You are not in control of your time
The most common challenge that we hear from facility management professionals across the country is that they don't have enough hours in the day. They get into the office at 7am, and before they've even had a chance to stir their coffee, their phone and email are blowing up. Some of these items may be urgent and important, but in reality the majority of them are not, but you still have to spend time on them.
Small tasks soon add up
If you have a portfolio of 150 stores and each store submits an average of 30 service requests per year, even if you spend just 5 minutes reading and responding, you will spend 46.875 days per year just responding to service requests! Some of these messages will turn into email tennis between you and a store manager and others will need to be handled over the phone. You then need to spend time finding, vetting, and managing your vendors. Let's say 10 different trades per store, 150 locations (some technicians could cover multiple stores), and a minimum of 2 vendors per trade would leave you needing to recruit 3000 individuals/companies!
Can't get your head above water
It's easy to see how quickly facility management professionals can find themselves in a world of pain where they just can't get their head above water. This cycle continues until you are let go, or you decide that enough is enough because your health is suffering, and you are missing precious time with your family and friends.
Start managing yourself
I am a huge fan of Rory Vaden, who refuses to use the phrase time management and instead refers to it as managing yourself. More of Rory's concept and paradigm shift can be found HERE. When you find yourself in the weeds and you are working in the business, your time is being controlled by those around you. It may be a call from a store, a service request via email, a text from a vendor, an internal memo from another department who depend on the facility that you manage, or an enjoyable group such as OSHA or the local fire marshal. Your time is being controlled by those around you, and you need to let go otherwise you will literally drown.
We are surrounded by distractions
We are constantly distracted by those around us with emails, text notifications, phone calls, visitors, social media notifications etc. and this is having a negative impact on our productivity. These distractions are what need to be managed and are things that you can control. However, time is not something that you can control, so you need to manage yourself in a way that allows you to make the best possible use of the 86,400 seconds that you receive every day.
Solving your time challenges
You have three solutions to this conundrum:
1. Clone yourself - impossible (currently...)
2. Hire help - Likely lack trade knowledge & experience
3. Find a Partner - You can start working on your business
Find a partner who can free up your time
Cloning yourself isn't possible (yet!), so we are down to two options, and one of which is much more preferable than the other. Hiring help is obviously a valid solution and will work perfectly for some organizations who have the budget and work volume to justify the increase in fixed overhead. On the other hand, by outsourcing your facility challenges, they are removed from your plate and are now our responsibility. No more tracking down vendors at awful hours. No more having to get up and leave a wedding because one of your stores has a broken toilet. And most importantly, no more being surrounded by your friends and family, but not being present as you are having to monitor your stores at all hours.
Think longer term value
In the long run you will save money as your assets will last longer, your repair costs will likely decrease, your stores will have less downtime, and you will be able to work on higher level strategies that provide more of a predictive or prescriptive approach to the upkeep of your stores.
Work on the business rather than in it
This is definitely a challenging position to find yourself in, and we understand that taking that first step to make a change is always the most challenging. Managing facilities is an exhausting job, but we have a solution that will help you reclaim your personal time, and allow you to work from 40,000 ft, instead of constantly putting out fires down in the weeds.
Take the first step today and start managing your time again
Schedule a complimentary facility consultation where we can evaluate your current processes, listen to you share your biggest challenges, and customize a plan that will create the premium in-store environment that your colleagues and customers deserve.