A year ago, I became Co-CEO of CIM. In these 12 months, our clients, partners and team have taken PEAK further than ever. PEAK now reaches the market through more than 20 partners, we’re delivering new products at roughly five times our previous rate, and we’ve more than doubled the buildings under management in 18 months.
So, is it working? The short answer is, yes. But progress in one direction can cause challenges in others.
Here's what the year looked like from the inside, why we set the company up this way, and what comes next.
Four things that tell the story of the year
Our core clients have gone deeper. The owner-operators who adopted PEAK early now run far more of their operations through it, and that has changed what best practice means and how it's measured. Faults are found before anyone feels them. Actions are closed by the people accountable for them. Their supply chains are measurably achieving more at lower cost, not just doing better work.
That maturity has become strategic value for shareholders: evidence-backed results rather than intentions, measured against benchmarks such as GRESB. We play one part in a bigger effort by clients determined to improve, and we're proud they disproportionately lead the world on benchmarks built on systematic best practice.
Our partners are now driving our business, not being driven. Every one of them has recognised that client expectations have changed. They have long wanted to improve what they offer and how efficiently they deliver it, and invested heavily trying. Now the technology is there to support them, and they're pushing us to help solve known client problems that couldn't previously be delivered efficiently. I'll share more on those, alongside our partners, in the coming months.
We are growing, and doing it efficiently. Revenue and margin are both up, and we're reinvesting them in better products and in helping our customers succeed. We're also running a leaner operation than a year ago. The secret is no secret: we use AI on ourselves, every day, the same way we ask our clients to.
Our market position is the strongest it has ever been. Across Australia, the US and the UK, our partners give PEAK combined distribution across more than 300,000 buildings. A year ago, almost every building we won, we had to win ourselves. That is no longer true.
Why two CEOs, and why it works
The decision came from growth. International demand for PEAK had reached the point where our founder, David Walsh, needed to give it everything he had. The clients who backed us first deserved a leader whose whole job was them.
His brief to me was clear. PEAK was proven in 700 buildings and built to run in more than 10,000. My job was to deepen what we deliver to our Australian clients, and to build a business that scales as well as the product does.
Co-CEO arrangements have a mixed reputation, and I understand why. Two people with the same instincts will fight over the same decisions. We're very different people, and the split came naturally from that.
The founder’s work is helping our international clients and partners do new things. That means changing how their businesses operate, and it takes vision, persistence and a tolerance for being early. My work is scaling what already works, inside our clients' businesses and inside our own. Where he finds and opens doors, I make sure what's behind them runs well, repeatably, for every customer.
Neither of us wants the other's job. He would find my week tedious. I would find his exhausting. Between us, the company gets both, and gets good results.
The doors have opened on the mission
The thing that matters most to me isn't in the numbers.
We built PEAK to help people run buildings better. Owner-operators were the early adopters, and they've been the most successful with it. But most of the world's buildings aren't run by their owners. They're run by outsourced engineers and contracted service teams, often stretched across many sites, clients and systems. For years, that was the part of the market we could see but couldn't reach to help.
The partner program changed that. The people who run most of the world's buildings can now run them on PEAK, on the same principles we've held from the start. Everything is evidence-driven, from the data and from proven practice. Everything is transparent, so the owner, the engineer and the contractor see the same truth. And everything is aimed at one outcome: more value for every person, for every hour of work.
It's already showing. For example, in London and Chicago, a growing share of buildings now run on PEAK dominates the skyline.
The goalposts move every month
All of this has happened in an environment few software companies have faced. Expectations of how fast an AI company should improve its product are higher than I've ever seen. The core model providers keep releasing new capabilities, and a feature that felt remarkable in March is table stakes by June.
Our clients, meanwhile, are working out how to govern this new capability and get real value from it. They want the benefits, and they're rightly careful about how they get them. Working in that gap, between what's newly possible and what a client can responsibly adopt, is most of the job now.
The next two challenges
Progress brings its own challenges. Two are front of mind as we head into year two.
Helping clients tell the real thing from the demo. It's now widely understood that there's a significantly better way to operate buildings. When that happens in any market, every vendor needs to show it's part of the shift, and the demos tend to arrive before the products do. A solution that looks good in an AI-enhanced demo may not be built to be reliable or to scale, and filling the gaps with people gives away most of the benefit.
A client who hasn't yet seen best practice in action can find that difference hard to spot. We hope to show them, not just tell them, and to give them time to learn what to look for.
Bringing a stretched workforce with us. This one our whole industry shares. Skilled people are in short supply, experienced people are stretched and ageing, and the data centre boom is pulling talent from a pool that was already thin. The organisations that employ them know they need to invest in knowledge sharing and development, but margins are tight, and the bigger the change, the harder it is.
The lesson from this year is that we have to move at the speed our clients can absorb. Companies like ours have historically tried to move fast. We've learned to respect how teams actually work, and to bring them along with us. It takes longer. It's also the only way it sticks.
Year two
A year ago, I took this role to turn a scalable product into a scalable business. Twelve months on, the business is scaling alongside the product, with less friction and a route to the majority of the market we could only look at before.
It's funny though that in AI driven workflow businesses like ours - the more you turn that data into usable information to improve workflows and supply chains - the more clients want. The success of last year can be a trap - more for more's sake - the goal is more value and less time, that is how to achieve scale.
The next year is about scaling more value and saving more time within each client or partner = deeper and easier use for more value now unlocked with new AI tools, more lasting improvement in the way each partner works, hopefully this will earn more of each client's portfolio on PEAK, and more of the people who run buildings every day feeling that this technology was built for them. Because it was.
If you run buildings, or the teams that do, I'd like to hear what best practice looks like from where you sit. The goalposts will keep moving. We intend to keep moving with them.
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