It’s every businessperson’s goal to grow the business they started into something bigger. The sense of accomplishment when what began in a small office with a handful of staff now occupies a whole floor is something most business owners aspire to.
As your business grows, though, so does your need for a fully-functional facility. If you don’t ensure that your business has an environment in which to thrive, it can greatly impact your brand. This is where facility management comes into play.
The Purpose of Facility Management
The International Facility Management Association defines facility management as a “profession that encompasses multiple disciplines to ensure functionality, comfort, safety and efficiency of the built environment by integrating people, place, process and technology.”
Simply put, a facility manager’s job is to efficiently manage an organization’s building, ensuring that it’s safe, functional, and comfortable, as well as compliant with all the legal requirements. As a testament to the growing need of this service in the U.S., the Transparency Market Research 2017 report estimates a compound annual growth rate of 13.6 percent in the facility management market between 2017 and 2024.
If you’ve never used the services of a professional facility management franchise before, you may be wondering when’s the right time to do so. Consider both situations below. If you’re experiencing either or both of them in your organization, it’s a sign that you need to hire a facility manager.
1. Rising Maintenance Costs
Maintenance costs money, like everything else that comes with managing a building. Still, your maintenance costs shouldn’t be so exorbitant that you run your business into the ground.
The maintenance costs usually escalate when you need to call independent plumbers, electricians, and other technicians for ad hoc tasks. This also shows that your maintenance team, if you have one at all, is reactive instead of proactive. Rather than spending on periodic maintenance, which is cheaper, your budget is going, instead, to fixing or salvaging problematic equipment in or aspects of your building.
Plus, if you spend more time reacting to problems in your facility instead of preventing them, you expose your business to otherwise avoidable emergencies resulting from recurring safety issues. This affects business continuity, which then impacts the productivity within your organization.
2. Difficulty in Tracking and Management of the Company’s Assets
According to Wasp Barcode Technologies’ 2017 State of Small Business Report, 43 percent of small businesses use a manual process to track their inventory – that, or they do not track it at all. While this may fly when the business is in its infancy with very few employees, issues surrounding inventory are likely to start when your business scales up.
If there’s no record of the assets and inventory of items the company owns, you will likely end up procuring things you already have, which amounts to useless expenditure. In turn, you’ll be spending money on equipment that you might already own and is available to you if only you kept track of it.
Additionally, the time spent looking for items and equipment or procuring new ones stalls the resolution of problems in your building. Then, it’s only a matter of time before your employees or customers become frustrated with broken lightbulbs, dysfunctional HVAC systems, or leaking taps. As a result, workplace satisfaction plummets, which leads to a decrease in productivity.
If any of these issues are happening in your organization, your time, money, and other valuable resources are going to waste. With facility management services to oversee these matters, however, you’ll notice a significant improvement in your budget and cost savings, as well as in the safety and efficiency of your facility, overall.