Stan Mitchell is Founder and CEO of Key Facilities Management International, the longest established facilities management business in the UK. With a global reach, the company is now operating across Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Stan has over 35 years of experience and is considered a pioneer in the establishment of facilities management as a profession. He chairs the British Institute of Facilities Management and the British Standards Institution Facilities Management Committee.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Learn:
- How COVID-19 has impacted Stan Mitchell’s facilities management (FM) business
- The biggest challenge for facilities managers following the COVID19 lockdown
- Stan talks about the challenges of upscaling old buildings with new technology
- The biggest threat to old buildings
- How buildings are reopening post-pandemic lockdown
- Stan shares a new ISO standard that will help facility managers better manage buildings during emergencies and pandemics
- How to contribute to the proposed ISO standard 41017
- Stan shares how anyone can get into facilities management
- Adapting facilities management during a pandemic
In this Episode:
With businesses worldwide reopening or planning to reopen since the COVID-19 lockdown, the role of the facilities manager has become increasingly critical. In this new world, they face fresh challenges: how do they give people the confidence to come back into the workplace? How do they demonstrate professionalism and thoroughness in keeping facilities safe?
Now that the facilities manager’s role is more than routine maintenance and cleaning activity, what other ways can they help keep workspaces safe?
Listen to this episode of Watching Paint Dry podcast with Greg Owens as he interviews Stan Mitchell of Key Facilities Management International. They spoke about what a facility manager’s role looks like today, how it is changing, what to expect, and more.
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
- Greg Owens on LinkedIn
- McCarthy Painting
- McCarthy Painting Contact No.: 415-383-2640
- McCarthy Painting Email Address: info@mccarthypainting.com
- Key Facilities Management International
- Stan Mitchell on LinkedIn
- NFMT Conference
- ProFM
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
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
Hello, this is Greg Owens here and this is The Watching Paint Dry podcast. It is Thursday, September 10. And here in California, it’s we’re still in this like lockdown pandemic mode, and we’ve added fires to it so it’s an eerie another eerie day of lots and lots of smoke not As bad as yesterday, you can actually see a little bit yesterday it was black all day, it felt like nighttime with this orange sort of glow to it all. And I hope everybody’s families and people are safe and able to kind of, you know, be productive and carry on here. But it’s it’s been tough here in California. We are continuing our conversations with talking with building owners, property managers, and facilities managers and all the companies that support those, those organizations and those people. There’s a tremendous amount of unique challenges that are going on right now that are facing the facilities management and building construction fields. And there’s also opportunities that keep coming up and it’s interesting to explore those. This episode was brought to you by McCarthy Painting, that’s my company. It’s was started in 1969 by my uncle, Fred McCarthy, and we paint both commercial and residential properties throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. If you’d like to know more about us, you can go to McCarthyPainting.com or info@McCarthypainting.com for our email, and we’ve done all kinds of projects for like from retail, Abercrombie and Fitch to Google to Autodesk, H&M and many, many more. And I’m super excited because today we have our first sort of European guest Stan Michell coming from the United Kingdom is currently in, in Scotland. Stan is the CEO of Key Facilities Management International, which is the largest facilities management business in the UK, operating across Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Welcome, Stan.
Stan Mitchell
Hi, thank you very much for the kind of invitation. Just one slight correction. I wouldn’t say we’re the largest. We’re the longest established, longest, longest established, this is our 30th year in business. So I’m talking to you, I usually say I’m talking to you from sunny Scotland but it’s not sunny. It’s gray and it’s cold. But at least it’s not raining so I can’t complain too much.
Greg Owens
And I’m sure if you go outside and you breathe the air it’s fresh air.
Stan Mitchell
I’ve got lovely fresh air I’m I’m not very far from the picture in the background of Dune castle. And we have wonderful in the countryside above Glasgow and Edinburgh. And beautiful part of the world.
Greg Owens
Yeah, that was it was interesting, because you’re you’re just telling us a little bit about that castle. And it’s not very far for your city, correct?
Stan Mitchell
Yeah, so I can’t quite throw a stone at it but it’s not too much further but this this is the castle that for the older generation might recognize From Monty Python the Holy Grail movie. Oh yeah. And more recently, it was the scene for some of the Game of Thrones, and it’s the castle that was used in the Outlander, the beginning of the Outlander series. So it’s quite a famous little castle for the movie buffs.
Greg Owens
That’s, that’s so great. That’s so great. And you can just go out and walk around it anytime you want.
Stan Mitchell
We can indeed and we often do at lunchtime.
Greg Owens
It’s so wonderful. Yeah, it’s gonna bring a whole new perspective when I watch those films. I also forgot to mention that we have Katrina Katrina Hayes from McCarthy Painting also on this podcast and sometimes he chimes in and has some questions and I know she’s a big movie buff and is now very excited to know somebody that knows that castle and knows that area.
Katrina Hayes
Big Game of Thrones fan
Stan Mitchell
Well, it’s I know why you’re here Katrina is to bring a better Golan Marcus is certainly not coming from me. Greg,
Greg Owens
that’s so true. Yeah. And how are you and your family and how are you guys holding up during this? This pandemic? I haven’t really talked to too many people from other countries. I have talked to some people from Asia and that kind of thing, you know, and they’re not in lockdown anymore people, my friends in Shanghai, how’s things going for you? They’re in Scotland.
Stan Mitchell
Well, we are, we’re kind of in the second wave at the moment. And Scotland actually is the UK is as most people don’t know, actually the UK is four countries. And in Scotland, we have our own government. So our rules around the pandemic and how we react is different than England. And England Connect rushed a little bit about getting out of the lockdown enough no paying the price for that. But even although in Scotland we were a bit more cautious. The second wave is beginning to hit in where the tried to open The pubs in the restaurants. And people were a bit silly and didn’t take as much gear as he should have. So it’s beginning to tighten up again a little bit, but relatively speaking, but not as bad as a lot of countries in the world.
Greg Owens
And not even close to the America.
Stan Mitchell
No, no, you guys are excelling as always,
Greg Owens
right? Yes, yes, we do things big. We do things. You know, it’s so interesting. I was just I might, I was just in North Carolina, I visited my mom and I traveled and it was interesting because like everybody was behaving on the plane and on at the airport, people wearing masks, social distancing the whole thing, right. And then as soon as they got out of the airport in a small town, like Asheville, North Carolina, off came the mask, they’re hugging their relatives, like people that they’re familiar with. They’re like, Oh, you’re safe, like you’re part of my plan. And I’m like, Oh, this is how it spreads. Right? And my, my friend, a friend of mine, who, you know, I’ve seen this both on both liberals and conservatives, my friend who’s very liberal. She said to me, she’s, you know, in her communities like we tried. We tried for two months. We gave it a good try. It didn’t work. I was like, Man, that sums it up pretty well. And you and your family have you guys been doing well through this? Have you? How’s that been?
Stan Mitchell
We’ve as a company, we work currently in about 21 countries. And I spend an incredible amount of time traveling and living out of hotels, etc. So since March, that soul stopped so my wife is complaining bitterly because this is the longest period in my career that I’ve been at home permanently. So she’s absolutely fed up with me. And but the business itself fortunately, our people are spread across those 21 countries. So all of our people are working to one degree or another. And of course, facilities managers are the people that that are going to have to go back into the workplace first to make sure that we try and prepare things and sanitize things and check the building services and the water systems to make sure because they’ve been on, they’ve been on shut down. There’s quite a lot of work to do to try and make sure that they’re safe again. And things like Legionella can quite easily pair me during a lockdown period like this. And if facilities managers aren’t wise to that, you could end up doing as much damage as the pandemics doing if you don’t prepare properly. So lots of people have been fairly active for quite some time and some countries, and in fact, every country takes a completely different view on what the risks are and what we should do about it. So people ask me, what are the biggest challenge That we’ve found in the business. And the biggest challenges are just that, that every country has different rules and regulations that you’re trying to follow. And you you guys will find that in within the states as well, I’m quite sure. And then when you go into a particular state or a country, you have different organizations have different views to the risk and rules that you need to try and follow on their behalf. And then when you go into the different buildings and those different organizations, the local MD or CEO, they have their own views on what the rules and the regulations should be. So actually trying to keep up with it and trying to serve the client at the end of the day as best as possible has been probably the biggest challenge but but the one that’s coming that I think will be most challenging because most most facilities managers know what to do in terms of hygiene and maintenance of air conditioning systems etc. probably our biggest challenge and often we’re not good at this is about how do we give the people the confidence to come back into the workplace? How do we demonstrate to them, we are professional in what we’re doing. And we’re thorough, and we’ve got the right signage in place, and we’re gonna give them all the peepee that they might need in terms of screening or whatever it might be. And you know, a lot of facilities managers tend to be engineering tapes, and I’m, I’m one of them so I can say this. And we’re not the best communicators at times. We’re not the, we’re not maybe quite so good at times on the soft side of FM, which is vitally important that we communicate and engage with people. And that probably is going to be one of the challenges that might be we have to think about a little more than the routine maintenance and cleaning activity. These switches day to day tasks that we’re all well used to.
Greg Owens
Right. And there’s, I mean, communication is a massive aspect of all of this right? And kind of, as you said, it’s the softer skills. It’s not always necessarily sort of, in an engineer’s sort of tool belt, let’s say, right? They’re really good with, they’re really good with equipment and tools and things, that kind of stuff. But then when it comes to people, they’re like, not not quite as always as good at like expressing or communicating what they what their needs are. And that’s one of the biggest things around this and then to safely come back into business businesses. I have some questions around like, because I know you deal with a lot of much older buildings and we have here in America and but I wanted to learn a little bit more about your company or the seat and how you’ve gotten to this position of being CEO.
Stan Mitchell
Well, okay, I saw a very good question. Chin. I worked I was actually, my career took me from an engineering hands on engineering apprenticeship background in a company that was a pump making company for around the world a company called weirs. j&j, we’re, and I learnt my trade there. And then a lot of the guys I work with the had been in the merchant navy or the Merchant Marine, nothing could you call it? Yeah. And I had all these wonderful stories about being on ships that traveled around the world and all the good times they had ashore. And so I thought, I’m gonna have a go at this. This seems quite exciting as a young man. And of course, what these guys didn’t tell me was you spend 98% of time at sea, looking at nothing. And then that 2%
Greg Owens
boiler, right, you’re in a boil? Absolutely. You don’t even have like a window. Absolutely.
Stan Mitchell
So the 2% can be quite good when you eventually get to somewhere, you know. So I spent my time at sea and then I get money and started a family. And I thought, well, I didn’t start a family to not be there. So I came ashore and I actually worked for an American tech company. The Code Wang, W, E and G. And they stood up, I helped them build a new facility in Scotland and manufacturing in Scotland. And we were making the computers competing with the IBM’s of the world, as was. And we were actually building PCs in 24 hours made to order long before Mr. Dale ever thought about doing it. So we were pretty innovative company at the time. Yeah. And then Dr. Wang, who is the president of that organization that had businesses all over the world decided to make a strategic decision that then the company started sliding in the wrong direction and I get made redundant. So when I got made redundant, I thought, okay, I can go work for another company. But hey, let’s go and have a go at doing this thing called Facilities Management at the time, which nobody had heard of. It was very, very new concept and language if you like. And so I started my own company. And as I said earlier, that was 30 years ago. And we’ve gone from strength to strength. And today actually, we work in 40 in 21 countries sorry. And we’ve this year we’ve just signed a contract that’s going to take is truly global, where we’re being asked to go and work for major corporations from New Zealand to Argentina. And I’m just waiting on the opportunity to come to California but nobody’s invaders there yet, but the deal come up.
Greg Owens
Oh, yeah, that’s that’s, that’s incredible. So you and your co CEO, no Founder of
Stan Mitchell
Yeah, yeah. And I’m the CEO and founder for my sense. And we’ve diversified as a company, we we do FM consulting, we do FM training. We do the day to day operations across those 21 countries. And today, we also do technology. So we’re very much developing technology for the FM world, utilizing all the new industrial revolution 4.0 tech, the AI and the machine learning and the IoT. And that is taking off very, very fast, particularly right now. We have sensors in our clients premises that are monitoring everything about the workplace and its environmental conditions. And we’ve also adapted it to monitor social distancing, so that we can monitor what’s going on in the dynamics. As people come back to work, so we can go and focus on those pinch points where social distancing isn’t taking place or what it is of the facility we need to clean, more robustly and more often than other parts of the facility. So we’re already switched on to technology as a tool. But of course, you know, people talk about smart buildings that there’s no such thing as a smart building. And but there is data that you can get from technology in our building. And what we’re talking about is smart FM, because getting that data, analyzing it, figuring out how it can improve what you’re trying to do. And that’s the value of the technology not just the data itself
Greg Owens
and making the decisions from the data.
Stan Mitchell
Absolutely. Absolutely. Then how can you improve I did a presentation in Dubai and the At least about a year ago, and my topic was Nanosecond FM in the Autonomous Building. And we actually today could have no nobody in the building and let the building tell us what it needs us. And that technology is here. And I believe the future of facilities management is totally integrated with the use of those technologies.
Greg Owens
Yeah. And so, and I, you know, I can think that it now it’s much, much easier to switch some of that technology into the older really older buildings where you prefer it was nearly impossible, but now it’s sort of the way wireless in the way that the mesh networks are working, that you can take a really old building that before it would have been incredibly cost prohibitive. Right and now you can like spread that out throughout the entire building. What are what are some of the other challenges with older buildings that you guys are running into?
Stan Mitchell
Well, older buildings of the like that we have in Scotland and you know, you go to these iconic buildings in Edinburgh or Glasgow or Sterling, which is my closest city, and which used to be the capital of Scotland, but we’ve got buildings that are very compartmentalised. And so very small spaces and lots of them. And you can walk into some of them and then like rabbit Warrens, you know, you you get lost in the building because of all these nooks and crannies. And the other kind of problems that you have then is things basic things like building services. You know, heating or cooling nice spaces is not necessarily straightforward. And then you get into more of the fabric things these things know you’re getting old and need need a different type of maintenance because you want to return To the original fabric and the original papers and flooring and things like that. And so trying to maintain them and maintain not just the aesthetics of them, but were possible the original materials, which we can, in many cases, is gives you different types of challenges, and certainly not, it’s can be cost prohibitive, for sure. But then that’s our legacy. That’s the things that we want to maintain to pass on to the next generation so that they can touch and feel and experience those kind of buildings. But they’re an absolute bloody nightmare to try to look after them.
Greg Owens
Yeah, and just give it give us some American some perspective, because we don’t understand time and how old things can be, you know, Katrina here, it will see something in San Francisco and be like, Wow, that’s really old, but it’s, you know, 100 years old. What does that got? Katrina
Katrina Hayes
you know what comes to mind actually old Armory in San Francisco, you know that that type where there’s there’s water underneath the building. They built
Greg Owens
it over it’s an armory in San Francisco and they built it over the mission Creek which ran right underneath it it was the water supply to the Armory in case they got like, besieged in a way Yeah, no, but this is 100 hundred year old building. It’s not that’s not all.
Katrina Hayes
The 1800s which is my level that’s old but not centuries ago old.