The property was way behind on work orders. I'm at corporate, staring at a dashboard, watching one crew take three times as long as everybody else to service the HVACs, thinking: what are these idiots doing out there? So I drove out. Whoever built the place had put the hot water tank directly in front of the HVAC. To reach the unit, you had to drain the tank and drag it out of the way. I was the idiot. That story came out of a 57-minute panel in St. Louis with Adrian Danila, Dave Dunlow of Cushman & Wakefield, Kenny of Thompson Thrift, and Donna of Price Brothers. Nobody has 57 minutes, so I pulled the parts worth stealing. Donna had the best line on the stage: "if the process is broken, tech just helps you fail faster." Her vendor test is the one I'm stealing: what actually breaks if this software stops working today? Ask it at your next ops meeting and watch the room go quiet. Kenny runs maintenance for 12,000 units at Thompson Thrift with three people. His crews used to click through 25 items on every inspection. Now every item is set to "good" by default, so the tech only touches what's broken, and marking one bad auto-generates the work order. They can also hit the mic, say "replace the fill valve," and close it out. Then he told on himself. They rolled an inspection app out to the field before his own admins tested it. A three-minute inspection turned into fifteen. They killed the software. His power users should have gone first. Dave's techs told him the new app was slow, leadership chalked it up to a learning curve, and the guys started calling it the spinning wheel of death, until somebody drove out and found the architecture could not handle the volume. His IT department ended up helping the vendor rebuild it. He never rolls anything out to everybody at once. He pilots in his most tech-savvy region and his least. Both numbers are true. My half was incentives. We offered $10,000 to anyone who showed me real waste. A maintenance guy walked me through one product line. It saved $330,000. We couldn't fill an assistant manager seat, so we hung a $5,000 sign-on bonus on it, and the woman we hired collected $53,000 from vendors who had never paid us. An incentive only works if it's measurable and they control it. We pay techs on units turned. They don't control turnover. One thing, if you take nothing else. Every fix in this post came from somebody already on the payroll. A maintenance guy found the $330,000. The field named the spinning wheel of death long before corporate listened. None of it came out of a demo. It came from people who had the answer all along and no reason to hand it over. The highest-return tool in our portfolios is often an employee who believes someone will listen to them. One last thing. Watch the video, and you'll notice I'm the only guy up there without a sports coat. No fashion police issued any warnings, so maybe the old guys get a pass. https://lnkd.in/eSGH2592