Learn about NexusCon!
âI think where the industry needs to get to is⌠looking at how best to service a portfolio, rather than the kind of one-to-one [management team to building] relationship.
And there's a tipping point of scale where it's not even like a business case anymore, it's like an IQ test as to whether you've got that different [portfolio-scale] operational model in place. But I think like what the technology is doing is lowering that barrier to entry, that crossover point where having a centralized operational model makes sense.â
âLeon Wurfel
Welcome to Nexus, a newsletter and podcast for smart people applying smart building technologyâhosted by James Dice. If youâre new to Nexus, you might want to start here.
The Nexus podcast (Apple | Spotify | YouTube | Other apps) is our chance to explore and learn with the brightest in our industryâtogether. The project is directly funded by listeners like you who have joined the Nexus Pro membership community.
You can join Nexus Pro to get a weekly-ish deep dive, access to the Nexus Vendor Landscape, and invites to exclusive events with a community of smart buildings nerds.
Episode 45 is a conversation with Leon Wurfel, Founder and CEO of Bueno Systems.
We talked about:
You can find Leon Wurfel on LinkedIn.
Enjoy!
Music credit: Dream Big by Audiobingerâlicensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
James Dice: [00:00:03] hello friends, welcome to the nexus podcast. I'm your host James dice each week. I fire questions that the leaders of the smart buildings industry to try to figure out where we're headed and how we can get there faster without all the marketing fluff. I'm pushing my learning to the limit. And I'm so glad to have you here following along.
This episode of the podcast is brought to you by nexus pro nexus pro is an annual or monthly subscription where members get exclusive writing podcasts and invites to members only zoom gatherings. You can find info on how to join and support the Without further ado, please enjoy this episode, the nexus podcast. Episode 45 was a conversation with Leon Werfel, founder and CEO of bueno systems. We talked about Bono's founding story, the analytics market today, how bueno approaches analytics and how analytics itself can go mainstream and finally cross the chasm. This is a ton of fun for me, please. Enjoy nexus podcast, episode 45. All right. Hello, Leon. Welcome to the nexus podcast. Can you introduce yourself?
Leon Wurfel: [00:01:16] Yeah. Uh, hi James. Thanks for having me. I'm Leon, I'm the CEO of when I, we are a SAS company in the property industry enabling, the transition to a centralized and dotted driven, sustainable operational model.
James Dice: [00:01:29] All right. We're going to unpack what the hell that means in a little bit. Can we start with your career history though? Uh, how'd you get into our space. Have you always been in our space? What's your, what's your educational background? That kind of thing.
Leon Wurfel: [00:01:44] Yeah. Um, I have, so my career history, uh, I started out actually as a sustainability engineer.
Um, working in the property industry. So my first job out of, uni or college, depending on which audience we're speaking to, was working for an engineering consultancy. And my job was basically going around and finding ways to tune up, buildings, you know, optimize what, what they had in place, but what their, but their existing systems where I look at capital operates, all that kind of stuff.
Okay, cool. Yeah. Um, it was a, it was small consultancy. I think I was employee number five. Um, when I joined and they, they read it maybe 35 or 40 people by the time I left. but yeah, I mean, we were basically doing the same kind of stuff that we do whenever, you know, the, um, old fashioned way.
Okay.
James Dice: [00:02:29] I started my career as well. I don't know if we talked about that before.
Leon Wurfel: [00:02:32] Okay, cool. Well, I'm glad we got that in common. Yeah. It's not
James Dice: [00:02:36] very fun when you're actually in the weeds doing it without analytics.
Leon Wurfel: [00:02:40] Uh, yeah. you know, human analytics, right? So like when, when I started out in the industry, you know, you're lucky if, and I'm not even mad.
All right. Like I started that in the industry. We were lucky if a BMS front end had USB ports. Um, and we were trying to get that off their systems. And, the way that we would do that would be anything as crude as taking a screenshot of what the values were at point in time and dumping that onto a USB K that's put on.
So some for like graduate engineers desks to do data interferon, or like, we didn't have a USP actually taking literal screenshots with a camera so that we could spreadsheet this stuff and run some formulas and then hopefully figure out, um, you know, figuring out some ways to make buildings from that.
James Dice: [00:03:25] Absolutely. Yep. I did that for a very long time, too. Okay. What'd you do, what'd you do after that?
Leon Wurfel: [00:03:32] Um, So, I guess I wanted to talk about that for just a little bit more, because one thing that was really interesting about that was, um, and I kind of wanted to point out like a bit of a difference between the Australian market and maybe some of the other property Mark might be of interest to some of the listeners, but, so Australia was the first country in the world to have a performance based environmental writing system.
So, as opposed to, like, I would kind of separate all of the writing systems into two broad buckets. One is feature based or performance based. Um, lead would be something that is come from like a feature based background where if you have certain, you know, features, design features or things built into your building, then you get credit points.
Whereas the, system in Australia, it was called. Um, neighbors and rates or performance, and it's something where you have to recertify every 12 months now within the last 12 months, but energy bills or water bills or indoor environment, quality measurements and all that kind of stuff. And that has really been, um, foundational to creating a market expectation around, performance.
People want performance rather than features in the Australian property market. Interesting. which I think is white. You know, you see a lot of Australian kind of pop tech companies. I think it's created a really good environment, a really suspended environment in terms of the lack of expectations around performance, which has then led to people being pretty open-minded to adopt different kinds of technologies that they want to try
James Dice: [00:04:56] really fascinating.
Leon Wurfel: [00:04:57] So, um, yeah, I was really proud of the work that we did. you know, when, when I was an engineering consultant, you know, I was, I was very heavily involved with one specific client. and, at the time, you know, we, felt like we were delivering some really good results for them.
And that was recognized. They were the number one ranked property portfolio in the global real estate sustainability benchmark for three years in a row when that started. so that was something that I was super proud of being involved in. uh, you know, at that kind of point in my career, it was great, but it was very rewarding.
James Dice: [00:05:25] Really cool. Really cool. And so where'd you go next? Do you start playing right after that? Or.
Leon Wurfel: [00:05:30] Uh, I know it's a bit convoluted, like how I got here. Um, bear with me. I think that, while I was working as an engineering consultant, I read a book that people are probably familiar with called the four hour workweek that starting a business on the side, um, and actually did it.
So while I was working full time, I started this hobby business wasn't winter. Um, it was actually, uh, an online retail business, selling, different kinds of supplements around improving, like your, you know, your cognitive performance, other kinds of aspects of your biology. That was a bunch of movements going on at a time called like the quantified self, which was about using different kinds of electronics and stuff to measure and quantify different things about, about your biology and your, and your health and, you know, your performance.
And so I got in really deep with that stuff and, uh, started this online retailer around it. And, you know, one of the first products that we were selling was, I don't know if you've heard of Bulletproof coffee. Yeah. So we were the first ever wholesale customer of like the Bulletproof guys and on this thing up and was really into it.
And, you know, it's kind of a common thread because, you know, it was using data to optimize building performance. And then, you know, it was using data to kind of optimize my own performance. I was really kind of eating mine, dog food, uh, and, uh, yeah, it was great. I mean, it, was something that, you know, it seems like a very, interesting, thing to work on, but really, I kind of ran out of bit of steam with it because at the end of the day, running an e-commerce store is basically running like a physical store that just happens to be online.
So I learned a lot about the business side of things and built up my confidence to eventually stop winter. But, yeah, the purpose wasn't there to kind of keep me motivated to keep, keep working on it.
James Dice: [00:07:11] Okay, cool. I actually surprises the first time that Tim Ferris has been brought up on this podcast because he was a huge influence in making me want to start this, sort of like a year into the nexus podcast.
Now I've been listening to Tim Ferriss podcast who, for those who don't know Tim Ferriss, he was the author of the four-hour workweek that Leon just mentioned, but I've been listening to his podcast for, I don't know, 10 years, however long it's been going on a huge influence in just like the, the reason I wanted to do this kind of one-on-one interview, you know, style of, of a show.
Uh, so that's really cool to know that you, you know, you read that back then. and he just did an episode with guy rods, where guy Roz, from how I built this, just sort of unpacked. Tim's story of the four hour work week and starting the supplement business and all that.
Leon Wurfel: [00:08:02] Yeah. Well that was, yeah, that was my, um, aha moment about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
So it's funny how many people can trace back to that book, being a bright, influential, um, having a very influential impact on like that career trajectory.
James Dice: [00:08:17] Absolutely. Yeah, it made me like really, I would say it made me a little bit miserable in my job at the time, but it kind of sent me along the path that I'm on today, which is, you know, growing and, you know, building and, being an entrepreneur.
So that's awesome.
Leon Wurfel: [00:08:33] Well, congrats on the one year anniversary. Yeah. Thanks.
James Dice: [00:08:38] Thanks. I think, I think Tim's on like episode, 600 now, so this'll be like episode 40 something. So it got a long way to go. Um, cool. So that was a little bit hairy in terms of like managing the commerce site. And so then what happened?
Leon Wurfel: [00:08:52] Well, I was basically working full time and my day job, I was running, my e-commerce business out of hours. And, also at the same time, I just saw this opportunity that so much of the work, you know, like we discussed earlier, right? So much of the work that we were doing as engineering consultants with very high value.
but it just didn't make the base such hard work. uh, you know, by the time you get this, analysis done, What's your spreadsheet at all this time, it could be six or eight weeks out a day. Maybe half those problems are fixed. Maybe just, um, the information wasn't readily available when people needed to do something about it.
By the time you actually done the work. Um, and also, you know, really, you probably need some engineering smiles to understand what you were doing that first time. But after the handle was really just kind of turning the handle over and over again, and seemed like a pretty raw, um, target for, you know, doing better and automating.
So I was, I was working a day job. I was running the e-commerce site out of hours and also working on the business plan for winter. Um, so it was a pretty, pretty intense couple of years. Oh
James Dice: [00:09:55] man. I'm sure. Wow. Okay. And then, yeah. So did you start a bit,
Leon Wurfel: [00:10:01] what, what happened? Uh, so then pointer. Uh, so I, I definitely saw the opportunity. I didn't think I could do it without some funding. So I went and spoke to, some investors, um, originally, um, you know, we, we say the same future vision as you are a mechanical contractor in Australia. Um, ended up being a strategic kind of co-founding investor.
they, they had the same vision. They said, well, we're doing this ourselves. You know, why would we invest in a separate business to do what we already want to do ourselves? That was pretty deflating. So went away, kind of kept doing the other stuff I'm working on the business plan. And then about a year later, I got the call saying that, Hey, we have, we haven't actually got this as far as we wanted to in the past year.
And the only way to actually do this is break it out as a separate business outside of our main business that can prioritize working on this. So, yeah, a year later after originally pitching it to them, it got off the ground.
James Dice: [00:10:51] Uh, that's awesome. And what year would this sibling
Leon Wurfel: [00:10:54] that was 2013.
So the first day of operation, was the 1st of July, 2013. Got it,
James Dice: [00:11:01] got it. Okay. And then you and I met in 2017 at, I don't know if you remember at the haystack connect conference in Tampa, Florida, um, you and Tyson. And there was, there were a couple of other people from, from bueno there.
Uh, so that was the first time I had heard of you guys. And I was super impressed by everything you guys presented, you guys did like four or five presentations, at that event. Uh, we had several alcoholic beverages. Uh, yeah, I've been kind of following you guys ever since. Um, you want to just dive into, I want to save my favorite question for a little bit later.
Do you want to dive into what's point out stand for, um, and why did you decide to name it that.
Leon Wurfel: [00:11:42] okay. So when, uh, um, it stands for built environment optimization. So in the BU from bill and from environment and the optimization, um, very creative. Yeah. And well, I thought that it was pretty clever to have an optimization company and name it, uh, good, really like good in Spanish.
and really what that came from was at the time, you know, very influenced by what I was reading. And I was reading the, biography of Steve jobs and he talks about when he started Apple, those so many literal, like a lot of his competitors when name things that look very literal, so international business machines or micro software.
Right. So, uh, you want something that was a bit different and that was kinda my, way of emulating, someone that I was kind of like interested in at the time. Okay.
James Dice: [00:12:30] All right. And you guys, I know that. At least at some point you decided to build on top of sky spark, what was the reason behind that?
and what's the state of that today?
Leon Wurfel: [00:12:41] Yeah, I mean, we started, and this is kind of part of the, journey that we went on to understanding that, you know, the need for a whole product. so, you know, really, when I started at the time being quite naive, but value that I thought I'd bring to the industry is, Hey, I'll do all these like kind of spreadsheet analysis of, different building systems.
Uh, I know there's really smart ways to identify after it stopped or, uh, A valve is leaking or what have you, or whether, uh, um, you know, chill, water, temperature, reset. It could be optimized to get the chiller efficiency done. So I thought a lot of the value that when I could bring was in coming up with those kinds of high value rules.
And so starting out with, sky spark and building set of rules was, you know, a logical way to kind of, you know, effectively bootstrap, that kind of solution. Right? And so we started out with sky sparks, started out delivering managed services off the back of that, and then very quickly realized that that wasn't enough.
Um, number one, it wasn't enough to get the results that we needed. and, number two, you know, we very quickly decided that being a services business would limit the amount of impact that we would have on the industry. And that's something that's really motivating to me.
Like we've, we're a very purpose driven company. Um, you know, our purpose statement is to, realize the dream of a sustainable future through data. And, as a service company, you know, w what a bottleneck in terms of like our ability to scale, to service the industry. So we also decided we wanted to be a SAS company, too.
Okay. so going to, sorry, going back to your original question, we started out before rules rules are where it's at, let's write some really smart rules. Um, we then kind of realized, we need the, to have scalable infrastructure. We need to be based on the cloud. so that was kind of an infrastructure pace that was happening, like, as we started.
and then, you know, you have a role, I hit on a rule, it's going to do something with it. Right. So, how are you gonna take that piece of information it's valueless and no one does anything with it. So how are you going to take that piece of information, but action. So the first, um, client facing bit of software that we've built around of our own platform was a workflow management system.
So this was like basically a light CMS that sat off the side of the analytics engine and, enable people to track for what was going on and where, and, um, you know, that's kind of evolved over the past few years now. It's, um, you know, it exists for people to help get started with our platform, but in reality we're much more, a much more optimized installation of our, solution is to integrate with whatever an enterprise CMS is already in place.
but yeah, so then we realized we needed to wait a minute of the workflow. We needed to be able to scale our platform. We needed some dashboarding and reporting and some ways to articulate the value of what we were doing and some ways for people to drill down to be able to take a top down approach to, asking questions about the portfolio too.
Uh, and then, one of the downsides about signing up with starting with star spike was that it uses a proprietary, programming language. So, um, we then realized that we needed to do some more work in the data science space that we needed to build an interface, to be able to do some sophisticated data science with hyphen instead.
So, We have over time added the different elements that we think enable us to, get better value, um, to, to get what we made out of the data in terms of the results of analytics and run more sophisticated data science and really like a focus now is in integrating throughout enterprise systems and kind of changing the way people look at this type of solution to being an enterprise software solution, rather than just something that you sell 1 billion at a time.
James Dice: [00:16:13] Absolutely. So, so I mean, how you just described how you got started as the way a lot of people get started. I think a lot of people don't. Move on from how you got started. And so then, you know, they sort of just, get used to using analytics as a tool to provide better services.
Right. And what you're saying is, Hey, we wanted to do something different here. And I think that's really in, like, in my mind, like what's unique about bueno. You guys have decided a long time ago to be SAS first and scalable first and not a services business. Um, so basically what you guys do then is partner with service providers, then that would help implement the tool or building owners that have internal service providers to help implement the tool.
Like how does that work?
Leon Wurfel: [00:16:59] Yeah, totally. So we've got, partners that we work with that, um, No service there they're customers' buildings and they use our, software basically to run their operations center so that they can deliver their services better or live with some other value added services.
And we've also gotten lucky, we're saying those kinds of direct customers who would be vertically integrated in terms of their own facilities management. And they will use our platforms run basically an operation center, to, manage their own buildings better.
James Dice: [00:17:27] Got it, got it. Okay. Um, I wanna, I want to save the whole product conversation.
I have some specific questions around that. Where are you guys at today? Like you started in Australia, you're worldwide now, you know, how many buildings, what stats can you share cause before we talk about how analytics can go mainstream, I want to talk about like where are you at today?
as one of the leaders in this space.
Leon Wurfel: [00:17:50] Yeah. I mean, you know, a lot of those, kind of key stats, like numbers of square feet, numbers of buildings, et cetera. And we used to track like very, religiously, you know, but we actually kind of just turned that on its head because we realized that those look more kind of like vanity stats about our, business rather than ones that were aligned with what our purpose is.
And so the stat that I'm real excited about is that we've got the equivalent of 2% of Australia's energy consumption on represented at home. Wow, that's really cool. you know, I think that, like I could roughly say that we've bought about 2000 buildings, like roughly say we've got about to a hundred million square feet on our platform.
but you know, what we're concerned about is making a difference, and, you know, having some kind of positive impact. so that's the really important metric for us is that, you know, like, let's say we can say 10, let's say 20, 20, 30% of that. That's like a meaningful, with, with our team of people, that's a meaningful change that we can make them meaningful, positive impact we have on the, on the world.
James Dice: [00:18:48] Absolutely. That's amazing. And that's a good jumping off point for like, talking about how analytics can scale. So you guys are one of the leaders, I think in terms of bill, you said 2000 bill or something like that. A couple thousand buildings. That's one of the leaders from my standpoint.
but a couple of thousand buildings is not like there are six, I think there's 6.5 million buildings just in the U S alone. So like, or, or not really scratching the surface in terms of taking your 2% in Australia and. Like getting that under monitoring, uh, have some analytics product worldwide.
Right. So I wanted to talk to you about how this thing can scale how this model that you guys have built can go mainstream. And one of the questions around that was like, how can analytics providers build the whole product and you kind of hinted at how you guys have done it. So you guys have, built a path to get work done, right?
So you, you built a lightweight CMMS, and now you're talking about integration to other CMMS. So could you expand a little bit on what you mean by changing how this product is viewed, changing, how it integrates with other enterprise tools? What do you mean by that? Because I think there's some, some current trends there that, would be good to unpack.
Leon Wurfel: [00:20:05] Yeah, for sure. I'll just take a step back. Um, okay. just to clarify, when I was saying the 2% of Australia's equivalent of Australia, that energy consumption that's if you take out international portfolio and kind of roll it up. Got it. Um, we've got, a lot of buildings in Australia, but we are in, countries around the world.
just to clarify that, but yeah, I mean, like you said, there's a lot to unpack there. I mean, what we, what are we talking about doing with this kind of product it's, um, taking data from operational technology, running algorithms that have effectively codify engineering knowledge and other heuristic or an ML based way.
Right. And then that gives us a piece of information. And from there, um, that's great. It's good to have interesting information, but it doesn't do anything for you unless you do something with it. And, really, the way to ensure that something is going to get done with that piece of information is in making sure that that information turns into an action that is then fed into somebody's hand that in somebody's, workflow in whatever the native way is that they do all their other tasks that they're doing in their job.
So if you've got a technician that's out there, on the side and they've got their, job management system or the service, app on their phone, and they're working through an affordable, there are other preventative or reactive tasks are on that. And then they've got to get out their laptop and login to some other system and remember to do all this other stuff so they can do their FDD or their analytics stuff that it's not, it's never going to work.
You know, you only ever going to appeal then to these. People that are really engaged. I mean, at, the end of the day, it shouldn't matter whether this has come from a preventative task list or not, it matter whether this is a reactive job or something that's been identified with an algorithm should all feed into that workflow in the same way.
And that's why I think it's really important because it's important to get the value. And it's important to make the process of identifying some kind of insights through to action being taken as frictionless as possible.
James Dice: [00:22:01] Absolutely. Yeah. And I think when people approach it from the sustainability driven, you know, like people don't understand that this isn't just an energy efficiency or justice sustainability problem.
It's a workflow problem. It's a people and processes problem. Uh, so it's really refreshing to hear you describe it in that way. Yeah. And
Leon Wurfel: [00:22:23] I think this is another area where I'd like the whole industry has its blind. Does Han rice got tunnel vision in that. You know, really, we said the benefit that what we can deliver is, you know, a sustainability benefit.
But the way to get there is through evolving, like an archaic preventative operational model and making it data driven and preventative. It doesn't just exist on HVAC preventative. Doesn't that there's a hell of a lot of other engineering services that we need to bring along with us to a data driven model, but that's elevators or water treatment or fire systems, all these other systems and buildings, and maybe, getting them to be data driven.
It doesn't necessarily result in direct energy savings, but there are a hell of a lot of, embodied environmental costs in running those systems and nonproductive way. So, yeah, the opportunity, that we have to improve the industry buyer, these kind of technologies. Isn't just unique and native alone to HVAC.
James Dice: [00:23:21] Yeah. And that's another piece that's unique about you guys here too. So I think what I'm hearing from you is you're not just going into a building and saying, let's connect to the Johnson control system and collect all the air handling unit data. You're saying it takes a new way to operate a building a data-driven way to operate a building.
And the people who operate a building, they care about HVAC, but they also care about the elevator. And like you said, fire system and everything else. So you're collecting a lot more data than I think a lot of the other people out there are collecting.
Leon Wurfel: [00:23:55] Yeah. And a use case are different in every system and the value is different in every different system.
You apply this kind of, different framework too. But, um, yeah, I mean, we started a house. Like the rest of the industry, you know, we started out very focused on HVAC and putting an energy made is optimizing HVAC in order to get energy savings. We very quickly saw that the scope of this isn't just limited to that one system.
so now, we've actually got the most, dominant system taught that going to have platforms, actually refrigeration systems. Yeah. So we've, we've got, uh, hundreds of elevators. We've got a water treatment, um, integrations, we've got fire systems. and it's just, yeah, I mean, we can't, we can't afford to leave the rest of the industry behinds and just have such a narrow focus.
James Dice: [00:24:39] Yeah. And, and so, my first thought as like an energy engineer, when you say that it's like, how do I justify like the payback on say connecting to the fire system when there isn't any quick energy savings that I can get from that. So how do you guys make the business case to sort of go through the extra effort on, on those other things?
Leon Wurfel: [00:25:00] Yeah, it's, a different business case. It's a different business case. And, um, I mean, that's those business cases aren't well understood by, you know, the smart building sector or at least this segment of the smart building sector. Because if you look at what they will come from, it generally come from being systems integrators or some kind of BMS backgrounds.
So all this stuff is kind of new to, you know, a large proportion of like this, this segment. Um, but the buyer, I mean, without like giving everything away, right? Like I, our systems like. It's about risks. It's about maintenance productivity. You know, when you're doing like these kind of full functional inspire tests, how many songs do you have to retest before you actually satisfy your, you know, your cause and effect matrix?
and, uh, you know, the risk question can be pretty significant depending on what the regulatory environment is that the country that you're operating in, like in Australia, if there's, found to be a negligence and the maintenance of, uh, fire system  members of the board of directors, of the company that owned that asset can go to jail.
So it's, uh, the risk benefit can be very, very significant.
James Dice: [00:26:03] Yeah. And depending on the workflow, this is how I teach it in the course, depending on the workflow, you then need to trace it back to those. Financial reasons, financial stakeholders for the people that are making the person do that workflow.
Right. Right. And so the business case could be different depending on all the different data streams you're collecting. That's really cool.
Leon Wurfel: [00:26:24] Totally. And then there's two, ways of projects that you want to directly drive actions. Or do you want to just monitor something to say whether the actions downstream or that are being taken in an effective way, measure the performance of like, um, say whatever services you're getting.
It's not two different groups. Yeah.
James Dice: [00:26:41] And how about, like, I feel like a lot of the themes that have come up on this podcast are, is like, there's this transition happening from collecting data so you can analyze the business's costs and hopefully optimize that versus the other side, which is how do I collect data so that can help increase the business's revenue?
Like, is there, are there use cases that you guys are getting into sort of on
Leon Wurfel: [00:27:02] that side? I wouldn't say necessarily that, um, That is a direct correlation between the work that we're doing and increasing revenue. But I would say that there's a direct correlation between the work that we're doing and increasing the enterprise value of the customers that we're working with.
And now we're talking about, um, crossing the chasm and, um, what would need to happen in order to get wider adoption? This stuff, one of the biggest problems is, you know, we're saying a lot of smart building uptake in, properties that are owned by rates. and, you know, unfortunately in that kind of landlord model, that's like incentives that go in the wrong way in order for the landlords, the people that are in the building to actually capture the benefits of what's being delivered.
so yeah, there is friction in converting savings from analytics through to like NOI, which increases your property evaluation. Now, if you look at all the types of businesses that aren't landlord operated and maybe a more vertically integrated. It's much easier to directly tie, savings as much as easy for them to capture the value of the savings.
And, um, when you're talking about these vertically integrated companies, any kind of saving that you deliver, we're not talking in Hawaiian, we're actually talking about, um, you know, earnings ratio, which can be, significantly higher, significantly higher, multiple and value compared to, um, you know, when you get off the, off the cap rate than I know in a one building.
Absolutely.
James Dice: [00:28:17] Absolutely. So you guys are trying to create a SAS product, right? The scalable, I think there's a, there's a catch 22 here, which is, if I'm trying to do only SAS, then I might not be able to drive with the results. If I don't have the service providers out there, you know, actually making it happen in the building that I'm installing in on day one.
Right. Um, How did you guys go from like that initial, we were developing this product and this product, probably not where we want it to be. And so we're going to prop it up with services today. Like that's a huge transition from the other side, which is we're going full SAS. We have this huge partner network built out.
Right. Um, how did you kind of navigate that transition? Because the reason I asked that is because I think that's where we're kind of at, as an industry. Like we need to get a lot more companies kind of thinking about taking that transition, you know, for it to scale.
Leon Wurfel: [00:29:12] Yeah. Uh, so like I said, we started at, uh, as a managed services company and, you know, we knew that the pathway was to transition from services to, to SAS.
Um, so very early on, we looked at ourselves as being the first customer of our software that we were building. Okay. So, um, organizationally, we kind of treated a managed services business as a, customer of our SAS business. Okay. And then, um, enabled as we brought on more and more SAS customers, we have that kind of organizational structure in place, which then, well, number one, we had our first customer when we started, so we're able to get good feedback on the, on the use of our product, but it also meant that we had the structure in place to be able to service SAS customers.
As I came on, you know, we understood the customer success requirements and, we had the expertise in house also help them get them, get the most out of the products. And we had the, had the product and we also had the expertise in using the product and now, so then became a, um, absolutely capability that we had to help others get up to speed with getting results out of the platform as well.
James Dice: [00:30:13] Yeah. And I think this is like a, a lot of the times, you know, Sky spark is one tool here, but I think this happens, industry-wide where if your business is like, you're talking about making a, a strict decision at the beginning, like we have two businesses here, but if you don't make that decision, what you get caught up in is like, we are a services business and we have a services business model, and all of our people are incentivized based on services.
And like you'd never quite grow out of that. Like thinking about it from a product standpoint, but what we need for this thing to scale is somebody to think about it from a product standpoint,
Leon Wurfel: [00:30:51] right? I mean, it's a really different, mindset between a services business and a product business in that. every service contract is a little bit different and afford to have some customization in your product, but you can't afford to have a different product for every single customer that you have.
Right. Um, so yeah, it's definitely a different kind of mindset and different kind of rigor that you need in your business in order to be successful at that, for sure. Yeah. I
James Dice: [00:31:14] think what we're going to see is that the people that have made that scalable product decision early enough, they're going to have a lot better product at some point, than the people that are just, you know, kind of dabbling in it.
So how do you guys think about that today? Like making that decision a long time ago? Like, do you feel like your product is, is way better? You can brag?
Leon Wurfel: [00:31:35] Um, I don't know. How do I humblebrag their response to this question? I guess I would say that, um, my background is as an engineer.
Um, you know, I guess I was effectively, you know, my, my DNA is to be like a user of this type of product. I'm not software engineer, sustainability engineer by trade, a lot of like yourself. but that has meant that, you know, that that goes for the DNA back. Our whole company is that we've wanted to deliver a product that we wanted to make a product that delivers value.
And that's been of key importance to us. You know, we are very conscious of, you know, the conversion like that complete the flow from identifying something and then doing something about it, and then even closing the loop and communicating what the value is of that action that you've done. So, what, in terms of strengths of that business, I think that's, put us in a position where we've been very product focused, um, in terms of weaknesses, you know, we've been very arrogant about like whether we would need to market or have a sales team and all that kind of stuff.
So I think in some ways that's helped us, but in some ways it's ended us, but at least we kind of recognize those kind of weaknesses. Now we know we to time to work on this stuff. That's a
James Dice: [00:32:39] good, humble brag. That's where to point out a weakness just a, after you pointed out a strength.
Hey guys, just another quick note from our sponsor nexus labs. And then we'll get back to the show. This episode is brought to you by nexus foundations, our introductory course on the smart buildings industry. If you're new to the industry, this course is for you. If you're an industry vet, but want to understand how technology is changing things.
This course is also for you. The alumni are raving about the content, which they say pulls it all together, and they also love getting to meet the other students on the weekly zoom calls and in the private chat room, you can find out more about the course@courses.nexus lab. Start online. All right, back to the interview.
Um, talk to me about refrigeration little bit.
so it's not something I have done a lot personally, but I had to do some due diligence last year on refrigeration analytics and kind of that whole world. And I'll say it's fascinating because you know, coming from these bigger buildings, you know, universities, K-12 offices, you have the, you know, the big four and you're used to sort of the dynamics that happen in the buildings industry.
And then you go into the refrigeration side of things and you realize there are different people involved, but all of the dynamics are basically basically like
Leon Wurfel: [00:33:58] a copy and paste like Honeywell or ACI or Schneider or whoever we'd like Dan FOSS and Emerson and it's yeah, it's the same kind of situation.
It's that same kind of market that now. Got it.
James Dice: [00:34:08] Got it. Yeah. So tell me more, a little bit more about that.
Leon Wurfel: [00:34:11] I think one of the really interesting things that changes in the refrigeration space is the scale, you know, and, uh, is the different mindset and is the fact that you're talking like price earnings multiple rather than a NOI multiple with United.
So,
James Dice: [00:34:25] and what do you mean by that? Right, because the buildings are smaller. What do you mean
Leon Wurfel: [00:34:30] by that? Um, more buildings, more buildings, you know, you've got a rate, maybe they've got a portfolio of like what, 20, 30, 50, maybe a hundred buildings. Um, so it talking to like grocery or January to tell them, yeah, hundreds and I guess that's what I mean by scale.
uh, and it's, it's interesting, because, Yeah. I mean, it leads to a whole bunch, it leads to a different approach that you have to take. and, and different mindset, it gets away from the asset management mindset where it's like, every building is an individual asset that I need to manage.
Right. And then that leads people to take an approach where it's like, which I don't think is correct, which is like, it's a, one-to-one like, it's an asset. It needs a team to manage it. It's not an asset and it's a team to manage it. Whereas I think where the industry needs to get to is lack of looking at taking portfolio view and looking at how best to service a portfolio, rather than that kind of one-to-one relationships.
And it's like, there's a tipping point of scale at where it's just like, it's not even like a business case anymore. It's like an IQ test as to like, whether you've got that different operational model in place. But I think like what the technology is doing is. Lowering that barrier to entry that cross site, that tip over point about we're having a centralized operational model makes sense.
And like now we're seeing a lot of rates, at least some of our customers, I don't know about the broader market, but having centralization strategies around their operations, as they're saying the opportunity that comes from technology, the same, the, you know, the, the challenges of that having, um, with the talent pool in the industry, and this kind of black, um, you know, this kind of perfect storm happening with that realizing I think, I think you've talked about this and when I got the podcast, it's like, you've done that super user of the, the analytics platform have the habits of a small team of super users and give them the technology to scale what benefits that can give across your, across your portfolio.
Absolutely.
James Dice: [00:36:21] Yeah, that's fascinating. I haven't thought about it From a portfolio perspective, you know, I've done a lot of grocery stores and just like the traditional, you know, the, the human analytics, like you said. Uh, but hadn't thought about that from the standpoint of bunch of small buildings versus a few big buildings.
Super interesting.
Leon Wurfel: [00:36:38] Yeah. I mean, I think, I think that that's the, that's the point, right? The point of what we're doing in terms of digitizing building technology, you know, you're getting the breaking down silos, you're breaking down silos and your system than you. You're getting all the data into one place and then you're applying platforms across the data.
And then, you know, you don't want to stop there and be shortsighted to stop there. You know, then, then it's about like, given the tools that we've got, how do we have the best structure and using those tools in order to get the most value. So I think it's inevitable. And the goal of the inevitable insight that we'll get to is that, property operations will.
Be more centralized over time.
James Dice: [00:37:18] Absolutely. More digital, more centralized. so talk to me about 2021. So first the products, like where are you guys at from a product standpoint and what are you excited about? Uh, pushing out,
Leon Wurfel: [00:37:29] ah, product? yeah, I mean, I guess like with all this kind of craziness going on, it's been, uh, helpful in that we've really been able to focus in on, our product because you don't have been able to travel anywhere and get distracted by things.
So, yeah, I mean, there's some really cool stuff that we've done. you know, there's a whole bunch of quality of life improvements we've made. Um, you know, it's all, it's all about being the most efficient to get from that insight to the action. So that's that's right, right.
You know, driving more actions with less clicks, you know, every, Seconds and hours that you can, a little more minutes that you can strip out of a workflow means more time. It feels like more actions, which means more value. So that's, that's great. And we've also, built out, you know, an IOT stack.
So we now have that native within our platform. you know, we've been working on IOT projects for a long time, but we've now actually productize that.
James Dice: [00:38:16] Okay. Can you define what IOT stack means?
Leon Wurfel: [00:38:20] Ask us. Yeah, I'll start with IOT and I guess, like with IOT, I just mean kind of instrumentation in a way where you're installing an instrumentation system.
Okay. And in terms of like, what I mean by that stack, um, it's really like what I ties to in terms of making it scalable within it, within our product. It's not something that we're just doing. One-off kind of custom solutions for people anymore. It's something that is now, you know, we, we can do that for everyone who's connected to that platform.
Okay.
James Dice: [00:38:46] So I want a CO2 sensor in this conference room
Leon Wurfel: [00:38:50] and yeah, sure. It just shows up in a hole the same, in the same place with the same, uh, reporting and all that kind of stuff in the same integration without, workload management system and all that.
It's not, it's not a custom project. It's actually part of that, but I've now got it. Cool. Very cool. That's exciting. Um, yeah, there's a whole bunch of interesting use cases. like th that are exciting and, you know, even outside of that kind of traditional commercial real estate space, like we've been integrating with like chicken cookers, bakery, ovens, all kinds of crazy, crazy stuff.
I would never have expected to be doing. When I, when I started out down this pot.
James Dice: [00:39:27] on the IOT side of things, I mean, that those things would probably be included in that, but, uh, what are you seeing around COVID and there's a whole IQ, you mentioned separate solution, you mentioned part of your product, but you're also mentioning what's now, which is a separate solution.
So what I'm seeing is a lot of people are doing, I Q silo, basically adding a new silo. And so what are you guys seeing as far as the use cases around ventilation and people in space and
Leon Wurfel: [00:39:56] that kind of thing? Yeah. Um, one of the very early on through, um, COVID, you know, lockdowns in Australia in particular were very, you know, thankfully that they contained and most of the most part that we still have snapped, locked down every now and then.
Um, and that were very, very strict in Australia. so our. Customers have had to develop their capability to shut down their buildings, hibernate them and bring them back online. and so I guess, like we took a different approach in terms of like what value we could deliver to our customers. Um, you know, what we, kind of saw was that there all these big buildings being hibernated without the operational staff and the technicians visiting them anymore, and that, you know, having some ability to, provide some caretaker kind of oversight over the building systems, you know, look for kind of risk issues or, you know, if you foolish on a building down for months and then switch it all back on how to control for all of these, You know, reactive kind of breakdowns that you can have when you're switching a building back on.
So now we're looking for risks. We're looking for a maintenance optimization, you know, risk in terms of making sure all of the loops are flowing water through them, a minimum amount of time that I need that legs cause it close valves and all that kind of stuff. And making sure that our malls have strong in dots.
So, um, and making sure air handling units and VAVs were opening and, and handling units running a minimum, there are all these kind of, um, making sure that, uh, different parts of plant were being exercising ran. I would running a, at least a minimum amount. Um, so I guess our approach was to support our, Clients on the operation side and allow them to be able to hibernate and then spin back up their buildings and help support them in that kind of capability rather than focusing on the indoor environment space.
And that was kind of our solution to how to, how to help our customers.
James Dice: [00:41:40] Interesting. Yeah. It's, it's crazy how different, you know, areas of the world experience things differently. Uh, yeah. You guys have, have had a much different pandemic than we have had in the U S um, well, I want to close off, this conversation by asking you, my favorite question. And if you said you listened to a couple of episodes before, but you might've heard, heard my favorite question, which is, you know, kind of, what's holding this, this industry back, uh, and why, or why are we behind in terms of technology adoption compared to other industries?
Uh, and, and how can we sort of unlock things?
Leon Wurfel: [00:42:14] Yeah. Why are we so far behind? I don't know. There's so many kind of related, but independent problems that we have in the industry. you know, there was pressure on commoditization. and I'm saying that the saying operations is something to minimize rather than trying to look at what value you can generate out of it.
And that's true all the way through the value chain from from FM. So the contractors sort of vendors that supply, you know, all of the above. Um, so commoditization is a problem, and that kind of cost pressure is going to give you the best, the highest value outcome. Um, and then, you know, you've got all these kinds of the best incentives where, you know, It's the last cycle of a building. The development team has a very different incentives than the people that are going to own and operate the buildings through its life, which then flows down throughout the rest of the value chain about people trying to get stuck in lower, but then make them money, you know, through, through, throughout the rest of the building's life cycle.
that, that whole, dynamic around, trying to optimize for a development budget rather than for last cycle budget, isn't helpful. uh, there's also the life cycle around development of, buildings and the fact that people making technological decisions, like probably years in advance of when the buildings are actually going to be delivered.
Um, and then while you're operating the thing, you know, there's so many people who build their business models around trying to externalize as many of the costs as possible. So. And we got that split incentive point on us and tenants where the owner isn't charged as the capital expenditure for the building.
It doesn't necessarily have an incentive to operate the building more efficiently when they're just going to pass those costs on to the tenants anyway. Or at least if they deliver any savings, you know, they're gonna have to wait for a full lease renewal cycle before they see any of those benefits, like hit their net operating income.
So there's a lot of things that the property industry doesn't have going for it that stifle technology adoption.
James Dice: [00:44:00] Uh, yeah. I, I had the feeling when you were given that list that you could just like go on 20 more. No. Yeah. There's just stuff that all of us deal with every day. Uh, Okay. So given all of those obstacles, you know, how do we sort of unlock things, I guess is my question for
Leon Wurfel: [00:44:19] you? Yeah, I mean, it's like, it kind of raised this before in that, I mean, what we're doing definitely makes sense. What we're doing definitely creates value and solves a problem. And there is this opportunity to evolve.
Like it was operational model will be data driven, it's based centralized, but like you kind of pointed out that market penetration of these kinds of tools is very, very shallow right now. So the very burning question is like, how are we going to go mainstream? Now we're going to cross that chasm and get, get into that, early adoption phase.
So we're not, we're not, there were no any of that. Um, and that the tough, think that the segment of the market is that we're not only, all trying to grow and get my penetration where we're creating the market at the same time, because most of the time people buy this kind of, um, solution.
The first time they bought it. Know, we're really competing with the way that
James Dice: [00:45:06] educated. Yeah. The education is like what you're doing to sell it. You're not competing with usually yeah, exactly.
Leon Wurfel: [00:45:13] The campaign with a spreadsheet, or you might be competing with like a calendar that's suddenly in this week, do this tasks, these tasks, you know, so I mean the addressable market is huge, right?
Like this is like a huge space. We all, we all know that, and if you look at how the like established prop tech companies, like, if you look at the economics and the protocols of the world or the yardies and the MRIs of the world, like these guys have like thousands of employees and there's no, no FDD company out there with thousands of employees.
So that's definitely at a very early point in the journey towards like adoption of this stuff. so I mean, it really comes down to, a few different kinds of problems that need to be solved. One is adoption around, like how, how do we make sure that if I should get results. Doing this stuff. How do we make that more scalable, remove friction, all that kind of stuff.
you know, how do we get that adoption and engagement and how do we remove friction? Um, that's one, that's one problem. And the second is infrastructure. Like this isn't a particular order, by the way, second is infrastructure, the data sitting there ready to put this kind of platform onto. Okay. So, um, the centralization of dollar problem, isn't something that is widely solved already in the industry and normalization speak for now, just about that.
Um, and then there's a whole bunch of use cases in products that need to get solved for like, you know, stuff like how do you have more confidence in and create a white list of issues that don't no longer needs to be triaged by a human before. You're happy to do something about it. Like. I think a bunch of people have made huge mistakes, trying to directly integrate FCD and more analytics systems. And with CMS says I'm creating tens of thousands of work orders a day. It doesn't work. It has to be very selective and not equal with how you're doing this, improve the confidence of each individual.
Cool. Um, so what
James Dice: [00:47:01] you're describing there is like a, like, okay, I have this existing workflow, I've inserted analytics into it, but now really? How do I, re-engineer the workflow itself to start taking advantage of, the new tool, essentially the new insights.
Leon Wurfel: [00:47:15] Totally. Right. Like everyone's thinking about raising tickets.
Duke has got rising tickets. what about like, not releasing payment on a purchase order before you check whether an issue is actually fixed or not.
James Dice: [00:47:26] That's what I feel like we haven't got to that piece of the conversation yet in our industry, which is like, it's a great press practice to look at a workflow and how you're inserting technology into it. It's a whole nother conversation to say that, okay, now this tool exists. What should the workflow be?
Right, right. And totally just re-imagine how the business is doing things right. And we haven't quite, I totally agree that that needs to get that flip needs to happen before this starts to really go, go
Leon Wurfel: [00:47:57] mainstream. Uh, great. And that's totally goes along with that theme of trying to take this from like a billing, my billing solution and turn it into an enterprise solution.
Um, because you know, we've got to change that mindset. This is something I bolt onto my existing operations to, this is a tool that I've built with my operations around. Absolutely extracting the most value on it, but that way, you know, so that's, that's the whole, triage piece. Like how are you going to make triage better out of these platforms?
Um, they don't have to put human set of eyes over all these issues as they occur as the workplace piece. How are you going to get the workflows, the information to where it needs to go in and the most automated way and how you're gonna feed back from those workflows. So you're gonna ensure that you're adding more context into your.
Uh, issues as you're, iterating on them and, and know the whole thing around like, PCRs problem cause remedies, right? Like the, you know, predicting costs, you know, so that's why it's not just a matter of 20 tickets. And it's also a matter of like, what kind of get out of these enterprise integrations that I'm doing.
And then, you know,
James Dice: [00:48:54] an example of that would be like, you have a hundred faults and they're leaking valve faults, and now you start to say, okay, well, 30 of them were, stuck set screws on the actuators, like things like that. And you start to get, is that what you're describing is like you get started back from the field and start to use that to like, make your diagnosis
Leon Wurfel: [00:49:15] better.
Yeah, totally. Get, get, um, don't just get  business data as well. Okay. Yeah. and then, uh, I think you'd probably the paper about this, you know, like taking it from fall detection down to that second day of diagnosis. Right. And I think, you know, this is something that we've been strong advocates for a while.
We would just describe it as like recalls analytics. Right. Um, but, you know, in, in any building, there's hundreds of issues that this is a very, um, laying industry. There's hundreds of issues. there's hundreds of root causes, never going to get to all of them. Um, why do I care? And maybe I've already learned to live with them.
my budget's not going up anymore. All this stuff's already breaking. Like, why do I care? Why am I going to do something about it? So it's about, um, ban on standing. Like if I have a certain goal and my strategy has certain goals on, I need to achieve, then I can start prioritizing, like, you know, based on what kind of outcome that I want to get.
Uh, which might be, it could be energy. That's a common one. It could be reducing maintenance costs could be improving confidence. It could be refrigerant leakage, depending on what kind of like segment that you're in. Um, but it's, I don't think, I don't think it's enough to just go down to like five diagnosis.
Like that's definitely helpful and that saves like technician hours and fault-finding what the, what the issues are. But, um, you know, more importantly, it's like understanding the context and then rolling that back up, like, you know, uh, more context about like why, and then rolling that back up to, you know, what you strategy is and kind of targeting things based on that.
James Dice: [00:50:47] Absolutely. Yeah. So it's almost like another whole nother level around like portfolio level prioritization and yeah, the, the why behind each fault.
Leon Wurfel: [00:51:00] Literally like you've got a goal, um, and just do everything. If you've got a goal to improve this one thing across the portfolio, then just keep going.
Everything else be at you, that's kind of like plugging the lakes or whatever. And then just everything else that just that like be ruthlessly, ruthlessly prioritize on just whatever that one kind of organizational goal is. Like, whatever that public commitment is that you've your organization's made, throw everything else at that.
Just keep everything else going. Um, and maybe you say data do a little bit smarter, but focus all your extra efforts and attention on that goal. Interesting. Okay. so yeah, I think that, I think that there's more layers that we need to go into, um, with FET, as you know, more of these use cases around and integrating with enterprise platforms, you know, all this kind of stuff, there's, there's more to do.
Um, And then we come down to, I guess, two other things we haven't considered. One is like the organizational side of things. I think we've touched on that a bit. Yeah. Having the right structure to support this stuff. Um, and then regulation also plays a part in as well. We were really, we were really fortunate, in Australia, uh, that I talked to that, right.
The sidebar neighbors as like the performance based rating system. So ] very early on the government said they wouldn't lease any buildings that were, this is important for commercial real estate and maybe not so important for other areas, but commercial real estate is the one that has the problems of externalities.
Yep. like in Australia, Yukon lace your building to a government tenant, unless you go four and house to house. And as you're writing performance, energy writing, you have to keep on maintaining. Um, you actually now have to publicly advertise what your energy writing is. Uh, if you're trying to lease your office space, so regulation, you know, you might have your own views about whether the regulation is good.
Regulation is bad, but what it helps do in this case was, um, it helped to cut through those externalities and tie, operational savings and operational performance back to the asset values. Because now if you're not maintaining a certain level of performance, then it means that certain segments of the market open to you to at least two, which has a very significant impact on your property value.
Absolutely
James Dice: [00:53:04] fascinating. Yeah, well, that's what set me down on down this whole rabbit hole of how can we go mainstream? Right. So I posted this on LinkedIn and like the first 10 answers I got were all we have to get a regulation and it's not that I think that's a bad thing. I think it needs to happen a lot faster than it is right now in other parts of the world.
Like for instance, we've had like five cities in the U S that have gone to this, you know, benchmarking ordinance and then, uh, energy reporting after benchmarking. and then, you know, start rationing down the requirements, which is great. but it's not going to get us there as fast as we needed to go.
And so there, there needs to be progress on the product side as well. So it's kind of like an all of the above thing in my opinion.
Leon Wurfel: [00:53:47] Yeah, I agree. I totally agree.
James Dice: [00:53:49] All right. What else you got in your list? Is that, all the way through it? Those are things that'll go it'll make things scale. Well, we, I
Leon Wurfel: [00:53:57] mean, we touched on the organizational structure before, um, like all we've been talking, but I guess I would just like, imagine this, like, Is there like a thought experiment, like imagine like a really high scale, property portfolio with a lot of assets. Imagine this is a property portfolio that isn't able to extend, analyze and pass on all of that costs. And then how would you like optimal structure around supporting that?
And this is, this is why I think centralization is the inevitable. Um, more and more people centralizing their operations. Centralization is the inevitable, destination that we're going to end up. And,
James Dice: [00:54:34] and kind of describe for me what it looks like before centralization. So w what I know is that you have like a local building engineer, local maintenance team, local property manager, right.
And then everyone else kind of looks at that building, like, it's their problem in a way. Right. And, and they might get some reporting coming out from them, but it's really, they're viewing it as like, yes, we have this portfolio, but it's really a bunch of individual entities. And so how does that change to this new model?
Leon Wurfel: [00:55:04] I mean, it's exactly what you described when it's like that one-to-one like one team, one building, and that means that they have a lot of competing priorities. They all say that too, you know, probably don't have the expertise across all of the different engineering systems that they have to manage and got a lot of fires to put out every day as well.
So in a, rather than, um, only having that, one-to-one support them with centralized specialized teams. Yeah, HVAC team, maybe a fire team or something like that. Refrigeration team to support them and use technology to support them in doing their job better in running the asset. Better.
James Dice: [00:55:38] Another piece of that though, is the vendors as well, right? So you might have a different vendor at every building for each individual silo in the building. So the building in Melbourne might have Siemens in the London, said they might have Johnson controls. And so you can't really centralize those guys because they're not going to service each other's stuff.
And if they try to pretend they are going to, it's not a good idea, but I mean, I
Leon Wurfel: [00:56:02] think that go ahead. That's why you need, if you're going to go across the whole plane, got to get a solution that isn't a vendor integrated solution and they an independent solution. I mean, the whole reason for. The analogy I always use is, um, you know, why, why, why are you going to let your kids mop their own home?
James Dice: [00:56:20] Uh, that's that's exactly where I was going with this too, is that it has to be somebody independent, not tied to any specific silo where it's at now. It's good.
Leon Wurfel: [00:56:30] Yeah. Yeah. You got to break down the silos, digitize it and have like agnostic solutions and then have the right structure to get the most out of the, what technology can do for you.
James Dice: [00:56:39] Absolutely. All right. Cool. Now we have the blueprint and the whole world can just follow along with what we've just now that we've solved everything. Uh, cool. Well, this has been super fun. Uh, yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, no problem. Thanks for unpacking it with us and, uh, educating. we'll have to do it again
Leon Wurfel: [00:57:02] sometime.
Anytime, anytime.
James Dice: [00:57:05] All right, friends. Thanks for listening to this episode of the nexus podcast for more episodes like this, and to get the weekly nexus newsletter, which by the way, readers have said is the best way to stay up to date on the future of the smart building industry. Please subscribe@nexuslabs.online. You can find the show notes for this conversation there as well. Have a great day.
âI think where the industry needs to get to is⌠looking at how best to service a portfolio, rather than the kind of one-to-one [management team to building] relationship.
And there's a tipping point of scale where it's not even like a business case anymore, it's like an IQ test as to whether you've got that different [portfolio-scale] operational model in place. But I think like what the technology is doing is lowering that barrier to entry, that crossover point where having a centralized operational model makes sense.â
âLeon Wurfel
Welcome to Nexus, a newsletter and podcast for smart people applying smart building technologyâhosted by James Dice. If youâre new to Nexus, you might want to start here.
The Nexus podcast (Apple | Spotify | YouTube | Other apps) is our chance to explore and learn with the brightest in our industryâtogether. The project is directly funded by listeners like you who have joined the Nexus Pro membership community.
You can join Nexus Pro to get a weekly-ish deep dive, access to the Nexus Vendor Landscape, and invites to exclusive events with a community of smart buildings nerds.
Episode 45 is a conversation with Leon Wurfel, Founder and CEO of Bueno Systems.
We talked about:
You can find Leon Wurfel on LinkedIn.
Enjoy!
Music credit: Dream Big by Audiobingerâlicensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
James Dice: [00:00:03] hello friends, welcome to the nexus podcast. I'm your host James dice each week. I fire questions that the leaders of the smart buildings industry to try to figure out where we're headed and how we can get there faster without all the marketing fluff. I'm pushing my learning to the limit. And I'm so glad to have you here following along.
This episode of the podcast is brought to you by nexus pro nexus pro is an annual or monthly subscription where members get exclusive writing podcasts and invites to members only zoom gatherings. You can find info on how to join and support the Without further ado, please enjoy this episode, the nexus podcast. Episode 45 was a conversation with Leon Werfel, founder and CEO of bueno systems. We talked about Bono's founding story, the analytics market today, how bueno approaches analytics and how analytics itself can go mainstream and finally cross the chasm. This is a ton of fun for me, please. Enjoy nexus podcast, episode 45. All right. Hello, Leon. Welcome to the nexus podcast. Can you introduce yourself?
Leon Wurfel: [00:01:16] Yeah. Uh, hi James. Thanks for having me. I'm Leon, I'm the CEO of when I, we are a SAS company in the property industry enabling, the transition to a centralized and dotted driven, sustainable operational model.
James Dice: [00:01:29] All right. We're going to unpack what the hell that means in a little bit. Can we start with your career history though? Uh, how'd you get into our space. Have you always been in our space? What's your, what's your educational background? That kind of thing.
Leon Wurfel: [00:01:44] Yeah. Um, I have, so my career history, uh, I started out actually as a sustainability engineer.
Um, working in the property industry. So my first job out of, uni or college, depending on which audience we're speaking to, was working for an engineering consultancy. And my job was basically going around and finding ways to tune up, buildings, you know, optimize what, what they had in place, but what their, but their existing systems where I look at capital operates, all that kind of stuff.
Okay, cool. Yeah. Um, it was a, it was small consultancy. I think I was employee number five. Um, when I joined and they, they read it maybe 35 or 40 people by the time I left. but yeah, I mean, we were basically doing the same kind of stuff that we do whenever, you know, the, um, old fashioned way.
Okay.
James Dice: [00:02:29] I started my career as well. I don't know if we talked about that before.
Leon Wurfel: [00:02:32] Okay, cool. Well, I'm glad we got that in common. Yeah. It's not
James Dice: [00:02:36] very fun when you're actually in the weeds doing it without analytics.
Leon Wurfel: [00:02:40] Uh, yeah. you know, human analytics, right? So like when, when I started out in the industry, you know, you're lucky if, and I'm not even mad.
All right. Like I started that in the industry. We were lucky if a BMS front end had USB ports. Um, and we were trying to get that off their systems. And, the way that we would do that would be anything as crude as taking a screenshot of what the values were at point in time and dumping that onto a USB K that's put on.
So some for like graduate engineers desks to do data interferon, or like, we didn't have a USP actually taking literal screenshots with a camera so that we could spreadsheet this stuff and run some formulas and then hopefully figure out, um, you know, figuring out some ways to make buildings from that.
James Dice: [00:03:25] Absolutely. Yep. I did that for a very long time, too. Okay. What'd you do, what'd you do after that?
Leon Wurfel: [00:03:32] Um, So, I guess I wanted to talk about that for just a little bit more, because one thing that was really interesting about that was, um, and I kind of wanted to point out like a bit of a difference between the Australian market and maybe some of the other property Mark might be of interest to some of the listeners, but, so Australia was the first country in the world to have a performance based environmental writing system.
So, as opposed to, like, I would kind of separate all of the writing systems into two broad buckets. One is feature based or performance based. Um, lead would be something that is come from like a feature based background where if you have certain, you know, features, design features or things built into your building, then you get credit points.
Whereas the, system in Australia, it was called. Um, neighbors and rates or performance, and it's something where you have to recertify every 12 months now within the last 12 months, but energy bills or water bills or indoor environment, quality measurements and all that kind of stuff. And that has really been, um, foundational to creating a market expectation around, performance.
People want performance rather than features in the Australian property market. Interesting. which I think is white. You know, you see a lot of Australian kind of pop tech companies. I think it's created a really good environment, a really suspended environment in terms of the lack of expectations around performance, which has then led to people being pretty open-minded to adopt different kinds of technologies that they want to try
James Dice: [00:04:56] really fascinating.
Leon Wurfel: [00:04:57] So, um, yeah, I was really proud of the work that we did. you know, when, when I was an engineering consultant, you know, I was, I was very heavily involved with one specific client. and, at the time, you know, we, felt like we were delivering some really good results for them.
And that was recognized. They were the number one ranked property portfolio in the global real estate sustainability benchmark for three years in a row when that started. so that was something that I was super proud of being involved in. uh, you know, at that kind of point in my career, it was great, but it was very rewarding.
James Dice: [00:05:25] Really cool. Really cool. And so where'd you go next? Do you start playing right after that? Or.
Leon Wurfel: [00:05:30] Uh, I know it's a bit convoluted, like how I got here. Um, bear with me. I think that, while I was working as an engineering consultant, I read a book that people are probably familiar with called the four hour workweek that starting a business on the side, um, and actually did it.
So while I was working full time, I started this hobby business wasn't winter. Um, it was actually, uh, an online retail business, selling, different kinds of supplements around improving, like your, you know, your cognitive performance, other kinds of aspects of your biology. That was a bunch of movements going on at a time called like the quantified self, which was about using different kinds of electronics and stuff to measure and quantify different things about, about your biology and your, and your health and, you know, your performance.
And so I got in really deep with that stuff and, uh, started this online retailer around it. And, you know, one of the first products that we were selling was, I don't know if you've heard of Bulletproof coffee. Yeah. So we were the first ever wholesale customer of like the Bulletproof guys and on this thing up and was really into it.
And, you know, it's kind of a common thread because, you know, it was using data to optimize building performance. And then, you know, it was using data to kind of optimize my own performance. I was really kind of eating mine, dog food, uh, and, uh, yeah, it was great. I mean, it, was something that, you know, it seems like a very, interesting, thing to work on, but really, I kind of ran out of bit of steam with it because at the end of the day, running an e-commerce store is basically running like a physical store that just happens to be online.
So I learned a lot about the business side of things and built up my confidence to eventually stop winter. But, yeah, the purpose wasn't there to kind of keep me motivated to keep, keep working on it.
James Dice: [00:07:11] Okay, cool. I actually surprises the first time that Tim Ferris has been brought up on this podcast because he was a huge influence in making me want to start this, sort of like a year into the nexus podcast.
Now I've been listening to Tim Ferriss podcast who, for those who don't know Tim Ferriss, he was the author of the four-hour workweek that Leon just mentioned, but I've been listening to his podcast for, I don't know, 10 years, however long it's been going on a huge influence in just like the, the reason I wanted to do this kind of one-on-one interview, you know, style of, of a show.
Uh, so that's really cool to know that you, you know, you read that back then. and he just did an episode with guy rods, where guy Roz, from how I built this, just sort of unpacked. Tim's story of the four hour work week and starting the supplement business and all that.
Leon Wurfel: [00:08:02] Yeah. Well that was, yeah, that was my, um, aha moment about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
So it's funny how many people can trace back to that book, being a bright, influential, um, having a very influential impact on like that career trajectory.
James Dice: [00:08:17] Absolutely. Yeah, it made me like really, I would say it made me a little bit miserable in my job at the time, but it kind of sent me along the path that I'm on today, which is, you know, growing and, you know, building and, being an entrepreneur.
So that's awesome.
Leon Wurfel: [00:08:33] Well, congrats on the one year anniversary. Yeah. Thanks.
James Dice: [00:08:38] Thanks. I think, I think Tim's on like episode, 600 now, so this'll be like episode 40 something. So it got a long way to go. Um, cool. So that was a little bit hairy in terms of like managing the commerce site. And so then what happened?
Leon Wurfel: [00:08:52] Well, I was basically working full time and my day job, I was running, my e-commerce business out of hours. And, also at the same time, I just saw this opportunity that so much of the work, you know, like we discussed earlier, right? So much of the work that we were doing as engineering consultants with very high value.
but it just didn't make the base such hard work. uh, you know, by the time you get this, analysis done, What's your spreadsheet at all this time, it could be six or eight weeks out a day. Maybe half those problems are fixed. Maybe just, um, the information wasn't readily available when people needed to do something about it.
By the time you actually done the work. Um, and also, you know, really, you probably need some engineering smiles to understand what you were doing that first time. But after the handle was really just kind of turning the handle over and over again, and seemed like a pretty raw, um, target for, you know, doing better and automating.
So I was, I was working a day job. I was running the e-commerce site out of hours and also working on the business plan for winter. Um, so it was a pretty, pretty intense couple of years. Oh
James Dice: [00:09:55] man. I'm sure. Wow. Okay. And then, yeah. So did you start a bit,
Leon Wurfel: [00:10:01] what, what happened? Uh, so then pointer. Uh, so I, I definitely saw the opportunity. I didn't think I could do it without some funding. So I went and spoke to, some investors, um, originally, um, you know, we, we say the same future vision as you are a mechanical contractor in Australia. Um, ended up being a strategic kind of co-founding investor.
they, they had the same vision. They said, well, we're doing this ourselves. You know, why would we invest in a separate business to do what we already want to do ourselves? That was pretty deflating. So went away, kind of kept doing the other stuff I'm working on the business plan. And then about a year later, I got the call saying that, Hey, we have, we haven't actually got this as far as we wanted to in the past year.
And the only way to actually do this is break it out as a separate business outside of our main business that can prioritize working on this. So, yeah, a year later after originally pitching it to them, it got off the ground.
James Dice: [00:10:51] Uh, that's awesome. And what year would this sibling
Leon Wurfel: [00:10:54] that was 2013.
So the first day of operation, was the 1st of July, 2013. Got it,
James Dice: [00:11:01] got it. Okay. And then you and I met in 2017 at, I don't know if you remember at the haystack connect conference in Tampa, Florida, um, you and Tyson. And there was, there were a couple of other people from, from bueno there.
Uh, so that was the first time I had heard of you guys. And I was super impressed by everything you guys presented, you guys did like four or five presentations, at that event. Uh, we had several alcoholic beverages. Uh, yeah, I've been kind of following you guys ever since. Um, you want to just dive into, I want to save my favorite question for a little bit later.
Do you want to dive into what's point out stand for, um, and why did you decide to name it that.
Leon Wurfel: [00:11:42] okay. So when, uh, um, it stands for built environment optimization. So in the BU from bill and from environment and the optimization, um, very creative. Yeah. And well, I thought that it was pretty clever to have an optimization company and name it, uh, good, really like good in Spanish.
and really what that came from was at the time, you know, very influenced by what I was reading. And I was reading the, biography of Steve jobs and he talks about when he started Apple, those so many literal, like a lot of his competitors when name things that look very literal, so international business machines or micro software.
Right. So, uh, you want something that was a bit different and that was kinda my, way of emulating, someone that I was kind of like interested in at the time. Okay.
James Dice: [00:12:30] All right. And you guys, I know that. At least at some point you decided to build on top of sky spark, what was the reason behind that?
and what's the state of that today?
Leon Wurfel: [00:12:41] Yeah, I mean, we started, and this is kind of part of the, journey that we went on to understanding that, you know, the need for a whole product. so, you know, really, when I started at the time being quite naive, but value that I thought I'd bring to the industry is, Hey, I'll do all these like kind of spreadsheet analysis of, different building systems.
Uh, I know there's really smart ways to identify after it stopped or, uh, A valve is leaking or what have you, or whether, uh, um, you know, chill, water, temperature, reset. It could be optimized to get the chiller efficiency done. So I thought a lot of the value that when I could bring was in coming up with those kinds of high value rules.
And so starting out with, sky spark and building set of rules was, you know, a logical way to kind of, you know, effectively bootstrap, that kind of solution. Right? And so we started out with sky sparks, started out delivering managed services off the back of that, and then very quickly realized that that wasn't enough.
Um, number one, it wasn't enough to get the results that we needed. and, number two, you know, we very quickly decided that being a services business would limit the amount of impact that we would have on the industry. And that's something that's really motivating to me.
Like we've, we're a very purpose driven company. Um, you know, our purpose statement is to, realize the dream of a sustainable future through data. And, as a service company, you know, w what a bottleneck in terms of like our ability to scale, to service the industry. So we also decided we wanted to be a SAS company, too.
Okay. so going to, sorry, going back to your original question, we started out before rules rules are where it's at, let's write some really smart rules. Um, we then kind of realized, we need the, to have scalable infrastructure. We need to be based on the cloud. so that was kind of an infrastructure pace that was happening, like, as we started.
and then, you know, you have a role, I hit on a rule, it's going to do something with it. Right. So, how are you gonna take that piece of information it's valueless and no one does anything with it. So how are you going to take that piece of information, but action. So the first, um, client facing bit of software that we've built around of our own platform was a workflow management system.
So this was like basically a light CMS that sat off the side of the analytics engine and, enable people to track for what was going on and where, and, um, you know, that's kind of evolved over the past few years now. It's, um, you know, it exists for people to help get started with our platform, but in reality we're much more, a much more optimized installation of our, solution is to integrate with whatever an enterprise CMS is already in place.
but yeah, so then we realized we needed to wait a minute of the workflow. We needed to be able to scale our platform. We needed some dashboarding and reporting and some ways to articulate the value of what we were doing and some ways for people to drill down to be able to take a top down approach to, asking questions about the portfolio too.
Uh, and then, one of the downsides about signing up with starting with star spike was that it uses a proprietary, programming language. So, um, we then realized that we needed to do some more work in the data science space that we needed to build an interface, to be able to do some sophisticated data science with hyphen instead.
So, We have over time added the different elements that we think enable us to, get better value, um, to, to get what we made out of the data in terms of the results of analytics and run more sophisticated data science and really like a focus now is in integrating throughout enterprise systems and kind of changing the way people look at this type of solution to being an enterprise software solution, rather than just something that you sell 1 billion at a time.
James Dice: [00:16:13] Absolutely. So, so I mean, how you just described how you got started as the way a lot of people get started. I think a lot of people don't. Move on from how you got started. And so then, you know, they sort of just, get used to using analytics as a tool to provide better services.
Right. And what you're saying is, Hey, we wanted to do something different here. And I think that's really in, like, in my mind, like what's unique about bueno. You guys have decided a long time ago to be SAS first and scalable first and not a services business. Um, so basically what you guys do then is partner with service providers, then that would help implement the tool or building owners that have internal service providers to help implement the tool.
Like how does that work?
Leon Wurfel: [00:16:59] Yeah, totally. So we've got, partners that we work with that, um, No service there they're customers' buildings and they use our, software basically to run their operations center so that they can deliver their services better or live with some other value added services.
And we've also gotten lucky, we're saying those kinds of direct customers who would be vertically integrated in terms of their own facilities management. And they will use our platforms run basically an operation center, to, manage their own buildings better.
James Dice: [00:17:27] Got it, got it. Okay. Um, I wanna, I want to save the whole product conversation.
I have some specific questions around that. Where are you guys at today? Like you started in Australia, you're worldwide now, you know, how many buildings, what stats can you share cause before we talk about how analytics can go mainstream, I want to talk about like where are you at today?
as one of the leaders in this space.
Leon Wurfel: [00:17:50] Yeah. I mean, you know, a lot of those, kind of key stats, like numbers of square feet, numbers of buildings, et cetera. And we used to track like very, religiously, you know, but we actually kind of just turned that on its head because we realized that those look more kind of like vanity stats about our, business rather than ones that were aligned with what our purpose is.
And so the stat that I'm real excited about is that we've got the equivalent of 2% of Australia's energy consumption on represented at home. Wow, that's really cool. you know, I think that, like I could roughly say that we've bought about 2000 buildings, like roughly say we've got about to a hundred million square feet on our platform.
but you know, what we're concerned about is making a difference, and, you know, having some kind of positive impact. so that's the really important metric for us is that, you know, like, let's say we can say 10, let's say 20, 20, 30% of that. That's like a meaningful, with, with our team of people, that's a meaningful change that we can make them meaningful, positive impact we have on the, on the world.
James Dice: [00:18:48] Absolutely. That's amazing. And that's a good jumping off point for like, talking about how analytics can scale. So you guys are one of the leaders, I think in terms of bill, you said 2000 bill or something like that. A couple thousand buildings. That's one of the leaders from my standpoint.
but a couple of thousand buildings is not like there are six, I think there's 6.5 million buildings just in the U S alone. So like, or, or not really scratching the surface in terms of taking your 2% in Australia and. Like getting that under monitoring, uh, have some analytics product worldwide.
Right. So I wanted to talk to you about how this thing can scale how this model that you guys have built can go mainstream. And one of the questions around that was like, how can analytics providers build the whole product and you kind of hinted at how you guys have done it. So you guys have, built a path to get work done, right?
So you, you built a lightweight CMMS, and now you're talking about integration to other CMMS. So could you expand a little bit on what you mean by changing how this product is viewed, changing, how it integrates with other enterprise tools? What do you mean by that? Because I think there's some, some current trends there that, would be good to unpack.
Leon Wurfel: [00:20:05] Yeah, for sure. I'll just take a step back. Um, okay. just to clarify, when I was saying the 2% of Australia's equivalent of Australia, that energy consumption that's if you take out international portfolio and kind of roll it up. Got it. Um, we've got, a lot of buildings in Australia, but we are in, countries around the world.
just to clarify that, but yeah, I mean, like you said, there's a lot to unpack there. I mean, what we, what are we talking about doing with this kind of product it's, um, taking data from operational technology, running algorithms that have effectively codify engineering knowledge and other heuristic or an ML based way.
Right. And then that gives us a piece of information. And from there, um, that's great. It's good to have interesting information, but it doesn't do anything for you unless you do something with it. And, really, the way to ensure that something is going to get done with that piece of information is in making sure that that information turns into an action that is then fed into somebody's hand that in somebody's, workflow in whatever the native way is that they do all their other tasks that they're doing in their job.
So if you've got a technician that's out there, on the side and they've got their, job management system or the service, app on their phone, and they're working through an affordable, there are other preventative or reactive tasks are on that. And then they've got to get out their laptop and login to some other system and remember to do all this other stuff so they can do their FDD or their analytics stuff that it's not, it's never going to work.
You know, you only ever going to appeal then to these. People that are really engaged. I mean, at, the end of the day, it shouldn't matter whether this has come from a preventative task list or not, it matter whether this is a reactive job or something that's been identified with an algorithm should all feed into that workflow in the same way.
And that's why I think it's really important because it's important to get the value. And it's important to make the process of identifying some kind of insights through to action being taken as frictionless as possible.
James Dice: [00:22:01] Absolutely. Yeah. And I think when people approach it from the sustainability driven, you know, like people don't understand that this isn't just an energy efficiency or justice sustainability problem.
It's a workflow problem. It's a people and processes problem. Uh, so it's really refreshing to hear you describe it in that way. Yeah. And
Leon Wurfel: [00:22:23] I think this is another area where I'd like the whole industry has its blind. Does Han rice got tunnel vision in that. You know, really, we said the benefit that what we can deliver is, you know, a sustainability benefit.
But the way to get there is through evolving, like an archaic preventative operational model and making it data driven and preventative. It doesn't just exist on HVAC preventative. Doesn't that there's a hell of a lot of other engineering services that we need to bring along with us to a data driven model, but that's elevators or water treatment or fire systems, all these other systems and buildings, and maybe, getting them to be data driven.
It doesn't necessarily result in direct energy savings, but there are a hell of a lot of, embodied environmental costs in running those systems and nonproductive way. So, yeah, the opportunity, that we have to improve the industry buyer, these kind of technologies. Isn't just unique and native alone to HVAC.
James Dice: [00:23:21] Yeah. And that's another piece that's unique about you guys here too. So I think what I'm hearing from you is you're not just going into a building and saying, let's connect to the Johnson control system and collect all the air handling unit data. You're saying it takes a new way to operate a building a data-driven way to operate a building.
And the people who operate a building, they care about HVAC, but they also care about the elevator. And like you said, fire system and everything else. So you're collecting a lot more data than I think a lot of the other people out there are collecting.
Leon Wurfel: [00:23:55] Yeah. And a use case are different in every system and the value is different in every different system.
You apply this kind of, different framework too. But, um, yeah, I mean, we started a house. Like the rest of the industry, you know, we started out very focused on HVAC and putting an energy made is optimizing HVAC in order to get energy savings. We very quickly saw that the scope of this isn't just limited to that one system.
so now, we've actually got the most, dominant system taught that going to have platforms, actually refrigeration systems. Yeah. So we've, we've got, uh, hundreds of elevators. We've got a water treatment, um, integrations, we've got fire systems. and it's just, yeah, I mean, we can't, we can't afford to leave the rest of the industry behinds and just have such a narrow focus.
James Dice: [00:24:39] Yeah. And, and so, my first thought as like an energy engineer, when you say that it's like, how do I justify like the payback on say connecting to the fire system when there isn't any quick energy savings that I can get from that. So how do you guys make the business case to sort of go through the extra effort on, on those other things?
Leon Wurfel: [00:25:00] Yeah, it's, a different business case. It's a different business case. And, um, I mean, that's those business cases aren't well understood by, you know, the smart building sector or at least this segment of the smart building sector. Because if you look at what they will come from, it generally come from being systems integrators or some kind of BMS backgrounds.
So all this stuff is kind of new to, you know, a large proportion of like this, this segment. Um, but the buyer, I mean, without like giving everything away, right? Like I, our systems like. It's about risks. It's about maintenance productivity. You know, when you're doing like these kind of full functional inspire tests, how many songs do you have to retest before you actually satisfy your, you know, your cause and effect matrix?
and, uh, you know, the risk question can be pretty significant depending on what the regulatory environment is that the country that you're operating in, like in Australia, if there's, found to be a negligence and the maintenance of, uh, fire system  members of the board of directors, of the company that owned that asset can go to jail.
So it's, uh, the risk benefit can be very, very significant.
James Dice: [00:26:03] Yeah. And depending on the workflow, this is how I teach it in the course, depending on the workflow, you then need to trace it back to those. Financial reasons, financial stakeholders for the people that are making the person do that workflow.
Right. Right. And so the business case could be different depending on all the different data streams you're collecting. That's really cool.
Leon Wurfel: [00:26:24] Totally. And then there's two, ways of projects that you want to directly drive actions. Or do you want to just monitor something to say whether the actions downstream or that are being taken in an effective way, measure the performance of like, um, say whatever services you're getting.
It's not two different groups. Yeah.
James Dice: [00:26:41] And how about, like, I feel like a lot of the themes that have come up on this podcast are, is like, there's this transition happening from collecting data so you can analyze the business's costs and hopefully optimize that versus the other side, which is how do I collect data so that can help increase the business's revenue?
Like, is there, are there use cases that you guys are getting into sort of on
Leon Wurfel: [00:27:02] that side? I wouldn't say necessarily that, um, That is a direct correlation between the work that we're doing and increasing revenue. But I would say that there's a direct correlation between the work that we're doing and increasing the enterprise value of the customers that we're working with.
And now we're talking about, um, crossing the chasm and, um, what would need to happen in order to get wider adoption? This stuff, one of the biggest problems is, you know, we're saying a lot of smart building uptake in, properties that are owned by rates. and, you know, unfortunately in that kind of landlord model, that's like incentives that go in the wrong way in order for the landlords, the people that are in the building to actually capture the benefits of what's being delivered.
so yeah, there is friction in converting savings from analytics through to like NOI, which increases your property evaluation. Now, if you look at all the types of businesses that aren't landlord operated and maybe a more vertically integrated. It's much easier to directly tie, savings as much as easy for them to capture the value of the savings.
And, um, when you're talking about these vertically integrated companies, any kind of saving that you deliver, we're not talking in Hawaiian, we're actually talking about, um, you know, earnings ratio, which can be, significantly higher, significantly higher, multiple and value compared to, um, you know, when you get off the, off the cap rate than I know in a one building.
Absolutely.
James Dice: [00:28:17] Absolutely. So you guys are trying to create a SAS product, right? The scalable, I think there's a, there's a catch 22 here, which is, if I'm trying to do only SAS, then I might not be able to drive with the results. If I don't have the service providers out there, you know, actually making it happen in the building that I'm installing in on day one.
Right. Um, How did you guys go from like that initial, we were developing this product and this product, probably not where we want it to be. And so we're going to prop it up with services today. Like that's a huge transition from the other side, which is we're going full SAS. We have this huge partner network built out.
Right. Um, how did you kind of navigate that transition? Because the reason I asked that is because I think that's where we're kind of at, as an industry. Like we need to get a lot more companies kind of thinking about taking that transition, you know, for it to scale.
Leon Wurfel: [00:29:12] Yeah. Uh, so like I said, we started at, uh, as a managed services company and, you know, we knew that the pathway was to transition from services to, to SAS.
Um, so very early on, we looked at ourselves as being the first customer of our software that we were building. Okay. So, um, organizationally, we kind of treated a managed services business as a, customer of our SAS business. Okay. And then, um, enabled as we brought on more and more SAS customers, we have that kind of organizational structure in place, which then, well, number one, we had our first customer when we started, so we're able to get good feedback on the, on the use of our product, but it also meant that we had the structure in place to be able to service SAS customers.
As I came on, you know, we understood the customer success requirements and, we had the expertise in house also help them get them, get the most out of the products. And we had the, had the product and we also had the expertise in using the product and now, so then became a, um, absolutely capability that we had to help others get up to speed with getting results out of the platform as well.
James Dice: [00:30:13] Yeah. And I think this is like a, a lot of the times, you know, Sky spark is one tool here, but I think this happens, industry-wide where if your business is like, you're talking about making a, a strict decision at the beginning, like we have two businesses here, but if you don't make that decision, what you get caught up in is like, we are a services business and we have a services business model, and all of our people are incentivized based on services.
And like you'd never quite grow out of that. Like thinking about it from a product standpoint, but what we need for this thing to scale is somebody to think about it from a product standpoint,
Leon Wurfel: [00:30:51] right? I mean, it's a really different, mindset between a services business and a product business in that. every service contract is a little bit different and afford to have some customization in your product, but you can't afford to have a different product for every single customer that you have.
Right. Um, so yeah, it's definitely a different kind of mindset and different kind of rigor that you need in your business in order to be successful at that, for sure. Yeah. I
James Dice: [00:31:14] think what we're going to see is that the people that have made that scalable product decision early enough, they're going to have a lot better product at some point, than the people that are just, you know, kind of dabbling in it.
So how do you guys think about that today? Like making that decision a long time ago? Like, do you feel like your product is, is way better? You can brag?
Leon Wurfel: [00:31:35] Um, I don't know. How do I humblebrag their response to this question? I guess I would say that, um, my background is as an engineer.
Um, you know, I guess I was effectively, you know, my, my DNA is to be like a user of this type of product. I'm not software engineer, sustainability engineer by trade, a lot of like yourself. but that has meant that, you know, that that goes for the DNA back. Our whole company is that we've wanted to deliver a product that we wanted to make a product that delivers value.
And that's been of key importance to us. You know, we are very conscious of, you know, the conversion like that complete the flow from identifying something and then doing something about it, and then even closing the loop and communicating what the value is of that action that you've done. So, what, in terms of strengths of that business, I think that's, put us in a position where we've been very product focused, um, in terms of weaknesses, you know, we've been very arrogant about like whether we would need to market or have a sales team and all that kind of stuff.
So I think in some ways that's helped us, but in some ways it's ended us, but at least we kind of recognize those kind of weaknesses. Now we know we to time to work on this stuff. That's a
James Dice: [00:32:39] good, humble brag. That's where to point out a weakness just a, after you pointed out a strength.
Hey guys, just another quick note from our sponsor nexus labs. And then we'll get back to the show. This episode is brought to you by nexus foundations, our introductory course on the smart buildings industry. If you're new to the industry, this course is for you. If you're an industry vet, but want to understand how technology is changing things.
This course is also for you. The alumni are raving about the content, which they say pulls it all together, and they also love getting to meet the other students on the weekly zoom calls and in the private chat room, you can find out more about the course@courses.nexus lab. Start online. All right, back to the interview.
Um, talk to me about refrigeration little bit.
so it's not something I have done a lot personally, but I had to do some due diligence last year on refrigeration analytics and kind of that whole world. And I'll say it's fascinating because you know, coming from these bigger buildings, you know, universities, K-12 offices, you have the, you know, the big four and you're used to sort of the dynamics that happen in the buildings industry.
And then you go into the refrigeration side of things and you realize there are different people involved, but all of the dynamics are basically basically like
Leon Wurfel: [00:33:58] a copy and paste like Honeywell or ACI or Schneider or whoever we'd like Dan FOSS and Emerson and it's yeah, it's the same kind of situation.
It's that same kind of market that now. Got it.
James Dice: [00:34:08] Got it. Yeah. So tell me more, a little bit more about that.
Leon Wurfel: [00:34:11] I think one of the really interesting things that changes in the refrigeration space is the scale, you know, and, uh, is the different mindset and is the fact that you're talking like price earnings multiple rather than a NOI multiple with United.
So,
James Dice: [00:34:25] and what do you mean by that? Right, because the buildings are smaller. What do you mean
Leon Wurfel: [00:34:30] by that? Um, more buildings, more buildings, you know, you've got a rate, maybe they've got a portfolio of like what, 20, 30, 50, maybe a hundred buildings. Um, so it talking to like grocery or January to tell them, yeah, hundreds and I guess that's what I mean by scale.
uh, and it's, it's interesting, because, Yeah. I mean, it leads to a whole bunch, it leads to a different approach that you have to take. and, and different mindset, it gets away from the asset management mindset where it's like, every building is an individual asset that I need to manage.
Right. And then that leads people to take an approach where it's like, which I don't think is correct, which is like, it's a, one-to-one like, it's an asset. It needs a team to manage it. It's not an asset and it's a team to manage it. Whereas I think where the industry needs to get to is lack of looking at taking portfolio view and looking at how best to service a portfolio, rather than that kind of one-to-one relationships.
And it's like, there's a tipping point of scale at where it's just like, it's not even like a business case anymore. It's like an IQ test as to like, whether you've got that different operational model in place. But I think like what the technology is doing is. Lowering that barrier to entry that cross site, that tip over point about we're having a centralized operational model makes sense.
And like now we're seeing a lot of rates, at least some of our customers, I don't know about the broader market, but having centralization strategies around their operations, as they're saying the opportunity that comes from technology, the same, the, you know, the, the challenges of that having, um, with the talent pool in the industry, and this kind of black, um, you know, this kind of perfect storm happening with that realizing I think, I think you've talked about this and when I got the podcast, it's like, you've done that super user of the, the analytics platform have the habits of a small team of super users and give them the technology to scale what benefits that can give across your, across your portfolio.
Absolutely.
James Dice: [00:36:21] Yeah, that's fascinating. I haven't thought about it From a portfolio perspective, you know, I've done a lot of grocery stores and just like the traditional, you know, the, the human analytics, like you said. Uh, but hadn't thought about that from the standpoint of bunch of small buildings versus a few big buildings.
Super interesting.
Leon Wurfel: [00:36:38] Yeah. I mean, I think, I think that that's the, that's the point, right? The point of what we're doing in terms of digitizing building technology, you know, you're getting the breaking down silos, you're breaking down silos and your system than you. You're getting all the data into one place and then you're applying platforms across the data.
And then, you know, you don't want to stop there and be shortsighted to stop there. You know, then, then it's about like, given the tools that we've got, how do we have the best structure and using those tools in order to get the most value. So I think it's inevitable. And the goal of the inevitable insight that we'll get to is that, property operations will.
Be more centralized over time.
James Dice: [00:37:18] Absolutely. More digital, more centralized. so talk to me about 2021. So first the products, like where are you guys at from a product standpoint and what are you excited about? Uh, pushing out,
Leon Wurfel: [00:37:29] ah, product? yeah, I mean, I guess like with all this kind of craziness going on, it's been, uh, helpful in that we've really been able to focus in on, our product because you don't have been able to travel anywhere and get distracted by things.
So, yeah, I mean, there's some really cool stuff that we've done. you know, there's a whole bunch of quality of life improvements we've made. Um, you know, it's all, it's all about being the most efficient to get from that insight to the action. So that's that's right, right.
You know, driving more actions with less clicks, you know, every, Seconds and hours that you can, a little more minutes that you can strip out of a workflow means more time. It feels like more actions, which means more value. So that's, that's great. And we've also, built out, you know, an IOT stack.
So we now have that native within our platform. you know, we've been working on IOT projects for a long time, but we've now actually productize that.
James Dice: [00:38:16] Okay. Can you define what IOT stack means?
Leon Wurfel: [00:38:20] Ask us. Yeah, I'll start with IOT and I guess, like with IOT, I just mean kind of instrumentation in a way where you're installing an instrumentation system.
Okay. And in terms of like, what I mean by that stack, um, it's really like what I ties to in terms of making it scalable within it, within our product. It's not something that we're just doing. One-off kind of custom solutions for people anymore. It's something that is now, you know, we, we can do that for everyone who's connected to that platform.
Okay.
James Dice: [00:38:46] So I want a CO2 sensor in this conference room
Leon Wurfel: [00:38:50] and yeah, sure. It just shows up in a hole the same, in the same place with the same, uh, reporting and all that kind of stuff in the same integration without, workload management system and all that.
It's not, it's not a custom project. It's actually part of that, but I've now got it. Cool. Very cool. That's exciting. Um, yeah, there's a whole bunch of interesting use cases. like th that are exciting and, you know, even outside of that kind of traditional commercial real estate space, like we've been integrating with like chicken cookers, bakery, ovens, all kinds of crazy, crazy stuff.
I would never have expected to be doing. When I, when I started out down this pot.
James Dice: [00:39:27] on the IOT side of things, I mean, that those things would probably be included in that, but, uh, what are you seeing around COVID and there's a whole IQ, you mentioned separate solution, you mentioned part of your product, but you're also mentioning what's now, which is a separate solution.
So what I'm seeing is a lot of people are doing, I Q silo, basically adding a new silo. And so what are you guys seeing as far as the use cases around ventilation and people in space and
Leon Wurfel: [00:39:56] that kind of thing? Yeah. Um, one of the very early on through, um, COVID, you know, lockdowns in Australia in particular were very, you know, thankfully that they contained and most of the most part that we still have snapped, locked down every now and then.
Um, and that were very, very strict in Australia. so our. Customers have had to develop their capability to shut down their buildings, hibernate them and bring them back online. and so I guess, like we took a different approach in terms of like what value we could deliver to our customers. Um, you know, what we, kind of saw was that there all these big buildings being hibernated without the operational staff and the technicians visiting them anymore, and that, you know, having some ability to, provide some caretaker kind of oversight over the building systems, you know, look for kind of risk issues or, you know, if you foolish on a building down for months and then switch it all back on how to control for all of these, You know, reactive kind of breakdowns that you can have when you're switching a building back on.
So now we're looking for risks. We're looking for a maintenance optimization, you know, risk in terms of making sure all of the loops are flowing water through them, a minimum amount of time that I need that legs cause it close valves and all that kind of stuff. And making sure that our malls have strong in dots.
So, um, and making sure air handling units and VAVs were opening and, and handling units running a minimum, there are all these kind of, um, making sure that, uh, different parts of plant were being exercising ran. I would running a, at least a minimum amount. Um, so I guess our approach was to support our, Clients on the operation side and allow them to be able to hibernate and then spin back up their buildings and help support them in that kind of capability rather than focusing on the indoor environment space.
And that was kind of our solution to how to, how to help our customers.
James Dice: [00:41:40] Interesting. Yeah. It's, it's crazy how different, you know, areas of the world experience things differently. Uh, yeah. You guys have, have had a much different pandemic than we have had in the U S um, well, I want to close off, this conversation by asking you, my favorite question. And if you said you listened to a couple of episodes before, but you might've heard, heard my favorite question, which is, you know, kind of, what's holding this, this industry back, uh, and why, or why are we behind in terms of technology adoption compared to other industries?
Uh, and, and how can we sort of unlock things?
Leon Wurfel: [00:42:14] Yeah. Why are we so far behind? I don't know. There's so many kind of related, but independent problems that we have in the industry. you know, there was pressure on commoditization. and I'm saying that the saying operations is something to minimize rather than trying to look at what value you can generate out of it.
And that's true all the way through the value chain from from FM. So the contractors sort of vendors that supply, you know, all of the above. Um, so commoditization is a problem, and that kind of cost pressure is going to give you the best, the highest value outcome. Um, and then, you know, you've got all these kinds of the best incentives where, you know, It's the last cycle of a building. The development team has a very different incentives than the people that are going to own and operate the buildings through its life, which then flows down throughout the rest of the value chain about people trying to get stuck in lower, but then make them money, you know, through, through, throughout the rest of the building's life cycle.
that, that whole, dynamic around, trying to optimize for a development budget rather than for last cycle budget, isn't helpful. uh, there's also the life cycle around development of, buildings and the fact that people making technological decisions, like probably years in advance of when the buildings are actually going to be delivered.
Um, and then while you're operating the thing, you know, there's so many people who build their business models around trying to externalize as many of the costs as possible. So. And we got that split incentive point on us and tenants where the owner isn't charged as the capital expenditure for the building.
It doesn't necessarily have an incentive to operate the building more efficiently when they're just going to pass those costs on to the tenants anyway. Or at least if they deliver any savings, you know, they're gonna have to wait for a full lease renewal cycle before they see any of those benefits, like hit their net operating income.
So there's a lot of things that the property industry doesn't have going for it that stifle technology adoption.
James Dice: [00:44:00] Uh, yeah. I, I had the feeling when you were given that list that you could just like go on 20 more. No. Yeah. There's just stuff that all of us deal with every day. Uh, Okay. So given all of those obstacles, you know, how do we sort of unlock things, I guess is my question for
Leon Wurfel: [00:44:19] you? Yeah, I mean, it's like, it kind of raised this before in that, I mean, what we're doing definitely makes sense. What we're doing definitely creates value and solves a problem. And there is this opportunity to evolve.
Like it was operational model will be data driven, it's based centralized, but like you kind of pointed out that market penetration of these kinds of tools is very, very shallow right now. So the very burning question is like, how are we going to go mainstream? Now we're going to cross that chasm and get, get into that, early adoption phase.
So we're not, we're not, there were no any of that. Um, and that the tough, think that the segment of the market is that we're not only, all trying to grow and get my penetration where we're creating the market at the same time, because most of the time people buy this kind of, um, solution.
The first time they bought it. Know, we're really competing with the way that
James Dice: [00:45:06] educated. Yeah. The education is like what you're doing to sell it. You're not competing with usually yeah, exactly.
Leon Wurfel: [00:45:13] The campaign with a spreadsheet, or you might be competing with like a calendar that's suddenly in this week, do this tasks, these tasks, you know, so I mean the addressable market is huge, right?
Like this is like a huge space. We all, we all know that, and if you look at how the like established prop tech companies, like, if you look at the economics and the protocols of the world or the yardies and the MRIs of the world, like these guys have like thousands of employees and there's no, no FDD company out there with thousands of employees.
So that's definitely at a very early point in the journey towards like adoption of this stuff. so I mean, it really comes down to, a few different kinds of problems that need to be solved. One is adoption around, like how, how do we make sure that if I should get results. Doing this stuff. How do we make that more scalable, remove friction, all that kind of stuff.
you know, how do we get that adoption and engagement and how do we remove friction? Um, that's one, that's one problem. And the second is infrastructure. Like this isn't a particular order, by the way, second is infrastructure, the data sitting there ready to put this kind of platform onto. Okay. So, um, the centralization of dollar problem, isn't something that is widely solved already in the industry and normalization speak for now, just about that.
Um, and then there's a whole bunch of use cases in products that need to get solved for like, you know, stuff like how do you have more confidence in and create a white list of issues that don't no longer needs to be triaged by a human before. You're happy to do something about it. Like. I think a bunch of people have made huge mistakes, trying to directly integrate FCD and more analytics systems. And with CMS says I'm creating tens of thousands of work orders a day. It doesn't work. It has to be very selective and not equal with how you're doing this, improve the confidence of each individual.
Cool. Um, so what
James Dice: [00:47:01] you're describing there is like a, like, okay, I have this existing workflow, I've inserted analytics into it, but now really? How do I, re-engineer the workflow itself to start taking advantage of, the new tool, essentially the new insights.
Leon Wurfel: [00:47:15] Totally. Right. Like everyone's thinking about raising tickets.
Duke has got rising tickets. what about like, not releasing payment on a purchase order before you check whether an issue is actually fixed or not.
James Dice: [00:47:26] That's what I feel like we haven't got to that piece of the conversation yet in our industry, which is like, it's a great press practice to look at a workflow and how you're inserting technology into it. It's a whole nother conversation to say that, okay, now this tool exists. What should the workflow be?
Right, right. And totally just re-imagine how the business is doing things right. And we haven't quite, I totally agree that that needs to get that flip needs to happen before this starts to really go, go
Leon Wurfel: [00:47:57] mainstream. Uh, great. And that's totally goes along with that theme of trying to take this from like a billing, my billing solution and turn it into an enterprise solution.
Um, because you know, we've got to change that mindset. This is something I bolt onto my existing operations to, this is a tool that I've built with my operations around. Absolutely extracting the most value on it, but that way, you know, so that's, that's the whole, triage piece. Like how are you going to make triage better out of these platforms?
Um, they don't have to put human set of eyes over all these issues as they occur as the workplace piece. How are you going to get the workflows, the information to where it needs to go in and the most automated way and how you're gonna feed back from those workflows. So you're gonna ensure that you're adding more context into your.
Uh, issues as you're, iterating on them and, and know the whole thing around like, PCRs problem cause remedies, right? Like the, you know, predicting costs, you know, so that's why it's not just a matter of 20 tickets. And it's also a matter of like, what kind of get out of these enterprise integrations that I'm doing.
And then, you know,
James Dice: [00:48:54] an example of that would be like, you have a hundred faults and they're leaking valve faults, and now you start to say, okay, well, 30 of them were, stuck set screws on the actuators, like things like that. And you start to get, is that what you're describing is like you get started back from the field and start to use that to like, make your diagnosis
Leon Wurfel: [00:49:15] better.
Yeah, totally. Get, get, um, don't just get  business data as well. Okay. Yeah. and then, uh, I think you'd probably the paper about this, you know, like taking it from fall detection down to that second day of diagnosis. Right. And I think, you know, this is something that we've been strong advocates for a while.
We would just describe it as like recalls analytics. Right. Um, but, you know, in, in any building, there's hundreds of issues that this is a very, um, laying industry. There's hundreds of issues. there's hundreds of root causes, never going to get to all of them. Um, why do I care? And maybe I've already learned to live with them.
my budget's not going up anymore. All this stuff's already breaking. Like, why do I care? Why am I going to do something about it? So it's about, um, ban on standing. Like if I have a certain goal and my strategy has certain goals on, I need to achieve, then I can start prioritizing, like, you know, based on what kind of outcome that I want to get.
Uh, which might be, it could be energy. That's a common one. It could be reducing maintenance costs could be improving confidence. It could be refrigerant leakage, depending on what kind of like segment that you're in. Um, but it's, I don't think, I don't think it's enough to just go down to like five diagnosis.
Like that's definitely helpful and that saves like technician hours and fault-finding what the, what the issues are. But, um, you know, more importantly, it's like understanding the context and then rolling that back up, like, you know, uh, more context about like why, and then rolling that back up to, you know, what you strategy is and kind of targeting things based on that.
James Dice: [00:50:47] Absolutely. Yeah. So it's almost like another whole nother level around like portfolio level prioritization and yeah, the, the why behind each fault.
Leon Wurfel: [00:51:00] Literally like you've got a goal, um, and just do everything. If you've got a goal to improve this one thing across the portfolio, then just keep going.
Everything else be at you, that's kind of like plugging the lakes or whatever. And then just everything else that just that like be ruthlessly, ruthlessly prioritize on just whatever that one kind of organizational goal is. Like, whatever that public commitment is that you've your organization's made, throw everything else at that.
Just keep everything else going. Um, and maybe you say data do a little bit smarter, but focus all your extra efforts and attention on that goal. Interesting. Okay. so yeah, I think that, I think that there's more layers that we need to go into, um, with FET, as you know, more of these use cases around and integrating with enterprise platforms, you know, all this kind of stuff, there's, there's more to do.
Um, And then we come down to, I guess, two other things we haven't considered. One is like the organizational side of things. I think we've touched on that a bit. Yeah. Having the right structure to support this stuff. Um, and then regulation also plays a part in as well. We were really, we were really fortunate, in Australia, uh, that I talked to that, right.
The sidebar neighbors as like the performance based rating system. So ] very early on the government said they wouldn't lease any buildings that were, this is important for commercial real estate and maybe not so important for other areas, but commercial real estate is the one that has the problems of externalities.
Yep. like in Australia, Yukon lace your building to a government tenant, unless you go four and house to house. And as you're writing performance, energy writing, you have to keep on maintaining. Um, you actually now have to publicly advertise what your energy writing is. Uh, if you're trying to lease your office space, so regulation, you know, you might have your own views about whether the regulation is good.
Regulation is bad, but what it helps do in this case was, um, it helped to cut through those externalities and tie, operational savings and operational performance back to the asset values. Because now if you're not maintaining a certain level of performance, then it means that certain segments of the market open to you to at least two, which has a very significant impact on your property value.
Absolutely
James Dice: [00:53:04] fascinating. Yeah, well, that's what set me down on down this whole rabbit hole of how can we go mainstream? Right. So I posted this on LinkedIn and like the first 10 answers I got were all we have to get a regulation and it's not that I think that's a bad thing. I think it needs to happen a lot faster than it is right now in other parts of the world.
Like for instance, we've had like five cities in the U S that have gone to this, you know, benchmarking ordinance and then, uh, energy reporting after benchmarking. and then, you know, start rationing down the requirements, which is great. but it's not going to get us there as fast as we needed to go.
And so there, there needs to be progress on the product side as well. So it's kind of like an all of the above thing in my opinion.
Leon Wurfel: [00:53:47] Yeah, I agree. I totally agree.
James Dice: [00:53:49] All right. What else you got in your list? Is that, all the way through it? Those are things that'll go it'll make things scale. Well, we, I
Leon Wurfel: [00:53:57] mean, we touched on the organizational structure before, um, like all we've been talking, but I guess I would just like, imagine this, like, Is there like a thought experiment, like imagine like a really high scale, property portfolio with a lot of assets. Imagine this is a property portfolio that isn't able to extend, analyze and pass on all of that costs. And then how would you like optimal structure around supporting that?
And this is, this is why I think centralization is the inevitable. Um, more and more people centralizing their operations. Centralization is the inevitable, destination that we're going to end up. And,
James Dice: [00:54:34] and kind of describe for me what it looks like before centralization. So w what I know is that you have like a local building engineer, local maintenance team, local property manager, right.
And then everyone else kind of looks at that building, like, it's their problem in a way. Right. And, and they might get some reporting coming out from them, but it's really, they're viewing it as like, yes, we have this portfolio, but it's really a bunch of individual entities. And so how does that change to this new model?
Leon Wurfel: [00:55:04] I mean, it's exactly what you described when it's like that one-to-one like one team, one building, and that means that they have a lot of competing priorities. They all say that too, you know, probably don't have the expertise across all of the different engineering systems that they have to manage and got a lot of fires to put out every day as well.
So in a, rather than, um, only having that, one-to-one support them with centralized specialized teams. Yeah, HVAC team, maybe a fire team or something like that. Refrigeration team to support them and use technology to support them in doing their job better in running the asset. Better.
James Dice: [00:55:38] Another piece of that though, is the vendors as well, right? So you might have a different vendor at every building for each individual silo in the building. So the building in Melbourne might have Siemens in the London, said they might have Johnson controls. And so you can't really centralize those guys because they're not going to service each other's stuff.
And if they try to pretend they are going to, it's not a good idea, but I mean, I
Leon Wurfel: [00:56:02] think that go ahead. That's why you need, if you're going to go across the whole plane, got to get a solution that isn't a vendor integrated solution and they an independent solution. I mean, the whole reason for. The analogy I always use is, um, you know, why, why, why are you going to let your kids mop their own home?
James Dice: [00:56:20] Uh, that's that's exactly where I was going with this too, is that it has to be somebody independent, not tied to any specific silo where it's at now. It's good.
Leon Wurfel: [00:56:30] Yeah. Yeah. You got to break down the silos, digitize it and have like agnostic solutions and then have the right structure to get the most out of the, what technology can do for you.
James Dice: [00:56:39] Absolutely. All right. Cool. Now we have the blueprint and the whole world can just follow along with what we've just now that we've solved everything. Uh, cool. Well, this has been super fun. Uh, yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, no problem. Thanks for unpacking it with us and, uh, educating. we'll have to do it again
Leon Wurfel: [00:57:02] sometime.
Anytime, anytime.
James Dice: [00:57:05] All right, friends. Thanks for listening to this episode of the nexus podcast for more episodes like this, and to get the weekly nexus newsletter, which by the way, readers have said is the best way to stay up to date on the future of the smart building industry. Please subscribe@nexuslabs.online. You can find the show notes for this conversation there as well. Have a great day.
Head over to Nexus Connect and see whatâs new in the community. Donât forget to check out the latest member-only events.
Go to Nexus ConnectJoin Nexus Pro and get full access including invite-only member gatherings, access to the community chatroom Nexus Connect, networking opportunities, and deep dive essays.
Sign Up
Nexus Labs exists to move the smart buildings industry forward, without the fluff.
On Wednesday, we send out the renowned (and free) Nexus Newsletter.