Are you familiar with the Bulgarian market and what you think about it for the last couple of years?
- On one hand, due to the crises, we have to make а little change in the FM market. Before, there was a very high market of office buildings and there were a lot of service providers, which had made some kind of facility management, but on a poor level. If you look at the interest of the landlords In the last months and years, they had invested a lot of money in the buildings and they are giving a lot of money to take care of for a long period of time. If you do not provide good service and maintenance, maybe nothing will happen in the first three to five years, but then there will be a huge crash on the HVAC or chillers and so on, and the landlord will have to invest a lot of money. In the last years the landlords themselves understand that they need a better quality to really take care on quality.

The international funds and Bulgarian landlords have gain some experience in the last couple of years that they need professional FM. But not all the companies that have FM in their names are really a good FM companies. We have the same problems in Western Europe – companies that are calling themselves FM but what they are doing is not FM.

This is the biggest problem - to meet their difference between FM, which means to think in the way the landlords are thinking. We are not only service providers making only maintenance. We are also talking the whole scope of work. We are here to make decisions for the landlords, who are only interested in the margins and the profit. This is normal, they want to make business. And it is our goal to help them. And also we are not talking only about maintenance, we are talking about the whole operational costs, we are trying to lower them, trying to get down energy costs.

We have to look on the scope of work we are providing. If we look at the tender documents, there is some scope of work, that you have to provide, but in the real life, some of these are not really useful, so you do not have to do it. And on the other hand, there are some missing links. The goal must be to close these missing links and to reduce the work that is not really senseful.

When making a SLA for each plant, you need to know what have to ensure that you are paying the scope of work that you are really paying for. It is some kind of a circle – you have to improve the service all the time. You cannot stop and say “OK, this is the scope of work”. You must always think the way the landlord is thinking, but also you have to take care about the tenants. Sometimes this is very difficult, because they are not always think the in same way. But if you are a good FM company, you can at least decrease the maintenance cost. This must be the biggest goal in times of these so call crises.

We don’t make offers for a only one year contract. We think that every company needs from three to six months just to get knowing the building and the technology inside. It makes no sense to make a new tender for FM every year. This must be a long term relation – no less than three years, in the best cases up to five to ten years.

Now on the market the landlords already know how many problems they have when they change the FM company too often. And now they are making unlimited contracts.

How did the economic and financial crises affect your company?
- It has been very interesting for us. At least, the buildings in which we have contracts, and which have to continue to managing. I think that there will be some kind of a gap in the next couple of months or years, until the construction of the buildings that have been started before the crises are finished. But at least the crisis helped us to show the landlords and tenants, that we are really good in what we are doing and providing quality. We started now to focus on the operational cost, to reduce the cost, to make decisions with the landlords and tenants about reducing the costs – LED lightning, energy efficiency and etc.
Now is the time, if you provide good quality and you are a good partner, the companies with high quality will survive.

The biggest problem is that, the investors, in most of the cases, just construct the building and then they sell it to a landlord. We are suffering from this fact – the investors have not thought in terms of adequate maintenance after the construction, so now the new landlords have to invest a lot of money.

We also have a lot of problems with the education in the field of facility management allover Southern and Eastern Europe. There are a lot of universities and programs for facility management, but the biggest problem is that there is no good proper FM education. The people who finish these programs have very good theoretical knowledge, but they have no idea what FM is in practice. You cannot learn FM from the books, you need to have it in your heart.

What is the most important aspect of the facility management, which needs to be improved in Bulgaria - legislation, education, the competence of the companies, or something else?
- We have the same problems in Romania, in Hungary, in Serbia and also in Austria. We have looked for six months for a facility manager and we could not find one. We have checked a lot of CVs, which have good education, but have no idea of a facility manager. This job is not 8 hours a day job – it is 24/7/365 work.

What do you think about the standard EN 15221?
- You can make a lot of standards, regulations and definitions, but FM is not a standard. You have to take the buildings and looking at the tenants - what is the mix, what is the idea of the landlord, and then you  can define a standard for this building. Maybe it would make sense to define some definitions and standards, but the markets, the countries, the circumstances, the weather conditions and so on are totally different. In Germany, Austria, Romania – it is totally different. The legislation is different.

What are your future plans for development in Bulgaria?
- We want to increase our market share. Our future plans include the FM to grow up here and to become nationwide. The goal is to find the investors who want to work together with a professional FM company from the beginning – from the construction and planning phase, in order to make a very good building. The investors now are thinking about such programs but these are mainly foreign investors.