Fix It Forward - Episode 3

 Hi, everyone. Super excited, super, super excited about this unprecedented production. We're here in Atlanta today. We're going to highlight the best. Maintenance professionals in multifamily.

We did a high rise first one. Second one was garden style. Now we're going to a mid-rise. So we're pretty much like covering most of the building styles in multifamily are the first three trips. Guys, make sure you watch the third episode because you're gonna see me walking a lot more.

Amari. Good to be with you. 

Hello. Nice to meet you, Mr. Adrian. My name is Amari Stevens. Welcome to the Vinings Loft and Apartment. 

Tell me about your history a little bit. You know, you, I wanna start with the origin story. Okay. When you grew up, what was that you wanted to do when you grew up? 

I grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and originally I wanted to be a therapist, but when I turned 18, I started college for a little while.

I realized college wasn't for me, and that's when I got into the maintenance field. I started off as a temp. So I was working for, as a temp for maybe six months, and after that I got hired on permanently. I started off as a tech one and worked my way all the way up through the years to being a maintenance supervisor.

Where I'm at today. 

How many years you been in a business now? 

I've been in the business for eight years altogether. 

Mm-hmm. And a, a supervisor or service manager For how long? 

I've been a service manager now for a year. 

For a year. How do you like it? 

I love it. I love it. 

Tell me about one thing that you thought about being a service manager that you learned The reason, so once you actually started doing it, 

the first thing I thought was, I thought it was easy.

Okay. 

But then as you dive into it, you realize it's a lot more that happens behind the scenes that you may not even notice even working as a maintenance tech. It's a lot that goes on behind the scenes that us. Maintenance supervisors have to take care of that everybody else wouldn't see. 

How do you feel about building longevity in the industry as of today?

How, how do you look at your career going forward? Is this something that you know you wanted to do for the rest of your career? Is this something that, you know, maybe it's just like for the time being, see how it was. 

Yes. This is something I would see myself doing for the rest of my life because in the maintenance industry, the possibilities are limitless.

You start off and then you become a maintenance supervisor, but that's not the end of the road. You also could go up to corporate levels. You could be a regional supervisor, and it just keeps going. It never stops. You'd be a project manager. The possibilities are limitless. 

Definitely. Tell me about this particular property.

How many apartments? 

Here we have 269 apartments. Um, we offer anywhere from a one bedroom to a three bedroom apartment. 

How long you been at this particular property? 

I've been at this particular property for a year. 

Okay. Pretty much around the time you got promoted? 

Yes sir. 

Yeah. So your first supervisor job was here, right?

Actually, this is my second supervisor role. Okay. Alright. However, when I transitioned to this company. That's when I've been here for five years, so they gave me a promotion. Once they seen my hard work and my dedication to the field, they gave me a promotion. 

Fantastic. How big of a staff, uh, are you supervising currently?

Well, currently I have five people altogether. I have two cleaners. I have a groundskeeper and I have a maintenance desk. 

What would you like to show us here on the property? 

Well, I would like to show you our pool. Okay. Our pool pump room. Okay. Kinda like a little behind the scenes of the pool 'cause everybody doesn't get to see that part.

Lo lo, love that we, we did this at the other property. It's been fascinating. 

Also do have a vacant unit. I could show you all. Okay. And I think you all, uh, enjoy it. Yeah. We'll, we'll take that. We have a club room. Our club room also has a view over the lake on the second floor. Yeah. 

Yeah. It's beautiful.

We'll let you lead the, you know, lead the way. Alright.

Our fitness center. Since I've been in the industry, this is probably one of the big biggest fitness centers that I've ever seen. We have our treadmills,

stair climbers. We have a couple of ellipticals punching bags, TVs in the. It's pretty nice. And we also have a upstairs part of our fitness center. 

Gorgeous.

So up here is where people come to do their pre-workout, where they come here to stretch and get ready for their actual workout. Go.

So this is our first floor where we also have our parking deck, and this overlooks our lobby area. Quite gorgeous. Yes sir. 

And this is the next floor to our park and deck. 

Tell me a little bit about how you got with, uh, to work with, uh Simpson. 

One of my past supervisors actually. Was working for Simpson first, and he reached out to me one day and said, Hey, how would you like to join my team?

I said, I'd be you later. I'd be very happy to join your team. So he gave me the opportunity, and I've been with Simpson ever since. 

Tell me about the company. How 

do 

you like working for him? 

How so? For how long now? Five years. I've been with Simpson for five years. Okay. I love the company. It's an amazing company.

They actually care about their employees and they actually hear, you know, your feedback and they do surveys to make sure that everyone's on the same page. And we have maintenance meetings every so often to where, you know, we can just sit down and just talk about everything that we go through. I love it.

This is our club room. It's a pretty spacious area. We also have. A outside deck that looks over our lakes. So oftentimes I'll come out here on my lunch break and I'll grab one of these chairs right here, and I just sit here and read a book. You get all the, all the sounds of the birds and everything that's going on in nature, and you hear the water and it's, it's very relaxing and a calming experience, especially while you're at work.

It's really quite beautiful. Um, is the lake your, your company's property? Yes. So, so you guys are responsible to maintain, right? Yes. To do lake maintenance and everything. Yeah. It's not such a common thing, but I work with companies that actually had lakes. 

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's beautiful. I love it.

Yeah. How old is the property? This property is eight years old. Eight years old. Um, looks a lot like, it is not like eight years. To me. It's like, you know, it's a new word than that.

So this right here is our lovely pool deck.

We have gas grills. We change out the flour, 

seasonal and. So these would be our spring and summer flowers. We also have pool, the showers on the pool deck, so just in case somebody wants to rinse off after they hop into the pool. And the pool is maintained every day. We check the chemicals twice a day. We clean it every, every day.

I 

can tell 

it's pristine. Yes, sir. Amazing job. Thank you so much. So 2, 3, 4, 5. Five stories. Six floors. Six. Six stories. Oh, this is like second here. Yes sir. Got it.

Marty, tell me about the big wind that you remember. What was, uh, like something that you said, wow, like this is a breakthrough for me from your maintenance career. How do you remember your big win and what, what was that? 

A big win for me was I came to a property where we just took over the property. We had a lot of work orders, maybe like 166 work orders, and within a month we got it down to 10 work orders.

To me, that was a, a major win for us and it just shows how hard work and dedication pay off. You just have to be consistent every day. 

Were you running the team? Were you the service manager there? Were you part of the team? 

I was the manager's assistant assistant, so my manager was, was kind of a regional where he was working at different properties and I was his assistant.

So in the morning I go downstairs, I get a list for the team, I get the team ready to go, and I give, I touch bases with my manager and then we work on the game plan from there, if anything else that needed to be taken care of that day. 

Tell me about, uh, a day at the office. What's a regular day for you? 

A regular day for me, I stick to a routine, so I have a, a routine that I follow.

The first thing I do is I go into the office, I print out all the work orders, I see all the make readys. If we have any apartments that need to be turned. I do all my scheduling first thing in the morning, and then after that I come up here to the pool deck where I check the chemicals. I make sure the pool is clean.

I check the, uh, the landscaping, make sure our landscaping is fine, to make sure, you know, if flowers may need a little extra water this day or things of that nature. Then from there. I jump right into work orders, and then from work orders I walk the property to make sure that everything is in order, and that's just about my day.

What are some things that you wish someone from outside looking in knew about what you do and they actually don't? How, how would you, uh, get the record? Get the record straight. When it comes to a misconception about what you do about your work, 

a misconception that I think a lot of people have is that they don't realize how much the maintenance team actually does, where it comes to picking up trash in the morning, to taking care of the landscape, to anything that may be outta place or anything that may seem wrong.

Safety concerns our FOB readers, making sure that our environment, our community, is a safe community. We take care of all of that, all of that falls under maintenance. 

Tell me about a very particular situation to where you had like a very, very rough day and then you left, you went home, and when you got home you, you were like, you look behind and you said to yourself, man, today was hard.

Was really tough. But you know what? I made it like I made a difference. Tell me about the situation. 

Okay, well this was in my early years. I was working at a property where. We had a leak coming from our domestic waterline where we had to have a plumber come in, and when the plumber turned the water back on, he shut our pressure, our water pressure skyrocketed, so we had pipes bursting all over the place.

We had a lot of repairs we had to do on water heaters and expansion valves, and it, it was a long day and we're getting calls left and right. So what I did was I wrote notes of every apartment I went to and I was able to get everybody taken care of by the end of the night. And when I sat home in my bed.

All I said was, it was a good job done. It was accomplished, my mission for the day. 

Can you think of a very, very other difficult situation that, you know, you encounter, like the most, the worst day that you had on a job, and, uh, how, how did that feel? Like? What happened then? Okay, 

this is also earlier in my career.

I was working in the high rise. We had about 20 floors. So one Saturday I'm on call. And I have eight acs come in. It's the first time it reached 90 degrees for the year, so everybody's calling about their acs. This was a stressful day for me because eight acs, it can be a lot, especially when you have compressors and fan motors going out.

It, it was, it was a pretty stressful day. 

How about the best day? 

The best day was when my manager called me into the office and said, Amari, we're gonna promote you. That was the best day. That's when I felt like all of my hard work and my dedication finally paid off. I felt the recognition from my hard work.

So on the average, we average about 15 work orders a day, and then over the weekend when you come in, you'll have a little bit more, maybe about 20 to 25, but it's all very manageable, very doable light bulbs, clogged sinks. Now that we're coming into the summer and our spring seasons, we have a lot more AC calls.

All 

of your, uh, AC units on the roof? Yes, sir.

Pump room at the same level with the pool. Where is like under Our pump room is under our pool. Under our pool. Interesting. Uh, if you had a full leak, you'll know it immediately. Yes, sir. If it's under gravity does, uh, amazing things. Yes, it does. So this is our pool pump room.

I, this is one of my first stops in the morning also, so this is where after I test the pool chemicals, I'll come down here after a long weekend if we have like a lot of swimmers. In the pool. I'll come down here. I do a back wash of the pool. I get the pool gauges back. Correct. And then I fill my chlorinator for the week.

And these over here are sand filters that filter. 

That filter the pool water. As far as tools, what's your favorite tool? My favorite 

tool is. I have a 27 in one screwdriver. 27 in 1 27. That's amazing. One. It has everything that you need. Whether you need to take apart a washing machine, a dryer, a microwave, everything you need is right there in that one screwdriver.

For me, it was a turning one back in the day where, uh, it looks like things have advanced. Yes, sir. You know, they got a lot more complex. 

Yes, sir.

So this is our three bedroom apartment where, so we have ceiling fans 

in every bedroom. Our guest bathroom. It is pretty spacious. 

You know what I'm thinking, what I'm watching you showing us around. Yes sir. You could make a great salesperson. Yes, sir. Sell apartment. Seriously, 

and with this apartment, we actually offer a hundred dollars gift card, so by the time you move in, everything settled in so you can feel free to buy anything that you may need moving in toiletries, air fryers, and stuff like that.

This right here is our master bedroom. A master bedroom comes with a ceiling fan. Also offers a balcony,

a pretty spacious closet as well, a brand new refrigerator. This refrigerator is brand new.

It comes with a ice maker, pretty spacious for our three bedrooms. This is actually a 20 cubic. Refrigerator.

Have you ever thought about, uh, making a career in sales? I have. I have. You're very talented. Thank you, sir. You're very talented. I think, uh, people are looking at maintenance professionals and they're thinking they're the people that turn the ranch, and that's about all they could do. Oh, no. Look, if nobody does it is.

How do we expect that, you know, more people know about great things, about great stories like yours, about great people like you? Yes, sir. It's, uh, you could be like the best book ever written that sits on a shelf and collects dust. That's true. Nobody knows about it. That's true. You know, you buy the best book, you start on a shelf.

And then you're not smarter, you're not better life. Your life didn't change 'cause you're stuck. Like the same goes with people and everything else. Yes, sir. Storytelling in today's age is more important than anything. 

Yeah. You have, to me, there's nothing as far 

for as storytelling. 

Yes sir. 

Folks, that's a, an amazing sign out there.

Yeah. Amari as we. Close this amazing conversation here. Um, I wanted to ask you, what's your message for someone young that doesn't really know what they wanted to do with their life, with their career, what do you say to them to maybe make them interested in a career in apartment maintenance just like you?

Well, the first thing I would say is that. This is an amazing field to get into. You learn everything from electrical, to plumbing, to carpentry. You learn about landscaping. You learn everything that it takes to run an apartment complex, and with that, it will open your mind to so many more things, whether if you want to stay in maintenance or not, you'll be able to see the corporate side of maintenance, the corporate side of leasing.

You'll be able to see, um, you know, the different vendors that come out are different plumbers, carpenters, um, painters, and you, you really get a feel for kind of everything that's out there. Honestly. 

If you were to have the year of all industry executives, what is one thing or two things that you would like to relate to them, that you think that they need to hear more of or they need to hear, period.

You have to listen to the people on the ground level. I feel like the people on the ground level will be able to give you some of the best advice because they're in the field every day. They see everything with their own two eyes. They can actually tell you what's going on. Trust operators. 

One other thing, best piece of advice that you would give your younger self?

The best piece of advice 

that I would give my younger self is to go harder, you know? Work harder. Learn everything that you can learn. Don't try to bypass any step. Don't try to skip any steps. Go through every single step. 'cause every step comes with a lesson. 

Now what the future looks like for you, what are you looking forward to for your future?

As a maintenance professional. 

As a maintenance professional, my future after being a supervisor, I plan on moving up the corporate ladder. 

Marty, it's great meeting buddy. Great meeting you too. Awesome job. Yes, sir.