The Controls NYC Startup Bible
Building Systems Excellence Through Principles & Stories
Purpose of This Document
Welcome to the Controls NYC Startup Bible. This living document serves as our North Star—a collection of principles, philosophies, and real-world stories that define who we are and how we operate.
Why This Exists
Since founding Controls NYC in 2021, we've grown from a one-person operation to a company that's redefining how legacy building systems are managed across New York City and beyond. Our work spans from the Port Authority Bus Terminal to the American Museum of Natural History, from hospitals to high-rises. As we scale, we must preserve the DNA that makes us exceptional. This bible ensures that every team member, from day one, understands not just what we do, but how and why we do it.
Who We Are
Controls NYC specializes in optimizing legacy building management systems for maximum efficiency, sustainability, and occupant satisfaction. We're master systems integrators who see opportunity where others see obsolescence. We retrofit buildings from the 1980s with solutions for the 2020s and beyond. We're the team that building owners call when everyone else says it can't be done.
What You'll Find Here
- Core Principles: The non-negotiable values that guide every decision
- Field Stories: Real experiences that illustrate our principles in action
- Customer Philosophy: How we build and maintain relationships that last decades
- Technical Excellence: Why mastery of legacy systems creates irreplaceable value
- Growth Mindset: How we balance prudent risk with aggressive opportunity capture
How to Use This Document
New team members should read this cover to cover. Existing team members should revisit it quarterly. Every story contains lessons. Every principle has been battle-tested. This is not theory—this is how we win.
Remember: We're not just fixing buildings. We're solving problems others can't or won't solve. We're building relationships that transcend transactions. We're creating value where others see only obsolescence.
Welcome to Controls NYC. This is how we operate.
Core Principles
1. Relationships Are Everything
"Wealth is all about deal structure. It's finding the right people to make deals with, and then the right structure with that deal."
We don't just service accounts—we build partnerships. Every interaction is an opportunity to deepen trust. Miss a client's call today, and you might miss their emergency tomorrow.
2. Embrace the Impossible
When others say it can't be done, that's where our work begins. Legacy systems, deprecated technology, "unfixable" problems—these are our competitive advantages.
3. Faith Under Pressure
In moments of crisis, maintain composure. Trust your preparation, trust your instincts, and trust that the solution will reveal itself if you remain patient and methodical.
4. Create Your Own Opportunities
Opportunities don't just appear—they're cultivated. Monitor them, maintain them, expand them. The moment you take them for granted is the moment they begin to slip away.
5. Document Everything
Your knowledge is valuable only if it can be transferred. Document your solutions, your thought processes, your victories, and your failures. Today's crisis is tomorrow's playbook.
6. Price Your Wisdom, Not Your Time
"Your wisdom and your knowledge and your application of those technologies... have to be included in your price."
We don't bill for the five minutes it takes to implement a solution. We bill for the decade of experience that makes that five-minute solution possible. Value-based pricing reflects the crisis averted, the money saved, the peace of mind delivered—not the hours logged.
7. Atomize Complex Problems
Break overwhelming challenges into major milestones, then into sub-goals, then into actionable steps. But remain flexible—if you're doing something manually and repetitively, pause and ask: "Is there a better way?" Persistence paired with adaptability is our methodology.
Field Stories
The Chicago Resurrection
October 2025 - A Story of Faith, Persistence, and Technical Mastery
The Call
I was sitting in a hotel room in Istanbul when the email arrived. The subject line made my stomach drop: "Need help ASAP."
The message was from my Chicago client—a relationship I'd been nurturing for over a year but had admittedly let slide the past few weeks. Their Star controller, a piece of 1980s technology that should have been in a museum, had completely failed. Everything was in manual mode. The building's climate control was essentially dead.
As I read their desperate message on my phone, 5,000 miles away from the problem, I felt a mixture of guilt and opportunity. Guilt because I'd let the relationship coast. Opportunity because this was exactly the kind of crisis that defined our value proposition.
"I might be able to come over next week," I typed back, knowing full well I'd be on the first flight I could book after returning to New York.
The Doubt
Two memories haunted me as I prepared for Chicago. The first was my old boss's warning when I'd first mentioned this account: "Don't get involved. This is not a good idea." His words had lit a fire under me then, but now, facing the actual crisis, they echoed with uncomfortable possibility.
The second was the simple fact that I'd never actually restored one of these ancient Star controllers from complete failure. I knew the theory. I'd worked on their successors. But this specific model, with its low-pressure steam controls that hadn't been manufactured since the early '90s? This was uncharted territory.
The Arrival
Walking into the building that Tuesday morning, I carried my laptop bag with the confidence of an expert and the internal anxiety of someone about to perform surgery for the first time. The client team was stressed but relieved to see me. In the conference room sat representatives from Siemens, our competitor, barely concealing their anticipation. They smelled blood in the water—an emergency upgrade worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"So what brings you here?" they asked, professional courtesy barely masking their interest.
"Just some routine maintenance," I lied smoothly, knowing they knew I was lying.
The truth was more complex. Siemens was both my competitor and my customer. They paid me to extract data from these legacy systems for their new installations. They needed me, but they'd profit more if I failed today. It was a dance we'd perfected—cordial on the surface, calculating underneath.
The Descent
The mechanical room was a time capsule. Pipes wrapped in asbestos-warning labels. Control panels that belonged in a technology museum. And at the center, like a dead heart, sat the Star controller—dark, silent, refusing all attempts at communication.
Six hours. That's how long I spent building safety checkpoints, creating test environments, developing backup plans for my backup plans. The client's facility manager stood behind me, watching every keystroke, asking questions I answered with more confidence than I felt.
With each passing hour, I felt the weight of expectation growing. I was the specialist flown in to save the day. The expert who commanded premium rates because I could fix the unfixable. But what if I couldn't?
The Revelation
It was hour five when I saw it. Hidden in a diagnostic panel I didn't technically need to access, a command string I'd completely forgotten existed. My heart rate spiked. This was it—the missing piece.
I closed my eyes for a moment. "God," I whispered under my breath, "if this is from you, let it work."
My fingers moved across the keyboard with newfound certainty. Enter one command. Wait. The screen flickered. Enter another. Wait. A cursor appeared where there had been nothing. One more command sequence, pulled from memory I didn't know I had.
The controller blinked to life.
Green lights cascaded across the panel. Temperature readings populated the screen. The building's brain was thinking again.
The Victory
"You got it working?" The facility manager's voice cracked with disbelief.
"Ninety percent functionality restored," I said, allowing myself a small smile. "I'll have it at one hundred percent within the hour."
But the real victory came later, as I was packing up to leave. The Siemens technician approached me, his expression a mixture of respect and bewilderment.
"You actually fixed it? That thing from the '80s? In two days?"
"Sometimes the old ways still work," I replied, knowing he was mentally recalculating every emergency upgrade proposal he'd been preparing.
The Lesson
That night, in my hotel room, I opened my laptop and did something I should have been doing all along. I documented everything. Every command. Every diagnostic step. Every moment of doubt and breakthrough.
Because here's what that Chicago trip taught me: Our value isn't just in what we know—it's in our willingness to face the impossible with faith that the solution will reveal itself. It's in treating every client emergency as our emergency. It's in showing up when others are hoping we'll fail.
My former boss was wrong. This wasn't a bad idea. It was exactly the kind of challenge that separates Controls NYC from everyone else. We don't run from complexity—we master it. We don't abandon legacy systems—we resurrect them. We don't just fix problems—we save clients from crises they didn't budget for and couldn't afford.
That Star controller is still running today, accessible remotely from technology that didn't exist when it was built. The client saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. Siemens still needs my expertise. And I learned that sometimes, God puts commands in diagnostic panels just when you need to see them.
This is what we do at Controls NYC. We show up with a backpack while others wait with trucks, and we still walk away with the gold—because we're the only ones who know how to extract it from systems everyone else has given up on.
The Hospital Audit Trail
June 2025 - A Lesson in Value Creation and Creative Problem-Solving
The Request
The call came from a longtime client—someone I'd built trust with over years of solving their "impossible" problems. This time, it was their hospital facility. The compliance team needed daily audit logs from their building management system, formatted clearly, delivered like clockwork every morning. It sounded simple enough.
Then came the complications.
The system wasn't connected to the internet. There was no email server. Worse, half their equipment ran on a legacy platform that predated the very concept of automated reporting. The facility engineers needed these logs to track their watch engineers' performance, to prove compliance, to justify their operations budget. Without these reports, they were flying blind.
"Can you make this happen?" my client asked, exhaustion evident in his voice. He'd already been turned away by two other contractors who'd deemed it technically unfeasible.
"Give me two days," I said.
The Challenge
Sitting in my home office, I mapped out the problem. Two separate systems—one modern but offline, one ancient and barely functional. No internet connectivity. No email infrastructure. Multiple stakeholders needing different data views. And a hard deadline: reports in their inboxes every morning at 6 AM, no exceptions.
The modern system could generate logs but couldn't send them anywhere. The legacy system couldn't even generate logs in any usable format. Most contractors would have quoted a $50,000 infrastructure upgrade—new servers, network connectivity, modern controllers. But that wasn't what the client needed. They needed a solution that worked with what they had.
The Innovation
I started with the legacy system. It couldn't generate reports, but it could display data on screen. So I wrote a script that would systematically navigate through every screen, copying the displayed data into a text file. Primitive? Yes. Effective? Absolutely.
For the modern system, I discovered it could export to local files even without network connectivity. I created a second script to merge these files with the legacy system data, parsing thousands of lines of raw output into something human-readable.
Then came the clever part. Without internet access, I couldn't send emails directly. But the system had access to a shared network drive that synchronized with an internet-connected server elsewhere in the hospital. I wrote a Python script that would:
- Generate the combined reports at 5 AM
- Format them into clean PDFs with charts and summaries
- Save them to the network drive
- Trigger a separate process on the connected server to email them out
It was a Rube Goldberg machine of data flow, but it worked flawlessly.
The Revelation
Two days later, I delivered the solution. The client was reviewing the first automated report on his phone when he called me.
"This is exactly what we needed," he said. "The other contractors said it would take weeks and cost tens of thousands. How did you do it in two days?"
This was the moment of truth. I could have said it only took me five hours of actual work. I could have billed them for two days at my hourly rate. But that would have been selling myself short—and more importantly, it would have been dishonest about the value I'd delivered.
"You're not paying for two days of my time," I explained. "You're paying for ten years of experience that let me see a solution others couldn't. You're paying for a system that will save your engineers hours every day, ensure compliance, and prevent issues before they become crises. What's that worth to your operation?"
He paused, then said, "You're right. Send me the invoice."
The Lesson
That hospital project crystallized something crucial about our business model. We don't sell hours—we sell outcomes. We don't price our time—we price our wisdom. When you can solve in five minutes what others can't solve in five weeks, you're not charging for five minutes. You're charging for everything that made those five minutes possible.
This is especially important for new team members to understand. When clients come to you with "impossible" problems, they're not buying your labor. They're buying your ability to see pathways others can't see, to connect systems that weren't meant to be connected, to deliver results without requiring massive infrastructure overhauls.
The hospital still runs my scripts today. Every morning at 6 AM, facility engineers across the organization receive their reports. No infrastructure upgrade needed. No monthly maintenance contracts. Just a creative solution that turned "impossible" into "automated."
This is the Controls NYC difference. We don't just think outside the box—we build new boxes that nobody else imagined could exist.
The Path Forward
Building Our Future
Every crisis resolved, every relationship deepened, every impossible problem solved—these aren't just business victories. They're the building blocks of something larger. Controls NYC isn't just a company; it's a philosophy about value creation in spaces others abandon.
Your Role
If you're reading this as a Controls NYC team member, understand that you're not just a technician or a salesperson or an engineer. You're a guardian of critical infrastructure. You're a solver of impossible problems. You're the person building owners call when everyone else has failed.
The Standard
We don't compete on price. We compete on capability. We don't sell services. We sell peace of mind. We don't maintain equipment. We maintain relationships.
Hold yourself to this standard. Add your own stories to this document. Build on these principles. Because the future of Controls NYC isn't just in the systems we service—it's in the culture we create and the excellence we demand of ourselves.
Remember: There's always a solution. Sometimes it's hidden in a diagnostic panel you weren't supposed to need. Sometimes it comes after six hours of methodical testing. Sometimes it arrives as inspiration in a moment of prayer. But it's always there, waiting for someone with the patience, skill, and faith to find it.
This is the Controls NYC way.
This document is a living testament to our principles and practices. It should be updated quarterly with new stories, refined principles, and evolved philosophies. Every team member is encouraged to contribute their experiences and insights.
Document Version: 1.1 Last Updated: October 25, 2025 Next Review: January 25, 2026 Company Founded: 2021 Headquarters: New York City Specialization: Legacy Building Management Systems Optimization