#23 - Restaurant FM Best Practices with Danny Koontz

#23 - Restaurant FM Best Practices with Danny Koontz

Introduction:

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  

Welcome to another episode of the modern facilities management podcast. Today, I've got Danny Koontz with me, Danny, how are you doing?

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

I'm doing great, sir. How about you?

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

I am doing well doing well. I'm really excited to have you on here today. We were actually introduced through a mutual friend and the quote they gave me one of the greatest people to set foot in the facilities world. That was how they described you. So to no pressure to live up to that today.

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

Yeah, no kidding.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Well, as a quick preview, you are the restaurant expert, you've been in the space for over three decades and so we're going to dive into best practices around facilities management, specifically in the restaurant space. I know we've had different folks on from different restaurant chains and groups and it'll be interesting to have yet another perspective and diving into a little bit more detail on best practices there. But before we get into that good content, want you tell the listeners and viewers now, who you are and how you got into this space, and I'll throw it on over to you.

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

I started long story, but I'll make it very short. I started as a sophomore in college, university, Tennessee, I was working at Pizza Hut. I was doing the Friday, Saturday night shift, where you get home about two or three in the morning. It's like, oh, do something here and a friend called me and said, do you want to go to work in Ruby Tuesday Commissary, Amman, what is that? I said, Well, we cook food and package it and we cook it in batches, soups, and quiche and things like that and we deliver it to the restaurant. Well, how many they have? Well, they have six. The good news is you can go to class in the morning, and then you come here and work in the afternoons after you get out class. Well, being very young I asked the million dollar question, which is, do you get paid every Friday? Yes, she did. How good? How good is that? I said, Okay and I started doing that and I worked in the warehouse for a while and they came to me and said, would you like to be the purchasing guy? Sure. What do you want me to purchase? Equipment and furniture for new locations. Sure. Do you know how, how hard is it? You make a deal? I mean, it's not that hard. I got it. So I became a purchasing guy. I do that for a year and they come back to me and they said, Hey, you want to be the facility guy? What does that mean? Well, you call people and get things fixed. Okay. I don't do the work, correct? No, you make sure somebody comes, No. Okay, great. Once again, I'm your guy and that's kind of how it started and I had a 35 year run at Ruby Tuesday, and I was the only director of facilities ever had so I guess that's a good thing, because I don't know how to compare me to anybody else, because there never was anybody else. But there was something really good about being there that no matter who came through the company, as a manager, director, Vice President, Senior Vice President, everybody but the owner, and founder was the only person ever been there longer than me. I was kind of like, when you came I was there and no matter how your career moved I was always there and I think that provided lots of trust over time, because it was a given commodity. Everybody knew who you are, you knew who they were, as they came through the system and over time, you hopefully have worked enough together to develop trust because again, at some point I had 950 restaurants and a staff of five people, nobody in the field, you have to have trust to be able to do that.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

No kidding. You went from day one that you started, they had six different locations up to you said 950. So that is an insane amount of growth that you saw over the years and I would say you're probably the only person that has ever been in a restaurant chain that's gone from six to nearly 1000. That must have been quite a wild ride and you said, you were there for 35 years. I’m sure you went from not knowing what the hell you're doing in facilities to obviously, running 1000. So that's just insanity to think of.

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

Well, and even with 1000, sometimes you had problems that you didn't exactly know what the hell to do but what you learned was kind of trying to be a calm voice when managers or whoever were calling you and they were bugging out because there was a problem and if your answers were very calm, and I got it, I'll take care of it. Whether I knew what to do or not, when I hung the phone up was a non-issue was to make them calm and let them say, okay, he's got it. Now I'll go back to doing my job and so on but you learn to carry your phone, prior to phones beepers 24 hours a day, if you went to the mailbox, you carried it with you wherever you went, it was with you all the time because somebody's got a problem and they need help.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Without a doubt and so, take a step back. Again, before we go into what you learn over this 35 years. What were you studying at Tennessee? General Business. And growing up did you have any idea what industry you wanted to get in or what you wanted to do or were you just going to go through life?

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

I wanted to be a major league baseball player, but I found out a good [inaudible 6:33] curveball. At some point your career kind of ends and then you do what all the other people do or former athletes, you moved to softball and you do started traveling softball for years so no, I really had no idea. I came to Ruby Tuesday, again, because of a friend who just said, Hey, you ought to come and work here and I needed a job and I didn't want to work weekends all the time so it was kind of good and then I saw a company that I learned was growing and very young and a lot of fun actually. You worked really hard but it was a lot of fun and you learned a lot and I had really great mentors who really helped me and then it's like, I want to stay I really enjoyed the purchasing part. I learned the facilities part purchasing a lot, I really enjoyed getting in a room and negotiating a deal, and stuff like that. But then I learned the facility side because there were always opportunities every day that I could help somebody. I had a tutorials in distribution, along with facilities and food distribution, that's very difficult. It's very hard to win. If you are in charge of the food trucks and you send them early that's not good because the restaurants not ready to take the truck and unload it. So you can't make points by showing up early. You can't deliver more food than they ordered. That's not good either. There's no real way to win. I mean, your best day is just deliver what they want. But if it's Fourth of July weekend and Daytona Beach, and they're getting ready to have a race or whatever may be in or air conditionings out and I get it fixed. At least for a short time, I've done something really good. So you had opportunities to help people along and I think the value of that isn't been gone from Ruby Tuesday's since 2013. There are people who were operations people, managers, directors and so on, who I talked to, to this day of, hey, I got a question. How about this? Or how about that? That’s where you kind of realize, hopefully you've done something.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

You're in good luck, because I've got plenty of questions for you today. Diving into it, and again, focusing on your experience in the restaurant space. What's interesting to me, as you mentioned, you have five people across the 950 stores. I imagine that you guys had a very robust vendor network and you didn't have too much in-house maintenance assistance. Is that true?

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

We had no in-house. I mean, we would have in-local markets may be handyman but what I really did was I took smaller contractors who did remodels, refurbishes, things like that and I use their network of people whether that was their electricians or plumbers. I would make a deal with this small regional contractor and he would have the states of Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina for conversation sake. So basically, most things that happened in those particular buildings or whatever, I just went through him and I used his sub network, because that was in the days prior to the companies who do a third party platform and also provide all the vendors, those people aren't out there. So you're either finding tons and tons of vendors, which gets very difficult to manage. Or in my case, I would have six or seven regional contractors and use their network and the better they perform, the more I added to their plate, the worse they perform, I took states away, or I just took them out altogether. But that was kind of the format that we used up until we became partners with service channel.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Interesting. I have heard that before. I mean, you essentially created your own team, it just happened to be external vendors, where you put it on them to have their network of subs to go out there, and they are holding them accountable and you have one point of contact for example, five different states lifted a lot off of your plate, I would imagine.

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

Yeah and you're paying a fee. I mean, obviously, there's a markup that they're going to make on that but what the tradeoff is, is, I know who to hold accountable for who's going out there. Nothing's worse than to blindly search the Yellow Pages and just pick someone and hope that they're good. There's tons of things that can go wrong by using this contractor and his network, have an accountability piece and he's trying to grow that because that's a program that as it moved along, that person can reach out to my competitors, and say, This is what I do for Ruby Tuesday and I would like to do the same for you so it's an opportunity for them at the same time.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Absolutely. It's interesting I haven't seen that and was that the model from the get go, as you guys continue to grow and you took on more and more responsibilities? Was it always outsourced or did you ever have an internal team?

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

Pretty much outsource, My team was split across the country so they were kind of the first point of contact for these contractors and operations. Prior to that, when we probably had 100 150 restaurants we let our directors and our general managers have input in who some of the people were that did work and then we would support them by working with them but that became very difficult over time, as restaurants got more and more and it was about you to making a larger deal with the contractor. In other words, pricing and so on, and making sure that you control and really, it was a budget piece too because over time, Ruby Tuesday took the repair maintenance budget out of the hands of the operators, and that all came to me, Well, if I'm want to control it, I'm the ones going to live or die by it. I want a strong hand and who's going to be going there, so that I own the process?

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And that's a great segue for the next question I had for you around heart and spin and if you look at facilities management, and you dumb it down at the lowest level possible, your main goals are to reduce that spin and make sure that you're enabling your team to run more efficiently, and not have to worry about their equipment or the back end of the day to day. And so on the RNM side of that, what are some quick wins? Not necessarily if you have 950 locations, but just for a restaurant in general, what are quick wins, that someone could do or could see, with some easy implementation of different processes and procedures.

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

I think two or three things, I think one in the restaurant industry, you do a lot teaching, and you teach. So I think things as simple as, let me do a sheet that tells you 12 things to check before you place a service call that takes all of seven minutes. I mean, as simple as it's a refrigerator, is it plugged in, did the breaker flip whatever it may be. There's eight or 10 12 things that you can put on piece of paper to check and you get that out to your operations team and you talk to them about the value of that and that every time they check that list and maybe find something that they could check or do their selves that's probably $100 $200 savings that they get. The other part is many times repairs and maintenance is a part of a manager's bonus. You want to get managers to help you control RNM, show them what it does to the money that comes out of their pocket. For instance, you can walk around a restaurant all day long, and there will be every restaurant in the country sinks are running, sinks are dripping. It's a given. Goes on all the time. You break that down, and you show a manager that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 30 days in a month this is how much that water costs by dripping and running and then you take a percentage of that, and you tell them, You're charged part of the utility bill goes against your bonus, this is how much money you leave on the table possibly every month, when you break that down to there, they'll hear you, hopefully, they're never going to hear you when the utilities are paid by the company, it doesn't affect them, they don’t pay attention. But when it's partly their money, that's where you can get those quick wins, because you show them what it does and how it impacts them and that's one of the ways that you can kind of do that to get a quick win. The other part is teach your vendors when they're in the restaurant, with the managers that are fixing something, show the managers what caused the problem so that they can stop doing whatever it is. A convection oven looks really good when it's hosed out. The problem is, all your controls are now wet, and they won't work. So that may sound really good to do it with a hose, but it's killer. But if you ever see that you have to teach why. You can't just say don't do that. Here's why. Here's what happens. So teaching is a big part, and showing them and helping the managers maximize their opportunities to make money while also lowering your RNM.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, and it's a great point, because what's in it for me? That's a classic line that, it might not be fun for a lot of people, they might not go out blatantly say, I'm not going to do that, what's in it for me, but at the end of the day, it resonates with people when it does come out of their personal accounts and their cheques and bonuses and so being able to your point, highlight exactly what's in it for them financially or just from a time perspective. It's really important to get buy in and that buy in at that level will then trickle down to every single level because there's motivation there, right?

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

Sure. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And so, as far as those are great short term, best practices to implement their long term, what do you see if you were to go in as a consultant, for a 10 unit restaurant, for example, and the first thing you would recommend for long term best practices would be what?

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

Make sure you have PM contracts in place and whatever you do, don't kill them. When budgets are cut, it's the very first thing that goes away and it goes away because people don't understand it. To this day, you will get calls from people that say, I don't understand why this broke. I just had PMs done a week ago. Well, I equate that to your car. I just took my car in for an oil change too so why did something break? Because the old change really has nothing to do with what happened to break on my car. The PM really has nothing to do with in most cases, what caused the equipment to break a week later. But the perception is one ties into the other and preventive maintenance stops breakage. No it doesn't. What you hopefully do is, by doing preventive maintenance and do it on a basis that continues over and over you give your equipment the best chance to succeed and live the life of that particular piece of equipment that it's supposed to. And hopefully beyond that, fryers always looked at fryers as seven years. If I did PM and I did the things I should be doing and we cleaned them as we're supposed to and bowled them out and did all the things we should I might get 10 years, 70 average but I might get 10. If I don't do PM I'm going to get five. So how do I do that and keep it going but people when they are in budget crunches the very first thing they do is we will kill PMs, and we'll bring them back. No, they don't. And when you do bring them back, if that is a case, way down the road, you're going to spend much more money to get them back into decent shape than what you could have spent by continuing. So that's one. The other thing maybe for a 10 unit chain, probably their RNM budget has been set on what did we spend the year before and we add a percentage to it, and that becomes our budget. But there's no real deep dive in it, I would do something like and I did it for a big chain. But I did full service contracts for dredge equipment HVAC and the reason for that was, I sat down with a trusted vendor, and said, we're going to agree to amounts for each piece of equipment, and I want to pay you X amount for the year. What that means is, if it breaks Monday through Friday, throughout the year, you come and take care of it for nothing. And I'm going to bet over the course of the year, that's a good program for me, why is it a good program for them. Because they may not get the business by doing straight repairs and maintenance because maybe their labor fee or service fee or combined fees are too high. So this gives them an opportunity to own that particular piece of the business. And the other thing it does, it stops my 10 restaurants from calling Jimmy who's our cousin to work on the oven, you're already paying a company, you have no other reason to call anybody else and then what that does is that helps me build my budget going forward for the next year. And I tweak it and adapt to it. But at least I am very close to what the budgets going to be. Because it's a fixed choice.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And in your experience there is that something where the vendor in that scenario would take more ownership because they don't want the emergency repairs just as much as you because they want to have their schedule planned out where they don't have any surprises where they're obligated to go out there. And, frankly, if they go out there once a year, they're making a killing off of it and the restaurant deployed all around, you might be paying more than you would. But it's working fine, you're going to get more of a longer lifetime on that piece of equipment.

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

What it does, it does two things for your vendors, it turns them from being a parts changer into a fixer. That is not in their best interest, go out there and say, Okay, I think here's the problem, I'll put a part in and if that doesn't work, I'll come back and do another part and it's a never ending cycle over and over because they didn't evaluate necessarily all the things that were wrong and fix them. By being on contract, every time they come out that's less profit. So the odds of them taking the time on the job to thoroughly evaluate what is the problem and get it fixed. The first time is good. The other things that a byproduct of that is while I'm here, and I thought it'd take me two hours to fix the fryer, but I fixed it in 20 minutes, I'm going to check all the other stuff and see if it's working so I don't come back because you're right. If they don't have to come, they make really, really good money and the goal is at the end of the year to be profitable for both, is that what my normal spend would be? Because here's what would happen at the end of the year, the company would take had we build you. This is how much it would have cost for this oven and here's what we charged you for the contract and you would work with them because obviously there's some pieces that are upside down. There's some pieces where they're making a killing because they don't have to come? Well, you adjust those up and down from year to year. So you try to get us as close as you can. People say well, you could come in there and the vendor could get stuck. Well, what you do when you start that contract is they come in and they evaluate every piece and they give you a list of needs and repairs that need to be done to get the equipment “up to speed” and then they take over the contract. That's their protection.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Something you mentioned earlier that really grabbed my attention was when budgets are really being looked at evaluated for the following year and there is a reduction in RNM. You mentioned that PMs are the first ones to go. Why do you think that is? For me it's hard to comprehend because being in the space knowing the importance of preventive maintenance plans and what impact that could have long term. But is that not as much common sense as I like to believe.

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

Again, most people don't understand it and when you don't understand it, it's a simple cut. Show me what we get out of it. I, as a Facility Manager can't necessarily show you I can tell you over time, but I can't particularly tell you at that moment, exactly what the savings are piece or what's going to happen. I know what it does to equipment over time. But it's hard to justify what that number is because there's so many variables that go into play, abuse at the restaurant level, a bad choice in a particular piece of equipment, many different reasons that cause it to fail early or whatever, you can't necessarily equate that 100% to be him or not. So it's really an understanding. And it seems, if you're the CFO, here's what we spent for PM. Well, if I cut that, here's how much money I save, surely I won't have that much in repairs. Well, you might or might not for the first year, over time you are. But it's a short term blip as what they usually look for is just an understanding. Unless you're a facility person most of the time the value of PM is not recognized.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, it'd be interesting to see the statistics out there and to quantify what difference that makes and in trying to have that out there, because you mentioned earlier having an example of the fryer where you'd expect seven years, that's the typical lifetime PMs, you would expect 10 years, well, that's a three year difference right there. Let's quantify that instead of having it as you'll get longer lifecycle that to me as a business owner doesn't mean much, right? It's like, cool, that's great, long term. But if you quantify it similar to your manager example, if you're saying it's going to cost X amount of dollars, you're going to spend three years earlier or in this case, if you're not doing PMs five years earlier, here's what's coming out of the bottom line here. That'd be interesting to me.

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

Sure and you have to look at the whole company as a whole, because what can happen is, you make a play on the fryers, per se, okay, well, we're going to cut the PM for a year and see what happens. Okay, well, the fryer ended up lasting longer than what I said, nobody wants to wait that timeline all the way up. The budget call is budgets have to be turned in in two weeks, I'm going to cut PM, there's nothing I can give you information was in two weeks, basically, besides me, and what history and experience teaches you to necessarily justify keeping versus non keeping, there's no real hard documentation.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton   

On that point, that's another great point to bring up is having that relationship with management and having them having to trust with you and trusting your opinion, your expertise, and you being at the same company for 35 years is certainly an outlier. But for people that are fighting that fight, and they're dealing with budget cuts, because we all know what's happened over the last year and that is going to be front of mind as we look forward. How could they have that conversation if they don't really have that data other than just trust me?

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

Sure. I mean, what I always did was, I fought for the PMs, and I would try to find a way to get the cut another way. I would have real honest conversations with my regional contractor saying listen, so you understand this is the amount of money that's out of my budget next year. Now, there's a couple ways you can go. We can go to cheaper vendors, which I'm dead set against, because it will hurt my restaurants. You can help me get creative and find a way to adjust your pricing that helps continue the volume of business you're getting without hurting your business. Find another way, maybe we change the way we buy parts, maybe we try to find a way to buy parts at a deeper discount. Maybe we stock, maybe we convince the people we buy the equipment from the stock more equipment. Maybe I'll work on free freight programs, used to be a program you bought three pieces at a time you got free freight. Okay, well then maybe I'll set up two or three warehouses across the country and I'll buy pieces three at a time and stuff like that and get some free freight which will lower my costs. As a long term facility person, you always look for, if I'm going to fight for something, I got to bring a different idea to the table, the money's coming out somewhere, I got to figure out where's it best that it doesn't hurt my restaurant. So you work on options. If you're brand new, it's very difficult to want fight the people above you on what the plan is, and how to be creative, you may not know enough, you might not have had enough experience to be creative to find this place. But I'll need to partner with my vendors together and be right up front and say, here's what I'm up against and I need your help

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And that's why people are listening to experts like you through this podcast so they can take that experience, go to their vendors and use your ideas.

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

And I mean, it doesn't always work. I mean, I've lost a couple of times where PMs got cut, but even then [inaudible 31:00], okay, don't cut it total, cut it in half, and live with it for a half and then I'll try to really work really hard to make a case that I can prove by not doing full PMs, what that cost us in repairs and downtime, so that I could bring it back, because some PM is better than none. We split HVAC PMs, from filter changes, which saved money, because PMs are done by HVAC techs. Filter changes can be done by anybody. So you could go to a filter company and all they do is change the filters, take the old ones out, put the new ones in, and you can save some money that way. So we adjusted how we did it, we still did same amount of work, we just did it with two different vendors. There's no need for me to pay a tech that's making $90 an hour to change filters when I can do it with a guy that does it for 40 because I'm not asking him to fix the equipment, I'm just asking him to change filters. You can do things like that to help.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

You've provided a couple of examples of things that you might not think of front of mind as you're looking to reduce your RMs spend with the leaking faucets. And now talking to getting creative with your vendors. Over the years, what are some other areas that you didn't realize or took you a while to realize that it was a money suck?

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

I think from an operation standpoint, not understanding vendor charges and what is a service fee. Nobody ever knew what a service fee was and it’s one of the reasons I went to contract because I took that out of play and it was a non-issue so I didn’t have to explain it three times a week on what a service fee is, like, well, the guy who service my equipment was just one mile down the road. How’s he charging me $100 for a service fee? Well, because the next time he comes, he may be 100 miles away. Do you want to pay per where they are? That didn't make sense. We set up an average fee and you had to explain that all the time to people. What was that? How does it work? How come if I placed a service call at 8am why are they not at my door? Well, because on their board, they had 10 calls from yesterday that didn't get done and those calls are to be done first, before they come to the new calls that come in. Okay, well, I'll just, every time I put a call in I'll call an emergency. No, that's not fair to the vendor and so you have to work people through these because they don't see outside their own window, or the company called and said the guy was going to be on site at 10. It's 10:30. Where is he? Well, he ran into a problem that is stopped prior to coming to you. Do you want him just to walk out the door at 10 o'clock and leave the fryer not working? If he was in your restaurant, you want him to stay till he's done? So it's an explanation again, back to teaching, to help people understand. Part of the job is understand your people and the restaurants and all the things that matter. Also understand what your vendor needs so that you can help communicate that to your restaurant people as well. I think that's one of the biggest keys that you learn over time. It's just the lack of understanding that those are restaurant managers. Their job is to get the food to the customer. Take care of their employees. Make sure Every meal is good. But they have a litany of things that they're responsible for. Not facilities, it's item number 20 and that's what my job is, is to help them and that's what my team's job is, is to provide that support and be the voice of reason to help them alone. Because for most of them, it's not in your wheelhouse at all.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Right? I love that. That's great stuff there and Danny as we wrap up, I really appreciate you coming on and once again, I'm going to read the quote that our mutual friend Josh said, one of the greatest people to set foot in the facilities world, and you haven't let down by any means so kudos to you. But before I let you get out of here, I'm going to have some quick hitter questions for you that I didn't prep before. So sorry about that. I'm going to put you on the spot. Who or what had the biggest impact on you and your career?

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

Two people at Ruby Tuesday that I work for; Lee Wallace and Dan Bettis, both were bosses of mine. Great leaders, no excuse leaders and if you look at my profile that I've set up on LinkedIn, I use the term no excuse facility manager, wrong is wrong, got to fix it, own it, take care of it, manage it and both those folks taught me. I worked for Sandy Beall, who's the founder of Ruby Tuesday, and I worked for him 35 years and learn tons how to manage, how to negotiate, how to never take no for an answer, how to drive a deal. Those things help me along and lots of people in my life, but those were my mentors that really kind of taught me how to do business and hopefully how to do business the right way because it's very important that when you do business with your vendors, it's a win-win. Not me win them lose, that doesn't work. Customer's always right, that's junk doesn't matter, either. It's you have to be a teammate and you have to be a partner, and you have to communicate. 

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

That P word partnership, absolutely. What was your biggest failure throughout your career at the Ruby Tuesday and what was your biggest takeaway from it?

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

I think my biggest failure was, it probably took me longer than I wanted to get to where I needed to be. I managed hard and I managed that I owned everything, and I would take my team off the rack, I wouldn't let them get hung out to dry and that was my way of being a good boss. What I didn't do well was learn to manage properly, early enough. I was excited, I wanted to be the best, I wanted my team to be the best and I thought by just driving and driving and driving those people that would get me where I needed to be and it widened. I didn't always manage the correct way and I had to learn that of how to give my team chances, let them go to the edge of the cliff. Let them get one foot over the ledge before you step in and fix something for them, because some people will just let you. But the other people are never going to learn as I had to learn without giving them an opportunity to fall down and it's okay to fall down. It's always about effort. I never really had a problem when folks would do something wrong. I had a much bigger problem in not doing anything, do something. Whatever it is, we can always recover, but make a decision. Don't wait. I think that's a long winded answer to learning how to be a better manager earlier in my career with people and I had great people and why they didn’t shoot me 100 times is beyond me. But I think I tried to learn and most of those folks who worked for me have really good jobs with other companies, some in the facility world, some and other pieces of business, but they are very successful and if anything in the world, I am extremely proud of what they’ve become.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, and I use that word failure. I look at it as a positive. I hate the negative connotation of failure and to me it's only truly a failure if you don't learn from it. You just keep doing the same mistake over and over and you just hit it on the head with letting your team fail and that is what you learned, what it took to be a good manager is letting them make those mistakes, because that's how you learn. I love hearing that and like I said, I hate a negative connotation there because, without that failure, you wouldn't get to…

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

If you're not failing, you're not trying, nobody is good enough that every decision they make or are forced to make or whatever, turns out right, it doesn't and I think it's what shapes a lot of people is that you learn and I learned in a much more positive way how to take care of people and be with people and it's funny, because now I'm on the vendor side, you do it all day and it's a whole different style than what you do sometimes when you're on the customer side with people, so you have to learn both.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, and I read this a long time ago, and I'm not one to remember exactly where I got it from, or what book or what author but it stuck with me where a bad decision is better than no decision which I found very encouraging because I make bad decisions all the time. But as long as you're learning from it, and you're constantly improving, and looking to learn from those mistakes and bad decisions, then it's going to at the end of the day, person and professional as well. But Danny, I certainly appreciate you coming on and sharing your story and best practices that you've picked up along the way. Where can people find you if they wanted to reach out?

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

My email is Dkoontz@Windycityaz.com. I'm on LinkedIn. I do a little podcast kind of thing called FM corner where it's, we're doing it for 16 might end up doing it for 30 weeks, it's a five or six minutes snippet of lessons I've learned, things that I can hopefully pass on that sometimes I've learned through trial and error, sometimes I've learned them from other facility managers, and to kind of put that out there to help people along, it's easy, they can listen to it at their own leisure. And if it helps them and gives them an idea of something that will help them in their daily job that's what it's all about because I always use my peer network to learn and my Google was to call the people who did the job for other companies and go I got a problem and I need your help and that's what lots of folks helped me and hopefully if I can do that to help someone else, that would be great.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Well, that's going to be in the show notes and so if you are interested, check out the show notes and I'll have a link there. But Danny once again, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for coming on the show and looking forward to staying in touch.

Speaker: Danny Koontz  

Thank you Griffin, very much for having me. Appreciate it.

Outro:

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