How Do Facilities Leaders Operate Through Constant Change?

With rising equipment costs, labor shortages, a flood of AI vendors in every inbox, and extreme weather that can close a store overnight, facilities teams are absorbing more pressure at once than most operating models were built to handle. At a recent industry panel on operating through external change, four facilities and vendor leaders sat down to talk about what actually holds up when everything around a portfolio is moving at the same time.

Shannon Andersen, VP of Sales at Fexa, moderated the conversation and opened with the thing most people in the room already knew: it’s no longer realistic for facilities teams to build systems for stability. The job now is building systems and teams that can navigate change without losing composure, and that can spot the opportunity inside the disruption. She was joined by Angela Tolmasoff, Director of Facilities & Maintenance at L’Oréal USA, Andrea Garza, Director of Facilities and Maintenance at Valvoline, Grant Baecker, Co-Founder and CEO of Authority HVAC, and Frank Sullivan, Vice President of Commercialization at BrainBox AI.

What Does Modernizing Look Like When You’re Still Scaling Fast?

Valvoline has been adding around 150 new locations a year between company-owned and franchise stores. Garza’s team rolled out a new CMMS platform this year to manage both routine maintenance and the company’s growing remodel and capital project pipeline, but the bigger shift was cultural.

Andrea Garza: “The theme that I think is so important as we modernize and scale is keeping all of our operations partners on the same page, giving them visibility into the work that we’re doing. Not just work orders, but their major plans too. Is their store on a remodel list? Is there a project underway? We’re working to get that system fully stood up so our retail partners have that full visibility. The theme you’ll hear me say throughout today is collaboration. How can we provide the most information without creating confusion, while giving operational partners what they need to fully optimize the customer experience and deliver the value of the brand.”

Why Stay Close Enough to a Customer to Solve a Problem They Haven’t Named Yet?

Sullivan described BrainBox AI’s approach to vendor partnership as staying close enough to a customer’s operation that you see the next problem before they have to name it.

Frank Sullivan: “Our message to the industry, and I know our peer vendors say the same, is stay flexible. There’s an instance with one of our largest customers where we’ve become a more important provider in an area of the business that eighteen months ago we didn’t expect to even participate in. If you’re staying close to your customer’s needs, there’s always a transition happening in what you do for them every day. If you partner well, the communication is fluid and consistent, and you’ll get the opportunity to address further issues for them. The trick is to get ahead of those issues and bring a solution back to your partner.”

The example he pointed to: a customer needed a refrigeration monitoring rollout across roughly 7,000 locations, driven by FDA temperature compliance requirements. Eighteen months earlier, that wasn’t a category BrainBox AI expected to serve. Staying close to the account’s evolving needs turned it into a natural extension of the relationship instead of a missed opportunity.

Can One Communication Style Work Across a Dozen Different Brands?

Tolmasoff’s team supports more than a dozen brands under L’Oréal, each with its own culture and pace. Her approach centers on protecting time and calibrating communication deliberately.

Angela Tolmasoff: “We really live through a simplistic day-to-day philosophy. Monday morning warm-up, carving out core working hours, not scheduling calls longer than 45 minutes, giving at least a two-day notice before putting a call on someone’s calendar. You have to analyze your audience’s preferred method of communication. Is this really urgent? Can you jump on a quick call, or is this an email? All of our brands are so different that it forces you to stay agile, because you have to figure out what to triage and when to act on it.”

She described a deliberate framework for exposing her team to leadership: give managers enough visibility into brand strategy and budget that their judgment sharpens, while insulating them from the kind of negative exposure that erodes confidence before they’re ready for it.

Angela Tolmasoff: “We want to expose the managers on our team to positive exposure. They understand the brand DNA, their cognitive flexibility is alive, they understand the brand’s budget. But we also want to insulate the negative exposure as they’re growing and learning. Uncomfortability is growth.”

How Do You Defend a Growing R&M Line to a Skeptical CFO?

Baecker didn’t soften the pressure facing HVAC providers right now.

Grant Baecker: “The pressures around the HVAC industry, which I think is a very underserved market, have been more challenging than at any point I can remember in the twenty years I’ve been doing this. CFOs see that expense line go up every year, on top of HR issues, OSHA issues, store closures, an employee posting online that they’re hot in a store and having it go viral. That creates pressure that didn’t exist nine or ten years ago.”

His response has been two-pronged: building internal capacity so the CFO conversation isn’t purely about paying someone else, and investing in the technology to prove it.

Grant Baecker: “We’ve had a self-perform footprint we’ve been expanding for ten or eleven years. We started as a subcontracted model, but now we can show a customer we’re performing 60 to 70 percent of that work order load ourselves. Scaling that with quality control is hard, but we’re focused on it. We also just invested in our own work order system that will hopefully let us integrate into different work order and energy management platforms, and any AI platform a customer is already using. There’s still a lot of manual, analog process in this industry that doesn’t have to be there four or five years from now.”

Is Facilities Capital a Cost Center or a Revenue Driver?

Garza’s team has spent the last several years building Valvoline’s first comprehensive remodel program, a shift from a reactive maintenance posture toward proactive capital investment. When an audience member asked whether she pitches capital spend as a revenue driver rather than a savings line, her answer was immediate.

Andrea Garza: “If our overhead door isn’t operational, we’re not serving customers in that bay, maybe all the bays. So the revenue argument is: if we keep our doors working, if we invest on the front end, we drive more revenue, not just in that moment, but by being reliably open. If we have three bays and they’re all working, a customer can go into any of them and have their oil changed in 15 minutes. Quick, easy, trusted, that’s what Valvoline is known for, and that’s what we want to contribute on the maintenance and facilities side too.”

Garza applied the same logic to equipment cost exposure. When certain categories are getting more expensive or harder to source, the better move is often reallocating capital toward the assets most at risk, rather than treating the facilities budget as a fixed line to defend as it stands.

What Actually Builds Trust With a Vendor Network?

For Tolmasoff, transparency with vendors isn’t a policy, it’s a habit built the same way trust is built with her own team.

Angela Tolmasoff: “Transparency is everything. We talk a lot about safe space, even amongst my own team, and we take that same approach out to our vendor relationships. I love a site visit with a vendor. I don’t need a QBR. A scorecard is a scorecard, but herding cats is herding cats, so I can’t base a vendor relationship off a scorecard alone.”

Some of that instinct comes from how she communicates more broadly. Tolmasoff shared that she is deaf in one ear, and described growing up in Deaf culture, where a story gets told straight through without the vocal tone shifts that usually carry emphasis. She’s carried that directness into how she runs vendor conversations: state what’s true, skip the drama, get to what actually needs solving.

That philosophy shows up operationally, too. After signing an MSA with a primary trade provider, she started meeting weekly with their work order team directly.

Angela Tolmasoff: “I meet now with that work order team once a week, and they bring me their one-off, crazy problems, and I spend 45 minutes going over what we’re looking for, how I want them to think outside the box. Within about six weeks, it made a real difference. The asset references Fexa gives me, and my primary provider having an admin login to make their life easier, that’s the kind of model that builds trust. Building that trust, having the transparent conversations, is the best part of this job.”

Which Signals Are These Four Leaders Watching Most Closely?

Asked what part of the business has their attention as uncertainty continues, the answers ranged from talent to timing:

Grant Baecker is deliberately looking past the next few months. He described running the business on if-then scenarios rather than predictions, and staying focused on where the industry will be in four or five years rather than reacting to every near-term shift.

Frank Sullivan is watching two things: the caliber of talent BrainBox AI can bring on as it scales against a long list of open roles, and how much fear around AI, data ownership, and compliance is slowing procurement cycles industry-wide. His ask to operators: bring vendor partners and their compliance teams into those conversations early, rather than negotiating trust into an MSA at the very end.

Andrea Garza is focused on making sure facilities and maintenance keep a genuine seat at the table as Valvoline scales, including building systems like design reviews so other departments understand why certain changes have to route through facilities first.

Angela Tolmasoff is watching an unusually low emergency call volume (running around 10 against a usual range of 35 to 50) while simultaneously preparing to onboard roughly 150 new stores into her portfolio by the end of Q3 through acquisition.

Are Facilities and Marketing Allies or Strangers When Budgets Get Cut?

An audience question about brand and budget produced two very different answers, and both were right for their organization.

Andrea Garza: “Marketing is as important as the rest of the job. I’ve partnered with our marketing team to put measurable KPIs on our remodel program, tracking customer count, NPS, and OSAT. I think marketing is a great partner, often forgotten, on the facilities and maintenance side.”

Angela Tolmasoff: “Our worlds do not collide. There’s no collaboration there. If I need to find budget cuts, I’m turning the music and the lights off, not dipping into marketing.”

Same pressure, same instinct to protect the customer experience, two completely different operating models. Neither is wrong. It depends on how tightly facilities and marketing are wired together in a given organization.

How Do You Make Vendor Trust Visible Across an Entire Portfolio?

Across every theme on this panel, the same idea kept resurfacing in different forms: partnership only holds up under pressure when the information behind it is visible to everyone who needs it. Garza wants operations partners to see remodel status without a phone call. Baecker wants a CFO to see self-perform rates without a debate. Tolmasoff wants her vendor’s work order team working from the same asset data she has, not a secondhand account of it.

That’s the same problem Fexa’s Integrated Vendor Operations work is built around: connecting vendor performance and accountability directly to the system of record, so trust doesn’t depend on who happens to answer the phone that day.

Want to see what that looks like for a multi-site team managing vendors at scale? Request a demo.