Sometimes the job isn’t inheriting a department. It’s being handed a building and a set of keys.

No asset list. No PM schedule. No maintenance history. Vendors nobody can name, contracts nobody can find, and a stack of requests that arrived by hallway conversation before you’d finished your first cup of coffee.

The instinct is to start fixing. Resist it for about two weeks.

Days 1–14: Find out what you’re responsible for

You cannot prioritize what you can’t see, and right now you can’t see anything. Two weeks of deliberate discovery pays for itself many times over.

• Walk everything. Every mechanical room, every roof, every electrical closet, every crawl space. Take photographs constantly — you will not remember, and photos of nameplates are inventory data you can process later.
• Find the contracts. Who services the fire system, the elevator, the HVAC, the backflow, the alarm monitoring? Accounts payable knows, even when nobody else does. A year of invoices reveals every vendor you have.
• Find the compliance calendar. What’s inspected, when was it last inspected, and what’s overdue right now. This is the thing most likely to bite you in month one, and it’s usually the thing nobody handed off.
• Interview the long-timers. The custodian who’s been there 22 years knows more about that building than any document you’ll find. Ask what breaks, what’s been patched, and what everyone worries about.

Days 15–30: Stop the bleeding on life safety

Before comfort, before aesthetics, before the long list of complaints — close the life safety gaps. This is the category where a delay isn’t an inconvenience, it’s an incident.

Extinguishers, alarm system, sprinkler, emergency lighting, exits, AEDs. Confirm every inspection is current. Schedule whatever isn’t. Read the last report on each system and find out what deficiencies are sitting open.

This also does something political that matters: it establishes early, in a way nobody argues with, that facilities is a risk function and not a repair service.

Days 30–45: Build the front door

Right now requests arrive by text, email, hallway, and sticky note. Every day you let that continue is a day of work you’ll never be able to account for.

Stand up one intake channel. It doesn’t have to be sophisticated — it has to be single, easy, and acknowledged. Then hold the line gently: when someone texts you, log it yourself and reply from the system. People learn the channel by watching where the response comes from.

Do this before you build a PM program. Intake is what generates the data everything else runs on.

Days 45–60: Win something visible

Pick the complaint everyone has been living with — the door that never latches, the bathroom nobody uses, the room that’s always freezing — and fix it completely.

This isn’t cosmetic. You’re about to ask this organization for money, for process changes, and for patience, and none of that is granted to someone who hasn’t demonstrated they can deliver. One visible, permanent fix buys more credibility than three months of good intentions.

Days 60–75: Start the PM program small

Do not attempt a comprehensive PM schedule. It’ll take three months to build and collapse in week two.

Start with the assets where failure is expensive or dangerous — usually your largest HVAC units, your emergency generator, and anything life-safety related. Ten to fifteen scheduled tasks, on real intervals, that actually get done.

A small PM program that runs beats a complete one that’s ignored. You can expand it every quarter forever; you can’t recover credibility from a schedule everyone watched you abandon.

Days 75–90: Report

End the first quarter with a written summary to whoever you report to. Keep it to a page:

• What you found — stated factually, without blame for whoever came before
• What you’ve completed
• What’s now under control and being tracked
• What’s identified, unfunded, and needs a decision — with costs

That last section is the most important thing you will do in your first 90 days. It transfers the backlog from your head to the organization’s decision-making, on the record, in month three — before anything has failed and before anyone is looking for someone to hold responsible.

What to skip

Don’t reorganize the shop, don’t renumber every room, don’t launch a capital plan, and don’t buy anything that requires a rollout. All of that is real work with real value and all of it belongs in months four through twelve.

The first ninety days have exactly one job: convert an unknown building into a known one, with a front door on it and the dangerous things handled. Everything else is built on top of that, and nothing works without it.