#24 - The New Wave of FM with Carolyn McGary

#24 - The New Wave of FM with Carolyn McGary

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 Carolyn McGarry joining me, Carolyn, how're you doing?

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

I'm doing really good. Happy to be here.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Well, thanks for taking the time to join. And really looking forward to this conversation. I know we've talked a couple times in the past, and you've got a million things going on in your day to day all surrounding facilities management. So I know you're really passionate about the industry, I've been looking forward to this conversation. So with that, just kick us off and tell us a little bit more about who you are both personally and professionally.

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Sure. So I am the quintessential overachiever, It's one of the reasons I feel that my brand of the Wonder Woman of facility management kind of fits. I fell in love with facility management in college, So I found a I'm kind of lucky, I found an FM degree program to join and learn about. And since then, I had a variety of roles in both project management and facility management. I am currently an assistant manager for operations and maintenance company, So we do operations and maintenance for federal government. I teach at a local university, facility management classes. I am a co-director for a nonprofit, I volunteer for another nonprofit. I'm on like three advisory boards and trying to stay active in my sorority.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

So is that it? Or do you want to keep going? Or? So the first thing you mentioned was You got lucky and you came across the Facilities Management Program in college. How do you find it? How do you discover it? Was someone telling you that they're in it and it was interesting or did you just hey, I need to take some classes and you fell in love with it?

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

I got to the end of my sophomore year in college and did not have a major yet. And so for our college, you had to declare your major by your junior year. So I was freaking out my fourth semester, I had tried a few different things. I was going to be a teacher, and I thought that was too hard. We'll get back to that later. I was going to be… I knew I didn't want to do music. I loved music, but I knew that wasn't gonna make me any money. I tried a few different things. Actually, I was going to be an aerospace engineer first but I didn't like calculus. Actually, I thought I was good at calculus but it turns out I wasn't very good. 

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Until you actually got in the class and was like oh…

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Yeah, until I got in the class and I got like a C and I was like, wow, I thought I did much better than that. Hmm, maybe I shouldn't do this for a living. So I was freaking out and I didn't know anybody taking the program. I actually spent probably a good couple of weeks in the Resource Center, taking little personality tests and whatnot to figure out what I might be good at. And I'd settled on architecture. But we didn't have an architecture degree program at CSU Pueblo. So I was looking around at what that might mean. I was like, well, Denver has some schools that have an architecture like master's program. So you can get a four year degree and then you can go do a master's program in architecture. I was like, all right, sure. So I looked for relative degrees, and I found facility management, which, looking back on it, the program lead for FM must have thought I was kind of you know, must have been laughing secretly at me when I said I wanted to be an architect so I was going to do facility management. Because then my first class was Facilities Planning and they made fun of architects a couple of times.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

So you were sitting in the course like, oh, wow, I'm an outcast here. They're making fun of what I want to do.

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Architecture isn't correct. Is this a good thing, is this a bad thing? I'm not sure.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

So you overcame that and getting poked fun at for, for choosing to be or at least thinking you're going to be an architect. And then did you just fall in love after taking courses?

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

After semester, I got voted in as Chapter President, joined EFMA. This was like way back in 2004. Joined EFMA, went to my first conference, and I realized that I didn't really want to go into architecture after that. It was really a lot of fun.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

So you getting voted in, that was the beginning of you just joining any and every organization, you could find around facilities management. Because now, you're a part of how many?

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Not really a member of like lots of them but I'm involved in several different organizations related to facility management. And I’d tell you a little fun fact. So when I was in college, so back to college, and I was applying for a facility management scholarship, through the from the foundation, I think they started doing scholarships back in like 97 or so. But I won the very first iteration of the leaf forest scholarship. It's one of those endowment scholarships. And I never met Lee forest, I heard she was really great person. And, but I got the very first one of the scholarships. And in my application for it, I swear, I'm getting around to the, to the meat of this; when I applied for the scholarship, you write a letter of intent. And my original letter of intent, I found the other day. So weird to see how my writing skills were like 18 years ago, but um, basically, I said that I wanted to, I had like two or three different goals. One was to earn my CFM. One was to serve on the board of directors. And the other one was to give back by teaching for the profession. So I've hit two out of three of my goals. I didn't even remember having those goals. But apparently, I said I wanted to give back by teaching. And I got my CFM like five years later after graduating, and the only other thing I haven't done to serve on the Board of Directors.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Not yet. And so go into and speaking more about you as a professor now, and giving back and teaching, so how did you actually meet that goal? And did you just… obviously didn't understand or you didn't recall having those goals; was that just something that, you know, you've recently said, I want to start teaching and just got involved in one way, shape, or form?

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

A little bit, yeah. So remember when I said my freshman year of college, I took a semester of some classes to think about going into being a teacher and I thought it was too complicated, I had to think about too many things at once.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, already with facilities managers thinking about a million things every day so…

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Yeah, facility… thinking of everything a facility manager has to think of every single day, I don't know what I was really thinking about, but whatever. Um, but yeah, it was like, I don't know, if I want to be a teacher; they got to think about so much stuff and pay attention to so many things. I guess I was just, you know, low confidence or something at the time. But it was probably in the back of my mind then for a while since I put it in that letter of intent. And shortly after I graduated, I was probably one of the last groups to graduate from that FM degree program. It had a low enrollment and our chair retired and left, so they closed the program through the university. And ever since, that had been the only FM degree program in Colorado ever, right. And ever since then, it's been one of my goals, but it's also been the Denver chapter school to get another degree program going In Colorado. Almost all of our scholarships that we give first priority goes to somebody local, that sort of thing. So I've been really passionate and I am really passionate about the future of FM. The idea that even since I was in college, we've been talking about everybody retiring out, there not being enough schools to teach it formally for four years before they graduate and enter the workforce, and there's just not enough of them. Not enough students, not enough degree programs. So we wanted to build a degree program. And we've been trying, a while. The trick that most people don't know is that colleges and universities, they run on a bit of a slower cycle that I think we're used to. 

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

How so?

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

They have a bit of that, like I call it aloha spirit where things kind of move a little slower. And so it took probably from the start of our conversation for this most recent one, probably three to five years to actually get the degree program approved at Metro State. So now we have it, but not everything is fully fleshed out. So there's, we've done I think we just got the last two classes approved, but they've never been taught.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Got it. So do you see that changing in that process? That being a more expedited process from, you know, the thought, or the identification of a school and then the actual implementation of that program?

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

I think it depends on the university, I think it depends on the kind of the state with the education looks like. And then I think it depends on the local support from the chapters. So we tried putting together a program with University of Denver a few years ago, or a few years prior to that, probably 2015 and we're really, really close. But the big thing they were missing at the time, and I realized what they needed now; the big thing they were missing at the time was real chapter support. Where, how could we provide chapter support, because most universities, it's a chicken or egg kind of concept. They won't develop the program, unless there's a bunch of students interested in willing to join the program. And the students aren't going to know about the program unless the program exists. So this is what happens. And most people, as we all know, don't even know what facility management is, right? They're like, what is that? Custodial? So, it's this big question mark. Right? So it's tricky to get everything started, which kind of leads us in over into the nonprofit I volunteer with. Because you know, in addition to, you know, the EFMA foundation is really focused on, I'm only volunteer for them, I'm not an official representative. So in case I mis-speak, but they're really focused on or they have been traditionally focused on accredited degree programs, so helping get programs accredited, and then they have been also working on helping get some of those programs started. But it's very complex, and it takes a lot of work. It’s a heavy lift. And our chapter really helped make this program work. A lot of interviews with different facility managers, even other ones I don't even know had been having conversations a couple years before I got involved, Darren was involved, from our chapter, Dean Stanbury was involved from our chapter and he and I kind of helped seal the deal and make everything work.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Do you think one of the big challenges is just standardizing what that program looks like? Because I mean, as we know, facilities management is such a wide variety of responsibilities and so it is hard to pinpoint and standardize what that really looks like to get people involved.

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Yes, and no. I think absolutely. I think if we can standardize some of the ways, having gone through the experience myself already, if we can standardize some of the ways that we approach the universities as well as helping say the need comes from a local chapter, they want to you know, Denver chapter wants to start a program and you know, the foundation is there, they're helping kind of make the case for hey, facility management is a really cool profession, the median salary is 90,000, four year degree programs are awesome, they handle the accreditation process and they have all of the little, you know, standard objectives. But for the chapter, if they don't have a bunch of, you know, college professors, we have no idea what any of those objectives really mean. And we don't necessarily know what to do once then it gets approved. Because the first question that was asked, once it was fully approved by the chair of the department was, alright, who's going to teach the first class?

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And that's when you raised your hand?

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Everybody was like… I'm like, alright, let's do this! 

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Checking off one of the goals. 

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Checking off one of the goals. I, you know, eased myself into it I guess; started teaching, I got qualified to teach the FMP through with EFMA. So I taught some adult learners, they’re usually a little nicer to you, right? They got to keep it professional. And then you ease yourself into college students; they're mostly having to, you know, take care of their education themselves. So that's not so bad. It's not like jumping straight into teaching kindergarteners or something.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Right. And so with that and looking at just how Facilities Management has evolved, and continues to evolve, do you believe that again, kind of going back to standardizing that the curriculum and as far as guess their core competencies, is there anything in particular that you are, you know, screaming from the rooftops, here's what absolutely has to be involved in this program?

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Oh, boy, that one's tricky.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

It's all tricky.

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Well, I mean, you know, try to explain what facility management is in 30 seconds; it's a tough elevator speech; unless you use the running joke I've heard of; this elevator wouldn't be running if it weren't for your facility manager. 

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

That's great. 

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

But it everybody has a different approach. That's why I think it would be nice to have that skeleton of here's the core things that we talk about, you know, if we're focusing from the EFMA standpoint, here's what EFMA’s core competencies are so how can we touch on each of these over the course of you know, a couple of classes, or you know, from that whole thing; like I said, the accreditation side has specific learning objectives, which touch, I mean, a relatively good amount of the core competencies. But some of those you can also cover with, for example, I took two extra classes for my degree program, and got a minor in Business Administration. So there's like a couple extra finance classes to have, because it's very business focused; it's hard to say what standard but I know where we're going with the standardization. Really where I see the standardization is if especially for new programs, or budding programs, maybe like a little mini book of here's what you should do, here's how you get started, here's what we think you should include, you know, but if you only want to pick five of these 20, you know, roll with it. You can really kind of keep going as you see fit. But to start somebody with too many options; I don't know if you've had this problem, but I have a problem for example, picking somewhere to eat, or going out to eat. And I saw a trick online that was if you have too many options, have somebody give you two options and then you can pick one of the two. Picking one of two is super easy. Picking one of 10, you know, what kind of food do you want today? I don’t know. So giving them at least some guidelines or some goalposts to work around would have made I think, my lessons learned for creating my own intro program from scratch and not using any of the standard, you know, certifications that I have was really tricky. So I'd say that I can't give specifics. I think that would be being so new myself would be like a little focus group of what would you guys include? A lot of it was business stuff. So personally for me, I included a lot of business stuff. So I started my class from strategy, and worked my way through, like, you know, leaders versus managers communication, customer service. And then I got into things like space planning and property management, little bit of business finance, maybe all the way down to big concepts like innovation, or using technology. You know, give them an idea of like what are some cool technologies that are out there that you could then utilize as a Facility Manager? And then innovation being a big point of we need people that are going to think differently in this profession. We've been taught that over the last year right? People who innovated thrived during COVID. People who didn't innovate, probably close their doors for good. Which is very sad.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah. And I mean, we've talked about that, I've had several conversations here on the show, just, you know, what… obviously, the impact of COVID, you know, it can't be ignored. But it really to your point, did highlight who is innovating. And that's across industries, I mean, you look at restaurants and how they got creative on having outdoor seating and meeting the six feet social distancing requirements, while also making sure that they're staying open, and, you know, paying the bills there. And so across industries that innovation is, you know, it's needed. And for facilities management in particular, that's not just a COVID thing, that is going to be every single day, you have to get creative, because you're going to come across new situations that you haven't before and you've got to think on your feet and do it rather quickly because you know, the whole building is counting on you.

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Absolutely. And I think the face of education is starting to change and we're going to see, hopefully, we're going to see soon, like I said, universities move a little slower, what that impact is going to be moving forward, we're finally going back to in person, but there are some of my classes that are going to be online still. And I know some students are really excited to go back to in person because they just learn in person better, you get a little more focus on what you're doing, you're not like, you get your camera off and you're like eating and doing your hair or probably just laying in bed, you know, with the laptop on your stomach type thing, you're a little more focused, because you probably showered before you came to class and had to drive, put real clothes on that sort of thing; gets you a little more prepared mentally. 

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, getting into the routine. 

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

That's going to be rough for some students. Other ones really enjoyed the flexibility of being able to work at the same time and at least in the case, for my classes, I recorded all my sessions and posted them for them so that they could if they missed something, or they got, you know, they were in the middle of something or miss class, they could go back and they could see what we talked about.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah. And we’re seeing that across the board right, where even you know, in the professional setting, people haven’t gotten accustomed to working remotely and you know, organizations are starting to adjust, allowing for more remote opportunity. And so it's going to be interesting not just with students, but across the working world having to get back into the swing of things.

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Absolutely. But for some of us, it's going to be the new thing, right? Wow, I might start taking the train.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Clearly, you're not here in Atlanta, where you have to deal with the with Marta down here, which isn't the most efficient. Maybe we get a facilities manager to work on the efficiency there. So switching gears and looking at the future of education in facilities management; I know it takes a while to get these programs up and running. And obviously EFMA is doing quite a bit to speed up that process and get exposure, expose people to facilities management. What do you see as some immediate things that can be done in the industry to address the concern that there's going to be a huge talent gap with people retiring and we need more younger people into the industry? What do you think we could be doing right here right now?

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

I think it's a combination of things. As evidenced by I'm pretty much involved in a little bit of everything right now. But I've written a couple articles on it, if you guys go look through the FMJ, look me up, I wrote a couple, kind of like how to guides about it, kind of what we've done and then I'm going to talk at World workplace this fall, if you guys are going to come to Florida, please do, I miss everybody. But I’m going to talk a little bit about that as well; things that have been working. What we've really found has been working actually is partnering with local workforce development. It sounds daunting to start with. But for example, in Denver, Dean actually got a hold of his local council representative. So like his local council woman, and said, Hey, I looked at some of your platform stuff and you were interested in this, this overall skills gap, right, and had a quick like coffee conversation with her. This was pre-COVID. You know, finally got a conversation with her, sat down and talked about future of FM and, you know what facility management as a career path looked like, and she got us a good introduction to workforce development. And so we got in talking to like their youth program group, their projects group, and they built a cohort for us. They found money, and helped us, all we needed was an instructor. Hello, Carolyn. How are you doing? And we taught a little pilot program and got, I mean, it sounds small, but we got, I think six students through it. Six of them graduated, we had eight total that started the program and six graduated and they got their essentials of FM certificate. That was workforce development looks a lot at the quick wins. So the things you could do right now to start getting people at least some basic ideas of what facility management is. And then they helped us help those students find roles in facility management, if they were still like super excited about it. Because workforce development, their main goal is to get people jobs. So why not help them get people jobs in FM?

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, I mean, that's awesome. 

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

I know, it sounds wild, but it worked. And then through a series of conversations, and I can't even tell you if it was because they knew that I was doing all of this stuff right, that I was super passionate about the future of FM stuff, somebody had reached out to me with an introduction to somebody in Hot bird Kitchen in New York. It's a program helping like immigrants and low income folks, folks that don't even speak English super well, helping them get jobs, you know, get good careers, get on their feet. Hot bird kitchen originally was mainly towards getting them into say, say baking or that sort of thing, right? That they wanted to expand, and they were looking at facility management. So how does this work? I connected them to the same program that I did, which was through the foundation, the FMA Foundation, and they just did their own cohort. So that's going to get talked about soon. California has done it. So these are things where it might be like a 6-week or it could be the shortest 6-weeks. I think mine was 15 weeks. And the students get into the workforce then; you know, they get some education, they get exposed to what facility management might look like for them and then we get them, you know, jobs.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

It's like a little boot camp where you see that… yeah you see that in technology, quite a bit of boot camps popping up where you have that, you know, 6 to 12 week, very intense, you know, education, where you're getting exposed, and then you go out and find your entry level job and you work your way up.

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Yeah, so that's one way that's starting to take off. Another way is through our nonprofit. So we, our nonprofit FM pipeline which is; I'm a co-director with Jim Zirbel, you might hear from on another podcast.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

You're spoiling the prize for the next episode.

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Yep. Jim founded FM pipeline team with a bunch of really excited mostly FM members, right, really excited about future of FM folks who realized, you know, they tried the college approach, they tried career fair approach. It's hard and like, just a 20 minute, you know, Career Fair talk to get students really understanding what facility management might look like, might feel like, you can hear words when somebody talks, but it really doesn't tell you a good story. So he stumbled into Skills USA, which is a career technical student organization. And these students, you know, it's kind of like FFA, or FBLA, they're a little jacket wearing organization. And these students are super smart, super excited. Some of them wouldn't have this opportunity anywhere else except when they're at school. And they're learning things, you know, some of the basic things like they have estheticians, and baking. So this is a place where food and hair can mix. But also like architecture, and engineering, they have plumbers, H-vac Techs, they teach people electrical, right, they have all these different career paths that line up with our industry. And so we stumbled into this thing where every year, each state has their own competitions. He's like well, what if we made a competition for facility management that allowed the student to kind of like go through some different questions, multiple choice questions and then like a little roleplay scenario, and a little emergency challenge to get them thinking like a Facility Manager. If they get excited about it, then maybe they pursue that as a career path. And we've been doing it for a few years now. And COVID, we expanded into online; I won't spoil too much. I know Jim will talk a lot about it. But one of the gaps we saw, you know, the EFMA Foundation and like I said, I'm not a representative of them, but they've been focused a lot on the degree programs, getting those degree programs rolling, getting them accredited so that they had a lot of, you know, good respect behind those. But the challenge that a lot of folks have, especially starting up right, is getting that pipeline of students in, getting students super interested in it and pursuing those programs. So that was the intent, the gap we're trying to close with FM pipeline is get them interested then give them scholarships to take college classes related to FM.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Addressing the you know, chicken and egg that you alluded to earlier of now we're you know, building up a pipeline of FM's, hence the name and hopefully, that will have, you know, a trickle down effect of having more and more programs being standardized, putting a bow on all this. Standardizing programs across the country, allowing people that are interested to pursue it in higher education and replenish the talent that we're going to be losing here over the next few years.

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Absolutely.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And so… go ahead.

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

I won't spoil it, but keep an eye out for the foundation, and their talks about an apprenticeship program.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

That's exciting. And that the theme that you know, we keep coming across here on the show is just looking at the future of facilities, management; everything, you know, all these different programs popping up everyone being on the same page and I haven't seen this in any other industry of you know, people arm in arm, you're trying to raise the industry and raise awareness about what facilities management is, because that need is certainly there. And so that has been something that getting into the industry has been very unique from my standpoint is here is the goal and everybody working together and getting creative and as we said earlier, facilities managers are some of the most creative individuals out there and when you have a whole country of innovative creative thinkers that have the same mission, then some cool things happen and I'm looking forward to seeing where that really goes.

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

A whole world of them actually. 

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

A whole world of them. Yeah, exactly. 

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Best Innovation I had for online classes was this last semester I had a gentleman from India talk to my class, I had a gentleman from Dubai talk to my class, a couple from Canada, you know, from all over the US, but then also, you know, out into the world so that they got more of a global perspective of what facility management would be.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, and shame on me because I've talked to a couple of folks from the UK and Canada.

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Yo! You’ve been schooled! 

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Exactly. So wrapping it up and one last question I've got surrounding you know, your journey and getting into it; what's one piece of advice you would give someone that's interested in… I know, it's tough question. Because I'm sure there's more than one piece of advice you can get out there but you're absolutely go to, what is the number one thing people should do if they're just interested in facilities management? If you want me to keep rambling for a few more moments and give you a couple seconds to think about it, I could talk about anything.

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

I could probably ramble and then I could find the nugget after I ramble.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Well, now it's on you. The spotlight is on you.

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

So for somebody not in facility management yet, but wants to learn more? 

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Correct. 

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Oh, goodness. There's a few different ways, but it really just Google it is what a lot of the youth today do, right? And they're gonna find a few things. They might find whatisFM.com which the foundation, you know, created, and they're working on continuing to update that but it's, you know, the basics of what facility management is, what types of subjects it covers, what kind of career paths it might get them into, I think it rolls over to the job posting board so they can see what kind of jobs there are. Our FM pipeline.org has some different things that talk about facility management. I don't want to spoil Jim's talk too much, but in case he doesn't cover it, very soon, this goes back to googling it, we’re going to YouTube. Right? We're going to start a little video series to talk about what facility management is. So little 10 minute teasers essentially of what is facility management? Why is facility management of value to any organization ever? And then what are the different things that facility managers might know? So things like, you know, technology. You know, we talk about technology for like 10 minutes. How about operations maintenance, talk about ONM for 10 minutes, or risk, or innovation, all these different pieces that, you know, students who are maybe interested want to hear a little bit more can hear about it or then teachers could use in their classes to give short bursts of information to students.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

So what you're telling me is there is really an endless amount of resources out there to at least get you introduced and it's only becoming more and more popular to your point having the YouTube channel coming up pretty shortly. But really immersing yourself in what it is and kind of taking the initiative there on learning what a facilities manager as best as you can describe what exactly that day in a day out looks like.

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Yep. Because no day is ever the same.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yep. So Carolyn, last question and I asked this to everybody; who or what has had the biggest impact on your career?

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Well, I'm glad you said or what. Because I don't know if I have a specific who but I would say the biggest constant for my entire career since college has been EFMA. Might sound a little cheesy, I know. But I've been a member of EFMA like I said since 2004. So for somebody my age, I'm still a millennial, I’m the on the far end right, to have been in EFMA pretty much half of my lifetime means that facility management and our organization has kind of been my family for longer than say I've known my husband which can be pretty interesting. But yeah, I'd say that the networking I've had with it, I think it had a really big impact on me especially early on. Like I said, I got coerced into being president and then I went to my first role workplace and pretty much everybody just adopted me. I have even people within… when I graduated and moved to the Denver chapter, I got adopted right away and everybody wanted to see me succeed. I don't know of any other associations really that I've been in or that I can think of that adopt you so quickly, and are just like, we want you to succeed 100%, come with me and help to make that easier.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And with your answer of EFMA, I mean, you did kind of address the who is well, it's just not one individual person. It's just, you know, the group of people that you've met over time through the organization. So, yeah, I mean, getting involved in any one of the organizations you're involved with, is something that, you know, I would highly recommend, just from a networking perspective, but to your point, it is a family and people want to see you succeed, they want to lift up the industry as a whole and so just getting involved, you know, taking that step to get involved.

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

Yep, take that step to get involved, join an association. I tell my students or I told my students that I think four times over the course of the semester, at least four. And a couple of my guest speakers touched on it too, was, you know, I'm really excited to be a member of the association and the networking and the access to training and that sort of thing that I had was just invaluable. And then you know, don't be a mailbox member, you know, be involved because you never know who you're gonna run into.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

That's how you actually connected. Well, Carolyn, thank you so much for joining today. It's been great hearing your perspective and your journey getting into facilities management. Where can people find you and reach out to you?

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

A few different ways. I'm definitely active on LinkedIn. So look up Wonderwoman McGarry, I think is my actual LinkedIn title now, but or just Carolyn McGarry. If you find the one with all the Wonder Woman stuff, you've made it.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

That’s you… okay. 

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

That's probably the easiest way. I'm also on EFMA’s engage and some other places but I do pay attention.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Well, thank you once again for coming on. It's been a pleasure catching up, and we'll talk soon. 

Speaker: Carolyn McGary  

All right, thanks. 

Outro:

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