In my experience managing large commercial equipment operations, I understand the need to minimize capital expenses to keep operations profitable. Simple as it sounds, right? Let’s imagine a property manager or owner comes to you and says “we’ve got money to spend.” Because this is not an everyday occurrence, it seems obvious that you need to put some serious thought into planning how that capital gets deployed in order to give you a high return for your investment. Yet this seemingly common sense approach is not always commonly applied.
Recently I read a really interesting series about a guy with a portfolio of buildings who had that exact experience -he was given a bucket of money, and told to invest it wisely and maintain the benefits. As a facilities leader, Scott Minnix understands balancing the multiple priorities. “Every facility manager has to deal with that reality.” When needing to deploy resources, he relied on the results of a comprehensive facilities assessment to move his team from reactionary to more predictive and preventive actions. By starting with an assessment, he was able to strategically approach operations instead of waiting for the next reactionary repair to be made. This has helped change the paradigm in a 400 building portfolio.
Read the whole story in the FacilitiesNet series.
