This is the smart buildings Academy podcast with Phil Zito episode 459. Hey folks, Phil Zito here and welcome to episode 459 of the smart buildings Academy podcast. In this episode, we're gonna be going over bas operational structures. So we're going to be continuing our business series on building
automation. So for those of you who run a p&l, those of you who run a business, we're gonna go through some common structures for building automation teams talk through the different roles, talk through the different processes answer what questions you have. As always, everything can be found at pockets of smart buildings academy.com forward slash 459. Once again, that is podcast, smart buildings academy.com, four slash 459. If you do have any questions, any thoughts as
we go through this, please pop them into the chat. And if you find this valuable, please consider hitting the subscribe button on YouTube and the notification bell selecting all so you get notified. Or sharing this on Facebook or LinkedIn just hit the Share and tag at smart buildings Academy all one word, or leave us a five star review on Spotify or Apple podcasts. Alright, let's dive in to the episode. So for those of you listening to this after the fact there is a video portion to
this, it's only three slides it's not a whole lot. So don't worry, if you're kind of driving, you're not missing out by not seeing the video. So the purpose of today is to describe the fundamental bas team structures identify the structure you need based on your current and projected growth, and then identify the processes you need based on your structure. So there's three structures we'll go through today, there are the construction structure, there
are the service structure, and then the operation structure. So operations is for facility operations service is for servicing facilities, and construction is for building I'm gonna go through at first and define these lead roles, because you'll see some of them look similar. Some of them are a little different than I'm going to go through the individual roles, we'll talk through some of the common processes, and
we'll also talk through the evolution. So first off, if we look at construction, we have technical leads, these folks lead the technicians, technicians are typically people who are doing startup, point to point upload download of controllers, setting up comm buses, etc. You've got a design lead. And these are folks who lead the designers these are people who create your graphics, sometimes graphics and submittal design will be split, sometimes it will be together. But this
would be people who create submittals. And people who create graphics, you'll have designers and then a design lead programmers obviously write the programs. And then project leads, these people lead the PMs of a project admin who's responsible for contracts, Billings, material order, etc. And all of this reports into the operational p&l holder. Now a lot of you maybe have a one three $4 million controls business, you're just getting started, you're wondering how in
the world does any of this work? What typically we see when someone is building a new controls organization.
Obviously, if you're part of an OEM or an established controls contractor, you have established processes, you should have established job descriptions, you should have established roles, career progression, you should have established processes, etc. But for the rest of you who are either building your controls department as part of a mechanical contractor or building it just from scratch as a controls, contractor, typically you start off in one of two buckets, either you were
a really successful salesperson. And you now have paired up with a technical person, and you're going about addressing the market need as you solve it and you're becoming a controls company, or you are a highly technical controls person who had some key customers and you ventured out onto your own into the world of construction or services we'll see later. Because customers said, Hey, you're really good at this, you
should do it on your own. Traditionally, you want to build your business by taking the lowest cost skills off you as fast as possible. So I'm not going to tell you your thresholds because I used to tell people revenue thresholds, but it really depends. Because you can have 20 jobs, right that are $50,000 or you can have one job that's a million dollars and the way in which those jobs are structured, and the needs you'll
have are going to vary. But what I will say is Whenever you are looking to expand your business and the building automation world, what you want to first focus on is what are you doing currently in the field that can be taken on by someone
significantly less expensive than you. So for example, if you, as the business owner, are going out and doing point point checks on inputs and outputs, or terminating wires, that's something that if you look at the return on investment, you could most likely find someone to do that for significantly less. And there's a reason I ordered these in the way I did, you'll notice that they progressively get more advanced until you hit the project leads and PMS. And those are folks
that are I'll talk about them a little bit later. But what you should progress from naturally is technical leads, right, so you'll start, you'll first get attack. And ideally, this tech would be senior enough that they could eventually progress into your technical lead and have other texts under them. Once you've got your texts handled, then you're going to want to move to off shore or offshore, offload your design, and then
offload your programming. That's if you're a technical person, if you're a salesperson, you're gonna probably do it the other way, you most likely have some technical person right now, that is partnered with you because I've not met salespeople who go out and start doing all the technical stuff and running their own business, they, there are a handful of them out there. But they're unicorns, majority of them are, you know, they're successful salesperson with relationships, and they pair it
up with a tech they knew and they started a business. In that case, that tech usually will be the lead for all of these roles. And you'll gradually fill in, you'll fill on tech designer programmer. And then once you get large enough that tech lead will start handing off to other leads. And I realize I could actually use a pointer here, give me one second, I'm going to use my laser pointer. There we go. So like I was saying, you'll have this tech kind of up here. And that tech will then act as
the lead. And you'll once again, tech designer programmer, until you build up enough to necessarily necessitate your own leads. Alright, let's keep moving on. If there's any questions at any time, do not hesitate to interrupt and ask, you will not be interrupting. So don't worry about it. Error rate, let's turn this off. And let's move to the next slide. And let's turn the pointer back on. And we're going to move to
service. Traditionally, service is structured in two primary buckets, you have technical service, which is going to be your planned preventative maintenance and your unplanned reactive maintenance. So service calls and plan service agreements, that's going to be typically executed by your service techs, which then will have a service lead, then you've got your retrofit leads, and your retrofit tax. So your
retrofit techs are going to execute any retrofit work. So this is going to be work that you go to an existing site, it has somebody else's system or legacy system and you upgrade it, eventually you'll build up enough book of business in this to need a lead, who will lead this. And those leads are going to be a blend of project management and technical
experience. And then your service admin exists to do dispatch to go and make sure your trucks are stocked to handle any service escalation and to make sure that people are sent to the right. pm projects that they need to do preventative maintenance plan service group projects. All right, let's keep moving along. Let's turn this off and turn it back on. And let's talk through operations. So operations, this
is facility operations. And what this typically will look like is and I'm actually just going to verify real quick that everything's streaming properly. I normally do this, but I had a long weekend. Alright, good. We're looking good. So like I said, with owner operations, you're typically going to have a director of facilities and then under that director of facilities or facility manager, you are going to have operators and engineers. This is going to
be on the operational side. So these folks are going to operate the facility The operators, they typically exist to go and change points. Go and monitor systems monitor graphics, they operate the system. Depending on your vertical market, as well as the complexity of your buildings, you may or may not have engineered now engineers does not mean licensed engineers
unless you're in Canada, or other countries. In the US, it can simply mean someone who goes and does more complex work, whereas an operator will operate the building, an engineer will be able to go into the building systems, modify graphics, understand programs, potentially even rewrite programs I've met building owner operators that have actually created their own building automation system, and deployed that these are more
usually University customers things like that. So these two roles in and of itself, you'll typically start with operators and you'll outsource the engineering until you have a large enough set of facilities, or something that is critical enough to deem having engineering in house, then we've got this construction lead. This role exists for new construction, it is they are your representative on the
construction team on the new build team. So establishing Building Standards facility standards, ensuring that those standards get communicated to the engineer of record and enforced throughout the contracts. That is the purpose of the construction leads. So they sit with the construction team typically part of the natural separate p&l, so it wouldn't be the operational p&l, it would be the capital projects
team typically. And then facility admins, these are folks who are meant to collect trouble calls dispatch them to the appropriate roles. They are also meant to coordinate any interaction with the contractors that come and work on the sites. Let's go back and get rid of the projector. So those are the fundamental team structures. Now let's talk about identifying the structure you need to have based on your current and projected
growth. So if you're currently a smaller controls business, you're like I mentioned going to typically just add a tech to augment you if you're a technical person. If you have a partner who's technical and you're more on the sales side, you still can add techs, but you're going to be able to delay the lead roles a little bit. It's only when you get to a
certain amount of projects. And I'm not going to tell you what that is because it's really dependent on each business that you'll want to start adding project managers and then you're going to add a project leader to be over these project managers but getting an admin to assist in Billings system material
orders. That's pretty low hanging fruit. As soon as you start to get any significant amount of work and you have a handful of tax, getting that project admin on board so they can manage billing payroll, material orders, etc. That is going to be a critical role. So that would be my progression would be add techs at the project admin, then add the designer and the programmer, then add your leads, and then start to look at adding a pm Kind of the same time you add
the leads, you add the PM. And then as you build up, you'll actually could do one of two things you can have a pool of talent, and the pool of tacks pool of designers pool of programmers can be dispatched to the PMs based on their leads their leads will work scheduling, or you can have kind of a horizontal team where each pm has a dedicated amount of programmers, designers and techs. I prefer the pool method.
I think it provides greater flexibility. Some folks prefer the horizontal method, because doing that creates a team atmosphere with that pm and some people believe that may or may not increase retention rates. We look at service building this out. It's pretty straightforward. Usually, when you're building out a service team, initially it's done as an attach. So you look at your attach rate. So you either are attaching to your construction controls or your mechanical
construction projects. So you'll have a service tech, you'll attach them to that job typically as part of a plan service agreement initially, and then you will leverage those service agreements to create service leads. And you'll start
responding to those. So as soon as you have one to two tasks, you'll want to get a service admin who can manage dispatch and then once you have that your tech should be finding pull through you should be incentivizing them to find pull through, at which point you'll need retrofit Tech's to execute that pull through work if it becomes complex enough, and eventually you'll need retrofit leads. Then right here, I kind of already talked through this earlier, but you start with
operators. Depending on the complexity of the building, you may add some engineers, you can initially have a single lead over both roles. But if you get enough people and it gets complex enough, you may want an operator lead in an engineering lead. But as soon as you start to add operators, you should add a facility admin admins are a great low cost role, that can really make things a lot easier for you and the hourly rate, you're paid as an operational p&l holder is going to be
substantially higher than an admin. So having them do the kind of lower value tasks at a lower wage rate is really a smart idea. Go back, identify the processes. So I kind of went through all of that I went through the processes, I already knew this was going to be slightly shorter than our normal
podcasts. But to sum it all up, at the end of the day, understand your market, understand your capabilities and your business partner if you have ones capabilities, and then build your team to take over those capabilities that are that have the least ROI. So if you're out there having to do install and start up should probably replace that first. If you're only having to do programming, you could probably bear that a little bit longer. But that's the basics of operational
structures. We'll get into processes. In a future episode, we'll talk through common processes. We'll look at the project development lifecycle. So we'll talk about from release to operations to your initial submittal design takeoffs. We'll talk about point to point we'll talk about the entire project lifecycle from start to finish. That being said, I'll see if anyone has any questions before we call the day. At cough there for a second. I hope everyone had a good Easter.
It's good to be back. It felt like this weekend was a lot longer than a normal weekend. I don't know why it just felt that way. For those of you who don't know, we are also doing a technical session on Wednesday. And this week's technical session is going to be on inputs and outputs. So we're gradually going to be building out that technical roadmap of podcasts for new technical talent that want to kind of get up to speed. So like I said, everything will be available at podcasts at
smart buildings academy.com Ford slash 459. I appreciate everyone hanging out here. I hope you all found this valuable. If you do have any questions after the fact hit us up on LinkedIn or on YouTube is great to see you all and I hope you have an awesome week. Take care