“We were already making an impact when things started to go poorly.”

Tyler wasn’t talking about software. He was talking about mindset, the discipline to invest in operational clarity before you need it.

In an industry where too many decisions still run on memory, tradition or best guesses, Tyler is leading a shift to something rarer: accountability through clarity. And it’s not theoretical. At Onsite Analytics, his company is making maintenance and asset data so accessible, it becomes a competitive advantage. But before he was fixing HVAC forecasting problems, Tyler was a professional baseball player. His story starts there and that mindset carries through.

We talked about hell yes moments. But this one started with a $1,200 mistake.

“I did my postmortem and realized… My vendor made an honest mistake. He didn’t have the information.”

When Tyler recounted the moment that sparked the creation of Onsite Analytics, he wasn’t angry. He was honest. A collapsed air duct that should have been replaced cost him twelve hundred dollars in repairs… and a full system failure anyway. The kicker? That detail had been known just not communicated to the person making the decision.

That’s when it clicked for him. Most maintenance decisions aren’t failing because of laziness or incompetence. They’re failing because of missing context.

As someone who works with ops teams daily, I see this constantly. And Tyler’s framing hit the mark: this isn’t guessing, this is gambling. And it’s completely avoidable.

“The scariest part of that mentality was they didn’t realize how much they were losing.”

I’ve been guilty of this too, thinking that “bad years” are just random. But Tyler reframed it: if you can’t point to why your forecast blew up, you’re not unlucky, you’re blind. And your business is flying without instruments.

That’s what Onsite Analytics solves. Their teams physically tag every unit in a portfolio, photograph and extract model/warranty data, and make it accessible to technicians, supervisors, and asset managers in real time. There’s even a microchip at each door. Scan it, and every asset record shows up such as manuals, warranty, work order history, everything.

And Tyler isn’t guessing on ROI. He’s seen the hard costs shrink. Two fewer work orders per unit, on average. Fewer callbacks. Fewer freon refills. That’s not hypothetical, it’s math.

“You’re choosing burnout. Not choosing change is a choice.”

That landed. Hard. We’d been talking about site-level realities – short-staffed crews, frantic vendors, broken handoffs and it all boiled down to this: inaction has a cost. If you’re not solving your labor bottlenecks, you’re not standing still. You’re choosing burnout.

That’s a message I’ve been trying to deliver too. It’s not enough to empathize with overworked techs. We need to equip them. Because if we can double the amount of data a tech has when entering a unit from 10% to 20%, or 20% to 40%, we change outcomes. Faster turns, smarter decisions, fewer fires.

And Tyler’s doing it by treating maintenance techs like the professionals they are. “You give technicians the resources,” he said, “they’ll make the right decisions.”

“Our pitch isn’t about visibility. It’s about client retention.”

This was a shift in how I think about selling ops solutions. Tyler realized early on that his buyers weren’t just buying reports, they were buying trust. His reports helped management companies not get yelled at. They helped them explain variance to owners. They turned a black box of aging HVAC systems into a proactive asset strategy.

What I appreciated most was his honesty about sales. It’s not just about the value, it’s about getting a seat at the table. “Sometimes our champion won’t even propose to us,” he said, “because they’re worried about rocking the boat with the client.”

So he started doing the internal sales pitch for them. Not a deck that screams software features. A deck that makes the management company look good. A deck that tells a story about stewardship.

That’s smart. And humble.

“I used to ask about pain. Now I ask: what would get you fired?”

We both laughed at this, because it’s a bit raw but it’s true. If you really want to understand what drives a purchase, don’t ask what someone wants. Ask what they’re trying to avoid. That’s the real hell yes lever.

For Tyler, that changed how he opened every sales conversation. “We used to ask, ‘how’s your budget process?’ Now we ask, ‘what’s top of mind today?’ And we just listen.”

That’s a lesson I’m still learning. We can’t pitch people into our problems. We have to find theirs. And if we’re lucky, we can meet them where they are and walk them to a better place.

Final Thought (from Guillermo):

What Tyler built isn’t just a software product. It’s a story about seeing clearly, seeing your data, your team, your customer relationships, your risk exposure. And most of all, seeing the difference between guessing and knowing.

Hell yes doesn’t come from shouting the loudest. It comes from showing someone what they didn’t realize they were missing. And Tyler’s story shows that clearly.