Watch the Full Conversation (24 min)
No facilities leader gets every dollar the backlog calls for, so the real job is deciding what to fund first and making a case that leadership will act on. Mike Harvey, Strategic Asset Management Consultant at Roth IAMS, did that work from the owner's side at Iowa State University and the Iowa Department of Transportation. In this conversation with Aaron Benz, he describes a capital renewal process built on condition assessments, maintenance records, and space use data, and he explains why the follow-up after the money arrives matters as much as the original ask. The result is a practical playbook for any institution trying to close a deferred capital renewal gap it cannot close all at once.
→ Know what you own before you ask for money. A facility condition assessment, tagged equipment, and an accurate record of the maintenance already done tell you where you stand and how much progress each dollar buys.
→ Rank the backlog by risk. Critical systems such as boilers, heating, and backup power come first, then the roofs and building envelopes that protect everything inside them.
→ Planned work is the cheaper work. APPA estimates that an emergency repair costs about three times as much as the same work done as preventive maintenance, before counting disruption to classes, research, and recruitment.
→ Partial funding still changes a campus. An Iowa State study identified $150 million in recreation facility needs; the team secured $50 million and made improvements that kept paying off.
→ Show leaders the problem in person. A TV reporter who could move an old window in and out of its frame, with daylight showing around it, made the case more clearly than a spreadsheet could.
→ Close the loop. Make the ask, do the work, then report back on what changed, so the next request starts from trust instead of a blank page.
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Hear more from higher education leaders working through capital renewal, facilities data, and space planning. Watch every Bow Tie Tuesday episode and explore reports, case studies, and insights here.
What actually helps universities move the needle in terms of tackling their deferred capital renewal? Welcome to another Bow Tie Tuesday. My name's Aaron Benz, and it is a pleasure to be joined by Mike Harvey today. If you don't know Mike, Mike has long been in the industry for starting at Weber State, Iowa State, Department of Transportation in Iowa, and now he is at Roth. So Mike, man, welcome to Bow Tie Tuesday.
Thank you very much, Aaron. Looking forward to spending a few minutes with you here for Bow Tie Tuesday. And one thing I learned about Mike today is he's also a photographer, so his background is like a real shot that he took, which makes me super jealous. I'd like to be there right now. Yeah, I actually was about this time of year, a couple of years ago, that I was able to be in Yosemite after a conference in Sacramento. So it was a wonderful time to be there and a great three days.
Awesome. So you've been in facilities a while, right? So when we talk about deferred capital renewal, right, as opposed to deferred maintenance, right, this kind of naughty word, what we're really talking about, right, is, hey, what is all the dollars that we're falling behind to support our facilities to make them awesome? And one of the things that I just think is often overlooked is the role of facilities, right? I mean, everybody who comes to a campus, facilities matter. If you're a prospect and you come to campus, like, and there's trash in the street, who gets the call? The facilities person does, right? If there's a leak, the facilities person does.
And so it's our most valuable assets as universities and institutions, and they're in hell, right? Which means we can never have enough money to actually pay for the problems. If we did, every facilities person, man, you'd go and solve that problem. And so the question I got for you, right, through all your experience, maybe to start with, is what do you see as being the important things, right, as a facilities leader to really move the needle, to get the board support you need, where you know you're not gonna get every single dollar that you need, but like, how do you get the important stuff? How do you decide what's important, what's not? How do you tell this story?
Yeah, that's a great question, Aaron, and really important. And as you said, it is pervasive across the whole United States, Canada, anywhere, even in our other continents. Everybody is trying to figure out how to find enough resources. And I will split that up. You talked about capital resources, dollars, but also it's human resources too. But we'll focus at first on the capital side. I think what is really important is to be able to have a good, solid understanding of the facilities that you have. What are their conditions?
And that's often done through a facility condition assessment or building condition assessment or similar name. People do it internal with their own staff. People do it externally with their staff, but really capturing all of that information about where your facilities are. Oftentimes doing tagging of the equipment so that you can go back and keep track of that as your staff's doing maintenance on that equipment. And I think that's a very important part that gets missed by a number of institutions or agencies is not keeping accurate data on the maintenance that you're doing. And so what progress are you making towards that overall total capital renewal situation that you're in? But once you have that information and then be able to understand where your priorities are within your association or your organization, your higher ed institution, where's risk come into it in terms of what's the risk if your boiler goes out? There was a presentation recently on a university that lost their heating capacity and their hot water capacity in February.
So what would most of us do? That would be a dire straits in terms of that situation. We lost the capacity of our backup generator for our facility and particularly our data center. Well, our data center is so important. We could not allow that to go down. So we had to bring in alternate power system as a backup just in case the city power went down.
But understanding not only your conditions, but also the maintenance that you're doing along the way. And then, as I said, how do you prioritize what you're going to spend the money on? Is it the critical systems of the top needs? Or is it also some of those support structures like roofs, exterior of your facility, things that if something would happen with those, there's gonna be catastrophic failure with other things. If water penetrates through from a roof situation or exterior, your HVAC systems are all very important to the structure and the operations. Think about it from your student standpoint, your faculty and staff standpoint, research facilities, athletic events. A colleague shared last week at the APPA U, an event that we're at that they lost power shortly before a athletic basketball game or a football game also came into a situation that someone gave as an example. So how do you able to pivot and be able to address those needs?
And that is through quality staff. It's through having parts and materials available to be able to do that. But also more importantly, how do you put those critical things on priority things on your list and seek the funding in a successful way through your state legislature, through your university or whatever your funding mechanisms that you have to be able to accomplish those critical things. Like you said, I did as well and we've all talked about it. We're never able to have enough money to do all of the things that are on our list, but how do we do the things that are the most important and most important through a prioritization process and also that is fed through reliable data in terms of where our facilities are and what improvements we've made.
The APPA and others talk about if you're doing a responsive emergency repair, it costs three times as much as if you were able to do that as a preventive maintenance activity. And that's not also including the disruption of activities and services and research and all sorts of other things that occur with that and the real possibility of bad PR. And that comes back to us in terms of potential recruitment in the future, retention of both faculty and staff and others within your institution.
So let me ask you this, right? Like if let's say you're a university, you maybe have kind of 200 million, 300 million deferred capital renewal, right? If you were gonna go in and all of a sudden you're head of facilities, what are like the two or three most impactful metrics that you would want to know and monitor and use to tell the story to the board or to understand like, am I operating well within my means? And how do I help tell the story to like either get more funding to fix problems?
Good question. Part of that, I think would be very beneficial to weave in some of your company's information, Aaron, in terms of the CampusIQ ability to be able to understand the utilization as well as other information. When I was in higher ed, we didn't have any systems like yours available to us. So we had attendance counts or door swipe readers or other sorts of things to be able to get that information of the individuals utilizing the space. But understanding the utilization and how important that is to your overall operations and how it's being used. Is it being used as a auxiliary drop -in overflow space or is it the prime location where everybody's going for ABC to be able to get done on your campus? And also understanding your overall, as we talked about earlier, your deferred capital renewal numbers through your facility capital or FCAs, how big is that number? How much are you being allocated a year and how much can you do to make that difference?
Very simply back at the Iowa Department of Transportation, I know we're talking about higher ed, but the DOT, we typically were able to replace one or two facilities a year. We had over a hundred facilities, maintenance facilities, a hundred locations. And so we talk about the typical lifespan of a facility, even 50 to a hundred years. Well, we're not making that, we're making progress, but we're not making significant progress into that hole. And all of the other facilities are getting one year older every year that they don't get the attention. So being able to tell that story and being able to tell that story effectively through reliable data, reliable information, and that's of all different types of information. We talk about that with the clients that we work with at Roth IAMS is what is the story you wanna tell? So the question that you asked me earlier, I wanna be able to tell that story to be able to inform and hopefully influence the leadership that we need more funds to be able to address our capital renewal needs.
And so with that in mind, what information is it that I'm going to need to be able to tell that story and illustrate those facts? I met with our university at Iowa State, I met with our VP for Finance regularly and asking them, talking to them, what is it that is gonna move that needle? What is it that's going to change that influence or numbers to be able to get more support?
We did a full capital renewal or capital needs assessment study with a national architectural firm at Iowa State to look at our recreation facilities specifically and how much in athletics and academic facilities that we shared. And we came away with $150 million worth of need. Well, we'd love to have gotten $150 million as we looked around other institutions, Ohio State or University of Missouri or some of the other Texas A &M in Texas.
Some of those schools were spending that sort of dollar named ballpark in terms of their facility improvements. And that's critical to faculty and staff retention and recruitment and student retention and recruitment. And also the balanced life and also teaching life skills down the road as well. But we were able to get $50 million out of it instead of 150, but we got 50 and we were able to make huge, huge improvements with those dollars and that continues to be able to provide funding for other facility improvements and enhancements along the way. So meeting with your leadership, understanding what is important to them, how they're going to be able to then tell the story to legislators or others to be able to convey them and educate them enough about what it is that's going on on your campus and how do you get that money. And when you do get that money, make sure that you have a plan and then follow up and share and communicate how you spent it and how that made a difference so that they don't just remember, well, we gave them that money and nothing, we didn't never hear anything. Don't just make the ask, make the ask, follow up, do the work, follow up with the work and show them what the difference it was that it made. I gave tours around our facility and went over and showed them the window.
I remember it was a TV reporter came over, relatively petite reporter and went over and was able to very easily move the whole window in and out and see daylight behind it in a 1930 or 1913 facility. And even the newscaster back in the stage said, that's very obvious, there's significant issues there when you can see daylight and you can move the window like that. So be convincing and share things that are gonna resonate with them. Student leaders, the president, the VPs, whoever it is that you need to be able to show them your needs and the deferred capital renewal situation on your campus, that tells a story, that informs them. Now they have a picture and understanding, but then also do the work and then you follow up with appreciation for what we've done and what we could do if you give us some more money. Here's how we make a different group.
Yeah, that's interesting. So it's, I mean, even just kind of picking out some of those pieces, right, as you were talking, I mean, I think part of what I heard is, an FCA, part of what it gives you is like, hey, what's actually a status quo, right? Like what's going on? How much need do we actually have? And let's say there's all these kind of analytic driven components, right? What is our real need, right? There's even that one to $3 example, it's, hey, how much of our work are we doing on a scheduled versus a reactive way and what is that ratio? I think I heard, hey, like benchmarking, that helps move executive teams and leaders and boards because of how, especially if we're being underfunded to show them, hey, we're just so out of gap.
And then I think how you really ended that is what are the emotional stories, right? That you could bring in, whether they're from students, whether they're, no, like, look at this facility. This is a real thing. This isn't just dollars on a piece of paper that we're trying to prioritize. Like here's the gap and here's how we went and solved it and followed up, right? This is what you can be proud about, about what this looks like now, that this wasn't dollars that you don't realize. Like here's what we actually impacted and here's how you can actually see and feel and live out the results. Yeah, and being creative with your funding sources in today's world too.
We were very successful at getting student support. So we had student fee funding as part of the mix and then also balanced with state legislative funding, but also because we collaborated and worked with athletics, we were able to get some athletics funding for things as well. So having that mix around the table and even our, I'll call it our facilities planning management team, we're able to contribute some dollars as well. So having all those different funding sources and who's gonna contribute how much. And sometimes it felt like it was way too much on our side, but sometimes it felt like we got a really good deal because of everyone else stepping up the table and giving some money. And not everybody has the same level of resources each year too, based on their own priorities. But if you can have a team approach and that's back to communicating and working with your clients and customers to really share that story, as you said, but also understanding, get their buy -in and their support of what it is you're trying to do. And probably the other piece of looking at that too is the capital planning piece here, but also weaving in and not forgetting about the operational excellence piece in terms of is it operating in the way it's supposed to be operating?
And then also from a performance stand piece, are we doing things that are making a difference from a performance standpoint? Are we making or reinvesting in things that are gonna require less maintenance and repair down the road or be less costly to maintain or operate energy efficiency? And can we raise our hand and say, hey, we're saving a million dollars through this energy conservation initiatives or new equipment that we're investing. Can we get that million dollars or even part of that million dollars to reinvest in the next phase of energy conservation or new initiatives so that we can continue to lessen our costs and our institutional costs as a whole? Yeah, that's a big one that I would advocate to facility leaders for sure, which is, I mean, we do some of this, right? Especially on the energy side and helping universities save dollars. But as a facility leader, a lot of times I've heard, right? Man, if we save dollars, like I don't get that money back.
And I kind of look back at that and I go, and some do, right? So I go, what's the difference, right? And then if you're not like, hey, that seems like an opportunity that you might have to fight for, right? But like you wanna be rewarded and you wanna tell your CFO, right? Or your, you know, exact team, your cabinet, like when my people can be rewarded and feel the rewards when we save dollars, when we do good for the university, that this actually is a reinvestment back into them to keep doing more of the work. Like that's how we build a snowball effect that actually gets real change. But if all those dollars just leave us, right? Then we're like, well, you know, what's there to be pride, like I guess I saved the university money, but man, my job is just as hard and I feel just as in a hole as I was before.
It's deflating, it really is. It's deflating to the team. And it's back to my team when we were able to get $50 million and not the 150. I understand, we left a lot of money on the table there, but we came away with $50 million we didn't have the day before. And so it's celebrating that. And it's also, you know, you really bring up a great point about the team. You know, we have to look after our team. We have a lot of folks that are nearing retirement.
So how do we still engage them and encourage them to be great advocates and trainers for the newer folks that are coming in before they walk out the door, but also capture that knowledge. And it's not just what they do. Generally speaking, we can figure out what they did because we worked alongside them. What I like to ask them is who did you work with? And who did you work with outside of our immediate team? And did you work with them weekly, regularly? Did you touch base with them when you were at their facilities or other things? But also, who did you work with every six months or once a year or every two years?
Because those are the people that we're not gonna see, we're not gonna know about. And those are the people we really need to be able to know that can help solve problems or address things, or we provide something to them that most of the team isn't gonna be aware of when they've been doing it for 30 years. No one else knows, they just quietly do those things. That's the sort of stuff that we need to be able to capture before they leave. And that's really important to continue and invest in our team and making sure that they feel valued.
It is hard work, but it is extremely important work. And oftentimes, as you started with, who's picking up the trash on the road? And I'll be honest, that's my start in higher ed, my work -study job. I was working in the Department of Residence, working with the facilities team, doing maintenance work, and filling in with the custodians who are gone. That's kind of my start, end of the world, plus my family and father, grandfather, uncles, all been in construction for decades. So it felt like the right thing to be able to do, to be able to work with facilities and very blessed to have a career where I was able to do all of those things for the past four decades. But really invest in your people and the new staff that you're bringing in. Hopefully have a progression, career progressions.
I think that's probably been the biggest titling factor I've seen is how do you have a progression that they don't just come in and, oh, I'm stuck here. I can't move up. So how do you create opportunities for them to cross train and be able to move into the next higher level position and be able to contribute more to the institution and to the students ultimately? Yeah, that I'm a big believer in, like how I would maybe describe that differently is how are we always creating a positive vision of the future, right? Whether it's getting dollars back to do stuff, but also our people. And how do we have a positive vision of the future where the world can feel depressing or get off of your Facebook feed or Instagram or all this other stuff, right? How do we go and do good work? Because that's what it's about at the end of the day, right?
Is we've got institutions where we're trying to, in some broad way, make better humans, right? We want people to come here and get educated, not just intellectually, but socially, emotionally, all of these things. And facilities has a huge role in that, right? And as leaders in facilities, it's like we gotta do that for our own people and that they also have, not just the students, right? But they have a positive vision of the future and what we can empower. Well, and they take pride. And I think that's what my, I was fortunate to be able to work with so many students at the universities, student government leaders, and they take pride in what it is. I arranged for them to go on the steam tunnel tour.
Everybody always wants to go in the steam tunnels and you can't do that, you get arrested. But I arranged with the facility staff to take them in a tunnel tour. And so they could see, and they were amazed. And we could take them in the clean, nice, cobweb -free, water -free type tunnel, but they were still interested in understanding how the under part or the behind the scenes and the ball type of systems work and support the overall institution to make it work. So doing little things like that, going beyond, helping out, staying at the student government meeting until 10 o 'clock at night to answer questions and engage in the students in your projects, just like engaging the president and the AVPs and others in the projects, starting at the bottom and the faculty staff as well, and even their parents. And I participated in the new student orientation sessions every year, and that was taking questions and answers tours with the new students and their parents, because the parents want to be comfortable where they're leaving their children. They want it to be a safe place. They want it to be aesthetically enjoyable, but also functional, operational, and they want to have faith that we're going to take care of their children while they're away from home.
And as you said, provide them with that opportunity for growth and lifelong skill, lifelong knowledge development that is so important to everybody, and also creating a sense of belonging in a place where this is my new home. How am I going to be part of this, whether it's part of the residence or student organizations, clubs, all sorts of things that we're able to provide at a university, and I will, you know, reflecting on this a little bit, and last week at the APPA U group that I was part of with the 3Ts presentation, my higher ed administration master's degree that I got a few years ago, it's not the same that what we're dealing with today in today's university world, but a lot of the undermining core foundation materials are exactly the same, just some of the parameter things have changed around the edges, peripheral things have changed, and so just really excited to see where we've been, but really excited to look to see where we're headed in the future. Even with the challenging enrollment numbers, the budget numbers, it's so exciting to be able to work with our higher ed partners to be able to improve their facilities for all of the students, faculty, and staff that are able to utilize them. Awesome, I agree. I think that's a great place to end, man, which is after we get our data organized and in order, like how do we tell a story, and ultimately how do we have that positive vision of the future? Mike, it's been awesome having you on this Bow Tie Tuesday, and hope to talk again soon. Yes, thank you so much, Aaron, and thanks everyone for making it to the end and listening here. Hopefully I came away with a little bit of learning and reach out LinkedIn connection or anything else.
Happy to help any way we can. Awesome, thank you. Thank you, bye-bye.