I have had the pleasure over my career of collaborating with some of the largest stewards of public sector real estate across North America.  I have also had the equal pleasure of working with many smaller and medium sized customers in secondary or tertiary markets.  This post is going to focus on the “little guys” in our audience. 

In some ways working for smaller, under-resourced clients is more challenging and, in some cases fun actually.  Generally the smaller you are, the smaller the resources (both money and people) that customers have to work with.  The Deferred Capital Renewal and Maintenance (DCRM) needs are the same, but the footprint and influence are just a bit smaller. 

For years, when talking to my smaller customers, especially those in smaller markets, I have suggested many times that instead of competing head-to-head with other public sector entities in their market for the same limited contractor resources, that they get together and develop complementary capital plans. 

When a school district, a municipality and a College all put out a big roofing tender at the same time, the only winners are the contractors who can name their price, especially when the contractor pool is smaller.  Sorry to my contractor friends, but I just don’t see why organizations keep doing that. 

Why not get together once a year, before your planning cycle starts and figure out a way to either work together, or at least not work against each other. 

Working together could look like joining together into a single, larger contract to try to get better pricing from the market.  For example, pool all the roof replacements across multiple organizations into a single contract.  Now we are not only offering a bigger carrot to those that typically play in our market, but maybe we can attract talent from outside of our market if the opportunity is big enough.   

Not working against each other could look like one entity focusing on roofing this year, while another focuses on HVAC and a third focuses on electrical.  Next year we all rotate.  This way we are not all competing for the same limited talent in our market. 

I know it isn’t as simple as I make it out to be, but it is not anywhere near as hard as I hear that it could be from lots of people. But I do want to push customers to think and act differently because when it comes to addressing our DCRM we cannot keep doing the same things and getting the same results. 

It might sound uncomfortable or difficult to do, but you might try reaching out to your neighboring organization and say “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”  You might be surprised by the response.

The next posts in this series will look at common objections (and some solutions) that I hear when I suggest this approach and the potential data challenges of this type of collaboration.