Portfolio planning
Five-year capital renewal schedules
A hundred locations, a fixed annual budget, and a board asking why this building and not that one. The answer has to be a model, not an opinion.
What a renewal schedule has to survive
Most capital plans are a spreadsheet someone typed: a list of sites in the order they were remembered, with numbers that cannot be traced back to anything. The first time a regional manager asks why their clinic sits in Year 4, the plan stops being useful.
A schedule that holds up has three properties. Every figure comes from a rating somebody made against a written definition. Every ranking can be recalculated in front of the person asking. And changing one assumption — a weight, a budget, a rating after a renovation — updates the whole five years without anyone retyping it.
How the model works
Each location is rated on a small set of components — building systems, equipment, overall appearance, flooring, paint — on a 1 to 5 scale where 1 is critical. Written definitions sit beside the scale so two managers rating the same room land on the same number.
Those ratings become one weighted urgency score, the scores rank the portfolio worst-first, and the ranking is spread evenly across the program years. Size class sets the renewal allowance, so each year carries a budget. You can watch the whole mechanism run on the working model on the homepage.
Who it is for
Multi-site operators with more locations than people to walk them: dental and healthcare groups, veterinary platforms, retail networks, and towns holding public building stock. The common shape is a small facilities team, a fixed annual number, and pressure to show the spending was reasoned rather than reactive.
What it costs
Quoted per engagement, based on the number of locations and whether the rating program is run for you or by your own managers. It is project work, not a retainer, and the workbook is yours to keep and to run yourself afterwards.
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Questions we get
- What is a five-year capital renewal schedule?
- A ranked, costed plan for renewing every location in a portfolio over five years. Each site is rated on condition, those ratings become a single weighted urgency score, the scores rank the portfolio worst-first, and the ranking is spread across five years with a budget attached to each year.
- Who supplies the condition ratings?
- Your own people. Regional managers or facility leads rate each location 1 to 5 on a handful of components against written definitions, on a one-page sheet per manager. The people who walk the buildings know the buildings; the model turns their judgment into a defensible number.
- How are priorities actually calculated?
- Score = Σ (weight × (6 − rating)) ÷ total weight. Inverting the rating turns a condition scale into an urgency scale, so 5.00 is most urgent and 1.00 least. Weights reflect what matters in your portfolio — equipment and building systems usually carry more than paint. Change a weight and the whole schedule re-ranks.
- What drives the cost figures?
- A size class per location, derived from square footage, with a renewal allowance per class. It produces a defensible budget before anyone commissions site surveys, and the allowances are yours to replace with real quotes as they arrive.
- What do we receive?
- A live workbook, not a PDF: a ratings tab your team fills in, a priority schedule that calculates ranking and renewal year, a five-year summary with spend by year, and an assumptions tab holding every weight, threshold and cost so the model can be audited or changed without rebuilding it.
- How long does it take?
- The model is built in days once the location list exists. The slow part is collecting ratings from the field, which is why the rating sheets are one page per manager. Partially rated locations simply stay out of the ranking until they are complete.