#11 – Retail Facilities Management with Ryan Rigley

11-retail-facilities-management-with-ryan-rigley

Intro:

Welcome to another episode of the modern facilities management podcast brought to you by stratum. I'm your host, Griffin Hamilton. This is the show where I interview industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights into modern day facilities management, from hospitality, to commercial, real estate, and everything in between. We'll learn what it really takes to succeed as a facilities manager. 

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton   

Thanks for joining for another episode of the modern facilities management podcast today. I've got with me Ryan Wrigley. Ryan, how are you doing?

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

Very well. Griffin. Good to be here. Thank you for the invite.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, of course, I've certainly been looking forward to catching up with you. We got connected over LinkedIn and actually through the podcast. So first off, thanks for being a listener and for reaching out.

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

Absolutely. I love the podcasts. And like most people in lockdown, it's been one of those things that really taken off. And it's been good to connect, like you say on LinkedIn. I've been flying through your podcasts and really enjoying them. So, it's a pleasure to be here and talk with you.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, absolutely. Well, why don't you give our listeners a little bit about yourself, how you got into FM and what you're currently doing?

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

Yeah, of course. Well, I started my career in hospitality. I left school at a young age. I left school at 16. And so went straight into the deep end to work hard in the, as I said, hospitality industry where I was working in a huge hotel environment, which was actually a private member's club and Carmel, which is like in between St. James' central London, just a stone's throw from Buckingham Palace. And yeah, as I said very much a hospitality five-star environment. And I was responsible and on the door. So, front of house staff, meeting and greeting, dealing with all sorts of issues of the residents and having them close relationships from a young age with maintenance and cleaning. It also gave me a good exposure to buildings in general, because we had all of these fantastic facilities on site, swimming pool, Turkish bar, squash courts, restaurants. And you can imagine all the plant areas for all of these facilities was huge back of house. So, you walk in through the kitchens on a Friday and Saturday nights. Absolutely pandemonium, but good fun.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And so, going from the hospitality space, how long did you work there, by the way?

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

Yeah, so I was there for five years. So quite a long time. And my original plan in my career was to go into Hotel Management, and it didn't materialize. And I was very fortunately headhunted by one of the members of the Private Member's Club, where I was in Carmel. And it turns out that he was a shareholder of a big financial business. And luckily for me, I ended up working there for four and a half years and that was like a crossover between a concierge role and facilities role. And that was my real first insight into managing buildings on my own and because it was a financial business, there was a lot of policies and procedures and it was heavily regulated because of the industry. And it was split between two businesses, one was a private bank, and the sister business was a retail foreign exchange business and that was my real opening to the multi Sites Manager and of.. there were only small kiosk but it was a reactive and planned maintenance exposure and that was my good insight and that stage of my career, I was very fortunate as well to be supported by my employer and they put me on a British Institute of Facilities Management course where I learned a lot. It was only a Foundation Certificate, but it really opened my eyes on what I wanted to do in facilities and I spent four and a half years there and Then I went on to work at Nesta Porter, Nesta Porter, some people say, which is a global E retail space. And so it’s a tech and fashion company where they really took advantage of the .com boom in the 2000s. And that huge global corporate business and I went to work as a facilities coordinator at their headquarters in London. And that was a very high pace business. There were also studios within the offices, it was a 90,000 square foot building, located in the roof of Westfield Shopping Center, which is like one of the biggest shopping centers in London. And there was around 1200 people on sites. And it had half of the.. office was Cooper, like all different types of deskin. And the other half was studios. So, all of the product was being shot in the studios. So, you had very different types of environments. And we also had the distribution center, which was a on the other side of London, which I had to go down once a week to see which was again, a very different type of environment where you have your forklifts and high light, a lot of security involved because of the products and processes to keep people safe.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And was the certificate you receive from the BIFM was that the only formal training you had in facilities management?

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

No, that wasn't actually, when I went to the Nesta Porter group. It was a lot of exposure to health and safety. So that made me realize I needed to really look at how to gain some more health and safety. Kind of like experience because I was very much thrown in the deep end, I was asked to do... it was a funny story, actually, I was asked to do a chemical risk assessment. And I spent a long time and spent the weekend doing these risk assessments. And really, if I hadn't known more, it would have been up to the suppliers to do these risk assessments. And all I had to do was to make that request to our contractors for the risk assessment. So, it was a hard way to learn. But it was an important lesson. And it wasn't long after them that I went to do my knee box certificate, which is an important sound accreditation in the UK, and the UK health and safety world. So that really opens my eyes to health and safety legislation. And I recently done a refresher in the last year, so that was good as well. And obviously we've COVID as well, we've had to adapt and learn so much with terms of our processes and how we socially distance and work. And it's been an interesting time.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah. There's no better way to learn than being thrown in the fire one and two, making a mistake where you're working all weekend where you never needed to. I'm sure you learn very quickly from those mistakes. And so right now, I believe you mentioned that you're at Stella McCartney, is that correct?

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

That's right. Yeah. So, I spent two and a half years at Nesta Porter. And I done a bit of traveling after.. no sorry, I was just under two years at Nesta Porter and then I done a bit of traveling and came back from Southeast Asia and I landed a job at Stella McCartney, where I've been for nearly five years, I joined here and it's more of a junior position. And it was elevated to a more regional position which I looked after UK, France and Spain, UK and France being quite our big markets in the world of fashion. And more recently, I've been promoted to global facilities manager. So that now involves looking at the whole FM strategy, regionally, region by region and trying to uniform the processes with other managers and working closely with them to support them and making sure that our head office processes are uniform.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And talk to me more about just retail facilities management because you're the first person I've talked to you that has been in this type of position specifically for retail, so give me some insights there.

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

Yeah, I think the retail you need to look at, it doesn't really matter about the square foot, whether the site is small or large, you need to treat each site as its own site. So same outlooks, same checklist, same compliance. That's what I would just ask people to bear in mind, if you're ever having to take on multi sites and treat them as individual buildings, no matter how small they are, treat them with that outlook, that you want to make sure that everything is covered in terms of energy, health and safety. Maintenance, security. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And how many stores do you guys have and how many are you managing?

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

So, we have number of just under 50 locations worldwide, just at the moment, we're going through a different stage. And we're growing in some areas, and we're trying to hold back in some areas, but it's around 50 sites at the moment.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And I imagine with it being, global organization, and you've got multiple time zones that you're going to have to manage, what are the difficulties and challenges with that?

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

Yeah. I tend to, if I've got a number of calls on Eastern Time, for example, I would just let my team know that I'm going to be working on Eastern Time on now, I may come in a bit later, but it's just understanding what suits everyone best. So, for example, if I'm talking to you, it'll be in the afternoon for me, and may be in the morning for yourself. And if I'm trying to reach out with some people in Japan, or Hong Kong or China, I need to respect their times as well. I can't just pick up the phone and call them at a ridiculous hour, whether 12 hours in ahead of me.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, yeah. And that's, to me, that's just another trait of facilities manager, where you're working on everyone else's schedule, there's no set time in this industry, you've got to be flexible, you've got to learn how to really think on your feet and with you in those different time zones. It's another great example to that point.

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

Yeah, absolutely. And it's really about adapting to wherever you are adapting to the people adapting to the region's adapting to the cultures. So, you need to kind of factor in all of this. And really good facilities managers should be able to adapt to he or she's environment.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And just in general, with the retail space, are there any unique challenges that that space presents?

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

Definitely. Yeah, it depends on how they're fitted out. You might have it within the luxury retail, there might be bespoke installations, which are hard to maintain, hard to access, you might have a rock taken from Scotland and implanted in the middle of the store, and they might want to install the real moss in around that rock? And how are you going to maintain it? How is the air conditioning going to kill the moss? So, can we provide sustainable solutions to that? Can we put in preserved moss and treated moss? Or can we look at the concept completely differently and take away that installation and put something that's more on brand, and that these are the kind of challenges we have with maintenance, which can be quite interesting. And it's about raising them awareness because ultimately, is the facilities manager to manage the budgets, manage the maintenance, and we don't make the decisions on the design of the store. So, the design come through, and we might have an opportunity to raise our concerns before it's installed, which is great because you can flag it and you've covered yourself, but if they go ahead, the implications need to be raised that look, if you install this, be aware that it's going to cost the business, this amount to keep it looking goods or keep it looking clean or and there's also challenges to the types of marble you might be using in the stores. You walk around, say Madison Avenue or Rodeo Drive and you see some of the fabrics and stones that are used in these incredible stores and you wonder they don't keep spare tiles in the back where space in the stock rooms are always limited. So how do you do that? Do you have good suppliers that you can rely on or do you have cuts as located nearby? These are the kind of challenges that we are used to in luxury retail.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, and also something that I personally would never think about. And you hit on something earlier as far as the sustainability. Talk to me more about that.

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

Yeah. Well, firstly, I just want to say this on sustainability, I don't pose or endorse any company I work for. So just wanted to get that out. So, my views and my views only but personally, I'm very passionate about sustainability and FM. It's really important to all businesses, as a green champion, or trying to influence other departments it’s really important to me. And at where I'm now it's, it's been great because we're working closely with our sustainability, teams and finance, a key players as well, and how we can make our sites more sustainable, how can we do that without spending as much money. So, we have all these different ideas that we meet up and we put on the table and there, it can be challenging. There's some recently we were looking at how we can use scrap fabric and how we can adopt that into different uses and reuse it. And we were very honest internally about like, and it's communicated as well as about progress, not perfection. And that's a real big message that we have. And there's an exciting project I'm working on now about rolling out renewable energy to every location. And there's some regions, I won't name them. But there's some regions simply because they can be state wrong. So, we're working on ideas where we can implement greener solutions if we can't implement renewable energy, but yeah, there's some good products in the pipeline.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And if someone's interested in taking that approach, and having their organization be more sustainable from a facility standpoint, how would they best go about starting that process?

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

Yeah, I keep this. There's so much information online that I would refer to, there's all sorts of courses available. There's, also, fortunately, in some companies, we've got sustainability departments, and you can simply approach them and say, look, I want to be involved, I want to be able to support you. And can I be involved in your promotion of, can I be a green leader? How can I help? These are the kind of questions which I was raising when I first joined and, it was also from previous places I've worked in, I found that the kind of green space was also sometimes a gray space, and not where I am now. But previously, and energy is a good topic to discuss because you'll find that people businesses, only a good FM will know that the energy is managed efficiently. Somewhere FM's will assume that finance look after it or sustainability are responsible or procurement are responsible, but really a good FM will know that what unit rate you're paying for, what renewable source you're using. How can you guarantee that energy is renewable?

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, certainly an area that an FM can take ownership of and you just alluded to it, there's certainly the potential of people looking across the table and saying, I thought you had this covered where this is something where it should fall, at least be on the radar of every FM out there.

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

Yeah, definitely. And you should look at creating your own policy on sustainability or energy. Similar to any other policy. You want to create a structure of management who is going to support you in this who's going to be the leader from your senior management team, and how is that going to filter down? And pre organization and who's going to be champions within key departments that are going to make these changes and support the business? 

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah. And kind of switching gears here, as far as the industry in general and promoting facilities management. Obviously, we're in different parts of the world. I know what it's like over here, to an extent, but enlighten me, what is the promotion of Facilities Management look like in the UK?

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

Yeah, that's a good question. I think the whole coronaviruses shone a real light on the FM industry and how we support the business continuity for example, here, the FM, more or less lead policies and procedures that gets us run in and guess enough to open and working when the doors were officially closed. And it was a really eye opener. And it's interesting, because also you hear about all of these different tools of IT and financing, whereas the tools for FM and this is important for when we're talking about these topics.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, absolutely. And on the note of COVID. Tell me about the differences in responses that you've noticed, seeing how you guys are a global organization. Just region to region how has there been a difference in response and how it impacted FMs.

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

Yeah, I mean, the UK is only just opened its doors as of last week. So, we've been in lockdown for three months solid. So non-essential stores have been closed. And we've been working behind the scenes and our retail team have been doing a great job in terms of how can we do virtual sales? Can we do online sales behind closed doors? And how can we do that safely? How can we put teams in the building without... we were looking at splitting teams. So, if there was a positive case, they could isolate and the other team could come in. And there's all these different solutions that we were working on to make sure everything was running smoothly. But yeah, it's been interesting to see how the US actually have operated because it kind of, there's a lot of you don't know what to believe on TV these days. The US seems to be operating pretty good. I was on the phone with our [Inaudible 23:00] manager recently. And it seems like the footfall has been fantastic. And that's great for the business to learn that the stores on that side of the water are doing really well.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, hoping that we're on the tail end of this. But it is been fascinating to see. I mean, even here within the US, obviously, there's been a huge difference region to region on how people have responded and, you know, both personally and then from just professionally, and from an organization standpoint, how they've responded and how they will continue to work. And with that, retail, obviously took a huge hit, with nobody really going out, like, how's the future going to be impacted? The future of retail can be impacted by COVID.

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

Yeah, it's a good question. It's a really strategic question for the senior management team and the business as a whole, and that there will be a big focus on the markets that are doing really well. So, our objectives are that the business sets out. Recently, it was really clear, and it's a lot of retail businesses will be it's quite common knowledge that they're focusing on the Asia market. And they will continue to do well. Japan is really doing well. And it's the markets in the US and Europe that we are focusing on as well to help them recover from what's been a tough challenge.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, and it's going to be fascinating to see the response and how, human behavior is going to have changed from all of this from a retail perspective. Now looking at your career in general, and the steps you took to get into this position, what do you think had the biggest impact, or who had the biggest impact on getting you to where you're at right now?

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

I would say they've all had their benefits. And I would say the tougher jobs would definitely reap the most rewards. I found where I came from the corporate finance business and going into a big, huge 1200 capacity office and studios, that was a big jump. And I found that a massive challenge. And in the short time I was there, I had a great manager and I learned so much from him, and he had a property manager background, and I really got a good insight and how things should be done. And I took that and also being where I am now, I've had some fantastic senior managers to work under who've all had their own different positives and learn from their nuances as well. So, it's been good to learn from different people and identify what style you know, works and what, works for the business.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, taking a little nugget from everyone that you're interacting with. And you mentioned style, everyone has their own unique style and how they operate. And, you know, if something works with or for some other individual, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work for you. But just take a little bit and add it to how you operate.

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

Yeah, just don't take yourself too seriously. And also I would just any advice I would give for people that wanting to get into FM is look at what's involved. I'm involved in many different projects. It's not just flat, reactive and planned maintenance. I'm involved in open ends of stores and pop ups and installations and so many different things that go on. And it's a lot of project management involved. And I really enjoy that I like the challenge of start to finish and making sure everything's done and checking on the contractors and coming back with the smugglers. I think you call them punch lists in the US. And we like to... Yeah, we would definitely like to throw some projects out at short notice. So, I always have to be on the backfoot ready for them. And yeah, I would strongly advise looking at the educational side of things. Because I left school at a young age, I soon realized, when I was around 21, I needed to get some qualifications behind me to give me more confidence in my day-to-day roles. So, I've worked on my NEBOSH or my health and safety. My certificate with the British Institute of Facilities Management, which has now changed its name to the Institute of workplace and Facilities Management, which I've recently done a certificate for them as well. So, I would invite five people to look into what's the recognized local accreditation and look at what suits you, look at what suits your work life and commit to it.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, it's interesting, you bring that up, because, at least over here, it's been interesting to see this, I guess the increase in the number of people getting into Facilities Management has led to a lot of certifications and different organizations that provide that education. And even now colleges universities are starting to offer more formalized education in facilities management.

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

Yeah, and there's all sorts of foundation degrees or masters available in the UK. And I would suggest start off doing a certificate and if it's something you really like, and it's going well and it's complementing your career, then look at doing a degree in facilities management. And there's actually statistics to show that if you done a degree increases your salary by 10%, which is brilliant.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah. Well, Ryan, you hit a few the last questions I typically end on. But one last one for you. Any, any bit of advice. Any additional advice that you give for anyone listening right now?

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

Advice for the listeners listening, I would suggest, don't take yourself too seriously. FM is a customer service role, but also manage people's expectations. And be ready for projects because the businesses are changing and adapting all the time. You might get a call to say that you're relocating tomorrow or you're closing one site. So be ready and have plans in place for when they happen.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Plan for the unexpected. Well, Ryan, definitely appreciate you taking the time to connect. Again. Thank you for reaching out. It's been a pleasure getting to know you and having you on the podcast.

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

No, thank you. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. It's been great to talk to you. And I really, as I said before, really enjoy the podcast and I look forward to hearing more guests on your show.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, absolutely. Oh, Ryan. Thanks again. And we'll talk soon.

Speaker: Ryan Rigley  

All the best. Take care.

Outro:

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