Creating A Better Culture For The Multifamily Maintenance Industry With Jesse Baker

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Creating A Better Culture For The Multifamily Maintenance Industry With Jesse Baker

This is episode number eighteen. During the first seventeen episodes, we had very well-known names in our industry. We also have rising stars as a guest. Our guest is a rising star, Jesse Baker. Jesse is the Facility Project Manager with The Turn Company. Welcome to the show, Jesse.

Thanks. I'm glad to be here.

Jesse, let's start by you telling us a little bit about your professional background and how you ended up working for The Turn Company.

Years ago, I started in the industry, working as a conventional junior maintenance tech. From that position, I joined the student housing industry in Bowling Green, Ohio, and worked in that area for a while. From there, I went to a Class A conventional property working for CASTO, their management company here in Ohio. From that, I joined Cardinal Group Companies, which is a nationwide full-service management firm. We have whatever asset manager owner needs under our umbrella. I worked for them for three years.

Cardinal has a lot of awesome opportunities, and I took one of them. Now, I work for The Turn Company, which is a Cardinal Group Company. We're under the Cardinal Group umbrella, working in facilities and project management, and drawing from the experience I had doing on-site maintenance. Built from all that to get to this spot, it's something that's greatly needed in the industry and something that we're still growing and building. We're doing a number of different things within that umbrella.





Jesse, would you mind sharing with the audience a few of the great things that you guys have going on at The Turn Company?

I should explain a little bit more about The Turn Company. The Turn Company started as managing contract work for student turns. For anyone who's not familiar, typically, in student turns, you have a move-out date. It's often July 31st. Depending on the academic calendars, it can be different. On the West Coast, typically, it's a little bit later. In some areas, it can be a little bit earlier. You may have half of your property move out, and you'll have 2 to 3 weeks to prepare all those apartments for the new residents that are going to move in. That's a ton of work. I personally have always enjoyed Turn, but it's very difficult.

Cardinal Group is quite large. We have around 250 properties in 38 states now in all kinds of different markets. There are markets where it's very difficult to find contract labor, whether it's cleaning, painting, or carpet cleaning. A number of our folks at Cardinal decided that they wanted to build out this turnkey vendor for student turns and also for conventional because depending on what market you work in, conventional maybe not that extreme of having half your property move out at once. In the Northern climates, you might have a summer month where you have 20% of your property move out. We're building into that as well.

That's the first half of The Turn Company, and they've been doing that for a couple of years now and have been very successful at it. It is a real asset for the onsite teams because they don't have to worry about that aspect of their student turn, the contract labor portion of it, paying, cleaning, carpet cleaning, flooring, and things of that nature.

Building from that, after Turn, they started getting requests of, "You guys helped us with our turn. Do you know anyone who can upgrade all the lighting on our property? Do you know anyone who can upgrade our amenity space on our property?" It's a natural outgrowth of what they were doing. That's what I work on, facility service project management.

So far, that is mostly consisted of managing large-scale projects, things I mentioned, lighting upgrades, amenity upgrades, power washing, gutter cleaning, and gutter repairs. We could spend the rest of the day of me listing out the different kinds of projects that we've done, and we're continuing to build out on that with inspections, property-wide inspections, preventative maintenance inspections, HVAC preventative maintenance, which is a hot topic in the industry given the challenges related to HVAC with fraudulent changes, and staffing difficulties that everybody is experiencing these days.

That's an area that's real easy for the property team to slide a little bit when there's a staffing challenge. I do think for us the sky's the limit. Given the conditions in the industry right now, there's a lot of different areas that we can build into. That's what we're doing right now. We do a lot of work within and outside of Cardinal Group.

For those out there that are reading, they might be interested in the services that your company provides, what are the best ways to contact you personally or your company for contract work?

Our website is TheTurnCompany.com. My email is Jesse.Baker@TheTurnCompany. Anyone can feel free to reach out to me for anything related to facilities and also for turn. I have not specifically so far worked on turn. That's not my area. For anyone who has worked in student housing, turn time comes, that's all hands on deck, so I'm sure I'll be helping out in some capacity with that as well.

Jesse, what geographical areas are your company covering?

Cardinal Group and The Turn Company are nationwide. Especially for us on the facilities management side, I am our Midwest guy, but it depends on where our projects come in. We can handle anything anywhere in the nation. One of the value add things that we bring to the table is we have an extensive network of contractors who can travel both on the turn side and for us in facility services, which again, nowadays, the staffing challenges aren't just within our industry. It's all the contractors that everybody are also struggling at times. We have a good network of contractors in all aspects of facility services that if you can't find a roofer in your area, we have guys who will travel to do those things, just as an example.



That's a phenomenal resource, especially nowadays when staff and labor shortages are everywhere. Speaking of that Jesse, I wanted to talk a little bit about what is known as the Great Resignation. Why do you think that we got to the point we're in right now and how do you see us improving the current situation, making this labor shortage pain, not maybe go away, but alleviate most of it? What do you say?

As far as how we got here, I feel like people, for the most part, make rational choices. There has been a diversification in the types of work that are available. Several years ago, Uber was in its infancy. DoorDash didn't exist. Especially when we're talking about entry-level roles per se, before, you didn't have an option necessarily to be your own boss. That exists now.

From our industry's perspective, the real estate and apartment management perspective, what we need to do is a better job of selling our industry, especially at that entry level. This is a great industry to work in. I really believe that I have had an excellent time in my career in this industry. It's my thing. I'm not going to be doing anything else. I have no desire to do anything else.

There are so many great companies to work for. I love Cardinal. I would encourage anyone to come work with us at Cardinal. There are a bunch of other great companies to work for also. I've worked for several others that I would cast a lot of. Columbus is one. I would say to anyone, "If you had an opportunity to go work for these guys, go work for them."

I feel like in terms of the general public, there isn't a great awareness of the jobs that we have, how good those jobs can be, and how many companies there are that have a great company culture. We need to work on that. There are maybe some stereotypes that people have of our industry that are not true on a large scale, at least of how difficult the work can be or how unpleasant can be at times.

There might be a grain of truth in some of that, but I think you would agree, Adrian, given your history in our industry that it's a great industry to work in. So many opportunities continue moving up the ladder. One of the things that I love about our industry is that you can start day one. You have to find the right opportunity, but with no experience that's truly relevant to our business, whether that's on the management side or in facilities. Within Cardinal, if you surveyed from our community managers on up, there's a huge percentage of those folks, especially because we're so big in student house, offhand, I don't know where the percentage, but we have majority of our properties are in student housing.

If you look at those community managers all the way up to the portfolio managers and above, so many of those people started their careers in our business as a college student working as a community assistant or intern at an apartment complex where they just happened to live when they were in school. They had no experience, didn't know anything about our business, and built from there up to the most experienced portfolio managers who have 15 to 20 properties.

It's the same thing in facilities. I didn't know much when I started in the business. At that point, I probably would've been better served to build an apartment building than to maintain it. That's where the knowledge that I brought in was at that time. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that you did, too, you started at the ground level and worked your way up. Am I correct about that?

One hundred percent. I started as a groundskeeper by accident. It just happened to be that way. I was new to the country. A friend of mine suggested there are a few groundskeeper openings at Georgia Tech. He was working to get his PhD out there. I went to the website to apply, but nothing came up. Nobody called me.

This work being a groundskeeper got stuck in my mind. I keep applying for groundskeeper jobs until my first groundskeeper job was part-time at an apartment community. That's how I started in the industry. That turned into a full-time with benefits job for $10 an hour. That was my dream job at the time, and then just work my way up all the way to a few director positions. You're correct.

That's a very rare thing in today's workforce where you could start as a groundskeeper. I was a junior maintenance tech. I painted and hung wallpaper. You shouldn't put wallpaper in apartments. It's a terrible idea. Don't do that. That's what I did. The easiest things that you could do as a maintenance tech is paint units and hang wallpaper. Overall in the workforce, there's just no barrier to entry into so many industries. A lot of industries, there are high barriers just for that entry-level role. It doesn't take long to look online at any social media to realize how much of a struggle so many people have to break into certain industries even if they're well qualified.

In our industry, that's not necessarily the case. Are you going to have to work your way up? Absolutely. Are there going to be requirements along the way? Yes, of course. You and I are super familiar with what it takes on the facility side, getting an EPA card or pool certification, and other types of stuff, but just to get your foot in the door, it's possible for almost anybody.

We need to do a good job of selling that. "You can do this. You can come work in our business. If you have a good attitude and you're willing to work, you can find a job in our industry, and then have the opportunities to move up." To be honest, those two things, if you are willing to work and you're a good person, it's not that difficult to continue making progress in your career.



The more steps that you take, the more requirements. One of the group facilities managers, which is our highest maintenance position within Cardinal likes to say that we want to have a path from porter to being a group facilities manager. We want to have that all defined out. That should exist, and everybody should know that. This is what it's going to take. This is what you got to do. In terms of in our industry and what we need to do, I think that that's what we have to do for us as a whole industry to move past this because it is good. We should be able to bring in great people to our industry for all of those reasons.

We're in complete agreement right here with the ways we should approach this particular topic. One thing that I would like to say is that it's not enough to wish to do it, but it's going to take a lot of time and effort for us to attract talent. That brings me to the next question. I wanted to ask you, Jesse, what advice would you have for anyone that wants to pursue a career in apartment maintenance?

As we just talked about, it's those very low entry-level positions. To get started, you need to have a good attitude, get out there, and apply. To continue moving on from that, my number one thing is problem solving. When we talk about multifamily maintenance, one of my colleagues likes to say, "Everything is on YouTube." He is right. It's within yourself to work on your problem solving skills because that's what it is. So much of what we do is not that complicated. There are some things that are a little bit more difficult, but most of it's not that complex. You have to be willing to think outside the box and use whatever resources you can find to deal with problems.

The other thing I would say is to continue working on your people skills because that I feel is an underrated aspect of doing any kind of facilities maintenance in our business. You're going to be going in somebody's home. There are no two ways about it. You have to be able to deal with and relate with the people who live there. I would say, too, if you were initially coming into our business or maybe making your first couple career steps in the business is two things, network LinkedIn within your company. I have experienced so many times that someone from corporate, not just in my current company but every company I work for, co many from corporate comes, and half the maintenance guys disappear.

You can't do that. Go meet those folks. There's a reason that they're in those positions. Talk to them and learn from them when you have those opportunities. Participate in whatever company activities that you have that work as much as you can. Also, take on whatever responsibility that you can. There's always something that you could take on. It's in my mind right now because we're working on this stuff. Say you're a junior maintenance tech at the property, "What can I do for heating and air conditioning preventative maintenance? Is there something I could build out for this?"

Looking a little bit further, when you want to advance your career more, those are the things that make the difference at that point. You don't necessarily have to be the most technically skilled maintenance person that's ever lived to continue advancing. I'll be perfectly honest, I'm not. I have so many colleagues who I know are better at one aspect of property maintenance. It is the total picture of, "Can you solve problems? Can you deal with people? Do you have a solid network? Can you relate well with your office staff?"

Jesse, we had conversations prior to this show. You did mention to me that Cardinal Group has a phenomenal culture. I'd like to ask you, what are the things that matter most to you when it comes to company culture? What are the things that make a difference for you when you work for a company culture-wise?

When you talk about company culture, all companies brag about their company culture in any industry. You pull up their website. What are they going to talk about? It's their culture. One of the biggest things for me is, "Does that company culture apply top to bottom? Does that apply in our industry? Does that apply from the porter that we just hired to the CEO?" In some companies, that's not the case. I can tell you, within Cardinal, that is absolutely the case. As an example, years ago, we had our last leadership summit. COVID put a block on that for the last couple of years, but we're about to have our next one.

I can tell you from our CEO Alex O'Brien, CFO Eric Frank, and everyone at HQ to the property level, friendly, excited to meet everyone, and interested in the best ideas. That is a saying that I love. The best idea wins. It's not the highest person's best idea wins. No, the best idea wins. That would be how I would answer that question, does it truly apply to everybody? I've certainly seen instances at some companies where that didn't apply. We put up with this for whatever reason from this group or that person. Does it apply to everybody? That's one of the things I love about Cardinal. We have a stated set of values and those truly do apply to everybody.

That's quite remarkable and right. There are other great companies out there within our industry and outside our industry that truly has great cultures. Culture does a big difference. I was listening to a podcast, and one of the definitions that were presented right there is that the company culture is what your employees say about your company with their friends and family at home. That's what the culture is.

That's a phenomenal definition of company culture, a very great way to put it. One thing that has been challenging for us as an industry historically and also currently is competitive pay, especially for maintenance. I don't want to discuss numbers. $15, $20, or $25 an hour is the right number. In your opinion, how should we determine what competitive pay is? What type of fractures would contribute to us determining, what's the right amount to pay, for example, a maintenance technician? How do we get to that number to where competitive is competitive?

It's always market dependent. Part of working for a larger company like I do now with Cardinal where we're in so many different places is that competitive numbers can be different in different places. One of the challenges that we face is, and I agree with you that that has been a significant challenge industry-wide for everybody, we need to provide competitive pay to attract good talent. That's every single company in our business. You do have to look at your market.

One thing that a lot of folks in the industry lose track of is that we want to increase pay. I hear that all the time. If you spend 10 minutes on LinkedIn looking at posts from people in our industry, you will probably see 5 of those of, "We got to increase pay." The question becomes though is, "We're going to increase pay. What value is that bringing for our property owners and asset managers?"

This will play into a little bit of some of the other things we're going to talk about for sure. One of the things that I want to see in the business is that we provide more value, especially from a facilities and maintenance perspective. That ties into things like training and higher-level support. I agree with you.

That's a challenge. Especially nowadays where you have to be competitive to bring folks to your company. If not, there's someone who's going to be paying more, and you're not going to be bringing those people, and it's going to be a real struggle for sure.

One of the reasons why we're losing very talented people in an industry, in maintenance, in particular, is burnout. People get burned out. There's way too much workload dropped on them, and then they get to a point where they just physically and mentally disconnected, and they just went out. What would you say would be a few things that we could do for our teams to prevent this burnout and get to that point of saying, "That's it. I'm done. I'm going to move on. I'm going to do something else?"

I have known folks who ended up in that situation. Some of them changed companies. Some of them left our industry, which always hurts my heart a little bit. I hate to see people just wholesale leave our industry. I was a maintenance supervisor or maintenance team lead for 6 or 7 years. I sometimes had to make my guys take their paid time off.

There are so many maintenance team members out there who just work. Cardinal, for example, has a really good paid time off policy. It's like, "You haven't taken a day off in forever. How much do you have saved up?" "We've hit the cap." It's like, "You need to take some time off then." You're missing out because you've hit the cap that you can have in the bank.

On a bigger scale, I would almost like to see that you are required to take a little bit of time off regardless of your property or company needs. Every company has its policy. If you get this many days a year, you can carry over this many, whatever that happens to look like. Maybe one of the things that we all need to do is say, "Employees, you need to take some time off, and enjoy it." That's a small-scale deal.

One thing I would love to see is better training for office staff type folks of to truly understand what it's like to do maintenance in our business because it can be very difficult. I found it extremely rewarding, but I certainly had my share of days that were next to impossible. That could look like a lot of different things for getting our community managers, regional managers, and whoever that might be better understanding.

I know we're going to talk about call here in a minute. I feel like there's not a great awareness industry-wide of just how miserable being on-call can be, and what a dent that can put in your life. Maybe that looks like community manager for this week, this call period, whatever that looks like. If there's a call, we're going to have you come out with your maintenance team member, whoever that is that's responding to those calls.

Office team members, one day a week, we're going to have you with whoever is the primary work order person on that day. See what it looks like to go and spend a full day going in and out of people's homes. That can be very difficult and exhausting. For lack of a better description, if that's what your day looks like, you have to be on all day long. You have to be friendly and polite. You don't have your personal space. If you're in someone else's personal space, you don't have your own. That can be very exhausting for folks.

One of the best things we can do to combat burnout is to make sure that everyone understands what that burnout looks like and coming from the facilities and maintenance's perspective, what it feels like for us. I'm sure that you have had times where it was tough. I certainly have. You get called out in the middle of the night, and walk into an apartment, and there are 6 inches of water on the ground floor. That's difficult. That's hard.

One of the best things that could help is to make sure that everybody truly understands just how difficult, especially being an onsite maintenance person can be, because it can be really hard. Personally, I also found it very rewarding. I did it for a long time, but it would be not truthful to not acknowledge that it's hard and it does burn people out. I would also like to see the staffing improve, especially given where we are as an industry right now.

We have a lot of people out there who are short staffed and all by themselves. I have a ton of faith in everybody in maintenance. The vast majority of people are going to try to do the very best they can no matter the circumstance but everybody has a limit. I'm alone on a 500-unit property, and I'm trying to do it all myself. You're probably going to burn out. We need to find a way to address that, and get you some help.

Through understanding and support. I love those two points. I'm in complete agreement with you, Jesse. Another topic that I'd like to discuss is you just mentioned earlier, on-call. On-call is probably the most hated thing by any maintenance professional because of that mental state that you're in. I just remember the times when I was on-call.

I would come home wearing my uniforms and I would keep wearing my work clothes throughout the evening just to be ready in case the phone rings. When I finally decided to go to bed, I'll take my uniforms off. I'll have a new set next to my bed, and I'll be in a standby position mentally all the time. It's not that the phone rings nonstop, but then you can't rest because you're always in that state of mind that the phone is going to ring.

It's very hard for you to step out of that mindset and say, "I'm on-call, so what? I'm just going to go on with my life." Any responsible maintenance person professional that I know is probably having this in their mind, "How to deal with being on-call with the stress?" This brings me to the next question. What do you think we could do for our guys that are on on-call rotation to make things better for them, whether it is schedule? The way we approach on-call pay compensation, what are few things that you think we could do as an industry to make things better for them?

Let's start right off the bat. I was on-call every other week for ten years, and sometimes more. I had times that I was working so low where we had lost a staff member, and covered 1 or 2 months on my own. That was hard. One of the things that I wish that we could normalize to an extent in our industry is paying for on-call. The standard across the industry, in my opinion, is probably that it's not overtime on-call, you're making up for it later. That would probably be a difficult thing to change based on budget certainty. I know what a priority that is in our business for a lot of people from the ownership on down is they do want budget certainty.

My opinion is that's a tough area to change. I would like to see more folks get paid to be on call. I negotiated that for myself and my team at one point, and it was a stipend. It was a certain amount per week of call. We did week by week. If you were on call for that week, you got a certain amount of money. That worked out well, and our upper management like that because it provides cost certainty. Was it an extra labor cost? Yes, it was, but it was a fixed amount for the year. They can budget for that.

When you talk about regional managers on up, asset managers, and owners, I feel like most of those types of folks would listen if you make a proposal like that because it's a fixed cost. It's a certain amount. When you start introducing variables into that and it's like, "I think it's going to be this," that's where things become more difficult.

In terms of just making on-call not so bad, I was fortunate. The last three managers that I worked for onsite were amazing. They did everything they could to reduce how much call we had. It had been a couple of jobs. One company I worked for had a position they called the resident manager, and that was a resident. The gentleman there had lived on site for a long time received a rent discount to take care of a couple things. He took care of the pool after hours, the trash compactor after hours on the weekends, and then he answered the emergency phone.

He would address that so he could go punch it. If it was a more complex issue, he would call out whoever was on-call from the maintenance team to address that. That helped us a lot. That kind of person can be difficult to find because you need someone who's generally available. We were lucky that we had a person there who fit with their lifestyle and their schedule.

That's an idea. That might work for some communities, properties, and companies. If you have a large site, one thing that I've noticed is, you're talking 750 to 1,000 apartments and more, that still staff in a traditional manner. If you have a 1,000-unit community, I would love to see a second shift maintenance team member. Can you do work orders after 7:00 or 8:00? Probably not. There's something that can be done, preventative maintenance, cleaning, figure it out, and then they're available to address emergencies at least till midnight, 1:00 AM, whatever that might be. You're also providing an opportunity.

I don't know how many maintenance type personnel would be interested in a second shift job, but I'm sure that there's some of them out there. Maybe that means that we can bring somebody into the industry who a first shift job isn't suitable for. By and large in multifamily, we all work first shift and during the day. There are some people that that doesn't work for with whatever their personal needs are, daytime job doesn't work.

Maybe we could bring in a couple people who a second shift job is more appropriate for, and then you're reducing the call for your regular maintenance team. Along those lines, I'd say, "Be flexible and creative." Every company has a formal on-call policy. Very few of them have any guidelines. "Whoever's answering that emergency phone, these are situations you don't have to come out for." There are 1 million different things that you can do. Any community manager who's setting those policies and guidelines, recognizes how difficult this is, pay for it if you can, and try to figure out a way to reduce the number of calls that your teams are having to address.

Jesse, the next topic that I want to address is training for maintenance personnel. You and I both came to the ranks, started the pre-entry level, and worked our way up. As an industry, we're lacking, for the most part, specialized maintenance training in areas of management mainly. For example, in the way you become a service manager. There might be exceptions out there, but typically, you are the most productive maintenance tech. If something happened with your manager and not working at the property anymore, you'll be handed the keys and say, "You've been promoted. Have at it. Good luck. The best to you," without any type of formal management training.

When we're thinking about individuals being promoted this way, and they're given the responsibility of $50 million, $60 million, $80 million, or $100 million assets on their hand to people out on their own, the pressure is gigantic. I always like to make this comparison. The comparison is with many people, people that manage other people's money. For someone to be a wealth manager to manage $100 million worth of somebody else's money, they will be a very successful person. Why do we think it's acceptable as an industry that we give this type of responsibility to someone with no formal management training?

I don't know if you share my sentiment right here or not. I'd like to hear your opinion on this and your personal experience. What do you think we should do better as an industry to better prepare our people to take on challenges like the one that I just mentioned, becoming a manager? The overlap between a service manager job and the service technician, in my opinion, is maybe 20%. The other 80%, they're completely different jobs. They're just not the same. It's very little overlap.

I'd agree that training in our industry as a whole is lacking, especially at the point that you mentioned. I would add one more. To become a maintenance supervisor, service manager, or whatever the title is, that's a big jump. The jump from that point, being the highest level maintenance person on a property, to being above the property level is a big jump also.

As you said, they're more soft skills than hard. It's management type skills as opposed to, "Can you go and fix this air conditioner that's not running?" That's relatively easy to teach somebody. You could do that in a couple hours probably. The other stuff is much more difficult. I would love to see more companies have a formal and laid out training program for all of their maintenance personnel. Define steps for what it takes.

I don't know how things went for you. For me, I had to just muddle my way through becoming a maintenance supervisor. I had a little bit more guidance taking the steps to the position that I'm in now. We have some awesome talent folks at Cardinal, and there was some guidance of, "This is what you need to do to prepare yourself and to be a competitive candidate for a higher level position."

I had to figure out a lot of that stuff for myself, and that's really difficult. We're going to lose people if they have to muddle their way through to those higher level positions where they look and say, "If I go to this HVAC company, they're telling me what I need to do to move up or what I need to do to become a service manager for them."

Within the industry that I'm in now working as a maintenance tech, nobody can say, "These are the licenses you need. These are the skills you need to have. This is the tech that you need to understand," which is a very underrated part of our business now. On the facility side, for anyone looking to make the jump from being onsite to a higher-level position, you need to have tech skills.

I was very fortunate that I did come to the position that I'm in now because I would've been in a lot of trouble if I didn't. I couldn't do my job without those skills. Hiring someone in the future, one of the first questions I have to ask is, "Can you handle these certain tech-related tasks? Do you have this type of knowledge?" Is that facilities-related? Not exactly, but it's still necessary.

That's the number one thing that I want to see. This is what it takes. Mr. Service Technician, Ms. Service technician, you say that you want to become a supervisor eventually. Here's what you need to do. This is the baseline. That's never a guarantee. You still have to have interviewing skills, people skills, and be successful in your position. I've been asked a number of times, "How do I do that? How do I become a supervisor? How do I get above the property level?"

The number one thing is you need to kill it in your current position. You need to be successful in your current position. That's number one priority for anyone. That applies on the management office side as well, is you need to be extremely successful at what you're doing now. I feel like sometimes folks get a little distracted like, "I need to get this license. I need to take this test. I need to go to this conference."



Your main focus needs to be on excelling in whatever position you're in. There are people who don't know that. "I want to become a maintenance supervisor. What do I need to do?" We need to let them know that, "The number one thing is for you to be our best work order technician or our best turn technician. When you hit that point, it's going to be reasonable for us to find a spot for you to be a supervisor." More defined list.

There are some companies. I'm going to give you an example, Village Green. They're very heavy here in the Midwest on some nice conventional properties. They have a program along those lines of defined steps and trainings and things that what it's going to take to move up within their company. There are others also. What's lacking is the general awareness and for everybody to know what it's going to take. That's not just for folks like you and I on the facility side.

When I got my EPA certification for refrigerants, I was super excited because I knew what that meant. I knew how positive that was going to be for my career. I knew how much more work I could do on site. It's been a while back, but I was excited. My community manager had no idea what that was. He's like, "Why are you so excited? What is going on here? You're usually not this upbeat. What are you so pumped about?" I had to explain it to him.

Our community managers don't understand what all of those steps and how important that they are for our careers. Also, being realistic, if we're talking about who's going to be guiding folks in their careers, those community managers and regional managers are going to have a huge piece of that also. Opportunities for the development in the industry is not just, "Maintenance personnel, this is what it's going to take. Everybody else, this is what we need the guys to do to help our companies and our industry. This is what it's going to take to be promoted."

Jesse, this is an excellent conversation. I truly enjoyed us discussing all these topics. Is there anything that you'd like to add in closing, something that you're passionate about and something that you wish we would've covered during our conversation you didn't have the chance to?

It was one of the points that we had set to discuss. I just want to mention it because I love that you included it in our ideas. It's something important to me and it has been important within my career. It's one of the reasons I love Cardinal, the parent company that I work for now, and The Turn Company. It is the upward mobility and how it contributes to employee retention.

I brought this up because I think it's a little bit of an issue for us in facilities. As a general rule, there are probably not enough of those higher-level maintenance positions and facilities positions. I think that companies that are going to be successful looking into the future are going to be the ones who have those things built out, and who have a robust support system.

Not only that. If you want to keep high-achieving folks working for your companies, they need to have at least the knowledge that there is something to strive for. You will lose high-achieving people if they think that they've hit a dead end. Nobody wants that. My company doesn't want that. I guarantee, your company doesn't want that. No company wants that. The thought that I want to put out there is that for all of us in the industry to keep developing those positions, make sure that our onsite staffs or your team members are aware of those kinds of things.

There is something to shoot for. It might take me and you a while to get there, but there's that opportunity there. Without that upward mobility, I have known people in the industry who had to switch companies or left entirely because they felt like they had hit that ceiling in every part of our business, IT, the management side, facilities, and upper management. When folks feel like they've hit that point, especially your highest achieving best folks, they're not going to stay, and then you've lost some of your best people. In particular, it's an issue in facilities, and something we need to keep working on.

I'm in complete agreement with you. It's a matter of personal experience for me where I wanted to expand who I was professionally. Hitting the ceiling on a couple of occasions happened immediately for me. It's having the realization that it was only so far that I could go. Not necessarily as far as getting a better title and money, but being able to expand who I am as a professional and what I could do, and the type of value that I could bring to the company. If you could bring so much value, but then the sentiment that you get from your employer is that, "We only need the percentage of that because we just want things to be okay. We don't necessarily want the sky-is-the-limit type of deal." Get out of the way. Do whatever you could do. Advance as much as you could advance professionally.

It could be discouraging at times, and you had to make a change. My personal changes were not easy decisions, but as I moved throughout my career, it became very easy, honestly. Lately, it hasn't been hard for me at all. As soon as I knew that there was a ceiling to be hit, that I'm approaching that point, I will make a decision that I need to find somewhere else where I could keep expanding. That is just personal experience.

It's important. I want to say it one more time. It's not just maintenance and facilities. It's anybody. I would say that to anyone at any level of our industry is not just our industry, any industry. Make sure your folks know that there's something else and something to strive for. Personally, if you have somebody who's in their job, they do a good job, they're happy there, and they don't want to take another step or go in a different direction or anything, that's fine. It's important to recognize that there are also people out there who are like, "I'm happy with my current job. I want to know what I'm going to keep working towards." I'm glad we're neck and neck on that absolute agreement.

Jesse, it was a real pleasure having you on. Thank you very much for taking the time. I should share this with the audience. You took the time out of your Saturday to speak with me, which I commend you for that. That's remarkable, and I truly appreciate. It was a great conversation. I hope that we continue to have this conversation in different ways, and maybe have you back out here in a few months for another episode. Thank you very much for coming.

Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to come and talk with you.

Everybody, thank you for reading. I hope you'll be back here soon for more episodes. Have a great day.

Important Links

• The Turn Company
• Cardinal Group Companies
• TheTurnCompany.com
• Jesse.Baker@TheTurnCompany

About Jesse Baker