Sunday night, hotel room, week five on the road. I was wiped out — counting down to late Friday when I’d get off the plane in Sarasota, sleep in my own bed, and finally get back into the hot tub. 

A bit of background: my team across SLAM and Roth IAMS is primarily remote, with some hybrid folks who come into our offices in Oakville or St. Pete. I live in Sarasota, so most of my time is split between my home office, an airport, a client’s office, or a hotel conference room. Video meetings have made all of this work, more or less. They’re how we run the business. 

But this past week reminded me of something video meetings can’t do. 

On the agenda was our Quarterly Senior Leadership Team Meeting and a Service Excellence Boot Camp — Service Excellence being the team responsible for our technical standards, tools, and staff training. Because so many people from across North America were coming into the Oakville office, a lot of our local staff also came in to see people they normally only see on a screen. 

For three and a half days, despite being road-worn, I felt energized in a way I hadn’t in weeks. The buzz around the office was so strong you could feel it. And it just so happened that we were issuing bonuses that week. For the first time in years, I was able to give staff their bonuses in person instead of through a rectangular lighted box. 

People kept stopping me in the hall to share how good it felt to have everyone around. For one week, we’d recaptured the lightning in a bottle that is an in-person team. 

The reality of our business is that I can’t manufacture this often. We have around 125 staff in roughly 40 cities across the U.S. and Canada, and a permanent in-person team isn’t in the cards. That’s a feature of how we serve clients, not a bug. But weeks like this one aren’t a consolation prize for the rest of the calendar — they’re an investment, and I’m going to keep making them deliberately. 

Here’s what I keep coming back to, though, and why I felt compelled to write this down in the middle of a series on something else entirely: 

The thing that made this past week possible wasn’t the agenda. It wasn’t the bonuses. It was the building. 

Without a place to gather, none of it happens. The hallway conversations, the energy, the handshake when I handed someone their bonus letter — all of it is downstream of a physical space that someone designed, built, and maintains. 

To my fellow facilities and asset management professionals: the work you do and the buildings you steward are what make any of this possible.  

Buildings are gathering places — for working, for learning, for healing, for living. It can feel some days like you’re swimming upstream, justifying budgets, defending capital plans, explaining to people who’ve never thought about it why the boiler matters. Don’t let it wear you down. Every day, millions of people are feeling some version of what my team and I felt this past week, in places that exist because of you. 

If the last two posts were about how to tell that story to a board, this one is the story. 

I hope it reminds you how much your work matters.