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Happy Thursday!
Welcome to this week’s deep dive exclusively for Nexus Pro members. It’s an honor to have you here. This deep dive is a follow up to my recent podcast conversation with Tyson Soutter, Global Business Development Manager Digitalization at Siemens HQ in Switzerland. I learned a lot from this conversation and want to share my takeaways and the full transcript with you below.
In case you missed it in your inbox, you can find the audio or video here:
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Enjoy!
—James
Man, this conversation was a lot of fun. If you watch the YouTube version, there was so much smiling and laughing. A couple of huge nerds. After we stopped recording, Tyson said he’d rather talk to me about smart buildings than his talk to his girlfriend.
Truth.
By the way, isn’t Tyson’s background impressive? Is anyone better suited to help change the industry? And it seems like he’s made career moves specifically to maximize his learning and building different perspectives. I love that. Glad someone like him is at one of the big 4. I think a challenge for Siemens will be getting the intelligence and perspective that Tyson brings out to the branches. I’ve dealt directly with Siemens branches as recently as 1 year ago and let me tell you: the gap is a mile wide between Tyson and what they’re up to. I digress and wish you luck, Tyson.
This conversation has several interesting threads for me. First was Tyson’s second answer to my favorite question. Buildings are behind because tech has always been behind the scenes… not interacting with the tenant. That’s where the value lies with Siemens' Comfy acquisition—it enables the interaction with the occupant, which is what all office building managers are thinking about right about now. Couple that with IAQ sensors (potentially from or enabled by Enlighted?) and Siemens is very well positioned. Add on what Tyson said at the end, where building owners are now thinking about long payback capital measures to decarbonize. Things seem to be looking bright for Siemens and our industry as a whole.
The point about continuing to add value to justify your SaaS fee (highlight 3) is the biggest insight from this conversation to me. It’s no longer enough for your software to create some energy savings and maintain them. I’ve heard this perspective from multiple places: the "what have you done for me lately?” attitude is real. That speaks to the power of a multi-dimensional platform to create stickiness across multiple stakeholders and use cases. Tyson and I seem very aligned on sales strategy outside of that point too. Building owners need a strategy. If they don’t have one, I’d argue that it doesn’t do any good for individual vendors to sell products until a strategy, or at least a long term vision is in place. The first step in sales (internal and external) is conceptual. It’s strategic.
I was fascinated by the whole digital twin conversation. So much information there from Tyson. Wow. My main realization was that there’s a good answer for the skeptic that says a digital twin for an existing building is too expensive. Tyson provides a low cost, easy-to-implement roadmap to digital twins for existing buildings: building it up component by component as you’re going about your business as usual. Just do it digitally. Start with a living asset register, add a data model, add live data, costs, then add 3D slowly over time when you’re doing upgrades. He called it “Collecting the digital language”. When you’re doing 3D, just start with floor plans and materials, which opens up simulations. And this is what digitalization means for a building.
My highlights:
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] Hello, friends. Welcome to Nexus, a smart buildings technology podcast for smart humans. I'm your host, James Dice. If we haven't met before, I write a weekly newsletter on the same topic. It's also called Nexus. Each week I share what I've learned, my opinions, and what I'm excited about in the quickly evolving world of intelligent buildings. Readers have called Nexus the best way to stay up to date on the future of this industry without all the marketing fluff. You can check it out and subscribe at nexus.substack.com or click the link in the show notes.
Since starting the Nexus newsletter, many of you have reached out to me wanting to talk shop, and we have. After a few weeks of those wonderful conversations, I realized I needed to record and share them with our growing community. So here we are. The Nexus podcast is born. This is our chance to explore and learn with the brightest in our industry together. All right. Episode 19 is a conversation with Tyson suture, global business development manager for digitization at Siemens HQ in Switzerland. This is a great primer, maybe even a masterclass on selling smart building solutions, whether you're selling internally or externally. We talk about selling semantic modeling analytics, advanced controls, digital twins, indoor air quality, and even carbon reduction.
No buzz word was left out. This episode of the podcast is directly funded by listeners like you who have joined the nexus pro membership community. You can find info on how to join, support the podcast@nexusdotsubsect.com. You also find the show notes there, which has links to Tyson's LinkedIn page. Oh, and by the way, if you take a look at your podcast feed and you're missing some episodes, that's because those episodes are exclusive to members of nexus pro sign up for a pro membership to get your personal podcast feed with access to all the episodes.
A further ado, please enjoy nexus podcast, episode 19.
Tyson. Welcome to the nexus podcast. It's awesome to finally have you on, can you introduce yourself?
Tyson Soutter: [00:02:04] Thanks, James. Yeah. So Tyson suitor. my role at the moment is global business development manager for digitalization. I requested a buzzword in my job title that was actually part of the deal, but I've been in the industry for a while.
We met many years ago. At a haystack connect conference, I believe.
James Dice: [00:02:24] Yeah. Tampa, Florida. Yeah. We had several alcoholic beverages,
Tyson Soutter: [00:02:29] me
James Dice: [00:02:29] and Leon and I don't know who else was there, but I bugged Leon about that a couple of weeks ago. he actually didn't remember. I was offended. So shout out to me again.
Tyson Soutter: [00:02:38] it's a great conference too, but just so I've been in the industry for what? 14, 15 years now. started as a air conditioning and refrigeration mechanic as a trade actually. So I did that for for nine years and that included. installing Tridium systems actually are two. So a couple of versions ago to AIX for anyone that knows this terminology.
and, but also installing, chillers, rooftop, units, compressors, doing maintenance and big commercial buildings and retail buildings. so I did that for nine years and very good base for where, what we're doing now. and then I joined a startup actually called Brenner systems. Built environment optimization.
So you mentioned Leon many on workforce CEO. I was one of their first employees, I think maybe three. And, during the four years I was there, we grew that company too. I think I would have 70 people when I left. I'm not sure, maybe a bit less, but quite a lot of people. And, we did everything from, that's why that's where we met data analytics, fault detection.
Maintenance replacement. So really connecting to all the systems in a building. So air conditioning, vertical transport, fire, car parks, waste. my role there was in between a bit of sales. but mostly I ran the integration team so that the deployment teams are getting data, how to build teams.
so we did some really interesting integrations, going into, Smart buildings and really actually connecting the systems off.
James Dice: [00:04:04] what do you mean by those air quotes? Do you mean by smart buildings and air quotes?
Tyson Soutter: [00:04:09] There's been, there's a few buildings that we worked at, where it was nearly finished and I'm like, Oh, by the way, we need to connect all these systems.
And cause we were smart buildings, so we need to have all the systems together. So you have to come in and then really connect the systems together, all these systems that are completely separated and no designed to bring, come and bring to bring them together. so yeah, there's some really interesting stuff.
we did over 200 buildings over thousand supermarkets. It was the scale of huge. And, did that was one of the best experiences I've had in my career working at when I heard the people I'm still very close to it and very friendly with, and I only left actually because, I got an offer for another company called Willow, which is a digital twin company.
You're probably familiar. Of course you're familiar with, which is another Australian startup. We have a lot of good, a lot of good Australian startups, where I'm originally from. And this was the design construction company, prating software for digital twins. And I really I've worked in construction sites.
I did some commissioning work and deal like handover, DLP defects, liability, period work. but never really to the point where I'm looking at the time, the cost of 45 day, the operational twin 60, not really understanding to it, to a level where I could discuss yes. With these people that are digital experts in this.
I'm sorry. I took the job and it was a really difficult decision. I left on very good terms with everyone in Bruno surprise to ever, um, I think even myself, but I was feeling a bit comfortable there. I think that it was time to learn something new. so I was there for around a year and it was one of the very intense period of my life because you get thrown into a construction site and you're working with every services in the building.
So you need to know. hydraulics, architecture, civil electrical, yeah. And then the automation and live data component. All of this is it's a big steep learning curve, but they had. The digital enterprise team, like the people that design the digital language on how to build these buildings.
There's incredible. So I just soaked up.
James Dice: [00:06:16] Yeah.
Tyson Soutter: [00:06:16] I really, to the point when I left there, I felt comfortable at any of those meetings because the people that I was around were just incredible. So I was very lucky to work with, especially specifically, there's a guy called Daniel he's. I was going to say relatively young around my age, But he so knowledgeable in this space.
So I really, I latched onto him and he taught me a lot when I was there. So very lucky, very well. Okay. and during this time was actually, wasn't looking at all. but I got, an offer come up through Siemens and originally I thought it was singing like Asia somewhere. Cause I was based in Melbourne in Australia and it is based in Switzerland.
And the first thing I had to do is okay. Whereas that's the first thing I have to check. And then once I worked that out, I was like, okay, this could be interesting. And it turns out it was in the headquarters of Siemens and I've always wanted to see what these big automation companies are like.
the w I'd say the big four, Siemens, Honeywell, Schneider, or Johnson's. Yeah. They're the big players in our industry and spending so much of my time in that world. I'm like, I'm very curious to see what this is like. And the role sounded very much to my skillset. It was coming in. And then what I do now is working with the product team on looking at the tools we use and we're where we need to be going forward and then some requirements, but then also helping create the sales strategy.
And then also the delivery method. So working with, global HQ. So you have to work with each region and help them understand this is what we're selling. This is how we sell it. This is how we talk to these specific customers. And this is how we then deliver it at scale, which is very important.
And it's so far it's been probably. The first six months, it was pretty easy start compared to any other job I had because I worked for startups where there is no such thing as an onboarding process, onboarding processes. Oh, Hey, we've put six jobs for you
James Dice: [00:08:12] started right now. Yeah, you're late.
Tyson Soutter: [00:08:14] But you know, I kind of ease into it. Once I got started, it really just got very busy and you really have to earn the credibility within the company. speak to the people. They need to know who you are, trust that you can actually help them in some way and then add to that process.
And once you get going, it really, it doesn't stop. And then eventually you're like, yep. This is back to my old working, staying busy and happy.
James Dice: [00:08:39] Got it. Cool. I think based on that introduction, everyone that's listening to, this is realizing why you're on the podcast because you have. A very rare skillset in our industry.
you just gave basically every level of everything that's hot right now. You've seen it from the ground level. you've been inside a chiller you've set up automation systems. You've done analytics on those automation systems. You've seen the digital twin process from construction or design all the way through operations.
It's awesome to be able to pick your brain. So thanks for coming on the show.
Tyson Soutter: [00:09:14] I made sure that I did one, one job per buzzword. That was really important. Yeah. That's exactly what
James Dice: [00:09:21] I did. Analytics digital twin. Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if mechanic is quite a buzzword at this point.
Tyson Soutter: [00:09:27] I think it's pretty
James Dice: [00:09:28] cool though.
Tyson Soutter: [00:09:29] Yeah. Digital mechanic. I don't know. Maybe it says. I've plugged it computer into a chiller. Does that count? maybe that can
James Dice: [00:09:35] accounts. Yeah. You digitized something. That's internet of things. There you go. You have it all. Yeah, there you go.
Tyson Soutter: [00:09:40] So
James Dice: [00:09:41] at Siemens, I want to hit, we're not going to talk a whole lot about Siemens specifically today, but I think.
just from my standpoint of trying to understand the industry. Can you talk a little bit about all these different acquisitions that have happened lately? So maybe start with comfy and what it means for Siemens to acquire comfy.
Tyson Soutter: [00:09:57] Yeah. So it's been a while since we've bought these companies, but it was actually one of the reasons that I even thought that maybe Siemens could be the right company for me.
They bought or invested, bought comfy J two, innovations and, Enlighted. So comfy we'll start with is they've been around for a while though, while we're at these reasons tech, IB con conferences. And they came in and said that we're going to, control buildings and be the connection to people. And if you think about our industry, we don't really build technology for the tenants.
Like we build technology to control the building, but not interact with the people within that building. always, and we create tools for that. And then that's just the way it always is. And it's still a very important in large part of our industry that you can't move away from that.
It's not an easy thing to do to control ability. There's very large technical step, but comfy is the way to be able to say, how can we actually connect the worlds? Really bring them together, somewhat not to the point where you have a single user turned on a new chiller. That definitely is an ideal, but have some way where people can feel like they're interacting.
There's a back point. I was a, we say fridgey in Australia, but air conditioning, mechanic, refrigeration mechanic. if you'd get an air conditioning complaint, the first thing you'd stay yet, we'll go adjust the symptom and do And that would solve 80% of your problems. people wants to have some feeling that they have control over their environment.
and then I need some controllers in a bind and that's what we're really learning. So this company is an interesting way to say, okay, let's actually give them the ability to controllability, but the ability to interact with the space. And then, but also keep that feedback and say, if you like a thermal zoning, you can go sit in this area.
Or if you want to control your light levels to your own requirements or a book rooms, or catch up with people, this is the stuff that the industry has to get there. And comfy was the first move is to do this really. So it's a very interesting purchase. And we're saying like daily interaction between the two companies is getting closer and closer.
And the value bundle is just. It's very interesting to me. Cause I think if, especially in this current situation where there's going to have to be at much better utilization of space and that's what company enables
James Dice: [00:12:08] cool. That's fascinating. And you mentioned the learning aspect of it too.
So when you're seeing the tenant or the occupant, doesn't have to be an office building, the occupant interact with, The built environment. you're gonna learn so much about how people interact with spaces. And that's really cool. What about Enlighted? I know that comfy and Enlighted have their own synergies as well, but how do they come into play?
Tyson Soutter: [00:12:29] Yeah. So they've got a very interesting offer where they are looking at creating IOT network within the building. when this IOT buzzword phase came into play and the first question everyone was like, Oh, I've got these great $5 sensors. Let's just Chuck them all through your building. And then people did and they're like, Oh What are these, what are we doing with these? who's controlling. These wires are a bunch of sensors that we can use access just installed all over my building. so what they did is they said, okay, what's in every building lights. Okay. They can be the infrastructure to be able to create this wireless network.
So they come at a price point. That makes sense. They allow you then to connect sensors to it. Now you can look at Siemens, you accompany, you look at digital services. All of these things are only as good as the census available and lots of enables that it becomes that infrastructure for these tools.
That's totally makes sense that these are two purchases they made.
James Dice: [00:13:21] Absolutely. Yeah. It's fascinating. And like picturing the pieces of the puzzle were getting pulled together. What about J two then? So I've have a little bit of familiarity with J too. but don't know a whole lot about like how Siemens plays in, because the confusing part for me is like Siemens already had building automation system solutions before.
So how does that work out?
Tyson Soutter: [00:13:41] Jay two is you know, you have a core group of people from Tridion back in the day, and they went everywhere and they made all these great companies. They choose another one that for me, where they said we've always done automation in this way.
But why, and how can we do it better and the way that they are taking and using semantic models and tagging and changing how you actually deploy and design a BMS. It's very interesting. and the way that I think the same as utilize this is that I have a huge market available to them. And it's not always going to be suitable for just a Siemens.
Does he go CC product? J two feels, that's more than medium spaces is growing for all the players in this space. And so is a perfect fit. And it's also a fantastic integration. you can put it on equipment, you can scale it away, down to microcontrollers. So it's very flexible, very powerful, and can fill the gap anywhere that we needed to.
So we've actually found that. It's been a very good solution, especially if you have, non Siemens products already installed install J through this, it just makes sense. It's a great integration. So it does really work well and it, not every customer is going to want to have to buy the same in this disease.
CC would feel controls fine. We can offer any solution. We can become agnostic to our customers. And maybe it's not the right time to do an upgrade and it's the right time to do a partial operate, just a front end graphic lock rate. And that's what J tree is perfect
James Dice: [00:15:06] for that. Got it. Cool. That's exciting.
you said that was probably one of the reasons that played into your go into Siemens because of that. Those are three very exciting acquisitions, so
Tyson Soutter: [00:15:16] cool. It makes sense strategically too. Like you can see where the market's going and they're like, okay, we need to get into this space and start competing.
So it did impress me when I saw those purchases.
James Dice: [00:15:26] Absolutely. Cool. So we're going to talk about selling tech smart building tech in a minute. I want to get into my new favorite question though first and get your answer to it. So you've seen my new favorite question is why are buildings, decades behind, other technologies?
And so I think your answer is going to be very important because you've seen it from so many different angles. So what is the Tyson suitor answer? So to James, his favorite question.
Tyson Soutter: [00:15:51] So think about this way too often. when I first started, I remember going into a building and seeing an automation system and thinking this is very old software and it wasn't at all.
But then as you start going through buildings, you start seeing a pattern. So the facade looks great. You open a cabinet and what's not looking so great is the pneumatic system that's been in there for 40 years, but it works So they're not going to operate it. So a lot of it comes to when you install a system, you're not installing it for two years or three years.
You're in sometimes installing that system for 10 or 20 years. So if we come up with data analytics, which. Really in our industry, hasn't been around that long, really? At scale, if you think about it, people have talked about it, but it's false detection before now. So if you have to have an acceptable amount of data in the right intervals, in the right structure, and you put cutting edge at the thought about industry, that's 3% of our buildings.
So that's 30 year replacement cycle. That's a very extreme case, but let's say on average, seven to eight years, In reality, I saw buildings that still had pneumatic systems that stopped being installed 20 years prior to me starting my trade still existing in America has a lot of these actually.
James Dice: [00:17:08] Yeah. The U S has where you have a lot of pneumatic systems that are still out there. Definitely.
Tyson Soutter: [00:17:12] Yeah. And then working pretty well, a bit of oil, but it's okay. But this is the problem that we find is that it's never the first thing that is thought of when someone's. Looking at a building like a, tenant's not gonna walk in and be like, what a fantastic automation system they're going to look in and say, Oh, that's okay.
Is very nice. All the, facilities, the gym, the lift, all of these things, they get upgraded And I think what we see is that people, if you walk into a new building and if you, especially, if you've been part of the design phase, You can walk in there and think this is it's a beautiful building, but this is an grade top of the range it's building.
But if you've been pilot design phase, all the cuts that have been made to the subsystems and the systems behind that, and until it becomes the forefront of the tenant experience, it's always going to be cut Fest. So one, I would say it's a very long capital life cycle and a very high capital expense too.
It's not. At the forefront of a tenant who is paying the bills. So until we can influence both those phases, yeah. One might take longer than the other. it's gonna, it's gonna take us a while to get to the technology required to actually bring us into competing with other industries.
James Dice: [00:18:27] Beautiful. Yeah. And just to add a little color from my experience there, I did a lot of work with universities and healthcare systems, over the past 10 years or so.
And in those two areas, those two different verticals, you have a lot of donors, so a donor will come in and say, I'm going to donate, 20% of my will to this organization and what happens is, and I've seen it everywhere. It's especially at a university where a donor will come in and they say I want my, the name on the library.
John H. Smith, library at this university. And I've always said No one says, Hey, what really want my name on this new chiller plant over here? I really want my name on that, on the energy dashboard. Yeah. And I always thought that was a fascinating, it's just not sexy to automate buildings.
at least for people that don't listen
Tyson Soutter: [00:19:14] to this podcast and it doesn't bring people in the door.
James Dice: [00:19:18] yeah. Right when I walk in, I'm like, who's got the thermostat and what sort of HVAC system is this? Yeah, exactly. Alright, cool. I love that answer. Thank you.
I'm getting unique answers every time I ask this question too. And so I feel like what I need to do is bring them all together into one, you know, synthesize them. I guess
Tyson Soutter: [00:19:36] I would be very curious to say how the answer has changed depending on what their current career path is.
Because I think that will definitely cause you hearing the raisins every day and it's probably influencing you through something like unbiased. Oh,
James Dice: [00:19:49] for sure. Yeah, definitely. All right. Let's transition to sales. So your what'd you say your title was again,
Tyson Soutter: [00:19:56] global business development manager, digitalization.
James Dice: [00:19:59] Okay.
Tyson Soutter: [00:20:00] So
James Dice: [00:20:01] Siemens pays you to know about selling smart building stuff. And that's what we're going to talk about
Tyson Soutter: [00:20:05] today. Exactly.
James Dice: [00:20:07] Okay. All right. let's talk about just selling smart building tech in general. So you have these conversations every day, so what are the keys, to getting started selling smart building tech.
Tyson Soutter: [00:20:18] Yeah. it's funny how many times I've have the same conversation with people as well. Like you do end up repeating and when you get asked a question, the person's always thinking, Oh, I've got him always, never answered this one before.
James Dice: [00:20:30] Yeah, exactly.
Tyson Soutter: [00:20:31] so I was pretty lucky when I was up, when I went over the course of three years.
Possibly thousands of meetings with customers and you really get like this speed learning course of okay, you'll really going to learn how to answer this. so I think it's smart. Building tech always starts with not going to a customer and saying, I'm going to sell you analytics.
However, you never start with, I'm going to sell you this. You always go to the customer and say, what are you trying to achieve? Like it has to be from a consultative approach. I've and this could be maybe just from my own experience with the success that I've seen and the kind of patterns where you can see other people being successful in this space is come in as an expo, come in as a consultant and say, want to understand what you need to do.
Don't tell me what you want to buy, tell me what you need to do. So once you understand, they don't want a digital twin they want to save energy. Okay. that's two different things. Like they don't always go hand in hand. So always starting by asking the customer, what do you want to achieve?
What systems do you have today and how big is that gap? So if it's an existing building, you can really say, to achieve this, we need to connect to these different systems. And here's the gap you're going to have to expect to bring together somehow if it's a design phase, You say, what is the digital language that you want to prescribe for all your buildings?
Not just this one, because there's no point having a digital solution. If you have a portfolio of buildings for one building, So really understanding, okay, if this is your plan for one building, then it's gotta be a grouping of buildings type of building fine, but you need to have the same somewhat goal that has stretch marks.
so this is an a grade building. We aim here and we scale down as we go to the lower grade buildings. And if you can provide that consistency, that's when you'll see success in selling digital services. You don't walk in and say, we're going to give you this tool. And everything works is all fine.
There's a process of understanding, where are you today? How do we get there? Because some customers, they might not even have a DMS. And that's when you need to say, okay, maybe you need to focus on putting some network controls together and that's fine, but don't skip the steps. There's no point, but let's build something that's going to be sustainable and actually beneficial, long term.
And so that's the first point. So really go along for that journey with the customer, the next is making sure that you're selling something that has continued value. So if you sell energy savings projects with some sort of digital thing, what happens in year two and three, when you stop saving energy.
So we're in a. Pretty cutthroat industry when it comes to budget. So capital expenditure CapEx is something that once you get that decision made, it's made you get the project. Great. All is good. You don't have to revisit it that often, maybe to justify the cost once, but operational expense. That is a cost that you need to be able to show value year on year, every year.
If you save or add a huge amount of value to a customer, you one and add no value here. To me, three you're gone. And the way that these corporations work in these companies, where every year, they review their budget. They look at the line items on the OPEX operational expense, and they say, why are we spending money on this?
And they should be doing that. That's their job. that's their responsibility. So if you're not adding value from the previous year, they don't care. If you say 30% of the first year, why continue paying for it? So that's where a lot of this building tech industry, they always come in as a SaaS and say, We want to be a SaaS. And if you're going to be a SaaS, great. You have to continue to add value and that value doesn't disappear ever.
It has to continue, and it has to be able to sustain multiple patterns and multiple years. so it's not that easy. So you have to be very careful on what you sell because you can be successful for one year. And we've all seen those companies that come in make a really big noise for one year.
And then disappear because they don't have a sustained value selling proposition. And that is very critical to be able to sell the technology in our industry.
James Dice: [00:24:27] It's fascinating. There's so many places I want to go there. one first thought is I've seen it happen.
And you mentioned it a little bit. I've seen it happen where say you're installing some sort of FTD package. You install that package. You and, implement an initial round of energy conservation measures. Those get implemented. If you're lucky, let's just to be honest first, if you're lucky those
Tyson Soutter: [00:24:48] first
James Dice: [00:24:49] get implemented, but let's just say that you would get implemented six months later, they're implemented, they're verified, you've created savings.
And so I think what I'm hearing from you is that what
Tyson Soutter: [00:24:58] people often find next is that
James Dice: [00:25:01] what have you done for me lately attitude. So what's the next thing. Okay. So how do you. How do you think about that then? So it seems like to me that the value proposition for selling a solution,
Tyson Soutter: [00:25:11] can't
James Dice: [00:25:12] be a single value proposition.
It has to be, if it's energy, it's maybe creating the savings and then maintaining the savings, but then it probably also needs to be like bringing in maintenance savings and things like that that are multidimensional rather than just one type of value problem.
Tyson Soutter: [00:25:28] Yeah. So love selling these kinds of tools because you're not selling something that doesn't have value.
if you don't have value to clean, like it's very quickly. So you've nailed that point. So energy savings, so important yet, as soon as you say, I can save you energy, every customer is like, great, what else can you do for me? And so if you really want to become. Sticky as part of the process in a good way, like really, to be able to say, I need to be part of the lifecycle of this building.
So that is where you have sustained value as a technology solution. So if you come in and say, you have. technicians, onsite, security guards, onsite cleaners, all these people. They're part of the operational budget and they don't get removed every year. They don't get reduced. Ideally, if you can add the same amount of value as these people or more, that's how you then prove your case, we're building owner, and that's how you become part of their processes.
So yes, maintenance is the logical solution. If you look at how we do maintenance time buildings, I'm sure you've seen some task please, that some of them are, quite, historically based on, older methods of running a building and there's ways to improve this. And I'm always cautious because you have statutory requirements in countries.
There's some critical assets. There's no such thing as a blanket reduction. that's ridiculous. And there's no such thing as a pure software solution either. It has to be looking at this and saying, okay, what can we do safely? How can we improve it? But how can we do it without taking technical knowledge, the building, or how can we do it without putting assets at risk?
So if you can do that successfully, you'll pause the process. Now. You'll pretty cool. Then your cost, should it be relevant to the entities savings you're making and the maintenance you're delivering? So maybe there has to be some sort of fluctuating fee there. Some that goes up and down depending on the value adding, and that is how you then justify continuing your service.
so there should be one and two should be, there should be more cost. That's just, if you want, like you said, if you want to implement energy savings, it's easy to find them. The next step is then implementing them. If you want to do that, you need to invest. So I always start with explain that to customers and, there is an investment he does.
You're not going to pay for the service and everything's fixed, or you don't have to pay for the software and everything's fixed the software helps you find the problems, you still need to fix them. So you have to be honest about every step of the way with the customer too. the last thing you want is for them to turn on a smart building solution and go, Oh, why isn't everything working?
Yeah, no, this is the first step. Now we fix the problems.
James Dice: [00:27:58] Totally. And okay. So energy maintenance. And then if I heard you from the beginning of this conversation, it might make sense then to get into the occupant sort of engagement, or is that the next step or how do you view that sort of roadmap?
Tyson Soutter: [00:28:12] So I think that, yeah, so energy maintenance and then, capital and operational planning.
So op ex cap. Yeah. those three things are, they're not future, like today. We have to do that. That's bare minimum. In my opinion, if you don't do that, if you can't help the facility manager, reduce energy, do maintenance in a more efficient manner and help them do the capital and operational planning.
Try something else. or, be cheap enough to warrant it. the occupancy thing that is when you need certain amount of centers, you need other solutions. You need some sort of, I won't go into any products, but you need some sort of tracking solution or not people, but measuring people coming in and out of floors, connecting to security systems, understanding space utilization.
That is also incredibly valuable, but you can really have them as a joint solution or a separate solutions. And that's okay. you try not to sell everything to a customer. You really say, if you want that great, let's do that. If you bring that into these other solutions, there's a huge value there, but not, everyone's going to be willing to jump all the way in.
Maybe you need to sell an incremental step. Like he's in with one solution and then expand into further solutions, Yeah.
James Dice: [00:29:19] And I want to give a shout out to the memoria did this, this webinar last month, called where smart buildings go wrong. I think, and Mike Ruman from vanity in the UK was the guest.
And he talked about the value of point solution. So like a single. vertical within the building versus this holistic value proposition. I'm wondering how you think about it. You mentioned it's okay. To the most separate. How do you think about selling in terms of the gold standard, like the, that everyone probably wants to get, it would be to have everything integrated together, single platform, versus like today, maybe it makes sense, like you said to maybe have these silos maintained right now.
So how do you think about that dichotomy?
Tyson Soutter: [00:29:59] Yeah. So I'm glad you brought that up because I definitely don't support the silo solutions. but think there's a value in saying this system does this, but they have to be, they have to be some sort of interconnected through some sort of data, structure or common platform, or some sort of centralized network, like a base building network with some sort of API or MQTT or backnet.
It doesn't matter as long as there's some sort of methodology there and strategy there. but the gold standard, I'm going to connect everything up into one building that is the dream. And I've sat on that, the design phase, and I've worked on new buildings and deliberate, some systems actually work like this and it worked really well.
But again, and the capital expense is so high that if you build a solution that only works with the gold standard. That's not a solution. So your solution, in my opinion, has to work with the silos and then should support that. But it also should work with the holistic every system together. So I always say you have to stop.
If you come into our industry and say, I've got a software solution. It's perfect. I need one second data. I need, 47 sensors on my equipment and I need to have no latency on the network. Yeah. Cool. So at that point, zero 1% of our buildings, like you really have to be realistic about this, and I'm really lucky to have that experience as an automation engineer and just seeing some horrific network and really thinking how, but when you say it, okay, again, you're like, okay.
This is just they're all. And the industry is changing so quickly. In terms of what's available today versus what's available 20 years ago, but the buildings haven't caught up to that yet. So yeah, our believe solution has to work in a silent, has to be able to work on one system. And it has to be able to scale up we've amounts of points and amounts of complexity.
And if he can do that great. And if you're building a new system and, helping a building owner, bring them along the way so that if you do a project that's in a silo. Make it, so that siloed doesn't have to stay isolated in the future. It has the ability to be able to connect other systems, meaning, make sure that it's network some way, make it some sort of data structure.
we've spoken at length about these things where it's okay to do that, but really open it up to the future possibilities. Totally.
James Dice: [00:32:16] I love that. It's almost like everyone. needs to have in mind what the gold standard or what the Holy grail, whatever we want to say is like the five year, 10 year goal.
But in the meantime, or not going to be able to get there immediately. So being able to sell and like you said earlier, put these puzzle pieces together in a way that sets you up for
Tyson Soutter: [00:32:35] that long term. I love that point too, because. That people, I think when they hear about these smart building technologies and that there's always two sides, there's the visionaries.
And they they're a hundred percent forward and you need these people. And then you have the automation, people that are very cynical. This is never going to work. It depends on the day I could be anywhere. And, the point is, if you have a project, treat that project as if it's the whole building. So don't go are the rest of the buildings or it doesn't talk to it.
So it doesn't matter. Just build, just upgrade that part. Don't worry about future proofing. This like always keep in mind every time you spend capital, every time you do service work, operational costs. That's an opportunity to bring that building to a standard. And then I think this is where we can teach or not teach condescending, but advise building owners to say.
If you create the blueprint, the structure the way forward, this is where I need to be. Every time you spend money in a building, that's an opportunity to get there. You don't have to do the whole building all months, do it slowly, but make sure you're bringing it up to that level where you want to be.
James Dice: [00:33:39] Absolutely. Yeah. It's your opportunity to take a step towards that five year goal or whatever it is.
Tyson Soutter: [00:33:44] So how do you,
James Dice: [00:33:45] when you're selling to owners that don't have that vision though, what do you do that? Cause I've experienced. I've experienced this so much, right? So mostly as an independent consultant.
So coming in and seeing all these projects happening within a portfolio and realizing that no one has this vision in mind and all of these projects are being done in ways that don't. Even if the owner decided what their five year goal was, I would bet that these projects weren't walking them anywhere near or anywhere, any closer to that five year goal.
So how do you think about selling in that environment? When that strategy, I call it a strategy, but it's really also a vision that vision doesn't currently.
Tyson Soutter: [00:34:27] Yeah. I would say persistence, repainting your values over and over again. It always comes back down to when you go into these people just they've got their project, they've got their, budgets.
they have to hand over it. It all makes sense why they can't see forward. I always, I'm very sympathetic towards this. and that's, you should always be sympathetic you, there's no point getting frustrated with this, But this, in this case, I always go back to saying if you build this way, how are you going to achieve these solutions? And I always talk about software solutions and things, the end goal. So if you want to, if you want to sell data analytics, if you want to sell digital twins, if you want to sell closed loop optimization, and people, they will, they can capture this and go, that's what I want.
And that's good because they don't have the historical knowledge to understand what it takes to get there. So if that's what they want, you have to keep reminding them saying it to do this. You need to be doing this today. Like it's a pretty lame analogy, but if you want a smart building, you really need a strong foundation, just like you would building a normal building.
you don't build it on a poor foundation. The digital infrastructure. It requires the same strong foundation. So I go in and say, if you do it in this manner, you're not going to be able achieve that. That's fine if that's what you want to do, but cross it off the list because that's not possible anymore.
And I just really important. I always, I never get caught up in the details of, Networks or control choices or data modeling until I explained, Oh yeah, these are gone. So the, all these solutions that you want to do in the end, they're gone now. So that's okay. If you're okay with that, continue with that.
If you're okay. Giving up everything you've ever wanted, that's completely fine. Yeah.
James Dice: [00:36:03] All your engineer, everything out of it.
Tyson Soutter: [00:36:05] Yeah, exactly. it's tough. It's tough. It's you can't win. You can't win every battle. And. When you find the right building owners who share, that they have the same goals in mind and they're somewhat forward thinking, just support them and give them your knowledge and don't try and sell them on a specific solution so that even if you sell them something once fine, what are you gaining there?
build those relationships and be able to advise them like ethically to say, no, this is the right solution. And it might not be your solution today. But it will be eventually. So really treated them as a, as I nearly treated it as like a, an educational process or like I'm looking at going, okay, maybe my solution is not the best today, but this would be good for you today.
this would be perfect. I really believe that this would work for you and that will sustain longterm relationships. It just makes it easier. It just makes it easier to really sell what you believe in.
James Dice: [00:36:58] Yeah, what I love about your approach here and your just overall attitude. It is that if, someone that works for a building owner where to listen to this, they could apply these same.
Approaches to selling internally. And you mentioned foundations. That's why I named the smart buildings course that the nexus smart buildings course foundations, because these sort of attitudes, these sort of strategies are what every building owner needs to like wrangle internally.
They need to figure this out internally and how like whoever the champion is, they need to figure out how to sell this to all of the stakeholders internally as well. So that's. that's why I think this conversation so important. It's not just about all of the vendors out there learning how to sell better.
It's also about, a champion taking their organization on this journey as well,
Tyson Soutter: [00:37:43] just to add quickly to that is the best thing about selling this smart building tech is it's more of a concept we're solving. We're not trying to sell a product or, we're not trying to sell a specific thing.
We're saying like, okay, this is what we want you to do. I don't really talk about products. I don't have to myself. I talk about the concepts and so we can work for anyone. And it's just, it's nice to be able to say, I truly believe this is going to help you. Like you need this solution.
I can't even fathom how you're running the building at the moment, but I know this will help you. it's not going to be easy, but we can do this and there'll be benefits. And by the end, when the value comes in, everyone will be high fiving each other, and it's going to be okay.
James Dice: [00:38:24] let's bring this down. So we've been talking about kind of high level selling. Let's bring this down to actual buzzwords, actual topics. Buzz words is a negative way to put it. These are very important solutions that people need to know how to sell whether internally or externally. so let's.
Not make fun of the fact that our industry loves buzzwords, but, let's start with one of your favorite topics, which is semantic modeling and, standards, for the organization. So how do you, it's something that you spend a lot of time on? How do you sell that? Very messy, very difficult topic.
Tyson Soutter: [00:38:57] I can, I think I've annoyed.
Every single person I've worked with this topic. To the point now, where I think if you asked me the solution to any problem, public NSA, some sort of data modeling. So it's, if you look at like what we have in our industry today is it's, proprietary systems, not interconnected, separated systems, data structures that really don't align across companies across countries.
across, the same company in the same suburb, the data will be entirely different one building installed by one company and the same company next door, it's a completely different system, a different style of structure. And everyone's Oh yeah, it can't be, it can't be that hard.
Yeah, it is. It is really hard. And then you have certain installers that come in and they don't even put data naming on your backnet points. For example. weren't mentioned nineties, but this stuff makes it very difficult. so I always stop saying naming conventions. I, a great, as long as you don't stop there because they never work, they provide some structure.
Structure's good. So put it in there, make it work. What's important is having some manner. Not to rely on a very specific name because, the relationship between a temperature sensor on the wall and the relationship between the chiller on the roof has endless and less variables. So the amount of equipment between that temperature sensor in the wall and that chiller could be, it could be one, could be 60, it could be endless.
Putting a naming, like naming something, temp sensor, not very helpful, but understanding that this sensor he's in a room, it's, the, eh, the temperature is going to be fluctuating based on air. It's linked to this equipment. That equipment has several components. That data on those components is it could be a VAV, could be an AHU.
It could be jewel dark. It could be hot deck, cold deck. All of this is data that you can't cover with naming conventions. And if you want a naming convention will only get you so far, but if you have a tagging methodology, you can do all these relationships like you could with the naming convention, but also make it so it's scalable.
So if you look at this and say, I want to create a solution for a fan, okay. So what type of fan. Just the generic fan. I have something that's going to work on any type of fans. Great. Now how many versions out of a pan or that unit in a building. So if you do naming conventions, okay.
Now you need to write something for every scenario of the type of fan. Send me pumps. Same with sensors. Same with actuators and the dampers. Same with, okay. Let's just apply some metadata and then we can just. Query one, one, one tiny. It would be, it's a metadata. I just wanted to write a rule for every damn not outside of our damper, not a exhaust fan air damper, not supply a damper, not a whatever.
It could be. Just the damper. Okay, cool. You run it once and now you've written it for every single type of damper. So if you get into this deeper and deeper into this world where you're like, I need to start adding value to a big data set. You want to be able to say, ah, I don't want to do things 10 times.
I don't want to do them. I don't want to do them more than once. And that's what the automobile allows you to do. It allows you to query huge amounts of data and actually do it in a very efficient manner. So the relationships have to be there. The metadata has to be there and it doesn't stop just with, attributes of a mechanical piece of equipment, or it can continue into.
okay. This is installed in this office space, or this is, this only operates during this time. These can all be taxed as well. Like you can apply the context of the scenario or the environment you can provide operating conditions. All of this can just be tagged onto equipment. So if you have some sort of standard, great.
Now that the second part of your question is the standards. Yeah. Okay, great. But every industry has. Crazy amounts of standards. if you look at the construction industry, Coby and like there's so many standards that you could list through and say, okay, all of them have value.
Same with our industry. You have haystack, you have brick, you have, I started writings like on the standards here. So if you want to be able to what's the best one, I get asked a lot am like the best one is One that's consistent and that's the standard so
James Dice: [00:43:16] implementation.
Tyson Soutter: [00:43:17] So haystack fall is coming and it's taking the best of relationships with, brick and the metadata, of haystack.
as long as you have the mentality of, I need to create a standard with the goals we just discussed in mind. Switching from your standard to the industry. Standard is easy because you've broken it up in a way. If you've done it correctly, switching to another standard, you do it once.
That's the whole point of creating this data modeling. So it's important that we have as an industry, come up with a standard. Don't let that stop. You. From doing any standard today, we need to invest more into some standards. I think open source community projects that haystack for, I say, in this being quite successful longterm, but no one knows, but the more we engage with this, the more we're able to invest our time into this and to spread it, then we're going to see who wins, but create something now.
Make sure you have the right mentality of structuring it in a way where you have the relationships, you have the metadata, and then when you have to shoot, it's a very easy process.
James Dice: [00:44:25] Very supportive. Oh yeah. The way I see it as like you said, the word scalable earlier, so it's enabling scalability, but it also enabling, sounds like it's enabling like your future proofing, your smart building.
So you're enabling yourself to. Switched standards later, but also enabling you to get value out of your data later on. You don't even know what you're going to do with it yet, but the model allows you to have
Tyson Soutter: [00:44:49] that
James Dice: [00:44:50] set up in a way that yeah. You, whatever you want to do with it later, you could do something with it.
Cool. That is a conversation that you and I were talking about, like it's happening all over the world and it's totally fascinating. So I just wanted to give a shout out for everyone. That's just is making the argument that Tyson just made here. and you summarized it very succinctly. So thank you for doing that.
Just a given, I like giving an example of just Let's say you want to do something with fan data across your portfolio. How would you do that without a model? So uh, I did a podcast on this with, Corey Mosman and we used the example of a discharge air temperature sensor.
So just. Pretend you want to do something with your discharge air temperature across your entire port folio. How would you do it without a semantic model?
Tyson Soutter: [00:45:33] So
James Dice: [00:45:33] that's I guess, where to start is to start providing examples to people, to be able to sell the concept. cool. Let's move on. if you're not worn out already, I have a guy more topics here.
so let's go. So say your data's model. You want to do some analytics on it. How do you then. So analytics to
Tyson Soutter: [00:45:52] a building owner. Yeah. this is my favorite topic, I think, but I always start by saying analytics is machine learning, AI fault detection. These are tools. what I'm selling to you is a digital service.
what I'm going to give to you is I'm going to solve your operational problems using these tools. So tell a customer, I always start by saying it's very easy for me to find a thousand issues in my building. It's hard for me to close five issues and I'm sure you've experienced this. And we may have discussed this over a few years.
And the biggest problem to a customer is that they don't need more issues. They don't need you to come and say, Hey, here's all your problems. Great. I could have got a consultant report for this. What they need is these tools have to be able to say, here is the issues, he's the highest priority issues and he's why you have to fix it.
So it has to come with a value assigned to it. And I say value a lot, but. if you're not adding value to a customer, the customer shouldn't be buying. That's just as simple as that. and we can close three to five issues of every month. You're going to have an inquiry, probably high performing building.
So what we do is we might not even find new problems. Like we're not changing the laws of physics here, where we're just finding really basic things. And finding some more advanced things with analytics, with linear regression, with machine learning. but initially for the first few months, a lot of our values come through fall detection and that in context of problems.
so from there you need to say, okay, once we do that, we add cost to it. We add the risk to us, and then we prioritize it for you. So it's all about saying we use a bunch of tools and I never say analytics in terms of just an offering. I always say. Fall detection, analytics, machine learning, all of these are part of what we're offering to you.
And each one of them has value and very high value. But together is where you start saying, okay, we're solving problems now. And
James Dice: [00:47:43] this is a good, this brings up a good point around the buzzword of AI. If the bottleneck is closing three to five issues per month, what value does AI have for closing those?
I think that's a good way to put it in context. It's like that's the real bottleneck, no one needs like more help uncovering issues.
it's in using analytics to
improve processes.
And how do you clear up this confusion around like AI is going to wipe all of our butts and make it make our lives so much better?
Tyson Soutter: [00:48:17] I think I was in that basket at one stage, and then I started looking into it and these tools are coming and they're incredibly impressive. Like when you say them working, you like. Wow. that's nearly scary how good these are, but it comes back to that first discussion point.
If your tool requires the ideal scenario, in terms of data, quality, data availability, uptime, low latency, very stable networks. It's a very small percentage of our market. So I always say yes, these tools they're coming and they're going to have a huge impact on our market, but. We're one of the few markets where we technology you can't, it doesn't change overnight.
it requires capital investment. So it's coming and it's getting closer. I feel like every year. Okay. One starting to see more and more impressive things. So I think it's going to be a very powerful tool. I just don't think it has a big enough market share for us to be worried that it's going to take over the building industry.
It's going to pay a big part of it. They're definitely eventually I don't know what that time period is, but eventually.
James Dice: [00:49:18] Cool. Cool. So the way I'm hearing it from you is if we don't have AI on our list here, but if you were to like sell AI, you're selling it as part of a suite of analytics solutions and that's where you see it playing right now.
Tyson Soutter: [00:49:33] I think data analytics is incredible. if you do like linear regression for them, that's really very valuable solution that it's not future tech. That's what people utilizing that everyday. Yes. It's expected in my opinion. if you look at that, that's fantastic, but that still requires, a lot of data.
And if you're trying to add value to a specific building, you can use external data from other buildings, but. The best thing you can do is capture the data within that building on that piece of equipment. So you can look at past performance and actually really determine how has this changed in performance based off previous operations.
so yeah, that's fantastic. that's three months, that's six months into a contract. So you need to add value all the way up until that point. So that's where fault detection and more basic analytics plays a bigger part. Once you hit the six, seven month period. That's when you can get a bit fancy with some more linear regressions, but there's still a lot of value thing, efficiently finding problems with faults and root poles analysis that I can't stress how important that is.
not just, Hey, here's a fault, the chiller failed and let's put everything in the building and fold the tool needs to be smart enough to be able to go, Hey, let's get back a bit and say, let's ignore everything downstream that's. You know that's where our industry needs to be as a band minimum selling these tools that they have to be able to offer that.
Brilliant.
James Dice: [00:50:51] Brilliant. Okay. All right. Let's move on. So we've talked about analytics, which is collecting data and a one way. A pole from the building. What about this new, I guess new, it's not really that new, but it's, becoming more sexy recently is this closed loop optimization. So instead of just a one way pole, maybe you have a smart building software solution.
That's then sending smart commands back to, the dumb, Air quotes, dumb, underlying systems that were there before. so how do you think about that and how do you educate owners and think about selling that solution?
Tyson Soutter: [00:51:26] Yeah, I think initially I was very skeptical of this offering
James Dice: [00:51:30] because of that, there's a lot of skepticism in the market.
Like I've talked to a lot of people that like, they're like, our clients don't want that and they just like end of discussion. So there seems to be a ton of resistance toward it.
Tyson Soutter: [00:51:41] But yeah, it's in my opinion, that's what a control is already doing. it's controlling to some sort of program.
your program. actually, it led me down many paths and I think brainbox is the company that I'm thinking of. you had a great interview. definitely worth checking out. It was fantastic. and then we've even in Siemens there's companies that are working on it and you see all these solutions coming up, a lot of universities are working on it.
There was an Australian company that did it a few years ago, that's scale. And I saw it firsthand. And I think that has a really large potential value. I just think that it's very difficult to implement. if you look at, playing controllers for children, It's a similar concept. but the way that they approach it is like limit out variations of equipment.
Let's focus on just doing chillers and even not creates so many variables. What type of chiller size, how many palms? Primary, secondary, like how big is the parking like what's load. Are we looking at. Refrigerant ambient, like all of this it's not easy. So I think there's loop optimization.
If you look at it from like the plant controllers and whether it's in success, they're seeing success in environments that have less technical abilities and need a very good control system that is highly efficient and highly technical. That's where those solutions work perfectly. I see the closed loop optimization.
Scenario. if people focus on it, VAVs or shoes or certain types of equipment being extremely powerful, because we're getting in our industry, we've always heard this an aging workforce, the technical skills are leaving our industry and we're getting less and less technical people. These systems are going to be very important in parts of the world where we cannot replace that workforce, which is going to be significant.
So I think there's, I think there's a high value there, but I like looking at them from the approach from like chiller optimization, all these plant controllers, let's focus on a type of equipment and expand from there. And if companies do it in that manner, I can see it being a very interesting sell. I think if someone comes in and says, I'm going to control your whole building through a closed loop optimization, I would be concerned or be concerned.
And I would say that maybe we need to take a few steps before we get there. let's not leap to that level because if you're controlling set points, for example, how many variations of programs hang off that set point, it's not not all controller algorithms are the same and these controls, so there's going to be different variations of controls.
That happened once you can change a set point. So they're not going to have enough data to be able to really mimic these scenarios enough to learn from them. So I think it's a future tech. I think if I focus on controlling certain types of systems, I've seen some really incredible solutions in data centers with crack units that work really well, super efficient.
They're 30, 40% savings. I've seen some really interesting solutions with very these and I walked into that thing very skeptical, but walked away, going that very impressive. So I think there's that there's a value there. I'm there. Yeah. We're interested to see where the pricing comes in for all these, like how much money do you spend to get so much value.
And what does that compare to a traditional manners? investing in the systems. that's the unknown at the moment for me, because I think a lot of these companies are very competitive with their pricing. They come in quite aggressive. which I think is fine, if we're going to see you, what happens in year two, year, three year four of these companies, like we talked about, does that value proposition carry on into the later years?
Or are we going down that, starter mentality of when the market worried about profit leader? that's a difficult sell for me. Yeah.
James Dice: [00:55:14] I've seen really aggressive pricing and I've also seen really aggressive, expensive pricing. I've seen like very significant high SAS fees, like capturing a significant amount of the savings that are being created.
this whole area is. So fascinating to me. so I've written several essays on what I call advanced supervisory control. Cause like you said, we already have supervisor controls, so we have to draw some delineation between what we have and these new, the solutions. So I've made up this stupid acronym.
I see. But I've been just like totally nerding out on this topic lately. And I would probably do a podcast on all the things I'm hearing from people about it. Cause it's fascinating to hear. Like just one example that I'll give you is like a very large analytics company. They told me that, yeah.
Number one, their clients aren't asking for this, but I proud of them a little bit and realize that their integrations they've been setting up are not two way. So like thousands of installations set up and they like, couldn't do it if they wanted to. And so it's are you saying it's not a thing because your
Tyson Soutter: [00:56:17] whole business is set up in a way that won't
James Dice: [00:56:19] allow it, or are you saying it's not a thing because like your clients really don't want this new tool.
So I'm seeing this topic as like this other layer of disruption. Cause it's not just disrupting, the building owners processes, it's also disrupting these Players that have been innovative. And now maybe they're the ones that are holding back the industry from heading in the direction that we probably need to head.
So I'll continue to nerd out. And I think it's a fascinating topic.
Tyson Soutter: [00:56:46] Yeah. And I love, actually read everything you've written on this tonight. I'm always the one question I ask when I meet with these companies and talk to them about that solution is like, where does the ownership stop? Because once you control something remotely through a cloud.
Yeah. Who's responsible for that now. that becomes a difficult discussion as well. So I think that doesn't mean it's a deal breaker. It just means, Hey, how does this work and how does the service change? know? It's five years from now, we could be saying that, how did we do this without these advanced surface controls?
Like how, why would we ever program a control locally? What was wrong with us? But we don't know, but I'm very interested to see where it goes. And I've heard some inquest saying some very impressive things. I just want to be able to say, what happens if you use it? Like, how does this work longterm and how does it fit into the operational versus I'm super fascinated by this topic.
James Dice: [00:57:35] Yeah, me too. let's move on. Maybe we'll have to do like a full unpacking of that, like later. So let's talk about digital twins. so it's an exciting topic. So I'm actually moderating a panel at, IB con in a couple of weeks, on digital twins. I don't know how I got myself in the middle of that conversation, but, so how do you think about selling digital twins?
And I think that. Like one aspect I've heard from me so far in this conversation, that's, there's like the design and construction aspect of it. And then there's the operations aspect of it. So maybe you can hit both of those.
Tyson Soutter: [00:58:06] Yeah. This is the main reason I change into this industry because I kept hearing about digital twins.
And I think at one point I'm like, I don't really know what that means. So I started looking into it like, okay, I need to learn. What this means because it kept coming up and I'm like, I don't know. It doesn't sound like what, how would you ever do that? It seems impossible. once you get into it and it goes back to my, my overall arching, feelings towards selling smart building techies, as long as you're delivering value, It's going to work for the company. And a digital twin is in the design and construction phase is. Already proven its value tenfold. So if you do it correctly at the moment if you're designing a building, there's going to be 3d durings, there's going to be planning. There's going to be four D and five D time and cost planning involved in some way.
there's going to be a BIM model. This is what it's all about. It's about saying, how can we utilize this process to be beneficial for the construction period? And what I found working on these construction buildings is, and through these processes is it is, as you can imagine so many services, so many companies, so many people, how do you track what's happened?
So the way you do it is through okay. Onsite builders or general contractors. but how do you control the digital process? Like the documentation? How do you make sure that things are getting stored in the correct manner? How do you make sure that what your pet design in a stock, how does that equate to something in the end and what if you do a correctly and you have to have some sort of consultant through this process.
You can say, I want to build this building. I want to capture all this information. I want to install it in this manner. And I'm going to have a digital replica of this. You're already paying for that when you build a building. So it makes complete sense. What is it digital like a project manager, digital project manager will do for you is that they will federate the models, meaning that would bring all the, these different services.
a hydraulics architecture see-able, mechanical electrical. And they bring them together and into one federated model and they might do this on a weekly basis while your building and make sure that all the assets are being low correctly. You're not going to have clash problems like clash detection.
So understanding where everything's going, make sure all the services are all going in the right way. You have enough capacity, enough load, make sure the foundations are all okay. You're not cutting through any sort of important parts of the floor. and then also just making sure the layout, the feel everything is done correctly, this is incredibly valuable.
And if you can capture all that digital data great. If you can entire the design documents to this same model, meaning the installation files, your design and commissioning figures, your manuals, your warranty. If you can put that all into the model. Okay, let me clarify that. Not put it into the model, but we'll link it to the model.
You don't want to put it into the model because it becomes very fortunate. I have some way where you can link it to this model because it's all geo located. It's very structured and you're paying for this already. You're all going to walk away at the end of this building process. And you're going to have a digital twin.
Yeah. some caveats that if you walk into the construction site, It might not look exactly like a model and be a model. As soon as construction happens, we have a bit of a gap benign the street where the beautiful three D model doesn't enter the construction floor and it's all printed two D models.
And you have someone with a red textile redline markup. And they're marking it up and changing everything and there's different versions. And this is a major problem, but doesn't change the value of the digital twin and that problem will be solved. you've got these 3d capture cameras already where you can go around and encaptured the geometry of the space and can capture the layout and put it into a point cloud.
you know, you're going around a spice and you're capturing real images and you're geo liking them.
So they're perfectly placed. This technology is becoming more accessible. It's becoming cheaper. And if you can accurately track the services as they're being built and then compare it to the model which you can do with augmented reality tonight. It's not like the crazy future tech. Eventually it's going to take time because the building industry, you'll be walking around with an iPad and you'll be able to look at the three D model, the BIM model.
And you'll be able to say, Hey, those pipes are, 20 mill off you can do that today. And I've seen solutions doing it today. It's not done in every building today. that's the next step. But once that becomes more acceptable and a builder or general contractor can just walk around and check all this services with one device, basically as they go.
The importance of a digital twin is just increasing every day, even though the value's already bad, just through collecting all the design and geolocation the size, the weight, the asset information of a building that's already so valuable for the construction process. And if you can help with the handover by making sure that all of that is collected on time and correctly.
That is a huge cost to any builder or building owner that can go on feed these, that process. So if you can periodically track and trace that and show that you're capturing all the information live, which you can do this tools that do that today, that by itself is hugely valuable.
So that's the design phase. So you can argue that there's value there. Definitely.
James Dice: [01:03:24] Let me stop you real quick. It sounds You said the value is
Tyson Soutter: [01:03:26] proven 10 times
James Dice: [01:03:27] over on the construction side. And, but then there's this gap where there, there might not be the value proven. Too. Well, it sounds like there's accuracy issues going from that construction to the operations.
Like what's actually in this building now, and you're saying that gap is being closed. is that how to understand it as like we're now in this phase of making that justification to go from, Construction to operations basically. And making that jump is like a big hurdle right now,
Tyson Soutter: [01:03:59] because it's a big hurdle and it's fascinating to me because you look at it and you say the digital twin is so valuable because it's so data rich.
now the accuracy on site, that becomes a problem, not so much for its current value in the. The design and construction phase because they have a process and it's working. I don't agree with it, but it works once this new solution poses that gap that creates a new value in the construction phase, because it's a huge process to manage all the services keep track of.
Is it being installed to design? is it working? Is it in the right location? that's nearly unmanageable for a builder
James Dice: [01:04:38] It's also about like the commissioning and warranty, getting it useful in that. Okay.
Tyson Soutter: [01:04:43] Got it. And so it all builds into a value there, but to your point, that's the missing link into operations as well.
Even though it's adding extra value in the construction phase. It's also now bridging a link and in creating a huge value for the operational phase, because now you have a fully accurate representation and I don't want to overstate the inaccuracies. it's not drastic, but. It's enough to say that there's an argument against that.
So you really want to be able to say we need to get at though. We need to make it easier. And it can't rely on us having to create a new model That becomes really difficult.
James Dice: [01:05:20] Yeah, it sounds like if you create a gap between reality and the twin, now you have this effort to keep it updated.
And if that effort continues to grow, you might abandon it. And it's so continuing to close that gap with realities, that seems like it's important. All right. So let's go to the operation side. So like what's the value of a twin? And I guess what I'm seeing in the marketplace is if you already have this federated model and it's.
Ready to be used in the operations phase. And it's been cleaned up. That's a totally different value proposition than the existing building that has nothing digital. And you have to spend a ton of capital budget to create this twin. So I guess there's two more arguments here, with the twin as well.
how do you think about that?
Tyson Soutter: [01:06:04] So this was really such a difficult problem to face cause. One, you have a small amount of buildings that have a digital twin to start with that's already a problem. So to go into an existing building, even if it's new and saying, Hey, you want a digital twin?
That's difficult. So it's a difficult process because you don't have an army of contractors doing this work already to do a construction job. but going back to what we talked about earlier, If you try and take small bucks, try and say, the three D model or the BIM model is very daunting to people, but it's also very misleading because it doesn't have as much value.
The value comes from the data behind this. So step is saying, okay, let's create a living asset register, like a proper living asset register. Okay. I do. I want to do my whole building. No. Okay. Let's do it periodically. You're paying people to maintain this equipment every single day. First step, get them to put it into a digital form, digitize this process, not in their database and your database will have it.
So it's accessible to you first. When is it being maintained? Track this? You need to be able to say that as a building owner, what are the costs? When is it breaking down? What's the live data. You've already just got four out of five major components of the digital twin. And if you just say I would like the three D model as well.
Okay, great. But again, put it into your face, fit out schedule. Do it slowly. Don't go in and say, I'll just do every building because the payback is gonna, it's going to take time, but it doesn't date value. Yeah. Digital twin. it's still incredibly valuable, but collecting the digital language that builds.
The value of a digital twin, even in the construction phase, the threading model component is a very small part of value. It helps with the clash detection and all these things, of course, but the data in the BIM model, that's the value. So statement operations, I always say it needs to be part of your processes.
So you're paying people to maintain your equipment, make sure they do it in a way where you're collecting the data. To form a digital twin. Then as you're doing that, have a plan like we talked about before, have you your stretch goal of he, and then every time you do work, make sure that work's done in a way that enables us.
And and eventually, if you want to get to three D models start very small with, geometry. You just want to catch the, full space, the geometry and the values. you know the materials with that. Now you can start doing simulations. You've just opened up another world of possibilities that are digital twin names, that's where that, if we go back to the very first point we made is that's making sure that you have spoken to the customer, understand what they want to achieve, and then engage them to make sure that you're not overselling or something.
So if they want a digital twin, maybe they just want a way to digitally and manage their asset and look at all the information. Okay. Let's scale it back and slowly move up because if you oversell them the value, just every time we try and oversell them on a solution. I think a digital twin is very valuable as long as you're not misled, but what a digital twin is the three day views, at least, Flying through and VAR.
Great, good for a marketing page, but the value comes from Hey, let's really, let's take the physical asset and have a So Rebecca, now we can manage the building remotely. So it goes back again to the foundation to all of this point comes back to data structure foundation. So I think it's incredibly valuable as long as you're not overselling what you're trying to achieve and not trying to do it too quickly.
James Dice: [01:09:35] Yeah. And that really ties together to this whole conversation. It's like, why do you need a data model? Or really, as you're building a data model, what are you building up to? So you're taking each project you're doing in the building and you're taking this step. You're taking a step towards what And a lot of people are saying, I need a digital twin. That's not like you're basically grabbing at the shiny buzzword versus realizing what you want and then taking steps towards that. And I think it's hurting the digital twin conversation because what I hear a lot is like, A digital twin is not feasible because front cost is far too high.
If I have a building that was built in 90 10, 82, creating a digital twin is too much of a capital expense for that building. And I think that's a little bit of a lie, because like you said, that if you just break it down into what is a digital twin and then there's these five categories.
you can take incremental steps on those five categories and provide immediate value. So let's just use one example that we've talked about is modeling the data.
So obviously a data model is a huge component of a digital twin. And so if you're taking steps in that main category of the twin, you're making progress towards the digital twin and you don't need to write it off as like this huge, massive project, when you can just take steps towards it and get there.
Eventually, I love that. I actually hadn't thought about it like that before,
Tyson Soutter: [01:10:56] so thank you. It really took me a lots of conversations with customers to really say okay, let's be realistic about is how do we achieve it? and just one more point on this to say, Don't devalue three D model of the Beamer leader, because if you have it, you can do certain things.
And that has a lot of value as well. If you have your three D model broken up into kind of bless it. Now you have I visual representation where you can geo locate to that. You can, yeah, you can plan sizing, replacements or remotely. You can do all of this work remotely, no longer. You have to have an FM sitting in the building doing these plans or a consultant coming to site.
So this there's value there too, but if you break it down into sections, it all comes back down to a digitalization strategy, but that's what it comes down to And that's why we make fun of buzzwords, but it that's what it's all meaningful. I want to take my physical assets and physical process and use technology to do them in a modern way.
Digitize that process
James Dice: [01:11:55] all that moment. Alright,
Tyson Soutter: [01:11:57] cool. this is
James Dice: [01:11:59] Anne. I just must say what we said offline a second ago is that if people find this episode long, like you can just pause it and you can come back to the boat, but Tyson and I, aren't going to stop talking just because people like short
Tyson Soutter: [01:12:12] podcasts and I'm not going to apologize for long podcasts.
James Dice: [01:12:15] anyway, let's move on. I want to talk about like where we're at in the world right now. So it's September, 2020. this podcast will come out sometime at the end of the month. so obviously we're still going through this big disruption in our industry with COVID and I want to talk about what you're seeing, in your conversations with your clients and what you're thinking about the implications and outlook for the smart buildings and industry.
Tyson Soutter: [01:12:38] Yeah. I had been having this every day. I feel like it's a lot of people have been asking, what does this mean for buildings in the future? Like the new normal, you say a lot. I'm very curious because I we're already seeing a trend in our market about. A more sustainable approach in buildings, but also more care to the people within those buildings, the tenants or the users.
but indoor environment quality, like this was, Wells ratings. You've got reset in Asia. There's all these standards popping up and people starting to care about what is a healthy environment. what's the sustainability, not just energy saving CO2 reduction. people talked about us for years, but people were vesting in it.
Like they were really saying, I want to do this. I'm going to put money forward. And the paybacks. Don't have to be two or three years, like every other project. So I was, very surprised that this was occurring. because historically people we'll talk about these topics, but never really put money into them and it big scale anyway.
so these situations it's really, Accelerated the process of why do we want to utilize our space to be as inviting as possible for our employees? Why do I want to make sure that my building is very sustainable? Not just facades, not just fit out, but really a sustainable and healthy building.
And so this situation, the conversations I'm having with real estate managers and property owners now, I need a way to make my office space as compelling as possible. If you talk to big enterprise customers, they want to be as attractive as possible to talent. A lot of big corporations now are saying can work from home.
you don't have to come back in. even Siemens made a public statement saying, that you can work from home 50 to 70% of the time. Now, even after the situation ends. and so you're starting to see employees make these really grand statements about there. Employers make these grand statements about the employees and then the backing it up.
Like they're really investing to make sure that they can create a space that is healthy, sustainable, and inviting, because they're going to have to. Because that office space, that the traditional, I went into an office every day. It's not going to be the same for bigger enterprise companies like smaller companies, maybe, this will pass at some point, I don't know, maybe in 20, 29.
and then from there we can say, no, it really like when we can go back out resumed normal life. I don't know. I think it's going to go back to complete. Normal life. It's proven that we can work from home effectively. The technology supports it. So to go back to the office, it's going to have to be invited.
It's going to be, have to be healthy. And historically, if you look at complaints within a building, it's always been hot or cold, like I'm hot, I'm cold 60, 70% of complaints and based around this. But if people understand what creates that environment, like what, makes you feel stuffy?
if it's poor airflow or, if it's, really pull humidity or actually like they painted in here a week ago, there's all this chemicals in the air. People are going to be much more conscious about the air they're breathing within the office space. And that is going to become a very high priority because after this, this will have some loss, I don't know to what scale, but it's really going to change the conversation.
As I want to understand the air and rating, is it healthy? And we both know that a lot of buildings and not. Giving you healthy, cleaner, it's poor ventilation. the filters aren't being changed enough. You're going back in there too early after it's all being painted. All of this stuff has, quite severe longterm effects to the health.
and same with lighting levels and occupancy. Now I go into the office to make people not to work. So when I'm in the office, I'm there to meet with my colleagues. That's going to be a pretty, it's be like a consistent message of big companies. So when you go to an office space, they have to cater for that.
That's going to significantly change the requirements for these buildings as well. So I think I'm very fascinated. I'm hoping we don't get five years from now, and everyone's just forgotten about this situation. And we're all crammed back into an office five days a week. And that's what I really hope,
James Dice: [01:16:50] I don't think that's going to happen. this also really ties back to the whole value selling thing. It's like what you talked about at the very beginning of this conversation, which is you can't just sell on energy savings. You can't just sell on maintenance savings, because what we're talking about here, if I understand you correctly is how.
Do
Tyson Soutter: [01:17:05] you
James Dice: [01:17:06] insert smart building technology, a or B or C into the new operation of this building and the new operation. This building is how do I keep my occupants safe? And I think that's what COVID has changed. And now it turns into this. I don't care what you have to do, but do it like it's no longer this, give me a two year payback thing.
It's is this building going to even exist unless we make the occupants safe. And that's a totally different conversation that has really changed things, a ton, which is really exciting.
Tyson Soutter: [01:17:37] I've been reading some studies that say, the they're expecting a 30 to 40% reduction in required office space.
Yeah. After the situation, if that's the case that is now creating a very competitive environment. so that means investment in technology. It's means it's going to be investment in creating really inviting spaces. It's going to benefit the users. Dramatically, but they're going to have to really answer some tough questions and invest some money.
so I'm very interested to see how this all plays out and I've, really believed that this will be a huge driver to a true smart building. Something like that. No, we've talked about for many years, but what are you when you have that complete package and it's focusing on creating a environment for the person.
And that doesn't really come into account when you're designing the
James Dice: [01:18:28] systems. it also makes that investment in comfy look pretty smart at this point.
Tyson Soutter: [01:18:32] Definitely. Yeah. Alright. Let's
James Dice: [01:18:34] We've already talked about a ton of things you're excited about, but there's a couple more things I wanted to ask you about that are, that have been on your mind.
So you talked about indoor air quality a little bit, but like what else are you excited about moving forward with the solutions and selling around that?
Tyson Soutter: [01:18:49] Yeah, there's so many, there's so many companies out there and I've been trying a few solutions and it's fascinating to me because.
If you look at it, maybe I'm just like blinded by my own world, but if you track the indoor thing, the sensors that are available, and if you track them under a typical office space, or even in your own home, it's insane. What, like happening in these spaces. Okay. And there's a great use case.
It has where a colleague of mine, moved into a new apartment and was really just not sleeping well, started waking up with like sore throats. saw that I was trying some sensors and we put them into his house and found that periods of the day when he wasn't there, there was this huge chemical spot.
I can't remember exactly what it was, but it basically came from like somewhere down in like the sewage. But every day when he wasn't home, And it didn't leave the smell an odor by the time he got there, but it was maybe cleaning product or something like that. And it was coming into his apartment and he had a young baby and he was like, struggling, sleeping.
And then he tracked it and he found this like incredible spec to the point where I got an alert and I called him like, are you in the house? Get out of the house. and when you look at the repercussions of this stuff, it's long term and. We don't track it today. We don't track it at all. Like you might spot check these values, but you do not longterm track these things.
Wow. What kind
James Dice: [01:20:07] of sensor are you talking about here?
Tyson Soutter: [01:20:09] this is something that anyone could buy right now. Yeah. there's heaps of, products on the market. Like I'm going to go into any company, I guess, where, like there's a few that really threw some interesting in things they track like particulates in the air.
CO2 temperature, a lot humidity. yeah, maybe right on like, there's a few of these chemicals that I kind of track. If you look at Wells certification or reset. very big in Asia, specifically, these values are they're tracking. This is what you want to be able to look at, because it can tell you like chemicals in in the air, the air quality oxygen you're breathing.
I've seen some office spaces from that customer. That's where your, say two numbers and not great when you're in a meeting room for more than 20 minutes. I'm sure we've all been there where you're sleeping at the desk, basically while you're listening to in a long meeting.
It's cause you're getting like restricted oxygen. So this is it's a serious problem. And the buildings aren't always designed with this in mind, and this is where I think the senses and enable the audience to be educated. And that will be the driving force. And that's why standards and certifications are very successful drivers where if you have, especially if it's government driven, but if you can measure.
The value of something in terms of, you've got a very healthy building. If you can measure that, put it onto a plot. with some sort of rating system that has inherent value for the building. Now that's value per square meter. That's that's like painting your walls. That adds value to that building.
So it's really important that we have some sort of measurement for this because at the moment, the argument has always been it's the paper. So is
James Dice: [01:21:43] this where you see reset going where cause reset has an ongoing data aspect to it. Doesn't it? So where you see reset going where it's not only if you think about the certifications of the past, You're certifying a construction project, essentially, if you're doing lead or things like that. But the way I don't have any direct experience reset, but is that where they're headed is Some sort of real time dashboard, like at, as a plaque, like replacing the plaque at the front, which is here's the current data on this building.
Tyson Soutter: [01:22:12] Yeah, exactly. Okay. You nailed that point though, because we had this writing system in Australia and I think I spoke about it with Nicholas. he's podcast resonating, but, we talked about this where you had, neighbors. So it's an energy efficiency system. A writing tool and it's just fair.
Like it's per square meter. you're not buying credits. You can't install bike racks or anything. It's just, are you efficient as a building energy efficient and it became a government initiative, had to be in putting on all these commercial office buildings. for, I think it was something like if you wanted a government contract in terms of a lease field by government agent, departments, right?
you have to be about four stars out of six stars, and every year you have to get recertified. So every single year it was panic stations. If you dropped your rating, in some cases, it would, was directly written into the lease. How much money they paid is based on the neighbors. Right. Whoa, and this is the single most successful thing I've seen to drive energy efficiency.
And that's why you see all these Australian startups come from that market. that's a, been a really big influence in my opinion on why you say seven, eight startups come from Australia. That, and we're also just great,
James Dice: [01:23:25] awesome people.
Tyson Soutter: [01:23:26] Yeah.
James Dice: [01:23:26] That's awesome. that's really fascinating.
So could we see a future then, where you would have leases dependent on a reset rating essentially?
Tyson Soutter: [01:23:36] Yeah, that's gone too. if I was an employer, I, if I had to, manage some sort of lease agreement, I would be saying. Okay. One, I want you to be sustainable. I want a very low carbon footprint, carbon neutral.
And I don't know if you've seen this. This is great website called, Ari 100 and it's all the big enterprise companies that have committed to a carbon neutral topic. And there's. hundreds, if not thousands of these companies, I love this. I love saying this because it's publicly stated I'm going to do this and I'm going to invest in it.
you'd want to see the same thing in terms of healthy buildings. And that will happen once people understand what it means. what do I need to measure to be able to do this? And that's why all these great companies that are coming up with these senses to go into these spaces, and the traditional companies as well, where they can say, I want to measure as much value as much, indoor environment, quality, I'm going to measure these values as much as possible. that is the first step. The second step is saying, like tying it back baggage, because a customer's going to ask you. Okay, that's nice. But I don't know. I just spent a lot of money to fix up so that the drive needs to come from the other way. It has to come from the tenants.
so it has to be part of the lease agreements has to be some sort of standard. and there's a bunch out there. really would love a standard that is year on you as fair as possible, and not so much around that, the design and the look in the field, the building, I think that. It's quite obvious when you can, interact with it and see it, the standard should be really around.
let's make this healthy, let's make this sustainable and bring those bullets together. There's a few out there too, and they're all doing well.
James Dice: [01:25:14] Okay, that would be something they continue to track and keep updated on. I love that. Alright. We're nearing the end of our marathon session here.
I do. So something that I thought of that when you were just talking is that we were talking about two things that are in conflict with each other, and so optimizing energy, but then optimizing for indoor air quality. And I think I've been saying that since the pandemic began, which is, if we're going to increase ventilation, we're also going to increase the energy usage and we've done different podcasts about this topic in the past.
We don't need to get into it, but like, how are you thinking about that dichotomy or battle right now?
Tyson Soutter: [01:25:53] It's it goes against every fiber of my being. Yes. I'm giving up all these energy. Yeah, it's tough, but it's justified. So if I've done some work with some of the engineers and we expect like anywhere to 15 or 40% increase in energy to hit the requirements, depending on your building, of course, it's difficult, but that's, I think leads perfectly into the next point is yes, energy savings is important in terms of dollar value per kilowatt hour.
But that's about tuning and getting the most out of your building when you can't do that. Okay. You need to invest in your plan because you need to reduce your carbon footprint. So if you can't tune your building to be super efficient, then you need to upgrade your building. And that's the logical next step we're seeing now, going back again to this change in environment and the is completely changing their mentality.
They're coming to us and saying, We want to be carbon neutral. How can you help with that? And let's extend the payback periods. Let's bring them out significantly. They're two year payback periods anymore. Cause that's really, let's go for the long haul because we have these targets.
And we need to hit them. and there's two responsible parties here. I think it's like, of course the company's doing this, but the government's also somewhat responsible. If you look at the price of electricity in certain countries, it's ridiculous.
quite so in Australia, we had a carbon textbook for a very small period of time until the prime minister, the loss of power. And eat was dramatic. The investment that went into reducing energy, like I've never seen anything like it. And it's a small increase to the day to day people in terms of energy, a few dollars every month, but for corporations, it is huge.
And so it should be, there should be a price. If you're going to use this power. so I think there's a responsibility for governments and then for companies to say, even if we have negotiated, I ridiculous cost per kilowatt hour, we can't judge projects of that. If you're paying a very low cost for this, you need to be able to say, okay, we need to set up high and no matter what, even if we're not paying it, set it higher.
I'm not saying they have to pay more, but I'm saying they should budget at a higher cost per kilowatt hour. Because even if it's not a good payback with your current, the cost is going to go up and there's going to be longterm effects here. So one you ethically, you should try and invest in this, but two, it's going to cost you a long time.
So get ahead of it now. So we are seeing customers go CO2 reductions, the highest priority. Energy savings also a high priority, but not the first priority, which is a huge shift.
James Dice: [01:28:25] A huge love it. Alright, thanks man. This has been.
Tyson Soutter: [01:28:30] Awesome
James Dice: [01:28:30] conversation. Anything else? Talk about where you talked about everything under the sun?
Tyson Soutter: [01:28:35] Honestly, that went very quickly for me. Yeah,
James Dice: [01:28:38] me too. Yeah, me too. Hopefully for the listeners, hopefully people can press pause if we talked longer than your morning walk with the dog or your commute we'll have commutes, but, this has been fascinating Tyson. I really appreciate you coming on the show and a half to.
Have you back again to talk about some, maybe one of these topics in particular, in a couple of months or something. So thanks, man.
Tyson Soutter: [01:29:00] And just, I just want to say that the work you're doing with the nexus, podcast and your weekly articles and the community, I love it. I love that there's a bunch of building nodes that can now.
Meet regularly and talk about these topics and people actually care.
James Dice: [01:29:16] Yeah, absolutely. Do we have a passionate group of people? Definitely.
Tyson Soutter: [01:29:20] Yeah, definitely. And now I'm frequently messaging people. About questions and topics from that community. So
James Dice: [01:29:27] the one thing that I'm loving too is it seems like people are connecting and I don't even need to be involved.
It's like they're meeting each other and then they go off and have a conversation and then not hear about it. And I'm like, that's amazing. Oh man, it's so cool. Yeah. So thanks for being a part of it and help build it up. Appreciate it.
Alright, friends. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Nexus podcast. For more episodes like this and to get the weekly Nexus newsletter, please subscribe at nexus.substack.com. You can find the show notes for this conversation there as well. As always, please reach out on LinkedIn with any thoughts on this episode.
I'd love to hear from you. Have a great day.
Happy Thursday!
Welcome to this week’s deep dive exclusively for Nexus Pro members. It’s an honor to have you here. This deep dive is a follow up to my recent podcast conversation with Tyson Soutter, Global Business Development Manager Digitalization at Siemens HQ in Switzerland. I learned a lot from this conversation and want to share my takeaways and the full transcript with you below.
In case you missed it in your inbox, you can find the audio or video here:
Nexus site | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Add to other podcast apps
Enjoy!
—James
Man, this conversation was a lot of fun. If you watch the YouTube version, there was so much smiling and laughing. A couple of huge nerds. After we stopped recording, Tyson said he’d rather talk to me about smart buildings than his talk to his girlfriend.
Truth.
By the way, isn’t Tyson’s background impressive? Is anyone better suited to help change the industry? And it seems like he’s made career moves specifically to maximize his learning and building different perspectives. I love that. Glad someone like him is at one of the big 4. I think a challenge for Siemens will be getting the intelligence and perspective that Tyson brings out to the branches. I’ve dealt directly with Siemens branches as recently as 1 year ago and let me tell you: the gap is a mile wide between Tyson and what they’re up to. I digress and wish you luck, Tyson.
This conversation has several interesting threads for me. First was Tyson’s second answer to my favorite question. Buildings are behind because tech has always been behind the scenes… not interacting with the tenant. That’s where the value lies with Siemens' Comfy acquisition—it enables the interaction with the occupant, which is what all office building managers are thinking about right about now. Couple that with IAQ sensors (potentially from or enabled by Enlighted?) and Siemens is very well positioned. Add on what Tyson said at the end, where building owners are now thinking about long payback capital measures to decarbonize. Things seem to be looking bright for Siemens and our industry as a whole.
The point about continuing to add value to justify your SaaS fee (highlight 3) is the biggest insight from this conversation to me. It’s no longer enough for your software to create some energy savings and maintain them. I’ve heard this perspective from multiple places: the "what have you done for me lately?” attitude is real. That speaks to the power of a multi-dimensional platform to create stickiness across multiple stakeholders and use cases. Tyson and I seem very aligned on sales strategy outside of that point too. Building owners need a strategy. If they don’t have one, I’d argue that it doesn’t do any good for individual vendors to sell products until a strategy, or at least a long term vision is in place. The first step in sales (internal and external) is conceptual. It’s strategic.
I was fascinated by the whole digital twin conversation. So much information there from Tyson. Wow. My main realization was that there’s a good answer for the skeptic that says a digital twin for an existing building is too expensive. Tyson provides a low cost, easy-to-implement roadmap to digital twins for existing buildings: building it up component by component as you’re going about your business as usual. Just do it digitally. Start with a living asset register, add a data model, add live data, costs, then add 3D slowly over time when you’re doing upgrades. He called it “Collecting the digital language”. When you’re doing 3D, just start with floor plans and materials, which opens up simulations. And this is what digitalization means for a building.
My highlights:
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] Hello, friends. Welcome to Nexus, a smart buildings technology podcast for smart humans. I'm your host, James Dice. If we haven't met before, I write a weekly newsletter on the same topic. It's also called Nexus. Each week I share what I've learned, my opinions, and what I'm excited about in the quickly evolving world of intelligent buildings. Readers have called Nexus the best way to stay up to date on the future of this industry without all the marketing fluff. You can check it out and subscribe at nexus.substack.com or click the link in the show notes.
Since starting the Nexus newsletter, many of you have reached out to me wanting to talk shop, and we have. After a few weeks of those wonderful conversations, I realized I needed to record and share them with our growing community. So here we are. The Nexus podcast is born. This is our chance to explore and learn with the brightest in our industry together. All right. Episode 19 is a conversation with Tyson suture, global business development manager for digitization at Siemens HQ in Switzerland. This is a great primer, maybe even a masterclass on selling smart building solutions, whether you're selling internally or externally. We talk about selling semantic modeling analytics, advanced controls, digital twins, indoor air quality, and even carbon reduction.
No buzz word was left out. This episode of the podcast is directly funded by listeners like you who have joined the nexus pro membership community. You can find info on how to join, support the podcast@nexusdotsubsect.com. You also find the show notes there, which has links to Tyson's LinkedIn page. Oh, and by the way, if you take a look at your podcast feed and you're missing some episodes, that's because those episodes are exclusive to members of nexus pro sign up for a pro membership to get your personal podcast feed with access to all the episodes.
A further ado, please enjoy nexus podcast, episode 19.
Tyson. Welcome to the nexus podcast. It's awesome to finally have you on, can you introduce yourself?
Tyson Soutter: [00:02:04] Thanks, James. Yeah. So Tyson suitor. my role at the moment is global business development manager for digitalization. I requested a buzzword in my job title that was actually part of the deal, but I've been in the industry for a while.
We met many years ago. At a haystack connect conference, I believe.
James Dice: [00:02:24] Yeah. Tampa, Florida. Yeah. We had several alcoholic beverages,
Tyson Soutter: [00:02:29] me
James Dice: [00:02:29] and Leon and I don't know who else was there, but I bugged Leon about that a couple of weeks ago. he actually didn't remember. I was offended. So shout out to me again.
Tyson Soutter: [00:02:38] it's a great conference too, but just so I've been in the industry for what? 14, 15 years now. started as a air conditioning and refrigeration mechanic as a trade actually. So I did that for for nine years and that included. installing Tridium systems actually are two. So a couple of versions ago to AIX for anyone that knows this terminology.
and, but also installing, chillers, rooftop, units, compressors, doing maintenance and big commercial buildings and retail buildings. so I did that for nine years and very good base for where, what we're doing now. and then I joined a startup actually called Brenner systems. Built environment optimization.
So you mentioned Leon many on workforce CEO. I was one of their first employees, I think maybe three. And, during the four years I was there, we grew that company too. I think I would have 70 people when I left. I'm not sure, maybe a bit less, but quite a lot of people. And, we did everything from, that's why that's where we met data analytics, fault detection.
Maintenance replacement. So really connecting to all the systems in a building. So air conditioning, vertical transport, fire, car parks, waste. my role there was in between a bit of sales. but mostly I ran the integration team so that the deployment teams are getting data, how to build teams.
so we did some really interesting integrations, going into, Smart buildings and really actually connecting the systems off.
James Dice: [00:04:04] what do you mean by those air quotes? Do you mean by smart buildings and air quotes?
Tyson Soutter: [00:04:09] There's been, there's a few buildings that we worked at, where it was nearly finished and I'm like, Oh, by the way, we need to connect all these systems.
And cause we were smart buildings, so we need to have all the systems together. So you have to come in and then really connect the systems together, all these systems that are completely separated and no designed to bring, come and bring to bring them together. so yeah, there's some really interesting stuff.
we did over 200 buildings over thousand supermarkets. It was the scale of huge. And, did that was one of the best experiences I've had in my career working at when I heard the people I'm still very close to it and very friendly with, and I only left actually because, I got an offer for another company called Willow, which is a digital twin company.
You're probably familiar. Of course you're familiar with, which is another Australian startup. We have a lot of good, a lot of good Australian startups, where I'm originally from. And this was the design construction company, prating software for digital twins. And I really I've worked in construction sites.
I did some commissioning work and deal like handover, DLP defects, liability, period work. but never really to the point where I'm looking at the time, the cost of 45 day, the operational twin 60, not really understanding to it, to a level where I could discuss yes. With these people that are digital experts in this.
I'm sorry. I took the job and it was a really difficult decision. I left on very good terms with everyone in Bruno surprise to ever, um, I think even myself, but I was feeling a bit comfortable there. I think that it was time to learn something new. so I was there for around a year and it was one of the very intense period of my life because you get thrown into a construction site and you're working with every services in the building.
So you need to know. hydraulics, architecture, civil electrical, yeah. And then the automation and live data component. All of this is it's a big steep learning curve, but they had. The digital enterprise team, like the people that design the digital language on how to build these buildings.
There's incredible. So I just soaked up.
James Dice: [00:06:16] Yeah.
Tyson Soutter: [00:06:16] I really, to the point when I left there, I felt comfortable at any of those meetings because the people that I was around were just incredible. So I was very lucky to work with, especially specifically, there's a guy called Daniel he's. I was going to say relatively young around my age, But he so knowledgeable in this space.
So I really, I latched onto him and he taught me a lot when I was there. So very lucky, very well. Okay. and during this time was actually, wasn't looking at all. but I got, an offer come up through Siemens and originally I thought it was singing like Asia somewhere. Cause I was based in Melbourne in Australia and it is based in Switzerland.
And the first thing I had to do is okay. Whereas that's the first thing I have to check. And then once I worked that out, I was like, okay, this could be interesting. And it turns out it was in the headquarters of Siemens and I've always wanted to see what these big automation companies are like.
the w I'd say the big four, Siemens, Honeywell, Schneider, or Johnson's. Yeah. They're the big players in our industry and spending so much of my time in that world. I'm like, I'm very curious to see what this is like. And the role sounded very much to my skillset. It was coming in. And then what I do now is working with the product team on looking at the tools we use and we're where we need to be going forward and then some requirements, but then also helping create the sales strategy.
And then also the delivery method. So working with, global HQ. So you have to work with each region and help them understand this is what we're selling. This is how we sell it. This is how we talk to these specific customers. And this is how we then deliver it at scale, which is very important.
And it's so far it's been probably. The first six months, it was pretty easy start compared to any other job I had because I worked for startups where there is no such thing as an onboarding process, onboarding processes. Oh, Hey, we've put six jobs for you
James Dice: [00:08:12] started right now. Yeah, you're late.
Tyson Soutter: [00:08:14] But you know, I kind of ease into it. Once I got started, it really just got very busy and you really have to earn the credibility within the company. speak to the people. They need to know who you are, trust that you can actually help them in some way and then add to that process.
And once you get going, it really, it doesn't stop. And then eventually you're like, yep. This is back to my old working, staying busy and happy.
James Dice: [00:08:39] Got it. Cool. I think based on that introduction, everyone that's listening to, this is realizing why you're on the podcast because you have. A very rare skillset in our industry.
you just gave basically every level of everything that's hot right now. You've seen it from the ground level. you've been inside a chiller you've set up automation systems. You've done analytics on those automation systems. You've seen the digital twin process from construction or design all the way through operations.
It's awesome to be able to pick your brain. So thanks for coming on the show.
Tyson Soutter: [00:09:14] I made sure that I did one, one job per buzzword. That was really important. Yeah. That's exactly what
James Dice: [00:09:21] I did. Analytics digital twin. Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if mechanic is quite a buzzword at this point.
Tyson Soutter: [00:09:27] I think it's pretty
James Dice: [00:09:28] cool though.
Tyson Soutter: [00:09:29] Yeah. Digital mechanic. I don't know. Maybe it says. I've plugged it computer into a chiller. Does that count? maybe that can
James Dice: [00:09:35] accounts. Yeah. You digitized something. That's internet of things. There you go. You have it all. Yeah, there you go.
Tyson Soutter: [00:09:40] So
James Dice: [00:09:41] at Siemens, I want to hit, we're not going to talk a whole lot about Siemens specifically today, but I think.
just from my standpoint of trying to understand the industry. Can you talk a little bit about all these different acquisitions that have happened lately? So maybe start with comfy and what it means for Siemens to acquire comfy.
Tyson Soutter: [00:09:57] Yeah. So it's been a while since we've bought these companies, but it was actually one of the reasons that I even thought that maybe Siemens could be the right company for me.
They bought or invested, bought comfy J two, innovations and, Enlighted. So comfy we'll start with is they've been around for a while though, while we're at these reasons tech, IB con conferences. And they came in and said that we're going to, control buildings and be the connection to people. And if you think about our industry, we don't really build technology for the tenants.
Like we build technology to control the building, but not interact with the people within that building. always, and we create tools for that. And then that's just the way it always is. And it's still a very important in large part of our industry that you can't move away from that.
It's not an easy thing to do to control ability. There's very large technical step, but comfy is the way to be able to say, how can we actually connect the worlds? Really bring them together, somewhat not to the point where you have a single user turned on a new chiller. That definitely is an ideal, but have some way where people can feel like they're interacting.
There's a back point. I was a, we say fridgey in Australia, but air conditioning, mechanic, refrigeration mechanic. if you'd get an air conditioning complaint, the first thing you'd stay yet, we'll go adjust the symptom and do And that would solve 80% of your problems. people wants to have some feeling that they have control over their environment.
and then I need some controllers in a bind and that's what we're really learning. So this company is an interesting way to say, okay, let's actually give them the ability to controllability, but the ability to interact with the space. And then, but also keep that feedback and say, if you like a thermal zoning, you can go sit in this area.
Or if you want to control your light levels to your own requirements or a book rooms, or catch up with people, this is the stuff that the industry has to get there. And comfy was the first move is to do this really. So it's a very interesting purchase. And we're saying like daily interaction between the two companies is getting closer and closer.
And the value bundle is just. It's very interesting to me. Cause I think if, especially in this current situation where there's going to have to be at much better utilization of space and that's what company enables
James Dice: [00:12:08] cool. That's fascinating. And you mentioned the learning aspect of it too.
So when you're seeing the tenant or the occupant, doesn't have to be an office building, the occupant interact with, The built environment. you're gonna learn so much about how people interact with spaces. And that's really cool. What about Enlighted? I know that comfy and Enlighted have their own synergies as well, but how do they come into play?
Tyson Soutter: [00:12:29] Yeah. So they've got a very interesting offer where they are looking at creating IOT network within the building. when this IOT buzzword phase came into play and the first question everyone was like, Oh, I've got these great $5 sensors. Let's just Chuck them all through your building. And then people did and they're like, Oh What are these, what are we doing with these? who's controlling. These wires are a bunch of sensors that we can use access just installed all over my building. so what they did is they said, okay, what's in every building lights. Okay. They can be the infrastructure to be able to create this wireless network.
So they come at a price point. That makes sense. They allow you then to connect sensors to it. Now you can look at Siemens, you accompany, you look at digital services. All of these things are only as good as the census available and lots of enables that it becomes that infrastructure for these tools.
That's totally makes sense that these are two purchases they made.
James Dice: [00:13:21] Absolutely. Yeah. It's fascinating. And like picturing the pieces of the puzzle were getting pulled together. What about J two then? So I've have a little bit of familiarity with J too. but don't know a whole lot about like how Siemens plays in, because the confusing part for me is like Siemens already had building automation system solutions before.
So how does that work out?
Tyson Soutter: [00:13:41] Jay two is you know, you have a core group of people from Tridion back in the day, and they went everywhere and they made all these great companies. They choose another one that for me, where they said we've always done automation in this way.
But why, and how can we do it better and the way that they are taking and using semantic models and tagging and changing how you actually deploy and design a BMS. It's very interesting. and the way that I think the same as utilize this is that I have a huge market available to them. And it's not always going to be suitable for just a Siemens.
Does he go CC product? J two feels, that's more than medium spaces is growing for all the players in this space. And so is a perfect fit. And it's also a fantastic integration. you can put it on equipment, you can scale it away, down to microcontrollers. So it's very flexible, very powerful, and can fill the gap anywhere that we needed to.
So we've actually found that. It's been a very good solution, especially if you have, non Siemens products already installed install J through this, it just makes sense. It's a great integration. So it does really work well and it, not every customer is going to want to have to buy the same in this disease.
CC would feel controls fine. We can offer any solution. We can become agnostic to our customers. And maybe it's not the right time to do an upgrade and it's the right time to do a partial operate, just a front end graphic lock rate. And that's what J tree is perfect
James Dice: [00:15:06] for that. Got it. Cool. That's exciting.
you said that was probably one of the reasons that played into your go into Siemens because of that. Those are three very exciting acquisitions, so
Tyson Soutter: [00:15:16] cool. It makes sense strategically too. Like you can see where the market's going and they're like, okay, we need to get into this space and start competing.
So it did impress me when I saw those purchases.
James Dice: [00:15:26] Absolutely. Cool. So we're going to talk about selling tech smart building tech in a minute. I want to get into my new favorite question though first and get your answer to it. So you've seen my new favorite question is why are buildings, decades behind, other technologies?
And so I think your answer is going to be very important because you've seen it from so many different angles. So what is the Tyson suitor answer? So to James, his favorite question.
Tyson Soutter: [00:15:51] So think about this way too often. when I first started, I remember going into a building and seeing an automation system and thinking this is very old software and it wasn't at all.
But then as you start going through buildings, you start seeing a pattern. So the facade looks great. You open a cabinet and what's not looking so great is the pneumatic system that's been in there for 40 years, but it works So they're not going to operate it. So a lot of it comes to when you install a system, you're not installing it for two years or three years.
You're in sometimes installing that system for 10 or 20 years. So if we come up with data analytics, which. Really in our industry, hasn't been around that long, really? At scale, if you think about it, people have talked about it, but it's false detection before now. So if you have to have an acceptable amount of data in the right intervals, in the right structure, and you put cutting edge at the thought about industry, that's 3% of our buildings.
So that's 30 year replacement cycle. That's a very extreme case, but let's say on average, seven to eight years, In reality, I saw buildings that still had pneumatic systems that stopped being installed 20 years prior to me starting my trade still existing in America has a lot of these actually.
James Dice: [00:17:08] Yeah. The U S has where you have a lot of pneumatic systems that are still out there. Definitely.
Tyson Soutter: [00:17:12] Yeah. And then working pretty well, a bit of oil, but it's okay. But this is the problem that we find is that it's never the first thing that is thought of when someone's. Looking at a building like a, tenant's not gonna walk in and be like, what a fantastic automation system they're going to look in and say, Oh, that's okay.
Is very nice. All the, facilities, the gym, the lift, all of these things, they get upgraded And I think what we see is that people, if you walk into a new building and if you, especially, if you've been part of the design phase, You can walk in there and think this is it's a beautiful building, but this is an grade top of the range it's building.
But if you've been pilot design phase, all the cuts that have been made to the subsystems and the systems behind that, and until it becomes the forefront of the tenant experience, it's always going to be cut Fest. So one, I would say it's a very long capital life cycle and a very high capital expense too.
It's not. At the forefront of a tenant who is paying the bills. So until we can influence both those phases, yeah. One might take longer than the other. it's gonna, it's gonna take us a while to get to the technology required to actually bring us into competing with other industries.
James Dice: [00:18:27] Beautiful. Yeah. And just to add a little color from my experience there, I did a lot of work with universities and healthcare systems, over the past 10 years or so.
And in those two areas, those two different verticals, you have a lot of donors, so a donor will come in and say, I'm going to donate, 20% of my will to this organization and what happens is, and I've seen it everywhere. It's especially at a university where a donor will come in and they say I want my, the name on the library.
John H. Smith, library at this university. And I've always said No one says, Hey, what really want my name on this new chiller plant over here? I really want my name on that, on the energy dashboard. Yeah. And I always thought that was a fascinating, it's just not sexy to automate buildings.
at least for people that don't listen
Tyson Soutter: [00:19:14] to this podcast and it doesn't bring people in the door.
James Dice: [00:19:18] yeah. Right when I walk in, I'm like, who's got the thermostat and what sort of HVAC system is this? Yeah, exactly. Alright, cool. I love that answer. Thank you.
I'm getting unique answers every time I ask this question too. And so I feel like what I need to do is bring them all together into one, you know, synthesize them. I guess
Tyson Soutter: [00:19:36] I would be very curious to say how the answer has changed depending on what their current career path is.
Because I think that will definitely cause you hearing the raisins every day and it's probably influencing you through something like unbiased. Oh,
James Dice: [00:19:49] for sure. Yeah, definitely. All right. Let's transition to sales. So your what'd you say your title was again,
Tyson Soutter: [00:19:56] global business development manager, digitalization.
James Dice: [00:19:59] Okay.
Tyson Soutter: [00:20:00] So
James Dice: [00:20:01] Siemens pays you to know about selling smart building stuff. And that's what we're going to talk about
Tyson Soutter: [00:20:05] today. Exactly.
James Dice: [00:20:07] Okay. All right. let's talk about just selling smart building tech in general. So you have these conversations every day, so what are the keys, to getting started selling smart building tech.
Tyson Soutter: [00:20:18] Yeah. it's funny how many times I've have the same conversation with people as well. Like you do end up repeating and when you get asked a question, the person's always thinking, Oh, I've got him always, never answered this one before.
James Dice: [00:20:30] Yeah, exactly.
Tyson Soutter: [00:20:31] so I was pretty lucky when I was up, when I went over the course of three years.
Possibly thousands of meetings with customers and you really get like this speed learning course of okay, you'll really going to learn how to answer this. so I think it's smart. Building tech always starts with not going to a customer and saying, I'm going to sell you analytics.
However, you never start with, I'm going to sell you this. You always go to the customer and say, what are you trying to achieve? Like it has to be from a consultative approach. I've and this could be maybe just from my own experience with the success that I've seen and the kind of patterns where you can see other people being successful in this space is come in as an expo, come in as a consultant and say, want to understand what you need to do.
Don't tell me what you want to buy, tell me what you need to do. So once you understand, they don't want a digital twin they want to save energy. Okay. that's two different things. Like they don't always go hand in hand. So always starting by asking the customer, what do you want to achieve?
What systems do you have today and how big is that gap? So if it's an existing building, you can really say, to achieve this, we need to connect to these different systems. And here's the gap you're going to have to expect to bring together somehow if it's a design phase, You say, what is the digital language that you want to prescribe for all your buildings?
Not just this one, because there's no point having a digital solution. If you have a portfolio of buildings for one building, So really understanding, okay, if this is your plan for one building, then it's gotta be a grouping of buildings type of building fine, but you need to have the same somewhat goal that has stretch marks.
so this is an a grade building. We aim here and we scale down as we go to the lower grade buildings. And if you can provide that consistency, that's when you'll see success in selling digital services. You don't walk in and say, we're going to give you this tool. And everything works is all fine.
There's a process of understanding, where are you today? How do we get there? Because some customers, they might not even have a DMS. And that's when you need to say, okay, maybe you need to focus on putting some network controls together and that's fine, but don't skip the steps. There's no point, but let's build something that's going to be sustainable and actually beneficial, long term.
And so that's the first point. So really go along for that journey with the customer, the next is making sure that you're selling something that has continued value. So if you sell energy savings projects with some sort of digital thing, what happens in year two and three, when you stop saving energy.
So we're in a. Pretty cutthroat industry when it comes to budget. So capital expenditure CapEx is something that once you get that decision made, it's made you get the project. Great. All is good. You don't have to revisit it that often, maybe to justify the cost once, but operational expense. That is a cost that you need to be able to show value year on year, every year.
If you save or add a huge amount of value to a customer, you one and add no value here. To me, three you're gone. And the way that these corporations work in these companies, where every year, they review their budget. They look at the line items on the OPEX operational expense, and they say, why are we spending money on this?
And they should be doing that. That's their job. that's their responsibility. So if you're not adding value from the previous year, they don't care. If you say 30% of the first year, why continue paying for it? So that's where a lot of this building tech industry, they always come in as a SaaS and say, We want to be a SaaS. And if you're going to be a SaaS, great. You have to continue to add value and that value doesn't disappear ever.
It has to continue, and it has to be able to sustain multiple patterns and multiple years. so it's not that easy. So you have to be very careful on what you sell because you can be successful for one year. And we've all seen those companies that come in make a really big noise for one year.
And then disappear because they don't have a sustained value selling proposition. And that is very critical to be able to sell the technology in our industry.
James Dice: [00:24:27] It's fascinating. There's so many places I want to go there. one first thought is I've seen it happen.
And you mentioned it a little bit. I've seen it happen where say you're installing some sort of FTD package. You install that package. You and, implement an initial round of energy conservation measures. Those get implemented. If you're lucky, let's just to be honest first, if you're lucky those
Tyson Soutter: [00:24:48] first
James Dice: [00:24:49] get implemented, but let's just say that you would get implemented six months later, they're implemented, they're verified, you've created savings.
And so I think what I'm hearing from you is that what
Tyson Soutter: [00:24:58] people often find next is that
James Dice: [00:25:01] what have you done for me lately attitude. So what's the next thing. Okay. So how do you. How do you think about that then? So it seems like to me that the value proposition for selling a solution,
Tyson Soutter: [00:25:11] can't
James Dice: [00:25:12] be a single value proposition.
It has to be, if it's energy, it's maybe creating the savings and then maintaining the savings, but then it probably also needs to be like bringing in maintenance savings and things like that that are multidimensional rather than just one type of value problem.
Tyson Soutter: [00:25:28] Yeah. So love selling these kinds of tools because you're not selling something that doesn't have value.
if you don't have value to clean, like it's very quickly. So you've nailed that point. So energy savings, so important yet, as soon as you say, I can save you energy, every customer is like, great, what else can you do for me? And so if you really want to become. Sticky as part of the process in a good way, like really, to be able to say, I need to be part of the lifecycle of this building.
So that is where you have sustained value as a technology solution. So if you come in and say, you have. technicians, onsite, security guards, onsite cleaners, all these people. They're part of the operational budget and they don't get removed every year. They don't get reduced. Ideally, if you can add the same amount of value as these people or more, that's how you then prove your case, we're building owner, and that's how you become part of their processes.
So yes, maintenance is the logical solution. If you look at how we do maintenance time buildings, I'm sure you've seen some task please, that some of them are, quite, historically based on, older methods of running a building and there's ways to improve this. And I'm always cautious because you have statutory requirements in countries.
There's some critical assets. There's no such thing as a blanket reduction. that's ridiculous. And there's no such thing as a pure software solution either. It has to be looking at this and saying, okay, what can we do safely? How can we improve it? But how can we do it without taking technical knowledge, the building, or how can we do it without putting assets at risk?
So if you can do that successfully, you'll pause the process. Now. You'll pretty cool. Then your cost, should it be relevant to the entities savings you're making and the maintenance you're delivering? So maybe there has to be some sort of fluctuating fee there. Some that goes up and down depending on the value adding, and that is how you then justify continuing your service.
so there should be one and two should be, there should be more cost. That's just, if you want, like you said, if you want to implement energy savings, it's easy to find them. The next step is then implementing them. If you want to do that, you need to invest. So I always start with explain that to customers and, there is an investment he does.
You're not going to pay for the service and everything's fixed, or you don't have to pay for the software and everything's fixed the software helps you find the problems, you still need to fix them. So you have to be honest about every step of the way with the customer too. the last thing you want is for them to turn on a smart building solution and go, Oh, why isn't everything working?
Yeah, no, this is the first step. Now we fix the problems.
James Dice: [00:27:58] Totally. And okay. So energy maintenance. And then if I heard you from the beginning of this conversation, it might make sense then to get into the occupant sort of engagement, or is that the next step or how do you view that sort of roadmap?
Tyson Soutter: [00:28:12] So I think that, yeah, so energy maintenance and then, capital and operational planning.
So op ex cap. Yeah. those three things are, they're not future, like today. We have to do that. That's bare minimum. In my opinion, if you don't do that, if you can't help the facility manager, reduce energy, do maintenance in a more efficient manner and help them do the capital and operational planning.
Try something else. or, be cheap enough to warrant it. the occupancy thing that is when you need certain amount of centers, you need other solutions. You need some sort of, I won't go into any products, but you need some sort of tracking solution or not people, but measuring people coming in and out of floors, connecting to security systems, understanding space utilization.
That is also incredibly valuable, but you can really have them as a joint solution or a separate solutions. And that's okay. you try not to sell everything to a customer. You really say, if you want that great, let's do that. If you bring that into these other solutions, there's a huge value there, but not, everyone's going to be willing to jump all the way in.
Maybe you need to sell an incremental step. Like he's in with one solution and then expand into further solutions, Yeah.
James Dice: [00:29:19] And I want to give a shout out to the memoria did this, this webinar last month, called where smart buildings go wrong. I think, and Mike Ruman from vanity in the UK was the guest.
And he talked about the value of point solution. So like a single. vertical within the building versus this holistic value proposition. I'm wondering how you think about it. You mentioned it's okay. To the most separate. How do you think about selling in terms of the gold standard, like the, that everyone probably wants to get, it would be to have everything integrated together, single platform, versus like today, maybe it makes sense, like you said to maybe have these silos maintained right now.
So how do you think about that dichotomy?
Tyson Soutter: [00:29:59] Yeah. So I'm glad you brought that up because I definitely don't support the silo solutions. but think there's a value in saying this system does this, but they have to be, they have to be some sort of interconnected through some sort of data, structure or common platform, or some sort of centralized network, like a base building network with some sort of API or MQTT or backnet.
It doesn't matter as long as there's some sort of methodology there and strategy there. but the gold standard, I'm going to connect everything up into one building that is the dream. And I've sat on that, the design phase, and I've worked on new buildings and deliberate, some systems actually work like this and it worked really well.
But again, and the capital expense is so high that if you build a solution that only works with the gold standard. That's not a solution. So your solution, in my opinion, has to work with the silos and then should support that. But it also should work with the holistic every system together. So I always say you have to stop.
If you come into our industry and say, I've got a software solution. It's perfect. I need one second data. I need, 47 sensors on my equipment and I need to have no latency on the network. Yeah. Cool. So at that point, zero 1% of our buildings, like you really have to be realistic about this, and I'm really lucky to have that experience as an automation engineer and just seeing some horrific network and really thinking how, but when you say it, okay, again, you're like, okay.
This is just they're all. And the industry is changing so quickly. In terms of what's available today versus what's available 20 years ago, but the buildings haven't caught up to that yet. So yeah, our believe solution has to work in a silent, has to be able to work on one system. And it has to be able to scale up we've amounts of points and amounts of complexity.
And if he can do that great. And if you're building a new system and, helping a building owner, bring them along the way so that if you do a project that's in a silo. Make it, so that siloed doesn't have to stay isolated in the future. It has the ability to be able to connect other systems, meaning, make sure that it's network some way, make it some sort of data structure.
we've spoken at length about these things where it's okay to do that, but really open it up to the future possibilities. Totally.
James Dice: [00:32:16] I love that. It's almost like everyone. needs to have in mind what the gold standard or what the Holy grail, whatever we want to say is like the five year, 10 year goal.
But in the meantime, or not going to be able to get there immediately. So being able to sell and like you said earlier, put these puzzle pieces together in a way that sets you up for
Tyson Soutter: [00:32:35] that long term. I love that point too, because. That people, I think when they hear about these smart building technologies and that there's always two sides, there's the visionaries.
And they they're a hundred percent forward and you need these people. And then you have the automation, people that are very cynical. This is never going to work. It depends on the day I could be anywhere. And, the point is, if you have a project, treat that project as if it's the whole building. So don't go are the rest of the buildings or it doesn't talk to it.
So it doesn't matter. Just build, just upgrade that part. Don't worry about future proofing. This like always keep in mind every time you spend capital, every time you do service work, operational costs. That's an opportunity to bring that building to a standard. And then I think this is where we can teach or not teach condescending, but advise building owners to say.
If you create the blueprint, the structure the way forward, this is where I need to be. Every time you spend money in a building, that's an opportunity to get there. You don't have to do the whole building all months, do it slowly, but make sure you're bringing it up to that level where you want to be.
James Dice: [00:33:39] Absolutely. Yeah. It's your opportunity to take a step towards that five year goal or whatever it is.
Tyson Soutter: [00:33:44] So how do you,
James Dice: [00:33:45] when you're selling to owners that don't have that vision though, what do you do that? Cause I've experienced. I've experienced this so much, right? So mostly as an independent consultant.
So coming in and seeing all these projects happening within a portfolio and realizing that no one has this vision in mind and all of these projects are being done in ways that don't. Even if the owner decided what their five year goal was, I would bet that these projects weren't walking them anywhere near or anywhere, any closer to that five year goal.
So how do you think about selling in that environment? When that strategy, I call it a strategy, but it's really also a vision that vision doesn't currently.
Tyson Soutter: [00:34:27] Yeah. I would say persistence, repainting your values over and over again. It always comes back down to when you go into these people just they've got their project, they've got their, budgets.
they have to hand over it. It all makes sense why they can't see forward. I always, I'm very sympathetic towards this. and that's, you should always be sympathetic you, there's no point getting frustrated with this, But this, in this case, I always go back to saying if you build this way, how are you going to achieve these solutions? And I always talk about software solutions and things, the end goal. So if you want to, if you want to sell data analytics, if you want to sell digital twins, if you want to sell closed loop optimization, and people, they will, they can capture this and go, that's what I want.
And that's good because they don't have the historical knowledge to understand what it takes to get there. So if that's what they want, you have to keep reminding them saying it to do this. You need to be doing this today. Like it's a pretty lame analogy, but if you want a smart building, you really need a strong foundation, just like you would building a normal building.
you don't build it on a poor foundation. The digital infrastructure. It requires the same strong foundation. So I go in and say, if you do it in this manner, you're not going to be able achieve that. That's fine if that's what you want to do, but cross it off the list because that's not possible anymore.
And I just really important. I always, I never get caught up in the details of, Networks or control choices or data modeling until I explained, Oh yeah, these are gone. So the, all these solutions that you want to do in the end, they're gone now. So that's okay. If you're okay with that, continue with that.
If you're okay. Giving up everything you've ever wanted, that's completely fine. Yeah.
James Dice: [00:36:03] All your engineer, everything out of it.
Tyson Soutter: [00:36:05] Yeah, exactly. it's tough. It's tough. It's you can't win. You can't win every battle. And. When you find the right building owners who share, that they have the same goals in mind and they're somewhat forward thinking, just support them and give them your knowledge and don't try and sell them on a specific solution so that even if you sell them something once fine, what are you gaining there?
build those relationships and be able to advise them like ethically to say, no, this is the right solution. And it might not be your solution today. But it will be eventually. So really treated them as a, as I nearly treated it as like a, an educational process or like I'm looking at going, okay, maybe my solution is not the best today, but this would be good for you today.
this would be perfect. I really believe that this would work for you and that will sustain longterm relationships. It just makes it easier. It just makes it easier to really sell what you believe in.
James Dice: [00:36:58] Yeah, what I love about your approach here and your just overall attitude. It is that if, someone that works for a building owner where to listen to this, they could apply these same.
Approaches to selling internally. And you mentioned foundations. That's why I named the smart buildings course that the nexus smart buildings course foundations, because these sort of attitudes, these sort of strategies are what every building owner needs to like wrangle internally.
They need to figure this out internally and how like whoever the champion is, they need to figure out how to sell this to all of the stakeholders internally as well. So that's. that's why I think this conversation so important. It's not just about all of the vendors out there learning how to sell better.
It's also about, a champion taking their organization on this journey as well,
Tyson Soutter: [00:37:43] just to add quickly to that is the best thing about selling this smart building tech is it's more of a concept we're solving. We're not trying to sell a product or, we're not trying to sell a specific thing.
We're saying like, okay, this is what we want you to do. I don't really talk about products. I don't have to myself. I talk about the concepts and so we can work for anyone. And it's just, it's nice to be able to say, I truly believe this is going to help you. Like you need this solution.
I can't even fathom how you're running the building at the moment, but I know this will help you. it's not going to be easy, but we can do this and there'll be benefits. And by the end, when the value comes in, everyone will be high fiving each other, and it's going to be okay.
James Dice: [00:38:24] let's bring this down. So we've been talking about kind of high level selling. Let's bring this down to actual buzzwords, actual topics. Buzz words is a negative way to put it. These are very important solutions that people need to know how to sell whether internally or externally. so let's.
Not make fun of the fact that our industry loves buzzwords, but, let's start with one of your favorite topics, which is semantic modeling and, standards, for the organization. So how do you, it's something that you spend a lot of time on? How do you sell that? Very messy, very difficult topic.
Tyson Soutter: [00:38:57] I can, I think I've annoyed.
Every single person I've worked with this topic. To the point now, where I think if you asked me the solution to any problem, public NSA, some sort of data modeling. So it's, if you look at like what we have in our industry today is it's, proprietary systems, not interconnected, separated systems, data structures that really don't align across companies across countries.
across, the same company in the same suburb, the data will be entirely different one building installed by one company and the same company next door, it's a completely different system, a different style of structure. And everyone's Oh yeah, it can't be, it can't be that hard.
Yeah, it is. It is really hard. And then you have certain installers that come in and they don't even put data naming on your backnet points. For example. weren't mentioned nineties, but this stuff makes it very difficult. so I always stop saying naming conventions. I, a great, as long as you don't stop there because they never work, they provide some structure.
Structure's good. So put it in there, make it work. What's important is having some manner. Not to rely on a very specific name because, the relationship between a temperature sensor on the wall and the relationship between the chiller on the roof has endless and less variables. So the amount of equipment between that temperature sensor in the wall and that chiller could be, it could be one, could be 60, it could be endless.
Putting a naming, like naming something, temp sensor, not very helpful, but understanding that this sensor he's in a room, it's, the, eh, the temperature is going to be fluctuating based on air. It's linked to this equipment. That equipment has several components. That data on those components is it could be a VAV, could be an AHU.
It could be jewel dark. It could be hot deck, cold deck. All of this is data that you can't cover with naming conventions. And if you want a naming convention will only get you so far, but if you have a tagging methodology, you can do all these relationships like you could with the naming convention, but also make it so it's scalable.
So if you look at this and say, I want to create a solution for a fan, okay. So what type of fan. Just the generic fan. I have something that's going to work on any type of fans. Great. Now how many versions out of a pan or that unit in a building. So if you do naming conventions, okay.
Now you need to write something for every scenario of the type of fan. Send me pumps. Same with sensors. Same with actuators and the dampers. Same with, okay. Let's just apply some metadata and then we can just. Query one, one, one tiny. It would be, it's a metadata. I just wanted to write a rule for every damn not outside of our damper, not a exhaust fan air damper, not supply a damper, not a whatever.
It could be. Just the damper. Okay, cool. You run it once and now you've written it for every single type of damper. So if you get into this deeper and deeper into this world where you're like, I need to start adding value to a big data set. You want to be able to say, ah, I don't want to do things 10 times.
I don't want to do them. I don't want to do them more than once. And that's what the automobile allows you to do. It allows you to query huge amounts of data and actually do it in a very efficient manner. So the relationships have to be there. The metadata has to be there and it doesn't stop just with, attributes of a mechanical piece of equipment, or it can continue into.
okay. This is installed in this office space, or this is, this only operates during this time. These can all be taxed as well. Like you can apply the context of the scenario or the environment you can provide operating conditions. All of this can just be tagged onto equipment. So if you have some sort of standard, great.
Now that the second part of your question is the standards. Yeah. Okay, great. But every industry has. Crazy amounts of standards. if you look at the construction industry, Coby and like there's so many standards that you could list through and say, okay, all of them have value.
Same with our industry. You have haystack, you have brick, you have, I started writings like on the standards here. So if you want to be able to what's the best one, I get asked a lot am like the best one is One that's consistent and that's the standard so
James Dice: [00:43:16] implementation.
Tyson Soutter: [00:43:17] So haystack fall is coming and it's taking the best of relationships with, brick and the metadata, of haystack.
as long as you have the mentality of, I need to create a standard with the goals we just discussed in mind. Switching from your standard to the industry. Standard is easy because you've broken it up in a way. If you've done it correctly, switching to another standard, you do it once.
That's the whole point of creating this data modeling. So it's important that we have as an industry, come up with a standard. Don't let that stop. You. From doing any standard today, we need to invest more into some standards. I think open source community projects that haystack for, I say, in this being quite successful longterm, but no one knows, but the more we engage with this, the more we're able to invest our time into this and to spread it, then we're going to see who wins, but create something now.
Make sure you have the right mentality of structuring it in a way where you have the relationships, you have the metadata, and then when you have to shoot, it's a very easy process.
James Dice: [00:44:25] Very supportive. Oh yeah. The way I see it as like you said, the word scalable earlier, so it's enabling scalability, but it also enabling, sounds like it's enabling like your future proofing, your smart building.
So you're enabling yourself to. Switched standards later, but also enabling you to get value out of your data later on. You don't even know what you're going to do with it yet, but the model allows you to have
Tyson Soutter: [00:44:49] that
James Dice: [00:44:50] set up in a way that yeah. You, whatever you want to do with it later, you could do something with it.
Cool. That is a conversation that you and I were talking about, like it's happening all over the world and it's totally fascinating. So I just wanted to give a shout out for everyone. That's just is making the argument that Tyson just made here. and you summarized it very succinctly. So thank you for doing that.
Just a given, I like giving an example of just Let's say you want to do something with fan data across your portfolio. How would you do that without a model? So uh, I did a podcast on this with, Corey Mosman and we used the example of a discharge air temperature sensor.
So just. Pretend you want to do something with your discharge air temperature across your entire port folio. How would you do it without a semantic model?
Tyson Soutter: [00:45:33] So
James Dice: [00:45:33] that's I guess, where to start is to start providing examples to people, to be able to sell the concept. cool. Let's move on. if you're not worn out already, I have a guy more topics here.
so let's go. So say your data's model. You want to do some analytics on it. How do you then. So analytics to
Tyson Soutter: [00:45:52] a building owner. Yeah. this is my favorite topic, I think, but I always start by saying analytics is machine learning, AI fault detection. These are tools. what I'm selling to you is a digital service.
what I'm going to give to you is I'm going to solve your operational problems using these tools. So tell a customer, I always start by saying it's very easy for me to find a thousand issues in my building. It's hard for me to close five issues and I'm sure you've experienced this. And we may have discussed this over a few years.
And the biggest problem to a customer is that they don't need more issues. They don't need you to come and say, Hey, here's all your problems. Great. I could have got a consultant report for this. What they need is these tools have to be able to say, here is the issues, he's the highest priority issues and he's why you have to fix it.
So it has to come with a value assigned to it. And I say value a lot, but. if you're not adding value to a customer, the customer shouldn't be buying. That's just as simple as that. and we can close three to five issues of every month. You're going to have an inquiry, probably high performing building.
So what we do is we might not even find new problems. Like we're not changing the laws of physics here, where we're just finding really basic things. And finding some more advanced things with analytics, with linear regression, with machine learning. but initially for the first few months, a lot of our values come through fall detection and that in context of problems.
so from there you need to say, okay, once we do that, we add cost to it. We add the risk to us, and then we prioritize it for you. So it's all about saying we use a bunch of tools and I never say analytics in terms of just an offering. I always say. Fall detection, analytics, machine learning, all of these are part of what we're offering to you.
And each one of them has value and very high value. But together is where you start saying, okay, we're solving problems now. And
James Dice: [00:47:43] this is a good, this brings up a good point around the buzzword of AI. If the bottleneck is closing three to five issues per month, what value does AI have for closing those?
I think that's a good way to put it in context. It's like that's the real bottleneck, no one needs like more help uncovering issues.
it's in using analytics to
improve processes.
And how do you clear up this confusion around like AI is going to wipe all of our butts and make it make our lives so much better?
Tyson Soutter: [00:48:17] I think I was in that basket at one stage, and then I started looking into it and these tools are coming and they're incredibly impressive. Like when you say them working, you like. Wow. that's nearly scary how good these are, but it comes back to that first discussion point.
If your tool requires the ideal scenario, in terms of data, quality, data availability, uptime, low latency, very stable networks. It's a very small percentage of our market. So I always say yes, these tools they're coming and they're going to have a huge impact on our market, but. We're one of the few markets where we technology you can't, it doesn't change overnight.
it requires capital investment. So it's coming and it's getting closer. I feel like every year. Okay. One starting to see more and more impressive things. So I think it's going to be a very powerful tool. I just don't think it has a big enough market share for us to be worried that it's going to take over the building industry.
It's going to pay a big part of it. They're definitely eventually I don't know what that time period is, but eventually.
James Dice: [00:49:18] Cool. Cool. So the way I'm hearing it from you is if we don't have AI on our list here, but if you were to like sell AI, you're selling it as part of a suite of analytics solutions and that's where you see it playing right now.
Tyson Soutter: [00:49:33] I think data analytics is incredible. if you do like linear regression for them, that's really very valuable solution that it's not future tech. That's what people utilizing that everyday. Yes. It's expected in my opinion. if you look at that, that's fantastic, but that still requires, a lot of data.
And if you're trying to add value to a specific building, you can use external data from other buildings, but. The best thing you can do is capture the data within that building on that piece of equipment. So you can look at past performance and actually really determine how has this changed in performance based off previous operations.
so yeah, that's fantastic. that's three months, that's six months into a contract. So you need to add value all the way up until that point. So that's where fault detection and more basic analytics plays a bigger part. Once you hit the six, seven month period. That's when you can get a bit fancy with some more linear regressions, but there's still a lot of value thing, efficiently finding problems with faults and root poles analysis that I can't stress how important that is.
not just, Hey, here's a fault, the chiller failed and let's put everything in the building and fold the tool needs to be smart enough to be able to go, Hey, let's get back a bit and say, let's ignore everything downstream that's. You know that's where our industry needs to be as a band minimum selling these tools that they have to be able to offer that.
Brilliant.
James Dice: [00:50:51] Brilliant. Okay. All right. Let's move on. So we've talked about analytics, which is collecting data and a one way. A pole from the building. What about this new, I guess new, it's not really that new, but it's, becoming more sexy recently is this closed loop optimization. So instead of just a one way pole, maybe you have a smart building software solution.
That's then sending smart commands back to, the dumb, Air quotes, dumb, underlying systems that were there before. so how do you think about that and how do you educate owners and think about selling that solution?
Tyson Soutter: [00:51:26] Yeah, I think initially I was very skeptical of this offering
James Dice: [00:51:30] because of that, there's a lot of skepticism in the market.
Like I've talked to a lot of people that like, they're like, our clients don't want that and they just like end of discussion. So there seems to be a ton of resistance toward it.
Tyson Soutter: [00:51:41] But yeah, it's in my opinion, that's what a control is already doing. it's controlling to some sort of program.
your program. actually, it led me down many paths and I think brainbox is the company that I'm thinking of. you had a great interview. definitely worth checking out. It was fantastic. and then we've even in Siemens there's companies that are working on it and you see all these solutions coming up, a lot of universities are working on it.
There was an Australian company that did it a few years ago, that's scale. And I saw it firsthand. And I think that has a really large potential value. I just think that it's very difficult to implement. if you look at, playing controllers for children, It's a similar concept. but the way that they approach it is like limit out variations of equipment.
Let's focus on just doing chillers and even not creates so many variables. What type of chiller size, how many palms? Primary, secondary, like how big is the parking like what's load. Are we looking at. Refrigerant ambient, like all of this it's not easy. So I think there's loop optimization.
If you look at it from like the plant controllers and whether it's in success, they're seeing success in environments that have less technical abilities and need a very good control system that is highly efficient and highly technical. That's where those solutions work perfectly. I see the closed loop optimization.
Scenario. if people focus on it, VAVs or shoes or certain types of equipment being extremely powerful, because we're getting in our industry, we've always heard this an aging workforce, the technical skills are leaving our industry and we're getting less and less technical people. These systems are going to be very important in parts of the world where we cannot replace that workforce, which is going to be significant.
So I think there's, I think there's a high value there, but I like looking at them from the approach from like chiller optimization, all these plant controllers, let's focus on a type of equipment and expand from there. And if companies do it in that manner, I can see it being a very interesting sell. I think if someone comes in and says, I'm going to control your whole building through a closed loop optimization, I would be concerned or be concerned.
And I would say that maybe we need to take a few steps before we get there. let's not leap to that level because if you're controlling set points, for example, how many variations of programs hang off that set point, it's not not all controller algorithms are the same and these controls, so there's going to be different variations of controls.
That happened once you can change a set point. So they're not going to have enough data to be able to really mimic these scenarios enough to learn from them. So I think it's a future tech. I think if I focus on controlling certain types of systems, I've seen some really incredible solutions in data centers with crack units that work really well, super efficient.
They're 30, 40% savings. I've seen some really interesting solutions with very these and I walked into that thing very skeptical, but walked away, going that very impressive. So I think there's that there's a value there. I'm there. Yeah. We're interested to see where the pricing comes in for all these, like how much money do you spend to get so much value.
And what does that compare to a traditional manners? investing in the systems. that's the unknown at the moment for me, because I think a lot of these companies are very competitive with their pricing. They come in quite aggressive. which I think is fine, if we're going to see you, what happens in year two, year, three year four of these companies, like we talked about, does that value proposition carry on into the later years?
Or are we going down that, starter mentality of when the market worried about profit leader? that's a difficult sell for me. Yeah.
James Dice: [00:55:14] I've seen really aggressive pricing and I've also seen really aggressive, expensive pricing. I've seen like very significant high SAS fees, like capturing a significant amount of the savings that are being created.
this whole area is. So fascinating to me. so I've written several essays on what I call advanced supervisory control. Cause like you said, we already have supervisor controls, so we have to draw some delineation between what we have and these new, the solutions. So I've made up this stupid acronym.
I see. But I've been just like totally nerding out on this topic lately. And I would probably do a podcast on all the things I'm hearing from people about it. Cause it's fascinating to hear. Like just one example that I'll give you is like a very large analytics company. They told me that, yeah.
Number one, their clients aren't asking for this, but I proud of them a little bit and realize that their integrations they've been setting up are not two way. So like thousands of installations set up and they like, couldn't do it if they wanted to. And so it's are you saying it's not a thing because your
Tyson Soutter: [00:56:17] whole business is set up in a way that won't
James Dice: [00:56:19] allow it, or are you saying it's not a thing because like your clients really don't want this new tool.
So I'm seeing this topic as like this other layer of disruption. Cause it's not just disrupting, the building owners processes, it's also disrupting these Players that have been innovative. And now maybe they're the ones that are holding back the industry from heading in the direction that we probably need to head.
So I'll continue to nerd out. And I think it's a fascinating topic.
Tyson Soutter: [00:56:46] Yeah. And I love, actually read everything you've written on this tonight. I'm always the one question I ask when I meet with these companies and talk to them about that solution is like, where does the ownership stop? Because once you control something remotely through a cloud.
Yeah. Who's responsible for that now. that becomes a difficult discussion as well. So I think that doesn't mean it's a deal breaker. It just means, Hey, how does this work and how does the service change? know? It's five years from now, we could be saying that, how did we do this without these advanced surface controls?
Like how, why would we ever program a control locally? What was wrong with us? But we don't know, but I'm very interested to see where it goes. And I've heard some inquest saying some very impressive things. I just want to be able to say, what happens if you use it? Like, how does this work longterm and how does it fit into the operational versus I'm super fascinated by this topic.
James Dice: [00:57:35] Yeah, me too. let's move on. Maybe we'll have to do like a full unpacking of that, like later. So let's talk about digital twins. so it's an exciting topic. So I'm actually moderating a panel at, IB con in a couple of weeks, on digital twins. I don't know how I got myself in the middle of that conversation, but, so how do you think about selling digital twins?
And I think that. Like one aspect I've heard from me so far in this conversation, that's, there's like the design and construction aspect of it. And then there's the operations aspect of it. So maybe you can hit both of those.
Tyson Soutter: [00:58:06] Yeah. This is the main reason I change into this industry because I kept hearing about digital twins.
And I think at one point I'm like, I don't really know what that means. So I started looking into it like, okay, I need to learn. What this means because it kept coming up and I'm like, I don't know. It doesn't sound like what, how would you ever do that? It seems impossible. once you get into it and it goes back to my, my overall arching, feelings towards selling smart building techies, as long as you're delivering value, It's going to work for the company. And a digital twin is in the design and construction phase is. Already proven its value tenfold. So if you do it correctly at the moment if you're designing a building, there's going to be 3d durings, there's going to be planning. There's going to be four D and five D time and cost planning involved in some way.
there's going to be a BIM model. This is what it's all about. It's about saying, how can we utilize this process to be beneficial for the construction period? And what I found working on these construction buildings is, and through these processes is it is, as you can imagine so many services, so many companies, so many people, how do you track what's happened?
So the way you do it is through okay. Onsite builders or general contractors. but how do you control the digital process? Like the documentation? How do you make sure that things are getting stored in the correct manner? How do you make sure that what your pet design in a stock, how does that equate to something in the end and what if you do a correctly and you have to have some sort of consultant through this process.
You can say, I want to build this building. I want to capture all this information. I want to install it in this manner. And I'm going to have a digital replica of this. You're already paying for that when you build a building. So it makes complete sense. What is it digital like a project manager, digital project manager will do for you is that they will federate the models, meaning that would bring all the, these different services.
a hydraulics architecture see-able, mechanical electrical. And they bring them together and into one federated model and they might do this on a weekly basis while your building and make sure that all the assets are being low correctly. You're not going to have clash problems like clash detection.
So understanding where everything's going, make sure all the services are all going in the right way. You have enough capacity, enough load, make sure the foundations are all okay. You're not cutting through any sort of important parts of the floor. and then also just making sure the layout, the feel everything is done correctly, this is incredibly valuable.
And if you can capture all that digital data great. If you can entire the design documents to this same model, meaning the installation files, your design and commissioning figures, your manuals, your warranty. If you can put that all into the model. Okay, let me clarify that. Not put it into the model, but we'll link it to the model.
You don't want to put it into the model because it becomes very fortunate. I have some way where you can link it to this model because it's all geo located. It's very structured and you're paying for this already. You're all going to walk away at the end of this building process. And you're going to have a digital twin.
Yeah. some caveats that if you walk into the construction site, It might not look exactly like a model and be a model. As soon as construction happens, we have a bit of a gap benign the street where the beautiful three D model doesn't enter the construction floor and it's all printed two D models.
And you have someone with a red textile redline markup. And they're marking it up and changing everything and there's different versions. And this is a major problem, but doesn't change the value of the digital twin and that problem will be solved. you've got these 3d capture cameras already where you can go around and encaptured the geometry of the space and can capture the layout and put it into a point cloud.
you know, you're going around a spice and you're capturing real images and you're geo liking them.
So they're perfectly placed. This technology is becoming more accessible. It's becoming cheaper. And if you can accurately track the services as they're being built and then compare it to the model which you can do with augmented reality tonight. It's not like the crazy future tech. Eventually it's going to take time because the building industry, you'll be walking around with an iPad and you'll be able to look at the three D model, the BIM model.
And you'll be able to say, Hey, those pipes are, 20 mill off you can do that today. And I've seen solutions doing it today. It's not done in every building today. that's the next step. But once that becomes more acceptable and a builder or general contractor can just walk around and check all this services with one device, basically as they go.
The importance of a digital twin is just increasing every day, even though the value's already bad, just through collecting all the design and geolocation the size, the weight, the asset information of a building that's already so valuable for the construction process. And if you can help with the handover by making sure that all of that is collected on time and correctly.
That is a huge cost to any builder or building owner that can go on feed these, that process. So if you can periodically track and trace that and show that you're capturing all the information live, which you can do this tools that do that today, that by itself is hugely valuable.
So that's the design phase. So you can argue that there's value there. Definitely.
James Dice: [01:03:24] Let me stop you real quick. It sounds You said the value is
Tyson Soutter: [01:03:26] proven 10 times
James Dice: [01:03:27] over on the construction side. And, but then there's this gap where there, there might not be the value proven. Too. Well, it sounds like there's accuracy issues going from that construction to the operations.
Like what's actually in this building now, and you're saying that gap is being closed. is that how to understand it as like we're now in this phase of making that justification to go from, Construction to operations basically. And making that jump is like a big hurdle right now,
Tyson Soutter: [01:03:59] because it's a big hurdle and it's fascinating to me because you look at it and you say the digital twin is so valuable because it's so data rich.
now the accuracy on site, that becomes a problem, not so much for its current value in the. The design and construction phase because they have a process and it's working. I don't agree with it, but it works once this new solution poses that gap that creates a new value in the construction phase, because it's a huge process to manage all the services keep track of.
Is it being installed to design? is it working? Is it in the right location? that's nearly unmanageable for a builder
James Dice: [01:04:38] It's also about like the commissioning and warranty, getting it useful in that. Okay.
Tyson Soutter: [01:04:43] Got it. And so it all builds into a value there, but to your point, that's the missing link into operations as well.
Even though it's adding extra value in the construction phase. It's also now bridging a link and in creating a huge value for the operational phase, because now you have a fully accurate representation and I don't want to overstate the inaccuracies. it's not drastic, but. It's enough to say that there's an argument against that.
So you really want to be able to say we need to get at though. We need to make it easier. And it can't rely on us having to create a new model That becomes really difficult.
James Dice: [01:05:20] Yeah, it sounds like if you create a gap between reality and the twin, now you have this effort to keep it updated.
And if that effort continues to grow, you might abandon it. And it's so continuing to close that gap with realities, that seems like it's important. All right. So let's go to the operation side. So like what's the value of a twin? And I guess what I'm seeing in the marketplace is if you already have this federated model and it's.
Ready to be used in the operations phase. And it's been cleaned up. That's a totally different value proposition than the existing building that has nothing digital. And you have to spend a ton of capital budget to create this twin. So I guess there's two more arguments here, with the twin as well.
how do you think about that?
Tyson Soutter: [01:06:04] So this was really such a difficult problem to face cause. One, you have a small amount of buildings that have a digital twin to start with that's already a problem. So to go into an existing building, even if it's new and saying, Hey, you want a digital twin?
That's difficult. So it's a difficult process because you don't have an army of contractors doing this work already to do a construction job. but going back to what we talked about earlier, If you try and take small bucks, try and say, the three D model or the BIM model is very daunting to people, but it's also very misleading because it doesn't have as much value.
The value comes from the data behind this. So step is saying, okay, let's create a living asset register, like a proper living asset register. Okay. I do. I want to do my whole building. No. Okay. Let's do it periodically. You're paying people to maintain this equipment every single day. First step, get them to put it into a digital form, digitize this process, not in their database and your database will have it.
So it's accessible to you first. When is it being maintained? Track this? You need to be able to say that as a building owner, what are the costs? When is it breaking down? What's the live data. You've already just got four out of five major components of the digital twin. And if you just say I would like the three D model as well.
Okay, great. But again, put it into your face, fit out schedule. Do it slowly. Don't go in and say, I'll just do every building because the payback is gonna, it's going to take time, but it doesn't date value. Yeah. Digital twin. it's still incredibly valuable, but collecting the digital language that builds.
The value of a digital twin, even in the construction phase, the threading model component is a very small part of value. It helps with the clash detection and all these things, of course, but the data in the BIM model, that's the value. So statement operations, I always say it needs to be part of your processes.
So you're paying people to maintain your equipment, make sure they do it in a way where you're collecting the data. To form a digital twin. Then as you're doing that, have a plan like we talked about before, have you your stretch goal of he, and then every time you do work, make sure that work's done in a way that enables us.
And and eventually, if you want to get to three D models start very small with, geometry. You just want to catch the, full space, the geometry and the values. you know the materials with that. Now you can start doing simulations. You've just opened up another world of possibilities that are digital twin names, that's where that, if we go back to the very first point we made is that's making sure that you have spoken to the customer, understand what they want to achieve, and then engage them to make sure that you're not overselling or something.
So if they want a digital twin, maybe they just want a way to digitally and manage their asset and look at all the information. Okay. Let's scale it back and slowly move up because if you oversell them the value, just every time we try and oversell them on a solution. I think a digital twin is very valuable as long as you're not misled, but what a digital twin is the three day views, at least, Flying through and VAR.
Great, good for a marketing page, but the value comes from Hey, let's really, let's take the physical asset and have a So Rebecca, now we can manage the building remotely. So it goes back again to the foundation to all of this point comes back to data structure foundation. So I think it's incredibly valuable as long as you're not overselling what you're trying to achieve and not trying to do it too quickly.
James Dice: [01:09:35] Yeah. And that really ties together to this whole conversation. It's like, why do you need a data model? Or really, as you're building a data model, what are you building up to? So you're taking each project you're doing in the building and you're taking this step. You're taking a step towards what And a lot of people are saying, I need a digital twin. That's not like you're basically grabbing at the shiny buzzword versus realizing what you want and then taking steps towards that. And I think it's hurting the digital twin conversation because what I hear a lot is like, A digital twin is not feasible because front cost is far too high.
If I have a building that was built in 90 10, 82, creating a digital twin is too much of a capital expense for that building. And I think that's a little bit of a lie, because like you said, that if you just break it down into what is a digital twin and then there's these five categories.
you can take incremental steps on those five categories and provide immediate value. So let's just use one example that we've talked about is modeling the data.
So obviously a data model is a huge component of a digital twin. And so if you're taking steps in that main category of the twin, you're making progress towards the digital twin and you don't need to write it off as like this huge, massive project, when you can just take steps towards it and get there.
Eventually, I love that. I actually hadn't thought about it like that before,
Tyson Soutter: [01:10:56] so thank you. It really took me a lots of conversations with customers to really say okay, let's be realistic about is how do we achieve it? and just one more point on this to say, Don't devalue three D model of the Beamer leader, because if you have it, you can do certain things.
And that has a lot of value as well. If you have your three D model broken up into kind of bless it. Now you have I visual representation where you can geo locate to that. You can, yeah, you can plan sizing, replacements or remotely. You can do all of this work remotely, no longer. You have to have an FM sitting in the building doing these plans or a consultant coming to site.
So this there's value there too, but if you break it down into sections, it all comes back down to a digitalization strategy, but that's what it comes down to And that's why we make fun of buzzwords, but it that's what it's all meaningful. I want to take my physical assets and physical process and use technology to do them in a modern way.
Digitize that process
James Dice: [01:11:55] all that moment. Alright,
Tyson Soutter: [01:11:57] cool. this is
James Dice: [01:11:59] Anne. I just must say what we said offline a second ago is that if people find this episode long, like you can just pause it and you can come back to the boat, but Tyson and I, aren't going to stop talking just because people like short
Tyson Soutter: [01:12:12] podcasts and I'm not going to apologize for long podcasts.
James Dice: [01:12:15] anyway, let's move on. I want to talk about like where we're at in the world right now. So it's September, 2020. this podcast will come out sometime at the end of the month. so obviously we're still going through this big disruption in our industry with COVID and I want to talk about what you're seeing, in your conversations with your clients and what you're thinking about the implications and outlook for the smart buildings and industry.
Tyson Soutter: [01:12:38] Yeah. I had been having this every day. I feel like it's a lot of people have been asking, what does this mean for buildings in the future? Like the new normal, you say a lot. I'm very curious because I we're already seeing a trend in our market about. A more sustainable approach in buildings, but also more care to the people within those buildings, the tenants or the users.
but indoor environment quality, like this was, Wells ratings. You've got reset in Asia. There's all these standards popping up and people starting to care about what is a healthy environment. what's the sustainability, not just energy saving CO2 reduction. people talked about us for years, but people were vesting in it.
Like they were really saying, I want to do this. I'm going to put money forward. And the paybacks. Don't have to be two or three years, like every other project. So I was, very surprised that this was occurring. because historically people we'll talk about these topics, but never really put money into them and it big scale anyway.
so these situations it's really, Accelerated the process of why do we want to utilize our space to be as inviting as possible for our employees? Why do I want to make sure that my building is very sustainable? Not just facades, not just fit out, but really a sustainable and healthy building.
And so this situation, the conversations I'm having with real estate managers and property owners now, I need a way to make my office space as compelling as possible. If you talk to big enterprise customers, they want to be as attractive as possible to talent. A lot of big corporations now are saying can work from home.
you don't have to come back in. even Siemens made a public statement saying, that you can work from home 50 to 70% of the time. Now, even after the situation ends. and so you're starting to see employees make these really grand statements about there. Employers make these grand statements about the employees and then the backing it up.
Like they're really investing to make sure that they can create a space that is healthy, sustainable, and inviting, because they're going to have to. Because that office space, that the traditional, I went into an office every day. It's not going to be the same for bigger enterprise companies like smaller companies, maybe, this will pass at some point, I don't know, maybe in 20, 29.
and then from there we can say, no, it really like when we can go back out resumed normal life. I don't know. I think it's going to go back to complete. Normal life. It's proven that we can work from home effectively. The technology supports it. So to go back to the office, it's going to have to be invited.
It's going to be, have to be healthy. And historically, if you look at complaints within a building, it's always been hot or cold, like I'm hot, I'm cold 60, 70% of complaints and based around this. But if people understand what creates that environment, like what, makes you feel stuffy?
if it's poor airflow or, if it's, really pull humidity or actually like they painted in here a week ago, there's all this chemicals in the air. People are going to be much more conscious about the air they're breathing within the office space. And that is going to become a very high priority because after this, this will have some loss, I don't know to what scale, but it's really going to change the conversation.
As I want to understand the air and rating, is it healthy? And we both know that a lot of buildings and not. Giving you healthy, cleaner, it's poor ventilation. the filters aren't being changed enough. You're going back in there too early after it's all being painted. All of this stuff has, quite severe longterm effects to the health.
and same with lighting levels and occupancy. Now I go into the office to make people not to work. So when I'm in the office, I'm there to meet with my colleagues. That's going to be a pretty, it's be like a consistent message of big companies. So when you go to an office space, they have to cater for that.
That's going to significantly change the requirements for these buildings as well. So I think I'm very fascinated. I'm hoping we don't get five years from now, and everyone's just forgotten about this situation. And we're all crammed back into an office five days a week. And that's what I really hope,
James Dice: [01:16:50] I don't think that's going to happen. this also really ties back to the whole value selling thing. It's like what you talked about at the very beginning of this conversation, which is you can't just sell on energy savings. You can't just sell on maintenance savings, because what we're talking about here, if I understand you correctly is how.
Do
Tyson Soutter: [01:17:05] you
James Dice: [01:17:06] insert smart building technology, a or B or C into the new operation of this building and the new operation. This building is how do I keep my occupants safe? And I think that's what COVID has changed. And now it turns into this. I don't care what you have to do, but do it like it's no longer this, give me a two year payback thing.
It's is this building going to even exist unless we make the occupants safe. And that's a totally different conversation that has really changed things, a ton, which is really exciting.
Tyson Soutter: [01:17:37] I've been reading some studies that say, the they're expecting a 30 to 40% reduction in required office space.
Yeah. After the situation, if that's the case that is now creating a very competitive environment. so that means investment in technology. It's means it's going to be investment in creating really inviting spaces. It's going to benefit the users. Dramatically, but they're going to have to really answer some tough questions and invest some money.
so I'm very interested to see how this all plays out and I've, really believed that this will be a huge driver to a true smart building. Something like that. No, we've talked about for many years, but what are you when you have that complete package and it's focusing on creating a environment for the person.
And that doesn't really come into account when you're designing the
James Dice: [01:18:28] systems. it also makes that investment in comfy look pretty smart at this point.
Tyson Soutter: [01:18:32] Definitely. Yeah. Alright. Let's
James Dice: [01:18:34] We've already talked about a ton of things you're excited about, but there's a couple more things I wanted to ask you about that are, that have been on your mind.
So you talked about indoor air quality a little bit, but like what else are you excited about moving forward with the solutions and selling around that?
Tyson Soutter: [01:18:49] Yeah, there's so many, there's so many companies out there and I've been trying a few solutions and it's fascinating to me because.
If you look at it, maybe I'm just like blinded by my own world, but if you track the indoor thing, the sensors that are available, and if you track them under a typical office space, or even in your own home, it's insane. What, like happening in these spaces. Okay. And there's a great use case.
It has where a colleague of mine, moved into a new apartment and was really just not sleeping well, started waking up with like sore throats. saw that I was trying some sensors and we put them into his house and found that periods of the day when he wasn't there, there was this huge chemical spot.
I can't remember exactly what it was, but it basically came from like somewhere down in like the sewage. But every day when he wasn't home, And it didn't leave the smell an odor by the time he got there, but it was maybe cleaning product or something like that. And it was coming into his apartment and he had a young baby and he was like, struggling, sleeping.
And then he tracked it and he found this like incredible spec to the point where I got an alert and I called him like, are you in the house? Get out of the house. and when you look at the repercussions of this stuff, it's long term and. We don't track it today. We don't track it at all. Like you might spot check these values, but you do not longterm track these things.
Wow. What kind
James Dice: [01:20:07] of sensor are you talking about here?
Tyson Soutter: [01:20:09] this is something that anyone could buy right now. Yeah. there's heaps of, products on the market. Like I'm going to go into any company, I guess, where, like there's a few that really threw some interesting in things they track like particulates in the air.
CO2 temperature, a lot humidity. yeah, maybe right on like, there's a few of these chemicals that I kind of track. If you look at Wells certification or reset. very big in Asia, specifically, these values are they're tracking. This is what you want to be able to look at, because it can tell you like chemicals in in the air, the air quality oxygen you're breathing.
I've seen some office spaces from that customer. That's where your, say two numbers and not great when you're in a meeting room for more than 20 minutes. I'm sure we've all been there where you're sleeping at the desk, basically while you're listening to in a long meeting.
It's cause you're getting like restricted oxygen. So this is it's a serious problem. And the buildings aren't always designed with this in mind, and this is where I think the senses and enable the audience to be educated. And that will be the driving force. And that's why standards and certifications are very successful drivers where if you have, especially if it's government driven, but if you can measure.
The value of something in terms of, you've got a very healthy building. If you can measure that, put it onto a plot. with some sort of rating system that has inherent value for the building. Now that's value per square meter. That's that's like painting your walls. That adds value to that building.
So it's really important that we have some sort of measurement for this because at the moment, the argument has always been it's the paper. So is
James Dice: [01:21:43] this where you see reset going where cause reset has an ongoing data aspect to it. Doesn't it? So where you see reset going where it's not only if you think about the certifications of the past, You're certifying a construction project, essentially, if you're doing lead or things like that. But the way I don't have any direct experience reset, but is that where they're headed is Some sort of real time dashboard, like at, as a plaque, like replacing the plaque at the front, which is here's the current data on this building.
Tyson Soutter: [01:22:12] Yeah, exactly. Okay. You nailed that point though, because we had this writing system in Australia and I think I spoke about it with Nicholas. he's podcast resonating, but, we talked about this where you had, neighbors. So it's an energy efficiency system. A writing tool and it's just fair.
Like it's per square meter. you're not buying credits. You can't install bike racks or anything. It's just, are you efficient as a building energy efficient and it became a government initiative, had to be in putting on all these commercial office buildings. for, I think it was something like if you wanted a government contract in terms of a lease field by government agent, departments, right?
you have to be about four stars out of six stars, and every year you have to get recertified. So every single year it was panic stations. If you dropped your rating, in some cases, it would, was directly written into the lease. How much money they paid is based on the neighbors. Right. Whoa, and this is the single most successful thing I've seen to drive energy efficiency.
And that's why you see all these Australian startups come from that market. that's a, been a really big influence in my opinion on why you say seven, eight startups come from Australia. That, and we're also just great,
James Dice: [01:23:25] awesome people.
Tyson Soutter: [01:23:26] Yeah.
James Dice: [01:23:26] That's awesome. that's really fascinating.
So could we see a future then, where you would have leases dependent on a reset rating essentially?
Tyson Soutter: [01:23:36] Yeah, that's gone too. if I was an employer, I, if I had to, manage some sort of lease agreement, I would be saying. Okay. One, I want you to be sustainable. I want a very low carbon footprint, carbon neutral.
And I don't know if you've seen this. This is great website called, Ari 100 and it's all the big enterprise companies that have committed to a carbon neutral topic. And there's. hundreds, if not thousands of these companies, I love this. I love saying this because it's publicly stated I'm going to do this and I'm going to invest in it.
you'd want to see the same thing in terms of healthy buildings. And that will happen once people understand what it means. what do I need to measure to be able to do this? And that's why all these great companies that are coming up with these senses to go into these spaces, and the traditional companies as well, where they can say, I want to measure as much value as much, indoor environment, quality, I'm going to measure these values as much as possible. that is the first step. The second step is saying, like tying it back baggage, because a customer's going to ask you. Okay, that's nice. But I don't know. I just spent a lot of money to fix up so that the drive needs to come from the other way. It has to come from the tenants.
so it has to be part of the lease agreements has to be some sort of standard. and there's a bunch out there. really would love a standard that is year on you as fair as possible, and not so much around that, the design and the look in the field, the building, I think that. It's quite obvious when you can, interact with it and see it, the standard should be really around.
let's make this healthy, let's make this sustainable and bring those bullets together. There's a few out there too, and they're all doing well.
James Dice: [01:25:14] Okay, that would be something they continue to track and keep updated on. I love that. Alright. We're nearing the end of our marathon session here.
I do. So something that I thought of that when you were just talking is that we were talking about two things that are in conflict with each other, and so optimizing energy, but then optimizing for indoor air quality. And I think I've been saying that since the pandemic began, which is, if we're going to increase ventilation, we're also going to increase the energy usage and we've done different podcasts about this topic in the past.
We don't need to get into it, but like, how are you thinking about that dichotomy or battle right now?
Tyson Soutter: [01:25:53] It's it goes against every fiber of my being. Yes. I'm giving up all these energy. Yeah, it's tough, but it's justified. So if I've done some work with some of the engineers and we expect like anywhere to 15 or 40% increase in energy to hit the requirements, depending on your building, of course, it's difficult, but that's, I think leads perfectly into the next point is yes, energy savings is important in terms of dollar value per kilowatt hour.
But that's about tuning and getting the most out of your building when you can't do that. Okay. You need to invest in your plan because you need to reduce your carbon footprint. So if you can't tune your building to be super efficient, then you need to upgrade your building. And that's the logical next step we're seeing now, going back again to this change in environment and the is completely changing their mentality.
They're coming to us and saying, We want to be carbon neutral. How can you help with that? And let's extend the payback periods. Let's bring them out significantly. They're two year payback periods anymore. Cause that's really, let's go for the long haul because we have these targets.
And we need to hit them. and there's two responsible parties here. I think it's like, of course the company's doing this, but the government's also somewhat responsible. If you look at the price of electricity in certain countries, it's ridiculous.
quite so in Australia, we had a carbon textbook for a very small period of time until the prime minister, the loss of power. And eat was dramatic. The investment that went into reducing energy, like I've never seen anything like it. And it's a small increase to the day to day people in terms of energy, a few dollars every month, but for corporations, it is huge.
And so it should be, there should be a price. If you're going to use this power. so I think there's a responsibility for governments and then for companies to say, even if we have negotiated, I ridiculous cost per kilowatt hour, we can't judge projects of that. If you're paying a very low cost for this, you need to be able to say, okay, we need to set up high and no matter what, even if we're not paying it, set it higher.
I'm not saying they have to pay more, but I'm saying they should budget at a higher cost per kilowatt hour. Because even if it's not a good payback with your current, the cost is going to go up and there's going to be longterm effects here. So one you ethically, you should try and invest in this, but two, it's going to cost you a long time.
So get ahead of it now. So we are seeing customers go CO2 reductions, the highest priority. Energy savings also a high priority, but not the first priority, which is a huge shift.
James Dice: [01:28:25] A huge love it. Alright, thanks man. This has been.
Tyson Soutter: [01:28:30] Awesome
James Dice: [01:28:30] conversation. Anything else? Talk about where you talked about everything under the sun?
Tyson Soutter: [01:28:35] Honestly, that went very quickly for me. Yeah,
James Dice: [01:28:38] me too. Yeah, me too. Hopefully for the listeners, hopefully people can press pause if we talked longer than your morning walk with the dog or your commute we'll have commutes, but, this has been fascinating Tyson. I really appreciate you coming on the show and a half to.
Have you back again to talk about some, maybe one of these topics in particular, in a couple of months or something. So thanks, man.
Tyson Soutter: [01:29:00] And just, I just want to say that the work you're doing with the nexus, podcast and your weekly articles and the community, I love it. I love that there's a bunch of building nodes that can now.
Meet regularly and talk about these topics and people actually care.
James Dice: [01:29:16] Yeah, absolutely. Do we have a passionate group of people? Definitely.
Tyson Soutter: [01:29:20] Yeah, definitely. And now I'm frequently messaging people. About questions and topics from that community. So
James Dice: [01:29:27] the one thing that I'm loving too is it seems like people are connecting and I don't even need to be involved.
It's like they're meeting each other and then they go off and have a conversation and then not hear about it. And I'm like, that's amazing. Oh man, it's so cool. Yeah. So thanks for being a part of it and help build it up. Appreciate it.
Alright, friends. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Nexus podcast. For more episodes like this and to get the weekly Nexus newsletter, please subscribe at nexus.substack.com. You can find the show notes for this conversation there as well. As always, please reach out on LinkedIn with any thoughts on this episode.
I'd love to hear from you. Have a great day.
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This is a great piece!
I agree.