In this episode we discuss how to design and perform owner training so that you don't get deluged with warranty calls.
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Phil Zito 0:00
This is the smart buildings Academy podcast with Phil Zito episode 296. Hey folks, Phil Zito here and welcome to episode 296 of the smart buildings Academy podcast. In this episode, we are going to discuss how to perform owner training. All the resources that are mentioned in this episode will be available at podcast smart buildings academy.com, forward slash 296. Once again, that is podcast dot smart buildings academy.com Ford slash 296. Now, I've been involved in a ton of owner training events. And this is in regards to construction projects. If you haven't been following since episode 283, I really encourage you to go back and listen to those, you'll still get a lot of good stuff out of today. But episode 283 kind of kicked off our construction series. And we went from sales to operations handoff all the way through every step in a project to where we are now, which is the how to perform owner training episode. So the importance of owner training is that it empowers your owner to be able to self execute and self maintain the building automation system. And I want to put you kind of in the mindset of the owner operator, quite often owners, building owners, campus owners, etc. They may only build a handful of buildings in their entire career, whereas we on the construction side are building multiple buildings and installing or retrofitting multiple building automation systems. Every single three months right, you know, we've got the summer quarter, the spring quarter, the fall quarter, the winter quarter. And depending on what time of the year it is you're doing different things. But what remains the same is that there is typically or at least there should be owner training at the end of these engagements. And my hope is that after this episode, you will have a framework of how to perform owner training, you will understand how to assess your owner training requirements. And you will agree with me that doing proper owner training is one of the best decisions you can make. Alright, So picture this you are a facility operator, you've never worked with XYZ building automation system before. It's what your construction team selected because this was a plan and spec contract and low bid was selected. And this is now what you're stuck with. You've worked on ABC system your entire life. But now you've got XYZ system. What are you to do? Well, if your owner training is rather poor, meaning that you know you, the contractor shows up with donuts has no plan just basically lets you peruse through the system has no documentation has no way for you to recall this information, and then send you on your merry way. There's a high likelihood that even if you have the best intentions, you as the owner operator are still going to mess things up. And who are you going to call when you mess things up? You're going to call the installing contractor. And now it's going to be a fight between you and the installing contractor on is this a warranty claim or is this not and usually the installing contractor loses out on these. And this is how construction projects become super unprofitable. So what would an alternative to this look like? Well, it begins with first understanding the operators understanding their intent and desire to operate and understanding their role structure. So the first thing I do whenever I get a project is I look at the specification. And I understand the owner requirements. Now some specifications in section three execution may be section one, which will be general, some specifications are going to clearly dictate what is required of owner training, how many hours what the content needs to be who the audience is, I would say that's about 30% of specifications that have that level of detail. Most of the time, it has your to provide eight hours of owner training, or owner manufacturer training, or owner education, something like that, but it doesn't get very specific. So the first thing I want you to do is understand how this building is going to be operated. Is this primarily outsourced labor? Are they relying on contractors to execute most and they just have a basic building operator? Or do they have building engineers and you know, well trained people who are going to operate the system? Do they have a way of triaging calls? Do they have a troubleshooting process? Or do they just take calls as they come in and they use the building automation system accordingly. Understanding how they're structured and understanding their use cases both for daily operations, as well as for triaging of troubleshooting is going to guide your training. What you should do is, in my opinion, you should have a training for each user type and that user type training should be based on the most common use cases that user type is going to execute. So rather than just logging into the system, and perusing through it and showing them, oh, here's where you click this, what I recommend you do is you say, Okay, I've got a operator engineer, I know their primary use cases are going to be running, maybe it's hospital, you all know, I like healthcare examples. So maybe it's a hospital, and in the morning, they're going to get or maybe they need to get a report on all of the patient rooms that are cold, or hot. And then they're going to triage accordingly. So that would be a use case, how do you set up a report? How do you use a report? How do you dig into the graphics or programming to diagnose issues associated with that report? That would be a primary use case. Maybe there's a scheduling use case, maybe this is a educational facility that has varying hours, and you need to schedule accordingly? Well, in this case, you would implement a scheduling use case, how do you set up schedules? How do you vary schedules? How can you tie schedules to variable events, all these things, your very use case focused. The next thing I recommend after you've done a role analysis, and a use case analysis is you build the training agenda accordingly. But you record the training using high quality recording. Now, this doesn't mean you have to go get an AV setup like we have in our business, which costs 10s of 1000s of dollars. But you do need to have something more decent than a flip phone. Now fortunately, most smartphones these days can record quite well. But you can also pick up a relatively inexpensive recording device for around $400. If you're using this on every project, then it pays for itself very quickly. Because what you can do with this is twofold. One, you can say okay, now we're going to teach you this use case, right? And from there, once you start teaching them that use case, whatever the use case is, you start the video, and you stop the video. And guess what you've just documented a use case, at the end of the owner training, or maybe you know, a week later, you just give them the raw video files, right? The most important thing is to have good quality sound, which is super cheap, super easy to set up and get a $200 Rode mic, that's our eau de. And you can get like an A 700, I think Panasonic camera, those are like 500 $800, you get those two things, you record this training, and guess what you've done, my friends, one, you've done something no other contractor is doing you're recording training and providing it to the owner, you're gonna reduce your callbacks. And like, hey, how do I do this, because you provided that you're going to provide unparalleled service, which you should then pivot into service work, which we will talk about in the next episode, we will talk about how do you pivot into service work. But also on top of all this, you're creating a training library that Now granted, my business is in the business of selling training to contractors and owners. So it doesn't really behoove me to tell you this, but I'm going to be straight with you, you can go and create a training library that you can offer as a service to your customers. Now we've already done this, we've created a course called bas for operators that a lot of our contractor customers use in lieu of owner training, they use this course or they use it in conjunction with this course. And we have seen significant reduction in callbacks and warranty complaints by customers having this video training. But the key point here is you focus in on the use cases. And you go and you create videos based on the use cases and you then provide those to the end customer. At the end of the day. That's the framework, it's super duper simple. All you've got to do step one, identify the training requirements. Step two, identify the roles that are being trained. Step three, identify the use cases for each role. Step four, create a video recording of each individual use case a single recording for each use case, not a four hour recording of every use case, because no one will watch that a single recording of each use case. Then you record those, you put them in a library. And you know what I guarantee you over the course of you know, a couple dozen projects, you're going to see the same use case again and again and again. And guess what that means you will start to get some videos that you're like man, this is a really good video for the scheduling use case or man that is a crap video for the scheduling use case. And you pick the best one and you gradually replace your library and this is what we do until you have a great library of training videos. So you've built out a library of training videos for your own or customers. And then here's the beauty. This is something you can sell as a service. to existing service customers, you can say, hey, we have an on demand training library, it's very simple to go host this on a website, and you can provide it to customers, you can stand up a really simple web page, you literally could pay someone out of a local university who has basic website development experience, you could pay them a couple $1,000 to stand up a basic website, and put your training library on that basic website. And guess what, then you have a training resource that you can provide your because it is still mind boggling to me how working at the large OEMs as well as working with contractors, people do not do this, and they do not sell this asset. I mean, you're creating these trainings, literally, every single month, you're on projects, closing them out creating trainings, why not record them, why not focus on use cases, build out a use case Training Library? Honestly, I'm jealous of all you contractors, because if I was still in contracting, like if I was still doing construction and project work, that would be something I would be doing. If I had known, I was going to start and create a building automation training business, I would have started recording use cases a long time ago for my own use, I don't know if I'd be able to use them because I was working for another company at the time. But I would have done that it would have at least been a valuable resource to the company I was working at. But I will tell you, this is something that no one else is doing. If you do it, and you can take it a step further, this is a bonus step for those of you you can put a QR code or a link on a individual system. And you could provide use case training videos related to that specific graphic or that specific thing that they may be doing. You do this you will stand heads and shoulders above your competition, because let me tell you, folks, talent is the most important resource right now. And if you can help your customers in any way augment their talent or increase their internal capabilities, they will pay for it because you simply have so much expertise, so much tacit knowledge leaving the industry that it is difficult to replace. So I hope this helps you. I really hope you listen to this and implement it. I look forward to hearing your success stories. I look forward to hearing what you do. Maybe you do something that's very unique for training. And I'd love to hear about that. Let us know in the comment section wherever you're listening to this. Thanks a ton and take care
