Multi-Site Facilities Leaders Earn Strategic Status By Becoming Invisible

Facilities management is absorbing more strategic responsibility than it was built to carry. Leaders now shape capital planning, influence user experience, enable multi-site growth, and prove operational value to executives who historically only thought about FM when something broke. The teams that handle this well make facilities feel seamless enough that nobody talks about them. The ones that struggle are often fighting organizational problems they mistake for technology gaps.

Hugo Gervais is CEO and Co-Founder of Urbest, a collaborative job tracking platform that simplifies service delivery for building management teams. Before founding Urbest, Gervais spent five years at ENGIE in M&A, advising on transactions totaling €800 million. He also lectures on finance and entrepreneurship at Université Paris Dauphine.

"The line of excellence would be when you are not an issue. You are not a topic of discussion. If you can open new sites and there is no little wave, everything is smooth, your process is well shaped, people on site understand perfectly how to request jobs, your contractors are in place, they come in time, they get paid in time. That is excellence," says Gervais.

Invisible excellence has a backbone

Gervais compares the best FM operations to well-run accounting departments. If payments flow without issues and nobody has to escalate anything, the process works. The same standard applies to multi-site facilities. Getting there requires heavy investment in the operational backbone: simplified workflows, clean contractor coordination, and request processes anyone on site can follow.

Gervais describes a consistent progression with teams that start from spreadsheets, emails, and WhatsApp groups. "Every day is a mix of pain because they can't anticipate everything. It's always somebody chasing them," he says. Bit by bit, teams begin logging tasks, discover which ones are predictable, and shift toward recurring maintenance. "The workload balances. That is the route to excellence."

Gervais sees AI and sensor data changing how teams time preventive work. "Sometimes you do things every quarter, but you could say, ' Why am I doing it this quarter? It's useless," he says. "With sensors or AI routines, people will be able to make the right preventive maintenance just in time before something could occur. That is where you get the most efficiency for every dollar spent."

What public and private sector FM can learn from each other

Gervais draws a sharp distinction between public-sector and private-sector FM models, but argues each has something the other lacks.

In-house public sector teams bring stability and relationship-based service. "It's almost a family of people you are serving because you are under the same team," Gervais says. Private sector teams push efficiency through KPIs and SLAs and tend to adopt technology two to three years faster.

"People who switch from one industry to another can bring really strong innovation," Gervais says. Private sector practitioners moving into public roles can quickly identify low-hanging efficiency gains, while public sector veterans bring institutional knowledge that private teams often churn through too quickly to develop.

The real barrier is organizational

When asked whether the biggest obstacle to modern FM operations is technology, talent, or something else, Gervais points to a third factor: organizational design. "It is some kind of sociological aspect of management, which is how people decide they want to work together," he says.

Passive technology, like energy sensors, deploys without friction because nobody has to change how they work. "But when you have to recruit new people, you start talking to HR about what to put in the job description," Gervais says. Those are the decisions that determine whether adoption sticks.

Technology increasingly empowers the person on the ground, but Gervais notes a paradox: "The guy on the field is gaining more and more power, and despite this, these are people who are less paid." FM professionals who want to earn more move into supervisory roles and stop doing the hands-on work that technology is now amplifying.

For leaders trying to close the gap between where their FM operation is today and where it needs to be, Gervais says the first step is not a technology purchase. It is a conversation about service levels. "First, clarify what kind of service you want to deliver to your clients, whether tenants or in-house people," he says.

"Be honest about the right level of quality you are inclined to serve, and that will already affect how much budget you are ready to spend." From there, teams can align staffing, define workflows, and select tools. "If you have the right tools to produce data and understand what happens to your equipment, everything flows," Gervais says. "You have trustworthiness. You are not lost."