Bob: Early on in my career, a very large tech company came
to me and said, “We’ve been reporting the square footage, for five years, of
these eight buildings that we are getting ready to sell and your numbers in
ARCHIBUS are wrong, Bob. Our real estate company came in and gave us different
numbers. You have an hour to tell us where your mistake is.” I said, “Alright,
give me their background data.” Within 35 to 40 minutes, I realized that they
had not calculated the vertical penetration within the buildings properly.
Because it was a whole building, the vertical penetration was included in the
square footage, not excluded. I came back and said, “Here it is, they removed
the vertical penetration which was not proper because it is a whole building
according to BOMA standards.” The VP said, “Well, you’re going to work late
tonight, so stick around. I am going to call the real estate agency.” The real
estate representative came over within an hour. I walked all eight buildings
with him and he agreed with my numbers. It saved that company about $30 million
in their sale within a five hour period.
The second story is another tech company in San Francisco
had purchased a company in Massachusetts. It was right at the Dot Com crash. They
were doing some tenant improvements on the third floor. Those tenant improvements
included 70 cubicles for one of their departments. They had realized from the
vacancy/occupancy report that we had provided that they had 65 vacancies on the
first and second floor. Because it was in the recession that started the Dot
Com crunch they realized they were going to lose a percentage by the time they
were done with the tenant improvements. So they chose to restack the first and
second floors and lease out the third floor. That was a couple million dollars
savings a year and those became revenues at the expense.
A very similar thing happened with a utility company in San
Francisco. We did what was called “spring cleaning”. We went through and
determined how many cubicles were being used for storage of books, servers,
Christmas trees, and other things, and they determined that there were about
350 cubicles that they could recapture. They were able to close a building of
three floors which is about a three million dollars savings per year. It’s
simply because of the data we are providing.
One of our big ones is that we walked the floor for an
insurance company in downtown San Francisco. They had four buildings and when
we got done walking we told them they had a 50% vacancy rate. They promptly
fired us and said we didn’t do the job right. So we went away and two months
later they called us and said, “We walked the floors. We have a 50% vacancy.
You’re rehired to help us restack.” They initially closed three of the four
buildings and and moved everybody into the one building, but then they built a
campus in the East Bay, simply by just tracking that data.
Those are the types of success stories we are used to.
Megan: It’s amazing that you can save companies that much
money.
Bob: Yeah, it is. It’s just by supplying data. A tech
company in Silicon Valley used our MicroView HVAC electrical module to track
the electrical use inside their servers. They wanted to find whether they
needed a new meter, whether they need to bring more electricity in. So we
helped them track all of their assets inside, tied it back to out HVAC electrical
application, which then calculated how much use is being expended. Two things
came out of that. First, they found that one of their new server rooms was
under powered and they needed to provide more. They also needed to get more air
conditioners for BTUs. But the second thing was this was 15, 20 years ago, so
servers were $10,000 per server and one of the VPs had two servers for every
employee that he managed, which was several hundred. The VP goes, “No, that
can’t be true.” We pulled the report out, we walked the server rooms with the
VP, he understood that he had two servers for every employee. He canceled a
forty server order and saved the company about half a million because we had
tracked and had the information.
Megan: That’s amazing. That’s a lot of money.
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