A Chat with Jeff Dewing, Founder at Facilities Management Consultancy Company: Cloudfm

Cloudfm was founded to fix the £200 billion facilities management (FM) industry that was fundamentally broken and lacking transparency. The market had applied aggressive procurement strategies for the last 40 years and the industry reluctantly accepted work they couldn’t deliver to make a profit. My mission was to change that.

We did this by working together with clients to solve problems, fulfilling promises that FM companies historically failed to uphold. We revamped operations and behaved differently from the rest of the industry.

We are now embarking on bigger goals, tackling climate change through our game-changing tech Mindsett, which empowers the population to take actionable steps to positively impact our planet. As a result, we’ve been named Queens Award winner for Innovation (2019) and a global leader in IoT-enabled predictive maintenance by Gartner. We’re now projected to achieve £250M by 2026.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

Culture is our No.1 priority. I strongly believe in giving staff the freedom to manage their own lives their way. We’ve put traditional offices in the past by adopting hybrid working and reinventing our office space to become a ‘collaboration hub’, used for solving problems and having fun.

These hubs are available 24/7 for employees to use to replace lost ‘third places’ e.g., libraries and local youth centres. Employees have been able to use the office spaces as birthday venues and more recently the head office is being used by staff over the weekends for ‘Mother and Toddler’ social activities.

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

I’m guided by doing things differently to influence others to also think differently. Mindsett, created in partnership with behavioural scientists at Essex University is no exception.

Using the latest IoT and AI developments, we’re changing people’s mindsets to help businesses reach net-zero goals. Mindsett monitors buildings and all mechanical assets within them, reducing costs and eliminating energy waste, reporting energy consumption and predicting failure long before it happens. Trials in the hospitality industry and NHS have shown the technology, when combined with behavioural science, reduces energy consumption by at least 20%.

We’ve also developed Cloud Coin, a gamification mechanism that rewards our supply chain for green behaviour to help tackle scope 3 emissions It’s an app that provides insights to users and action recommendations, eg. ‘turn off the lights between 10 pm – 4 am as no one is in the building, saving you £X’. Users are automatically rewarded with Cloud Coins for their green actions which can be redeemed for vouchers for various retailers.

What can we hope to see from Cloudfm in the future?

The labour shortage is a key problem that demands innovation. Some employers are offering higher wages to attract the talent they want. However, this simply moves the problem around. We’re looking at using augmented reality (AR), a highly visual and interactive method of presenting digital information in the context of the physical environment that democratises information sharing irrespective of physical limitations, to upskill and reskill people across our supply chain.

We’re also launching a marketplace model never before seen in this industry – Freedom platform 2.0 – which has been dubbed ‘Uber for engineers’.