Key Takeaways:
I have walked enough hotels early in the morning to know that buildings are terrible at keeping secrets. They tell on us. A ceiling tile needs to be changed twice in one month. A fan coil gets another service call. One guest room is out of order again. Somebody has put a handwritten note on equipment because everyone knows the workaround, even if nobody has officially called it a problem.
After 38 years in hotels, I have learned that major facility problems rarely arrive with a brass band. They arrive as little inconveniences that everybody gets used to. The dangerous phrase is not, “We have an emergency.” It is, “Yeah, that has been doing that for a while.”
Hotels make the lesson obvious because the building is part of the product every hour of every day. But the same principle applies in an office, school, medical building or any other facility: the building sends information all day long. The job is to notice the signals while they are still cheap.
I do not get too excited about a work order being closed. I want to know whether it stayed closed.
Years ago, I started asking engineering teams which rooms or equipment they were tired of seeing. Technicians know repeat offenders. Housekeepers know which leak keeps coming back. Front-desk people know which rooms generate the same complaint.
A repeat call is telling you something. Maybe the repair is treating the symptoms. Maybe the asset is at the end of its useful life, and we are trying to negotiate with it. I have tried negotiating with old mechanical equipment. The equipment usually wins.
Looking at recurrence over 30, 60 and 90 days gives you a different picture than closure rate. That operator instinct has a formal counterpart: U.S. Department of Energy O&M guidance tells practitioners to use machinery history, root-cause findings and failure-mode impacts when deciding what maintenance work is required.
There is nothing wrong with a temporary fix. Sometimes you stabilize the situation, protect the guest or occupant, and come back when parts, money or access are available.
Temporary repairs are patient. A portable unit appears in the back office. A leak is caught in a pan. A control is bypassed. A door develops a special closing technique known only to staff. Eventually the workaround becomes part of the building’s operating manual, except nobody wrote it down.
I like temporary fixes to have an owner and an expiration date. If the answer has been “leave it for now” for nine months, we should probably admit we have made a capital decision without calling it one.
Facilities teams naturally track downtime. Owners and operators need the next part of the sentence: what did the downtime take away from the business?
Four hours of downtime can mean very different things. A failed ice machine is annoying. A failed chiller in July can take rooms out of service and send the front desk into full-time apology mode. An elevator outage can become a serious accessibility and service issue.
The same thinking applies outside hospitality. Did the outage remove classrooms, workstations, treatment space or critical equipment? Did it create overtime? Facility problems have a habit of sending their bill to somebody else's department.
Preventive maintenance (PM) percentages are useful, but averages can be comforting in all the wrong ways. A building can show 95 percent completion while the 5 percent sitting unfinished contains the items most likely to hurt you.
I would rather know what is overdue than simply how much is overdue. Criticality, age, consequence of failure, and redundancy matter. OSHA’s safety-management guidance makes the same basic point from a risk perspective: preventive maintenance should be routine, and controls should be inspected to confirm they remain effective.
One of the best sources of building intelligence is also one of the least technical: what people keep complaining about.
One “the room feels warm” comment may mean nothing. Five similar comments in the same wing should get my attention.
The same goes for odors, water pressure, recurring noise, moisture and doors that never work quite right. EPA guidance for building managers recommends keeping complaint records to detect patterns, including by linking complaints with equipment-operation and maintenance records.
I like reports. I like dashboards. I like a clean capital plan. But I still want to walk around the building.
A short weekly facilities-and-operations review can be remarkably effective if it stays focused on a few things: repeat repairs, space or equipment out of service, critical PM items that are aging, temporary fixes still hanging around, and complaint patterns that are starting to cluster.
Then make a decision. Fix it now. Watch it with a date attached. Or move it into the capital plan and fund it honestly. What gets buildings into trouble is the fourth category, the one nobody says out loud: keep living with it and hope it behaves.
Buildings rarely send one large memo announcing that risk has increased. They send notes. A stain. A vibration. A recurring ticket. A room that is down again. A technician who says, “I have been telling you about that thing.”
The best facilities leaders I have worked with hear those notes early. They do not treat maintenance as a department that fixes yesterday’s problems. They use it as operating intelligence about what the building is likely to do tomorrow.
And after enough years around buildings, you learn one more thing: When the building has been trying to tell you something, it is usually cheaper to listen the first time.
Marty McDaniel, CHA, is Chairman & CEO of The Northstar Companies and a second-generation hotelier with 38 years of senior hospitality leadership across hotel and resort operations, development, renovations, turnarounds, multi-property leadership and owner/lender advisory work. He has led more than 25 renovations and 12 development projects.
