Badreddine Benabdallah 23:15
I mean, at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a there was a lot of discussion about filters and mounds of fresh air and stuff like this. Yeah. But when buildings got locked down, there was less discussion, there was also discussion about the vacuuming filters, when people are doing the cleaning stuff. So I mean, there is a letter of recommendation in terms of bringing fresh air more than what is normally required by law, adapting the type of filters to to prevent from virus spread. But as you said earlier, I’m trying to do read some, some stuff about this and not convinced that this it’s really there is a high risk with the because when I remind them in the beginning of the pandemic, during the February, I was working on a client site with a lot of Italians. And we discovered afterward that you need in Italy. There was COVID cases since November 2019. Oh, wow. Yeah. So I was telling myself, I mean, if there was already cases there, I think these guys were traveling on a weekly basis and coming to the office, and we are sharing the same air handling units. And I mean, the air should be and we we didn’t have any any case there. So honestly, I’m not looking. Yeah, I’m not. Yeah, I’m not convinced. I mean, if when I first heard this, I said well, we will have big problems with with the people at the office. But at the end we had any case. So I said I mean based on the experience, I don’t think there is a really high risk there.
Greg Owens 25:04
Yeah, I agree. I think there would have been a lot more cases of like an entire floor of people getting COVID because the way hv AC works, at least in America, you know, it just goes from one room to the next to the right. It’s we circling? Yeah,
Badreddine Benabdallah 25:17
absolutely. Yes.
Greg Owens 25:19
There’s some fresh air, but most prickled going through filters. Right. And so you, would you I would think you would have seen like, you know, an entire floor of people, all of a sudden sick. And we haven’t, we haven’t really seen that, right. I’ve seen only one case study out of Korea where one person had it. And in the restaurant, you know, it was dead. There was that case study that one. This was a case study where they were in a high rise, and they were on a floor and they they had a map of all the seating and they said, okay, case one, and then all the people around this individual person had gotten COVID. But all the people on the other side of the office did not get it. Ah, yeah, it was pretty, it was pretty clear. Like, like, who got it from where they were sitting in proximity to the person that you know, the ground zero person, let’s say,
Badreddine Benabdallah 26:12
Yeah, but But was there any evidence that they got it from the HVC?
Greg Owens 26:18
No, no, no, no evidence from the HVAC. whatsoever. It’s more more because like it was where he was seated. And he had like the you know, that it was a call center. And they’re talking loudly, okay. And they’re tightly You know, they’re wearing the same sort of headset. Yeah. And they’re right near each other. They’re all in a very, you know, and that was like the clusters let you know, of people. So it’s interesting that we definitely need more case studies on this. I found it fascinating that the cruise industry, um, started operating out of Bermuda, I think it was, and they had a cruise ship that had gotten a bunch of people that said, yes, they wanted to go, this is like a month ago. And they they tested everybody, like a week before, right. And I think it was like 60 or 80 people that was getting on this cruise. And then they tested everybody the day of Right, so the day they were departing the bar, getting onto the boat. And then three days into it, they tested everybody again. And three days into it, they had five people that ended up with COVID. But it was only the five people that were sharing the same room space. Right. So somebody in that had it developing. And so they ended the experiment. But what blew me away? I thought that was fascinating, right? This is a great case study. And we need these kinds of things. And we need to see the we need scientists to go in there and really study what happened there. Right? And and then how to make it better. And what blew me away is like on Facebook, the amount of shaming that this particular cruise company got for even trying. And they were just told like you guys are idiots like what did you expect? That’s so stupid, you should just stay home? And I’m thinking like, no, this is we need people to try to go to the moon, right? We need to try and they volunteer, then they volunteer for it. Right?
Badreddine Benabdallah 28:15
Yeah, I agree. I agree. Definitely.
Greg Owens 28:17
Yeah. Right. is the same with this vaccine. We need volunteers. You know, I’m not going to be first for sure. I’m gonna let let let a lot of people go first. Well, it’s one in one is there’s like nowhere, I think only the you know, I agree that they should do the at risk people. And then of course the wealthiest people are going to get it if they want it. Right. Like we all know that. If they want it sure.
Badreddine Benabdallah 28:44
Yeah. Sure. Yeah.
Greg Owens 28:47
Yeah. So and and you’re your own business. You’re staying. You’re you are you seeing other types of projects come in, you’re doing a renovation for healthcare, which I’ve heard a lot like health care definitely is still. They’ve got a lot of things that they have considerations. Anything else that you’re seeing any trends coming in in your area?
Badreddine Benabdallah 29:08
No, no, I think I mean, even, let’s say feet out or refurbishment projects. A lot of people are putting things on hold, because they’re, I mean, because of the predictability of the of the time we are. We are leaving when you heard all of these guys pushing say that we no longer needed an office and these other guys saying no, we will either be in office, I think the CO working space options will be the next. I mean, as I said earlier, I mean, the miracles that happened like the spread of working from home probably the next miracle to happen would be more people allowed to go to co working space and having the CO working strategy as part of the real estate strategy for more companies, more or less in France we have differentiation between French company And international ones, even about when it comes to the workplace, because in French ones we will, I mean, most of them, I would say, keeping the private office and if even if they’re moving to flex, flex office or open space or stuff like this, or trying to find the hybrid solution, but I mean multinational companies considering I mean, the size of the company, the number of workplaces they have, and offices, they’re always having a different strategy. So an assigned seating and share shared space, much more developed. And I think French companies will, will be a little bit more open to this kind of options, have an assigned seating and co working space? Because I mean, from a financial point of view, I mean, if you could consider that you lived without an office tomorrow, if you’re going to ask for more space or for new offices, they will tell you, I mean, why do you need this? Yeah, so you will have to find the best fit for your needs. And probably one other miracle that might happen is the cause here in France, the leases has to be 369. So you have to commit for at least three years, six years or nine years. And this is for companies. I mean, when you’re developing your real estate strategy, you have to be sure of your headcount growth of your numbers of your needs, how would you support them in a growth or a decrease in your business and staff numbers. So probably if if things changes in the commercial leases, terms, changes, to allow a little bit more flexibility to allow people to have more duration, because it’s also about the financials, because when you commit to a longer term lease, you get better prices, if you commit to shorter term, you get higher prices.
Greg Owens 31:49
And I would think that the like, what I’ve seen here, too, is like what the political environment is of that particular city, right? And so there are places like here in California, where some companies, I’ve seen these companies like say, like, that’s it, we’re moving out of California when this lease is up, because we can’t handle how strict you have been. And we’re gonna go to a state that is not as strict and has more relaxed rules around this, because they, like I just heard, like, in LA, downtown LA that the mayor there has, like, he’ll turn off the power to your building, if you’re not complying to the rules that they’ve set forward. Right. And so some companies are like, Man, you know, in the same thing for me as a painting company, like this didn’t make sense when they told us and it was no fun. Is there like, we want all companies to stay home back in March, right? So including less as a painting company, and we were working on some houses and some buildings that were empty. And we have two man crews. And you know, we’re used to wearing masks and protective gear. So we’re, we’re like, what, why? Why us? Right? Why are you keeping us from going to work? Right? This is crazy. Why did you just do a blanket, this thing makes no sense from all the things that I read about how COVID is spreading and that kind of thing. You know, and then in our, in our case, like, I know, Marin County has 200,000 people. And I forget how many cases we have, but it’s like 60% of the cases are in the Latino community. Right, like, so. Yeah. So it’s culturally right. Can you imagine, right, like, you know, probably in the Japanese community, where they bow to each other, they don’t have as much, then you go to the Latino community, and they’re just all about family and close quarters and living.
Badreddine Benabdallah 33:38
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It wasn’t the same thing in Europe. What happens in Italy, because in Italy, people used to live in, in the family in big families. That’s why the spread of the virus there was so big, it’s, it’s related to culture. I mean, I totally agree with you. Yeah.
Greg Owens 33:56
Yeah. And then and then I just, I love this, that my friend in Montana, so Montana, the state of Montana has a million people. And he lives in a small town of 50,000 people and he has his own companies, five or six employees. And, and he lives on a ranch, right, that’s probably like 400 acres and I don’t know how many Hector’s but it’s a lot, right. It’s big. And his, you know, you can see for miles and miles, right? Like, nobody, and he got tested positive. And when I heard that, I was like, We’re all doomed. There’s no way you’re this one guy that’s out here on a ranch in in Montana, which is super far. This this virus is you know, it’s going through the communities and and and locking onto certain people at times, right? Yeah. Yeah. I’d love to. So I just want I don’t usually go into politics much but because we have you on as an international person here from France. What do you think of the American election here? Did you Pay attention to it. What’s what? Oh, of course, of course, the
Badreddine Benabdallah 35:03
word paid attention to what was happening in the rest.
Greg Owens 35:09
That’s happening over here.
Badreddine Benabdallah 35:11
Yeah, I think Yeah. Well, we don’t know what will happen with Joe Biden, but at least I think we will have less surprises than what we have when Trump. This is for sure.
Greg Owens 35:25
I think that’s the case with Americans too. For a lot of Americans. They’re like, at least we won’t have Trump like shaking things up like yeah, every single week with a new tweet. And cause Yeah, you’re causing a stir and people getting upset. Let’s see, like,
Katrina Stevenson 35:42
entertaining at first.
Greg Owens 35:43
I mean, are seriously entertaining? Yeah. And then it got really mad.
Badreddine Benabdallah 35:51
He can keep entertaining you even when he will not be
Greg Owens 35:56
sad. If that is true, that is true, we still have to figure out how they’re going to go through a peaceful transition, right? Because that’s an amazing thing. That’s, you know, you really I don’t think we as, as Americans, and as, as human beings even can really appreciate this. But, you know, even just 200 years ago, 300 years ago, it was insanely hard to have a peaceful transition of power. And like throughout the entire world, I’m not even like, absolutely, yeah,
look at any country. Every time there was a transition, there was usually a tremendous amount of bloodshed, right. And so, yeah, it’s interesting to sort of watch this unfold And see And see, you know, of course, we all hope and pray that it will just be a peaceful transition. And I’m sure it will be because, you know, there’s a bunch of safeguards that they have in America to sort of help prevent sort of that thing from happening and the separation of the Yeah, and all those things. So, but it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s great to sort of watch it unfold in a way and see if it actually, you know, we have a few more months before that happens. So yeah, I’m sure that the world will be watching that too.
Badreddine Benabdallah 37:09
Yeah, definitely.
Greg Owens 37:12
And I want to, I want to get to how did you get into facilities management, consulting your own business a little bit about your own personal journey into this, because oh, and part of the show is, is I like to just sort of highlight facilities managers, and the people that support facilities managers, and building owners, that kind of thing as a career path for others. Because there’s a tremendous amount of people that don’t even know that this exists. And there’s a wealth of opportunity here. And it can be a lot of fun. And really, past people are really passionate about it. Go ahead, definitely.
Badreddine Benabdallah 37:46
Well, I have an engineering background, I have an engineering degree in Industrial Maintenance that I got in Tunisia, where I’m from, and then I moved to France to study facilities management, I attended the master in in FM and then started to work in this fascinating word. Personally, what I love is that is the mix between the hard and the soft, so soft services, you’re getting in contact with people, you’re the internal clients, and then the hard piece of it, you’re getting in contact with subcontractors, and demons and guys doing maintenance and stuff like this. So I worked for a few companies, I worked for Dell. And then I moved to work for DLL to lead some of their clients sites. And few years after, I mean, when I was working for gll, doing some consulting work for other clients than mines, I was convinced that there is an opportunity to do consulting around this, because in at the time, talking about 15 years ago, there was more or less, no consulting activities in the FM area. And I met a lot of clients, I mean, having a lot of troubles because they are not from this field. I mean, they’re coming from IIT or from HR from finance. They’re having a lot of struggles, I mean, to get the job done to to do outsourcing or to have the right contracts in place there was convinced that there is there was an opportunity there. And five years ago, it was an opportunity to start a consulting business helping nightie company that has been created a few months before to have their new headquarter. I started from from from there and kept them in having a variety of activities. Sometimes it’s about real estate, supporting people to find new offices working with brokers, defining their need, finding the strategy, sometimes leading feed out projects, some other times doing entry management and leading sites from a fan perspective to replace sick people for example, or stuff like this. Yeah. So in going from from a client to another, I built a kind of Good relationship will with all of these clients and kept good connections. And this is feeding my business. I mean, we’re not doing any commercial effort, just gli our clients that are talking about as to other clients. And being as business, my point of view is what could very important skill to do this job is to have a various background, we have to know about hard services, soft services, HR, legal issues happen safety, real estate. So if you’re having all of this background, you, you can manage client expectation, and also you can give the good advice. The other thing is, as I said earlier, I mean, getting in contact with the internal client, with subcontractors with senior VPS and stuff like this. So you have to adapt every time your your speech, and the way you talk to the people you have in front of you. So this is very helpful in getting successful work done.
Greg Owens 41:06
Yeah, there’s a few things that you said in there that are interesting one is that bridging, bridging talking to subcontractors and talking to the company itself, right. And being that sort of being able to speak language of both sides of that, right and I can see that there your hard skills side of you and your engineering and all that stuff can really help and talking to a subject directors, right, you can speak our language in so many ways. And then being able to you know, articulate that to the to the company and say, No, we can’t get this, you know what your idea is just crazy. And here’s why it can’t happen this fast or whatever the reasons are. Yeah, and then and then being a generalist, right, like is such an I see that as being such an important right once upon a time this industry was very specialized, but there there needed to be a generalist, you need to know how the entire building vibe works, right? Both from the the construction of it and internal aspects and all the different mechanisms to how the people will flow through that and interact with the building, right? Because at the end of the day, we don’t want the people that are entering the building to even notice the building, except for its beauty. And its, you know, work environment, right. Like and it’s health that, you know, they want to just, they don’t want to like think about the HV AC system ever. And when they do, it’s usually no.
Badreddine Benabdallah 42:30
I mean, you have to think about the experience. Yeah, I mean, it’s all about the experience. So the workplace experience how they would leave this experience into the building. So this is how you have to care about it. I mean, age, HVAC, maintenance, safety, security, cleaning, and all of this stuff. So you have to consider it as an experience and do you do the job or giving the advice to the client to make the employees having the best experience they can in their workplace. And to your point, being a generalist is it’s a good thing, because if you need special skills in H vac, you can bring an engineering company in H vac and they will provide you with the best in class advice in that topic. And and this is how also we approach things with our clients. I mean, we we say that we are generalist, and when it comes to something really specific about electricals or MEP s or H vac, we can bring a specialist to give the right advice. And then we will help also the client to take the decision helping him to understand what this specialist because sometimes these guys are so special that they cannot make things easy to understand for for a financial guy or something like this. Right. So. So this is how it works.
Greg Owens 43:51
Yeah, no, that’s great. Really good stuff. Well, this has been a pleasure chatting with you here today on a Saturday in December. How to? How would people find out more about you and your company and your services? Would LinkedIn be the best you have a website?
Badreddine Benabdallah 44:07
LinkedIn is the best way to meet we have a LinkedIn web page for the company. The website is still under construction. I mean, it’s being redone. But LinkedIn is the is the best way to keep. Keep contact. Okay, absolutely.
Greg Owens 44:21
So we’ll put your we’ll put that in the show notes so people can find out more about you. Do you know real pleasure talking to you? I hope at some point in my visit, we can have you and I can work together at a little cafe in Paris.
Badreddine Benabdallah 44:36
That sounds lovely. Or if you
Greg Owens 44:38
ever come to San Francisco. I mean like yeah, or about you happy to take favorite coffee spot to if they’ll be my pleasure. And we all survive this thing.
Badreddine Benabdallah 44:48
They will look in one day. Right, right. Yeah. Absolutely wasn’t even there. Yeah,
Greg Owens 44:55
yeah, absolutely. Wonderful, fun discussion here. Thank you so much for coming. for putting this together, and this has been the Watching Paint Dry podcast with Badreddine on it’s so awesome. Good to have you.
Badreddine Benabdallah 45:11
Thank you. Cheers. Take care.
Outro 45:24
Thanks for listening to the Watching Paint Dry podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.