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May 5, 2021 | 39 Mins Read

Is Your View of Outcomes-Based Service Limiting Your Success?

May 5, 2021 | 39 Mins Read

Is Your View of Outcomes-Based Service Limiting Your Success?

Chris La Fratta, Vice President & Head of Professional Services and Solutions Delivery at Philips, talks with Sarah about embracing a broader view of what outcomes-based service can mean for your business, how Philips is evolving its service offerings, and some of the key changes necessary in order to deliver.   Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we are going to answer the question; is your view of outcomes-based service limiting your success? We talk a lot about outcomes-based service and delivering greater experiences and guaranteed results to our customers, but today we're going to dive in a little bit more to what that really means and how you may be keeping your view too small of the opportunities for you with your customer base.   Sarah Nicastro: I am excited to welcome to the podcast today, Chris La Fratta, Vice President and Head of Professional Services and Solutions Delivery at Philips. Chris, welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast.   Chris La Fratta: Hey, Sarah, thanks for having me. It's so nice to virtually be with you here today. It's everybody's reality all day, every day.   Sarah Nicastro: I wish we were doing these on site in a studio. Maybe we'll get there someday, but for now, virtual, yes, and happy to have you.   Sarah Nicastro: So, Chris, before we dig into the topic at hand, tell our listeners a bit about yourself, your background, and your role at Philips.   Chris La Fratta: Thanks, Sarah. First, let me tell you a little bit about Philips and I'll dive into my role. Philips has been around for about 130 years, we're 80,000 employees worldwide, and our purpose is to improve the lives and wellbeing of people through innovation and technology. We're very specifically focused on healthcare. And that's actually been a transformation from Philips. People who are familiar with the brand would know we've sold consumer electronics like flat TVs, and lighting, and things like that, but we've divested the portfolio and we're 100% focused on healthcare, so it's been a big shift for Philips. And also, part of our strategy, another big shift and what I want to talk to you about today is that we're shifting from a company that primarily sold products to a company that sells solutions.   Chris La Fratta: And just to use a simple definition of a solution, for me, that means hardware, software, services, kind of bundled together, both Philips developed content as well as third parties, and that together, these things solve a customer's problem and deliver an outcome better than a product will on a standalone basis. So, that's kind of, in a nutshell, who Philips is.   Chris La Fratta: I've had a long career in healthcare. I've worked at HP, Hewlett Packard, back when they had a medical device product group, I've worked at a company called Elekta, which is an oncology focused medical technology company, but I've spent most of my career at Philips and most of my career in services. I've run call centers and technical support groups, I've run field service teams, both on the software and IT side as well as on the capital equipment side. And these days, my job is really, as you said in the title, it's around solutions delivery. So, as we make the shift into solutions, how do I repurpose an organization that was designed to deliver break/fix into an organization that sort of consults upfront with our customers around how to design a solution, and takes them through an implementation, and then at the end, it's really all about helping customers adopt the technology so they can achieve whatever it is that they want to achieve.   Chris La Fratta: So, a lot of words there, but that's what my job is, is to run these teams. I have team members who are solution architects, I have team members that are project and program managers, technical consultants, which I've converted... and maybe we can talk about this, I've converted a lot of field service engineers and technicians into a role called technical consultant. Then for us, because we're in healthcare, clinical application specialists who do training and consultation on the products and solutions.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay, excellent. So, there's a lot we're going to dive into and I'm very excited to do so. I said in the intro and you kind of mentioned in your introduction of yourself, the conversations I have with people across a variety of industries these days are in some way all tied back to this concept of solving customer problems instead of delivering a product, a service, right? So, this idea of, however you want to say it, for a product organization moving this way, often servitization, delivering more outcomes, that sort of thing. So, you already defined that for us, and I think it was a very simple but very good definition, which is putting together solutions that solve customer problems, right? So, that makes perfect sense. Let me ask you, why do you feel this is the path every company, in some form or another, is on right now?   Chris La Fratta: That's a great question. I think about it, maybe what's going on in the IT space where everything is as a service today, or maybe companies like Uber and Lyft, they've kind of set the world on fire with their business model. So, if you think about Uber, the car companies model was to build and sell you a car, and they make all their money, then they service it after and keep it running, but you as a consumer, do you really want a car or do you just want to get from A to B. And I think that's kind of what it's all about.   Chris La Fratta: So, I think that we have a demographic shift going on in society where people have grown up kind of around these business models, but if I think about my business space in healthcare specifically, hospitals are stretched. They don't have the capital they used to have. A lot of them don't make a huge operating margin. So, these innovative business models where you're tied in as a supplier to the customers' outcome and success, I mean, it just works well because of the economic model there. And I think we've seen it happen in other industries. I think IT was the first place it really happened. I think IBM started this revolution, whether they wanted to or meant to or not, when they kind of got out of the mainframe business and got into web services and things like that.   Chris La Fratta: So, I think those are some of the variables going into it. I think the digitization of everything enables it to happen. I think that's also part of the reason why you see these shifts happening at the moment.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. So, in the headline, we said, "Are you limiting your view?" Okay? So, as an organization, whatever industry you're in, if you're thinking about how do we act more as a trusted adviser? How do we sell solutions instead of products? Oftentimes, the first thing people think of is, "Well, we need to guarantee uptime," that must be the answer, uptime, right?   Sarah Nicastro: And our argument today is that there's nothing wrong with guaranteeing uptime, but if that is where you sort of stop, in your thought process or in action, you achieve this, and then you just end there, you could really be limiting your potential to expand your service revenue, because if you can step outside of maybe your historical role in your customer's landscape and think more about how you could potentially solve some of the problems they have, you may find different opportunities to contribute to the outcomes that they need to drive.   Sarah Nicastro: So, tell us a little bit about some of the different ways that Philips has expanded its portfolio to deliver more customer outcomes.   Chris La Fratta: Yeah. And it's funny that you started off with the uptime comment, because as I told you, I've had a long career in service, and I think that traditionally it was about, keep my system up, and so it was about making it available. And I think over the past 10 years, at least in healthcare technology, it kind of shifted from, "I want it to be available, but I also want to integrate with the rest of everything else that's going on." So, in healthcare, it meant sending data from devices to an EMR, so it's about integration. But now, I think it's really about, "Help me adopt it so that I can be successful."   Chris La Fratta: So, in healthcare, hospitals talk about a quadruple aim, their targets as healthcare providers is to achieve this quadruple aim, and its financial outcomes, clinical outcomes, patient satisfaction, and staff satisfaction. I'll give you a couple of examples of where Philips plays in this space and why we've been successful. So, in an intensive care unit, you have a system of patient monitors, and they connect to a network, and nurses are able to centrally monitor the vital signs of patients and they respond when an alarm goes off. So, we've always sold that as a capital equipment with some services bolted in. And there's uptime and bench repair and all these things that go on to make the monitors available. So, that's the way we've always done it.   Chris La Fratta: Last year... actually, a couple of years ago now, we had a first of kind implementation in a big hospital in Florida where we actually offered this as a service. So, instead of getting paid for the monitors after we've implemented them and sold them and then going on a service contract, we actually get paid per patient day. And so, what is the customer is trying to do there? Let me talk about the outcomes that we're looking for.   Chris La Fratta: We're trying to make sure that they're efficient. We don't want patients to stay in an ICU any longer than they need to stay in an ICU. We're trying to make sure that as they move around the hospital from the OR back into a post op recovery area and what have you, that we don't lose any data. It's really important that the data gets captured through the whole journey. Then of course, we don't want them to be readmitted and things like that. And so, through this offer, we're able to completely upgrade a hospital where they wouldn't normally have the capital to do at all, every unit of the hospital is using the same technology, so a nurse can move from one place to another. They get software upgrades through the lifecycle of these things, because it's Philips's assets at the end, not the customers, and we'll keep them up to the latest and greatest and things like that.   Chris La Fratta: And what we're seeing, and last year was a great example because COVID happened, and when COVID happened, all of a sudden, it was a different subset of patients that needed really specific care. So, we were able to adapt and get monitors where they need to go in the hospital without the customer spending an extra penny, right? So, that's one example of where we've done it. We've done some great studies at this customer, whereby we asked the staff, "Hey, how do you like the new technology?" And there was just off the charts positive. This hospital was literally at a place where a new patient would get admitted and they have to check to see if they could find a monitor that worked. If it was from brand X or brand Y, they wouldn't necessarily know how to interact with that monitor. So, the patient, or the staff satisfaction went up really high.   Chris La Fratta: Obviously, the financial outcome was a big improvement for them. Instead of spending this huge amount of capital upfront, they moved their spend from CapEx to OPEX, so if they have a lot of customers, their bill goes up for the month, like our gas or electric bill, right? But if they don't have a lot of customers, when they have a down a month, their fees go down accordingly.   Chris La Fratta: And then we saw some clinical outcomes too. So, specifically, because they had this hodgepodge of technology, it took a long time for them to transfer a patient from one unit to the other, which meant patients sitting around kind of in limbo. So, now that we have all the Philips equipment in-house, they're able to transport patients quicker, the nurses are happy with that, and the patients spend less time kind of just waiting for something to happen. So, that's one example.   Chris La Fratta: Another example that I would cite is that we have something called Managed Technology Services, it's an offer that Philips has, where we actually go in with the hospital staff, assess their installed base of technology, and help them make a 10-year plan for replacement. So, Philips will finance that equipment, we will service it for them, regardless if it's ours or a third party, but the key is that we really help them to adopt and utilize the equipment well. So, we have counters on all of our equipment, we can zoom in and see if an MRI is being 65% utilized in one unit and you have another unit that might be 120% utilized, maybe they run it on a second or third shift or what have you, we can take that information back to the customer and say, "Hey, look, you can utilize this one asset better, or maybe it's time to retire it because the service costs are too high."   Chris La Fratta: So, really, partnering with their capital asset planning, because let's face it, what our customers, and my case with healthcare customers, are really good at is providing care to a patient, not capital planning for medical equipment. But at Philips, that's what we do all day long, and so we're able to kind of help and assist. And that's an example of helping a customer drive a financial outcome. And we've had some really good success stories with that.   Chris La Fratta: It's not an easy model to shift into, and it takes a little bit of courage, and it's kind of risky, because a lot times that you move in, the model is not always perfect, but you go out, and you get your feet wet, and you start to learn from it, and then you hone the model. So, I think the real key, though, Sarah is, if you have shared goals with your customer, now, they're partners and not customers, and when you win, they win, and vice versa.   Chris La Fratta: So, in the first example I gave, if we could increase the number of patient days that the customer is being monitored, because we're consulting with the customer and helping them put these devices in the right places, then I get a higher patient per day price, but they also get better utilization of the asset. So, uptime is keeping the thing available, but what we're talking about is making sure it's used and used well, and used to deliver these quadruple aim outcomes. That's probably a good way to state it and kind of summarize the points.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's perfect. And I think it is interesting, and I've mentioned this on the podcast before, Chris, there is a great overlap there for companies that are willing to find it, of needs customers have, real needs, real value opportunities, not forced, not, "Hey, we need to increase our service revenue, so what can we try and sell them?" But real opportunities to help that can help your business build revenue. I mean, it really can be a mutually beneficial place that you can get to, and this is a good example of that.   Sarah Nicastro: Before we talk about some of the complexities, I did want to just go back to the examples you shared. So, obviously, there is a real thing of, for a lot of these hospitals and health systems, modernizing the equipment they have and the lift that can bring in patient care itself, right? But to your point, there's a lot of planning that goes into that, there's a lot of knowledge about what's needed, and where it's needed, and what the right patient flow is, and things like that, on top of this change in model that we're going to talk a little bit more about to being OPEX versus CapEx. But the other thing, and we're also going to talk more about this, but I want to clarify it before we dive in is, some of the opportunity from a services perspective to kind of expand the skills that you're leveraging to bring value to your customers, and I know from one of our earlier conversations, there's a couple we talked about that I'm hoping you can touch on.   Sarah Nicastro: One is, knowing that this equipment is part of a hospital's bigger IT infrastructure, there's some opportunity there, and then I think a really big one, because I think it covers a lot of different industries and a lot of needs people's customers have is this idea of, "Hey, we see you're only using your MRI machine at 65% capacity," to your point, maybe they have an extra one they don't need or something like that, but it could be maybe their staff is struggling because they're not good at using it or they need some extra training. And so, I believe you've also kind of expanded into some more services there to help assist your customers in making sure that their staff as effective as well. So, can you speak to those two aspects?   Chris La Fratta: Well, yeah, I'll take the first piece about how things have really shifted. When I first started my career, when we hired a field service engineer, we were looking for somebody who had a mechanical engineering or electrical engineering background, and then we taught them customer skills. Back then, most devices were standalone, they didn't talk to themselves or each other, they didn't connect to the hospital's network and things like that, and if they ran software, it was proprietary, for the most part. Now, everything is on common platforms, Microsoft and things like that, everything is highly integrated and talking to each other.   Chris La Fratta: About five or six years ago, I was really involved in our patient monitoring solutions, and they were really highly networked. So, we started to realize that we needed to get network experts on the team, and so we kind of went down this path of, we think our guys are really smart, our guys and girls, and they can get Cisco trained and certified, so we provided them that opportunity to make the shift. At the same time, we were growing, so as we were hiring new people, we brought in Cisco trained and certified people that were really good with networks. And then there were people who were in the ranks that realized, "The way things are going, maybe this isn't the job for me anymore."   Chris La Fratta: So, we kind of went through a five-year journey where some of our internal folks stepped up and learned the skills, as we were hiring, we hired people with those skills. We hired a lot of people, actually, from the military who have been network trained, but also people from data centers and banks and things like that, and we had to teach them what healthcare was. And then we had some turnover. There's kind of a demographic thing going on in terms of baby boomers retiring and things like that. So, it was about a third, a third, a third, if you know what I mean.   Chris La Fratta: So, that was a big shift we had to make, and now we're seeing it again where networking is kind of not enough, we're seeing a few specialties that we have to get really good at. So, cyber security is one. We're starting to hire staff that has some experience and background around cyber security. Microsoft OS's, Microsoft server and things like that. Virtualization is really a big things. So, all of those skills have been important for us to realize we needed them and then either acquire them or train people to get them. So, that's kind of a little bit about the first question.   Chris La Fratta: I think the second question, I'll give you a really good example. So, Philips has trusted advisor and consultative partners. If you're in an ICU, there's all these alarms going off all the time. It's really, really a stressful place to be. If you're visiting a loved one, it's stressful, if you're sick in the hospital, it's really stressful too. It's particularly stressful for nurses. They're hearing these beeps, and the beep turns into a page on their phone, there's a central monitor, there's things going on all the time. And it turns out that a lot of them are false positives or alarms that don't need to be responded to.   Chris La Fratta: So, what we are able to do is to go in and consult with the nursing staff and make decisions around their alarm policies. They can lower thresholds, they can silence alarms and things like that. It's a really collaborative process. I mean, as Philips, we can't go in and tell them what their alarm policy should be, they need to make those decisions on their own with information from us. So, we can say, for example, "At hospital X, we see a best practice whereby they set this alarm here." And then they make those decisions, and we can implement them on the monitors.   Chris La Fratta: So, we've had to take our clinical educators, who are nurses, for the most part... well, almost every clinical educator in Philips has credibility and background as a nurse, but we had to teach them how to facilitate that discussion. So, they went away and learned how to run a Kaizen so they can get a group of nurses from a hospital site be open and have this conversation. And we just have great results from that as an offer.   Chris La Fratta: And it's great because it's done in conjunction, and you see the hospital nurses, sometimes, they start a conversation like this, and they just don't want to hear it or know it, and it's something outside of their day to day job that they don't have time for, and six weeks later, they talk about it being a life changing experience, having participated in something like that. And now there are fewer inoperable false alarms, there's less noise and they can focus on what's really important. So, that's a good example. And it took time not to build that skill on the team. Nurses tend to be really good at it, for whatever reason. I think they have right levels of empathy, but it's a good example of where we do that.   Chris La Fratta: We do some cybersecurity consulting, helping hospital CIOs prepare a plan and a strategy for things that live outside a data center. So, we're in a world where everything is a connected device, and IT people tend to be really good at connected devices than are computers, but when it's an MRI machine, or patient logs, or an ultrasound, they don't typically know how to apply an OS patch to a device like that. You can't just say, "Hey, there's going to be a maintenance window in the ICU at three o'clock on Sunday," it doesn't work like that, so it's a different problem set. So, we advise and we help with things like that, I mentioned some of the capital planning, and of course, utilization of the devices. So yeah, it's a special skillset. We've taught some of the staff how to do it, like the clinical educators.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So, there's a couple things I want to touch on based on what you just said. The first is, going back to the title of our podcasts and not limiting your view of outcomes, right? So, what you just described to me is a perfect example of, you start with your core competency, and maybe you even servitize that well, right? So, instead of just offering products, now you've bundled that with services, so you are Philips, and you offer X equipment, and you can service it supremely, right? But now you start looking at what is your customer journey, right?   Sarah Nicastro: So, how much pain would it cause your customer if you show up and say, "Hey, great, I have this industry-leading piece of equipment, I can sell it to you, we'll take great care of it, we'll make sure it has uptime, but this network stuff, good luck. So, see you next time we talk," right? And then they're sitting there like, "Okay, now we have to interface with another person and bring them in? And do those people know the Philips equipment, etc." Right?   Chris La Fratta: It's the worst experience for our customer, right? When they say, "Hey, Philips, your system is slow." And we say, "No, our system is working fine. It's a problem on your network." And they call Cisco, or they call their internal... and everybody's pointing at each other right? And so we decided, you know what, we're going to just help them solve the whole problem end to end, and if we have to be the middle person and work with Cisco or whoever it is, we'll take that role and do it, because to your point, they can't get what they want unless that problem is fixed. And for us in this example, the network infrastructure is such an important component of it all that it's just absolutely fundamental to what we're doing there. So yeah, I agree.   Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. So, by eliminating that friction for your customers and improving their experience, you're expanding your own value proposition and your revenue potential, right?   Chris La Fratta: Exactly.   Sarah Nicastro: So, it's just a really good example of looking... I think sometimes companies get really... they're kind of stuck in their history, and so when they start thinking about innovating, or servitizing, or delivering outcomes, they have really good intentions of innovating but they still kind of are on this lane, right? And so, just being able to kind of expand the view a bit and just think about, "Okay, what are these friction points? What do we hear? What do we see? Where do we know our products connect with other systems in our customer's infrastructure, etc?" Because sometimes it's a situation of not communicating enough with your customers to the point where you're not asking the right questions for them to share their pain points, but sometimes they might not know to ask you, right? So, sometimes it's observing instead and going to them with suggestions, right? So, that was just one thing that I thought was important to mention. And there was another one, but I forgot it now, so hopefully, it'll come back to me.   Sarah Nicastro: But I think that those are fantastic examples of really being able to look at your customers' journeys and look for those opportunities to really help them, and in turn, help yourself by creating more potential.   Chris La Fratta: Yeah. I've got a mentor of mine who always says, "Chris, we have two ears and one mouth, right, and you've got to use them in those proportions." So, you said it a few times, but it is really listening. And I think sometimes it's also... when you talk about that trusted advisor comment, sometimes it's about being brave enough to tell a customer, "Hey, I know you want to do that. That's not the best practice." We had a customer who wanted to use Active Directory in a certain way. No other Philips customer does what they do, and we should have said to them, "Look, you're taking a risk doing that and we're not sure we can support that." But I think a lot of times our tendency is, " We want to close this deal, so let's just give what the customer wants."   Chris La Fratta: But I think one of the reasons why customers want to work with an industry leader is because of the experience you have as an industry leader, especially when implementing very complex things like this, they want to know what the best most successful customers have done and how they've done it. So, I think you got to kind of own that and bring it to the forefront.   Sarah Nicastro: And you just reminded me of my other point, so thank you, but it was exactly that, which is when you have a wealth of assets that are connected assets across a variety of customers, and you can look for those insights that your customer base is going to find value, and that in and of itself is another opportunity for that revenue, diversification and to differentiate yourself to build that relationship, to stop looking at it as a transactional product, sale, break/fix service to that partnership, because there's so much value, in your case, to the hospitals, of you knowing, based on fact, based on data, "Hey, actually, the best practice other hospitals do is this. Let me show you a couple examples. A customer we have in this state does this, this state does this."   Sarah Nicastro: They don't have that information, so that information, that data is power you have that you can use to educate your customer base that no one else has, right? So, a lot of times, that data in and of itself, is an untapped opportunity to expand these relationships and diversify revenue, because companies might use it operationally internally, but they're not looking at it from that perspective of what's this telling us that is insights, best practices, information that our customers would potentially pay to know or that we can bundle into this overall thing?   Chris La Fratta: Yeah, no, it's fascinating. Again, one of the customers that have bought into this as a service model with us around our patient monitoring, I was at a quarterly review with them not long ago, and we were reviewing their statistics. And so the monitoring gets broken into three segments, there's high acuity, mid acuity, and low. So, the most sick patients are in high acuity, your sort of middle patients are mid, and then when you get checked into the ER or the general ward, they put you on these low acuity monitors. And so, by looking at their statistics over the last quarter, and we're reviewing this from a billing point of view, like eight years, this is what your quarterly invoice is going to be, but they saw this huge spike in mid acuity, and they start to ask operational questions about why? "Why did it go up so much? I don't understand." Well, it was driven by COVID volume.   Chris La Fratta: But it's to your point that, if you have this huge install base of information, not only can you help one hospital compare itself to the other and get some best practice, of course, the information is completely anonymized and de-identified and things like that, also, even within the hospital, they're not always seeing operationally what's going on. Everything from our equipment is being used, and I gave some of those examples earlier, to where is the equipment? I mean, we have a patient-worn device that allows people to walk around the hospital when they're recovering while still being watched. Well, things get lost all the time. And I can tell the last time it made a network connection were in a hospital that it wasn't. So, even as simple as, "I lost my keys. Help me find them," sort of thing.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, for sure.   Chris La Fratta: So, it's all about data. And I know there's a question that we'll talk about maybe at the end about my vision of what's next, and it's all about how do we better use all this data that's being generated, whether it's to deliver an economic or patient outcome. I think there are clinical outcomes that could potentially be better achieved if we can somehow... And Google, Apple, GE, Siemens, Philips, we're all trying to get there, but nobody's really cracked the code yet, but if you think about all the sick patients that go to a hospital, so much information about them, and their symptoms, and their treatments have been captured, that's a place where we've got to start applying AI and machine learning and things like that so that we can get some better treatment plans, quicker diagnosis and things like that. That's sort of a vision of the future that I have.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay. We're going to get there.   Chris La Fratta: All right.   Sarah Nicastro: All right. So, everything we've talked about is really exciting. You guys are doing an amazing job of becoming that partner to your customers instead of a vendor or supplier, and really looking at modernizing the relationships you have with them. But this process and that shift, it's a fundamental change in how you're doing business, right? And that is, in no way do I want to touch on the good points and have people think like, "Oh, Philips is doing it, it must be easy," because it isn't. It's really, really hard. And I think that the deeper and richer the history in developing, manufacturing, selling, servicing products, the harder this transformation can be and this shift can be.   Sarah Nicastro: So, you're obviously doing an excellent job at it, but I want to talk about a couple of the major points, and you can maybe share a little bit the challenges and how you've either overcome them or are working to overcome them. And the first thing I want to talk about is just this idea of transitioning to the as a service model, right? So, for Philips, I understand the value to the customers loud and clear, but to you guys, you're moving from these large influxes of revenue to more of a recurring model, and then you're risk sharing. So, to your point, if the hospital doesn't use as much one month as another month, that dips. So, explain how you kind of get on the same page about why and how that's worth the risk and what that takes to migrate too.   Chris La Fratta: Well, there's a lot in that question, so let me try to touch on some of the topics there. The first thing I would say is, as you start to make a transformation like this, think about Philips, as I said, it's 130 year old company, when I introduced myself, and for 125 of those years or so, we sold a thing, we manufactured a thing, sold it, and then did some service on it, right? So, all of our processes, all of our back end systems are designed to do that thing.   Chris La Fratta: And so, a few years ago, we decided to get into the solution space, and all of a sudden, SAP doesn't want to allow us to transact business that way, or our service system is really good at break/fix service, and dispatching engineers and doing things like that, but not so good with other things. So, there's a lot about kind of tuning up your back office systems to allow these business models to work and things like that.   Chris La Fratta: Then you start having discussions with your CFOs and folks, because they used to get in the sort of episodic revenues, what I would call it, and install a huge capital deal, and there's a little bit of services that go along with that, but that's how we forecast revenue, but we're basically getting all the revenue up front. So, let's just say we're going to do a million dollar deal, we get a million dollars up front, we get a $75,000 a year service contract, and that's kind of the model. Now we've gone towards that million dollars that gets spread over five years, and oh, by the way, there's some risk in it, because if the customer doesn't achieve their outcomes, you're going to make less money in that month. And we actually saw that.   Chris La Fratta: A lot of our solutions... we have a paper use solution for our picture archiving services, so when you get an image done on an MRI, or a CT, or whatever, it gets stored digitally and clinicians retrieve that and they work the images, and they read them and all that stuff. Well, during COVID, a lot of elective procedures were postponed. So, for the whole year, last year, people getting MRI scans or going in, in some cases, for things as serious as a bypass surgery, a lot of that was postponed for a long time, so the usage of those images went down and our revenue went down, and it's a big hit. So, why would you still do it?   Chris La Fratta: I think why you would still do it, first and foremost, is this is the direction that industry is going, so if you don't make the shift, you're just going to become irrelevant in a few years. That's one reason. But I think the second more compelling reason is, it deepens the partnership with your customer and it makes what you do really, really sticky. So, these customers that have been using your service as a service, it's not easy to switch. It's really, really difficult to migrate that data that might be in our systems, the competitor's systems, or what have you, once you kind of make that shift, but I think you become sort of indispensable as a partner so the long term is worth it.   Chris La Fratta: The other thing I'd say is, if you go from that episodic revenue, and all of my peers who are listening to this podcast will tell you, you've got these huge fourth quarter hockey sticks. You got to make that Q4 number, everything's being discounted, there's so much pressure to make that revenue number. I mean, somebody has to sell it, supply chain has to deliver, I have to go out and install it, and all that stuff needs to happen. But if it's recurring revenue, that recurring revenue just builds on itself, and builds on itself, and builds on itself, and builds on itself, you still have to renew it, and hopefully over the lifecycle, you're expanding it, but it's a lot more predictable, and it just makes running your quarterly business that much more sustainable. It's a little bit easier.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. It's just that initial transition. It's this big hurdle and then you can start to see how it can be an improvement.   Chris La Fratta: I'm jealous, so jealous of the companies who started this way, like salesforce.com, because they didn't have to make the shift. And then there are companies like IBM who said, "We're not going to be in mainframes anymore, we're going to shift totally to services," and they kind of like made a bold decision. At Philips, we still do both, so it's sometimes hard to kind of run both-   Sarah Nicastro: Straddle, yeah.   Chris La Fratta: ... but there's good reasons to do it. And I'll tell you, the number one reason to do it is not every customer is ready to consume this way either. There's still quite a few big customers that just aren't interested. They want to buy capital and depreciate it over 10 years because that suits their operating model better. So, for us, it works being in both worlds at the same time. Sometimes I wish it wasn't the case, because I think we can move faster, but we're balancing it as well as we can.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Okay. So, that's a big one. The other one I'm wondering if we can just touch on quickly before we get to the other big one. And I say quickly, because I know that service is your world, not necessarily sales overall, but obviously, this is a complete shift for sales too, right? I mean, it's a different value proposition, it's expanding, really, the stakeholders within a customer organization that you need to be selling to, when you get into these adjacent services and all of that.   Sarah Nicastro: So, what have you seen in relation to what it takes to transition to selling that as a service model?   Chris La Fratta: Yeah, a few things there, I think. First of all, it's not a department level sale anymore. You can't go to the head of biomed, or the chief nurse of a unit, or the chief radiologist, it's a C suite sell. So, that means the salespeople have to really up their game and learn how to talk to and sell to the C suite, because these tend to be longer term, and they tend to be enterprise wide. They are big bets on both sides of the equation.   Chris La Fratta: Second of all, the incentive schemes have to be taken into account. So, we have a really good sales executive within Philips who came over from Microsoft, and at Microsoft, remember, you used to buy Windows and Office and pay $300 for it, and you got the CDs, and Microsoft shifted from that model towards 360, which everything is online and downloadable. They had to change the comm plans for their people because of that. It means they weren't getting the one time episodic hit any more. And so now you need to comp on total contract value over time and things like that, and that's very different.   Chris La Fratta: And I think the last piece is, and I alluded to this a little bit in my last answer, but the renewal becomes a really important conversation, and expansion becomes a really important conversation. So, out in industry, you'll hear people talk about success managers, customer success managers, which we're still figuring out what that means for us in Philips, but part of it is making sure that when the renewal conversation comes up, that customer is so happy with the value that you've added that it's not even a conversation. But it's also things like, "Hey, you're doing really well in these units of your hospital with the solution. Why don't we go to the west building now, or why don't we go to your children's clinic, or whatever it is?" And so, it should provide you with a base to do that stuff. So, if you're doing it well, you're not hunting business as much, but it's a different art form or different science, or however my sales colleagues would describe it. It's just a new methodology.   Chris La Fratta: So, those are some of the thoughts around sales. I can't emphasize that first point enough. Upping your game to be able to talk to the C suite. At Philips, we've sort of developed playbooks around how to do that. We have account executives who are identified as those people who should go in and have that conversation. And yeah, I mean, we're on our journey. I can't say we've solved it all yet, but we've had some success there. And even identifying the right customers. So, in the US, there's a lot of consolidation going on around healthcare and stuff, lots of small hospitals, now you have these big integrated delivery networks, and some of them are kind of taking this journey and making this leap of faith with us. But like I said earlier, someone who just aren't ready yet, they'll be ready on their own time, so I think timing is really important as well.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I would imagine it forces a closer relationship between service and sales too, right, because it's just kind of a continuous cycle of that. Like you said, you don't want to get to a point where it's, they're sold, they're serviced, and then they need to be sold again, right? You want it to just be cohesive.   Chris La Fratta: Yeah. So, my sales counterpart, "Hey, I sold the equipment," and he gets all that order intake and all that revenue, and I get the service. And so in a way, we kind of had our own P&L. There's a dependency, of course. And that was just one thing. The solution is the equipment and services integrated as one thing. So, we can't split it up anymore, we have to be side by side, and it forces that, and that's actually a really good thing.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And that's probably a whole separate podcast on its own, right? Because I think the companies that are trying to do this with to P&Ls are the companies that are trying to innovate this way without the top level commitment to taking the business in that direction. I mean, it's really tough to make this transition if everybody isn't working in the same vein. But we'll tackle that another time.   Sarah Nicastro: I want to get into one more big thing before we finish for today, which is, the thing we've alluded to but haven't really discussed in detail yet is the fact that this requires a real significant shift in skillset, mindset of your technicians. And so, you touched on the fact that you gave them a choice, empowered them to decide, do they want to kind of expand their skillset and all of that, but I know you've also increased your use of contingent workers to be able to eliminate some of the, we'll say, more traditional break/fix non value add work so that your technicians, you can focus on upskilling them, re-skilling them, expanding their skills, to have those consultative relationships and to do these different things. So, talk a little bit about that and what you've learned in making that work for Philips.   Chris La Fratta: Yeah. It's a good topic. I mean, at the end of the day, you can only focus on so much, so you define what your core competencies are. And our core competencies have shifted from people who are really good mechanically and electrically to people more IT oriented, as I said, or people more consultative, which I think is even more kind of a unique skill.   Chris La Fratta: So, what we've determined over time is that that's where we want to focus and develop folks. But guess why, at some point, when we ship product, there's a loading dock where there's tons of boxes of our stuff. And so, we used to pay our staff whatever their hourly rates are to unbox things, and to stage things, and to prep them so that they can go into the hospital. So, that's a really easy example of where we've used third parties to kind of supplement. It's not a skill that's highly specialized, it's not something that we want to develop a core competency in, and there's some variability around demand. So, if we have a really big fourth quarter, I don't want to hire 100 people and have them part of my fixed costs as we enter the next fiscal year, I want to be able to ramp them up and down as needed. So, it's really helped there.   Chris La Fratta: But even if I say, "Okay, that's some basic stuff. I'll take it one step further," we do a lot of staging of servers and equipment like that, and that's pretty standard and can even be done remotely. So, there, even in the IT space, when it's something fairly basic like loading an image onto a server or doing some configuration of a server, we start to work with third parties as well. If I have a third party that shows up on site, they are part of the Philips team, they get treated as if they were a Philips employee, they get the same training, in many cases, that our employees would get. We really do a lot to ensure the quality is there. It's a little bit more difficult to control, if I'm honest with you. I mean, probably the worst story I can tell you is one of our third party guys fell asleep on a patient bed or stole a dessert off the lunch tray. I mean, these things kind of happen from time to time, so you do need a process to check in and make sure that the quality is there.   Chris La Fratta: But for us, I think the main benefit is being able to focus on what's core, and it offsets some costs, of course, that's part of the reason why we do it, and it allows for a lot more flexibility. So, it's a tricky road to go down, but I think it's important. Like I said, the approach we've taken is we're allowing and promoting the development opportunities for our internal folks, so as we shift, we want them to come with us, but at the same time, where it doesn't make sense for us to unbox equipment and to do basic configurations, we're just going to use the contingent help. I mean, I think it's happening everywhere.   Chris La Fratta: And it's kind of interesting, people talk a lot about the gig economy, and I don't know if a guy who works for Philips can change his field service engineer jacket and go in and work for Siemens, and on the next call, go in and work for GE. I don't know if we'll get there in healthcare because we're a little bit specialized, but definitely, I see it as an increasing trend that any activity that's not core, you're working with a partner, and they are partners, and you're giving them the training and you enable them to work on your behalf.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think what you said at the beginning is spot on. You can't do everything, right? So, if you're going to work toward this world of creating more value, then you need to focus on fueling the skills to do that value added stuff instead of unboxing things, right? I mean, you're not going to want to pay W2 employees to do all of those things, and this gives you that opportunity to unburden them with some of the things that you can leverage these other resources for so that they have the time, bandwidth, energy to commit to where you're going and build their skills, right? So, I think it's a really good point. I actually think that's another area we could do a podcast on, because I agree it's a direction we're going in, but at least based on my conversations, I still have more people asking me, "So, what do you hear around contingent workers, and how, and how do you make sure they don't fall asleep onsite? And how do you train them? And how do you control them?" All of those things.   Sarah Nicastro: So, I think it's an area that will grow, but there's a lot of people trying to sort out how to make it work, and I think that's a different conversation. But the premise of incorporating that into your labor mix to free up your resources to progress and build skills in the direction of those solutions I think is very, very smart. So, we'll have to hopefully have you back sometime.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So, last question, Chris, and you touched on this earlier, the future is data, right? That's where we're going, right? So, tell me a little bit more about that.   Chris La Fratta: Yeah. I mean, my vision of the future starts with Philips being an indispensable partner and helping hospitals achieve these outcomes that we've been talking about. So, we'll become trusted advisors, bringing to bear all the experience and everything that we've learned by being a leader in healthcare, and pretty much present in every hospital and every health system in the world, but especially in North America.   Chris La Fratta: And so, I think about it this way. In certain segments, we have like 50, 50 plus percent market share, and that means for patients being treated with those devices, one out of every two, we're collecting their data, and it's all being saved now, right? Everything's being saved, it all gets dumped into the data warehouses and all that. So, I think, like we were talking earlier, being able to harvest that data, I think it starts out with simple things like dashboards, like, I want to watch the patient flow through the hospital. I want to have a sort of command center where I can see everything happening. And we have that, in some senses. There are central organizations where they can monitor all the cardiac monitoring of the hospital in one place, and there are people behind all these LCDs, it's kind of like a NOC but for healthcare.   Chris La Fratta: I think it starts with things simple like that, but then it gets into more advanced like, "How can we really harvest this information and use it to drive a better outcome? Is it machine learning and AI?" I'm actually not smart enough to tell you whether that stuff works because there's a lot of hype about it, but there aren't really good examples. But I certainly think that you can say, if a patient came in and he had these symptoms, and he was a man, and 50 years old, and whatever else his demographic information was, if you've seen 1,000 of those cases, how were they treated and which one had the best outcome? In my simple mind, those are ways that you can really provide a valuable service, that not only helps my customers, it helps mankind, it helps us stay in the hospital less, get diagnosed more precisely, and get back to our healthy lives.   Chris La Fratta: Philips actually is a big player right now for monitoring people at home. So, when you're chronically ill, you don't want to be in the hospital, doctors don't want you in the hospital, so let's figure out better ways to deliver telehealth, and that's a big play for us. And I think data enables that and enables better outcomes there as well. So, if I were in school right now, I'd be becoming a data scientist because I think that's where it's at. And for companies like Philips, I think it's yet another area where we can develop services and solutions and continue on this journey that we've started.   Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely, yeah. I have two sons, and my five year old son has type 1 diabetes, so I've never cared so much about medical data as I do now. But I mean, he has a continuous glucose monitor, and he has an insulin pump, and those two things don't yet, at least the type he has, work together, right? But the advancements that you're seeing in being able to leverage that data, to, if not find a cure, which hopefully is coming, be able to have the, they call it the artificial pancreas, right, it's really cool.   Chris La Fratta: Yeah. And COVID, I think, last year forced a lot of that. There's a healthcare provider out in the Midwest somewhere, huge, huge system, and I think they were doing like 4,000 telehealth visits a month before COVID, and now it's like 80,000 telehealth visits a month. And it's something that nobody wanted before the pandemic, now, docs like it better, patients like it better. I mean, they don't have to leave the house and travel if it's not that serious of an issue.   Chris La Fratta: I myself, I think it's great. I'd rather call my doctor on the phone and say, "I think I have a rash," and answer a couple of questions and get a prescription than interrupt my day and go into the hospital or in the doctor's office where there are other sick people. So, I think it's inevitable and technology will certainly enable it., and it's just now even a bigger pool of data to pull from. So, yeah, I think that's definitely a big part of what we'll see in the next five to 10 years.   Sarah Nicastro: Cool. Well, Chris, thank you so much for coming and sharing. I love the vision. What Philips has accomplished is fantastic, and I appreciate you sharing that with us. I think it'll be really helpful for our audience, and I'd love to have you back sometime.   Chris La Fratta: Sarah, thanks so much. It was really fun to talk about all this stuff with you, and yeah, I'd love to come back any time.   Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. You can check out more of our content by visiting us at futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter @thefutureofFS. The Future of Field Service Podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thanks for listening. </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="col-12 col-lg-3"> <div class="form-wrapper"> <h2 class="form-tittle">Stay Connected</h2> <iframe src="https://info.ifs.com/GM-CP-CU-2012-12-FoFS-Newsletter_IFrame.html">

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Lead Yourself First: Exploring the Link Between Self-Care and Service Excellence

Dot Mynahan, Executive Director, Field Operations for Otis Americas talks with Sarah about her 30-year history in field service, how Otis is working to mentor and advance women leaders, and how she’s chosen to challenge.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. I'm excited today to be speaking with Dot Mynahan of Otis on International Women's Day week. I've interviewed Dot in the past, but not for a very long time and I'm so excited to be interviewing her again, sharing that with you and talking about this important day and month.

Sarah Nicastro: So, Dot, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Dot Mynahan: Thank you, Sarah. I'm really happy to be here and I appreciate this opportunity. As you said, my name is Dot Mynahan, and I am currently the Executive Director of Field Operations for Otis Elevator Americas. So I cover the Canada, the US, Central America and South America.

Sarah Nicastro: Excellent. And so, thank you for being here. Before we get into the topic at hand, just tell us a little bit about your current role, your background and your history, anything you want to share about yourself.

Dot Mynahan: Sure. I started with Otis 30 years ago as a temporary employee, believe it or not. I answered a newspaper ad, so I'm aging myself there, for a service clerk. So I started as a service clerk in the Portland main office, and over the course of those 30 years, I've worked my way up through the company to now be the executive director of field ops.

Dot Mynahan: My role currently is to ensure that our field employees have the proper training, tools and support. I really focus on support to perform their work safely and efficiently and deliver our products to our customer so that we meet customer's expectations. Actually, we try to exceed the customer's expectations here.

Dot Mynahan: So, I think when I looked back at Otis and where I started, I was really struggling to find a company where I felt like I had a career that I could grow with the company, and that it felt like a family kind of atmosphere and I think I definitely found it with Otis. So I'm so thrilled that I made that step way back then.

Dot Mynahan: And then on a personal level, I live in Florida. I have a rescue cat named, Girdie, who's 11 years old. I rescued her when I lived in Maryland. And my sister is a snowbird so she's been living with me since November and I kicked her out in May.

Sarah Nicastro: Nice. Well, I'm jealous of her. I'm in Pennsylvania, so the snow is actually falling outside the window as we speak. We have a quarantine rescue kitty who will be turning one on the 15th of March. So he is the sweetest thing ever, and he's been a welcome distraction while we have been cooped up.

Dot Mynahan: That's awesome.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. So you've been at Otis 30 years. When you answered that newspaper ad, did you have an inclination that maybe Otis would be that company you could grow with or did it just kind of happen serendipitously?

Dot Mynahan: Definitely serendipitously. As I came into the original interview, I was thinking, "I really want to stay with this company five years." Other jobs that I'd had previous to that, I'd worked in water and sewer, sold pipe. So I had kind of non-traditional roles leading up to this role.

Dot Mynahan: But usually after two years, I had maxed out on what I could learn and I would become bored, and then look for my next opportunity. So I came into Otis, and I thought like I really want to learn. I really want to grow and see what I can do, and boy, if I can get five years with this company, I'd be really, really happy.

Dot Mynahan: I came to Otis and I was so challenged to learn how we work, to learn about elevators. I started as a service clerk, so just even parts and however thing went together, and I can remember being so humiliated and humbled by my lack of ability to learn the job easily. And my supervisor at that time said, "Don't stress out. It takes about six months for the light bulb to go on and then all of the pieces are going to come together."

Dot Mynahan: And he was right on the money. One day, it was just like, boom, I get it. But I got the insight part of the job. I was still working in the office, I'm ordering parts, I'm processing payroll, working with the field guys from the office support side of the house. I think one of the interesting things was when I was given the opportunity to go out in the field and actually work as a helper as part of a training program.

Dot Mynahan: That's when everything really started to come together and I understood how elevators work. I actually worked on installing them and repairing them and maintaining them, and that really kind of took me to the next level.

Sarah Nicastro: I have a feeling you would say serendipitously and I'm going to challenge you a little bit here because I think that this is an International Women's Day episode. And I think that this is something that we as women can tend to do, which is minimize a bit the role we've played in our success or longevity, et cetera.

Sarah Nicastro: I don't think it's not serendipitous. I mean, you didn't obviously know when you answered that ad that 30 years later you would be where you are. I mean, I'm pulling some stuff from LinkedIn here, but over the lifespan of your career with Otis, you went from service clerk to field management trainee, to maintenance supervisor, to branch manager, to general manager, to regional field operations, to senior regional field operations, to director of field operations for Latin America to now.

Sarah Nicastro: I think there's also a need to ... I highly doubt that Otis only challenged you to do all of those things. I mean, there had to be a drive within you to learn and to progress and to continue to push yourself. What are your thoughts on that?

Dot Mynahan: So I think serendipitously because Otis has this phenomenal employee benefit called the employee scholar program. So I actually took advantage of that benefit to finish my undergraduate degree and to get my MBA. So, I see it as being how lucky I am to work for a company that has that benefit that I could take advantage of.

Dot Mynahan: But you're right. I mean, a lot of these was agreeing to take the interview for the next step, and thinking like, "Why are they asking me to interview for this job?" But I think after the first couple of times of taking those interviews and taking the jobs and proving that I could do it to myself as well as to others, at that point in time, I started thinking ... In fact, I started answering interview questions differently when they said like, "Why do you want this job?"

Dot Mynahan: And I'm like, "Really, why do you want me? You know what I bring to the table. You know what I'm capable of doing. Is that what you need for this next role, if that's what you need to fill this position?" Because I brought a lot to the table, and I felt like I brought a lot to the table.

Dot Mynahan: So I think the part that came from within was just that confidence of saying like, "You know what? I think no matter what, I can do this job." And I think one of the lessons that I learned when I went out in the field, and this is probably for Otis where I first felt that, is when I went out in the field as a trainee and I was a helper, I went out to a construction site, and they're like, "Okay, run that chain fall and hoist that heavy piece of equipment."

Dot Mynahan: And I didn't have the upper body strength of the guys who were running the chain fall for years on construction sites. And I was so humiliated and so disappointed in myself that I couldn't deliver the performance that a peer could deliver. But then when it came time to wire up the controller, I did it without any errors. My wiring was all treed up. And the mechanic was like, "This is awesome. I don't have to check your work. I can trust your work."

Dot Mynahan: And I thought like, "Okay, so bring that skillset to the table." So I just have kind of done that same approach through all of these positions, is just take those learning lesson. And maybe I don't everything to the table these job requirements, but I think what we've seen statistically is that men will apply when they have 60% of the skills required for a job, and women will apply when they have a 100%.

Dot Mynahan: I no longer look at the 100%, I look at, do I think I can-

Sarah Nicastro: What am I bringing to the table?

Dot Mynahan: What am I bringing, right.

Sarah Nicastro: I hope that didn't ... I didn't mean that to come across as a criticism in any way of that answer. I was saying it only because I resonate a lot with ... And I've actually had a mentor of mine that I'll say, I'm really fortunate, I'm really lucky and I'm always pushed of, "Okay, maybe so but you've also worked really hard and you're also very talented, so don't underemphasize or minimize in your own mind or externally the value that you have."

Sarah Nicastro: And I just think that's an important point because I think that there can be a tendency to do that. The other thing though that your story made me think of is the really cool synergy that happens when you have an employer that recognizes, acknowledges and fosters that sense of worth and how that builds your confidence, and then how that kind of snowballs to continue expanding the value that you can bring to the company.

Sarah Nicastro: I think that that's a really cool thing to see happen. They believed in you, maybe a little bit before you started to say like, "Okay, I can do this." And then as you build that confidence, you realize, I can do more and more and more. Your value to them grows because they gave you those opportunities. They challenged you to learn and grow and that's really cool. I mean, I can see why you would stay around 30 years if you have the opportunity to do that.

Sarah Nicastro: I want to talk a little bit about, as a woman in field service, what are some of the most notable experiences, some of the lessons you've learned of being a woman in a field that is still in 2021 largely male dominated?

Dot Mynahan: One of the lessons I already talked about, going out in the fields and realizing I didn't bring what some of the men in the industry brought to the table but I brought other skills that were beneficial. And so, just kind of understanding my value to the team, maybe just in different areas. So I think that was really good.

Dot Mynahan: I think one of the other most notable experiences and this was incredibly challenging, is at the tail end of that field training program, my mentor at that time said, "What I want you to do is ... Over the final few months of this training program. As a supervisor in another office in New England goes on vacation, I want you to go to that office and be the supervisor for the week."

Dot Mynahan: So think about that. I'm going into an office, I know nobody. I don't know the field mechanics. I don't know anybody and I have to go in and I have to be a leader sitting at that desk and helping the field mechanics. And the reception oftentimes wasn't warm and fuzzy. They were like, "Who are you? My supervisor has 20 years of field experience. What do you bring to the table?"

Dot Mynahan: But it didn't take long. Sometimes I think they were challenging me. It didn't take long for them to realize I knew my parts. I knew how to order parts and get them to them quickly, and I knew the systems. So frustrations that they had where maybe a piece of equipment showed up and their paperwork that wasn't right, and nobody knew how to fix the systems, I knew how to fix them.

Dot Mynahan: And so what ended up happening is by the end of the week, I often had three or four mechanics waiting to speak to me before I left saying, "Before you leave, can you help me with this, this and this?" I think that was incredible experience because I had to learn how to go into some place cold, how to build relationships. But I also developed an incredible network that I still leverage to this day. There are still people from those offices both in the field and in the office that I still reach out to, to this day as part of my network.

Dot Mynahan: They'll oftentimes say, "Hey, remember when you came to our office and filled in for the supervisor?" That was just an incredible experience for me and really taught me that I could go in cold to an operation and make a difference. And I think I faced the biggest challenge after that was when I was asked to consider going to Latin America. I didn't speak Spanish, didn't speak Portuguese, had never been to Latin America.

Dot Mynahan: And they're saying, "Hey, would you be interested in talking to us about the director of field operations for Latin America?" I can remember being on the flight down to Brazil thinking like, I don't know anybody. It was such an odd experience. But I thought like, "You've done this before. You've done this before. You used to go into all these offices. You didn't know anybody, and you made it work. So go in with an open mind and see what they need."

Dot Mynahan: And sure enough, what they needed were all of the skills that I had that I could share. And the interesting thing was a lot of the people in the positions that I was helping in Latin America, they needed to learn English or to practice their English in order to be promoted, be considered for future promotions within the company. And so, a lot of times, it ended up being a very strong relationship where I might not speak Spanish or Portuguese well, but they really wanted to practice their English.

Dot Mynahan: And so, we made it a point to work together. I would help them with presentations. So I not only was making an impact in the field, but to them personally. And once again, that strong ability to network and I still talk to those people all the time as well.

Sarah Nicastro: That's good. So let me ask you a question about the construction example that you shared because I'm just thinking, staying on the field service topic, and how do we kind of welcome more women into field service roles. In a situation like that where there truly was a challenge in the sense of you couldn't lift the heavy equipment. You could do a lot of these other things and arguably do a lot of these other things better than some of the other folks doing them, but there was thing.

Sarah Nicastro: As an employer, so now, putting on your ... Later on, putting on your director hat, and for others listening, what's the resolution there so that ... Is it just team work? Is it some changes in the requirements? How do you get around that real challenge to be able to bring more women in? I appreciate you just had to deal with it personally and kind of find your own solution. But thinking of it from the director's side or from the employer's side, what are some of the ways to make the work more welcoming to women that can do 99% of the job?

Dot Mynahan: So I just want to be clear. I could do the work. I couldn't do the work as fast. I couldn't run a chain fall as fast the guy sitting beside me who run a chain fall for years. So, I could do it, but I felt like I was slow and it was just disappointing. But how do we make it more appealing to women? We have a member FORWARD which is the employee resource group that I co-started, one of our leaders in the Midwest region was a former new equipment mechanic and I don't even think she's 5' 2".

Dot Mynahan: But she knew how to use the tools available to her and the hoist available to her, and to ask for help from her apprentice. And she actually went from an apprentice to a mechanic and actually was promoted into a supervisory role. So I think one of the big things that I like to say is, and that we try to do through my employee resource group FORWARD, is to share those stories. Share pictures of women in the field.

Dot Mynahan: Otis has done a phenomenal job of doing professional photo shoots for some of these women in the field that we can use in materials that we go to recruit at job fairs. Say, "Look, here's a picture of a woman working on the elevators. Well, here's a picture of women working in escalators. You can do this work." And it's the highest paying trade. So you want to do this work. And I think that we've had a lot of success in Brazil, I hate to admit to bias, but I was biased myself.

Dot Mynahan: So we have a training program where we bring in apprentices every year and hire 40 apprentices to train. And so HR came to me and said, "How many women should we target to hire this year?" And I said, "Well, how many did we have last year?" They said, "Eight." I said, "Let's double it. Let's go to eight." My boss said, "What are you saying? Let's get half. Let's hire 20. 20 women, 20 men have gender parity."

Dot Mynahan: And the light bulb went off for me thinking like, "Why didn't I think of it like that?" And we actually changed how we posted for the job saying, "Women are encouraged to apply." There were 1,200 applicants, 400 were women. We went out and took photos of women working in the field and posted those with that recruitment, and we had gender parity in that class. And not only did we have gender parity in that class, but we've had gender parity in every class from that point on.

Sarah Nicastro: That's awesome. And that's kind of exactly the insight I was looking for, because maybe it sounds simple but something like those photos that builds that confidence, instead of you having to go out there and kind of feel uncomfortable and build it yourself, that helps Otis paint that picture of, "Hey, anyone can do this job. Women can do this job. It's a well-paying job. Look at these people doing it. This is something that is as applicable to you as it is to anyone else."

Sarah Nicastro: That's good. So let's talk about ... You obviously have a passion for mentoring and supporting other women, particularly in field service. Let's talk a little bit about why that's so important to you and then also why it's important to the industry for everyone to do a better job of mentoring women in service.

Dot Mynahan: Well, I think it's important to me just because of my background. I still ... I know you're going to disagree, I still think I was so lucky to find Otis and to find the trade that I just love. And so, I just feel like ... And I've been successful, and I feel an obligation to give back, to show other women this can happen. You can be successful. You can come into this trade. It's a great trade. It's a great industry. You can do this.

Dot Mynahan: So I think that that's really important. I think from a financial standpoint, if you want to get to the business bottom line, I think studies show that having women in senior leadership roles actually leads to better bottom line results. And so from a strictly financial standpoint, I think companies missed the ball when they don't have a diverse workforce.

Dot Mynahan: I mean, the diversity of thought, how I could do wiring better than the other person, it's a stronger team. One of our culture statements is we're stronger together and I really and truly believe that. And so what happened for mentoring, I also didn't understand what mentoring meant. I thought a mentoring relationship was I set aside one hour a week or month to meet with you. We have lunch, how are you doing? What do you need help with?

Dot Mynahan: But that's not what it is at all. It's actually a relationship that's owned by the mentee and you agree to be there for that person. So once I understood that and once I had one of my mentors tell me that he was mentoring 15 people, I realized that I could actually help influence 15 people. And then I met a peer of mine when I was in Latin America, I was the director of service operations and I met a peer who was the director of service operations in Singapore and we never knew of each other. She was another woman.

Dot Mynahan: And we met in Berlin for a safety conference, and we were walking down the street and I said, "If I can mentor 15 women in field operations, and you can mentor 15 women in the field operations, then we could change the lives of 30 women in the company. Wouldn't that be awesome?" And then we both looked at each other and said, "Do you know 15 women in field operations?" And the answer was no.

Dot Mynahan: So that's when we went to HR, and they suggested we start the employee resource group. So that we started FORWARD for women in the field operations, and now we've gone from an original group of 12 at the kickoff four years ago this month, to over 500 people worldwide.

Sarah Nicastro: That's awesome.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Just for the record, I do think you're lucky. I just think Otis is lucky too. That's all I was trying to say. No, and I know that feeling. So, no, that makes sense.

Sarah Nicastro: So let's talk a little bit then about, so you had this idea, you realized, "Okay, great. I could mentor 15 women in field ops, but where are they?" And then that's how the concept for FORWARD kind of initiated. Talk a little bit about exactly what FORWARD is, its intention, what it provides, how it's grown, and how you see its impact.

Dot Mynahan: So we started four years ago this month with a group of 12 women field leaders from across the US and actually we had representation from Canada and Latin America. And I think one of the biggest difference of why we were so successful is coincidentally the same week we were meeting in Connecticut to start this group and to meet each other and get this kicked off, the executive leadership team was meeting in Connecticut and our diversity inclusion person from World Headquarters who was helping us, April, she arranged for a social hour, a happy hour with the team.

Dot Mynahan: And when the executives came in and started talking to these women, we had a former Navy fighter pilot. We had a naval academy grad. We had the mechanic in the Midwest who became a supervisor. We had one of the apprentices from Brazil who was such a good troubleshooter that after two years, she became a help desk engineer helping other mechanics troubleshoot.

Dot Mynahan: And their eyes lit up. And they realized that we had hidden gems in our organization that the old adage, if you can't see it, you can't be it. I think that a light bulb went off for them that we have these resources that are under-utilized. And so, each of those women went back into their regions and started a smaller sub-regional group for FORWARD, and then it just continued to blossom.

Dot Mynahan: And the interesting thing is we say that we're there to help women in field operations, but in reality and if you look at our mission statement, we're there to help employees in field operations. So we do that through networking, through training, through support, and have regular calls and conferences in order to try to help grow all of our employees in field operations. And hopefully, we do focus a lot of our attention on women and then they will benefit from that as well.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. So what are some of the actions from those meetings or the resources that become available to these folks to help them in terms of progressing? Is it based solely around the connection and the communication or are there different sort of actions or insights, trainings, et cetera that are sort of a part of that as well?

Dot Mynahan: So we've done some technical training classes as part of the course, but I think the number one value of it is networking and sharing success stories. So each of us as leaders at some point in time or another has told our story about taking that chance, about taking the interview, sharing the statistic of men will apply when they have 60% of the credentials.

Dot Mynahan: And I think what's happened is through the normal kind of networking and mentoring relationships that have developed is when women see an opportunity posted in their office now, they'll usually retell to one of us and say, "Hey, I saw this posting. Do you think I should apply?"

Sarah Nicastro: And you say, yes?

Dot Mynahan: Why wouldn't you? Look at what you bring to the table. Look at everything that you bring to the table. Apply, put your name out there. And even if you don't get the job, because one of the things that I've made it a point to share with the women is I have not gotten every job that I've interviewed for, and that's okay, because I still put myself out there and I still met people who became part of my network. And sure enough, further along in my career, I've gotten to work with those people but the relationship had already started. So, I encourage women to do that in order to move forward.

Dot Mynahan: I think that it's a combination of just the support and the network. For a big win, this might seem small but it's not for our women. It's just we didn't have women's PPE. So, women's fall protection harnesses. We're just getting those lined up for our women. We've always said we'll just order the extra small and the smallest size those gloves come in are size seven. And so we've really put a concerted effort on women's uniforms, women's PPE. I think that those kind of benefits are things that never even crossed our mind as being a problem. We weren't even aware of it until FORWARD.

Sarah Nicastro: That's really a good point. And I think going back to what you mentioned earlier too when we were talking about the construction example with just the way you post a job description and the language you use. We've had some different episodes on the podcast that were more related to recruiting. But if you're looking to diversify in your recruiting, there is oftentimes some really bad habits ingrained that aren't malicious.

Sarah Nicastro: It's just you keep doing the thing you've been doing without stopping, reviewing and thinking, "Okay, wait a minute. How could this be perceived? Or how could we be more inclusive here? Or boy, we should really have uniforms made specifically for our women," or those sorts of things. So, I think that a lot of times making improvements in having better gender parity, making these roles more appealing and more accessible to women is just a matter of really slowing down for a minute and thinking, and just being a little bit more creative.

Sarah Nicastro: The other thing I liked is just emphasizing that value of connection. It's hard to feel like you're the first one doing a thing or you're the first one having a feeling about this role or this situation or this opportunity. And when you can connect and see so many examples of growth and evolution and maturity and learning and failure and all of those things, it normalizes all of it so that there's this collective, "Okay, we all can do this," and "I should apply for this job and I should learn this new thing."

Sarah Nicastro: It's just there is so much value in community, and I think that I'm glad that you have that passion and I'm glad that you took action on it and put that together, and the growth in four years is so super impressive. And you have to be really proud of thinking about the impact that's had on that many individual human beings and their confidence or their livelihood, all of that stuff.

Sarah Nicastro: If you were to give listeners advice or thoughts around the importance or the process of creating a program like FORWARD, what do you feel like you've learned that you should share?

Dot Mynahan: I think that there is a common misperception about employee resource groups, giving people an unfair advantage. In fact, when FORWARD first started and we had our first meetings, supervisors would reach out to me and say, "Well, how come women can attend those training sessions and I can't?" I'm like, "Oh, no. look at our mission statement. It's all employees. Please, join."

Dot Mynahan: And we started to see the attendance creep up with more and more men participating both to learn but also as allies because you not only have to have the women who are there but we have to have allies and those who will advocate for us.

Dot Mynahan: So, I think from a company to start an employee resource group, just find a leader. Find a couple of leaders who are willing to put forth an effort, who are willing to put themselves out there and take that chance, take that step and to be the face and the voice of women in field service and help other women succeed. I think that that's the big thing, is it can't be done for selfish reasons. I didn't co-found FORWARD for selfish reasons. Erika and I truly had it in our heart that we were trying to help 30 women. So, find those people in your organization that can do it and that can help.

Dot Mynahan: And the other key benefit, I think, that a lot of companies may not understand as well as I've learned is the employee assistance programs. When we think about employee assistance programs, we think about them in terms of counseling. When somebody has a problem, so we're going to leverage the employee assistance program and get them counseling. But in reality, the employee assistance programs are incredibly valuable resources for far more benefits than just counseling. They help during natural disasters and finding resources available in the local area for you.

Dot Mynahan: With COVID, we had them present several times throughout the year to us just all of the additional pressures on the women that it's okay to feel the way that you're feeling, the additional stresses at home, the people that had to homeschool who had kids. All of the additional burdens really started to add up and have negatively impacted women.

Dot Mynahan: So, I think that it's kind of ... I would recommend two specific actions. Number one, start and employee resource group, and I think that's a huge help and it's not hard to do. And number two is really leverage your employee assistance group to help with resources and benefits that will encourage women and help women be successful. As they take on these new roles, as they have doubts and concerns about themselves, they have outside support as well as internal support.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. So you kind of segue to the next thing I wanted to talk about which is I've been reading a lot of the data around how COVID has impacted working women and especially working moms. It makes me really sad. I have two children, four and five-year-old boys, and I am incredibly fortunate to be in a role with an organization that is supremely supportive of doing whatever it takes to juggle it all and understanding that this last year has been crazy times and just the best support.

Sarah Nicastro: So, to see how this is impacting so many women that aren't that fortunate, it just makes me really sad. I've worked really hard on my career, and it's really important to me. And I know that it is equally important to a lot of these women that have found themselves having to give it up. And I'm just curious outside of what you just mentioned about the employee assistance, what other thoughts do you have on how ... This isn't have to specific to field service necessarily or it can be, but just how companies and leaders need to be responding to support working moms and also to think ahead a bit about as hopefully we recover from this, how can we put an effort on bringing those women back into the workforce and giving them, not just handing them their careers back, but how do we make a space for them?

Dot Mynahan: Yeah. I mean, that's a great question. I was looking at a research from McKinsey and LeanIn that said basically one out of four women have stepped away during COVID from their careers, and one of five men. So, the impact to women is greater than to men. And we're looking at also additional workload at home, that there's an additional three hours of work at home to women versus men.

Dot Mynahan: And so it's just an incredible burden that we've asked these women to shoulder. One of the things that I've seen done successfully by UTC when Otis was a part of UTC is how to welcome ... They had a special program welcoming women back to careers who had taken a break for either to have children or because of COVID and the impact of COVID, and having specific programs designed to say, "We welcome you back. Please come back and join us."

Dot Mynahan: And I think that for us at Otis, we're going to do the same thing. We have done a phenomenal job with transitioning to remote work, supporting remote work, really being understanding with our teams. I mean last ... oh, god, it was probably end of October, beginning of November, in my weekly staff calls with my team, I could hear the fatigue. And it's all men but I could ... from my direct reports ... but I could hear the fatigue in their voices. They just were tired.

Dot Mynahan: And I stopped the meeting and I said, "Here's the deal. I can hear that you're there. You're at the breaking point. So what I want you to do is sometime whenever it makes sense to you, take a play day. Just take a play day. Just take the day off. Send me a note. Let me know. Text me, I don't care, and just say, 'You know what? I need a play day,' and go do something fun for yourself, with your family, whatever you need to just kind of get that break we all need." And that was so successful, even just the offer of doing that was so well received. And you could just feel the tension break and really just helped reset everybody.

Dot Mynahan: So, I mean I think we've done a lot. I really, really, really can't stress enough how important employee assistance programs are. There are so many resources available through employee assistance programs for childcare, finding childcare, finding eldercare, financial assistance like where can I find financial assistance. That's a benefit that I think a lot of people have that they don't realize that they have.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That's a good point. I mean it's obviously a very multifaceted issue, right? There is a lot of societal things and all sorts of stuff that comes into play. It's not like any employer or group of employers could have prevented that data. But I do think that first of all, kudos to the companies that have responded well and have done anything and everything in their power to create a more flexible environment. And to take into consideration the mental load for all of us and to acknowledge that to do what you can to give people some breathing room.

Sarah Nicastro: I think the other big thing I think about is, to your point, like the welcome back idea. There is going to be a real thing that hopefully when these women are in a position to reenter the workforce and they have this gap ... I know just talking from moms that have taken time off. It's like, "Well, now I can't find a job because I have three, five years on my resume where I wasn't working."

Sarah Nicastro: So, things like that like understanding, "Well, hey, there's a really big reason right here why so women and men were forced to do this. Let's be understanding." Just think about how we make accommodations for that in terms of our hiring and things like that. It's just, yeah, I hope we make some good progress.

Dot Mynahan: I bet there's a bunch of hidden gems out there, right? I mean I think that's the thing, like go past those gaps and look for those hidden gems. They're out there. They want to come back and giving them that opportunity is just the right thing to do.

Sarah Nicastro: I'm not trying to get too off topic, but this just made me think of a thought which is if service organizations are being strategic about the fact that this has happened, welcome them into service. Look for some skillsets that maybe in different industries that maybe could be useful in your organization. And go recruit those people. Think about how you can not only help them, but you use that as an opportunity to market a field that maybe those women never thought about getting into before. So, just a thought.

Dot Mynahan: No, it's a great thought and it's the thoughtfulness. It's not only thinking about it but trying to come up with a plan and measure yourself to that because once you start measuring yourself to a goal, you're likely to achieve that.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes. And that's a good point. Any consideration or support or allyship, it's one thing to say it. It's another thing to take action. So, it's good if people are understanding that this is a real challenge but what can we as leaders, what can we as organizations do to help build some resolution to this problem over the coming years.

Sarah Nicastro: The international women's day theme for this year is Choose to Challenge. It says, "From challenge comes change, so let's all choose to challenge." So, I wanted to ask how do you challenge gender bias and inequality and how maybe is that different for you now versus 30 years ago when you were first starting out in your career with Otis?

Dot Mynahan: I think it's markedly different. There are more women in field operations roles. We've been celebrating them now for four years with FORWARD and really sharing their stories. So, the conversations have become so much easier. Before FORWARD, before we had this opportunity to really highlight all of these hidden gems I call them, the conversation would always be a struggle. You'd have to be fighting for them. "But she can do this, and she can do this, and she can do this."

Dot Mynahan: And now, I just feel like you bring up their name and they're like, "Oh, yeah. She's done a great job in this past role. Yeah, we should consider her." So, it's just kind of changing the ... It's changed the discussion. It really has changed the discussion and I truly believed that the, "If you see it, you can be it" adage holds true and that we've done a great job within the company to have a lot of pictures of women in field operations which has helped that discussion as well.

Dot Mynahan: We're the only employee resource group right now at Otis that reaches out and includes our women field employees, so we're challenging ourselves as how do we get more women into the apprenticeship program to have a feeder system of women coming into the field. And that requires a change in the way that we approach recruitment and outreach and how do we find other women. But I think we really, I think, celebrate women and the success in a way that because of the success stories that we shared and because the conversations have occurred and they're occurring regularly, it's happening more organically now for us.

Dot Mynahan: And hopefully as other companies follow suit, the same thing happens. We're doing these shirts for International Women's Day with FORWARD and Otis on them and wearing purple. And we had these masks made up for them as well. And it's just all about, okay, go out. Be in the field. Take a selfie. Share it. Share it on social media. Share what you do and really get out there and celebrate what women can do in field operations.

Sarah Nicastro: To hear about the progress and how much has changed and how it's being celebrated at Otis, it's really, really cool and refreshing and good. I know there are still organizations out there that need to make far more progress than they have. And I guess last question on the idea of challenging, which would be if you went back to some of your earlier experiences where it wasn't quite as normalized and it was a little bit more uncomfortable to speak up if you saw something unfair or that sort of thing, what advice do you have for people that are in situations that they do need to challenge what's being said or done or what that status quo is. Is there any thoughts you have on how to challenge effectively?

Dot Mynahan: I think that part of the ... And we have this happen on a regular basis. We have a lot of women in the fields who are the only woman in there, local. So, they don't even know any other woman in the trade. So, I think just trying to make those connections happen by giving women support, I put my name. I put my cellphone number out there, my email address. I'm like, "Text me if you have a problem." I've gotten calls all hours of the day and night from women or text messages saying like, "Hey, I need to talk to you."

Dot Mynahan: And oftentimes, it's either just like, "Look, I can understand what you're saying, but I think this mechanic would be a good resource for you to bounce things off of." Or sometimes, I'm like, "You know what? Let's get you talking to labor relations and how to handle situations, their unionized employees, how to help with that." I think it's just for me trying to get make those connections and allow the woman names of people that they can call for help.

Dot Mynahan: So, we have kind of two tiers of help. We have kind of the FORWARD tier in leadership ... Well, actually three. I would say we've got the FORWARD leadership team and all of our FORWARD members who will help each other. We have the company resources that are out there. And then we have the sisterhood of the IUEC, the International Union of Elevator Constructors. We have a group of women there who will openly share their names and phone numbers and email addresses to other women who are coming into the trade.

Dot Mynahan: So as we're hiring new women into the trade, I'm trying to connect them to the other women in the trade.

Sarah Nicastro: But I really like that point, Dot, because knowing that there are women that aren't working around other women that may run into situations that they feel they need to challenge, maybe they will have the confidence or the desire to just challenge in the moment, but give them a safe space if that's not the case, right?

Sarah Nicastro: So, by you offering yourself as a personal advocate, "You can reach out to me anytime. You can text me, you can email me," you're a safe place for them to go if they're not comfortable challenging someone else in their reporting line or what have you, to help them feel that they're not alone. I think that's a really good point. So, how can other women leaders act as that even personal advocate for other women in different positions in a way that, "Hey, if you need something, anything, reach out"? So instead of them maybe keeping it in, they can come to you and find a way to get that out.

Dot Mynahan: Yeah. And I think that there's another key piece to the puzzle. It's not just women leaders who should be allies, right? And so one of the programs that we did last year, we got the idea from the iron workers is we have the special stickers and cards that the women can give to allies, to give to mechanics who gave them a fair shot to thank them but to give them a sticker they could put on their hard hat. And then if another woman comes on to that job and sees that mechanic with that sticker, she will know that that mechanic was willing to give another woman a fair shot and was thanked for that.

Dot Mynahan: And so, we're trying to even strengthen our ally network out there in the field and try to make it a visible indication so that you're not out there alone. There are men who are very supportive of women in the field, and we're just trying to leverage that network as well.

Sarah Nicastro: That's a really good point. Okay, Dot, last question for you. What advice would you give your younger self?

Dot Mynahan: God, I hate this question.

Sarah Nicastro: You're welcome.

Dot Mynahan: No, because I have this whole mentality where I never have a regret. I might apologize for something I've done but I can't regret it because to me, it was a lesson. So, I would say probably two things. Education is key. I think it took me a long time to get to the point where I got my college degree and I should have stuck with it earlier on and I didn't. So, I think whether it'd be through college education, a trade, apprenticeship program, anything education is key. Take advantage of every opportunity to learn.

Dot Mynahan: I think that the other thing that was probably a really hard lesson for me to learn is I'm fiercely independent. And I never believed in study groups or work groups. I wanted to do it myself and figure it out myself, and I have really learned that I'm an idiot, that those groups and the diversity of thought and the strength in numbers and just the different creative approaches to solving problems is just phenomenal. And I think that I would look back at my younger self and say, "Join those study groups. Join those work groups and take advantage of not only the networking capabilities but to just hear the diversity of thought, to hear different approaches to solving a problem."

Dot Mynahan: I'm in a DE&I training class right now, and we got a homework assignment. And it was a minor homework assignment, and I thought, "Oh, I could get this done in like 10 minutes." But I put together a working group, a homework group and I invited like five other people in the class to it and it was the best discussion. And we really went so much further with the material than what was intended from the homework assignment, and I kicked myself I didn't learn that lesson earlier.

Sarah Nicastro: Now, do you think ... I said one more question, and I lied because I can't resist. Do you think that that willingness to let go of some of that independence happened as you gained confidence?

Dot Mynahan: Oh, that's a really good question. I have to think about that. Maybe a piece of it is, but I think it's just kind of forced participation into those groups. That was the door that opened where I was just like a light bulb went off and I'm like, "Oh, my god, this is awesome. I never would have thought about approaching this problem that way, but that's really creative."

Dot Mynahan: And so I think just experience of being pushed into those groups has ...

Sarah Nicastro: You saw the value.

Dot Mynahan: I saw the light.

Sarah Nicastro: I asked that because there's so much of what you've said today that I really resonated with. But I am fiercely independent, and I think that ... I also have a psychology degree, so forgive me for going deep on all of these things. But I think at the root of that, I'm fiercely independent because I feel like I need to control and improve my own worth.

Sarah Nicastro: And so I think that as my confidence has increased, I've been willing to relinquish a little bit of that independence or control because I recognized the benefit of others' opinions because I'm more confident in my own. So, instead of feeling like I have to know it all, I have to be able to do everything myself because I need to prove that I'm worthy and I'm capable, now it's kind of like, "Yeah, I actually don't really know this. So, like let's get a group together and do some brainstorming because I'm good at this thing but I'm not good at these other things." And that confidence in being able to admit that has taken some time.

Dot Mynahan: Yeah, and I think seeing working groups as asking for help, and it's not. And I think that that was the other kind of piece of the puzzle there.

Sarah Nicastro: No, you're right. It goes back to that diversity of thought. You can learn so much just by engaging. Honestly, I mean I loved doing these podcasts for that exact reason. I mean it's not a group. It's a one-on-one but the different things that it makes me think about or reflect on or the concepts that surface is just really cool.

Sarah Nicastro: Really appreciate your time, Dot, and you sharing so openly. I have very much enjoyed our conversation, so thank you.

Dot Mynahan: Thank you, Sarah. It's been my pleasure to speak with you today. And I would just say for anybody, I am on LinkedIn. So, if anybody from another company has questions or concerns, they can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm more than happy to help.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you for that. You can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter, @TheFutureOfFS. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more about IFS service management by visiting www.ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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5 Biases That Hinder Service Marketing

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