How to Turn Your Facilities Spend Into a Revenue Strategy

Most facilities teams operate in a constant tension: proving value while being viewed as a cost center. But what if that entire framework is backwards? What if your repair and maintenance budget could be a direct driver of revenue growth, customer retention, and competitive advantage?

The most successful facilities teams have already made this shift. They’ve moved beyond keeping the lights on to becoming strategic revenue partners. And the data backs up this approach: organizations that frame facilities spending as revenue protection rather than expense management see measurably better business outcomes.

Facilities teams can transform from cost centers to revenue drivers by using a few key strategies: 

1. Reframe maintenance spending as a customer experience investment
2. Implement strategic vendor management
3. Use data to prove business impact to the CFO 

How does repair & maintenance work (R&M) impact sales and customer experience?

Your repairs and maintenance (R&M) budget touches revenue in ways that most CFOs never see on a balance sheet. Let’s consider an example from a major retailer: Valvoline. 

Andrea Garza, Valvoline’s Director of Facilities & Maintenance, recently shared with Fexa about how something as simple as overhead door problems can cause so much more trouble than just maintenance issues. They can also take a direct hit to the company’s revenue. 

“If those fail at a Valvoline store, and we can’t open a bay—or worse, all the bays—we’re not serving customers. That’s a direct hit to revenue,” Garza explained. The strategic insight here isn’t just about fixing what’s broken. It’s about reframing every maintenance decision through the lens of revenue enablement.

Reframing the “Cost Center” Mindset

Consider Valvoline’s partnership between facilities and marketing teams. They integrated brand updates into fiscal planning, ensuring that interior work matches external brand expression. The result? Measurable improvements in customer count, net promoter scores, and overall satisfaction metrics—all tied directly to facilities investments.

Revenue Impact Areas

• Immediate sales loss: Equipment failures prevent customer service
• Brand perception damage: 29% of shoppers abandon brands after one bad experience
• Customer retention erosion: Unreliable service reduces repeat visits
• Transaction value decline: Poor environments decrease spending behavior

The facilities team and finance department should have mutually aligned goals here: keep everything running to protect the bottom line. Fixing an overhead door isn’t an aesthetic goal. It’s a customer-focused one!  

Your facilities are often the first touchpoint customers have with your brand, making R&M decisions critical revenue drivers rather than simple expense line items.

How can smarter vendor strategies protect uptime and unlock revenue?

Traditional vendor management approaches treat service providers as transactional commodities, as opposed to individual people who need to receive clear, effective communication and instruction.  If you’re not managing your vendors effectively, you’re missing massive opportunities for revenue protection and growth.

Working with multiple service providers—the average organization manages at least 20 different providers—creates communication overload and inconsistent performance. With so much potential for fragmentation, you can find yourself looking at increased downtime and reduced sales revenue. 

Benefits of Consolidating Vendors & Automating Workflows

Smart vendor consolidation eliminates several inefficiencies: 

• Reduced vendor fees through platforms that don’t charge transaction costs
• Trade bundling combines multiple work types into a single site visit
• Streamlined communication
• Consistent quality standards across all service providers
• Faster emergency response through established relationships

The revenue impact becomes clear when you consider Garza’s overhead door example. When Valvoline invests proactively in overhead door systems and preventative programs, they increase their ability to serve customers reliably. 

“That’s immediate revenue we’re protecting and enabling,” she noted in a panel discussion at 2025’s Fexa Flex event. When customers know they can consistently get quick, easy service, trust builds—and trust drives volume.

Automated workflows and streamlined communications ensure that critical repairs happen faster, reducing store downtime that directly impacts sales. 

How can preventative maintenance help you avoid lost revenue?

Too many organizations are forced into a responsive approach to maintenance: always frantically repairing the latest problem. 

Reactive maintenance costs three to four times more than proactive approaches, but the revenue impact extends far beyond repair costs. Every breakdown represents potential lost sales, damaged customer experience, and eroded brand equity. Switching to a proactive maintenance approach leads to reduced repair costs and longer lifespans for your assets. 

Preventive HVAC Maintenance as a Cost-Saving Strategy

HVAC provides the clearest example of this connection between preventive maintenance and cost savings. Studies indicate that appropriately warmed or cooled environments lead shoppers to spend 9-11% more. When HVAC systems fail, the revenue impact is immediate and measurable.

Waiting for an HVAC system to break down before taking action to fix it is just putting off a disaster that will lead to expensive repair or replacement costs, operational downtime, health risks for employees, and a bunch of dissatisfied customers–not to mention the possible EPA fines for non-compliance. 

Yes, there are costs associated with major repairs or replacing an HVAC system, but the costs associated with not making those preventive repairs are far worse! 

How do you train store teams to avoid expensive mistakes?

Store team training represents one of the most overlooked opportunities for eliminating waste and redirecting resources toward strategic initiatives.

Poor communication between store teams and maintenance personnel can drive average annual R&M spend to over $52,000 per store. The issue is all about efficiency. 

Organizations often discover that a significant percentage of work orders are redundant or unnecessary. One national retailer found that 7% of their 7,000 annual work orders were completely avoidable through better call avoidance strategies. 

“We see a ton of waste when a dispatch-based work order system routes jobs to vendors without the right trade selected or the right description in place,” said Catherine Barnes at Fexa Flex 2025, Barnes, a Senior Facilities Leader, explained, “Trucks roll out only to say, ‘We don’t handle that.’ Some vendors do that just to check, but that’s wasted time and money.” 

The waste compounds when human error enters the picture. Barnes explained how someone accidentally marking a repair as complete instead of requesting a proposal flows through invoicing when working with national vendors—creating billing confusion and administrative overhead.

Common Store-Level Waste Sources

• Wrong trade selection in dispatch systems
• Incomplete or vague issue descriptions
• Misclassified repair vs. proposal requests
• Lack of understanding about business-critical vs. cosmetic issues
• Poor asset knowledge that leads to unnecessary repair attempts

Barnes identified where the real savings live: training at the store operations level. She explained that: “Teaching them that every work order costs money—and helping them understand when it’s business-critical, what trade it falls under, and whether it’s an asset that should be fixed—that kind of education helps us prioritize the right work.”

Basic Components of a Training Program 

What should your training program include? 

• Basic troubleshooting protocols for common issues
• Equipment operation guidelines
• Emergency vs. non-emergency classification
• Vendor communication best practices
• Documentation and reporting standards

The training investment pays for itself through reduced work order volume and faster resolution times for genuine emergencies. Teams that implement structured call avoidance strategies see reductions in overall maintenance costs while improving operational efficiency across departments.

How do you explain facilities spend to your CFO (so you actually get a budget)? 

Revenue strategy requires narrative strategy. The most successful facilities teams have learned to speak the language of business outcomes rather than operational activities.

Think of it this way, if you tell your CFO that a preventive repair process will increase HVAC efficiency, all they have learned is that you’re thinking about HVAC efficiency. But what if you can tell them a story that shows that HVAC efficiency is also about revenue protection, risk mitigation, and competitive advantage?

You should frame every budget request in terms of business impact. 

Instead of requesting elevator replacement funding, present data showing five years of repair costs versus the cost of a new, energy-efficient model. Document how much revenue has been lost to downtime and how proposed investments will protect future earnings.

Successful budget conversations focus on three core themes:

1. Risk Mitigation: Preventing costly failures and compliance violations
2. Brand Protection: Maintaining customer experience standards
3. Customer Experience Enhancement: Driving satisfaction and retention

Speak the language of a CFO to win that CFO’s support. 

What’s next?

The facilities teams driving the most business value have stopped apologizing for their budgets. Instead, they’ve become strategic revenue partners who use data, vendor relationships, and proactive maintenance to directly impact business outcomes.

This shift requires both operational excellence and narrative sophistication. You need systems that provide real-time visibility into how facilities decisions impact revenue. You need vendor relationships that prioritize uptime over cost-cutting. And you need the ability to translate operational metrics into business language that resonates with executive teams.
Ready to see how modern facilities management can drive revenue growth? Request a demo to explore how Fexa’s platform helps facilities teams become strategic business partners.