Ben Ouwinga is the Vice President of Operations for KKR & Co. – West Coast, where he manages the day-to-day operations of their two facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area. KKR & Co. is a leading global investment firm with over 150 billion dollars worth of assets under management in the areas of real estate, finance, private equity, and many more.
Prior to joining KKR & Co., Ben served as the Department Head of the US Navy Reserves in Dublin, California. He was also an Operations Manager, HR specialist, and Facilities Manager with Kirkland & Ellis LLP. Ben brings his expertise in organizational structure and an eye for creating frameworks that take on big challenges with simple solutions.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Learn:
- What does a typical day as a Vice President of Operations look like in the middle of a pandemic?
- Using ionisers to safeguard the inevitable return to the office.
- The biggest challenges in managing the space of a multi-tenant facility.
- How has the shift towards work-from-home changed the negotiation of building management?
- Being involved in the building process and creating relationships with your building engineers and architects.
- Ben talks about his origin story and how he got started in facility management.
- Understanding how the work that happens in the off hours defines the environment of the office.
- How being a part of the Navy and the Marines shaped Ben’s mindset towards building management.
In this Episode:
If you were to solve a puzzle, you would generally start with the corner pieces and make your way towards the center. Think of building management as the same concept: a giant jigsaw, with each day presenting new ideas, problems to solve, and the adventure and mystery of a never-ending brain teaser. Managing a building is a versatile and sometimes daunting task, yet, it is also immensely rewarding when the environment you create facilitates innovation and productivity. Ben Ouwinga, Vice President of Operations at KKR & Co., knows the joys and pains of piecing together effective building management along with what it means to create a lasting relationship between building engineers and architects.
In this week’s episode of Watching Paint Dry, host Greg Owens talks with Ben about the ins and outs of what it takes to seamlessly manage two buildings while creating a framework for people to return to the office gradually. He delves into his start in Facility Management and the resources he uses to stay up-to-date on innovative ideas while creating a comfortable, yet inspiring environment. Stay tuned!
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
- Greg Owens on LinkedIn
- McCarthy Painting
- Ben Ouwinga on LinkedIn
- KKR & Co
- IFMA
- BOMA
- Livermore National Lab
- CDC
Sponsor for this Episode:
This episode is brought to you by McCarthy Painting, where we serve commercial and residential clients all around the San Francisco Bay area.
We’ve been in business since 1969 and served companies such as Google, Autodesk, Abercrombie & Fitch, FICO, First Bank, SPIN, and many more.
If you have commercial facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area and need dependable painters, visit us on the web at www.mccarthypainting.com or email info@mccarthypainting.com, and you can check out our line of services and schedule a free estimate by clicking here.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:03
Welcome to the Watching Paint Dry Podcast where we feature today’s top facility managers, property managers and property owners talking about the challenges and opportunities of managing hundreds of thousands of square feet of real estate and how to beautify and improve their properties. Now, let’s get started with the show.
Greg Owens 0:32
Hello everyone, this is Greg Owens here and this is the Watching Paint Dry Podcast. It’s Friday, May 22. And another week quickly has gone by here in quarantine mode in the San Francisco Bay Area. I hope everyone is doing well getting through this global pandemic as best you can and your families and loved ones are healthy and safe. We are continuing our conversations with facilities managers and property owners and building owners and especially right now there’s so much information and so much about their roles that have changed and there’s so many challenges and we’ve also been finding like there’s opportunities during this during these times, and we’re having these kinds of conversations to get this information out there. This episode is sponsored by my company McCarthy Painting. The painting was started in 1969 by my uncle Fred McCarthy, and we paint all kinds of commercial properties and residential properties throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Some of our clients include Google, Abercrombie and Fitch, H&M, Autodesk, Ferrari, and many many others. For more information you can go to McCarthypainting.com or info@McCarthyPainting.com today I am excited to have Ben Ouwinga Vice President of Operations for KKR West, a global investment firm located here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Welcome, Ben, thank you for taking time in your day.
Ben Ouwinga 2:16
Thank you, Greg. Happy to be on.
Greg Owens 2:18
Yeah. So I don’t know much about KKR. So let’s just start with like a little bit about, like your facility, your building and what your role is there.
Ben Ouwinga 2:28
Sure. So I’ll give you a little bit of background on KKR. So KKR is actually called Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts, I mean, it’s KKR for short, and it’s a global investment firm with offices around the world. And we have three or four offices in the United States, our headquarters in New York, a small office in Houston, and then two offices in the Bay Area here. San Francisco is at 555, California, and we have the top two and a half floors, basically. And then we have an office here in Menlo Park where I’m actually sitting today and we do a wide variety of financial things from investing to private equity to private credit, and a few other investment things across the world but a great place to work. I’ve been here three years. And we have, like I said, two offices here in the Bay Area. One is a five by five, which is obviously a multi tenant building. And then here in Menlo Park mentioning today, is a two story office park type building, two very different facilities that I have to deal with.
Greg Owens 3:30
Yeah, no kidding. And, and I, as I’ve been having these conversations, I’m assuming like, like a lot of people, your job has been turned upside down and you’re having to look at so many different new aspects of how to bring people back to work and you said you actually been going to work to their PR offices in Menlo Park. How has that been right now?
Ben Ouwinga 3:52
So the wonderful thing about going to work now is that I commute in from the East Bay and the traffic is glorious the past few weeks. So I come in just because we have a few people who will kind of breeze in and out and grab some of their equipment. What I’ve seen, interestingly enough, is in both of our offices in San Francisco and in Menlo Park here, people know that we’re extending our work from home, people are coming in and getting there. We have widescreen monitors. So again, the 36 inch curved screen monitors over the last week here in Menlo Park. A lot of people have come in and got their chairs. We have Aeron chairs or chairs. Yeah. And people are getting sick of sitting out there. You know, they’re, they’re like in their living room on the small desks or at their kitchen tables. So it’s been very, I’ve been very busy. In addition, you know, we have the whole COVID thing that we’re planning for, and we’re doing kind of a US approach and a firm wide approach around the world. We’re looking at it coincidentally because we have so many offices and a lot of different businesses. We actually have an epidemiologist and we retained right when they started. We used to work for CDC and we have another doctor who is a consultant that we use. And looking at all the different aspects of coming back to work, we’ve gone through, I can’t say how many iterations of a return to work document. And then we realized, like, we were kind of spinning our wheels and said, let’s make it more of a framework. Because it’s not going to be the same in all of our offices. Because as you’ve seen from the news, it’s different in every state. In every county, it seems like and it’s very confusing. So I’ve been constantly doing that over the past few weeks. And as we, when you contacted me earlier this week, I thought I thought about, you know, how are we going to talk about this. And as I’ve gone on my runs the last few nights, I’ve said, you know, we’ve looked at everything from the 50,000 foot view all the way down to the individual desk. And then I thought to myself, look, we could talk about just the architectural aspect of this. And that would take, you know, probably two hours, and then you know it so you could probably talk for the whole you probably talk for a week straight and what we’re doing changes we’re making things we’re looking But that’s kind of a general thing we’ve been doing and been very busy all of our operations staff and frankly, working from home, as we found with a lot of our staff has been very tiring. And people are getting kind of burned out. Actually.
Greg Owens 6:16
Yeah, there’s something about being on Zoom calls. Even for us as a painting company, we’re using Zoom a tremendous amount and it’s very exhausting in a way to have all your meetings and the other hand, though, like you said, like there’s been no traffic. So as I’ve been going into the city, and to look at facilities and that kind of thing, it’s, it’s been super easy. That’s amazing that you guys have early on hired an epidemiologist, and a doctor, any, any info that you can share that you’ve learned from those guys, because you’re talking straight to them, you know, like one of the biggest challenges I’ve seen in this whole thing is like, nobody has really correct information, and then there’s contradicting information. Constantly so I’d love to get what, what you have heard so far?
Ben Ouwinga 7:04
Sure. In terms of the health stuff, you know, I stopped watching the news, the COVID portions of the news, probably two weeks into this just because there’s just so much information and people were getting overwhelmed. We haven’t heard anything I would say that has been monumental from the people we retained or from the outside. A few things that we’ve narrowed down though is one is we do food service at both our Menlo location in San Francisco as well as our New York office. One is that we’ve been able to narrow down with our epidemiologists that this is not something that is foodborne, and we do food in house now it’s a very important aspect of our culture. So that was very important for us and two, I guess maybe this is something which is really neat, which we’ll delve into is kind of the 50,000 foot view with our HVAC units. We are starting to integrate either UVC, or ionisers. So as a matter of fact, right before this, I just got off a call, we’re finalizing, I’m gonna have ionisers put in our HVAC unit here in Menlo Park. I don’t know about UVC. That’s a whole kind of separate realm. But I’m also walking with our engineers at 555 next week, see what we can do for our floors there. But we got to know a lot about ionisers in the past few weeks. And that’s a great technology. And there’s a lot of what you can do now is you can, you can add it to your HVAC system without too much cost in without too much like imposing too much on wherever your structure is. So like, if you were to, for example, if you were to install like a UVC unit here, you’d have to make access panels and there’s a lot of intrusion up into the plenum. And with the ionisers, it’s a lot less they’re able to actually just kind of put it before your coils, near your filters and your HVAC units and it’s much more efficient. So I’m learning a lot more about that. But that’s one of the things we learned. And that’s one of the things that are the epidemiologist and the doctor who we are consulting with. pointed out, the epidemiologist was more involved with the HVAC unit, the doctor that we have is more involved with mental health, which is, I know we’re not dealing with mental health on this. But that’s become a big issue. It’s kind of a separate issue for a different podcast, probably, we can address that here. But that’s why we have the doctor, but the epidemiologist really was really pointing out that we, in our headquarters in New York, are in the midst of a build out we’re scheduled to move to a new building in September, which is probably going to get pushed out to the end of the year. But because they’re mid build, they’re able to implement UVC a little bit better as well as the ionisers. And we also changed our filters firm-wide to the number 15s. Right now, like I think we have like number we were on like number like nine or 10 or something like that. Now, we’re on moving all the way up to 15. And we were able to determine that it’s not going to affect the static pressure in the buildings, or increase like wear and tear on the unit. So that’s one of the big things that we worked with our epidemiologist on early on and was able to, he’s able to kind of point out that that’s a good move to do.
Greg Owens 10:18
Oh, that’s great. I know, we, I actually looked into the, you know, ultraviolet light for our own company, and like, in how we can use it as a disinfectant, because we were looking at how we could pivot as a company and offer more services to our clients and sort of be there and be ready and even for our own offices, and that kind of stuff. Um, but I don’t know much about the ionizer. Can you fill us in on a little bit more about what the ionizer is and that kind of thing, and we can get this kind of information out there to other facilities managers, too.
Ben Ouwinga 10:49
Sure. So first, the UVC, let’s go back to UVC real quick. There’s UVA, UVB, and UVC, and UVC is what’s commonly used at hospitals. The thing with UV See though it’s also very dangerous like you can’t be exposed to it. It will burn you it can alter the DNA, your DNA, which can lead to cancer all the stuff. A very dangerous. Yes, yes. And there’s a lot of maintenance involved. Not a bad thing, not a bad technology. It’s a technology they implemented I think like the 1970s, like late 60s, early 70s, especially with hospitals, the ionisers. What they do is they now we’re going back to high school science here college science. They blast ions into the air when the air passes through your units. And then what that does is they’re positive and negative, they cling to viruses or bacteria. And it makes that ionic call the cell by bacteria bigger, and then they get caught in the filter, so then they don’t end up coming through your AC units. And I guess one of the interesting things is that dealing with air volume, which is a hot topic for hkc. For UVC units, it’s a little harder for them to handle if there’s like a lot of air like a tremendous amount of air. Yeah. But with ionisers, they can handle the airflow much better. So you can have a lot higher volume. And we had the consultants we use, the group I use for HVAC come out just last week, and we went through all this and we looked at all the material, it’s sitting on my desk right now. And one of the common things we found out is that they’ve been putting these units in over the last few years at like Samsung and Google. And it’s the same technology that they use, like in clean rooms. So when you’re when they’re working on, like microchips or anything that has to be very sterile, they’re able to use it and they’re able to use it in hospitals as well. And like I said, the great thing about it was for the most part, you’re able to add this on to an existing unit without with a minimal intrusion. Which is a great thing.
Greg Owens 13:02
Right? And what’s the firm that you used here in the Bay Area to install those just out of curiosity to let people know about that.
Ben Ouwinga 13:11
So in the Menlo Park office I have here we use a Silicon Valley mechanical. And then in at 555, I have a separate contractor air system. They’re an M core company, they’ve been around a long time you probably see their trucks a lot. Both of them have been very busy in what’s happening to kind of add on to this is that with the ionisers people a few weeks ago started to realize that this is going to be probably an important thing as well as UVC which is the other option, but now there’s going to be probably like there’s been runs on toilet paper and hand sanitizer or anything like that. They’ll probably be a you know, a run on these types of installs and these types of units. And so I think that my vendor told me by the week, by the weekend, by the day, the lead time as well as the cost and demand is going to get higher for them.
Greg Owens 14:06
Right, like thermometers too, like we’ve noticed that like trying to buy those for our company and that kind of thing. So I’m still waiting for the order that I ordered like, four weeks ago or something like that. Um, and so are you? Are you managing the facilities both here and then globally for the company and overseeing those kinds of things? Are you mostly just here in the Bay Area?
Ben Ouwinga 14:31
I’m focused here on the west coast. So two offices keep me busy enough with the facilities, as well as I also do it. I’m an operations manager. So it’s facilities, its office services. It’s our food service, which takes a ton of time above the office offices in reception, as well as security so it ends up being a full scope of things.
Greg Owens 14:56
Right, right. And at some firms that’s like four or five different people.
Ben Ouwinga 15:01
Yes, and we are a little bit more efficient and smaller here. So my—prior to this position, I was actually in the same building at 555 for a firm called Kirkland & Ellis had worked with them for a long time in two different stints between Chicago and here. And I was, specifically I was the facilities manager there. And we did a build out for like two and a half years, I was in charge of doing a lot of that. But then I got added on toward the end, a bunch of extra responsibilities, which is pretty, pretty normal. Depending on the size of your organization, you may be just a facilities manager, just wear that hat, which is really several different things. And then the operations people are in charge of everything besides facilities. But we try to make it efficient and I don’t sleep much and I have a lot of energy. So I’m still doing it. And I have people who assist me in both offices.
Greg Owens 15:51
Oh, yeah. Yeah. And, and so when it comes to the Bay area here, though, and you said Menlo Park and then also San Francisco now there’s lots of different considerations and you said you like yet 50,000 foot level let’s let’s look at like the San Francisco in a high rise multi, multi tenant space, what are your biggest challenges when it comes to that? That facility there?
Ben Ouwinga 16:16
So, pre pandemic and post pandemic now, the challenge is, I think pre pandemic was managing space as well as post pandemic. So pre pandemic it was, hey, we’re growing. Look how much space costs and in San Francisco, what do we do? What does our real estate picture look like because we need a certain amount of square footage. And is, you know, you know, is 50 is 75,000 square feet going to come up in the next few years. So you know, constantly working with our broker on that, because you don’t want to get landlocked in the building or what’s coming up in that building because you know, you don’t want to move. So having all these considerations pre pandemic And then post pandemic. It’s, it’s the same thing. Okay. All these places I’ve gone to work from home models, we have 60,000 square feet, you know, do we need do we need all that, you know, we’re coming up for renewal in probably like three years, right? And then there’s also something in a contract that says, hey, 18 months out, you have to let us know if you want this, you know, if you want to continue past this, or do we renegotiate? Now, do we wait to renegotiate? So that’s going to be a huge 50,000 foot thing coming up for us. Same thing in Menlo Park. You know, timings of lease renewals? And just the space in general Do we need all this space? In our San Francisco office, it’s a combination of open space because we have two trading floors. And we have traders and then we also have individual offices. So you know, now that this is happening, you know, do we want to get those acrylic shields around all the day traders down Which, which I’ve seen advertised, and, you know, trying to weigh that, and we’re not going to do that right now. Because we’re looking at a phased approach to returning it, you know, but hey, if we got those acrylic shields, you know, how would that look? How would that change the aesthetic? And is that a, you know, once you put those in, you know, are you ever gonna be able to take those out? That was a big thing. And, and I was advocating, saying, Hey, this is an option. But do we want to do this because once you put them in, you can almost never take them away. And then say, you want to take them down within you have to store all this stuff somewhere, and how much damage you do to the desk, all those type of things. So that’s a 50,000 foot level for that office. And then same thing here in Menlo Park where we have closed offices, you know, what do I need to do here? Do it you know, when we come back? Do I tell people you know, one person to an office or how do we set that up? So some of those things, and I think one of the things I learned over the years, and I didn’t start in facilities, I’ve done this For the last 10 years, I started in human resources. But I had gone through some moves. When I was in our Chicago office with Kirkland & Ellis, I’ve gone through two building moves over the span of like 11 years, one to an existing building one to a new building. So I moved into two built spaces, and didn’t have much say in it. So then when I became doing a lot of facilities work, I said, Look, one of the things I learned is, you have to incorporate a lot more people and listen to architects more. So the 50,000 foot view here is, you know, what are the architects doing? And right after this happened, I reached out to the architects I knew and said, Hey, let me know when you guys are doing podcasts or zooms. I’m curious to see what you’re hearing. And I guess one of the things I’ve learned over the years is, you know, really, really have a good relationship with your architects and your other departments to look at these things because now what’s going to happen is, we’re going to have to incorporate architecturally in new builds or T eyes, different types of changes. It used to be, you know, open space was the thing. And then people kind of went away from that. And I, I’ve seen all these things on LinkedIn recently, you know, this COVID, it’s put the nail in the coffin of open space. But you know, all these places, especially in the Bay Area, because of how much square footage costs have open space. So you’re looking, I’ve been to Airbnb before, I’ve been to other people inside our building, and they have large trading floors or large, you know, clusters of desks, you know, how’s that going to look? And, and none of us have the answer to that right now. But that’s a huge consideration. And that can change the real estate market, commercial real estate market here in San Francisco, or even in Silicon Valley, probably a little less than Silicon Valley, but more in San Francisco, because now people are going to say, Hey, I am going to be running away from this cost per square foot. What can I do to avoid this, and it could drastically alter it whereas, like, on a daily basis in San Francisco, there’s like .03% of space available in San Francisco as a webber two weeks ago, what’s that gonna look like in the future?
Greg Owens 21:02
Yeah, and just hearing them. I think I read this morning that Facebook is saying like, over the next 10 years, they’re predicting, they have 45,000 employees, and that half of them will start working from home. And at the moment for the Bay Area they said all employees are indefinitely working from home. And that’s everybody’s, like gotten concerned about how that’s going to change the real estate sort of outlook or where people actually work from right like this. Now, it kind of opens the door to like, the suburbs again, in a big way, a big push and move towards that direction. Um, I love the sort of origin stories around facility managers and how you get into this, because it’s not always like, what I’ve learned, it’s not it’s not always like the career direction. It’s kind of like people kind of stumble across it and then find out it’s a really good fit for them. And there’s so many great pluses and benefits to being a facilities manager and looking over real estate and properties and that kind of stuff. And, and some of them that I seen is that you’re not stuck to a desk, you have to learn all the ins and outs of a building and how it works and functions. And you do have to wear those multiple hats. So tell us a little bit about your getting started in this as a career choice and what you’ve enjoyed about it.
Ben Ouwinga 22:24
Sure. So actually, I started 20 years ago in human resources for Kirkland and Ellis in our in Chicago office, which is the headquarters that firm in worked in HR for a long time. And then I’m also was in the reserves for 20 years, the military and the Marine Corps and the Navy, and I deployed a few times, and I got back from a deployment and this is in 22,007. And as you know, I enjoyed my job and and, but I wanted to expand a little bit more and at the time, I promised my wife that If, you know since it was like my second deployment that we’d moved to California, where she’s from originally, so, okay, we’ll all move. And then when I came out here, she had her job already set. I had a bunch of options. And one of my options was a colleague of mine, who we knew out here was like, hey, how do you manage this property? You know, it was a retirement community, an independent living retirement community in the Central Valley of California, along with an assisted living, had a separate manager but fell underneath the executive director. So I took the executive director position, knew what I was doing second manage people but you know, it was my first time with facilities and it was a large facility with like 100 different units and then living completely differently than office facilities. Completely different.
Ben Ouwinga 23:47
So I enjoyed doing that. And it was in 2010. So we were just coming out of, they were kind of they were in the red, because we were coming out of that, you know, the housing issues that hit California much harder in the United States. So, these were all rental units. So it was, you know, I was like, hey, that’s a good challenge. Let’s try to get them out of the red. And finally after, you know, year and a half able to get them on the red and it stayed there about three years, but learned a lot about building land acquisition, I did a big property acquisition, and just enjoyed it. I grown up in construction in Chicago, as a teenager doing carpentry and trim work. So I was able to get back to, you know, some of that construction stuff. And we were able to expand that facility in the Central Valley, added land, added some more buildings, as the housing market was coming back. And then my old firm, Kirkland & Ellis, said, Hey, why don’t you come back working for us in San Francisco, in Menlo Park, and I did. And they said, Well, we want you to become the facilities manager here and I had no experience you know, being in a high rise. So jump right into it learned learn the trade a little And more of the trade from that aspect of it, jumped right into a build out at 555, three different floors. And did that full tilt, and then got a call from KKR after that project had finished, and then they pulled me over here. So that’s kind of how I got started, started in HR, and then moved out here and then had a challenge to work in one position. And then that led to this and I’ve done this now, for 10 years, I enjoy it, I enjoy. I don’t mind sitting at a desk sometimes I enjoy being you know, wearing the white shirt sometimes but then also getting underneath and getting dirty too. I don’t mind doing that at all. That’s what I enjoy about my desk, I can get out I can look into things, and I can have a pulse on things in you know, to understand, like, especially the real estate aspect. That is a pivotal component of like running a business. And you know, and what I’ve learned over the years is that in facilities, my goal Is that people when they walk in the office, they can do the job that they’re there for. So if we have somebody investing in healthcare or if we have somebody trading in stocks, they can sit there and they can, you know, they can walk to their desk, the atmosphere feels fine. They can, you know, the restrooms are clean, they go to the pantry and get snacks, they can have our food service from our chefs, and everything is fine. They can just focus on their job. And I can worry about the hundred things in the background. And you know, people don’t think about it unless you know, the AC is broken. Or if we have, you know, fires in the northern counties and you know, we’re not recirculating the air, you can smell the smoke. So all those types of aspects, and I really enjoy it, it’s just it. It’s, you know, it’s you. You kind of hold the office together. And people don’t realize your value until something really goes wrong.
Greg Owens 26:54
Yeah, no, completely and it’s interesting because I was just talking about my painters, we were painting for some executive offices of a biotech company. And, you know, we come in at night or on the weekends or that kind of thing. And I was telling my painters, it’s like, Look, we’re here at night and on the weekends, painting these offices to make them look really good. So that there’s no odor and that kind of thing. And so that the scientists can come back to work on Monday, and, and try to cure cancer and not have to worry about these things. Right. And there’s a lot of behind the scenes, things that happen within facilities, as you said, so that other people can just come in and focus on their, on their job, and they don’t even like Like, like, like the temperatures correct the things the tools and everything they need to get their job done is done. And you know, and a lot of that stuff happens that on nights and weekends and that kind of thing, and I’m sure that you’re you’re involved in, you know, on almost you could be called at any point, right like, it’s really I know we had one facility we were in this winter, we were in a skyscraper in San Francisco and painting at night. And I was there checking in on things. And, um, I heard like running water. And I was like, that’s weird, shouldn’t be running water inside a skyscraper, and went around the corner and found like a leak, you know, and we’re on like, the fifth floor. And that’s really odd and really challenging. It was pouring rain outside too. But I had to make that call to the facilities manager of that building and wake him up at three o’clock in the morning and say, hey, sorry to do this, but we’ve got an issue over here. You know, and yeah, I’m sure you have those kinds of stories too, from your experience.
Ben Ouwinga 28:46
Yes. So multiple stories with that type of stuff. So being on call 24/7, you’re basically on call 24/7. And, yeah, so things I deal with, in even though I’m the VP and I have people report to me, I still like to be involved in it, know what’s going on. I like to be on scene a lot too, especially for some of the vital things like if you have a water leak, especially if it’s in your server room. And you know, I’ve had that happen at five by five, where there’s been some water issues with the supply water from the building to our heat pumps and our supplemental HVAC units are like the cooler server rooms. And you know, the thing about you know, like, you’re referring to a painters I know when painters have to work and I try to be on scene too. When that happens. I kind of enjoy it actually. And people don’t fully realize that at night in the city, it’s still alive because that’s when cleaning crews come in, that’s when painting is done after the you know, after the HVAC is off because you have to low VC paints, you know, that’s when hot work is done if they have to weld something, and you know, so I spent many early Saturday mornings and Sunday mornings in building things, you know, that are building in San Francisco. You know, watching the sunrise with whatever vendor we have there doing work, whether it was a build out or just certain type of maintenance. So it’s funny, like people explain that to people, sometimes they don’t fully fathom that. And then there’ll be like, Oh, yeah, I guess you’re right. You know, when I was here Friday, you know, the walls were all mucked up. And now it’s, it’s Monday morning, and now you know, our walls are beautiful and white, and, you know, there’s new tile and all that type of stuff. It all happens on the off hours and, and my goal is always just like with you is to be very seamless. So people, when they’re off work, they can come back to like a nice environment and you know, that’s when you get that stuff done. And, and, you know, moves are done at night and on the weekends. And, you know, testing for safety systems are done super late at night and into the early morning hours. So yeah, it’s a very, it’s a it’s it’s funny when people the light kind of clicks, you tell them that they’re like, Oh, yeah, I guess that’s how it works.
Greg Owens 31:06
And that means to me with my wife, a lot of my friends that are, that work in buildings and that kind of thing. And they and I tell them Oh, yeah, I was out, like, two o’clock, three o’clock in the morning inside the building and like, Why Why don’t you do that during the day is like, you wouldn’t want painters and cleaners and people around your desk at all.
Ben Ouwinga 31:25
Yeah, in certain people don’t understand. Like, they’re like, well, how come it costs so much? And I’m like, well, these are off hours. And this is when you want to get it done. It’s like, we’re not going to close business, like on Wednesday, the entire day, and have painters come in and have hot work done and all steps up. Would you want me to tell you, I mean, now we’re in an environment, we can do that because we work from home. But like, you know, before this, you weren’t going to tell your staff Hey, just stay home on Wednesday. We’re going to do it. You try to avoid that.
Greg Owens 31:50
Yeah, we’ve been in a lot of facilities in regular business hours right now, which is, you know, is an opportunity for us in a lot of ways. We can come in and do some of that, and get some of that kind of work. Um, I thank you for your service too. And I want to just go back to that a little bit and how has being how as being in the Navy, I think your Navy and Marine Corps, how has that helped you in this role? And what have you sort of that kind of knowledge share there.
Ben Ouwinga 32:23
So it’s interesting now, because when you deploy, and I was in Iraq, was doing the combat deployment, when you deploy, you kind of get on a certain type of schedule, and you have to be very disciplined. And that’s what gets you through it like rough times, whether you’re on a ship, whether you’re on land, something like that, you have your routine, and your routine keeps you keeps you you I wouldn’t say sane, but it keeps that, that level of sanity with you. And during this time, what has helped me especially the training and I’ve talked to a lot of colleagues about this, we’re still in, you know, gotten out is the fact that You’re like, hey, there’s something happening. And we have to kind of step up and do certain things. And there’s going to be people who are panicky in the situation, or who just kind of spin their wheels. And you have to kind of try to be the maybe a guiding hand, especially when you’re dealing with people who are like a several levels above you, and say, Hey, you know, maybe that will work or this, you know, this will work or this won’t work. So it’s just kind of keeping a level head, but also having that, that schedule that you stick to, and I’ve stuck to my schedule and a very routine oriented. And that’s what’s helped me through this, and it’s interesting. We have General David Petraeus actually is one of our partners in our New York office. Yeah, well in that and he put a and I worked with him a little bit in Iraq, and he put a posting on this LinkedIn thing the other day and said, you know, hey, this is just like a deployment. And you know, for all you military people treat it like the employment, especially if you’re working, keep that schedule because that’s what keeps you through. And a lot of the people, my friends, I was talking to one last night, he works at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, but he lives in the city. So he does a reverse commute. And we were just talking about how, you know, you keep the schedule, and I have a lot of other colleagues who had served around here. And they’re like, Hey, we keep our schedule, weather and they don’t all work, none of them work facility. And one of them work. One works in facilities, but the other ones don’t. But just keeping that schedule in keeping a level head and saying, you know, we’re all talking about, hey, everyone’s running around with their heads cut off, like a chicken with a head cut off in the situation, and how you had to like kind of calm down on groups and say, This is what we’re going to do. This is how we’re going to look forward to this. And also adaptation, being able to adapt. That was one of the key things too, and you taught a lot of that in the military to adapt and overcome or, as Rumsfeld said, you go to war with the army that you have, not the army. You want. And you have to look at the situations. And also it’s taking a step back and looking at things in a simpler way. Not everything is going to be super complex to address this. Some things are just very simple. And it’s having the discipline to do it. So it’s helped a lot.
Greg Owens 35:17
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I really am grateful that I’ve had like, sort of my own morning routine and my own practices that I do on a daily basis. And I find that it’s been essential in keeping a level head and having that sort of discipline to keep doing it, even when it’s when it’s tougher days. We also have Katrina, who’s on who’s been on this call, who works for McCarthy painting. And I know, for Katrina, she was asked if she could go into the office because that routine of going into the office was really like and since nobody’s there, having one person at our office has been Okay. Um, and that routine has been really helpful for her. Any thoughts?
Ben Ouwinga 36:00
I agree. Yes. Oh, go ahead, Katrina. I was gonna say, I don’t I keep the same routine. But tell me about your routine.
Katrina Hayes 36:07
Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much, Ben for being on the podcast, first of all, and I’m very routine-oriented. And having that routine is my structure and being productive. And I love that, that you shared that, you know, that’s what the military teaches because it is a doctor overcome through these tough times. So that’s really great that that’s what the military does, too.
Greg Owens 36:31
Yeah. So any, any sort of other resources or other things that you as we as we sort of get to the close of this, I like to ask like if there’s any books or, or apps that you were using or things along those lines to help in this times? or just in general?
Ben Ouwinga 36:56
Yeah, so I probably say a few things. One is, you know, I’m a part of IFMA in the Bay Area here, and, you know, I’ve tuned into a lot of their webinars, especially like, you know, COVID planning and in what they’re doing and looked at a lot of the kind of the talking boards, when people are talking about everything from electrostatic sprayers to tie ionisers to fazed return planning to the office. So I’ve tuned into a lot of those in you know, broad kind of incorporated a few of those things I’ve heard and seen and reached out to some people. I’ve used people on the boards to get as resources for giving hand sanitizer, as well as some local people we have and other people we have through our firm. So that’s been very helpful. I’ve also used architects who I work with, to ask them some things here and there, as well as engineering firms, especially with the HVAC In reached out to yet like, I’d say it’s you know, it’s like the mentorship part like I know some senior architects in now i’m not i’m not old but I’m not young so I had some people reach out to me colleague of mine who left right before this happened is now an office manager in the city and he was like, Hey, I What are you guys doing? You know, in I think it was a you know, what do you guys even doing for mail service because right now like a lot of people are using a mail service to pick up their mail, right hold it for their work and like deliver at least twice a week. So reaching out about those things. Are you guys having a day port or extra cleaning? What are you guys doing for this and this and this so probably my people who have mentored me as well as people who I mentor, a little bit, so using those types of resources, and also, you know, being in tune with what is on like, you know, CDC websites, or BOMA, that type of stuff and reaching out to colleagues, tenant groups. I have a tenant group at 555 California. You— we talk regularly, as well as with the building manager and management who I know very well. And then here in Menlo Park, there’s just two tenants that I speak with the other tenants and a few other people in local buildings. So those tenant groups are very well. They’re good things to use. And it’s interesting, because I’ve noticed that some organizations very well prepared jumped on this right away. And I’m proud to say we, we jumped on that like very quick, other organizations kind of didn’t know what to do. Not because they’re bad organizations, but this is something that we’ve haven’t faced in our lifetime. So some of them like we’re reaching out like, like, they’re big organizations. They’re like, Hey, we know. Well, you guys are working from home now. Yeah, you know, we’ve gone to this as a precaution and you know, we’ll monitor it and then, you know, they eventually went to it, what a week later, but, you know, this is a interesting time. It really is in I hope that it’s a temporary thing or, you know, that passes But a lot of people who, you know, as a side note I’ve been speaking with, whether it’s our food contractors or people who we use for furniture, we’re looking at solutions that are flexible solutions. So if we have to put up extra sneeze guards in our pantries that they can be moved when we don’t have to have this because we also have to look beyond this as well. This is temporary. And I don’t say that just because I’m optimistic. I am optimistic. But it is a temporary blip and I don’t know how temporary it is, if it’s, you know, six months, a year, whatever happens, but we also have to plan for what happens after this, when it goes back to what we considered normal. And then also in case we revert back to a spike or something like that. So that’s what the you know, the adaptability and flexibility. And that’s where reaching out to a lot of different people is helpful and mentoring. Like, because if I want to take a step, my mentor can tell me, hey, that’s a step you could take but that’s a very drastic solution. And that’s a very something that’s going to be there for a long time, like those acrylic panels around the desk. And, or one of the people who I mentor could reach out to me and say, Hey, well, we’re gonna do this. And I’ll be like, Well, you know, you can do that. But that is a long term thing. And if we go back to normal, that’s going to be not useless. But you know, it’s going to be kind of an albatross in your, in your, in your office.
But I did want to add one last thing, too is I’ve noticed over the last few weeks night commute in from the East Bay, is that traffic is picked up. And I’ve noticed it’s a lot of contractors, which is good. I’m glad people are working, that’s good. And they’ve lifted kind of that restriction on that. And I’ve noticed here in Menlo Park, in our office park here as well as by my where I live in the East Bay and downtown San Francisco that if people had construction projects that were kind of in the chamber and they were holding off and doing now they’re doing them so I see that those are going on and a lot of people are taking advantage of it. I think it’s a good thing. So you know, whether it’s you know, getting your facility repainted, hey, you can do it on regular hours now, or whether you’re doing a tie or a build out, or changes to your HVAC whatever electrical work, your network stuff, now’s the time to get it done. And I’m trying to over the next several weeks, get it done. We are working from home to September 8, across the United States, but like I’m pushing stuff to get it done, because once we get back to semi normal or normal, it’s going to be obviously harder to do but I’d say like if other people listening to this, I know I hope other people listening to this, get out and contact, you know, your, your vendors or the people who do projects for you and get it done now. It keeps the economy going and keeps people employed. You’re also going to be able to pay straight hours instead of overtime hours, and you’re able just to get it done.
Greg Owens 42:54
Yeah, yeah, no, we’re super happy that we that they lifted the restrictions on construction as you can imagine you know and being able to have those opportunities to go back to work has been really really important and then doing them and you know, figuring out like you said, like tapping into all these different networking groups basically to find out what is the best ways to go about coming back to work and working in a you know, in a space and construction sites that have multiple different trades on it and that kind of stuff and everything is going to take a little bit longer to is what I find is because we’re having sometimes or even our guys are having to like, wait for another contractor to finish and they’re just sitting in their van. So you know, holding back because we don’t want so many people in the, in the same facility at the same time, right. And there’s all kinds of considerations, um, it has been a pleasure to talk to you, I really enjoy your energy and you really have a lot of love that you’re just like, like a lifelong learner, in in this process and it really shows You’re you’ve definitely tapped into lots of different resources, any other sort of tidbits or things you can give to somebody that wants to come into becoming a facilities manager, like what they should check out and that kind of thing.
Ben Ouwinga 44:14
Yeah, I would say, it’s a great job, it’s a demanding job. Like we said, 24/7. And if you’re starting out new, you know, a lot of times it starts in a different area in the company, so like, you know, working in the in office services, or working like in the food portion of it, and then you know, you see how the company runs and then you know, a spot opens up and then you transition over. A lot of times it isn’t directly like you’re not hiring somebody off the street. Sometimes you are a lot of times you’re trying to get people internally to do it. So if you want to start become part of it, learn about it, learn about construction, learn about how to read, Prince, architectural aspects. If you have a background in What is it? Like lead, like you know, lead become a lead consultant, something like that, which is a big thing say out in California? Or if you are if you start in one of the trades, and you want to transition over, and that’s the thing, too. But yeah, it’s a great, it’s a great job. It’s a very dynamic job.
Greg Owens 45:23
I really appreciate having you on our podcast Watching Paint Dry. If people wanted to reach out to you would LinkedIn be the best way to get in touch with you?
Ben Ouwinga 45:33
Yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best. Because that goes to my personal email. And I don’t always want to speak for my company when I say certain things or have my go to my company. Well, but LinkedIn is great, for sure.
Greg Owens 45:43
And we’ve been talking with Ben Ouwinga, Vice President of Operations for KKR. It’s been a real pleasure to have you on our podcast today. Thank you for taking the time. Yeah, and any last any last thoughts or words?
Ben Ouwinga 46:05
Yeah, no, I guess. Thank you very much. And for people listening, you know, this will pass. And that’s been a prominent theme by our CEOs. This is a blip and this is part of history, or you’re living in a, you’re in a part of history and adapting and overcoming is going to be a large aspect of all portions of life, not just facility.
Greg Owens 46:27
All right, thank you very much.
Ben Ouwinga 46:30
Thanks for everything man.
Outro 46:40
Thanks for listening to the Watching Paint Dry Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.