FACILITY PROFESSIONAL SPOTHLIGHT

I was born and raised in the Construction Industry. Worked for my uncle with my father after school and during off periods from 9 years old. I went to Utah Technical College @ Provo (now Utah Valley University) to get my degree in Architectural and Mechanical Drafting and Design. I forayed into the manufacturing side of things for a while before returning to construction. I spent several years estimating, more years in residential, commercial, and industrial coatings as project manager and superintendent, even owned my own painting company for several years which helped me grow as a leader and motivator. I moved into the maintenance side of facilities in 2007, in 2017 I was moved into management to coordinate maintenance capital projects. I then became a Facilities Supervisor with a Credit Union with 18 branches and Admin center, then the Facilities and Maintenance Operations Manager for a Non-Profit Head Start provider with 44 classrooms spread over 27 locations in 2 counties, and a 15,000sf Administration center and Central Kitchen to prepare food for all our students. I negotiated leases, purchased, renovated, and built new buildings. I then moved into the Medical Laboratory field managing the 3 buildings (60,000sf) in Vancouver, WA and a 1500sf site in Dallas, TX. Here I am now as the owner of Left Coast Facilities Consulting, helping businesses become more profitable through PM procedures and sustainability, helping them comply with Clean Buildings Performance Standards and other codes.

My combined experience in Construction and Maintenance has allowed me to look at Facilities issues with an eye on value engineering, and yet minimizing maintenance. I have worked as a manager of some sort on facilities of 30,000 to 1.5 million square feet and have loved every minute of it.

My nightmare project was when we got an irrigation system water bill 7x the norm in April, a rainy month. Ground is soaking wet everywhere, no obvious point of a leak. We had to call out a Leak Detection Company, and after 3 hours of various methods, finally found the leak at a valve that we didn’t know existed, under a bank of shrubs. This location of course was in a highly visible a rea of the building. We brought in a backhoe with a big bucket and scraped back, roots and all, the shrubs and held them there with the backhoe while the plumbing was repaired, valve removed, then replaced the shrubs, added some new soil, fertilizer, and at the end of the day, if you didn’t see us there, you wouldn’t know what had transpired. That is a day in the life.

I am currently the Treasurer of the Oregon Southwest Washington Chapter of IFMA, Chairman of the Emerging Professionals and Career Development committee. I work extensively with the IFMA Foundation. I am also the VP of IFMA’s Facility Management Consultants Council. I will be going through Accreditation Training in the spring so that I can audit universities FM programs to ensure that they are meeting IFMA and Accreditation standards. I have my FMP, SFP, and hope to have my CFM by September. I recently received my CFT (Certified Facilitator of Training) so that I can teach IFMA’s courses.