Dave Scroggins is the Facilities Manager at Cushman & Wakefield, a global commercial real estate services firm. In his role, Dave manages two office locations. Before Cushman & Wakefield, he was the Facilities Manager at Hines Building Maintenance, the Maintenance Team Lead at Silicon Valley International School, and the Operations Manager at The Training Zone.
Nic Guedenet is the Vice President of Operations at Hines Building Maintenance, a facilities service company. He was promoted to this position from Director of Facilities in May 2022. In his role, Nic works with clients to ensure the successful implementation of a preventative maintenance program. Before Hines Building Maintenance, he was the Director of Facilities and Facilities Manager at International School of the Peninsula.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- The challenges of managing projects, material shortages, and price increases
- Dave Scroggins shares his company’s hiring process
- How hybrid work models affect facility spaces and structures
- The process for managing corporate and other public facilities
- How Nic Guedenet and Dave prepare for industry growth and changes
- Nic’s career path in facilities management
- Why having a broad knowledge base is critical for facilities managers
- Advice for breaking into the facilities management industry
In this episode…
The pandemic has created hybrid work models and the need to condense or expand building spaces. So, how can you reconstruct your facilities to overcome these challenges and comply with demands for innovative work styles?
When developing new spaces, it’s imperative to modernize your facilities to accommodate collaboration and encourage a smooth transition back to the office. These renovations require shutting down areas that no longer serve a purpose to make room for open spaces with inviting and comfortable environments. Through careful consideration of contemporary work approaches, you can manage your facilities effectively.
In today’s episode of Watching Paint Dry, Greg Owens sits down with Dave Scroggins of Cushman & Wakefield and Nic Guedenet of Hines Building Maintenance to discuss preparing facilities for expansion. Together, they share the challenges of managing projects, material shortages, and inflation, how hybrid work models affect facility spaces, and the process of managing corporate and other public facilities.
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
- Dave Scroggins on LinkedIn
- Cushman & Wakefield
- Nic Guedenet on LinkedIn
- Hines Building Maintenance (HBM)
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 0:10
Welcome to the Watching Paint Dry podcast where we feature today’s top leaders, industry experts and more to discuss issues affecting facility managers and property owners. Now let’s get started with the show
Greg Owens 0:29
Hello, everyone, this is Greg Owens with a another episode of Watching Paint Dry, where we are deep diving into the world of facilities, facilities, management, building owners, the operations of buildings, and all this incredibly massive industry of taking care of commercial properties throughout the San Francisco Bay area and beyond. This podcast is sponsored by my company McCarthy Painting, we beautify and protect those buildings on a regular basis in the San Francisco Bay area, we do a tremendous amount of work right now his closing down offices and getting them ready, hopefully, that they rent them out again, which has been new in this pandemic time. And as people decide that they’re going to not come back to the office, they are needing to paint them, which is a good thing for us. But we’re also hoping people come back to work and come back into their offices. And because that’s also really good for painting is the wear and tear of these buildings is important. You can find out more about McCarthy painting by going to McCarthypainting.com or email us at info@McCarthypainting.com. This is going to be a fun podcast because I’ve to two people within the facilities industry, Dave Scroggins with Cushman & Wakefield, facilities manager, and Nic Guedenet that’s correct with HBM, and we’ll find out more about both of these companies. Nic is the recently promoted to Vice President of Operations for HBM. All right. All right. Well, I like to start off with a little bit of like, how are things going for you? I don’t watch the news. And so what’s it things going on in your lives that are as interesting or where you’re at right now? Why don’t you start Dave?
Dave Scroggins 2:31
Currently, I managed two office locations. One in San Francisco, three floors, and one in Oakland, which five floors. Combined, it’s about 200,000 square feet. We are currently the hybrid model, we have moved away from Return to Office as a company wide directive. So what we’re finding here is being that this is our client headquarters in the bay area where we’re having a lot of events and meetings, people coming from other locations. And so as opposed to the everyday standard occupancy, seeing a lot of event planning and coordination
Greg Owens 3:12
night, so is it is it something like I was at at Google recently, and they were the guy there was saying that everybody comes in for lunch. And then well, he doesn’t work for Google. He just he just noticed that in the building that he’s operating. He’s like, Yeah, I just noticed everybody comes when there’s food available.
Dave Scroggins 3:34
I will tell you on Fridays in the Oakland office, there’s a lot more people because there’s an awesome taco place. And on Fridays, they have a special here. So that’s fine. Everybody’s here on Friday.
Greg Owens 3:47
Fridays, Nic, and Nic, how’s things going for you? And where are you? Where are you? You’re in Oakland also right now? Right?
Nic Guedenet 3:54
Yeah. Currently, I’m in Oakland at one of our sites. So we primarily deal with private schools throughout California. We also have some religious facilities. So currently, we are we’re in the thick of it. All of our managers, all of our directors are at that pinch point of, oh, did we plan too much work? Are we gonna get buildings open in time for school? You know, and for schools, it’s been interesting, because the last couple of years have been really difficult going in and out of hybrid learning new protocols. I mean, things change so rapidly. So I think this year, we’re going to see some form of consistent normalcy, hopefully. And so we’re all kind of gearing up for that and hoping that we can find a baseline of living in this new world right with with our new safety procedures or new precautions. So it’s an interesting time. It’s always a hectic time, especially with our company, because, you know, we oversee a couple of million square feet of schools and all of them have a lot of capital projects that need to happen in a very small amount of time. So it’s crunch time for us.
Greg Owens 4:58
Yeah, that’s it. That is Unbelievable. Can you imagine kids like through the last couple of years and learning and going going to school and not going to school staying home? Yeah, it’s, it’s best. I could not imagine as a kid in that I had a hard time paying attention in school, let alone like, get onto these zoom calls and pay attention, right?
Nic Guedenet 5:19
Yeah. It hats off to all the teachers and the administrators out there. I mean, really, there was so much effort put in behind closed doors for coming up with how do we continue to teach and bring value? I mean, just the IT infrastructure that was put in across who on for campuses is incredible in such a small amount of time. And just really bizarre to for the kids, but good on everybody for making it happen.
Greg Owens 5:44
Yeah. And we were talking as we got onto this podcast that I’ve all of a sudden gotten a bunch of phone calls from schools, school districts wanting painting done within the next 10 to 15 days. Which is surprising, because it’s just sort of like, normally they’re they’re looking at it, you know, back in March, April, May kind of timeframe in lining us up. But then all of a sudden, they’re, they’re like you said, this is a crunch time, and they’re doing a whole bunch of projects, that’s for sure. Yeah. And then I think then they kind of look around and like, we need to kind of get this place painted, can we get somebody in right away?
Nic Guedenet 6:19
So either either two things happen, the in house staff handle had it planned, and they can’t, you know, they’re gone, oh, we don’t have time, or they’re walking around and exact same thing, we should really paint this place.
Greg Owens 6:31
Right, right. I think that’s what it was, too, is like they there’s a bit of like, because I heard that they were they were overly optimistic that they can get all the projects done, right. And as you guys know that it’s hard to plan these projects, multiple, multiple projects in the building, let alone one like just the painting. But when you’ve got a laundry list of 30 or 40, major capital improvements that kind of have to happen, the chances of things going wrong in this environment is unbelievable. Dave, you heard in the corporate world, in that regard, what? How are things in that you guys planning any projects that your buildings are you guys, in the midst of this?
Dave Scroggins 7:14
I’m very different, like came from education as well. You don’t have that two and a half month window to squeeze all your projects in. A lot of our stuff have been after business hours. So yes, we’re paying a premium for a lot of it. But, you know, like, we can’t have painters running around through the office when there’s people here trying to run the work. So, you know, for us, since we don’t really have that deadline of when we need it by we’re just slowly, you know, constantly doing sidewalks, little, you know, things that we notice here and there. And then we have our regular preventative maintenance program. And that keeps a lot of the
Greg Owens 7:54
right right. It’s it’s so it’s so critical to do those those sidewalks, right? We were we were talking about just like getting up on a roof and realizing like, Whoa, there’s there hasn’t been maintenance done for a while. Right. Any surprises you’ve guys come across in the last in the last year here with with in regards to COVID? Or like just projects or things? Because I mean, personally, we keep running out of paint, which is a, you know, makes it challenging to paint buildings.
Nic Guedenet 8:24
Yeah, man. Because the resin shortage, I’ve been having trouble getting DTM almost every location,
Greg Owens 8:30
right? Yeah, that’s for sure. DTM definitely. Yeah, that’s that one for sure. We’ve had better luck with like Benjamin Moore, being able to come through for us, okay, in that, yeah, check that out. But anything, anything else like surprises, things you guys have run into, we had
Nic Guedenet 8:49
a major construction project at one of our sites in the middle of the pandemic. And I’ve never seen material shortage or price increases have such a dramatic effect. And kind of stemming from that we did a capital replacement project one year, and it was a phased project. The next year, the wood had more than doubled in price. And this was after the lumber, you know, the big boom in lumber a year and a half ago. So we had thought and we did pricing, okay, roofs are elevated. Let’s do inflation plus a little bit more kind of pat ourselves in our wooden findings. Our budgets are just it’s so hard to do cost estimates for anything in advance. Because if we do that in three or four months, usually with material shortage, it’s completely out of realm. And so we’ve just seen that time and time again. I think it’s the biggest surprise we’ve been running across.
Greg Owens 9:47
Yeah, I’ve told clients that we can’t we I can’t even give prices on materials when it comes to construction projects. Right like yeah, like when you get close for I’ll give you an idea of what it will cost and I’ll let you know if we can get it.
Dave Scroggins 10:02
It’s just it’s just so variable and that supply chain is just causing headaches across the board and for everybody. Yeah,
Nic Guedenet 10:09
yeah, absolutely we do a lot of lot of what we do is capital forecast and cost estimating for the future facility condition assessments. And it’s a nightmare to do because you get your annual cost estimate, estimating from Gordian or BOMA or whatever, but three months in I mean, that’s shot. We can’t even just do standard inflation on these things anymore. So it’s, you almost have to redo it every year just for pricing. And, you know, by the time you’re ready to actually execute it, who knows where you’re going? Oh,
Greg Owens 10:42
yeah, that’s interesting, you know, to have that sort of not being able to plan that far forecast that far in advance and jimmying way off. We’re not talking just a couple of percentage points. But like you said, in some products and things like that, it’s doubled.
Nic Guedenet 10:56
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, especially in wood, like it was a wood siding project. And for 37 square feet of cedar shingle more than doubled in price. It was already expensive. A year and a half ago, at $250. For 30,000 square feet,
Greg Owens 11:13
we’re paying, I just paid 350 $350 for 37 square feet. Yeah, I and you can get it was funny, here’s something else like I keep running into is lots of mistakes being made. That didn’t happen on a regular basis. So a bundle of shingles is 37 square feet, and it was $350. But you can get a square and what they call a squares, four bundles. A little over. Yeah, I mean, four bundles of shingles is a square. And you can get that cheaper if you buy them by the square. But they charged us for the squares, I was at a job and we had bought a, like 16 bundles, but they charged us for 16 squares, which is 64 bundles. And so my my employee was like, right, the price would it’s gone way up 16 bundles cost 20 something $1,000. And I looked at the invoice and I’m like, be right, like there’s no way it’s I talked to these guys like a month ago, there’s no way it’s jumped that much in price. That fast. But so it was like finding those kinds of mistakes here lately, right? Because I think, you know, I know the lumber company pretty well, and they’re understaffed right now. And they’re struggling with getting stuff done. We’re understaffed in our office and with painters it and I see it across the board is how many more mistakes are being made? Because people are doing these different jobs? Have you guys run into things like that? Or how is staffing for your individual companies? We’ll go back to you, Dave.
Dave Scroggins 12:45
Funding bring it up. I’m, you know, the labor market is really is difficult right now, I’ve been I’ve had to open positions, you know, for the last couple of months and fill them and then are just not getting people applying. What kind of position facility coordinator? You know,
Greg Owens 13:01
what’s the what’s the range?
Dave Scroggins 13:02
What’s the pay range? Yeah. 65 to 70 a year?
Greg Owens 13:06
Yeah. Alexa stop.
Dave Scroggins 13:09
You know, and that’s, that’s, that’s decent money for entry level position. But in the Bay Area, it’s just it’s tough to find the talent that, you know, for that, that right. And there’s really, you know, a lot of it’s out of my control, you know, as far as I can only pay my employee what the client has budgeted for that, you know, expense sort of stuff. But what do you
Greg Owens 13:31
what you’re running these ads in, like, like LinkedIn, and bead.
Dave Scroggins 13:36
Yeah, so Cushman has their own recruiting recruiters that, yeah, I work with to try to fill these roles. But like I said, we’re getting three, four or five applicants over the course of three weeks,
Greg Owens 13:48
I’m looking for admin people, and I’ve run an ads, I ran it again, last week, I’ve gotten to write to people interested. One of them’s in Sacramento, and I want this to be in person, right? That’s not going to work. I wanted most of the time in person, I’m, I’m flexible, but we need people, we need somebody in our office. And then and the other person starts off their resume with, they really want to be they’re studying to be HTML programmer, but they want to, you know, they’re just looking for a temp job beforehand, and I don’t want to waste the time.
Dave Scroggins 14:21
Yeah. You know, and I’m finding that, like, there’s not a lot of selection, something that I think is good as you could get, like, really green people in those roles and teach them and train them and help them grow in their career and, you know, hopefully turn them into an asset for not only my company Cushman but for the client as well. Right?
Greg Owens 14:44
Yeah, no, I’m with you. I better I mean, a lot of ways I’d like to have somebody that’s because it’s a lot of it’s an entry level position for me, but you have an opportunity to learn and grow and really sort of up your skills, right. We’re just not seeing we’re not getting any applicants for that. We which, which is interesting, because like, what is our people? Is it? Are we that tight on on unemployment? Or are people just not going to work? I don’t understand the
Nic Guedenet 15:10
it’s a good question.
Greg Owens 15:13
I have some theories. I mean, I keep thinking that that COVID taught people they could live with a with a lot less, right. And yeah, and do gig sort of do gig jobs, right, lots of different types of gig jobs that are out there and kind of, and bounce around more, but that’d be like, That’s a That’s my only impression of it.
Nic Guedenet 15:34
You’re seeing a lot more movement to write like, I think people are being very selective about what’s the flexibility of the job. Can I work remote? Can I work from home? Do I I think those site based jobs are people are starting to move away from there, just look for those options. And even in the trades. I mean, we’re just seeing it a tremendous we have been for a long time and a tremendous decline. Right?
Greg Owens 15:56
Yeah. That’s an interesting, that’s interesting, because in the trades you run into, I find that there’s, there’s a lot of younger people want more of an air conditioned type job. What right where, where it’s not as harsh of an environment and if you know if you’re going to be painting as crazy hard work, and sometimes you
Dave Scroggins 16:16
don’t want to be on that roof. Or
Greg Owens 16:19
even harder. I don’t know how you I’m glad I didn’t go that direction. roofing and or paving. Right. Can you imagine? Yeah, yeah.
Nic Guedenet 16:30
We used to get on in Central Valley on those single single ply roofs in the middle of summer go up there. And you have go work on the tracks. And that’s just as tough work.
Greg Owens 16:40
Oh, man. Yeah, totally. So especially Central Valley. Yeah. Dave, you were saying that you’re you guys have not even going there is no plan to go back to it’s going to be hybrid from for the inevitable future for a while. What and you said that it’s mostly events that are people are coming in for what types of events? Is it sort of like team building kind of things? Or is it speakers? Or what? What are you seeing in your facilities?
Dave Scroggins 17:06
So what what our client has, like, the direction that they went? Instead of they found that saying, Okay, everybody has to be back in the office at least three days a week on, you know, at this, they were getting a lot of pushback. You know, there’s companies like I know, Airbnb just went to work from anywhere model. So they’re fully remote, all their employees can be fully remote. And,
Greg Owens 17:29
you know, so I’m You Ever Have you ever been in Airbnb facility ever? I have not. No, they have a bar on every floor, a wide open bar, you can drink anytime. I mean, they were really pushing the envelope on, like, all the workplace fun features. So it’s surprising to me that now they’re like, Okay, we’re not going to use those built this whole building anymore. Right? Yeah, I mean,
Dave Scroggins 17:53
so what they kind of did was they left it up to the individual departments, when you if, you know, HR wants their people, and if growth wants their people have technology wants their people, and then they leave it up to the individual teams. So what we’re seeing is that they may be relatively effective remote, but they still want that, you know, every couple of months, let’s get everybody in to meet in person and collaborating. So that’s kind of what we’re seeing, like, a lot of people coming in, they’re normally remote. And they’ve never been in the office, but they come in every couple of months.
Greg Owens 18:26
Have you been a part of this trend that I’m seeing where there’s no more individual less or less and less individual offices at these built facilities. And they’ve knocked down walls and opened up space and created these like living rooms sort of atmospheres where collaboration like that can happen in smaller teams?
Dave Scroggins 18:47
Absolutely. We we just opened a new location down in Southern California. And the the entire office is that, like, there’s a spot for focus work. But the majority of it is that collaborative element, like open concepts, kind of just chat and brainstorm and work together. Yeah, that’s definitely where the, I think the corporate space is.
Greg Owens 19:10
I have funny because middle school, my middle school, and this is back in the 80s. That went to an open concept for a trial, a trial of a middle school, you could imagine this with no walls, open to the hallways, no wall to the hallway. Right, which, you know, and it was an experiment that went wrong in a lot of ways. Because I think after I left, they closed it and put doors on each and made it a classroom. Because you know, me sitting in that classroom with the kind of add that I had, there’s no way that I can pay attention here. And there’s people walking by the whole time. Plus, I was also I also figured out that I could sit in the back and anytime I wanted to leave I could just get up and leave and the teacher wouldn’t even notice. Right so that was another old problem.
Dave Scroggins 20:00
Okay. Like you said, I mean, a lot of people are finding that if I’m gonna be sitting in virtual meetings all day, I can do that from home. I don’t have to commute. I don’t, you know, I don’t have to waste an hour getting to the office. And it’s working for them. Right, right. So when they come in, they don’t want to sit at a desk, they want to collaborate.
Greg Owens 20:19
And I don’t see those kind of any changes at schools, because at the schools that I just toured, are gearing up and all the teachers are in their classrooms right now getting things together, getting things ready. And we mean, the staffing offices looked exactly the same as they always have. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff in them. There’s a lot of activity happening, right. Are you seeing any any changes that you’ve seen in the sort of private sector schools? Yeah, I mean, it varies school to
Nic Guedenet 20:47
school. It’s funny, you’re mentioning that open hallway thing that almost came back, like, like a decade ago, we started getting a lot of requests for, hey, we want to open up the whole space. And you know, I think it’s kind of when this collaborative space concept started coming in the office space. And then I never actually saw it come to fruition for a for a classroom, but what we are starting to see is a lot of working spaces for teachers. And then more collaborative classrooms that are for specialty things like, you know, woodshop is now makerspace. And so you are starting to see the shape of classrooms and working spaces change. I mean, there’s still a lot of stuff everywhere. And storage is always an idiom. But yeah, in the teachers work rooms, I think that’s where I’ve seen it, that where they’re really getting away from having assigned areas. And it’s just a more of a collaborative space. In sometimes there’s even a break room. And separate from that there’s another work for him, kind of varies from what sites you go, and then kind of also their educational theory, you know, people that are going to be more focused on mathematics is going to be set up different where we’re seeing a lot of the arts type schools have very open floor plans that are very collaborative.
Greg Owens 22:07
Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve toured through a few private schools that have different learning agendas, right, like, where they’re really more more science focused, or a little different space than if they’re like this art artsy focused, it makes
Nic Guedenet 22:21
it interesting doing facilities, because all of our facilities are so different. They’re not just steel frame structure boxes, right? I mean, they’re they’re old residents that have, you know, in the city, that there’s multiples that have been retrofitted and built up to this building to fit their education style, their wood frame structures in the middle of the woods areas, sometimes it makes facilities really interesting, and especially getting to go visit all of those sites, like you get a little bit of knowledge about a lot of different types of buildings and floor plans.