The Mindset Behind Siemens' Service Success | Brad Haeberle | UNSCRIPTED Ep. 370

Hello, welcome to the Unscripted podcast where you'll find discussions on what matters most in service leadership and business transformation. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Let's jump in. Today we're going to talk about the mindset behind Siemens service success. I'm excited to be joined on the podcast today by Brad Haberly, who is the executive vice president of services for. For smart infrastructure buildings at Siemens. Brad, did I get that right? Yep. Perfect. Okay. Perfect. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks. I'm very excited to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to have you. Brad and I ran into one another at Field Service next West in San Diego and I was thrilled that he said he is a regular listener of the pod. And I said, well, hey, we need to get you on an episode then we have to. We must. So, Brad, before we get into our topic of the day, can you just tell everyone whatever else you would like to share about yourself, your background, your role, anything to set the stage? Yeah. First, thanks for having me. And I want to thank all my peers out there who participate in the podcast because I always listen to. I get a lot out of it, so I appreciate them because I learn it and take that back in our organization. So thanks for that. Been been in the Siemens for many different roles over the year, technology roles to run in different type of businesses. I have a great wife and two kids that are slowly leaving the nest. And for me personally, I like to compete and play sports and I have a real passion for business. In the standpoint, I just find it fascinating. How do you win in the marketplace? I focus on customers, so I always just find businesses very interesting, even if they're not the business I'm in. Just how do people make money? How do they do things? It's just very interesting to me for whatever reason. So about it. Well, when we think about the, I mean, we're talking a lot about mindset today. Right. Like, there's a lot of parallels between, you know, the mindset in the competitive landscape of sports and what does it take to win, you know, the strategy of it, the mentality of it, the, the practice, the, you know, all of the things. Right. And there's a lot of parallels between that and then the, the business landscape. What's your favorite sport? I switch on a regular basis. But right now my go to sport is pickleball, of all things. Okay. I like it for exactly what you said because it's athletic, but it's also super social. But it's very much strategy. It's It's a lot of more thinking and positioning and doing stuff, and that's what I like about it. And been playing for about four or five years and really got into it. And so it's my go to probably a little too much right now. That's really cool. So we just. We were really invested in the NBA Finals, the semifinals, to be more specific, because the Cleveland Cavaliers were in the semifinals and we live about an hour and a half from Cleveland. So my older son especially is a big Cavs fan, and we actually went to one of the games where they played Detroit. But it was really interesting for me to be watching all of those games with my sons because it gave us a lot of opportunity to talk about mindset. Like, you can kind of see when one team gets in a player's head and they start to unravel, right. Whether it's that or if they have such a big lead that they start to get full of themselves, you know, there's like all of these things you can kind of pick out to talk about about like the whole mental aspect of the game. So it's really, really interesting. That's a great analogy. I mean, you think about it great with your kids because you think about it as you're playing any sport. You're looking at their weaknesses and where the weaknesses are and you're attacking that and. And that kind of stuff. And so it is a lot never thought about that analogy with business. It's very interesting. And teach your kids, be great. Yeah. Because, you know, you can be if you think of it this way. Right. Like, you can have great athleticism and lose a game because you give up. Right. Or you get frustrated and you let your emotions control you or whatever it is, you know, and it's the same thing in leadership. Right. Like, you can have a really good knowledge of X, but if you don't have the mindset and, you know, the ability to check your emotions and all of those things, there's not one ingredient that gets someone to a win. There's a lot of different factors and we're going to talk about some of those today. You gave a great keynote presentation at the Field Service Next west event, and there were some different aspects of it that I pulled out and then some other things when we chatted afterwards that I'm really excited to talk about today. They all sort of come back to this importance of mindset. So before we get into some of those specific topics to start, what can you share about how you stay from a mindset perspective, focused and Positive because I know there are many, many challenges and stresses that creep in that could kind of throw you off your game. So how do you kind of stay in the right mindset to do what you need to do? Yeah, I. Tough question for me a little bit. But let me start with first. From a business perspective, in every meeting I go to, any review, any structure, I always, I try to do everything from a customer lens. So I just. My team's talking about, we're going to do this, this, and I'm always going, all right, if I'm sitting in there, a customer shoe, what I care about this thing, how does it help me? I think that's the starting point, at least for me to, you know, make decisions where we go, what's really important to do that is really critical. But also I know and you, you talked about a little bit like, you know, you could be really great athlete, but it's, it's no different than that. Is, you know, the, the core of everything that I always remember is service is a people business. Okay. First and foremost. Foremost. And actually what I've learned is the actual most competitive advantage you can have by far is you can have the best people with the right attitude. Those two things have to go together, and that's super hard for competition. You can build the next technology or whatever else, and eventually they'll catch it pretty quickly. You know, you kind of have a little. But to. If you have the right people, you have that right attitude and customers really like you, then you can't. You. It's really hard for them to overcome that. And frankly, that's a fun place to be. If you got those kind of people around you and everyone has that mindset, it's fun. So you like that. And then you get also winning. What's winning look like? What's. What's winning look like? And you celebrate that winning. And to me, it goes back to the competitive stuff. You want to win and you gotta. But not be afraid to make mistakes too, because it's. No one gets everything perfect. So the key is you try, you know, you. You learn, try adopt, keep moving until you get it right. And if you build that. And I have a great team that has that same mindset and it kind of infects on. And the last thing is having a little fun. Don't take life too serious and don't take work always. It's so serious. Have a little fun while you're there. And that's kind of the mindset that I try to incorporate in for me How I kind of work every single day. Yeah, I love that. I think, you know, what you said is so true. Like, it's, everyone wants to do well and you want to win and you want to have that winning formula, but you're not. It's. You can't be winning 100% of the time. You're going to make missteps, you're going to make mistakes. And I think as a leader, especially a senior leader in a role like yours, you know, it's okay. I just think there's a lot of pressure in the sense of, like, your attitude sets the tone for everyone else's. Right. And so on one hand, that's a lot of pressure. Right. On the other hand, that doesn't necessarily mean you can't get frustrated or stressed. It's how you model how you handle that that affects those around you. Right. It's, you know, it's just like you can have a bad game, you can lose. You can't wallow in that for the next three weeks. Right. You gotta get up the next day and get back at it, you know? And, yeah, and I also like what you said about having fun. I think fun is such an underrated, you know, characteristic of the workplace because we spend so much time at work and people want to be happy, you know, And I, I think I remember I had a change management expert on a few years ago, and one of the things that came out of our conversation that has stuck with me is all too often at work and with initiatives, we celebrate success but not effort. And sometimes you want to celebrate effort because those mistakes are going to happen or things might take longer to get to a certain mark and you want to keep people motivated and having fun and happy and that sort of thing. So good stuff. All right, so I want to talk about optimization. We spoke about this reality that we were both sort of talking about in different terms. I wrote an article about this not too long ago. You talked about it a bit in your presentation, which is this reality that a lot of organizations are still in the mindset, very focused on how they optimize their own operations, when really they need to be thinking about how they optimize their customers, businesses. So let's talk a little bit about that mindset factor and what you see there in other organizations, how Siemens has kind of evolved through this and what you're focusing on. Yeah, first, thanks. And I did read your article. It was very interesting because then I made that context of our conversation even more, Chris. So I really appreciate that. Let me Try to address this in three different ways. Everyone always has to optimize their business just to compete. Okay, we've been doing that and Siemens on that is we call it a digital transformation. And we're trying to take our existing businesses, we have multiple businesses and our services and we're constantly trying to evolve that once again with customers lens. And how do we do use digitalization to make it a better services, faster, cheaper, better. The best win, win always to me is if you can have higher value your customers and you get the points and you can do it for cheaper. That's the win win for both of you. Make more money, they make more money and it's really good. So that's first on that side but then really that's just table stakes for me. What we're trying to do is build services that optimize our customers organization and it's not overly sophisticated. On how we do that is a couple things. First is what is our customer's mission? What's their mission that they're trying to accomplish? And we provide services to buildings. That building is there for a reason and they're very different for different vertical reasons. And how important that is is different between different markets too. But that's there for a mission of the entity or whatever that is that they're supporting. So what is that entity trying to do? What's their mission? Okay, and it's simple. How do we help them support their mission and do it better, but also cheaper. Okay, because there's pressure on cost. But they also have to get better. And if you can meet those mechanisms, those two things, then you win and they'll buy from you and they'll buy against competition. And that's the mindset and that's a little bit from an optimization. What we also look at is we looked at our traditional business and then we look at our customers and how do we save them money through it? And that's what generates new businesses. They're businesses that we're not even in. And we look at it two ways. Two ways is one is simple. What are they actually buying today and how can we do that better? Because they're already making a purchase, they're already spending money. I can displace their money. If I can do it for better, cheaper, then they'll buy from me. And I already have relationships. That's number one. Then two, what is it that I can do that doesn't even exist in the marketplace? And that's a lot of technologies that we can do put in place that really have a game changer for their business. And if you can impact that budget. I don't know what most industries are, but my customers have huge pressure on their budget. They don't, they don't get increased budgets, they're tight on their budgets and have an older working workforce that's moving out. So they're losing talent. So how do I help them through that transition and accelerate that and meet that? That's just how we look at it. And that's optimizing our customer site, not just ours. And so the issue with this is it sounds very simple, but obviously it's not. You know, and I think, you know, the, the crux of the article was, you know, basically saying it wasn't all that long ago that the effect of optimizing your own business, you know, being on time for every service visit first, having a high first time fix, having a high nps, you know, that these things were a competitive differentiator. The problem is they aren't anymore. To your point, it's table stakes. So it isn't to say that you don't need to optimize your own business. It's just that if your mindset is solely focused on that and you aren't leaving capacity to think about how the work you're doing helps optimize your customer's business, you're leaving. I mean, you're not only leaving a lot of potential on the table, but you're risking irrelevance, I think is the real issue. So you mentioned, even at the beginning, when I asked you about mindset that you have really got in the practice of trying to think through the lens of the customer, every decision you're making, is this something our customers would care about? Tell me a little bit more about that in the sense of like, for our listeners, what questions could they use to make sure that they're framing their mindset around customer outcomes or at least expanding it to better include customer outcomes. Yeah. Can I tell you a quick funny story before I do that? Where I got minimized is 2007, 2008, if you remember, that's when we had a huge crisis, economic crisis. And I still remember that I was running a US service business and we were getting calls from all of our large customers right at that time and they said, I want to cut, you know, I'm getting pressure from the CFO to cut 20 to 30% of my contract or more. What am I getting from that? And what we, our answers were not good. It was task based, basic stuff. We were doing and guess what? We get cut. I said I'm never going to live with that experience again. So that's what changed my mindset. But I go back to it is, it's the question to really ask is, it's really simply is what is the KPIs that your customer is using to run their business and how is that affecting the mission of their business? Okay, because the KPIs that are the most relevant, the ones in the missions and knowing. So that's the first question you have to ask. But you have to ask then what are the KPIs that you can deliver that have those impact of those things? Because you can't meet all those objectives and those things. But you can first then understand which ones you can impact and then how do you impact it and then you can look at which ones you could impact if you do things differently or produce new services. So it's really starts with the basic. That's what I meant by the customer. But it's driven by their relevant KPIs, what's important to them to run their business. And then how can you impact that? And, and changing that's the starting point of all that discussion. And the biggest question then, then it's actually how to do that is not easy. And then put it in a way because you not only have to do that, you have to prove it to them. So you have to show those impact. You have to have the technology and tools to do that. So to make it happen is the hard part. But the starting point is asking that questions. And it depends on your customer group. We have many, many segments of the customer. So that question is answered in a different way with many, many of our customers. So we have to tailor those services. But they tend to be common industry questions and our commas common piece of example. We have healthcare customers, they answer the same way. We have industrial customers, we have universities, they answer the same way. So there's, there's, there's a consistency on certain ways that the market slice. And as long as you do that, then you can solve that for that slice of the market. Yeah, yeah. I think there's, there's a conversation we had, I believe with Tetrapact at one point that was really interesting about when you get into delivering outcomes. Right. Like there are these distinctions to your point from customer segment to customer segment, but you're talking about like a percentage of a core offering that is then tailored toward these different segments. It's not that every customer is getting a completely, you know, Bespoke so solution from top to bottom. Right. An interesting thing that came up at our recent event is this conversation about so customer needs and expectations and how they've evolved. This is what we're talking about and the person made the point and it's come up many times before, which is you also can't assume that your customers will know to ask for everything that they need. Obviously in this idea of a customer centric mindset, getting firsthand feedback from your customers is important. Asking the question of what KPIs matter most to your business, what are you struggling with? Those are important. At the same time, if you're thinking ahead and you're thinking about, like you said, how can we come up with things that are different, that aren't out there right now? You also want to be thinking about what, what things could help them that they don't know to ask for or what challenges have they not seen yet that are coming, etc. How do you kind of like balance that need to like get the input but also not limit yourself to only what they're telling you? Yeah, I think that's a great question. And it's where most companies make mistake is and, and I always say this, customers can't tell you what they want, they can tell you their problems. Okay. It's a very big difference. And what I in Mike's one of my many, many roles is I ran marketing and strategy and so I did a lot of this stuff years ago and learned a lot of that experience. And what I've learned on services is if you ask those questions not only with KPI, but the problems and you have observation of what's really happening and you are going to have to conceptually design different ideas in there. And what really works really well is using a UX UI concept like software teams do. But to do that in a service thing because you have to visualize what these, not only what they're going to get, but what the changes and how they operate. Because a lot of times you're changing the process, changing their structure and the only way to do that is you have to understand their problems, understand the impact and you have to design some concept and then you've got to bring those concepts in front of the customers. Customers can react to them really clearly. If you can show them, physically map it out, then they can react and they'll tell you yes or no and you'll get the great feedback. They won't be able to tell you what that design concept. They'll just, they can react to it. But most customers know what you can do is what I've learned also. And the beauty of the service business, because the people business is a lot of times that innovation happens with some local technician somewhere and a salesperson, they solve. They did this, and they do it by just solving a problem they don't even know that they're doing. And that there's a lot of innovation. Just listen to what's going on. And then some, somewhere along the line, a customer solves these problems too. And it might do it in a clunky way. And if you can do it much more efficient, you can do it as a service. You got to listen to all those different viewpoints. And the last thing is, to me, you got to really listen to the technology industry, which you come from, because a lot of times they're in the forefront of that and they come into the industries. This technology applies. It doesn't really know how to apply an industry. But if you look at what the capabilities, you marry that to your domain knowledge. That's where the concepts really come in play. And you got to marry that. And it's not easy, it's not simple. Otherwise everyone would do it. Yeah, right. There's a magic that happens if you can pull all that together. Yeah. And I think that leads us very well to our next point, which is this distinction between that of a service business and a service organization. Because I think a lot of what you're describing is that distinction. Right. It's staying ahead of the trends from a technology perspective. It's, you know, not only listening to your customers, but like really having your ear to the ground for what's going on and where is the opportunity and then hunting that down. Right. What are your thoughts on the priorities for the next one to three years? Knowing that you very much are, in your role at Siemens running service. It is a service business, not an organization. And the distinction, again is, are we just looking to minimally continually improve what has existed for some time, or are we constantly looking for these opportunities to evolve, to innovate, to grow, to expand? That's what I mean when I say a business versus an organization. Yeah. Well, the second, if I want to be around in three years, that's first. But I would say, you know, you look at, like from our priorities, and the pressure is, I don't do this. But through our board members, they make commitment to the marketplace, and one of them is commitment for service. We have commitments out there, and it's to grow above market. You can't just do the same way and grow above market and grow at a certain pace and achieve those objectives without doing those things, there's just no way. If you just trudge along, you might get a little point over market, but it's hard to really beat market. And do you think got to build new businesses, you got to build new ideas, you got to build new markets. All those things have to happen to go to. So for my priorities and what I look at is first and foremost is growth. How do I get our growth? And that's many different ways to do that. But then also how do we transform? Because not only transform to get growth, but also transform to stay relevant and be competitive. And through digital transformation, we've been down that journey. It's, it's accelerating. It's always been around. We've been into AI, machine learning, but now with the technology moving that things that we never even dreamed of two years ago are happening very rapidly. So you have to speed up that process drastically and then, but it also creates huge amounts of opportunities because you can do things, capabilities that in house staff can do and you can displace things in a, in a positive way. And I told you earlier that my, my customers workforce are aging out and the talent's aging out very quick. It's a huge pain in our industry. So if I can supplement that during that process, that's a huge opportunity. So I just look at opportunity, opportunity, opportunity. And the key is where you're going to put your bets and you got to have enough bets. And, and my finance person, my finance had always hates me using that word because he goes, it's, you know, it's, it's a different way likes to describe it, but they are bets. You're taking calculated bets and you want to make enough of them that you're going to work and some aren't going to work. And then you'll be able to hit your objectives as soon as you hit home run, sometimes you hit base hits and then you just got to keep working it. Yeah. Okay, so a couple other things I want to talk about when we're on this idea of service business versus service organization. And so again, I think a lot of this has to do with, I mean it has to do with leadership, but it also has to do with, to your point, your board is setting expectations that you are then responsible to find a way to carry out that helps you be in this mentality of like, okay, so we're saying we're going to grow X percent this year. Now how are we going to go and make this happen. Right. There are organizations that for whatever reason maybe they come from a rich product product legacy and they just have not really come to understand the potential that exists in service where they're not necessarily driving that mentality in the business. They haven't embraced it. And sometimes for service leaders in those organizations it can be frustrating. So I guess one question I have for you on this kind of topic is you're in the position where you work for an organization who already sees service as, as a business. If you were giving advice to a leader who sees the potential for the service business but is currently existing in an organization that looks at it as just an organization, not a business. Like it's, you know, you hear all sorts of unnecessary evil or it's a. Whatever. What advice would you give to them on how to open some eyes to the potential that exists in service as a business? Yeah, I think that's a very normal thing of what you said Sarah, in, in Siemens. We have businesses like that because we're, we're product rich company with makes incredible products. But sometimes that's dominant position and there's a normal life cycle that you go through to get to that level of service business and it doesn't happen overnight. I've seen that in our business first and foremost. So they shouldn't feel like that's that anything against them. It's just. It's a normal course of kind of culturally where companies. But advice is a couple things is first it depends on where they are and I think it's just a maturity level. If they're purely a cost center, okay, look at what they have that they could start to charge revenue so they can see because the value changes also when you start to jam revenue and also look for high margin revenue. Because what people think of it is if they're a product they're like I'm going to give this stuff away because I'm going to sell more product. They don't realize that they have this crown jewelry a profit that they can make and it's a, it's a reoccurring profit. So it's much more steadier state. So the economy goes down. That's that's the thing that keeps the business going. So they got a first view how do they. And I would, I would view it a couple ways. They first look at all right how do I even start down that path and where do is my first revenue? What can I turn into revenue? Second then I would look at where I can add a Lot more value for our customers in that discussion and build tighter relationships and stickiness. And then I would make proposals on let's turn this thing in the business and have this investment and start that way down that journey. You gotta, you just have to start down that journey on there. And then, then you start to build really portfolios that really is service relevant in there. And then when I know when a team is really really becomes a service business is when they start to get their own dedicated sales force. And they start to because that's the hardest journey is they still want the product guy to sell that. And a lot of times it's not that it's not a good seller. It's a different mentality of selling service than product. And if you have product people they usually tend to want to give away the service instead of making a lot of money. So how the margin and I think you have to. You have to sell that business case to the organization. But if they do it through view it from what problems are solving the customer and selling it through stickiness that they're going to build a reoccurring especially a reoccurring revenue business that has a lot of stickiness and profitability and telling the story that guess what, What I've learned over the years if you don't have good service on a product, a lot of times a product doesn't consider competitive could be a great product but if they can't apply it doesn't work or doesn't know how to do it. The product loses its value when they have that. The product can be actually the reason the service can be the reason why they buy the product. It pulls it through. And that's what the evolution that we've learned. And so you got a piece part that together. But if they view it from solving problems, turning revenue and make business case and don't be afraid to go up to the senior level to go have that discussion and get people's attention if they're not at that level. And the quicker they can get a seat at the table, the more they'll have a voice. And that's hard when you're a cost center to get that seat at the table. And when you're in a revenue center, it's easier to get that seat at the table. Yeah. So the other question I had on this topic is actually I think something that happens somewhere along that continuum and I'm just curious in your experience where and how you navigated this, which is like on this transition from a service organization to a Service business. Right. You were talking about how a lot of the offerings that you are now positioning to customers, it's not just like a line item, like. And we can also throw in X service. Right. You're talking about how you can help them, like you mentioned, with the talent, the fact that like a lot of your customers are having a really hard time bringing people in and there are services you can offer to help offset that challenge. But you mentioned some of these things fundamentally change the way your customer organizations operate. And so the other thing that seems common on this journey is that at some point who you're selling to changes. Right. Because when you're an organization and you're just providing a transactional service, you might be having a conversation with a certain individual. When you start talking about a bigger, broader, more impactful offering, that starts to affect the way that company operates, that's a completely different level of conversation. So what's your experience with that and how you know when you're kind of at the point where you need to be developing those different relationships? Yeah, it's a great question, and it's a, It's a tough question. Is, Is first and foremost, because we, I've been through many reiterations over the years of our sales organization, but the starting point that we view everything through is who's the buyer? Okay. And how do they buy? How does our, how does our customers buy? Because you got to enter in through the most practical way. And who's, who's the decision maker and who's the technical buyer and how do you enter? And they were saying, so I have, I sell into facilities, but I have dedicated salesforce for very specialty services because there's actually very different buyers inside of facilities that make that decision. And they don't cut across. So the fact they don't want to talk sometimes in their own departments cut across negative on there. So. And then if you have to go up higher level. And that's exactly so I might have, I sell fire alarm systems bill and automation mechanical systems. There might be an expert buyer in an organization, but when I'm trying to sell a transformation, a digital transformation, how they do, I got to go up to the VP of real estate or minimum, the head of facilities. You can go up at the C level, but the C level doesn't tend in our stuff because we're not on the revenue side. If you're on the, if you're on the cost side of their balance sheet, they don't really want to talk to you. If you're on the revenue side, you can get their attention and we do have business like data centers that we have impact on their revenue or that we can do that, then you can go up to that side. So it depends on what you're selling and it depends on target. But your point is exactly right is look at where the decisions are going to be made, how those decisions are made and who do you target for those specific things and do you have the right skill sets to do that? In the capabilities we transmission transition from traditional break fix selling contracts to outcome, what we learned is we had to have a supplemental sales force that would go in for really the first two or three times and have that conversation and teach our organization and then, then you start to transition the organization to that. Not everyone can make that transition, but you got to support them too. So I think it's all over the road depending on who you're. But if you. But I go back to. That's why a customer lens. If you look at how they buy and who they buy and the skill sets you need to go have that conversation, then you make a good decision. Yeah. And I think this is, it's really good advice and it points back to sort of the maturity. Right. Because we did a joint research project last year with Simon and Kutcher all around the massive growth potential that exists within services. But how much of it is really untapped? I think one of the findings is the idea of how many companies don't do, or at least do well, customer segmentation. What you're talking about is not only having good segmentation but then good Personas so that you understand sort of like, okay, we've reached the ceiling of what's going to be possible with this Persona. So do we have a value proposition to take forward to, you know, the next Persona and to really understand. Well, you know, yeah, this salesperson could go pitch this offering to the person we've been working with for the last 10 years, but that person actually will be put off by this because we're really talking about a value proposition that's changing the way the company works. Right. Like you really need to be smart about those things. And I think that certainly comes with maturity. But it's another aspect of this idea of just getting the job done versus creating the narrative like that organization versus business mindset, you know, and that's, that's actually one of the things that we've learned is we've launched lots of new businesses over the years. And one of the testing is not the product. It's Actually, the sales approach and operational delivery and. And, you know, we will test it in multiple cities and you'll find out that doesn't work. Right. Until you get it kind of, you get the magic recipe, and then all of a sudden you duplicate that. So we don't try to go broad. We get. We try to get the recipe down, figure it out low on the I side, the investment side. So quick return, and then when we get it right, then we can make a quicker eye investment and quicker returns. But you're describing a very tough problem, especially when you're doing new things, you're trying to expand, is figuring that out. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, another thing that's come up a lot is, you know, the need to figure a lot of this out in parallel with your existing business. Right. Because especially when you're first getting started, you need to do both things at the same time. Right. You can't cannibalize your existing business with these new offerings, but you have to find those pockets of opportunity to go out and build momentum while you maintain the existing thing. Super interesting, but incredibly complex. Yeah. Just think about this, Sarah. You build new, new things, new portfolio, and you have an existing sales team and you layer that on there. Okay. Either one. They only have so much capacity. So unless you're increasing that capacity, then basically you're just robbing Peter to pay Paul and you're. You're hurting other things. I, you know, they might get a little bit better, but you don't grow. So. Yep, you're right. The complexity is all those math has to work together to make it work. Yeah. Yeah. All right, so I. We had a session at our event recently where I was talking about the need to shift mindset around digital from that of an enabler to a multiplier. And this is a different framing again of a concept that you brought up in your keynote at Field Service Next West. Right. Because what you were saying is no one in today's landscape can scale service today based solely on human power. You have to be thinking about the digital aspect and how that it acts as a force multiplier. So what does this look like currently at Siemens, this sort of balance between the people that make service special and then the digital component that allows you to multiply that. And how do you see that evolving in the next couple of years? Yeah, it's a great question and probably the hardest question that you asked to answer. Okay. What we've seen is we've been down this digital transformation. If you're growing, you still need More people. That's what you learn. But the question is we couldn't people was a big problem. Capacity people. So it's also help how we can, you know, can get ourselves moving in the right direction. The. And let me, let me give you a couple examples. What we've done is first, what we've learned is we got to have a technology stack layer that is consistent before we deploy that out deployed on many different technologies. So we couldn't actually deploy. It took us forever to do that. We had very inconsistency and there was no scaling effect. It was very difficult to do that in. You just had our biggest customers that could do that because we couldn't afford to do that in a scalable way for the customer. So they couldn't afford this tech technology we did. So building a technology later consistently is really critical. But then the actual delivery that. Cause it's a combination of technology and there's still people, but there's a different type of person that does that. So what we've learned is we still keep our field organization exactly as they're delivering services. We built something called a digital service center and they're distributed around the world, but that's who delivers our digital layer. Everything we call bubsite is delivered to that organization. So that way we're scaling an organization. We try to do that local by local, country by country. You couldn't bring that talent in. You couldn't afford that talent. By bringing it together in larger groups, you can build some critical mass, get there and they start to optimize even what they do at a much more efficient layer. And then when we go deliver around the world, I don't have to teach that and build that organization every time. I just need to build it in one or two places. And I can scale very quickly, so I can do it. So that's extremely important and extremely helpful to kind of get to that next level of what we're trying to do and. But still not easy. None of that stuff's easy because to get all that magic work, it's very complicated because you're changing the way you work drastically. It used to be we used to do everything local. So now we have to do our planning effort has to be all right, who does what when it's done. It's different people doing stuff, how they handle. We're changing a lot how our technicians are doing, which they do in the most important thing they did before they would go on site, they would plug in their computer to our systems, they'd run this analysis report sit and have a cup of coffee with the customer, maybe an hour, hour and a half, and then they would go look at stuff they fixed, or they would have a physical log that a customer would write down, say, these are my problems I want you to fix while we're there. The difference today is we're running those reports behind the scenes through our dsc. We're providing that information to our technician before they ever walk on that job. We have an interaction portal, so our customers are on automatically interacting with us. We're fixing things along the way, or we're seeing that. So it's not a reactive call. So when our technicians come there, instead of just doing standard PM and running analysis reports, they're doing directed activity and they're actually fixing the problems that need to be, that have an impact. And then what we can see on our Reporting is the KPIs that were the stuff we agreed upon, how that's improving or staying steady at the level that we're doing. Tying those pieces to do that is not easy. It's very, very difficult. You got to have all those moving parts working there. So. And trust me, we had lots of challenges with that over the years and still challenges every time we deploy to get it right and get it efficient and. But that's the scale in effect. And we start to see that. We can see that our digital services, our fastest growing business, because we are getting that scale effect and our value goes up significantly with our, our customers. And I believe it 100% is the winning way and. But it's difficult. Yeah, absolutely. What do you see as the biggest potential there, like for growth over the next couple of years? You know, you've made a lot of progress in getting that structure in place and, and you know, I guess getting over some of those hurdles. Right. From a digital services perspective, like what is the biggest opportunity for Siemens to grow, to help customers, et cetera? Yeah, I'll say two things that what we're. Two big things we're focused on is our, the way our digital services are being produced is what we're. We traditionally did services on different product systems. Broken those things apart, our digital layer now can actually see what's happening in the ecosystem of our customer systems and then marry that with what's happening with their workforce and our workforce. And we can see how that can be optimized. And the difference is, I'll give you a simple example, but this is a big difference on there. When there would be a problem, it'd be a technical Problem somewhere in a system. That system we're in our H Vac building automation business. It shows up in calls of people that are uncomfortable or systems. So it might be 10 or 15 calls in different places in the building that got a problem and then they might roll different technicians out to go see what those problems are. And they're out there diagnostic problem. And it might take them three, four days to figure out is this one little problem downstream that's causing all these problems Today we can see digitally what's happening there and through our machine learning or analytics we can detect exactly what that problem is. And then we can provide that either our team or our customers, depending on our customers wants actually high recommendations what to do fix like most likely exact fix. So we're directing that if you what that does is they can lower their in house staff substantially. What they do, they lower their energy costs substantially. And what they're improving on there, that's worth a lot of money to them. So we're, we're extracting value out of providing a lot of services and we can do those services either remote or when we have to, we roll truck and success making that magic. That's, that's where we see the biggest opportunities going well beyond our products and looking at their whole systems and, and running. That's one thing. And then the other thing for us is new. We've always been a direct business which we deliver services through our direct sales channel. We actually have a huge partner channel who delivers our products out there. And what we're doing is we're taking our technology and our services and we're now offering that to our partners to be able to make monetize money in there. So that's an opportunity new for us and new business venture for us is that we're really just starting to bark on this year and we see that as another big opportunity. But that also is just taking the magic that we put together and enable them to do that in the marketplace. So it's a lot of the same things. It's just to enable them to take our shrewd and chai things and, and help them run their business better. Yeah, it's interesting on the first point you made though, you know the analytics piece, you know, now that you have that system in place and that digital services team in place. Right. Like the contextual information compounds. Right. So if you're smart about it, what you're able to do with that from you know, a consultant, a consultative standpoint. Right. To help just like we said at the Beginning, you know, the customers optimize their businesses and make better decisions. It's really, you know, there's. That's, I think, where there's so much potential of, you know, it isn't just about to your point, like you're not anymore like the H vac aspect or the buildings aspect. You become sort of this broader context in their business which, you know, has a lot of value. Now, Brad, you mentioned, obviously all of this is a lot of change and it's, it's not slowing down. And I think I get the sense that you probably quite like it. I think there's some people that are built to enjoy a constant challenge and those changing dynamics. But as a leader, I'm sure you also have to reconcile not everyone's built that way. Right. And you're responsible to, like we said earlier, set the tone, but also to keep people around you motivated and empowered. And what have you found works in avoiding change fatigue and kind of keeping people, you know, invested in the forward momentum? Yeah. Interesting question. Yes, because that is really true when it happens. It happened actually just this last year, year and a half ago, and we were pushing our team really hard, probably too hard. And for the first time, even our leadership team, we, me and my cfo, we could feel the stress on them. And we're like, wow, we can feel it is. We're. We're pushing too hard. We got a stress thing and how do we. How do we relieve that stress? And so the first thing is, which we always do, we listen to our employee satisfaction and we talked to and find out what was going on, what we found. And because we. We have to keep moving. We can't, you know, stop the movement happen and the market's moving and we got to move. But what we did is we looked at what was causing that stress and what was the friction in our system to do that. And what we found is it was actually we had a pretty rigorous process, but a lot of. Remember I said all those movement parts have to happen. Well, those moving parts actually have to be built too, at the same time. So you have to have the portfolio team that our technology team has to have that stack and it's got to work. Our DSC has to deliver then our countries and our sale. And there's. These were all departments that had to work together, but they would get stuck somewhere because it was different priority for this group. So the stress level was going high because I got to get this stuff done, but I get blocked by this group and this group and this group. So what we did and right or wrong is we kind of change how we operate. We still have processes but we created pods and we gave those teams that all work together together as a working ecosystem. We said you guys have these goals but you all have these decisions. You get to make the decisions for the group. And we put them in these pods and says you go and then we're going to have a regular review. But it's not going to re review a beating the crap out of you. It's going to review on what's getting in your way. And how do we get stuff out of the way Change a little the mechanism is it perfect? No, but that's at least you know you got to recognize that because if you go too hard and then the other thing is you got to prioritize. We sat with our leadership team first and prioritize. Okay this is what we're going to do that must have. We're going to build pods around. This is the stuff we absolutely done the other stuff we're going to do but if it's not the end of the world doesn't get done. But you got to know so those two things and but it always. The stress level comes somewhere at some point in time and I think it's just a fine line and some people can strive in that, some people can't. But you gotta get, you gotta get the stuff that's out of their way. I think that's the main thing. If you can get the. It's a lot of busy stuff and stuff that's really just cause friction. People do really good job. It's when they get stuck and that's at least that's what we try to do to resolve that best we can. Yeah, yeah, that's really good and like you said, I mean it might not be perfect but you're making a change. You're learning as you go and then you make another change. Right. See what else is in the way. Fix the that you know, I mean that's the name of the game is continuing to find those barriers and break them down. And you know that's how you keep moving ahead. Well, this has been great Brad. I really appreciate all of the. The wisdom and insight. Any final thoughts for everyone? Any closing thoughts? One service is a great business. Don't forget it's a of piece people business. If you're not having fun and having high energy then that's what's going to lose you the business. And that's. That's you know I probably my most important words in this business. And then the other thing is constantly learn. And Sarah, that's what I said. That's why I. I participate, listen to your podcast. I participate in industry stuff. Is I'm looking outside of our industry for learning. It's not inside of our industry. I see that every day because I have to fight with that every day. But learning constantly. If your organization's learning and not afraid to try things, then you'll have success. Yeah. And you can pick up those nuggets of inspiration or idea anywhere. Like you said, a frontline customer conversation, listening to a peer, attending a conference. It just takes the act of having an open mind and thinking about a little bit of curiosity, you know, like, oh, how could that apply to what we're doing? Or interesting, you know, and reflecting on that. So really good stuff. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing. So thank you so much. Thanks. Have a great day, Sarah. You too. You can find more by visiting the home of unscripted@futureof fieldservice.com the podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com as always, thank you for listening.