#146 The Hidden Value of Data and Authentic Conversations in Winning Healthcare Projects
She was the
client first.
Abby Lauck sat on the owner's side of a hospital replacement build before she ever worked for the engineers. Now she takes CMTA to market — and what she learned wearing the owner's hat still decides how she shows up in the room.
#146The Hidden Value of Data and Authentic Conversations in Winning Healthcare Projects
Abby met CMTA from the owner's side of the table at Major Health Partners, then joined the firm she'd been hiring.
A national MEP and high-performance design firm headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky — and still growing.
CMTA keeps watching the utility bills long after a project closes. That repository is how they get ahead of the next one.
Forrestal Elementary at Naval Station Great Lakes — a $57M federally funded build, designed to operate at 21 EUI.
She was going to be a nurse. She ended up in the built environment.
Abby's route into engineering ran through a hospital — not an engineering school. Click any stop on the timeline to see how a healthcare-administration degree turned into a career taking a national design firm to market.
Greenwood Central Indiana, and a plan to go into nursing +
College Nursing and the women's golf team — then a change of major +
2015 Project coordinator on a replacement hospital +
~2020 Crosses the table — joins CMTA +
2024 First-ever SMPS Rising Business Developer of the Year +
2026 Marketing & business development at a national design firm +
You can tell a lot about a building with the square footage and a year's worth of utility bills.Abby Lauck · on how a retrofit conversation actually starts
"I think we design the best and most energy-efficient buildings in the country."
Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing design; a large technology group covering AV, security, and acoustics; and a performance-contracting arm. Asked what makes CMTA different, Abby doesn't reach for the org chart — she reaches for the outcome: cut the building's energy usage without losing sight of what it costs.
Four places a high-performance design firm goes to work.
The verticals Abby and Jim walked through, and what makes the efficiency conversation land differently in each one. Tap any tab to switch markets.
In a hospital, a lower utility bill is not a line item. It's an oncology program.
Abby's first industry was healthcare, and it's still where she speaks with the most conviction. The patient always comes first, which means the central plant never does. Deferred maintenance stacks up. Aging equipment depreciates. Nobody in the C-suite wakes up thinking about the chiller.
That's the opening. Reduce the energy usage, reduce the operating cost, and the savings don't disappear into a spreadsheet — they become staff FTEs, or an expanded oncology program at a rural hospital. Abby's line for it: "it fills my cup."
What works in healthcare
- Systems that are realistically maintainable by the staff you can hire
- Benchmarking a building against 20 years of comparable project data
- Framing savings in terms of patient care, not payback periods
- Having the hard conversation early, even when it isn't welcome
What makes it hard
- Heavy depreciation on medical equipment complicates the financing math
- Deferred maintenance that has compounded for a decade or more
- Expansion plans that outrun a central plant nobody sized for them
- Speed to market — healthcare projects rarely have slack in the schedule
K-12 is where performance contracting does the heaviest lifting.
CMTA ranks among the top three K-12 school engineering firms in the country in BD+C's Giants 400 report, and Abby names it as one of the firm's biggest national markets. It is also the market where funding is hardest and the creative financing conversation is most necessary.
Education has absorbed real funding cuts. Performance contracting — using guaranteed energy savings to pay for the work — is how districts get projects done anyway. That's the differentiator Abby points to: not just designing the building, but finding the mechanism that lets the district afford it.
What unlocks a district
- Performance contracting against guaranteed savings
- Alternate funding: grants, bills, and federal programs
- Utility-bill analysis before anyone talks scope
- Multi-year capital planning instead of one-off projects
What stalls one
- Funding cuts with no alternate mechanism identified
- Infrastructure 20-plus years old and past the point of patching
- Treating energy savings as a nice-to-have rather than the funding source
- No baseline data to prove the savings were real
Universities, city halls, and a surprising number of libraries.
Higher education sits alongside K-12 as a core CMTA market, and local government rounds it out — municipal buildings and, as Abby notes with some affection, "definitely a lot of libraries" around the country.
These are public-good institutions. They are not always the most profitable organizations, so finances become a hard constraint and resource allocation becomes the whole conversation. It is the same pattern as healthcare and K-12: aging infrastructure, tight capital, and utility bills that quietly hold the answer.
Where the value is
- Alleviating operating cost so budget can go where the mission is
- Adaptive reuse of buildings that cannot be economically replaced
- Designing for maintainability, not just for the ribbon cutting
- Being the transparent voice when the honest answer is inconvenient
Where it gets stuck
- Capital budgets that cannot fund a new building at today's costs
- Competing priorities across a portfolio with no single owner
- Infrastructure replacement that is invisible to the public it serves
- Institutions that issue capital projects rarely and have thin internal expertise
A net-zero elementary school on a Navy base.
Abby's favorite example of the work is Forrestal Elementary School at Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, which had its ribbon cutting shortly before this recording. Roughly $57 million of its cost came from a federal Public Schools on Military Installations grant. It is designed to operate at a 21 EUI, and it is the first elementary school on a US military base to pursue net-zero energy.
Federal and K-12 in the same project. That overlap is what Abby means when she says the fun comes from markets touching each other. Beyond it, CMTA is pushing into data centers, advanced manufacturing, and industrial — the growth edge of a firm that says it isn't afraid of the unusual project.
The Forrestal project
- 100,800 sq ft, 36 classrooms, on an active naval installation
- Funded ~80% by the DoD's PSMI program
- Designed to a modeled 21 EUI
- CMTA led MEP/FP, low-voltage design, and energy conservation
The growth edge
- Data centers — a market CMTA is actively trying to grow
- Advanced manufacturing and industrial facilities
- Federal work that overlaps with education and healthcare
- "Projects that are awesome and different and unique, and we're not afraid of them"
We wanna save money, and that goes back into patient care.On what a lower operating cost actually buys
Maybe you expand your oncology program in your rural hospital.
Six questions worth expanding.
The threads Jim and Abby went deepest on — pulled from across the conversation. Click any question to expand.
01What actually changes when you take off the owner's hat? +
At a hospital, the patient is always first, and everything revolves around keeping them safe. It is the whole world. As a consultant, Abby says, you care about that just as much — but at the end of the day, you leave. You move on to another project. The hospital never does.
That difference reshapes how you approach your day and your clients. Having once been the project manager on the owner's side, she now tries to be the kind of consultant who left a lasting impression on her back then.
You're not over-promising and under-delivering. You're doing the opposite. You're underpromising and over-delivering.
02Does the client bring the problem, or does CMTA bring the solution? +
Both, Abby says, and she means it literally. Sometimes a hospital has a problem, has worked with other consultants, and gets referred to CMTA as a problem solver — a referral that may have nothing to do with energy efficiency at all. Efficiency is simply what they are best at once they're in the door.
Other times CMTA sees it coming. A hospital wants to expand, and the central plant doesn't have the capacity. Nobody designed it to. That discovery, made early and collaboratively, is what turns into the innovative project.
03How does 20 years of project data become an advantage? +
CMTA doesn't stop looking at a building when the project closes. They keep watching how it operates, pulling utility bills, asking why there was a spike this month and what's going on here. Twenty years of that becomes a large repository of real operating data.
The payoff is anticipatory. Looking at how previous projects performed and how similar problems were mitigated lets the team get ahead of challenges on the next one — and show the client proven numbers instead of assurances.
Building trust and showing proven data really differentiates what we're doing.
04If LED lighting no longer carries a project, what does? +
Ten or fifteen years ago, LED retrofits generated enough savings to subsidize the other energy conservation measures in a project. That era is over. Jim asked what fills the gap now, and Abby's answer was "all the above" — geothermal, solar, battery storage.
But geothermal is the one they see the most of, and the one with the best savings. With clean-energy tax incentives layered on, she argues it becomes the cheapest option outright, with payback landing about a year after the building is up and operating. There is no one size that fits all; it depends on what the owner actually needs.
05What does she listen for in an interview? +
Communication, first. How is the candidate engaging back? In a world of Zoom interviews she's reading body language through a screen, trying to understand how someone responds, not just what they say.
Then: are they willing to ask? She remembers the people who weren't afraid to name the elephant in the room, or to admit they didn't know something she'd assumed they knew. And she's listening for appetite — whether someone wants to grow into something bigger, or is content where they are. Both are valid answers. Only one is a fit for the role she's hiring.
The quality of the interview is directly correlated to the quality of questions the candidate asks. — Jim's framing, which Abby endorsed without hesitation
06Who stays ten, twenty, thirty years — and who doesn't? +
Collaboration and communication, Abby says. The people who last are the ones who ask questions and speak up. Some people want to sit behind a computer and do the work, and she understands the impulse — but you're going to collaborate in every job there is.
The people who stay embody an entrepreneurial culture: they know deadlines come in seasons, that there will be weeks when you're there until nine at night, and that you won't be there alone. The ones who leave, in her telling, tried to take advantage of that same entrepreneurial trust — wanting to stay home, stay in their own bubble. That isn't who CMTA is.
I can confidently say people here wanna be here. And you can tell.
The four questions every BEP guest gets.
It was Abby's first podcast, and she'd clearly thought about these. Tap any card to see how she answered.
Concepts worth knowing before you listen.
The episode moves fast through some specialized vocabulary. If any of these terms are new, tap for a 90-second primer — no prior industry knowledge assumed.
Abby Lauck, PMP
Abby is a marketing and business development manager at CMTA, Inc., a national engineering design firm headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, with more than 50 offices across the country. CMTA designs mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, runs a large technology design group, and operates a performance-contracting arm — all organized around high-performance, low-energy building design.
Born and raised in Greenwood, Indiana, Abby studied nursing before transferring to IU Indianapolis (formerly IUPUI), where she earned a degree in health services management. In 2015 she became a project coordinator at Major Health Partners in Shelbyville, Indiana, working on a replacement hospital and reporting into the VP of facility operations. That is where she entered the built environment — and where she first worked with CMTA, as their client.
She joined CMTA roughly six years ago. In 2024 the Society for Marketing Professional Services named her its first-ever Rising Business Developer of the Year. She spent four years coaching golf at her alma mater, Cathedral High School in Indianapolis, and remains a vocal advocate for getting young women into the game.
Marketing & Business Development · CMTA, Inc. — a national high-performance building design firm with 50+ offices, HQ in Louisville, KY.
What MEP engineers actually do.
MEP stands for mechanical, electrical, and plumbing — the systems that make a building habitable rather than merely standing. Mechanical is heating, cooling, and ventilation. Electrical is power and lighting. Plumbing is water in and waste out. An architect shapes the space; the MEP engineer decides what keeps it alive, and what it costs to run for the next thirty years.
Firms like CMTA add layers on top: a technology design group handling audiovisual, security, and acoustics, and a performance-contracting arm that ties the design to guaranteed savings. "FP" you'll sometimes see appended — fire protection.
Abby is careful to note she is not the engineer. She's the one who takes the engineering to market — and who translates it for owners who don't speak it.
Performance contracting, explained.
A public institution wants to replace failing infrastructure but has no capital to do it. In a performance contract, the improvements are paid for out of the energy savings they generate. An energy services company designs and builds the work, then guarantees a level of savings in writing. If the savings fall short, the contractor makes up the difference.
That guarantee is what makes the financing possible: a lender or a district's budget office can underwrite a stream of savings that somebody is contractually on the hook for. It's the mechanism that gets a school district's boiler replaced when there was never a bond issue for it.
Abby names performance contracting as the key to K-12 and education work, where funding cuts have made conventional capital budgets unreliable. CMTA runs its own performance-contracting arm.
EUI — and what "net zero" really means.
Energy Use Intensity is a building's annual energy consumption divided by its floor area, expressed in kBtu per square foot per year. It's the miles-per-gallon of buildings: one number that lets you compare a school in Indiana to a school in Arizona. A typical US school lands somewhere around 50 EUI. Forrestal Elementary is designed to operate at 21.
Net zero goes a step further: over a year, the building produces at least as much energy as it consumes, usually via on-site renewables. You get there by driving the EUI down first — through envelope, solar orientation, ventilation, and efficient systems — and only then sizing the solar array. Efficiency first, generation second.
100,800 sq ft, 36 classrooms, modeled at 21 EUI, with geothermal wells and rooftop and parking-canopy solar. Per its architect, it's the first elementary school on a US military base to pursue net-zero energy.
The PSMI grant behind Forrestal.
Public Schools on Military Installations is a Department of Defense program, administered by the Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation, that replaces or upgrades aging public schools sitting on military bases — the schools that the children of service members attend. The DoD funds 80% of the cost. The local school district covers the remaining 20%, and owns and operates the finished building.
Forrestal Elementary, at Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, drew roughly $57 million of its ~$72 million cost from PSMI. Its ribbon cutting was held in May 2026, weeks before this episode was recorded. About one in four of its students come from families attached to the base — the Navy's largest installation, and the only site of its boot camp.
On air, Abby refers to it as the "Public Military Installation Fund." The program's formal name is Public Schools on Military Installations (PSMI).
