“Building Teams & Dreams”

Owing to his background in the military, Myron Schram, CTO at IFM Restoration has the capability to quickly identify problems with incomplete information. Understanding these problems allows him to commit to decisive action within difficult situations. On the other hand, Myron’s corporate world experience has helped him to provide depth to his answers, pushing him to examine how he maneuvers within the development of what “soft skills.” “Contextualizing these contrasting worlds has made me more self-aware. Taking the best and worst experiences from both worlds gives me the upper hand,” says Myron. “I take advantage of problem solving from different perspectives and decisively execute those solutions without burning out the teams or harming business relationships that may be necessary for long term growth.”

“We maintain, repair, and improve your property.The perfect partner for property owners, managers, and real estate investment trusts.”

But, the road has not been easy for Myron, as an engineer he had to fight the urge to gold plate solutions; instead he pushed for the Minimal Viable Product (MVP) or “good enough” solutions. “It’s important not just to listen to the business, but to understand what it needs vs what it wants. Realignment of business practices is a regular occurrence for me. Engineers become afraid of making mistakes, it’s my job to reorient their focus towards the MVP and not base their decisions on fear,” explains Myron. “Maintaining confidence and code is a juggling act that I face weekly. Defining the problem before we begin work, getting agreement on the desired outcomes, and then pursuing the goals being tracked with lead and lag indicators keeps our resources focused on the right things.”

The pioneering leader makes it a point to hire risk takers, who are not afraid of making mistakes. “We diligently train our engineers on our process and every aspect of our business operations before we entrust them with the code base. We know that we’ll hit 100% of outcomes when we follow our process,” adds Myron. “We encourage our engineers to not only follow the process, but to find ways to think for themselves and to be more efficient when asking the right questions.” Myron spent the first year of the company defining and refining a process to make it easier for property owners to find quality contractors at a predictable price who provide a great quality of work. Then he began to apply technology to the process in order to achieve higher volumes and increase business efficiency. Within critical business value streams, the application of the right technology managed to achieve 70 percent growth in revenue without compromising quality or requiring a significant increase in headcount. This new user experience allows clients to see how the workflow is progressing in near real time without having to be inundated with multiple phone calls. “Residents aren't tied to their homes not knowing where their repair guy is and when should they expect him to arrive. Contractors get to set their schedule and know exactly when and how much they are getting paid. Everyone gets what they want with less effort/stress. When you can disrupt the market by making people's lives better, you are bound to succeed,” says Myron.

According to Myron, right now there is a drought when it comes to people of skilled trades; his theory is that people spend more time running their businesses than practicing their craft. “With machine-learning we can process data and form a game plan for the future. They now have a short-term and long-term business plan. By us allowing them to run their own business they can take one hundred percent of their profit home – removing the greedy middle man,” says Myron. “Our machine learning identifies contractors who can expound on their current talents and branch off into more trades, Machine Learning rewards work ethic. Our AI makes real time decisions to maximize success. All this is powered by our massive data lake which allows our AI and machine learning to make more effective decisions.”IE