Facility Management Companies: Should You Hire One?

How do facility management companies get clients?

A facilities management company delivers a valuable service to its clients. By focusing on facilities management alone, a company can develop best practices and invest in significant employee training and development. It can then offer these services across the board to many customers in different industries, eliminating their need to maintain internal maintenance departments.

If you are thinking of starting a facility management company, you must approach the challenge like most other service providers when it comes to finding new customers. Here are some key steps.

Step 1: Create a Business Strategy

The first step in establishing any successful service business is to come up with a strategy as well as measurable goals. For a facilities management company, this includes targeting a specific industry or group of industries and defining what makes them rise above the competition.

Step 2: Establish a Marketing Plan

Once its management team has set a direction, strategy, and goals, a facilities management provider typically defines their potential customer base and how to reach it. By focusing on a particular industry, they gain access to prospects through professional organizations, trade shows and conferences, or industry-specific websites, blogs, or publications.

Before reaching out, the most successful companies invest time in creating a brand and message, which can be consistently communicated through every interaction with their target audience. The primary goal is to build recognition, curiosity, and interest, so that businesses seeking a facilities management company will investigate theirs.

Step 3: Under Promise and Over Deliver

There’s nothing quite like positive reviews and enthusiastic referrals from happy customers to build a business. Yes, any facilities management company can go out, pound the pavement, and fill their sales funnel with inquiries about its offerings.

However, the bottom line will be whether they deliver a valuable service that helps customers save money and time. Facilities management companies have the opportunity to be the one behind the scenes, helping customers focus on their core business while taking care of all the regular and unexpected maintenance issues that are certain to arise. If a business reduces the stress of day-to-day facilities problems, they will most certainly be appreciated, applauded, and deemed well worth the investment.

Tips for lowering operating costs

Whether you decide to hire a facility management company or manage your own maintenance program in-house, you’ll want at least one of your objectives to be lowering operating costs. Here are some key areas where most facilities can cut spending.

Track all maintenance costs. Unless companies understand how much they are spending on maintaining their facility and assets, they really can't take steps to lower those costs. Businesses that use a centralized computer system such as a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) can start collecting complete information on current work orders. Today’s software solutions provide plenty of analytical and reporting tools so that companies can make smarter business decisions down the road.

Look at energy usage. Whether you're talking about HVAC costs or energy consumed in industrial uses such as chillers and boilers, there's always room for improvement. Small improvements such as setting back thermostats, installing motion detector devices, or using smart technology such as sensors can make a significant difference in long-term energy usage. In addition, many more sustainable energy alternatives are available today. Companies may want to explore these options as older systems require replacement.

Consider all lifecycle costs. By understanding the costs of critical assets from the moment of acquisition and implementation through their entire lifecycle to decommissioning, companies can have a better idea of overall maintenance costs. These costs can be compared with repair, rebuild, or replacement costs.
Pay attention to failure modes. Many effective and affordable technology solutions are available today in order to help companies identify failure modes of critical assets. If the business can identify the conditions when a critical asset may be at greater risk for failure, it can implement preventive maintenance tasks to prevent that failure. This action alone can significantly reduce operational costs.

Understand the strengths and weaknesses of different maintenance programs. Most organizations will operate a mix of reactive, preventive, and predictive maintenance efforts. It's important to understand the pros and cons of each program. For example, reactive maintenance may make sense for those items that do not impact production or safety if they fail. In these cases, it may make sense to simply repair or replace the item or component upon failure. Preventive maintenance tasks are well-suited for those activities that should be completed on a regular schedule, based on time or operation hours. Although predictive maintenance is often hailed as the gold standard today, many components need to be in place in order to conduct such a program effectively. It's important to apply predictive maintenance efforts on the most critical assets, or those processes that have a significant impact on productivity or safety to justify the time and costs associated with it.

Common facility management mistakes

Since facilities management can encompass such a broad number of activities, it's easy for both in-house facility managers and third-party contractors to make common mistakes. Here are a few to avoid:

Scarce inventory

A myriad of tools, parts, and materials can be required to maintain any individual facility. Facility management companies have a greater challenge because they must maintain their client's facilities. It is therefore paramount that the facility management companies have an effective and accurate way to maintain inventory levels. Client companies are relying on them to be able to respond with both labor and materials as soon as an issue arises.

Inaccessible or poor quality data

The issue of data can be complex for a facility management company. In many cases, third-party consultants must be able to rely on client data in order to make decisions. It's important to establish a trusted partnership with your clients so that you can access historical data and maintenance records of the systems you are responsible for maintaining. Without this background and high-quality data, it's easy to make costly and ineffective decisions.

Inadequate resources

If you are a facility management company, it's important that you stay on the cutting edge in terms of technology and training. Your clients are relying on you to bring in up-to-date knowledge and provide sound advice. Be sure you can offer best practices, a catalog of available technologies, and expert employees to provide the exceptional level service that clients expect.

Failing to be proactive

Although it's understandable that a facility management's company will want to respond immediately to emergency phone calls from their clients, it's important to allot time to do some strategic planning and proactive thinking for each client as well. After all, your clients are relying on you to not only minimize their overall expenses but also provide an outstanding level service. In order to do this well, you'll need to be sure to think ahead and put programs in place to anticipate potential problems.

No point people

For every contractor/client relationship, it's important that there is a single point person both on the consultant side and on the client-side. These individuals need to be accountable for the relationship and for the correct implementation of the overall facility management program. Having too many people working with multiple client contacts can result in an inefficient and undisciplined facility management program.

Conclusion

The decision of whether to hire a facilities management company often hinges on the exact services you need, your business’s scale, and the resources you currently have at your disposal. Regardless of the route you take, investing in FM can improve reliability, safety, and efficiency overall.