Operations Analyst Spotlight: Joshua Abbott

With 86 Repairs, handling restaurant equipment repair and maintenance is as easy as sending a text. While our Customer Success Managers are on call, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, our Operations Analyst, Joshua Abbott, works behind the scenes to help optimize all processes for the Operations team.

Joshua got his start at 86 Repairs in 2019 and worked for two years as a Customer Success Manager. In early 2021, Joshua was promoted into the role of Operations Analyst, in which he streamlines the operations functions of the company.

Throughout his time at 86 Repairs, he’s loved watching the company go from a small team to a 30+ person (and growing!) venture.

“It’s been very wild to see how we’ve grown; how we’ve taken a lot of customers' feedback for what they were looking for in their R&M process and then being able to apply that to our processes has been awesome. It’s given us a lot of flexibility and growth and really allowed us to develop a product on a service that is catered toward the customer very, very well,” said Joshua.

Before 86 Repairs, Joshua worked in the restaurant service industry for nine years, from a large-scale coffee chain to family-owned small restaurant groups in the artisan food space. A self-proclaimed tinkerer, he was always the one trying to fix any equipment that went down and spent a lot of time with his nose in a manual. This inquisitive spirit serves him well at 86 Repairs, where he uses this firsthand knowledge to solve customer problems.

“In my role at 86 Repairs, I get to take those opportunities with customers to walk them through some basic plumbing things, equipment maintenance, and whatnot, so they can understand these pieces of equipment aren’t always big, scary things, and there’s a lot they can do with a little bit of knowledge. And also just being very familiar and hands-on with a lot of the equipment, it just helps to know exactly what you’re talking about … So it gives me a bit of perspective for how those owners can feel when things go wrong,” Joshua said. 

Joshua understands the old vs. new approach to R&M as well as the advantages of working with restaurant preventative maintenance software. In his previous experience, he saw restaurants work with binders or a piece of paper taped to a filing cabinet, leaving R&M to become a disorganized, stressful process. Through digitizing the entire approach, 86 Repairs saves customers on costs and time by taking R&M off restaurants’ plates. And as part of the Operations team, Joshua loves helping 86 Repairs serve their customers more effectively every time.

“From the get-go, we [86 Repairs] are able to properly identify what exactly is going on with a piece of equipment. There are a lot of instances in which a piece of equipment may be an electrical issue and we need to get an electrician out there, or maybe it’s something where we need to get a cold-side provider out there, so we’re able to figure out, ‘Hey, who’s the right person for the job the first time around?’ We also are able to walk them through troubleshooting and help them know their equipment a little bit better … We have all of that history for them, so we both help the store level troubleshoot and dispatch, but also on the flip side, we offer a lot of KPIs and metrics to upper management,” said Joshua.

Interested in accessing these data points for your restaurant operations? Get started with 86 Repairs.