Don Gelestino: The Future of Elevators – Technology and Trends
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Intro:
In this conversation, Don Gelestino shares key points of the presentation that he gave last year at the International Elevator and Escalator Symposium. Don is on the road again this fall. He recently spoke at the NAAC Expo 2025, Interlift 2025 and he will be presenting again at the IEES in Buenos Aires in December. Don emphasized the importance of adapting to technological advancements, the challenges posed by supply chain issues and the growing focus on sustainability. Looking ahead, Don predicts a future where predictive maintenance and AI play crucial roles in the industry, while also highlighting the enduring value of independent operators.
Summary:
In this conversation, Donald Gelestino shares his extensive experience in the elevator industry, discussing the impacts of consolidation, globalization, and technology on safety, efficiency, and competition. He emphasizes the importance of independent companies, the challenges they face, and the role of technological advancements like AI and predictive maintenance in shaping the future of the industry. The discussion also touches on sustainability and the evolving landscape of manufacturing and supply chains.
Transcript:
Matt Allred (02:28)
Don, welcome to the show. Let’s start with a little bit about you.
Matt Allred (02:32)
You’ve been in the elevator industry, what is it, 38 years?
Donald Gelestino (02:34)
Yeah, yeah, yep. 38, now 39 and soon it’ll be 40.
Matt Allred (02:40)
Awesome, and obviously you’ve kind of done it all. I mean, you went from helper to mechanic
owner to you sold it and then you became an owner again. obviously CEO, president, you’ve seen a lot of different angles and obviously witnessed a lot of this consolidation. And so that’s kind of why I wanted to start was
Do you think consolidation overall has helped improve safety, efficiency, or do you think it’s, I don’t know, mixed bag, maybe?
Donald Gelestino (03:12)
Yeah, I think there’s a little bit of a mixed bag because the consolidators when they’re the large OEMs, obviously they have some of the best safety practices and policies and it’s very standardized
So I think from a safety perspective, the consolidation, I think that’s one of the pluses of a consolidated, because I do think the safety standard is usually elevated. It’s very far and few in between that.
Matt Allred (03:36)
Okay.
Donald Gelestino (03:46)
a small mom and pop company or even a decent sized company is going to have a better safety program and a large OEM or there’s sometimes, they have more capital to put together a safety program. There may be other areas where they’re lacking, but from a safety perspective,
Matt Allred (03:51)
Mm-hmm.
Donald Gelestino (04:06)
I think it’s enhanced by the consolidation.
Matt Allred (04:09)
Yeah. So what would you say are some areas that maybe then it’s not positive? It’s not a win?
Donald Gelestino (04:17)
Well, I do think that, you know, cultural shifts, you know, like the mom and pops may have fishing trips and may have, maybe picnics and little things like that, where, you know, when you’re a global player, this is stuff, they may have it by a branch level. It’ll probably be, kind of ticked and tied into, this is what you have for your use and
might end up at the end of the day turning into a pizza party on a Thursday. You know I’m saying? So, but, listen, you got the safety net of working for a major, you know, owner that, you know, you’re getting a paycheck, you know that you got good benefits, you know that where some of the small mom and pops maybe listen, people are flying, you know, paycheck to paycheck and so, you know, everything has its pros and cons.
Matt Allred (04:43)
For sure.
Yeah, that’s a point. I mean, obviously you talk a good bit about globalization and some of the, I guess the vulnerabilities, the opportunities. What would you say that opportunities are created or even vulnerabilities for maybe US service providers?
Donald Gelestino (05:25)
Yeah, well, you know, it really happens. A lot of it happens at the material level with manufacturing and material. My belief is when you have major globalization, When one major sector or company owns such a big majority,
And then you have an industry that relies so much on that material. That’s where you can have these, these situations where an OEM or a larger buyer of that can cut better deals than smaller companies.
it makes it harder, I believe, for, the independently owned and operated companies to compete with the OEMs. It’s definitely a dynamic that needs to be looked at and understood a lot better,
A lot independent companies, you know, they may say like, I can’t really bid a job against Otis, Schindler, Thyssenkrupp and Kone. I’m just not competitive. But they don’t understand really why and where it comes from and how it happens. They just know that, hey, you know, all of my parts cost X and their elevator installed costs the same as my parts. How do they do it? But it’s all these factors and it does happen at a global level, you know, it doesn’t happen at a local level.
Matt Allred (06:43)
For ⁓
Right, right. Well, and to your point, every penny adds up, right? So if you’ve got a good deal here and a good deal here and a good deal here, then overall the package looks a lot different or could look a lot different. And yet I still see independents competing. So it does happen, right? It’s like, okay, they found some avenues, some niches, and sometimes people, maybe they don’t want to deal with one of the big players, right? Maybe they want…
Donald Gelestino (06:59)
Yeah. yeah.
Matt Allred (07:10)
somebody that maybe they can get a little more personalized attention. that’s how works.
Donald Gelestino (07:15)
very
Very important. I got to tell you from a relationship perspective, I feel my personal opinion is sometimes literally down to the mom and pop operation, literally like, hey, it’s the father was an elevator mechanic, brought his two sons in and now there’s four people, mother does the payroll. Some of those little businesses could give better attention than the biggest of the big.
They’re ready. They know everything about the elevator. know everything about so it’s literally like when you pick up a phone It’s like your elevator person like it’s they know it it isn’t like what’s your client ID number? What are we what state are you in like, you know, so you could never minimize the power and the ability of an independent.
Sometimes developers will go for rock bottom price. And because when they’re done, that building’s going to some ownership and now ownership’s going to have the maintenance on it and developers over in another city building something else. But some of them I consider
educated developers or educated owners, or they’re going to be the end user of that building in that elevator. And they do not want proprietary equipment. They recognize that sometimes bigger isn’t better. And they go for the independents. And the independents, when you look at a globalized market, and even in the US market, the independents actually have a big
majority share of the overall market.
Matt Allred (08:49)
And I saw
that like what, 55 % are considered independent.
Donald Gelestino (08:51)
Yeah, I’d
have to look but it stays pretty consistent. They’re big and there’s a reason for it. And even when these consolidations happen, Champion Elevator bought 14 companies in the two and a half year period. When you take people and companies, some people don’t wanna come over.
Matt Allred (09:01)
For sure.
Donald Gelestino (09:14)
Some people you don’t want over. So what happens is people fall off. They start up companies or they go to other companies. So there’s always gonna be that cycle. It isn’t gonna be like the consolidator is gonna take every person and every thing. So there’s always gonna be kind of like a resurgence of new independents. The only game that I believe
makes a big difference is the insurance. As all these companies consolidate and they are able to buy insurance at a better rate because now they have 10,000 elevators on service, the rate per worker is a lot cheaper when you have a thousand workers, right? So what happens is the smaller independents are kind of getting really hit with a high rate, which makes them another, it’s another thing.
on top of the material makes them less competitive. Technically, if everybody had to provide an actual, like, let’s say the government said everybody in the elevator business has to be at 25 % margin.
Matt Allred (10:13)
Gotcha.
Donald Gelestino (10:27)
you would see the prices for the independents way more than the prices for the OEMs because their costs are just so much more. So you can’t think an independent is going to end up cheaper, but you could have great service.
Matt Allred (10:44)
You
may get the time, the attention that you want. it’s hard to say, of course, but yeah. I guess one question on this subject is, you mentioned that maybe some independents don’t want to bid against majors. Do you feel like they maybe sell themselves short at times and maybe need to go head to head more often? do they just need to remember what their strengths are and
Donald Gelestino (10:48)
Yeah.
Yeah, something that you gotta pay for.
Matt Allred (11:14)
Play to those strengths.
Donald Gelestino (11:16)
Yeah, I do believe, it depends on the company. It depends on kind of their style, their dynamic, kind of their geographic footprint even. ⁓ It’s not bad to compete with the OEMs. I really don’t, especially, you know, 20 years ago, very hard to compete with the OEMs. Now you have people stepping up, creating products.
Matt Allred (11:25)
Mm-hmm.
Donald Gelestino (11:42)
that are an alternative. you know, having that availability does give a independent contractor a little bit of a competitive advantage.
Matt Allred (11:53)
So let’s talk a little bit about technology. You know, it’s obviously a big game changer. There’s rope free, there’s IOT, there’s, you know, drones, right? I didn’t know about that. I didn’t even know that, you know, some of this stuff existed. So I’m curious from your perspective, what’s real now versus still sci-fi? I mean, are…
Donald Gelestino (12:09)
You can’t make it up. You can’t make it
Yeah.
Matt Allred (12:19)
You know, are drones really being used on installation?
Donald Gelestino (12:22)
I’ll tell you so funny enough like the R.I.S.E Robotic installation system by Schindler that is happening like they are doing that and that’s you can’t make it up. It’s gonna be better, safer. You know, I’m sure I mean, I don’t I Think yeah, I don’t know if these are gonna be union robots or non union robots
Matt Allred (12:26)
I did, yeah, I watched that video.
gonna put some people on the bench for sure, right? I’m like, dang, that’s a crew right there.
Hahaha!
Donald Gelestino (12:48)
But I know it’s not gonna make some people happy, but you know, when you’re talking, you know, AI and you’re talking robots, this stuff is precision. Like I remember doing rails and you’re dropping pump bobs and piano wire and you’re doing things and you were good. And I was pretty good, but like there were guys that were great rail guys, right? You got this robot for the R.I.S.E product. It’s gonna be within.
probably 100,000ths maybe somewhere like they could be within 10,000. Like these things are perfection. So that’s what you’re competing with. And again, it’s probably making the overall industry safer and maybe mechanics will be focused more on, you know, different parts of the field. One of the things I know that’s happening right now that is absolutely amazing is,
Matt Allred (13:16)
for size. Sure.
Donald Gelestino (13:43)
troubleshooting software, I mean, I literally seen a software a week or two ago that can take a blueprint and you could dial in and it will talk to you. Like you will think it’s a person talking to you. You’ll say, oh, I got it. You’ll say, I got a Schindler 311 and I need to know the voltage on this terminal.
Matt Allred (13:55)
my gosh.
Donald Gelestino (14:03)
and it’ll say to you, the voltage should be 12 volts DC. And you say, I’m only getting nine volts. Oh you should check this contact or this printed circuit. But I mean, it’s bizarre. Like so, but that’s happening. Like me being my age with the gray beard, I would think that that’s sci-fi, but it’s happening. Yeah.
Matt Allred (14:13)
Wow. Wow.
But it’s really happening. Yeah. What’s amazing
What’s amazing about that, you know, just from a talent perspective, the people that know that are, you know, they’re retiring out pretty fast, right? And it feels like from my perspective, you know, trying to fill some of these roles, it’s like, where do you find those guys? Right? I mean, and we’re not, we’re not producing them as fast as we’re retiring them out. So, you know, I know of a company that, you know, they, they’re on the phones all the time, right? They’re kind of like your little
Donald Gelestino (14:42)
Yeah.
Matt Allred (14:53)
app you’re talking about, but they’re the ones saying, you need to check this and check that and helping people walk through because yeah, troubleshooters, they’re not being minted at the rate that they’re leaving.
Donald Gelestino (15:05)
Yeah, that’s true. And that’s why, you know, like, it’s funny because I’ve been in different meetings where, you know, people present this AI and then, you know, some of the people’s, like the field people, like that stuff’s going to put us out of a job. the, but no, the reality is that can actually help your job. Well, you got to look at it different ways.
I seen some troubleshooting software where let’s say, you know, in Manhattan, if you have a supervisor for seven mechanics and you’re covering, you know, 500 elevators, if someone’s having a problem, what’s happening with the other guys
if they have a problem? There is software that like AI stuff that’ll help these other people to learn faster.
I’ll give you a great example, like they could take all of their documents that they’ve ever created that they have stored and download that stuff into AI. then AI can, there’s programs that could read all of that and will know all of that. And even if you were a technician,
with a blueprint in your hand, you are not gonna find it as fast. You know, it’s just gonna make a mechanic’s life easier from the knowledge perspective. This way, my opinion is, instead of spending three of your eight hours a day trying to figure things out, you’ll actually be able to spend that extra time doing maintenance. You know, the little things that need to be adjusted, the rollers.
Matt Allred (16:41)
Fixing it, okay.
Donald Gelestino (16:46)
You know, little things that there’s certain parts of an elevator that no robot, no AI is ever going to be able to take care of. There’s a human element that is needed for a lot of work. So I think that all these tools will definitely make the industry better. I mean, it’s almost like when you look at the old carbons and copper controllers versus a printed circuit board, a controller that’s the size of,
like a dishwasher versus something that used to be the size of a refrigerator. the progress is happening if we like it or not. And, you know, these items are just valuable tools and the faster independents could work with them, the better because the OEMs are gonna have this stuff and they’re designing it themselves and they’re…
Matt Allred (17:22)
for sure.
Donald Gelestino (17:38)
they’re gonna be ahead of the race, because they got the dollars to do so. So I think the independents have to really focus and look into these tools, because you don’t wanna be left behind, you know?
Matt Allred (17:50)
Sure. I mean, it sounds like people are making these tools available to them, right? So it’s like, okay, if you subscribe to this service or whatever, then you’ve got Troubleshooter in the pocket and you can just pull it out on your phone and it’ll walk you through some of this. So it could be very advantageous to have those tools.
Donald Gelestino (18:10)
Absolutely, it could be very helpful.
Matt Allred (18:36)
Very cool. It sounds like on one hand, yeah, there’s an element of sci-fi, but you know what? Sci-fi is becoming real probably faster than a lot of us even realize. And this stuff is happening. It is being implemented. It is affecting the market, even if you don’t know it.
Donald Gelestino (18:54)
Yeah, and some of the predictive maintenance programs that tie into controllers are unbelievable. Like you could, a technician gets a call that the elevator shut down, you know, the machine room’s up on the roof. The guy has to walk up five stories, check out what’s going on, come back down to the third floor, check out the door lock because it’s broken, right? Here,
on dispatching, you could know that, on your way up, check out the third floor door lock. It will save you a lot of time overall. So predictive maintenance, preventative, like all that stuff is just, I mean, it’s amazing. Obviously it needs to be worked. It needs to be enhanced. We’re still in the first stages of AI. God only knows where that world’s gonna go, but I mean,
The tool, just like you said, to me, stuff seems like sci-fi. If I didn’t see people using it in live presentations, I would say, oh, that’s like, high in the sky, can’t ever happen. But it is amazing. The younger generation may say, of course, that’s the way it is. But I’ve come from 40 years in the business. You’ve seen it where guys are using hammer and chisel on things that now.
Matt Allred (20:00)
Yeah.
Donald Gelestino (20:15)
You know, robots are doing, so it’s just interesting.
Matt Allred (20:18)
Yeah,
It is evolving so rapidly, right? And gonna keep changing and so, yeah, who knows, right? It’s easy, I guess, to say, well, that’s gonna put us out of business or whatever, but it’s like, people are gonna have to still be people. So there’s gonna be work to do, but can we learn to use the tools and then make ourselves more effective along the way?
Donald Gelestino (20:23)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. You have to be open to it, I think.
Matt Allred (20:43)
⁓ Yeah. Yeah.
So the next question, we talked a bit about the independents, the OEMs and what I’ve found interesting just in the last few years is how much consolidation among independents, right?
Some of the independents seem so eager to grow, to bring in private equity, to acquire, and yet I guess the question I’m having is it seems like there’s strength in kind of staying local, right? I know a couple companies that come to mind that they really only operate in this one city, but they rock that one city. They dominate that one city.
and they’re very profitable, very highly respected. it’s like, I can see the lure of, hey we’re gonna go everywhere and do everything. And I can also see some huge risks. What are your thoughts on something like that?
Donald Gelestino (21:36)
I say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If they are doing it and they’re profitable and they’re good at it, my opinion would be stay the course. At Champion, we’ve seen, you know we’re New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, a little bit of Pennsylvania, but we’ve seen the big moves, Florida and Texas, some Washington DC work. And we looked…
Matt Allred (21:50)
Mm-hmm.
Donald Gelestino (22:05)
We didn’t really make the move because to us, there is opportunity there. But if you’re not focusing on your main core here in New York, there’s someone that’s going to eat your lunch, right? So we made a decision, like let’s stay local in our tri-state area, hone our systems, hone our processes, and do things the best that we can do rather than jump and…
going to other cities and do startups. I mean, it’s all about, your thought process, how much energy you want to spend in other areas.
And your leadership team, if you have a leadership team that you can multiply and duplicate and get them out to other areas and keep, you know, like what makes you great in one city might not mean you’re going to be great in another city. It’s different codes. It’s different labor forces. It’s different relationships. It’s even just a different way to do business. You know, they don’t do business down in Florida.
the way they do business in New York. The whole process is different. And, you know, it might not work or it might work. So I think it’s great. I love when, I love the tenacity of when somebody says, I’m going to go now that I’m good in New York, I’m going to go to this, this, this, and this, conquer the world. I love that. But you have to be careful and you, you know, all that startup costs a lot of money.
You have to manage all of that. You gotta build it. So it’s definitely not an easy task, by any means.
Matt Allred (23:45)
Yeah. Are you glad you’ve done it the way you have, building your empire, if you will, within a reachable distance? Or do ever think, man, I wish I’d have gone to California and bought XYZ or…
Donald Gelestino (23:58)
Yeah, I know I’ve seen some companies across the country that were amazing opportunities. But overall, I think we made a smart decision to just stay more localized and kind of get our company running very good versus jumping around and having more stuff to focus on. I think that was, for us, that was a better choice, I believe.
Matt Allred (24:26)
Good. Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve seen it more than once, hey, let’s go do this. Let’s go to this state and then have to retreat, retract, you know, sell whatever. Cause it’s like, okay, they just spread’s us too thin and now we’re traveling all the time and we can’t even take care of our home front because we’re gone half the time.
Donald Gelestino (24:38)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. For us, that wasn’t a good option. We seen it and we took a pause. We’ve got just under 6,000 elevators right now that we’re maintaining over at Champion elevator. And that’s a nice book of business. It’s manageable. You got to manage it. You got to work it. But I don’t know if bigger is always better. And I don’t know if…
being out there everywhere is always what it’s cracked up to be. It might sounds great. But you know, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’d look like. I might be in a hospital.
Matt Allred (25:24)
No, yeah, it’s
It’s a good point. It’s a little bit like fighting a war on multiple fronts, right? If you know you got one or whatever, but if you start jumping out there, then I’m seeing a lot of independents gaining a lot of ground on some of these bigger companies because it is hard to keep your eye on every single area. And it is difficult at times to find the right talent and, hey, we just lost this person that had X number of years and they retired.
Donald Gelestino (25:30)
Yeah.
Yeah?
Matt Allred (25:51)
That’s tough sometimes to find that person, especially if you haven’t raised them up through your ranks or they don’t want to relocate or maybe you lost them to the competition because you weren’t treating them well. Well, you could have multiple things going against you.
Donald Gelestino (26:05)
Absolutely, yep. It’s a whole different terrain. Every city is its own terrain and yeah. I mean, if you bought a company that was operating in that area and they were gonna continue to operate it, maybe that’s an okay model, but usually when people sell or wanna get out or whatever transaction happens.
Matt Allred (26:06)
Yep. Yep.
Donald Gelestino (26:29)
Usually they’re not looking to stay doing the same thing that they were doing. So yeah, I think it’s a little bit risky doing the moves like that, you know?
Matt Allred (26:38)
Yeah, yeah, I mean it works for some and sounds like you’re pleased with the direction you took and that’s great. I do want to chat a little bit. We talked briefly about some of the supply chain and I want to just bounce back to that for a second because I was talking to a guy last week I think and he was saying that you know that rails aren’t even made in the US. I was like really? I didn’t know that. I didn’t know you had to go international to get them and we were actually talking about the tariffs a little bit and I was like well what do you do? He’s like
Nothing you can do. You just pay the tariff and go on. So I don’t know. Have you seen some of those issues or how have you seen them, I guess, manifest for you?
Donald Gelestino (27:19)
It definitely goes over to the point of the globalization, the steel market, the permanent magnet market, these you know, if you wanted to manufacture a motor here in the U S just bringing the material, you’re to bring in 80% of your raw material. So
already you’re going to be less competitive than anything anyone’s going to get. So it’s going to be impossible. Same thing with the rails. The rails, what once were something manufactured here
that’s gotten so far out, you know, that it’s now you got China, you got Italy, you got Germany making rails and, you know, everybody’s fighting for the market. There’s not a lot of margin. Like when you look at the manufacturers, they’re making it and they’re keeping their people working in these other countries, but they’re not
really making crazy margin. And then by the time you bring it over here, you know, you got the tariff, you got the shipping, you got insurance, you got now after it lands on the point, you have to ship it again. I would assume
that after all that work is done, I would have to hope that somebody selling rails would be making a good margin because it’s not like the way it was. And I don’t think it’s going to get like the way it was because it takes so much work.
Matt Allred (28:46)
Obviously steel manufacturing in the US was a 100-year, multi-generational endeavor. then we’ve kind of walked away from a lot of it because of low margins and because of, we can get some cheaper labor elsewhere and taxes aren’t favorable here. So we’ll just let somebody else do it.
Donald Gelestino (28:46)
Yeah.
Even with, you know, our scrap in the US, you have the small scrap guys and that collect all the little stuff and you know, you got the cans that go into the little machine at the shopping machine, like shopping centers. The reality is that all goes to a next bigger guy that goes to a next bigger guy that actually ends up putting it on barges and sending it out to be processed.
Matt Allred (29:29)
wow.
Donald Gelestino (29:31)
overseas. So even our scrap, as fast as we’re knocking down buildings and collecting cans and doing all sorts of things, our scrap as we harvest that, it’s going overseas. And then already they’ve got a competitive advantage because they’ve got the metal ⁓ because they’re even they’re even doing the recycling cheaper than we can do here. It took a long time to get ourselves into this situation.
Matt Allred (29:48)
Sure, okay, take it.
Donald Gelestino (29:59)
And it would take a lot for us to get out of it. I hate to say it. I don’t know if we could ever get out of it. I don’t know if, you know, the USA will ever become another manufacturing giant again. Like it was, in its day. but I think it does leave opportunities open for other good, material suppliers to actually.
get their products into the US back, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, there was nothing that was really imported, very few items. Now there’s a lot. And even for the majors, their stuff is made overseas.
Matt Allred (30:32)
Interesting.
I was gonna say a lot of US companies
have outsourced their manufacturing, right? It still has the sticker on it, but it’s like, yeah, we made that in Taiwan or we had it made in China or we, know, Vietnam, yeah.
Donald Gelestino (30:50)
100 % or least
A lot of the components are for sure. Yep. Yeah.
Matt Allred (30:53)
Yep. Yep. Absolutely.
Obviously we’ve talked a little bit about kind of the sustainability of manufacturing, but curious, you know, sustainability seems to be one of those, issues, topics that, comes up a lot. Do you, do you see a lot of this, you know, greener elevator? I don’t have a lot of visibility to that. I mean, I see it in cars, you know, electric this and, you know,
Donald Gelestino (31:20)
Every manufacturer, I believe, is always trying to make things more efficient, right? Because, you know, if you’re going head to head with another competitor, at some level, sustainability is going to come into the topic. And these architects are looking at it, developers are looking at it. There’s greener projects, there’s projects that are
you know, focused on that hyper focused on it, especially California. So they’re looking at this kind of stuff pretty serious, you know? You could, you know, become not competitive just from that, you know, from that perspective, you may have a product that’s cheaper to install all this other stuff, but if you’re not meeting certain criteria, you might not get yourself the job. So it’s smart for
all of the companies to focus on sustainability, not only for what it really is, a better planet, but just to make sure they are going to have a place in the marketplace. Some of the things that, I remember years ago, when a consultant spec would come out, it would say, give an alternate price for regenerative drives, you know, the drive system that’ll put energy back into an elevator. Now,
It’s almost like, it used to be like $9,000 more. I would, you’d tell the owner, they’d say, what’s this $9,000 extra cost? we could put power back into your building. Wipe it out. They would put a marker right over that. Get rid of it. We don’t want to know nothing about it. Like one in every 50 would choose it. Now it’s like so many people would choose it that it’s almost…
in all the jobs. And I do believe that all the controller manufacturers and stuff, it’s, in a few years, regenerative drive will be in everything. Like, why would you not do it?
You know, not that long ago, it was an alternate that people would put an X over. So again, you know, sustainability, everything you hear, the global warming thing, everybody’s got, you know, everybody’s got their lane and you know, it’s not going away. No one’s gonna wake up tomorrow and say, who cares about pollution and energy efficiency and a greener planet?
And if they do, I gotta watch out how that’s gonna play out. Because if it works for them, that’d be a miracle. But, it’s always gonna be here, and there are responsible ways to get all of this done. But again, that’s a thing on a global scale that the OEMs and bigger manufacturers, they will have a jump on all of that.
Matt Allred (33:49)
Ha
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Donald Gelestino (34:12)
You know, Kone with the EcoDisc that was a real first time movement. Otis with the Gen2. So slowly it’ll come around and every day it’s getting greener. Like I mean,
I used to go into elevator machine rooms in the 80s and it was carbon dust everywhere and cobalt and stuff that you would have, like you just wipe something and your hand will be black and you’re breathing that in. Nowadays that’s not happening. So, you know, it’s gonna continue and it’s gonna get better. You have to keep moving with the progress.
Matt Allred (34:29)
Sure. Sure.
for sure.
For sure, for sure, which leads us to the last question here, just kind of the vision forward. So if you had to predict elevator industry 2035, what do you think it would look like in terms of technology, competition, and the role of independent?
Donald Gelestino (35:03)
Wow, so that’s a big one. It’s real big one. So I do believe at that point, almost everything will be in the predictive maintenance, where right at dispatching, I don’t think even right now of a building superintendent or a facility manager placing a call by phone to a dispatcher and them doing, I think,
Matt Allred (35:05)
That’s a big bite
Donald Gelestino (35:31)
It’s all going to happen at the controller level where an alert will probably, you might not even need dispatches. An alert will probably be sent to an app based on a region where, you know, you kind of know what you’re walking into. If you have sensors and you’re able to test vibrations of different parts of the equipment there’s enough ways to put sensors and predictive
Matt Allred (35:34)
Wow, yeah.
Donald Gelestino (35:54)
things where you’re gonna know what floors are being used the most. Hey, change these three rollers this month. You know, like people make assumptions we’re all human, like oh, the top floor gets used the most. And so we’re gonna change the rollers there and we’re gonna go down, down, down. And then what happens? You get an emergency call, you gotta go somewhere else. You don’t make it back the next month, you know.
Like here, the machinery will be able to tell you like, you may think the top floor was used the most, but did you know that the third floor of the building just had two move-ins and move-outs in a month period. The doors were held by furniture companies and this and that, and blah, blah, blah. And that stuff is beat up, but that’s the last place you might think of going.
That’s going to be the biggest dynamic change. A lot of AI will be handling troubleshooting work. Mechanics are going to be, I believe mechanics will be able to do the maintenance on the parts they need to do the maintenance on and take less guesswork on the stuff that they struggle with now. Yeah.
Matt Allred (37:03)
Right, right. Yeah, and
It sounds like the tools are there. Even some of what you’re describing is available now, maybe just not implemented now. Like a lot of the remote monitoring, it’s like, okay, we have stuff to do that. And I think it’s moving forward, but got a long way to go to actually get a lot of those installed.
Donald Gelestino (37:25)
Yeah, well, it’s easy. It’s even like a mindset. Like right now, if we would go to every one of our customers and say, hey, we want to put this predictive maintenance component on your system so that you could tell, you know, we could know faster. They would, they would not, I don’t think they would engage it. They would look at it kind of like the idea of the regenerative drive. Like, well, if you’re doing the maintenance, you should probably know when it’s going to break. Right? Like that’s the mindset.
Matt Allred (37:42)
Interesting.
Donald Gelestino (37:52)
for some clients. There are people that would love this idea, put it on all my buildings. But the reality is, as a whole, I think a lot of people would say, ⁓ I don’t think so. But as controllers are coming with this product built in it and stuff, and it’s just a flip a switch on, or it’s baked into your monthly maintenance price, I think it’ll just be an acceptable thing that if…
Company A has it, Company B has it, and Company C don’t have it. I think Company C is gonna have a problem, you know, keeping up with the other companies. So it’s again, a movement that’s gonna have to happen. I think all elevator systems are gonna end up having some kind of remote monitoring, you know, fees built in, fees built out. Again, it’s a revenue generator. Everybody loves that idea.
You know, there’ll definitely be subscription based monitoring services and stuff like that. I think it’s just, just inevitable.
Matt Allred (38:55)
Sure, sure. I’m sure as they understand the benefits and hey, if we can prevent shutdowns because we can anticipate that this is gonna, this is vibrating, it’s gonna go bad, this machine’s gonna fall apart, then I think it’s just kind of, yeah, making sure they understand what’s there to be had.
Donald Gelestino (39:14)
Yeah, 100%.
Matt Allred (39:15)
Very cool, very cool.
Don, thank you for being here with me today. It’s been a lot of fun to discuss all these different aspects that you’ve been addressing.
Donald Gelestino (39:25)
Hey, you’re very welcome. Anything I could do to help the industry and you know, I love what you’re doing. Keep doing the great work you’re doing. Thank you.
Matt Allred (39:31)
Thank you. Awesome.