How We Streamline by Design

“Streamline by design.” It’s catchy, isn’t it? It certainly rolls off the tongue. While we’re fond of our cleverness, we think the phrase describes exactly what we do at Ascendant Facility Partners.

As an engineer-led Guaranteed Energy Savings Company, design is our focus. As an energy efficiency company, we converge designing with streamlining. We do this to create energy efficiency solutions for facilities that are designed from the start to do more for you while leaving less of a footprint. One of the brains behind the design process is our Design Principal, Baccus Oliver. We sat down with him to pick his brain.

We Design Solutions That Work with You, Not for You

If you’re a facilities manager, then you understand the precarious nature of the systems within your facility. It might feel like a constant struggle to keep it under control—to keep it operating smoothly so that you can keep the lights on or even keep the environment comfortable. When your facility systems flip the table and manage your organization, operational costs skyrocket taking your organizations attention away from its purpose.

Baccus is here to tell you that he’s in the business of creating a new reality around facilities management. “We are in the solution business; it’s what we excel at. The biggest problem posed by a facility is the inherent fact that buildings must use energy to perform work. When they aren’t using that energy the correct way; either through an outdated or broken system, then they waste precious time and money.

You don’t want to put a bandage on these kinds of problems—you want to rethink them. That’s where we come in. We design solutions for facilities that work for our clients rather than control our clients.  We use that newfound efficiency to finance improvements so that our clients can focus on their mission.”

Baccus makes a subtle point—as a guaranteed energy savings company, we don’t just save you money, we give you back focus, which is the continued maintenance, proactive improvement, and overall health and happiness of your buildings and the people within them.

Let’s Get You Situated with the Future of Facility Operations

Are you a leader or a follower? We’re not asking you to take a personality quiz—we’re simply giving you the option to get ahead of what the future holds for facility operations. Baccus points us to the EPA’s Commercial Buildings Integration Program (CBIP).

Through this program, the EPA hits the nail on the head. “The potential to reduce energy consumption in existing and new commercial buildings is enormous. On average, 30% of the energy used in commercial buildings is wasted…”

Baccus, for one, is a leader when it comes to energy efficiency. He’s had his eye on the EPA’s CBIP for a while. “Building efficiency is going to dramatically change before 2030—it must be as we head further into a century with diminishing fossil fuels, a higher demand for energy, and an exponentially increasing need to do more with less.  We are on board with EPA’s goals, and it’s our mission to get your facility to that place, too.”

Our Facilities Engineer Finds Your “Aha!” Moment

We asked Baccus how he approaches advocacy of this modern way of thinking about facilities management. After all, it’s much easier to keep doing what you’re already doing.

“I am a realist and understand everyone has their specific training and expertise.  Everyone has their job, and it can be hard to think outside of that boundary. My job as a facilities engineer is to educate, advocate, and get clients excited about the potential.

Even today, I feel somewhat guilty our industry isn’t doing enough to focus our work on the thoughtful use of our valuable energy sources.  Let’s face it, we take energy for granted; it’s an out-of-sight, out-of-mind process that many of us try not to scrutinize. So, how do you convince someone that the way their facility operates may be antiquated, and becoming less viable at an alarming rate? At our firm, we do that by creating an “aha!” moment, where we hope everything suddenly clicks.

Often when we show the potential cost savings of these improvements is when clients get excited because they start planning what they can do with the energy-saving dollars. We earn our way through their success—that’s by design.”

A Good Guaranteed Energy Savings Company Works Smarter, but Also Harder

Our ability to calculate your energy efficiency is through an established methodology known as Energy Use Intensity (EUI.) To put it simply (it’s much more complicated than this—trust us) EUI is a calculation of your building’s energy use per square foot per year.

Someone like Baccus takes your facilities’ EUI and scrutinizes it. Using his expertise, he assesses the systems that are behind the number and conceives what can be done to improve it. The beauty of a guaranteed energy savings company is our process is non-invasive.

“We improve upon what a client already has; we’re not looking to disrupt an existing system by completely gutting it.  Instead, we work on existing facilities that have an established EUI.  We improve the EUI to create utility and maintenance savings.

Imagine someone coming to your home and telling you that you can have the same home but achieve energy savings with an upfront investment which goes towards the improvement of the home’s function. The money you save would roll into the cost of those improvements, and, if we’re doing our jobs right, you’ll receive enough cost savings to set money aside for future improvements down the line. Would you say no? Could you?”

Save, Invest & Save; Wash, Rinse & Repeat

Believe us—the know-how required to be a facilities engineer is enormous. Baccus has decades of experience as an engineer. True to his roots, he takes complicated topics and distills them into their simplest form. He can give you the big picture of what we do and make it seem simple—and it is, for you.

All we ask is you trust us—trust our decades of engineering knowledge, and ultimately trust that we guarantee energy savings for your facility.

Lastly, we asked what drives Baccus to be a part of a Guaranteed Energy Savings Company. “Everyone in this office is an engineer or builder at heart.  We are visionaries, we see a great need, one that will only be greater in the near future. That great need, if embraced early, is also a great opportunity. Above all else, I do this because I’m passionate about cultivating a brighter future for humanity.”