 Good morning, Jim Walters. Good morning. Community matters with Jim Walters. Hi, Jim. Hey, how are you doing Jay? Good to see you buddy. Yeah, thanks for coming around. I know Jim for about 30 years. He's been running Hawaii building maintenance for about 200 years now. It doesn't show yet Jim. Well, it's because I've got a, I've got a son is now the president and chief operating work. It's about time. Yeah. Why building maintenance is my recollection biggest maintenance building maintenance company in town and that means that means you are dealing with a whole bunch of office buildings and other properties to keep them cleaned. Can you tell us how a building maintenance company works one like yours. As far as in the covert or just regular regular. Well, our company provides several services, one being the janitorial day for services, the night cleaning. We also have about 200 people on staff that are in our billing engineering department that operate the actual physical properties themselves as far as the equipment. We also have an HVAC chiller operation that comes in and establishes and installs high rise equipment for our customers. You say that like it was so ordinary routine but it's not ordinary routine is it. Well, no, I don't think so that was 25 years ago we were looking at how to diversify just being a janitorial company at that time when I when I came as you can tell I'm my accents from South Kona. So, when I came all these years I thought it was South he low when I came we were known as the largest but not the best. But janitorial and window cleaning were our primary things that we did then. And then in 1995 started the building engineering division, and that has grown exponentially since then is always a big challenges is just finding technicians and technical staff. We have a lot of good smart people on board. And it sounds like you've been very innovative over the years when you've seen problems and opportunities you've gone there and it's all connected anyway right building maintenance is actually connected with everything that happens in the building. So it's a natural transition to go out of you know janitorial services into equipment and maintenance of well everything in the building. I'll have to give the economy credit for that because every time there's been a nosedive. We've looked at how to add other services and broaden our base. And so that's we've been very fortunate from that perspective from a service basis. I don't want to pin you down to exact numbers but say the end of December. How many people in total at Hawaii building maintenance Hawaiian building maintenance it must be quite a few hundreds maybe. 700 and something. Yeah, 700. And most of them are still deployed in the janitorial service. There has been some reductions in staff. We do a tremendous amount of retail. I think we have probably close to 40 retail centers that we take care of in the state. Oh, let's talk about what is retail we're going to buy a widget there. You can get food. Now you can get some widgets but there was a time where all you could get was food or alcohol. It's like a sundry thing that yeah so you know we had we've had reductions in staff because of that we still perform services but common area maintenance part yeah. Well yeah let's let's let's go to coven now for a minute because you know we start out with the proposition that coven has changed our lives all of us no exceptions and coven has changed our business lives all of us no exceptions. And you know the more staff you have 700 people that's that's enough to change a lot of lives. So, then of course, you know the whole thing sounds like it's a real it's a real threat for you. A lot of the tenants in the downtown area at least for the past few months have have shut down there they're not in their offices. Some of them are coming back now but a lot of them went home. It's really really quiet downtown. I've been there. Not often. I've been there and I've seen in the parking lots are essentially empty. Most of the security people are the largest single contingent in any of those buildings. The tenants are gone. The offices are closed and locked is not there. So, you know, one would one would assume there's no need for building maintenance or janitorial services. Am I right. There are essential there's essential businesses that's been operating and some of those that supply services for them. But you still have to have common area high touch disinfected cleaning. So, no matter whether you have one tenant in the building, you still have to make sure the elevator or elevators, all the touch points are disinfected on an hourly basis hourly. Yeah. So that's what we tried to do and each one of our customers has helped us develop that we developed a model to fit their own particular needs. And so our whole objective now is is training education and getting the proper chemicals and supplies. And that was a real problem. Wasn't available. No, face mask was a big concern. We had 10,000 coming in but didn't make it. There's a lot of stories like that but fortunately we were able to. I think we procure something like 8000 masks so that each one of our employees could have a minimum of three masks to change out and allow for time for disinfecting. So we supply that for all of our employees. They don't bring their own mask we supply them. No, that's great. Okay, so different profile different procedure protocol for each building, but it's all around what elevators public spaces, high touch surfaces. And I would imagine there's a lot of that in office buildings, and the protocol would be they would go around at certain intervals established intervals, like the elevators. They would go once an hour and and they would take disinfectant and what kind of distance I'm asking because you know I really want to know how the professionals do this. I'd have to have a contract with you Jay first of all that confidential information. A non compete. I knew we were going to have fun on this show Jim, we always do. So we spent a we spent a large amount of time and that's one thing about having an intelligent staff it's helped me a lot to look better to do research and things of the nature plus my son's pretty smart. So we've done a lot of research. He was on the show last year. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, you know used to I was, he was known as Jim's son. Today I'm known as Jerry's father. So see what happens. So just to kind of give you an idea what we've done you know from an operational management and the safety basis because we have our own in house safety department that goes around does inspections audits training etc. Taking educational classes over these last several months and even before then with BSCA I the ICRC which is your all acronyms for different organizations that relate to training ocean and many more. So we've taken those and develop proper resources for safe operation. We're hoping by doing that the objective is to help the customers develop individual plans for their facilities, which we've been successful so far in doing. Zoom has become an integral part of how we operate. All of our managers have of course smartphones. They're all connected and a lot of them also we have iPads and laptops for them to operate with. But so we had training, for example, last Wednesday of the month. And in that training we had 72 of our manager supervisors on that particular zoom training, which we do that once a month. And out of that, you know, we've been able to develop strong relationships also with our insurance carrier. And we do, we've continued to do safety audits with them and inspections, but because of social distancing. Now everything we operate is web based. So we can actually walk to a facility. Our insurance carrier can be in their office we can be an hours and our onsite managers able to walk around with the camera show look and discuss and find any discrepancies that are there to be corrected. So, you know we spent a lot of time doing that. And I'll have to get credit to our leadership team. We've devoted a lot of hours and times been very stressful. Nothing's any worse than having to let someone go home. Well, let's talk about that you have these hundreds of people. And now you have in the shutdown, the lockdown you had a serious reduction in the number of tenants who are actually there. Right in the buildings. So what did you do with all the staff that you have to furlough them terminate them what did you do. Well, right now we probably have let 80 people go home, you know we continue for those that have benefits to be able to provide benefits for them under this process. We were not eligible for the PPP program, the federal government because of too many employees. So that that offered a little bit of a challenge for us. At the same time, you know, we still are bringing people back in grad had gradually, but now it looks like we may be going backwards a little bit so we'll see what happens it's a, it's a day to day week to week situation and all those employees that have gone home. They're on call and ready to come back so we keep in contact with them and making sure that if we have an opening we bring them in. Because we have also started up some new accounts since the COVID started. I think the ones at home they've been living on unemployment insurance. Yeah. That's a tough, tough situation. One thing it strikes me is that you know you learn by this experience and some people say we'll have COVID or something else on on for years to come maybe forever. And you know the point I make is that you're sensitive to the needs of your clientele to those buildings and those buildings are sensitive to the needs of their tennis. You know you're like directly connected somehow to the economy itself. And when the economy is dropping or the governor decides he wants to lock down, you're affected. When the governor says well it's doing better now. We're going to reopen. You're affected with that. And you have to be totally flexible about this. It's rack and pinion. If it's going down, your staff has to go down. Your staff has to go up. You have to have the flexibility of doing that. This is not the case before. Before you could plan. You know, you got some idea about where you were going but now it can happen anytime. Yeah we plan on making a new plan anytime. Yeah. So that's about the only planning that we can do right now. But what we've done too is we've been able to, we went through the supply chain issue in the beginning. I think most people on Island did. They all know everything only comes in by ship. So we were able to get that. I'm sorry. You use a lot of supplies. So this is not a small thing. You can't go down to longs and stock up. You need gallons and gallons and tons of stuff. We have an exclusive product that we use called Virox for most of our office cleaning. And it's a peroxide base. And it's green, all those other things. So that's a big deal with our chemicals. The biggest ones had to do with trying to get the proper disinfectants. As you know, no one can guarantee if they do, they're going to be soon that they can kill COVID-19. So we have a new product that we have on a boat right now coming in. And it's a, what do they call it, microbial. Microbial. There you go. Thank you, sir. So with that, they have a 30 day lifetime. So we go into an office, we can, we can apply this. This is going to be a certification cleaning that we're going to start. It's a able to certify for the employees and for the customer of the tenant themselves that they have been disinfected. It doesn't guarantee anything, but it does stay on the surfaces for 30 days. So. You know, that is so funny. Only a few days ago, we had an interview with a woman from pro service. You must be familiar with them. Staffing. Yeah. Ideas all the time with pro service. And one of the points of discussion was, you know, the public needs to have confidence. And certainly if you're in the business, the business round, your clients have to have confidence. And so there will come a time just as the Department of Health initiated three, four years ago with, you know, their, their past fail signs you see, you used to see in all the restaurants. So there should be a certification procedure here. And again, you're ahead of me, Jim. Yeah, a certification system. So if you not only certify, you know, this or that, you certify it for other companies too, and for buildings and firms and whatnot. And you're able to say, you know, that, you know, that the best steps were taken here. And so you can certify, you know, within limits, as you say, guarantee, but this will be an additional service. I mean, they'll have a base, the base services are covered through their, through their leases, as you know. But this would be so that if someone wanted to go on a 12 month program, because we don't know how long this is going to last. And so that would allow them to be serviced, because we also have hazmat suits, we bought a ton of hazmat suits, just so because at one point you couldn't find them. The thing we couldn't find, we now have at our new warehouse at our new building. So we're prepared. You know, the challenge though is really it's, it's stressful for our employees. And it's stressful for everyone right now. And but our guys are the frontline folks and I hope out of that there'll be some larger appreciation for the folks that come in and dump your trash or sometimes miss your trash. And that, you know, they're the ones that are there, but in their lives at risk every day. So the training aspect of everything we do and supervision is, is totally critical right now. Well, I could see a couple of things where there would be risk for them. Number one is, they're touching surfaces presumably in the in the office space. And they don't really know who's been there. They don't know if somebody's been there that might have thrown droplets on that surface or touch that surface. So be careful what surfaces they touch there's a risk there. And I suppose they wear gloves. Well, you know, that's how to deal with that. That's a good question because you know, there's there's two views of that you know it looks good if you have the glove on. Right. It looks like you're being safe. Well you touch something that has cove it on it. Where does that go stays on the glove. Yeah. My concern has been that, like when you get food service, you know, I know by law they have to have gloves when somebody serves you, or hands you something with a glove on. What are they giving you. They're protected. But are you protected. So I think we have a lot to still learn about this. And so we were utilizing the gloves. Yeah, we have sanitizers for all the employees to be able to sanitize. Yeah, and hand washing would be probably the best. That's the best thing because the gloves gives you a false sense of security and I know I saw a video when they used, you know, some type of a chemical that whenever they put it on and showed them when they got through doing something how much of whatever they touch was on their body. So they have a way they have a way of emulating how the virus works, and they can show that under ultraviolet light or something. Have you have you thought about ultraviolet light by the way you know, DBED last week DBED had a webinar about it. Yeah, and they brought in this expert of course, by remote from New York and he's talking about the various products that are out there. Mostly customarily for hospitals but the idea is they're trying to deploy them into hotels now. So the tourists, you know, people who stay at the hotels can feel that every, you know, possible step has been taken. You were going to say that we, you know, we also do LED installs and represent LEDs for a lot of our customers. So we're now working with or talking to a company that has the LEDs or the fluorescent lights actually are UV lights to be able to put into office spaces. So that's one avenue we're looking at. We're also looking at some of the new ones that you can set in a room and overnight will do the disinfectant. The only problem is with that you can't be in that room at the same time. You have to be out of there. So those are things that my son is working with right now along with his team and our safety director and his folks. The other thing with the staff is, you know, it's physical work and they're wearing masks, of course, but they're still close to other people, I guess. I mean, have you set up systems on social distancing among them so they don't get too close? That's been probably the biggest challenge is making sure that everybody's given each other space because a lot of our employees come from the same community. And it's not, they're not really thinking about that at the time. So we're continually working with them. I think and plus we have what's called section cleaning where you have responsibilities for one person to do one thing. So we try not to over, over bear them with people on top of them. Yeah, right. I can see. So, you know, there have to be lessons here. I just, I can imagine. There have to be lessons that you are learning now in the COVID time that are that are so efficient and helpful that you would continue them on into the future, whether the future is a ripple effect of COVID or we can somehow get back to a reasonable existence together. What kinds of things have you learned? You think you might, assuming you can tell me, Jim, you know what I mean? I know if it's proprietary just tell me to leave you alone. What kinds of things do you think will, you know, go on forward into the future? Well, I think the, you know, the high touch areas are going to be probably a concern going forward with everyone. So that is one in particular along with I think the certification program because this this is not going away soon. It's getting too much news and too much exposure for everyone we know that it's here. So we know that those areas are going to be a continuation and again hopefully that mutates itself out and we don't have to worry about that in another year. But we're planning right now for the future as though it is what it is today. It could be another outbreak tomorrow. Yeah, got to do that. And you're in a position where you can see a broader picture so you're, you know, you're at the 50,000 foot level in terms of the way these office buildings work and the way the businesses in them work so you can make hopefully can make a reasonable plan that way. It's really important to be at that level. But the biggest challenge I think for us is going through the due diligence aspect of it, because we know that whatever we bring in or whatever we do can either be a real positive for us or real negative. And so a lot of scrutiny and we've delayed time on accepting some products until we have full disclosure and have done our complete due diligence on them. That's great. It must be, you know, it must be gratifying actually to be in a place where you can see clearly, or at least reasonably clearly what's happening. And then you have the ability which isn't easy, you know, to be nimble about it and develop new systems. Thank goodness for Jared. Exactly. I'm his father. Oh, oh, you. Yeah, I'm that guy. So talk about your new building in Kakaako that was in Pacific businesses a few days ago and I just like to know how that went down. Well thank you I appreciate that we've been doing a search for the last three or four years, trying to find something that met our needs reasonable price location. As you know, in the industrial area that's a real challenge. We were fortunate because we had a good broker that was willing to make some cold calls, because we were looking we finally realized we had to find something off market. So that's how this building came about was an off market deal. What kind of building we are looking for it again, you know, because all those employees, all the janitorial staff the engineering staff, do they need to be in one place. Or they, okay they could be home and come in go directly to work and then go home again. Yeah, yeah we don't really, we don't really hold anything from the janitorial side in our warehouse to ship directly to the job sites. We don't keep inventory on that except for now with cove it, we have inventory of different things that we didn't have before from disinfectants and the hazmat suits, you know, all those other things that go with making sure we're keeping our people protected. So what do you put in the building. Because of the fact we have a construction division that also takes care of HVAC and does some light construction we have a at a warehouse in Sand Island. Oh, I don't I never liked that because we had to have it somewhere it's kind of hard to have it in Bishop Square I don't know why they wouldn't get me part of the parking garage to utilize. Sure, right. Yeah, so that the vision we had was to be able to put all our services together one you can't watch what's going on with your equipment or your supplies. And two, you're just you're disjointed. So now we're together, to some degree, because we've even have a, we've had to reduce our time in the office we've been doing a lot of work from home. And we've also kept a schedule in the office to make sure that everybody is socially distant. So, you know, every week and you schedule goes out. Maybe you're in on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or maybe you're in on Tuesday, Wednesday. So these are the things that we've been incorporating. This hasn't been me, it's been our team there, they've done a great job and and trying to make sure that everybody's comfortable and everybody is safe. Well, you know, in your kind of business is so much of it is human resources. Really, so much of it. And you've got it, you got to treat it right. You're going to be aware of their needs. You got to make a good environment for them all that stuff. And I think that's key to your success. I know you've always been good to your people. And that's why you've been successful. So, so this building. Are you using it all now in the time of COVID are you growing into it. We're in April 1 actually we barely got in. You know, we were concerned we couldn't get the movers even move us if that ended up happening with the essential workers. We were very fortunate we got everything moved in. We know it's like anything else you still, we still have some spots that got to be maybe touched on and things of that nature but we put a lot of lipstick on our coca-occo pig. We're very happy with it because we've got parking and we're not having to pay for parking now. And that was a huge, huge expense that we had downtown. We love downtown. I miss it. You'll go down to see my buddies to have some coffee occasionally there at the coffee shop. I would say you should come down and see me except I'm not downtown. I know I can't look before you. He's buying mass for his fish. Yeah, so okay so this is a new, it's a new thing you know my first reaction would have been gee coca-occo is actually where, where the, you know, the city is evolving to all these buildings down there, except, except their condos. I'm not gonna tell you anything you don't know condos. Why not do COVID in condos? There's people around that would just love to see your smile and face and, and have you disinfect their condos because they don't really know how. That's a part of our market that we're looking at right now because we do, you know, about seven or eight large condominium projects. And we're pretty particular on, you know condominiums because it's a challenging market. You've got, you know, 500 customers, and then you've got a board so we have offered that services and will continue to offer those services we're doing the common area touch points. But yeah, it just depends. I think there is a market there. We haven't tried to exploit it. We just want to make sure people are communicated to to know what's available. There's a lot of exploitation that's going on right now. Oh, tell me. In my industry. Oh, in your industry. What, what, what do people do to exploit the situation? Overcharge fear factors, make promises that probably if they had a had an attorney listening we go this is there looking my chops because this is a great. My oldest son is in Oklahoma and he's in the same industry and business I'm in. And part of what he's been doing to is, you know, being able to spray with his hazmat suit on to do the disinfecting in offices. And he said that there that people were charging $2,500 for every 10,000 square feet. And but he figured out the cost and he's charging 250. Because there's gouging going on everywhere. In Florida when you have a hurricane, you have all kinds of people show up that can fix your roof. I mean, you know, I'm familiar with the tech side of things and all the people who do scams on the on the internet. A huge body of people and it seems like it's growing. And the number of scams are growing. They see the opportunity they move right in. It's really, you know, you like to think that people come together and they're kind of the fellow human being in a time of crisis. That isn't necessarily true. I'm sorry to say. I know that we've experienced that that is not true. So what do you see for the future that you know everybody says this is an inflection point. Indeed it is, you know, coven creates new ideas and innovations, new challenges and inflections, where, you know, a company like yours can see a lot of challenges a lot of risks out there, but you can also see if you can the way the community is going to develop in the future. I think that, you know, the kakaako move was really smart. Whether you realize that or not at the time you're committed to that. It just happened to work out. I think they're individually. So where we're now, where do you see, you know, where are you going you've done so well. But now it's an inflection point. You know, it's another time of opportunity anytime like I said, there's a downturn. It always motivates us to look at how do we now find new services to offer, how to expand that base of operations we have because we don't know what the commercial business is going to look like in the future. People are learning and folks I've talked to that are tenants, you know, they're mostly their staff is working from the house. So I think you're going to see a lot of folks having a small office conference room, and they come in for meetings or interviews within those facilities like that. So you're absolutely right. So that's, it's got some sadness to it but it's a reality. You know, it's some people talked about this 15 years ago, just took to have something like this happen. The forces to take a look at how we can operate differently. It's great to talk to you. It's great to come and compare notes and and reconnect. I'm going to look for you. I'm going to find you downtown. Don't leave town. I'll be looking for you. I can't get all violent anyway. Good. Let me get a coffee. I would love to appreciate the time and thanks for calling me on this. Jim Walters, the CEO of Wine Building Maintenance, a company that has been an essential part of the Bishop Street community for years and decades. And now maybe other neighborhoods too. Thank you so much Jim. Thank you, Jay.