Outspoken and Active in Retirement
At age 68 retirement hasn’t fully stuck for Vern Baker, a native Arizonan who has worked for two city governments in the Grand Canyon state and continues to provide contract facility management consulting expertise for his previous employer.
Vern is a graduate of the University of Arizona with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. He has a background in engineering and construction, but never felt like he truly found a home until he got into Facilities Management. Now retired, Vern gets to do the professional things he loves best like capital planning, strategic planning, and asset management. He still gets to go up on rooftops, he’s just not working every day, all day.
Vern explained that one of the cities in Arizona needed to update the capital plan he originally prepared for their spring training baseball facility in order to reflect current conditions. In addition, they wanted to stay on top of equipment assets in their new computerized asset management system which Vern also implemented to track their repair history, lifespan, and replacement cost. He worked for the better part of a year putting together these plans. Now the organization knows more about their assets, their condition and age, and replacement costs – a ten-year plan that they can use for budget planning purposes. The process includes collecting manufacturer names, model numbers, serial numbers, condition, and criticality scores, which Vern puts into a spreadsheet and provides to a planner to upload into the computerized asset management system.
“That's really where the future of facilities management needs to be. We need to be more in this information age and having those critical assets on record in our computer system so we can manage them more effectively because no one's giving us any more people or any more money,” said Vern. “By using the available information to prioritize the limited resources to the most critical assets we can operate to our highest and best ability and document those decisions to leadership, so they understand the choices made and the impacts to the organization.”
The new arrangement is perfect for Vern, after working full-time for 40 years. There’s less stress and strain. He’s helping his team, and he still has time for his family, camping, skiing, and hanging out by the pool.
“Within hours from where I live, I can be at the beach, I can be in the mountains, I can be at the river, the lakes. I mean, I can be at the lake in 30 minutes from my house. It's amazing. I love Arizona. It's a great place,” said Vern.
He reflects on the leadership aspects of being a facility manager and defines leadership as “a three-legged stool supported by vision, courage, and compassion” placing an emphasis on helping people with problems by leveraging the power of communications – listening and understanding before speaking. Vern’s approach to teamwork is to build teams that are smarter than their leader. He’s managed plumbers, electricians, and HVAC, and roofers and supervisors, and superintendents who have forgotten more than he’ll ever know about their trades.
“It would have been foolish for me to tell them what to do,” he said. “I set the direction of the business and work with them to define the goals and success, then get out of the way, and check back in with them periodically to make sure they are still doing okay”
Upon entering college, Vern wanted to use his mechanical engineering skills to design motorcycles but found that wasn’t his passion. Instead, he opted for a career in the HVAC field -- a critical component of survival in the Arizona desert.
He talked about the value of developing trust as a customer service specialist,
“You serve two sets of groups – customer business needs, and the fiduciary responsibility of helping maintain assets and buildings, which have long-term value,” he said.
Critical listening, according to Vern, is one of the keys to being successful.
“I’ve had to dive in deeper to seek the root causes of a problem,” explained Vern. “Sometimes a customer would suggest a solution to a problem they have yet to really understand. The most critical step of the service business is to clearly define the source of the problem. Often, it’s not what you initially thought. I encourage customers to just say I have a problem with x, y, z, can you check it out?”
For example, in Arizona, water leaks are typically associated with air conditioning problems rather than plumbing problems. That’s just something an experienced Arizona facilities pro learns over the years. Vern sees technology’s promise to help individuals and teams prioritize tasks when dealing with limited resources, based on having data to make decisions.
“I've had an interesting career,” said Vern. “I've been able to choose my roles and follow my goals and my dreams and make that happen,” said Vern. “I have a saying that the customer is not always right, but the customer has the right to be wrong. But if people don’t trust you, then you don’t have a chance in any business, but especially in facility management.”
For those curious about or considering a career in facility management, Vern believes that technical skills are the bare minimum in what’s needed to be successful. He feels that emotional intelligence, the joy of helping people, and strong listening and communication skills will set you apart when looking at opportunities, joining a new team, and seeking new challenges.
“One of my favorite customers stories is the time a customer wrote a very nice note to my boss saying how appreciative he was of my help and that I was an asset to the organization. I had sent him some information earlier and like all good bureaucrats (his words, not mine) he lost it. He called me up and asked me to send him the information again, which I was happy to do. He told my boss that I made him feel like he was my only customer that day, which he knew was not the case, and that I made him feel like he was important (which he was). That is the moment I knew I was in the right business and what I most love about Facilities Management- helping people!”
Explore the experiences of retired facilities professionals in the latest series from ARC Facilities -- Legacy Insights: Wisdom from Retired Facilities Professionals and follow us on LinkedIn.
