The Power of IoT in Facility Services | E23 – Hard Refresh – An ISSA Podcast

SA.

Welcome back to Hard Refresh. Another amazing prepared episode for you today. We got John Kunzier with us today. John, welcome to the show. Go ahead and introduce yourself. We are excited to have you, my man.

Thank you so much, Kaden. I am excited to be here. My name is John Kunzier. I'm the CEO and president of Invisible Sun Technology. We are an Iot solution targeting soft facility management services like janitorial security, routine maintenance, landscaping. And what we do is we do what we call proof of presence. We provide proof that someone's there and we actually deliver the data that is missing today in most facilities. On. Hey, what actually happened today within my. Within my building? And did everything happen the way that we think? So I'm really excited. I'm really happy to be here and excited to kind of walk through this conversation with you guys.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, offline, we were just talking about. John was preparing. He said he has some. Some interesting stories in his life. So he's prepared Two Truths and a Lie for our kickoff today. So let's dive into that now. I'm a little nervous.

You should be.

You know, and again, I'm, I'm, you know, I have no hair and I'm pretty. I think I'm old at this point. I think that's what's happening. I've got a long, long life that I can actually pull from. So I wrote these down. Let me. Let me start with. With the first one is back in the day, I had the opportunity to present to the Panama Canal Commission around a new project that they were doing, which was the Panama Canal extension. The option one, Option two. I back a number of years ago, walked the entire Appalachian Trail from start to finish. Took me about a month and a half to two months to do. Um, I lost a bunch of weight. Now I put it all back on, but that's another story. And the last option you have is I'm a former Division 1 volleyball coach and had some famous siblings on my. One of my teams. So you guys tell me which ones.

Wow. Which one's not okay? I want to. The second one I think is real. Appalachian Trail, because it felt real. Based on his after comment about losing weight. He lost a bunch of weight, but now I put it back on. I think that one is real. He really did do that. The only thing that I question is the length of time, but it feels. It feels real to me. And then I think he might be a Division 1. He may have been a Division 1 head coach. However, he did say he was in corporate America before. How does that play out in a timeline? Is that possible? He could have done both.

Yeah.

But, John, you also said you're getting up there in age, which means that comes with a plethora amount of experience. So this could have been. Gosh, the Panama Canal thing. I'm going to go with Karina.

I think.

I think the Appalachian Trail thing is real.

Yeah. I think the Division 1 head coach for volleyball is real as well. But I'm always wrong.

I'm going to. I'm going to go with. You were not a head coach.

Okay.

And I'm going to spill the beans.

Yeah. I'm going to say that you were.

So the first one I had the opportunity to. I did actually present to the Panama Canal Commission in their Panama Canal extension. I was working for a company called Primavera, where we were. We were bidding on the project management project controls components to major project. And the other one that is true is I am a former Division 1 volleyball.

Yeah, see, I'm terrible at this.

We both were wrong.

That's okay. Well, I had to fit. You know, I had to pick one that sounded really real. I made that one up because one of my buddies did that, and it took a month.

So the story was connected. You knew the details and the way you shared it, it was right there. And that's where, like, how long is the Appalachian Trail?

I don't have freaking an idea. Like a thousand miles. That was a buddy of mine named Todd Tremor, who is a bit older than I am, and he literally walked it and just you would watch the. The photos of him as he kept going and he just kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller. Shout out to Todd, who was an amazing guy. But, yeah, I was. I was a coach at LaSalle University for four years back when I actually did have hair and I could jump out of the gym. And the. The sibling was. Was a girl named Shaya Bryant, who had a very famous brother named Kobe Bryant.

Wow.

I met Kobe when he was 15 years old.

Unbelievable.

You know, rest his soul, a great family. His father passed away also about a year or so ago. But the family's lovely and some of the nicest people you'll ever meet across the board. So interesting. You know, people are like, you did all that? Like, yeah, I've had a really crazy career, so. And I'm enjoying every moment of it.

Wow, that's amazing. I love it. Well, I'm, like, really giddy to. To talk to you about Iot. I love this topic so much because I think that the Landscape as you know, has changed drastically from COVID to now that proof of service is kind of where, how I cut my teeth in technology because at the time of COVID everything was accountability and transparency and cleaning. And so we really tried to leverage not just proof of service reports, but we also were doing countdown to clean and showing cause, you know, CDC had passed out multiple mandates about cleaning, disinfecting. So I'm so excited to hear from you, from your perspective, how that proof of service concept has changed from COVID 2019, 2022 to now.

I think the most important value in any technology, whether it's IoT or cloud or AI, is how do we implement it and what does it really do for us and how does it solve the problems that we're having within a market? Because again, IoT has been around for, for years and years and years and it's seemed to be the underperforming emerging technology in my opinion. Yes, cloud took off. AI's taken off.

Yeah.

Is kind of like what do we really have?

Yeah, well, and I think it's so interesting because when I had my commercial cleaning company, I had got an opportunity to present to Boston Properties. It was like a bid of 336 buildings. And I remember I reached out to it was it Kimberly Clark or George business, one of those that had the IoT system. And I was like, guys, this is amazing. This is the type of technology I want to bring at that time. That was 2019. And to your point, they, the, the client didn't get it. They were like, well, it just seems like the hardware and like the, the barriers, obstacles. And I was like, this is amazing technology because what you're doing now is you have the tech and the data, but you also. Now I'm bringing the labor part of it and putting two together and paints a beautiful thing picture. But they still were like, yeah, it just seems like it's not going to be manageable. It's not going to be. We can't sustain something like that. What happens when we change vendors and things like that? So I'm curious, from your perspective, who is your actual client? Is it facilities management? Is it janitorial companies? Is it like who is your potential or client?

So that, and that's a really interesting question because I think it's a little bit of both. Right, right where we are looking at either the client or the real estate company and you know, like a JLL or a Cushman or are really, you know, part of our target market where we're saying okay. How do we, you know, how do we control what's happening? A building, and that's what they're responsible for.

Yeah.

And they're saying, well, how do I know in your example, the 36 buildings, how do I know that the bathroom on the second floor and building five actually, you know, got clean today?

Right.

And really that's when we start to look at folks that are having a large portfolio of properties or buildings are saying, I really want to make sure that that's being. The scope is being executed.

Okay.

We are actually having conversations though, with facility companies, usually the larger ones, like an ABM or a compass, where they're saying, look, I've got a large portfolio of buildings and I really need to understand what's happening within those. And I've got a facility manager that is targeting that. And all that facility manager does is chase down people to get data, right?

Yep.

And we want them to do something else like energy management, where there's a big upside.

Right.

Or client satisfaction. Make sure my clients are happy.

Right.

It's a very. We're relegating facility managers to a lower level activity when we can actually put in IoT that will help us automate that process. Really. That's what we do, right. Is we, we put sensors in locations that you want to track and then everybody gets a nice little smart cart that goes with them. And as they enter a building or enter a room, whether it's a bathroom or a lobby or a rooftop, it literally tracks that you were there when you got there, when you left, and gives us a duration. And then it says, here's the scope of work and did you do what you were supposed to do?

Yeah.

And we find in our implementations we are saving a facility manager a day. A week.

Wow.

A day.

Right.

What can you do with a day a week? I mean, Karina, you're a busy person. What would you do with an extra day?

Right.

There's a lot you can do. Kaden, what would you do with an extra day? Right. That is, you know, kind of the value that we're delivering because ultimately the client wants that service done. They really want to save money on the energy consumption of that building, the sustainability of that building. We want to make sure that that building is operating at a highest efficiency, yet we're just tracking down stuff and that. And that's really what we. That's the value we deliver. And we make staff 30 to 40% more productive. And in certain instances, like hospitals and healthcare, we help drop, you know, infection rates because we're cleaning and we know cleaning is actually happening right within that. So that's really what our solution does and how we, and how we deliver it. And the cool part is you set it up and you don't have to think about it again, it just does it.

But I think that you touch on a really interesting part of this, right, the sustainability. We had a couple clients in dc, Washington harbor, right. And they had, because of the DC mandates that are being passed down from a sustainability initiative, they have to produce these reports to, to be able to show what they're doing. And so to your point, having that type of technology, and we've said it time and time again, really does help with proving that case and meeting those mandates. Because some people don't have the luxury of electing to be part of a sustainability movement. They have to do it to ensure that they're compliant. So I do think that the sensors IoT in general paints a really nice picture for compliance and for sustainability. So I always have this, like, not this push, but like, I always try to get these companies to think through how to expand past your, your typical sensor. And IoT really does give that amount of data that, to your point, you have it there. It's not set it and forget it, but it's there and it's capturing so much information and what ends up happening, I don't know, John, if you'll agree, but once you see data, then your brain starts to kind of unlock, oh my gosh, this, I didn't even know that was happening. And this and this because you're, you're having a dynamic relationship with data instead of a static one.

And it allows you to be inquisitive, right? I think one of the things that good managers do is they don't pass judgment. They ask questions and they inquire. So let's take it, let's take in a scenario, right? So we produce, we literally will produce a daily compliance score. So how do we do today?

Right.

And, and, or how did we do yesterday? Depending on whether it's real time or neo real time.

So.

Right. So we can begin to look at it and then we can also begin to look at that data across a trend. Right now we're not talking AI yet, but we're really talking about just trend analysis. So let's take a scenario. On Friday afternoon, the folks that are cleaning the bathroom are spending only five minutes in the afternoon cleaning that bathroom. And everything else is perfect except Friday, Friday afternoon. Now, an inquisitive manager would go in and Say, you know, I'm going to go ask some questions why we're consistently having Friday afternoons where we're not really complying. Well, the answer is nobody's in the damn office. Excuse my language, Right?

Yeah.

So we don't really have to do the normal amount of work on a Friday to do to make sure that that bathroom is what it needs to be, right? Because we just don't have the occupancy. So what was it? What would a smart facility manager do and say, look, that's the trend. We'll go in and check it if we have to. Here's a second task that you can do that we've been wanting to get to, right? That we haven't been able to get to because we are fully optimized, fully utilized, right? So now it's allowing us not to, you know, use it as a hammer against people that, hey, you're not doing the thing. We're starting to identify the gaps in our, in our thought process, in our plan with real data. So you can back to the client and say, hey, guess what?

Right?

This is what we're doing because of this. And now we're. That thing that we talked about we can't get to. We're now getting to it, right? And that to me is the value of IoT. Everybody kind of looks at things as a negative, right? We're going to, we're going to, you know, we're monitoring people, we're watching what they're doing. Like, no, we're helping them, right, Do a better job. That's really what we're helping them do. And I think that's really what, you know, what I want our clients to think about, right, Is how do we actually make them more productive? And if you're a janitorial company, that's great, right? Because productivity is everything. And if you have a solution that there's zero to no training required, it's really easy to implement with, you know, let's, let's face it, a lower cost staff, right? Potentially that staff doesn't speak English or doesn't, or English as a second or third language for them. So again, those are the elements that we want to begin to look at that technology. And a good implementation of technology allows us to make those decisions pretty easily. And it's easy enough for somebody to implement because we've all been around technology that it was not easy to use and it usually fails.

Well, being so, being Peruvian, right. I, I've grown up in this industry and one of the things I'M very mindful of because I've built technology with Pioneer, I built technology. When I sold the technology to Pioneer, I always wanted to humanize the technology in a way that it felt to your point, you are empowering the people. Because a lot of times what happens. John. So when we're on site and I've had multiple conversations, there's an enormous amount of fear that our community and Hispanic community feels when it comes to technology because they feel like they're going to get replaced or tracked. And so to kind of have this narrative of. Kind of have to have a narrative that shows them this is a tool to help you, to empower you does change the way that you interact. And I think human behavior because becomes incredibly important when you talk about this type of technology because. And Kaden, I don't know if you'll remember when we talked to Rob Wash from washi, he talked about how when you go into a restroom, you really are only using the first three stalls. Right. And so, and again, I've cleaned buildings. I know exactly what this, like the rhythm of coming in and checking which. And you're kind of, you're not replacing the entire role. You're actually just taking the one that. The stall that it wasn't used and switching it out. So there's a lot of like human behavior elements into this. And so from your perspective, I think how does your. How does the IoT really start to understand that there's a human still? Like, you can tell me my scope of work is cleaning the five stalls, but I know better to your point about traffic that no one's here on Friday and that they're not going to use the first three stalls. Are only going to use the first one. Right. So how do you guys. Is it just a matter of being involved with the reports? Like how do you kind of work through the human aspect of it?

So. So let me give you an example of something that actually happened. So this technology is implemented in the largest healthcare network in the uk.

Okay.

Wow.

We are actually managing all of the cleaning and a number of hospitals in the UK and they had been trying for two years to justify adding more cleaning staff. Two years. And you know, again, if you've ever been in a situation where you are understaffed in any capacity, whether it's, you know, in a job in a facility company, whether it's a technology company, you name it, it is. Is hard to manage. Right. You can never get ahead because you just don't have enough hands.

Right.

So we put the technology in. And in two weeks, we justified the headcount because we were showing the full utilization. People were doing their jobs. Right. The teams themselves were like, thank God we finally have a way to communicate what we've been saying for two years, which is we are totally understaffed. We can't get to everything. And now I can now put two more headcounts. Headcount to solve that problem. That's the value when we start to look at the technology because again, you've got a community and I, again, I've never worked as a cleaner other than, you know, things that I do locally.

Right.

I look at that and when you don't have a voice in a management chain, it's really, really hard. And we actually give them a voice. We give them a capability of saying, this is what's happening. And now we have data behind, hey, they're just not doing their job. No, we are. We're doing our job. Here's the data. We're 100% capacity and this isn't happening because we can't get to it. And again, I think that's part of when we start to think about using technology. Well, Right.

Yeah.

You will always have people that will use this technology or any technology in a way that will punish people. And that's not the right way to think about it. That's not good management. You're really not driving the productivity that you need. Again, the idea is this technology should pull people through the process. And it also help us identify when we have somebody that's new that isn't getting everything done. We can actually give them support. Right. Should be supporting people, not punishing people through the process. And that's been all. That's always been my management style. Look, I'm a, I'm a former D1 coach.

Right.

My job is to in that role was to get the most out of a diverse group of people. And some were superstars and some were, you know, supporting players. But everybody had to work as one to make all that work. And that's really the thought process we should have when we're thinking about technology.

So it takes a lot of staff. There's across the industry, when you have a few million employees in the United States, at least in this realm of cleaning, obviously it hits a building service contractor's books or even facility managers. It is a huge budget item on the facility management side is employing people. And I'm always in awe about the resistance to put technology to the benefit of frontline measurements of their staff. Like for years and years and years, decades. Even the investment into higher level senior management training, efficiency on senior management training. Why do you think there's still such a resistance in this industry to get data capturing happening all the way down to frontline, when yet it is the biggest potential impact on the financial impact of a business.

Wow, that's a loaded question for a Wednesday in August. And you know, again, I think I'm as surprised as you are. I think the resistance is good. People are hard to come by. We need to trust our employees. It's hard to say. We're a family organization, family oriented. And oh, by the way, I'm going to monitor everything you do. No one wants to be monitored. I don't want to be monitored. Unfortunately, we all have cell phones. We're being monitored. We're monitoring what we watch, what we eat. When we're driving down the road, we get monitored. So I think part of this is I don't think it's the employees as much. I believe middle managers are afraid of upper management finding out things. Certain things aren't happening.

Right.

We all, when you, when you kind of, you know, go up the ranks in an executive level.

Right.

And I've gone all the way up to a chief marketing officer, a pretty large organization. I've had very big jobs.

Right.

I remember being in a corporate America. I'm not going to throw the company under the bus, but we would at the bottom, our frontline people would be reporting it's red. And I would get to the middle managers and say, we can't say red ever. So it's yellow. And by the time it got to the executives, before we went to the CEO, it was green.

Right.

And I'm like, wait a minute. We were, we're supposed to deliver in a month. It's red. We're not even close. It's green. Don't care. You're going to, you're going to put something out. It's not what we want. So I think there's a reluctance to create that. There is, there's, there's a lack of honest communication in certain as you kind of go up the chain. And I think that's part of the conversation that happens from there. I'm sorry, Karina, go ahead.

No, and I was just going to add to that. I think, honestly guys, it, there's a sense of like. And again, I've cleaned buildings. I know exactly like, right. Like the plays that you have to make to kind of make things work. Because unfortunately the reality of the cleaning industry that the first Thing that gets cut is always the labor, is always the people, it's always the hours. And so we do our very best to allocate to seres esgalas, make those plays so that we can still deliver a service, but we also can do right by our people. And so to have. And it's not wrong, it's not right, but that's just the reality. So when you come, you start to come up the layers, they're so far removed from the actual realities of what's happening on the front line. Because you can sell a scope of work that you're cleaning the five buildings in five days a week with all the bathrooms. Reality, you're really not, you can't, there's no way you can do that. And so you have to get really comfortable on the front lines to making these moves and making these plays like, okay, I can do this. And if you got, if middle management or even executives really knew the amount of strategic moves that you're making from a managerial perspective, it would change, it would change the narrative of the cleaning industry. And so I think that's kind of, kind of where it's, it's not so much of like you don't want to empower the, this level, but it's. If you start to unpack that Huala, it's Pandora's box. And it becomes a little bit of like a contentious conversation because they're doing their bet the best that they can and it's unfair to require them to do X, Y and Z and then get monitored all the time. With that being said though, I John, to your point earlier about like the, the I love Iot because I think it meets people where it they are. And what I mean by that is that when I had the CAD countdown, even clean code, clean code is a QR code based technology, blah blah, blah, you scan and you enter your service. But that's still another thing that they have to do, right? Like that's something else in the building that in the bathroom they have to do one more thing, right? And so what I love about IoT is that they're coming in and they're just doing their job and it's all just tracking it on top of it. So it feels like it's meeting them where they're at. They're not adding to their work. It's a matter of just supplementing the data and the IoT to the actual labor. So I think that's what I love about it. But there is always going to be a fear of, well There's a lot of stuff that we do candidly, that I've done that, that you just have to. You, you're running these accounts, you're doing your best. You don't want to lose quality of service. You also don't want to lose the, the client, but you also do have to be. Do right by the people. So it's this really tricky paradigm that you're facing.

And I totally agree with you.

Right.

I, I've been in that frontline management side of this and there are things that we just do.

Right.

Yeah.

And people are like, and, and I always love it when an executive finds out what you did to make that happen and they're number one surprised that you have to do that. And I've had a number of occasions where, like, why are you guys doing that? You need to come to us. And that, and that's part of this open communication that needs to start to happen where you're saying, because if we think about it, if we know that we can do only X, Y and Z, but we're being more productive with IoT. My people are being more productive because I'm really taking something away from them. They don't have to do all the logging and tapping and with an IoT solution.

Right.

So I'm making them more productive. That should flow all the way up to our bid process.

Yep.

If I'm a janitorial company and I don't know what your margins were and I, I always look at industries based on what. Based on margins.

Right.

So if my margins in janitorial are 4 to 6%.

Right.

I, I don't have a lot. Those are skinny margins.

Right.

I don't have a lot of wiggle room to make a mistake.

Right.

That's a lot of services. Whether it's construction services, facility services, a lot of companies live in that world. A buddy of mine actually implemented some mobile technology before. It was really cool. Using BlackBerries. That's how long ago it was.

Oh, wow.

He took his margins, which were about 12% to 28%, because what he did, all of that redundant administrative function, and literally his people were handed packets to Bill.

Right.

That completely changed the way that they did their, their, their process. So when we think about these elements, right. These challenges, this friction. Friction has a cost.

Right.

If you think about every time that you have a piece of, a bit of friction throughout a process, that is your margin leaving you, that's your gross profit leaving your, Your company. So we need to figure out how we eliminate those things, whether it's uncomfortable for an executive to find out that these things aren't happening. But you know what? I'd rather tell the executive these things aren't happening upfront so that they're prepared and they're not surprised versus having them find out from the client that these things aren't happening. That's even worse, because we know that then everything goes downhill from there. So, again, I think when we look at it across industries, and again, I make fun of the fact that I'm going to be 60 in a month, right? I make fun of that. But I've seen a lot of things over a lot of years, and there's some really kind of common truths, right? Common truths. People do. You know, most people, regardless of what. What they do, try to do a really good job, right? They work really hard. They do the right things, right? What we do gets watered down as it goes up, right? And every time someone touches it, it becomes less profitable to do it. So we can address those. Those common things with that common understanding that your staff that you had as a cleaning company, you hired them, regardless of where they're from, they just want to work. They want to be respected, right. They want to be recognized for what they do. They don't want to be beaten, right. When something doesn't go well. And they want their opinions heard, right? Because if you have an employee that's at the bottom rung and they can say, look, I can help you save 10 hours a week, 20 hours a week, you know, 3% off this, you should listen, because that's important information as you go up that chain. And that's really what we're opening up, is that that pipeline of information, that's what's actually happening up through. Through that process? In a bigger sense, yes.

But you think you touched on something super important in terms of like the actual bid sheet and the data that then can support that bid sheet. And what I would also add to that is that oftentimes there's, you know, the janitorial teams have a lot of information to support changing the scope of work. Right? The scope of work oftentimes is very archaic. A lot of them still include ashtrays. And so to be able to present the property team like, hey, based on this data, we should modify the scope of work, and we should also modify periodic work to show because based on the traffic and the trends or whatever, but what ends up happening. A lot of property teams that I've worked with, they're like, we love that. That's amazing. Yes. But then the lease within those buildings, multi tenant, you'd have to change that as well. And then that's where you get the brokers and all that and then becomes super complicated. So I think it's a matter of all coming together from an industry perspective and saying, okay, we've got to do better, not just for the people, but for the entire narrative of the scope of work, what's actually happening in these buildings. Because you're exhausting the labor unnecessarily. The buildings are so empty still. So why not use data, John, to your point, to show like we don't really need to be cleaning five days a week these restrooms because they don't get occupied. There's only Monday through Wednesday, Friday, which is typically traffic. So like how do you, how does everyone come to that at table and say, okay, let's, let's do actually something about it.

We're, we're actually having some conversations with some space planning tools. So you know, people are doing hoteling, right? No desk reservation, conference room reservations. So when you begin to look at saying, because again, a building is a, is a living, breathing entity, on a Monday or a Friday it might be pretty empty, but on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, it might be pretty busy. You got a certain week of the month and it gets really busy, right? Or the end of a quarter, right? So I mean ultimately what we, what we need to get to or what we should get to is this demand driven cleaning where, right, where all of a sudden we know that, hey, look, there's a hundred people in the building. They're generally on floor one. We're going to focus on floor one. We'll do all of the other things on the other floors. We'll, you know, if we have carpetings to shampoo or whatever, whatever that, that the scope is, right? But we know we now have 4,000 people coming into this building on a Wednesday, right, for an all hands company meeting. And it's only on the fourth, third and fourth floor. Maybe we need to not do something on the fifth, sixth floor, on the first floor and focus our attention on that demand that's happening on that Wednesday. So I think there's an opportunity for us to begin to look at being more dynamic because now if I start to monitor what's happening, I can then modify the work order that happens in the morning. And what we're going to do and the validation that we actually did change that and the collection of that data and then that reporting and that can resume back to the model that says when we have 4,000 people. Here's the optimal facility staff that we need right now. Again, that's very idealistic but very practical in the way that we could implement it.

Right.

We could do those kinds of things. Where, again, you're. Karina, to your point, right. We're still not at full occupancy on all of our office buildings. There's so much space, people are trying to make sure that we're staying within the guardrails. The best way to stay within guardrails is to measure. If you're not measuring, you're hoping. Not a good idea.

Right?

Yeah. If you're. If your speedometer is broken and you're driving down I95 and you're doing 110, the cop isn't going to say, I'm sorry, you're not measuring. I'm not going to give you a ticket. They're going to. They're going to give you a ticket, probably throw you in the jail for doing 110. Right. So we really need to look at those. That measurable item. If you're not measuring it, you're really not managing it. That, that old adage. I don't, I hate to say that, but if you're not measuring. Again, if we're not managing it, are we doing right? And we're getting paid to do that.

So what is your appetite? Because you said something really important. The integration piece of Internet of things IoT. Right. Right. You guys, what is the appetite for you to integrate with like a 2B that's a, a quality control tool that then the janitors are using or access to come in and out of the building? Are you already doing a lot of integrations on site? What is your thought process behind that?

You know, again, I come out of the, you know, a lot of the IT side of the world data should be integrated whenever possible.

Yep.

UV is one that we're already talking to, which is even a simple integration in a way that says, I can send you an email if you can pick it up and do something with it. Yeah, easy enough. That's a simple integration to, hey, I want to be able to provide data on time and attendance. We're doing that also where we're actually pushing data over to a time and attendance system so folks can validate their pay.

Right.

We actually have. We haven't, we haven't done. Well, we've done this in the Dubai airport where we're managing the buses around an airport. We actually have a. We're having conversations with a major manufacturer to manage their manufacturing equipment. So if you think about, we think about people, equipment is also a big driver and we're talking about autonomous equipment. And now I'm going to go buy, you know, I'm going to buy a vacuum from this manufacturer and a shampooer from this one. They're both autonomous. I've got two dashboards and now let's put tags on them, roll everything in. We'll manage all of that so that we know where they're, what's happening. All of that should be going into a large database, a large data lake, whatever you want to call it. And we should be able to start to apply at a minimum and ideally AI against it, so the AI can actually understand and build a model on the performance of that particular building and find correlations and relationships that we wouldn't necessarily connect. So again, from a simple perspective, I want to integrate. I don't want to live in a vacuum. I want my client to say, I've got this really good work order management system. I'm going to keep using it.

Great.

We'll backfill, we'll tell you what's going on. And oh, by the way, you can use their audit system to go audit what we're doing so that there's one record for everything. And oh, by the way, here's the occupancy around that we actually have. We're doing a building in Arlington in September where we're also adding, you know, foot traffic. So we're not.

Arlington, Virginia.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's. Well, I'll give a shameless plug. It's with Cushman Wakefield. Amazing Hughes building, which is a. Owned by, it's a George Mason University building.

That's where I went to school.

Well, it's their new, it's their new tower, Innovation Tower. And we're going to be going in and helping them with managing all of the soft fm. And then we're also going to be doing some foot traffic monitoring because there's, you know, a dozen entrances to that building from the street, from bridges, from other buildings, from restaurants. Very cool. Because what they want to be able to do is show the owner, hey, this is, you know, we've put this, we've developed this property. It has a purpose. We want to validate that the purpose is being met. We want to make sure we understand who's in, who's out, what's happening within that building. So again, when we think about these kinds of projects, we're going to start in an innovation facility. But I think these are the kind of projects that we need to begin to look at and say, how do we make them affordable in every project? And maybe we don't do everything, but how do we manage that with an IoT perspective to say, and make it really simple to implement? I think that's part of the challenge is, you know, again, making it 100% easy is good. I think that's the most important element.

I love this so much. Sorry, Kaden, go. I know you have. You're like, let me get a question in.

Good. I've been just, like, taking so many mental notes.

Yeah. When we do the implementation, I'll invite you over and you can.

Please. Oh, my God, please.

And again, another shameless plug for Carlos Garcia, who's the senior facility guy. He's a freaking riot and a great guy and, you know, we'd love to.

Nominate him for VO for the VE Awards. I would love to have him.

Yeah.

You know, John, I'm thinking the compliance report that you mentioned, I think you should do a compliance industry report with the data that you have and set the standard for that. I think Issa is always looking shameless plug on me too. Right. Issa is always looking for partners to lead their, the, their subject matter expert. If you can provide that and have it be kind of a guiding principle for our industry, that would be huge for bscs, for everyone. So let's talk about that.

Well, and, and I think, I think we need to look at it in a broad sense. I have some experience with doing that kind of reporting. In other. In another, it was aerospace more than anything, but, but same idea.

Right.

How do we, how do we baseline where we are, what's happening? And starting with. With that fuse building is a very good spot because they're doing digital twin access control. They're doing our stuff.

Right.

So it is literally a technology showcase that.

Oh, my God.

Going. And it's an amazing building with a good idea, you know, good vision. But I agree, Right. We were looking at saying, what's the standard compliance rate on, you know, on the different services? It's hard to tell.

Right.

And again, I think that's part of it, educating our clients to say, all right, if we don't do this, this is what you're going to get. Right. If you do this. You know, in our hindsight, on average, we see 60 to 80% compliance prior IOT.

Wow.

And it goes to 90 plus.

No way.

About a month.

30 days.

30 days.

Holy smokes.

Yeah, it's. We literally get a 20% bump in the first week or two, because people know that things are being monitored, tracked, Right? We're tracking. But, you know, again, but they know that, yeah, I gotta go do what I'm supposed to do. And again, these folks, I have empathy for them. This might not be their only job, right?

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

They're trying to get from here to there, and they're gonna do what they. What they have to do to make it work. May or may not be all the scope that we need. So, again, I want to make sure that we're doing the right things and that we can discover areas where they don't have to work as hard. Again, I come from the place of everybody works hard, right? Everybody does a good job, right. I don't want to penalize those folks. I want to help them. So how do we make that happen? But how do we get to that 90% and understand where we're falling down so that we can evaluate it? So, yeah, but that's been our experience.

I think one of the things that I learned really early on is that there's a difference between data driven and data influence. Right. So to your point, data driven, you look at the data and then you make decisions based on that data influence is you're looking at the data, but you're also understanding experience, experience education. You're saying, hey, like, why are we not going to this location? Why is it taking you? And oftentimes, John, to your point, we have no idea what's actually happening with that porter during the day. Did the engineer call them and have them go outside and water the plants? Was someone had an accident in the bathroom upstairs? What is actually happening? So using Iot to say, like, hey, we do see a glip or a lapse here. What happened? Then they can say, I got calls for three hours, I couldn't make it there. Okay, cool. Let's. Let's redirect and have that conversation. But now you can paint the entire picture because you have the data, which is the most critical part.

And to your point, I think, you know, again, from a management perspective, one of the things that I learned and I didn't, I didn't discover this, I learned this from other executives, is that you ask simple questions as an executive and listen to the answer, right? When you ask simple questions, if people have real logical answers, it'll come out, right?

Yeah.

And again, hey, look, we didn't get there because unfortunately, somebody, you know, had an accident up in the other bathroom. We had to go manage that. And that didn't Happen. And that's something that, you know, we can report back, we can do whatever. Maybe there's an exception report that we can actually, you know, fill in. Or we just continue with our job and know that that's out of sequence for us. But if you're, if you're sitting at 92, 91, 96, 57, 91, 92, all of a sudden you go, okay, that's an anomaly. I'm just going to ask a question because we're so good.

Right, right, right.

That, you know, again, that's what good manager to do.

Right?

But I asked those questions.

I also think that it changes the mindset of the frontline team in terms of like being proactive versus reactive. They get to understand, like, okay, instead of them waiting for me to tell them why I wasn't there, I'm just going to give a heads up, hey, I couldn't make it to that building. And that approach of being. I always tell, I used to tell our teams, you got to play offense all the time, don't play defense. It's so important because property management companies, they get it. They know things are happening. All they want is a heads up. Just give them two steps ahead and they'll be able to block for you as well. But they need to know the worst thing that can happen is that they get a complaint and they're like, great, now I don't know what happened. Why aren't they there? So just changing that mindset with them is a huge advantage from a sales perspective, from an operations, from a quality control perspective and just catching it before it happens, hey, I wasn't there. I wasn't able to come. I had something going on or, or what ends up happening too is like you start to kind of expand your psyche from a, from a front line because I've had it multiple times. You give them the tools, they start to understand, hey, maybe I. We don't need to be here. To your point, John, earlier, they're the boots on the ground. They can tell you, like, with this technology, maybe I can be shifting the scope of work. Maybe we can go here instead of here. Now I have like, more more. Wait, I'll play this game with you too. I now I have the tools. I'll help. I love that part about this.

And let's, and let's think about again. We've all sat through quarterly business reviews, right? Qbrs, no one likes them. Imagine walking in with data to say, hey, let me tell you what we did this month. We stopped cleaning the bathroom On Fridays and did this, this, this and this. Because the reason being nobody was there.

Yeah.

So we did something else. I mean, again, you're building political capital with your client. All of a sudden they're going, man, you're doing the right thing when it comes to rebid that, that political capital lives.

Right?

You've got that.

Yeah.

And then on the other side, when, when you build that trust with your frontline people and they do have an issue and they can come to you like I used to this, my, my folks, I don't care what it is. I might be mad, but I will protect you as long as you tell me, right. You don't tell me I'm not going to protect you as much as I should.

Right.

But if you tell me, I'm going to. I'm going to. We'll spin it the right way or we'll kind of smooth it over going forward. Those are the things you talked about earlier, right? The plays you run, right? The things that happen, we all have them in our business lives. That's part of what we need to kind of look at in this environment because it is very siloed, right. It's very non visible to what's happening. And we need to create that visibility so that real decisions, real conversations can happen in an area where the client, that is best for the client, where they're going, hey, you know that thing you've been bugging up finally got to it because now we have the data to show that we don't really need to do these five. Yes, there we go.

And I think from a landscape perspective, the building service contractors have to get very creative right now with the things that they're positioning, like how they're actually securing new opportunities. Everyone throws around strategic partnership. We want to build a strategic partnership and then they throw around innovation. Oh, we're super innovative and we've got this tool. Well, what are you using that tool for? To your point about, you can bring to the table this type of technology with the data to change the scope and to make better decisions. Give them the heads up. That is a strategic partner. That is someone that's thinking ahead of. Okay, I have the people, I have the data, I have this. Like, how do we. Kudos to Cushman for investing in that. Because that is a game changer, not only from a quality, a control perspective, but also from a tenant satisfaction perspective. To be able to really understand what's happening in these buildings ultimately serves everyone involved much better. But you got to lean in on actual innovation. Because innovation is not just picking a tech tool, it's what you're doing with that tech tool. And a lot, a lot of times it's with the data. Because there's so much power in data.

You and I are speaking the same language on that one. Because again, it's, it's also not just one tech, right? No, it's a portfolio of products that you're pulling together, solutions that you're pulling together. We're actually in the midst of doing that right now in the healthcare business industry with our solution.

Right.

Because again, we do a very specific thing, right? We're going to help you make sure that patient rooms get clean, surgical theaters get cleaned. All of that happens, Right? Really cool stuff. Are we going to impact health acquired infections? No, not by ourselves.

Right.

We need hand washing, we need misting equipment, we need good process and procedure. We need all of that to work in concert. And if we can do that, we can eliminate incidents that cost between 20 and $40,000 an incident for hospital. Very important stuff. And oh, by the way, we're saving lives, Literally saving lives, because if you get an infection as an older person, you have a pretty good chance that you might not survive that infection. So. So again, those are the areas where, when we think about it, in certain, in certain industries, it's paramount. In general building, in general facilities, it just drives efficiency, it drives productivity, it makes your clients happier, Their people are more productive. When their people are more productive, guess what happens? They make more money and they stay. It's a vicious positive cycle that we want to get ourselves into. So again, not to say that my technology starts all that, but we don't know what we don't know until we start to actually create that environment for people to, to thrive and to really, you know, again, have that open communication.

I could talk about this for hours. I love it.

But again, I am. You have more, you have the expertise and facilities. Like I said, I've just been in a lot of different industries. I spent almost 20 years on the construction side of the world, you know, and again, it's just interesting, the same themes that pop up, especially in the building services trades, whether it's I'm an electrical contractor or I'm a janitorial company.

Right.

It is about people, it's about efficiency.

Right.

And it's about doing a good job day in and day out and monitoring that job every day.

Yeah, 100%.

Well, that, that puts us at time of this masterclass. Yes, the conversation. So, John, in just a couple sentences, what would be the gold nugget that you want people to remember, our listeners to remember from today's discussion that they should use as the writer downer, as I would say that they should walk away from.

You know, I'm trying to come up with the I'd heard a quote about, you know, the right thing. It's never the wrong thing to do the right thing right. Do the right thing around data, do the right thing around your operations right. And have that, you know, don't be afraid of that transparency because it might feel painful at the beginning, but what you find is that it's cathartic. After a while, you're going to learn a lot about what's going on again, whether it's Iot or any other technology. Don't be afraid of it. Learn what it can do for you and how it's going to impact your business.

Love it.

That's been said before here on the show, so more and more backing behind those statements. So, John, it has been a, an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you for sharing all of your expertise and for our listeners, be sure to reach out to John on all the good social media platforms. Give him a follow and we'll catch you next time on Hard Refresh. Thanks, everyone.