Keith Ryan is the Co-founder and CEO of ScanQuo, a leading software that is transforming the way pricing is handled in facilities management. After 32 years of working in the cleaning industry, Keith discovered that there was no consistency or accuracy with contract pricing. So, he teamed up with Jeffrey Teglas to create ScanQuo and provide accurate measurements, avoid underpricing or overpricing, and allow businesses to save significantly.
Before starting ScanQuo, Keith worked in various management positions at Kier Group, NationwideFM & BBCS cleaning, OCS Group UK, and Xcell Cleaning.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Keith Ryan explains how his company, ScanQuo, can automate pricing for businesses
- The benefits of using ScanQuo in the facilities management industry
- How was the idea for ScanQuo born?
- Why Keith pursued business development in Croatia
- Keith discusses when he expects ScanQuo to be fully automated
- How Keith built his company’s algorithms
- The details that Keith hopes to factor into ScanQuo
- Keith, Greg Owens, and Katrina Stephenson talk about the current atmosphere in Croatia, Ireland, and the US
- What Keith is excited about in the coming years
In this episode…
Are you exhausted from spending too much time pricing contracts? Do you wish there was an easier way to analyze the cost of your work? With his company, ScanQuo, Keith Ryan is making contract pricing effortless for businesses in the cleaning and facilities management industries.
ScanQuo is getting more scientific about pricing. Using 3D scanning technology, the software takes into account a building’s internal DNA, allowing for a more accurate pricing algorithm. Plus, ScanQuo is fully automated; what used to take months to finalize can now be completed in minutes! Now, Keith is here to share all of the details behind the software.
In this episode of Watching Paint Dry, Greg Owens and Katrina Stephenson are joined by Keith Ryan, the Co-founder and CEO of ScanQuo, to talk about how the company is transforming pricing models in the facilities management space. Keith explains the benefits of the software, discusses his hopes for the future of the business, and talks about how technology is changing facilities management operations for the better. Stay tuned to learn how ScanQuo can help your company!
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Greg Owens on LinkedIn
- Katrina Stephenson on LinkedIn
- McCarthy Painting
- McCarthy Painting Contact No.: 415-383-2640
- McCarthy Painting Email Address: info@mccarthypainting.com
- Keith Ryan on LinkedIn
- Email Keith Ryan: kr@scanquo.com
- ScanQuo
- Jay Hsueh on the Watching Paint Dry podcast
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by McCarthy Painting, where we serve commercial and residential clients all around the San Francisco Bay area.
We’ve been in business since 1969 and served companies such as Google, Autodesk, Abercrombie & Fitch, FICO, First Bank, SPIN, and many more.
If you have commercial facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area and need dependable painters, visit us on the web at www.mccarthypainting.com or email info@mccarthypainting.com, and you can check out our line of services and schedule a free estimate by clicking here.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:03
Welcome to the Watching Paint Dry podcast where we feature today’s top facility managers, property managers and property owners talking about the challenges and opportunities of managing hundreds of 1000s of square feet of real estate and how to beautify and improve their properties. Now let’s get started with the show.
Greg Owens 0:31
Hello everyone. This is Greg Owens with another episode of the Watching Paint Dry podcast where we’re continuing our interviewing of facilities managers, business owners, property managers, and all the different types of support services and contractors that support this incredible leave large and diverse industry. This podcast Watching Paint Dry is sponsored by my company McCarthy Painting. McCarthy Painting has been in business since 1969. It was started by my uncle Fred McCarthy, and I started working when I was 16 years old, actually painting with my uncle. And we continue that tradition today in the San Francisco Bay Area by painting both residential and commercial properties throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. We’ve done in the commercial realm we’ve done lots of different companies, including Abercrombie and Fitch, Chase Bank, sng carpet, we just did a bunch of work for discovery Bay museum here in Marin County, Sausalito, their beautiful spot, and unbelievably perfect weather right now as the beginning of fall starts. And I’m super excited to have Keith Ryan, on our podcast today. He’s so gracious to be here. And he is the co founder and CEO of ScanQuo. Sorry, I have a hard time with certain pronunciations of words. But Welcome to the podcast. Excellent,
Keith Ryan 2:14
Greg, and thanks for having me. And I look forward to having a good conversation. And I know just before we came on, we were talking about these Irish names. action from American diet. This is smaller, right?
Greg Owens 2:24
It is a small world. Yeah. You know, and, like, like, I think I mentioned that beginning here. My, my grandmother was born in Ireland, and then and moved over here when she was 17 years old. And that was like, in night. I want to say 1918 or something like that. And, and, and the Irish. Yeah, my grandfather was born there, too. But my grandmother, she she came over here at a time in America where there were signs in the stores of New York City that said Irish do not apply here. Right? Yeah. Things change. Right? And, and you know, and she, she, she lived to 105 100 years old, she got a little a little like, token from the Prime Minister of Ireland. And she was so excited for that, that she was recognised by the Prime Minister for hitting that age of 100. Really? Yeah. What’s that? Katrina? Sorry,
Katrina Stephenson 3:32
she got four more of those after the first one. For more,
Greg Owens 3:36
I had something like that. Yeah. Cuz it was like, each year after that, she got another one because it was a milestones. Right? Well, and so so Keith, tell us where are you located? Right now you’re just saying a little bit about that. And there’s a little bit of background on your, on what you’re
Keith Ryan 3:55
sure. And it’s interesting. In all you’re saying you got into painting with your uncle at the age of 16. My first job was cleaning at 57. So I’m 29 and a half knows, though a little bit I’ve seen a lot we’ve done a lot. But getting back to your question and where I am, you know, this journey and while it’s been going on with COVID, by being able to quite interestingly still be able to travel around in different countries as a digital nomad per se. But still, we have in our main base from where we’re set up is actually London with the technology, but of course with everything being remotely as it is at the moment, I can pretty much work from anywhere. So so funny. I went to Tenerife last September for two months, and they ended up staying here. And now I’m hearing this for two months. So let’s see. But I suppose one of the reasons farming company here as well as we’re taking on five new developers, we’re having a team building exercise, not installation, but actually where they live in Zagreb. So it’s really exciting and it’s great and over On the right role, per se, and what we’re looking to revolutionize within the contracting industry, and that is contract pricing.
Greg Owens 5:09
Yeah, and I read a little bit of your bio, and I’m fascinated by it. And you’re so your company does contract pricing or helps cleaning companies. Let me see if I get this straight and you correct me if I’m wrong. You help cleaning companies price, the cleaning of a skyscraper or a big warehouse building, or whatever it is by plugging in certain information, and then it spits back out the price.
Keith Ryan 5:40
Absolutely. And not only are we doing it for the cleaning industry, and that’s what we want to achieve. To become the first ever global benchmarking technology within the sector, you know, is fun, glamorous and unsexy and clean is it’s still a quite a big market cap goby, it’s 212 million pounds. So just under $300 million. And then, you know, within what we’re developing with our platform, and our tech, the the brainchild was seven years ago and decided to move to London to bring it to life was like wonder could 3d laser scanning technology cameras that you would see on construction sites? Could they be brought interlink to digitally map the twin. And then could we from there use machine learning and AI to automate the whole process to identify the cleaning tasks, given an algorithm for the task, then give it a frequency and then put the overhead costs to give the exact same benchmark specific DNA for each of the buildings. Because at the moment within the industry, it’s just all done from assumed productivity guidelines per hour. And also just generic floor plans, which is not scientific. And it’s not accurate, because my argument has always been, and this is why we tried to bring our we are bringing the laser scanning to automate, then our platform into the benchmarking exercise is to take into consideration the specific DNA of each building. Because when you price the floor plan in the cleaning industry at the moment, it’s done on square feet per cleaning hour. So there’s no specifics given to the floor plan of what will be in that price. So for example, if you have 100,000 square feet, there could be 100 desks in one office now 100 bins but so forth. But then in the exact same building, there could be 500 tests. So how is the cleaning time ever going to be the same race, it’s not because of the footfall traffic and all the different things that’s going on. So this is what we are bringing to the table. So you know, I’m bringing it back down. And just getting a little bit more scientific about it. If you were to do it manually at the moment, it’s a very time labour extensive process to do that, walk around a building and count every PC monitor every phone, every desk, and so forth, and chair. So we’re looking to automate the whole process from contracts with the normally take months to price to be able to deliver in minutes when we have the product, fully automate users. So we will be going to build a full end to end testing in q1, which is really, really exciting. And what’s even more exciting is that you know, from the CRA space clients, we’re working with two of the top three. And then on the cleaning side as well, we are working with two top 20 companies globally. So we believe with golden age coin we do in becoming that first ever global accepted benchmark because there has never been and I think Greg in them, sorry, what’s his name?
Greg Owens 8:33
Katrina here. I forgot to mention that Katrina’s on the podcast too. And she, she works with McCarthy Painting and helps in all sorts of endeavours here with the podcast and sometimes has questions too.
Katrina Stephenson 8:46
It happens to me. And I
Keith Ryan 8:49
apologize for the words or for him. So I always forget everyone’s name. But yeah, it’s become the first ever as you’re getting back to the first ever global except for benchmarking technology provider, which is very exciting. And then even to Bosch, from that, you know, we are going to build in nine other direct revenue, contract pricing modules into our platform. So cleaning is my domain industry experience. First we have from a scan we can painting and decorating is the perfect one, right? Right. The walls are so you know you don’t have to walk around or look at the building, we can give it to you from the scan and we’ll automate the whole process. Whatever will take you hours or days will be given to you in minutes because we will know the size of the walls and the internals of the building. We will be able to tell you how much pain they will need we’ll be able to tell you how much time it’s going to mean so maybe if says me selling a deal, we open that module we’ll be happy to collaborate guys potentially.
Greg Owens 9:49
always excited about this because I was I have thought about this and I’ve actually talked to some AI companies and they but I’m just not as smarter as us to put the whole thing together because it makes total sense, right? Absolutely.
Keith Ryan 10:03
And just from one scanner, we’re going to do mechanical, electrical, hedge fac workspace utilisation. asset tracking is a very big in the halfword verse at the moment. Yeah, you know, even directly from just doing the cleaning module. indirectly, we already have an asset tracking list because we know how many guests fuels these, the monitors are in the place. So from there, then we just need to type on the serial number where it’s located from the scan, and put the asset value of where it is, and its lifecycle value as well. So the list is endless. You want to do dilapidations, people move into a tentative building, we do a scan, but we retain that data. Because perfect example was the contract I used to manage in London as an operations manager. Before I brought this vision to the early stage, is they had three buildings of offices in central London and we’re moving into one central space. The dilapidations build went in an excess of a million and a half. But they weren’t able to challenge it because they had no data. And can you imagine we just haven’t been charged 10 of that building to be able to tell them what was in there before they moved out, whether it’s three years or five years, 10 years there. The list is endless as me you know, I don’t have to share off the rooftops too much. regard the ugly break a lot of tech records because we’ve already broken a few global first, even just within the machine learning and AI with the cleaning and just automating that process. So we’re very excited for the future.
Greg Owens 11:31
Right? That sounds amazing. Katrina, it looked like you had a question.
Katrina Stephenson 11:35
just so happens that this is such a hot topic, it seems decommissioning of the workplace. We just posted an event last night on zoom about this topic. And this sounds like something they’ve facility managers would greatly need to use for their role.
Keith Ryan 11:55
And it’s just an easy process per se, in the scanning. And you know, I didn’t mention a few minutes ago though, these tripod scanning cameras, the actual evolution of 3d scanning technology is exploding. So it’s really, really exciting because in doing the scanning you know, with those tripod scanning cameras, so taken 12 hours to scan like buffer details in Spearfish. We now have source one from California which is quite close you guys I believe, and does a million square feet a day. And it’s a hell of the companies and give them a dog because we’re going to work with these guys that if they can scan a million square feet in one day, it’s a game changer and really streamlines and automates if not from our process to slickness and the productivity of getting around the building. That helmet is very non intrusive. And it’s we’re all in a theatre, a guy walking around with a pair of glasses well, very cool piece of technology in there. It’s so great, because that really just expedite how many square feet we can scan the day to be delivering even more budgets to our brains.
Greg Owens 12:59
Wait a minute, is it actually a person wearing Google Glasses walking around?
Keith Ryan 13:03
Yeah, I wish I hadn’t. I don’t know if I could share my screen. Can I?
Greg Owens 13:08
I guess, yeah. But you can mention Well, you know, you can you could share your screen. I mean, we can see it and talk about it. If you want to do that’s fine. I’ve never done that, that just give it a brief change things up.
Keith Ryan 13:23
Yeah, just give it a brief talk. Anyway, these guys, they’re super excited because this was a belief developed in Stanford University, this piece of technology. So this is actually our
Greg Owens 13:32
Xian is
Keith Ryan 13:34
in heaven, right. So there is another one it’s called I won’t say the name of it, but it’s it’s too geeky. It’s a kind of a frame around that a frame mounted on your body and over your head. So this is just super super cool. Because I think it was one of the major airports they did with 5 million square feet basically. And they got it down under the five days of super right.
Greg Owens 13:54
You don’t want people walking around the airport with like, you know, they’re already wearing that they’re already wearing masks. You don’t want them to have the full dog, you know, VR headsets on their heads or Well,
Katrina Stephenson 14:05
I’ve seen people in hazmat suits lately. Show in goggles kit, right?
Greg Owens 14:13
That’s That is amazing. It’s like a bicycle helmet with just the google glasses. So it’s pretty, pretty ordinary, but he’s wearing it any and he is wearing a backpack so that that’s all the content. You
Keith Ryan 14:23
know, there is another device out there it’s called the blk to go but it is a handheld device, but it’s just not there yet. I do believe in getting enough. And we’re excited to see these different ones out. But this is the slickest one so far we’ve come across, and it’s great. But then now it’s done in as well. I believe guys in the future, I don’t know, one year, two year or four years with the mobile phones. I actually believe it’s going to get there and I actually believe we can get there to the development of even forms where they are male, but they just want to take an extra lot of time and resources that we’re not focusing on because we don’t have the resources in place. We have some sort of Moment of wanting to work from 3d scanning module one a bridge it into more waveforms. And I believe once we get it to mobile phones and enter, that’s the game changer. So you do the recording, download it onto our platform, it will give you back the recording, it will give you the benchmark results and the cost analysis. And of course, the cleaning will give you the cleaning specification as well. So super cool. And as well as doing as well guys is bringing some credibility to the cleaning industry and contract racing, as it is, can be very Cavalier. In terms of you know, the sales guys are still guys for reasons, you know, and they don’t probably know a lot of lt per se. So a lot of it is how well it’s sold on the the sales page. Whereas this technology is going to remove all of that and give the science and the automation of the benchmark results. And you know, within the benchmark as well, for some companies don’t deliver cleaning companies and corporates want a premium cleaning service. We are factoring in three service levels within the benchmark within our basic service level, reduce frequencies and reduce costs. Or you can have the optimal service level. And of course, then you can have the Rolls Royce premium. So we can we can benchmark against those three service contracts for notwithstanding also guys, we’re also developing a very basic entry level benchmark from floor plans, which just factored in more specifics in the DNA down a person will do from the floor plan are in the next level as well. We’re doing them in CAD files, which is a step up, again from the floor plans. So we’re doing on three different levels. So of course, three different benchmark service levels for three different service benchmarking levels offering from floor bands into CAD, and from the scan as well. So we’re covering all the angles, we think we’re getting it right.
Greg Owens 16:44
That’s amazing. Yeah, we do it we actually do a lot of painting for Autodesk that makes AutoCAD and I’m bet you they’re all over this technology too because you know the faster they can figure out how I don’t know if you’ve ever programmed in AutoCAD but it’s it’s it’s hard to draw just even just a straight line in that programme. And then something like this could be a major game changer. They must be using it. They’re they’re very, very heavily involved in 3d printing now to that company.
Keith Ryan 17:15
Yeah. And you know, it’s getting you You’re right, Greg, it does take a bit of learning and training. And we are very blessed whenever we got Boogie, or we’re just call it picking the right people. The type of people we have are just so talented in what they do, we’re Wi Fi, we’re very blessed. And you know, over dinner recently, about 13 months or so ago, we didn’t really have much running resources. But we were fortunate enough to win a COVID Uk innovation grant benchmarking assessment for for COVID which we’re factoring into our benchmark as well probably not to others a lot of metal because we’re coming out of COVID but it’s still relative per se. And then only recently two months ago we want a second innovation grant from again from innovate UK and this one first one actually was for 250,000 and this one is for 470 so what’s very exciting about it guys is they actually believe we have something we’ve always known and have something so we are stage secrecy and we’re raising an extra 560k in VC money at the moment as well so it’s exciting times and I believe next year if there’s any angel investors out there connected into facilities management we want to go big scale either in a big area next year because we want to build a road or nodules and in doing so we need those extra resources to scale fast so
Greg Owens 18:39
Wow, you’ve got so much going on that is amazing and such a great great timing with all that you have going on in these things there’s so many different questions I have because you know yeah, I mean I’m very excited to see if you can get this to work for us as a painting company can do pricing on you know per floor and get the square footage of all the walls and how many doors and that kind of thing within the facility. Where did Where did this idea for this come up from the you were what was the what’s the history here? I know you mentioned that you were cleaning you were you were doing cleaning at the age of 15 did you how did this all come about? Yeah,
Keith Ryan 19:24
it’s it’s good and I was I was actually going to bring it back to background before you even asked you knows cleaning industry is that it’s high volume, low profit margin business. And of course they started out from the ground up and clean our supervisor, area manager, regional manager, national contracts manager and then national or sorry, I business owners with three national contracts for nine years as well. You know, but I did get disillusioned with industry in 2011 and 2012. In terms of contract pricing was just because of the heat Downtown globally, it was like a race to the bottom. And cleaning pretty much has always been that case. And it should be different now and, you know, you would feel because of course, cleaning is just not an assembler. It’s not a nice to have it’s an essential, right? Because hygiene and you know, it’s it’s so important. So hopefully it can stay on this trajectory of time. Because I do see that other companies, corporates are giving their resources to put into a boy, I can see the film side as well. They’re often looking to quarterback because what’s going to come into into effect very soon with cost problem. We’re going to be able to assess the corpus or how the cleaning companies how to reduce the frequencies accurately because in falling within the contracting industry, because a 10 to 20%. But they don’t know what the resulting outcomes by calling its crash and burn. And then they bring it up 10% of it’s that bad again, no. But getting back. Sorry, Greg, to your question. Yeah. So the brainchild was just disillusioned with the industry, and how the contracts were price. So I actually toyed around with it back home in Cork in Ireland where I was living for about three years. And I said, right, I need to get my ass in gear and get over to London and just give it a fresh change not only from a personal perspective, but a new challenge and approach in business as well. And heading to London. It’s interesting. And it’s so funny. Most people in these major cities are looking to get out into the countryside, whereas I’m coming from green fields in Ireland, and I’m looking to raise into the city. It’s quite the opposite.
Greg Owens 21:41
Yeah. No kidding.
Katrina Stephenson 21:44
And it’s the opposite. It’s it is
Greg Owens 21:47
Yeah. Got what was the last piece?
Keith Ryan 21:51
Or maybe Yeah, that’s the way for now but but maybe it’s not whatever. But I actually do love London so much. Of course, they love love form as well. But I actually you know, when it’s safe to make the move. And so you know of London all the time and what it has to offer just the speed and the ignorance of the audacity of it as well. Right. So
Katrina Stephenson 22:12
you’re in Croatia now? Is that Croatia?
Keith Ryan 22:20
Well, I suppose my my, my one Savior is that we have our new developments that we’re taking on that will be next week. So that’s part of the reason probably being down.
Greg Owens 22:30
Wait a minute, did you? Did you pick the developers from Croatia because they’re in Croatia, because that’s where good developers are coming from right now.
Keith Ryan 22:39
Yeah, so interesting. And always tonnes of tech developers here started in India did that and went a bit around the world and some other countries to American back around the desk push. These guys we believe are just a hidden gem down here. They’re so talented, and great people, great work ethic. And it’s you know, we had some other developers recently, these guys were doing 10 hours while they talk on a device to do in 48 hours, and also at 35% less costly as well than what we were paying. It’s there. I’ve only ever
Katrina Stephenson 23:11
heard great things about Croatia seriously. I’m not just saying that because they’re in Split but I
Keith Ryan 23:16
owe the whole damage to the course they are all as you know Beyonds they are told by someone the other day I was down here and Michael Jordan or you know Vaughn or they all have coming down here on their yachts because the whole coastline is just a we’re doing a bit of a promotion and it got Virgo ratio they’re listening but it is awesome just the whole scenery and you know just in Dubrovnik alone like it is just you know Game of Thrones like it is what it is it’s mega incredible so yes I’m sorry
Greg Owens 23:52
No that’s incredible it’s because I also Croatia has been one of the only countries during COVID here that Americans can travel to for a long time right like where does a lot of travel blocks to other countries but Croatia was like wide open for a lot of my friends went there a lot of my tech developing friends went to Croatia
Keith Ryan 24:12
Wow. And they all say the same thing.
Greg Owens 24:15
Yeah, well different different different types of people like some of them are worker bees and they went there just to you know to play and and also work from Croatia being digital nomads like yourself, and then then then a few of my friends have high tech companies and they’ve gone they’re just similar to what you’re doing is and finding developers and that kind of stuff because they had said the same thing. They you know, they they they’d found a good workforce there where it’s been really challenging at least here in the United States. I don’t know how it is the rest of the world but uh, there it’s been an incredible challenge to find new good employees new just to any employees in Iran always like we see. Restaurants are closed at airports because they can’t get enough People in it’s been really challenging.
Keith Ryan 25:03