1547 – Why Preventative Maintenance is Important with Maintenance Care’s Dan Roberge

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0:58with us right now it's dan roberge dan you are the ceo of maintenance care you're found on the web at maintenancecare.com dan thank you so much for joining us thanks for having me josh and what is maintenance care who do you serve well we do facility management software it's also known as CMMS, computerized maintenance management software. So we help the maintenance teams at every building around the world to manage the building itself. So that's what our software does and manages daily work orders, preventative maintenance that they need to do on a reoccurring basis and asset management, which is also fixed asset cost lifespan of the equipment and just cost of repair, replacement.

1:42So all of that is done within our software. Yeah. So for someone like who kind of might be, I've never had to run that, right? So, you know, my companies have largely been virtual. They've been mostly online based products. So for someone who's maybe not in that world, can you talk about why it's important that you, like, you have to manage that stuff and you have to have pretty good system. What are the consequences of not? And so if you could talk about like just general overview of that for someone who's never had to run a company like this? And then why is it important that you're proactive in how you manage all of this?

2:19Like, what are the consequences of not doing that well? Yeah, that's a great question. It's to the core of what we do when we sell the product is we talk about this exact thing, which is, you know, our three core features deal specifically with the actual return on investment that the customer will get from their building operation. So the first thing is the work order process. Let's say you notice there's a light bulb somewhere, you can communicate that to the maintenance team? Well, if you don't get to problems fast enough, let's say there's water on the ground and you can't communicate that to the maintenance team, there could be some liability issues.

2:51Somebody comes and slips and falls on that water. So just the fact that you have a workflow established to communicate potential problems in the building to the maintenance team, that software can help you mitigate those liability issues. And then just the longevity of your building. So imagine not doing preventative maintenance on a car. It would never last, right? You can never do the old change on a car. It would never actually stay running. So the same is for the building. If you don't maintain all the equipment in your building, they will break down. People visiting the building might get injured.

3:22They might not be able to have cooling air or whatever they need to work there or to live there. And so that's where our software helps maintain just the environment of everybody at that building. And so the consequences are high costs, potential injuries, disruption in the business, all of those things, if you don't do good maintenance into a building, you're going to be faced with all these issues. And why would you want to have a full kind of CMMS as opposed to, I don't know, maybe just throwing things into Google Docs and just setting reminders? I don't know. There's probably some very inefficient ways that you could do this.

4:01Actually, it's funny you say that because most of the customers that come to us are doing exactly what you said, and they've realized it's not enough because there needs somebody, the system has to maintain itself too, right? Like it's not going to do everything by itself, but it needs to keep going despite any human interaction. So for example, if you decided that filters need to be changed every two months, the system needs to keep firing that off. And then there needs to be some processes in place for you to be notified at different levels. If people aren't doing their job, there's compliance issues.

4:30If the, you know, any compliance officer comes on site and says, have you been doing this for the safety of the, let's say it's a long-term care home for the residents. You know, have you been cleaning the HVAC properly? And if you, if you don't have proper documentation, you don't have the proper process, it's that stuff can, can fall through the wayside. So yes, you could set it up on a calendar, but that could also be, that could also just kind of fall apart on you pretty quickly if you're not monitoring it. So a software that keeps everybody accountable is a good way to go for that. Plus it does a lot of things that are very specific to their job on a daily basis.

5:04Yeah. And from what I can tell, we're not talking like a$20 ,000 a month platform here. It's very accessible. Absolutely. Yeah. Our price is so inexpensive. And one of the reasons we're able to stay so inexpensive is because we're self-funded right now. We didn't go out and get investors when we started. It was hard go. It took 20 years to get here. We've only started to become profitable in the last five to six years because we've reached that where we were always spending on our marketing. But the advantage of that is we're able to keep our costs low right now. And so that's where we compete very well.

5:43And that cost savings that we translate to our customers, the return on investment for them is like adding a new person on their team. It's like, you know, it could be$50 ,000,$60 ,000 a year's worth of return on investment at a small cost. even our highest plan is a couple hundred dollars a month. That's it. So we have a free version. People can use that if they don't even have a budget for it and they just want to try it out. They can use the free version forever until they decide to upgrade to have more features and more users and things like that. So what kind of pushback would you get? I mean, you're basically like, listen, here it is.

6:18It's free to start. And then when you want to pay, it's a couple hundred a month. That's it. And you can run and all of a sudden have all this information, just, you know, better managed. You can reduce liability. So why would somebody say no? I think in the past, we've seen people not being used to having the maintenance team be on a computer at all, right? It's just been like, oh, we just run it on the back of it. Exactly. And so that's been, that's been the, it's been changing in the last five to seven years, but in the past, that's what it was. It's just my maintenance person won't be tech savvy enough.

6:55Now we've built our tool to be as easy as possible because of that. So the front end interface, which even with the mobile app now, you know, it's so easy to use. And when we started, there was no app, there was no device that we were doing two way pagers. So I think the only, the only pushback you would get nowadays is if we're using a different software or they want a specific usage that maybe we don't focus on, but typically if they're in need of a software like ours and they're wanting to get one, we're a really good solution for people because of the price, especially. Yeah. You said that it's taken a couple of decades to get to where you are today.

7:31Can you give me just a little history lesson and kind of where maintenance care came from? Yeah, absolutely. So we started off in Toronto, Canada, and we were first just focused on senior care homes. And it took us a long time, as I mentioned, because we didn't have outside investors. We remortgaged our homes and we made that decision early on. And it was a choice that we made, but it took a long time to get to a plateau where we could compete with other software providers that had investors and that were spending a lot of money in marketing. But once we moved into different industries outside of senior care and into the US, which the marketplace is so much bigger, we've doubled our size.

8:13One state is bigger than all of Canada as far as a marketplace. So you can imagine the growth potential there. It comes with a lot of challenges, but that's when we really started to take off about 12 years ago. And then I guess it's just been constant growth for us. We've always had growth and it's been a really good thing because we keep expanding too. We keep expanding not just our marketplace, but the breadth of our products. We have three other products that we now are peripheral products that tie in with maintenance care that people can also get. But the core of our service is maintenance care.

8:51That's the core. Yeah. And today, what do you do to attract and grow business? Yeah, that's changed quite a bit in all the years that we've done. I mean, we're an inbound marketing company. So we really do a lot of social media and interviews like this and also web advertising. And we cultivate our leads through a funnel of giving them real good, effective content, whether it's e-books or blogs or return on investment calculators or anything like that that they can actually use and take advantage of if they're not ready to purchase. But then eventually when they are, they know that this is a trustworthy company that's been around, that's doing, you know, giving them valuable information.

9:35So we're inbound in that we don't call out, you know, telemarketing and things like that. It's all inbound marketing. Once they come to us, then we cultivate them to, you know, to graduate to a paid service. That's our goal. Yeah. You know, you kind of talk about self-funding, you know, inbound. these are all kind of longer term. Like it's not like, I guess if someone's like, no, no, no, we only have four months to get to market. Like they're going to take the investor capital. They are going to dump a lot of money into outbound. Right. And you've kind of gone the other direction. So, so being methodical seems to be a little bit part of your culture.

10:16Well, actually it's funny to say, well, our product is about being methodical. So it is fitting that our actual company is also that way. I think that I would have different advice for people coming up and thinking about how to build a business now that I've gone through this, because this is a long-term sacrifice that takes its toll. And you kind of, you know, there's a lot of stress and there's stress in everything, but when you're, when you're getting an investor, like you said, it could be a short period of time that you're just driving and you're seeing immediate growth because you're investing.

10:43So I, I think you need to know what you want before you start. Right. And, and I wouldn't necessarily say everybody should just do it the way we did it. I mean, it definitely is different for different people and what their goals are. And so, you know, today, I guess the landscape, are there any big elephants in the room that regarding maybe other comparable platforms and, and how would you say you compare? Yeah, you know, the biggest, obstacle we faced is the change in what we call directory listings online. So there's all these services that are like top 10 CMMS, top 10 software that do these things.

11:25They're competing with the individual product itself. So not just in maintenance software, but in every type of software, when you search a software, the first five or 10 things you're going to find are these directories that are not really, they're not really success directories. They don't really say, you know, top five, because they're actually really good. It's the top five typically because they pay us the most amount of money. And so we find that quite a challenge in marketing against those directories, because you're having to pay Google or whoever to market, and then you have to pay those directories to be on top of their directory.

11:58So there's layers to the marketing that costs more. So I think that's definitely a big obstacle to, you know, to software companies these days, especially if you're doing business-to-business advertising, that's another side of things. Consumers, you can get to through different areas like social a little more. Business-to-business is a little different. And those directory listings are an opportunity, but they're also sometimes an obstacle. Yeah, for sure. So today, what does it take to run this company? So, you know, we've, you know, as far as when we started, we were all working remote and that was 20 years ago.

12:39We started that way. And then when, when the pandemic hit, everybody else had to go remote, we just kept doing business. Right. So we established a really good culture and processes and technology in order to keep that functioning, even though we weren't in an individual office and it's never changed. And I think that that's what has made us successful and being able to do a low cost kind of team. We're still a fairly small team, even though we have tens of thousands of customers, we have about 25 employees. And that remote structure has been in place because we've had good processes. We've been methodical about our processes.

13:17And that's important. And I think that's what's been kind of the core success of why we can weather kind of ups and downs of just the marketplace in general. Yeah. Yeah. And then is there, you know, with maintenance carriers, I mean, is it really just kind of capped at$200 for the enterprise or are there other possible places that they, you know, would pay or, you know, there's obviously there's got to be somewhere else that I could dump money into if I'm a company and I need, you know, a lot of facilities management consideration. I have facilities management considerations. Yeah, so our prices, so our$200 a month is if you pay yearly, and you can pay monthly as well, which is just slightly higher.

14:03But the licensing cost is unlimited users. And so you can put as many users as you want, but it is per what we call per facility team. So if you have multiple facilities and multiple teams, we have customers that have 200 facilities that they manage and they have a team at each location, they want 200 licenses. So in that instance, they would pay times 200. There'd be a small discount, obviously, for having that many licenses. So there is the ability to buy multiple licenses if you have more teams, more buildings. But there's also, we have peripheral products. So we have CareClean now that is a housekeeping software.

14:36So instead of just managing the maintenance team, CareClean manages housekeeping teams the exact same way with some additional features that are specific to housekeeping. So it's really valuable for hotels and resorts and long-term care. So they use our CareClean products. So they can start to buy our peripheral products. One Access is a room booking and visitor management software. So they can buy that as part of, it's all building centric. So they can get, and eventually a one-stop solution for all of their needs around the building management itself, not just maintenance. Yeah. And so currently industries that you're pretty big in, what would be some of the most popular ones that you're, that are using maintenance care?

15:17Yeah, I mean, I think senior living is one of the biggest ones, because of the compliance requirements. We all know, you know, if you don't do certain things, you know, it's dangerous for the residents, right? So, so that's been one of the biggest. But we also do a lot of manufacturing, property management, airports, schools, hotels. So we have everything. I mean, casinos, you name it, we have some really nice resorts in the Caribbean. You know, I'm going to plan on visiting soon. Yeah, we're in the non-site visit, I'm afraid. So there's some really, you know, the interesting thing is you learn so much about different industries, because you are always, you need to get to know them intimately to make sure the software works for them.

15:59And so you're learning. And it's really interesting. You know, we know a lot about senior care. Now we know a lot about all these different industries that, that are what their needs and what their pitfalls are and how we can resolve those issues. So that's really interesting. Yeah. Dan Roberge, it's been a good conversation. Your website, maintenancecare.com. For someone who's listening to us, maybe they're doing their due diligence right now. They happen upon this website and now they've heard our conversation. What are the next steps? Easy. You just press get a demo and fill out that form. And we're a non-pressure salesperson team.

16:36So we're going to have a call with you and just talk about what your needs are. And then we can show you the software and that's it. If you want to sign up for the free version, you can do that on your own right from our website as well. Yeah. All right. And that website again is maintenancecare.com. In fact, I was just kind of playing around with the, you have a calculator here as well that can help you see your estimated yearly return on investment. Again, that's right on the front page at maintenancecare.com. Dan Roberge, CEO. Thank you so much, Dan, for joining us. Thank you very much. It was great talking to you.

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