Fix It Forward - Episode 8

 Hey everyone. We're back for more episodes of Fix It Forward. It's a pretty chilly day in Atlanta today, right? It's kind of like 30 degrees and I'm freezing, but I'm loving it. We're having some incredible stories to share with you all when you think about an apartment community, hundreds of families living together.

But we're not really thinking about how is this place running? It's like a $80 million, a hundred million dollar community that's being run. What's behind it? And behind it is like great maintenance professionals dedicated that are keeping everything running the way it should be. Incredible stories that we're going to tell today of great Atlanta professionals, rider Atlanta.

It's behind me. Uh, an incredible backdrop and, uh, super, super excited about continuing this project. With a team and with our maintenance academy. Shout out to our friends from Maintenance Academy.

Hello, everyone, fix it. Forward is back on the road today with Kelly. She's an amazing inspiration for us all. Uh, you're gonna hear how she's starting an industry knowing nothing about maintenance. Eight months later, she became a service manager and she's been doing an incredible job ever since. Right now, Kelly is overseeing a multimillion dollar high rise community in Atlanta.

Incredibly gorgeous, and she's doing a unbelievable job. Let's go.

Good morning, Kelly. 

Good morning. 

Thank you for having us. 

No problem. 

So, uh, tell us where we are today. 

Today we are at 99 West Paces. We are one of the premier properties here in Atlanta, in the Buckhead area. Um, we're on walking distance of a lot of stuff, and this is one of the showpiece properties in Atlanta.

So 

how did you get here? 

I actually came from another property down in Midtown, uh, it's called Lilly and my current regional. I had worked with her before. She gave me a call when there was a opening here, so that's how I ended up here. And I've been here for about seven months now. I started in June. 

Okay, let's go.

All right.

How did you get with uh, range Water? 

I actually met two people from Range Water at a program called Construction Ready, so Allison Turner, who's our. Head of 

recruiting, 

acquisition and recruiting. And then Chris Haney, my old regional, they came to speak at the program and I was really interested to see what they had to say about the company and I ended up applying for them and got hired on with them.

So that's how, 

what is 

this area? Don't, anyway, this area here, a little bistro area. For coffee. We rent this out for resident events and people come down here and work and just have a good time. In the summertime is really cool 'cause you can go outside on that patio right there and it's just a cool space.

Is it rentable space or it is like for you? 

Yeah, it's rentable. So 

you could do events? 

Mm-hmm. 

If you're a resident. 

Yeah. 

Okay. Are you renting to outside people? They're not residents? No. Just for 

residents. Just for residents, yeah. We don't do any outside rentals. Just because it can create issues and problems, 

so, well, you know, just more moving parts.

So, you know, keeping it simple. I mean, it's, it's complicated as is, right? Yes. You don't wanna make it even more complicated, I guess that's what it is. 

Yeah. 

It's not where the headache for the, for the little extra money. 

No. So we have a pretty big mail room. This is my favorite part of the building, almost next to the pool.

Um, this is where all the magic happens, all the packages. All of the issues that can happen with packages, but I think that this space is pretty cool. It's one of the biggest mail rooms I've seen on any property and also one of the most organized, and you can chill down here it is seats and you can have your coffee and do all of that stuff.

So Kelly, tell me a little bit about how. You got, well, you told me how you got into the industry, but what did you do before getting into multifamily? 

So, before I got into multifamily, I was working for myself. Um, I actually built furniture for restaurants and nightclubs. Like custom furniture and I buy properties and renovate them and flip them.

So I was doing that and kind of just bounced around a little bit doing that, trying to figure out what it was that I actually wanted to do. Um,

so you leave maintenance, apartment maintenance now for about four years, you said? 

Yes. 

Do you see this as a continuing to be your career going forward? 

I, yeah. I, I see this as. Been in my career for as long as I'm physically able to do it. Of course. Um, that's kind of the taxing part of maintenance is hard on your body, but this is these office spaces that we have here and they're available for, um, for rent for the residents.

So we have a lot of residents that rent these out just to kind of work here and get out of their home to do their work. So,

so your, your entire career has been with, uh, range water? 

Yeah. In multifamily. In 

multifamily. In multifamily, 

yes. 

Uh, four years. For those that are watching us today, um, what are some things that you could share about range water? Why range water? I mean, four year tenure for a maintenance professional. You know, putting this in perspective, it's, uh, it is not a short term.

Yeah. It's pretty long. Right. Uh, we, we've seen average of like employment right now, way lower than that. 

Mm-hmm. 

So when you say four years, they must be doing something right. So what are they doing right? 

Range water actually does a lot of stuff right? I like the culture of our company and the fact that I'm supported in my role.

Um, I'm able to get the resources that I need and help that I need when I need it. And I also have a really big support group and mentors here that help me. Get to where, uh, I wanna be, and they help elevate me to the position that I'm in right now. Um, I didn't know that maintenance would turn into my career when I started with them, but I'm glad it did and I've been able to meet a lot of people and network with a lot of people than put me in a different mindset and a different perspective than I had before that I never would've met if I came to Range Water.

So next we're going to my favorite place. The pool. 

The pool already. The 

pool. 

Are you open 365? Is it a heated pool or it just seasonal pool? 

It is a heated pool and it is open 365. The thing about this pool that's so cool to me is the shape of it and the view that we have. If you're up on the higher floors, you can look down at the pool and it's really awesome.

This is the wrong floor. We're going on the four. Um. 

No, you're 

good. I 

over here. 

Where is Reese? 

She is upstairs, Susan. 

Okay. At 

least I hope be not screaming. 

Disclaimer guys, this is also a part of my, my favorite part of my job is getting to know my residents and their dogs. And she has one of my favorite 

dogs.

Have a great day. So, uh, I noticed that about you, that you know everyone. You talk to everyone. 

Yeah. Oh. 

Like they're very close to you. So that's, uh, that's super cool. 

I just try to build rapport with people that way it makes them more comfortable when I have to come into their home to fix something. So it's chilly out today.

Super cold, but 

alrighty. Thank you. 

You are welcome. This is the pool. It's not, uh, deep at all. It's only like three feet, three inches, but it's heated. You can see the steam. Coming off of there right now. We got that cool fountain. Um, what I do in the morning when I first come in is to go ahead and drop that dolphin, um, and first thing in the morning.

That way it runs for about two to three hours. We test the chemical. Once it gets light outside, go ahead and brush everything down, and then I see my pillows blew back off. Another part of my morning routine while I'm up here doing the pool is just making sure everything looks good. So like those are down right now.

I'll move them up even though I moved them this morning, but they blew back off 'cause it's windy. Pool maintenance is my favorite part of the day. I'm normally doing it by myself, but it gives me time to clear my mind. The sound of the fountain and the bubbles kind of helps me relax and get my day started.

And kind of strategize my plan for the day with my team and see what needs to be done on property.

You started by, uh, showing us around the swimming pool and your more room routine. Keep walking me through your day today. 

So my day. Like I said, it normally consists of, uh, when I first come in, I walk the property, the parking garages, check the gates, um, make sure we don't have any malfunctions. And now since it's super cold outside, I'm checking for standing water anywhere in case we have to use ice melt and any leaks that are going on.

I kind of just like to keep my eyes on the property and make myself and my team aware of anything that could be going on. Then I start doing the. Pool. So I do everything with pool maintenance. Come in, make sure everything looks good in here. Um, this area over here is our media room, so I always wanna make sure that this looks nice and presentable.

They come in here at night and play pool, so I will reset the pool balls, make sure this is good. TVs are on the games and stuff are over here. Then I head down to the gym and check out the rest of our amenity spaces. That takes up a lot of my morning, and then I start with trash, making sure that that's good.

After that, my team is normally in, we have a staggered schedule. I come in first and then, um, the rest of my team follows at eight and nine o'clock. Once they're in. We just, um, I look at the computer, check for availability, see what move-ins and stuff we have for the day, and then just delegate to them what I need them to do and what I'm helping out with and just doing my thing.

So tell me about your team. You know, how large is the team and, you know, tell me about, uh, 

immediate their 

physicians. 

My immediate team, I have two technicians. Um, I have one groundskeeper and three. Housekeepers. So that's my immediate team. Um, one of my technicians, he worked with me previously and when I came over here, I had a opening pop up.

I called him and I was like, Hey, you wanna come work with me again? And he was like, absolutely. So I brought him in and my other technician is a young guy. He's straight outta high school, 19 years old. I'd say working with him is part of my. Favorite thing at this property because he doesn't have the skillset, but he has the mind to learn.

He wants to learn. He's trainable and he's just soaking everything up like a sponge. A part of my role as being a supervisor is to help people grow and elevate in their roles. So me having the opportunity to train him and teach him and work with him is. Awesome for me

and everything here is phone operated, so 

I love that hotels have that for decades. 

It's, it is good until it's not. Okay. 

So tell 

when something goes. 

Tell me about that. 

When something goes wrong, power outages, or if there's a issue with the app. Then you can't get in. But I've only had that happen one time, so it was pretty good.

But this is, this is one of our models here. I would say like one of, one of my favorite things about these units here at nine. Nine, every unit has one of these. 

Is that a cooler wine 

cooler? Yes. Wine cooler. 

Well, if you're a wine person, this is the place to be, 

but people keep waters in there. Sodas, juice, anything.

Um, it's just a pretty cool feature that I like. 

Yeah, 

all of our stove tops and ranges are gas here, so I think that's pretty cool. And then we have these inset microwaves. They do allow you to do like wallpaper or do whatever you wanna do to the walls as long as you change it back. We have a lot of different finishes though.

There's two types of floors. There's this one, and then we have a light brown color floor. So many different styles of cabinets though. This is the one with the silver handles, and we have some that have black accessories, but it's like 3 0 4 different color schemes. Bedroom over here. The design team who did this property.

I, I love what they did with the panels on the back of this. It's pretty awesome. So over here we have the bathroom

standup shower in here.

Um, a lot of the units have a shower and tub though, so. But

tell me about your most favorite part of the day. 

My favorite part of the day, um, is again, just being out at the pool by myself in the morning and my team huddle once the rest of my team comes in, just getting with them and putting out. Game plan in place for the day. I like to think I have a pretty good sense of humor, so I joke with everybody all the time and just getting to see everybody and seeing my residents.

That's my part of the day, my favorite part of the day. 

What is the part that requires the most out of you? 

Juggling everything from day to day. No two days in maintenance are ever the same. And even if you come up with a game plan for that day, something can happen that will throw you completely off of your game.

So you have to be ready for when those emergency situations come up. Vendors are popping up on site, residents are stopping you in the hallway. So it's just kind of juggling everything and being able to delegate and being quick on your feet. 

Okay. How do you do that? Do you have some. Do you have some tricks?

Do you have some advice for someone that's in your situation, you know, maybe struggling, uh, maybe they're looking for a, you know, for, for some help or advice? 

I set a lot of reminders in my phone. I have a daily calendar that I refer to all the time, but I also set personal goals for myself. Um, monthly goals, quarterly goals, and yearly goals.

That way I can kind of track. What I'm doing, track my progress and see where I am and then figure out what I can improve on. Mm-hmm. Um, that helps me, but it also helps my team to kind of figure out where we are and get better and grow, um, as a team together. 

I, I love this. I'm not hearing this very often.

Individuals, like, you know, setting goals for themselves outside of like company requirements, right? Yeah. Uh, so I think that's, uh, that's incredibly powerful there.

When it comes to your career, I want to go back a little bit. You started, as you said, as an entry level technician, right? 

Mm-hmm. 

What was that position name? Was it like, uh, Mike Grady? Was it. I was, was it really straight up technician? Like, yeah. Okay. So you started with a technician title, right? Mm-hmm.

And what was like the, I know that you flip, you know, uh, you flip homes before, so you, you know, you had the hands on knowledge to some extent. Uh, what was the day to day then, like? Like what was your level of know? Okay. When it comes to lake maintenance in general, 

nothing. When I first started. Okay.

Alright, 

so you started with nothing. 

I had zero experience and zero zero level of knowledge with maintenance when I came in. But I was fortunate enough to have a really great supervisor and he took me under his wing. He showed me a lot of stuff 'cause I didn't, I didn't know anything about unclogging, the garbage disposal.

Uh, fixing the fill valve on the toilet, any of that stuff. So he showed me all of that, and then he was showing me how to troubleshoot with different types of acs. The property I started at was like a 23-year-old garden style property, and it had the air handlers up in the ceiling over top of the bathtubs.

They were hard to work on, but he showed me how to diagnose those, how to troubleshoot 'em, and how to do repairs on those. 

What was your supervisor name? 

Um, his name was Mr. Lee. 

Mr. Lee? 

Yeah. 

Shout out to Mr. Lee. 

Yeah. 

I hope he's watching this episode. 

Yeah. Mr. Lee, 

when is ready, Mr. Lee? 

Yeah. 

We salute you. 

Yeah.

Mr. Lee is, 

and we, we, we Thank you for the inspiration. Uh, there's. Thousands and thousands of individuals like, uh, like Mr. Lee that, you know, had help us grow. Uh, I had some of those in my career too, that I'm always, uh, you know, I'm eternally grateful for. Wanna talk about something else right now, Kelly?

How long did it take you to move from a service technician position Through a service manager? 

Uh, it took me about eight months to move from a technician to a service manager. Um, unfortunately, Mr. Lee had ended up leaving three months into me, starting at that property. So I didn't think I wanted to stay in the field.

I was like, uhoh, like my teacher's gone. I don't know if I still wanna do this 'cause I was still new to the industry and really unsure of myself. But by me working with him, he showed me so much stuff in the interim of him leaving and somebody coming in, I stepped in and I was scheduling, um, turns with the vendors 'cause the property was under renovation.

So I was scheduling stuff. I was just kind of taking on that management role. So I had the mindset like, I wanna work at this property. Like it belongs to me like it's my business. His being an entrepreneur and coming from that mind state, you have to wear every hat and you have to be able to juggle multiple things at one time.

So that's what I did until they brought somebody else in. He didn't stay very long either, and when he left, I stepped in again and I was kind of just doing the same thing to make sure the property was still running and functioning. They offered me the position and I told them no. And my old regional at the time, Chris Haney, he asked why.

I said, I, I don't have the experience. I don't feel like I know what I'm doing. He was like, well, you're already doing it and if you need any additional training we'll get it for you. So they did. Um, I went through some other training with Range Water. I finished up my EPA, got my CPO and that was it. 

This was incredible.

Folks from like knowing nothing. Never done this work, this type of work, uh, to a manager position in eight months in multifamily. And if you really don't know, like details of how maintenance works and everything, maintenance in apartments is like several trades. If you're not a, if you're HVAC tech, like your grade at hvac, if you're a plumber, you're great at plumbing.

If you're a maintenance technician or maintenance supervisor, you had to be like, over average or great. At hvac, plumbing, electrical, carpentry, dry repairs, so on and so forth. It, it's, it's an incredible, it's like six, seven trades in one. Mm-hmm. And for someone like Kelly to go from like nothing to just becoming a manager, it's an incredible accomplishment.

I wanna put that into perspective, so, uh, everybody understands. When did you have your first breakthrough? From like, basically, you know, knowing nothing about maintenance to the first like difficult troubleshooting moment that you did on your own. How, how do you recall that moment and what was it? 

Um, I would say working on that pancake unit.

Um, I had done two of them with Mr. Lee before, but I got ended up getting an emergency call. I was on call. I had to go do it by myself, and I opened the ceiling and I'm like, what is going on here? But I remember everything that he showed me, everything that he taught me, and just went through the steps. Um, what had ended up happening, the transformer had blew out, that had some wires touching and it burnt up.

So I took it off and replaced it. Once I turned it back on and it started working, I was like, yes. So I would say that was like my favorite moment when I was like, okay. I can, I can do this. I, I got this. 

I, I love it. Uh, when, when was the moment that you told yourself or you felt like, okay, this is not just a job until I figure out life, like this is a career for me.

Like, I wanna be here for the long run. I want to invest in myself, I want to grow. When did you know that? 

I would say once I got to my second property, so. Uh, right after I entered into my management position at my very first property, I got a call about four or five months after that asking me if I wanted to move to a property in Midtown, which is a high rise building.

Um, is one of our, another one of our flagship properties in Atlanta. And I was so scared to take on that task. I'm like, I just got into this position, but again, I had some really great people backing me up and just, um, willing to elevate me. So I took, took on that. Once I got down there, it was a whole different ball game and I was like, okay, I can do this.

And I, it really sunk in for me when I was able to bring someone else. Along with me. So one of my previous service techs at my old property, I had a position open up at at that property as well, and I asked him if he wanted to come there and he said yes. The favorite part about this industry for me and my career is just really helping other people, helping them to exceed their goals and elevate.

Um, I always have people ask me like. Well, how do you gauge your success or how much money you think it would make for you to say you consider yourself successful? But I don't look at success in like a dollar amount. I look at it as how many people I'm able to help, how many people can I bring up? How many people can I elevate?

How many people can I help reach their goals? And I always wanna be. A type of leader and mentor like Lee was to me, um, to help other people go forward. 

So making no difference. I love it.

It was hard to figure out when I first got over here. It took me about two weeks to get acclimated to the we, the layout of the building and how everything is over here. Um. So, like I said, I've been here for like six months or seven months now and um, I have some good plans set in place just getting things running a little more smoothly and plans to paint the hallways and all types of good stuff.

So we have a lot of exciting stuff coming up next year at 99 West. 

For, uh, for someone young that doesn't really, college is really not for them, right? And they're trying to figure out what do I want to do with my life? Uh, why would they consider a maintenance career? 

I would say for someone that's just trying to figure out what they wanna do, maintenance is a great entryway into all of the trades, like you said earlier.

Um, and you can kind of just bounce around and figure out what you like and what you have an interest in, but it also gives you room to grow, um, room to elevate, and you meet a lot of people along the way. You get to connect with vendors, so if you have a really vested interest in doing electrical work.

You meet with those electrical vendors all the time. You can ask them questions, you can build those relationships, you can network with them. And it's, it's hands on. Rainwater has so many training opportunities. We have computer trainings, we have modules that we can go on and do, and then we have in-house training.

I make training boards for my teams when they come in. So I would say it's, um. It's definitely a great entryway career and you can figure out what it is that you wanna do. 

Any final thoughts as we wrap up today? 

Um, my final thoughts is just anybody that's thinking about getting into the maintenance industry, just do it.

Go forward and if you work hard and you really put the effort in, you can really move far in, in this industry and I love it. 

Thank you for the inspiration. Thank you for having us, for, uh, making time for us today, Kelly. 

Thank you.