your challenge to the CMMS providers in the market right now?
Reed Powell: Yeah, well I think first is conceptually thinking of how you would provide insight to a service provider on SLA forecasting and achievement based on deployment of resources. So, hey, if I go out and I, we, we'll get to the bundling of work orders in a second, but like if I go out and I do these things. Do I think that is gonna put me in a better position to achieve SLA or not?
And where am I at from a remaining budget to spend? Wow. It's even beyond what I thought. Okay. Yeah, keep going. Sorry. So, because you want to be making smart and informed decisions [00:28:00] for the building owner on, should I fix these issues with. The, the budget that we think in agreement with the customer that we, it'll take to hit these SLAs, or should I wait and reserve these for some other potential issues that are coming up in the building.
And so the CMS platform doesn't need to be doing the mechanical analytics, right? There's, there's platforms for that. Bueno Clockworks, like that's gonna be their niche. But the CMS system and contract admin system needs to start enabling. The business side of doing tech enabled services to make some smart decisions and distribute that over someone who hasn't been in the space for 10 years, right?
Right Now, a lot of these decisions you'd have to roll up to probably a. Uh, superintendent in that zone who may, was maybe actually the apprentice within that building who goes like, yes, I inherently know what happened in that facility. And that is a high priority. Um, and so you [00:29:00] want, you want the contract side of the CMS system to help you make some informed decisions.
That's a. Beast of a problem to figure out how to program that into some tech, right? 'cause the workflows aren't all developed, so you're anticipating some potential workflows there. And then the next is just, is just the bundling and like providing that next layer of detail of, well, if companies have been providing services this way for 20 years, they've actually driven lots of efficiency over.
I do these tasks together when I'm there. And it's more effective for the customer for me to do these everything on the first floor all at once, right? So you could get super sideways for a customer. I come out and I only did condition based maintenance on this one item, and then I came out next week and I did that.
And, and there's, there's can be truck fees and just different inefficiencies of access to the site. Um, so maybe I should have done those all at [00:30:00]once. And so you, you need the CMS system too. Be looking at what your KPIs are, and if you're down at the FDD layer, making, helping you identify and bundle things together in a smarter way so that you're not losing some of the efficiency that actually has been driven by prescriptive tasking where someone said, this is the best way to get this done in this sequence.
Um, and so there's, there's potential for you to get sideways and not be as effective for the customer. Um, and so. Hoping those, those software platforms can help enable those things and, um, I, I, I know a couple of them are definitely chipping away at that battle right now.
James Dice: Nice.
Reed Powell: That's good to hear.
James Dice: Okay, great.
Let's close this down, this discussion. People want to dig deeper into this. They can do two things. One is go read the article. We did several interviews about this and packaged them all and together into, uh, a Guide for Building Owners. And really, if you're a service provider, it's probably a good guide for you too.
Um, the second thing you can do is actually come to [00:31:00] Nexus Con, where Reid is a part of a 90 minute session, uh, all on technology enabled services. Reid, can you just tell us real quick, 62nd version of what's going on in that session?
Reed Powell: Uh, yeah. What what's awesome about it is there's going to be a kind of a flow of company who's getting after tech enabled services, but really from the CMMS side, so that, that second bucket we talk about, then there is, uh, a company talking about, um, their journey with deploying FDD, but then realizing that like.
You need smart people in addition to the technology to really to, to drive that change and, and how they're attacking that all the way down to, I think the, the final one is this building owner, and that's where McDon Miller will be speaking, um, in, in support of another building owner, um, as they've taken it from the energy lens.
And it's not, the contracts aren't built out with SLAs around energy, but that's their, their take and, and how they're [00:32:00] supporting that with fault detection. Some of the results and some of the hiccups and things not to do. Um, so, you know, hopefully the result of that session is you could walk away with Cool.
Someone already made a few of those mistakes. I'm gonna bunny hop those, I won't do them. What are some of the cool benefits or maybe how fast or slow should I be moving in this space? Um, but it should be super fun. We'll break out into some table topics afterwards and discussion, and you'll get to, to chat with people who are in different phases of this transition.
James Dice: That's cool. I feel like that's a good advertisement for Nexus Con as a whole. Just like, let's, what, what, what Can I bunny hop that people have already messed up in the past. Um, Leslie, what are you excited about coming back for a year? Two.
Leslie Beu: Well now I'm really excited to go to that session. I'll just say that, um, I am not presenting this year, um, with, you know, moving companies.
That's, that was a little bit difficult of a transition, but, um, I'm excited to. Some of [00:33:00] those breakout discussions were my favorite thing about Nexus Con last year. Um, just really being able to hear other creative ideas, uh, as well as, as you guys are talking about, like what were the mistakes, um, and, and what's coming in the future.
Like how can we help support some of these other companies that. That are moving in that direction. So, and I'm excited now with my new role to really come to listen a whole lot more to what all service providers are, are talking about what those challenges are so that I can figure out how at Clockworks we can meet those needs and we can, uh, propel that into the future for better tech enabled service.
James Dice: Nice. Um, yeah, I'm excited too. I just got the chills thinking about those breakout discussions. 'cause I was walking around, you know, I'd hear one table and they'd be having everybody's so engaged in those discussions last year. So, um, so Brad, there's also a bunch of other FDD sessions [00:34:00] or presentations.
Can you just tell us what else is going on with FDD?
Brad Bonavida: So I feel like if you're listening to this, you know, we're, we're kind of talking about the second level of this problem. Like, first you gotta like understand, does my build, can my building utilize FDD? And then what this conversation has been about is like, are my service providers utilizing that FDD that I have?
But step one is like, does your building have any FDD technology or can you implement that? And so we have two sessions that are just about. Building owners who've got fault detection diagnostics within their buildings. And we've got a ton of different case studies from building owners who've done that in different building types.
We've got Auburn and two sessions, Auburn Universe, two sessions, three hours, by the way.
James Dice: So it's just crazy how much like. Stuff there. Is there?
Brad Bonavida: Yep. And, and Reed's gonna actually mc one of these sessions too, so he's involved in, you know, the technology enabled services one and then one of these FDD case study ones.
But I was gonna just read off this list of building owners 'cause it's cool. Um, Auburn University is gonna talk about how they use FDD. [00:35:00] Glenstone Museum, LinkedIn, Lockheed Martin, Amazon Lincoln Property Company, and the Hyatt Regency, new Orleans. All those people are gonna be there saying, this is how we use it in our building and what it's done for us.
And you can bunny hop all the mistakes and lessons that they've learned by listening to those case studies.
James Dice: I'm excited about the Hyatt one. They're focused on water. So if you think about hotel, uh, like a hotel. Domestic hot water is literally the most important thing. Like can you give someone a hot shower?
And so I'm excited about
Brad Bonavida: that one. And if you, if you watched the Netflix documentary on Hurricane Katrina that just came out, the Hyatt, new Orleans is like featured in that. So I'm sure that there's so much technology that went into that building post Katrina to figure out how to make it, you know, able to sustain more water issues.
James Dice: See everyone there, we will, we'll stop talking about Nexus Con after Nexus Con, but right now it's three weeks away. And if you're listening to this, [00:36:00] it is literally the last minute that you, you, you need to sign up very, very soon. Um, I, I do
Reed Powell: wanna make a plug here, there. FDD we're a huge proponent of it at McDonald Miller, but you could, you could think about being a technology enabled service provider and actually not go to that step.
Be doing outcome-based maintenance and using your CMMS to, to empower that. Couple quick ways would be just looking at your demand, or sorry, your repair to maintenance ratio of dollars spent on a customer basis. Start with that metric. I bet you're already looking at it as a service provider. From a profitability standpoint, you should actually, your repair to maintenance ratio.
How much does a customer send in emergency repairs versus pre-planned work? And there's a golden zone there, right? Where that's acceptable for them to have a little bit of downtime. But pre-planned work is more cost effective than emergency work. Just talk start. Yep. Yep, yep. [00:37:00] For the service provider, it's better.
You want it to go a certain way, but you actually should be in partnership with your client, keeping it within a range and, and being transparent there. You already have that data today if you're a service provider. The next one that's is pretty accessible is EUI, and you could start talking about how am I helping this customer on their EUI journey without going through.
These technology deployments, which sometimes require big capital improvements from a, going from pneumatics to DDC. Um, and so there's, there's a couple ways you could play in this space without maybe the long upfront of getting in into this technology offerings.
James Dice: Totally. And, and I think we've done a good job.
Well, Brad has done a good job putting together these sessions that don't necessarily like the Hyatt Regency one's a good example, NEX a, um, they have installed. Not necessarily a huge capital program. It's just a couple sensors on the domestic hot water program and then integrating that in [00:38:00] with the maintenance processes.
Reed Powell: Perfect.
James Dice: So we're, we're trying to get to where we have case studies that are a little bit more easy to bite off. Not that FTD is super hard, but it's like what are the, what are the first steps for transforming your, your processes? Um, alright, let's close this out with some carve outs. Um, something fun from your personal life that you think people should check out.
I'll go first. Um, I, so Rosie and I, Rosie's not here today, but we like to talk about snacks. We're both huge snackers and I have this snack that I literally texted her about last night. I was like, dude, you have to have to do this. It is. Pretzel crisps, everything. Flavored pretzel crisps. So you know, like the pretzels that are super thin and crunchy with, um.
Bitch and dip. Do you guys ever, have you ever tried bitch and dip? Yep. Buffalo. Buffalo, bitch and dip. So everything preble, flavored pretzel scripts. Chris Re's shaking his head and making me laugh. Um, with buffalo flavored bitch and dip. [00:39:00] Just try it. I'm not even gonna say anything else. Uh, Brad, what's yours?
Brad Bonavida: Uh. I what has been engulfing my free time is that right after Nexus Con, um, a close friend of mine has asked me to pace him in this race called the Moab 240. Oh. So he's running 240 miles, um, which is just absurd. There'll be a lot of walking. It's not all running, but I have to pace him for just 30 miles of that.
But that's a lot for me. Thirty's a ton of. It's 8,000 vertical feet that I have to pace it for, and it's probably gonna be in the middle of the night. So I'm trying to determine how you train to walk with somebody who's 200 miles into a race in the middle of the night, um, that far. Which, uh, yeah. So I've just been walking uphill a lot, which sounds super boring, but somehow I'm enjoying it.
Reed Powell: Yeah.
James Dice: That's cool. Good for this guy that has enough friends that, that can run 30 miles to Yeah, to have eight of them. That's pretty cool. Um, Leslie, well, my wife is pacing it too. Nice. He's a [00:40:00] ragtag group. Yeah. Yeah. Leslie, what's yours?
Leslie Beu: All right, so I was just recently traveling across Kansas. I have a lot of extended family in Kansas and I was visiting people I hadn't seen since I was nine years old.
Uh, but to break up the visit and the drive from Colorado all the way through Kansas, um, if you, if you know, you know, um, that's
James Dice: boring drive ever,
Leslie Beu: right? There's actually this really awesome salt mine in the middle of Kansas under Hutchinson. And they, so we toured the salt mine for like three hours before we drove the rest of the seven hour drive home, and it was fantastic.
First of all, the. The tour program was great. Um, but then I learned a whole lot about salt mining, and two of my favorite facts were, um, Hollywood actually stores a ton of their stuff at the Salt Mine. So there's like costumes on display, like there's Batman there, [00:41:00] there's, there's all sorts of things, um, as well as actual like film and tape because it's just the perfect conditions.
It's always 68 degrees, it's like perfect humidity, et cetera. Um, it's an eighth mile underground. And the other really cool thing, um, about it, I learned that. Um, salt mines close in on themselves over time, and there's a, there's like a close rate that they measure and so there was this company that was looking to bury actually nuclear waste in a salt mine.
So they went to this salt mine to measure how it was closing, but unfortunately it's only closing one inch every 500 years. So they had to choose something in New Mexico instead that was closing one inch every five years so that they can encase their nuclear waste. Wow. So I thought that was really fascinating.
I, I suggest anybody who's driving through Kansas actually take the time to go stop at the salt mine in Hutchinson.
James Dice: That's hilarious. When I moved from St. Louis to Colorado. So [00:42:00] I drove on this, what you're talking about and my famous story is I, it was so boring that I was driving so fast that I got pulled over twice on the trip.
Nice. So like, yeah. Alright, Reid, what's yours?
Reed Powell: Um. Okay. By the way, you were with, I was with you. I have that exact same snack, James, until you said Buffalo. The Chipotle vision sauce done better option. Okay. Um, for, for pretty much anything. But, um, I, I think you can actually for relatively affordable, um, take a picture of your friend that's probably not complimentary.
Go to a website like Sticker Mule. Uh, and create a sticker and get 50 stickers of, of this person for like less than $50. And then when you're hanging out with your friends, you can just start putting these embarrassing stickers on backs of phones, on their bikes. [00:43:00] Um, I might be the best carve out of this, the history of this podcast.
Um, so I, I have started doing it at least annually. I pick a, a new, new person just to absolutely roast with these stickers. Wow, that's awesome. They just start living on people's nalgenes and stuff, so I've been having a hoot with that.
James Dice: You know, what I want to do now is take. Like unflattering screenshots of people on this podcast and bring all those Yeah, you could.
No, no free reign. I'll just have them in my pocket. Ready for you guys? Alright, that's a good place to end off. I'm so excited to see you guys in a couple weeks. It's gonna be great. Uh. And we'll, you'll nerd out on some smart building stuff. All right. Thanks for coming on the show.
Rosy Khalife: Okay, friends, thank you for listening to this episode. As we continue to grow our global community of change makers, we need your help. For the next couple of months, we're challenging our listeners to share a link to their favorite Nexus episode on LinkedIn with a short post about why you listen. It [00:44:00] would really, really help us out.
Make sure to tag us in the post so we can see it. Have a good one.
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This is a great piece!
I agree.