#7 – Real Estate FM with Dan Santiago

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Episode Summary

Dan Santiago, Sr. Manager of Workplace Operations at Peloton, sits down to discuss his career in Facilities Management.


Dan highlights his transition from residential, to commercial real estate, and the importance of a preventative maintenance plan.

Enjoy!


Episode Transcription

7-Real-Estate-FM-with-Dan-Santiago


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  

Good morning. I've got with me today Daniel Santiago with Peloton. Daniel How you doing today?


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

Good? How's everything with you?


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

I can't complain. Well first of, I appreciate you taking the time to connect here. Really interested in going over your career path getting into facilities management and how you got in with Peloton here in 2020. But before we jump into those details, give us a rundown. Who are you both personally and professionally?


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

Sure. Well, first of all, thank you so much for the opportunity. My name is Dan Santiago. I have been working in facility management for over 15 years, I've done a myriad of different types of facility management, whether it be residential, commercial, so I've had a lot of good experience and exposure. Personally a little bit about me is I am a huge geek. I love Star Wars. I like to kind of read a lot. I'm really into obviously different things like that. That's a little bit about me, personally and professionally. 


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Gotcha. Very cool. When you started your career, what really drew you to facilities management.


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

What’s interesting is I live in New York. In New York what actually brought me into it was my dad started, well he's a doorman on East End of New York. So one of the big things is they do summer relief and during that time, usually whoever's in the union, they provide an opportunity for the kids to come in and do summer relief. They cover shifts. So that's actually how I started. I started just doing like Porter work, stuff like that over the summers while I was going to school working other jobs and that's kind of my way that I started working in buildings.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Interesting and was that something where you were really excited to have that opportunity? And I guess how old were you when you got that opportunity?


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

What was interesting is, I was absolutely excited to get that type of money at 18. To be quite frank, it was great because it allowed me to kind of see the back house workings of a building. I used to always have the experience of walking into like a luxury building, but never really understand what it took to run it so with doing summer relief, I got to see some of the things and be really granular with some of the cleaning, some of the pumps, stuff like that, like things I would have never seen before. That really like opened my eyes and I was very hands on. I liked that aspect of it.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

You got to peek behind the curtain of how everything operates there. Very cool. That piqued your interest and from that introduction to facilities management did you know right then and there, it's like, okay, I want to do this?


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

What's interesting is, during summer relief I was also working at FedEx. So the summer was the second job I was doing it for the extra money. It is definitely something I knew that I could do. During that time while I was doing that 911 happened. When that happened, it was a huge, it's very tough to get jobs. I actually moved over to Pennsylvania for 10 years. I was in the Lehigh Valley and there I was able to cut my teeth in construction. So it was another facet of kind of building of facilities. I did that for about 10 years and then guess what, we had the economic collapse down in 2009. I was moving back to New York and looking for a job back in facilities. During the time there was a friend of mine, who was like, Hey, listen, they're hiring for a building on 13th and 11th Avenue. There was nothing being done on 13th 11th Avenue. It was just the train, shipyard, that's it, nothing else. I went over for an interview and I had obviously a lot of mechanical skills, but I didn't have New York skills. Because I didn't have New York skills, no matter how much I've done in the past, it was like okay, but it's not the same as New York. I had to start as a cleaner and I was like, you know what, give me the opportunity, I'll take it and I'll show you what I can do and during that time, I took it. It was a new construction building which most people in residential don't like to do. New construction tends to be very hard and it's very transient for employees because it's not such shifts. You still working with construction personnel in the building, you're flipping apartments, people are moving in. There's a lot of punch list thing. It's tough. I took the job I said listen I'll take it, took the job. I was working easily at the time, anywhere between 12 to 16 hours a day, running around doing everything. Within three months, they made me the handyman, three months after that they made me the head handyman and then after another three months, they made me the assistant resident manager. I actually assisted the facility manager for the building. The building was 37 storeys and 364 units. (crosstalk 5:29) It was all new construction? All new construction, all class A luxury which is tough too because you're not tough, but the demographic of people you have coming in. At the time you have people coming in renting a car, we had an apartment there, that was $10,000 a month, including nothing. Now you're walking through with people for rentals and of course normally you think kind of like a new car, right, I get a new car, there should be no problems. Most people think, Oh, I'm moving into a new building so there's no problems. That's not the case at all, the building's guinea pig, you're going to teach us where the issues are at. So it was really, really interesting to kind of deal with all different people, find out some of the issues and then really learn about stretching mechanicals, because when your mechanicals first get opened up, when they first turn them on, there's a huge stretching period, even something as simple as your elevators. You go on your elevators every day, we take it for granted, we press the button, we jump in, we go upstairs, but we don't understand that first year, all the ropes are being stretched. There's a lot of maintenance and a lot of commissioning so I would have to learn how important commissioning is for new construction buildings and you're negligent on commissioning, you're going to have years of problems.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

How do you stay up to date and ahead of those maintenance issues? Go into the example the elevators where they're brand new, they're stretching out like, obviously, that's something you got to be proactive on. How did you manage that?


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

To be very honest with you, that first building was very Lord of the Flies, I'm going to be really honest with you. It was a lot of learning by trial of fire, which was good. Really I learned by because at the time my manager, this was his first time opening up a building as well so we were both learning at the same time. But it was this building that trained me on how to open new buildings. One of the first things was for example, the water pumps, the elevators, they got commissioned, they got turned over the turnover process wasn't done correctly, I learned that after the fact wasn't turned over properly and then what was happening was we were having a lot of consistent issues with them. What I did was, I got with a third party consultant, we did a retro commissioning, went through everything brought in the right vendors fixed everything up and that's actually where I was really propelled in the company to start opening all the new buildings because I put in a lot of parameters on how to do it successfully. Because I learned, you learn by falling, right? How do we learn, we fall first, then we crawl then we fall again and then we stand up and then we fall and then we're starting to walk then we run and this was really that place where I cut my teeth where I was able to say hey, you know what? Okay, this is where we made mistakes before now we have to do this. Now the nice thing about the company I worked for, at the time, really great family owned company. Don't really want to give their name, but they're great. They're here in the city and they were a three phase company. They did development, building and management. It was huge. The nice thing about working for this company was that every new project, they would bring in the management team which then I became part of the management team and say, Hey, listen, these are the hits and misses on the last building. These are the things that we can do. Can we do this to mitigate it and every time they made a new building, it only became better. It was good. That first building all the heartaches, all the tears, especially we had came in with a full steam system. Steam is very, very, very tough if you don't know what you're doing. You have typically a very vac system, which is what it's doing is it's sucking down the condensate. If one thing is not working, it throws off the whole system, a lot of maintenance, a lot of making sure you're watching what you're doing there. As I continue to progress with the company and each building, it became better and better. The next building after that that we built was a 47 storey building tower in Williamsburg, New York, so it was on the waterfront. It was 509 units 47 storeys and then I took that one over and with some of the things that we learned from the other building then we were able to implement some safeguards.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

You mentioned the core team went from each building on to the next one.


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

Actually no. What typically happens was after I finished with the first building, they promoted me over. I became a resident manager and I took over a building in Chelsea. It was a condominium 347 units at nine galleries and the reason why they promoted me over there was because it was destroyed by Sandy. So the whole first floor and basement and the resident manager who was there at the time, just turn in the key and says I'm done so they brought me over there because of the fact that it was construction. I went over there, within a year and a half, we were able to fix everything, put everything back in place, but it was a lot of juggling. The insurance company wanted like for like, so if you had a leather wall, they want a leather wall they don't want to agree more. If it was stone tile, that's what they want back, they don't want to see marble so it was a lot of that. I was able to finish that project in a year and a half and then I moved over to Williamsburg. At Williamsburg, what they did was basically my job was to not only help to stabilize the building, so go through the commissioning process, hire the team hire strong, then I would transition out, I would then hire the new manager and go to the next project. Me and my family, we were moving every year to year and a half. One of the benefits of living in the company was I was able to live in any property, any of the new properties so I would live in the property that I was working in and then after I was done, I would then move to the next one. Something as simple as that, that really nice picture you have behind you. I didn’t even have pictures because I knew I was going in a year and a half. I was like painting, furniture and then we are out.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

It can never really get settled. On the flip side of that the commuter just walking out your door and being at work isn't too bad.


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

No, you're absolutely right. There's never traffic from your door to the lobby, however, you're never off. When you're done, you get to go home and I'm done for the day. I'm walking in like I'm done for the day. and then it's Danny, I know you're off but


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

The blinders on and just go straight ahead.


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

But I will tell you that it was great experience for me because in New York typically anybody who's done resident managing in New York, they know that depending on the size of building, it really goes with age and tenure. How long have you been in the industry? At the age of 30, I was already taking over 347 unit building, that's unheard of, really, really is because the building industry is very who you know, how much do you know and when it comes to resident managers, people don't typically jump from building to building unless, for example, money or size of apartment, that's really the reason why they jump. So for me to be able to go from there, then to all these buildings, and then it'd be exposed to development, be exposed to construction, be exposed to development budget.  I learned a lot like, Hey, listen, we're opening this new building, I need $600,000 worth of startup material, oh, let's put that into the development budget because they have the money for it and then we're able to get these things and trying to get as much done during that time while development constructions there because once they're gone, a building's budgets very lean. Once they're gone, it's really on your budget. There was some times like, for example, with other construction guys, I had a really good rapport but at the end of the day, even though we're the same company, we all had our own budget so there's a lot of elbowing in there. So being smart, not I'm cutting off my nose to spite my face. So for example, if I really need something really, really important, I would get it however, on the flip side when they need something from me, I relent because we need this to get this going because it’s our customers who is the people who live there. It's not an office building, it’s  people who live there. I was with this company for close to 10 years, really hard decision for me to leave and I went up leaving and that's how I got into commercial. We work at the time before the botched IPL and I came in to fix a lot of the buildings that they had (inaudible13:55).


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

So tell me about that transition going from the commercial side or the residential side into WeWork where, I mean, those facilities, you've got potentially hundreds of tenants and different organizations that are probably reached out to you of hey, x y & z needs to be fixed and this top priority to get this fixed because it's interrupting me and my company. Tell me about that transition and what takeaways you had from the first industry you're in and how it translated to WeWork.


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

The difference between doing residential and doing WeWork was really based on the building and the lease structure. WeWork their bread and butter is they essentially lease the space and they release it to whoever is working or whatever small companies are working there, which is fine. The problem that I found was, they gave me a portfolio of about two, three buildings and during that time, those buildings, they were mixed, they were a mixes of residential and of office space. The problem was, that the buildings were actually commercial buildings originally, and they retrofitted it to be both. So that was a huge, huge issue and one of the other issues were the lease agreement. A lot of this stuff was really on WeWork to fix. The one building that I had to go over, it was actually down in Wall Street. The big thing with it was they were using anywhere for energy consumption is a very small building, it was like 1.2 million, which is unheard of. So I had to do a full retro commissioning go back and I found that, honestly, most of the issues were just normal maintenance wasn't done to any of the mechanical systems. Once we did the normal maintenance, it changed everything. It's a big testament to facility management, how important maintenance is. If you're not maintaining the thing, whether it's your pumps, whether it's your mechanical systems, you're going to see the change not only in the fact of how efficient it is, but in your budget, you're going to see the change and it's huge. For example, let's say $3,000, for typical quarterly pump checks, something as small as $3,000. If you're not doing that, now you're looking at anywhere between 20 and $30,000, to refix, all this stuff. I dealt with it in construction, but when in construction, the difference was it was handed over, and then I took care of it well. Here it was handed over and it wasn't touched in three years so it really opened my eyes to Okay, these are the things we have to do and then honestly, in New York, commercial versus residential, there's a lot of things that you have to do in commercial that you don't do in residential, you have to have verify life safety, you have to make sure that you're doing all your local laws. Like in New York, you do your local law level, which is, you're outside making sure that all the bricking, the facade is good. You do that also, however, you have local law 84, you have local law 26, you have all these different local laws making sure that you're compliant and that, God forbid, if something happens, the (inaudible 17:05) apartment deal, like everybody's fine. It was making sure all of those items were compliant as well.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And so go back to the maintenance piece of that. Every industry has their own standard that they have to follow, from preventative maintenance standpoint, the way I interpret what you're saying that when it's not done properly, you're not staying on top of that quarterly inspection, or whatever that PM would be, it's really going to cost you in the long run. Did you have the ability to actually quantify how much you are saving by spending the small amounts on the front end for preventative maintenance?


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

I actually I was. The one thing I will say about WeWork that I really liked. So you work for your org and then you have depending on your job title you have a dotted line over to another org. I worked under the one org, which was working on the buildings, but I also had a dotted line over two facilities management. I got to deal with a lot of great people on the facility side. I will tell you that when I took over this building, they told me from the beginning, Danny, all these things are problems here. We need somebody to come in to help to fix it, to see what it is and really fix it. I got to work with the regional director. Now when I say regional for WeWork regional for us was United States, Canada and Israel. Huge problem. So I got to work with him and he started looking at the trends and when he started looking at the trends, he's like, Danny, I started getting emails every month of how much we were saving. It came to the point where we saved almost $800,000 by the end of the year, because of just something as simple as going through the pumps, going through all the fixing, we had a lot of pumps running on hand. Anybody in the industry knows hand is temporary, it's only for Okay, I got to fix this really quick. It's not working, throw it on hand until the pump guy comes and then we fix it. By doing all these small little incremental things it saved huge amounts of money huge $800,000 is huge, no matter how big your company is. I started getting emails now from because that WeWork is very at the time the hierarchy for is very large. I started getting like huge emails from people thanking me, can we do this in other buildings? What can we do? And it was me and another young lady, she worked on the retro commissioning team and because we kind of spearheaded it together now they were looking to duplicate it everywhere else because they're like, How did you do this? I called in a vendor to fix it. But I got to be honest with you, it was kind of like throwing that stone in the middle of the pond, but able to see the ripple effect and how large it got.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

You mentioned that it was close to $800,000. That was just over the three buildings. That was one building and how many buildings does WeWork have in its portfolio?


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

I had to be very honest with you, just to put it in context, WeWork is the largest LISI in New York. It’s huge. They say 100 buildings, I couldn't even tell you. We have multiple H cues. Like it's huge. It just was at the time, they were huge. They were everywhere (inaudible 20:38)


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Right. I could imagine, you're saying the impact of preventative maintenance, as nearly  a million dollars that one building and if you extrapolate that over their entire portfolio, that's a big number right there for just doing the preventative maintenance and making that small investment on the front end.


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

Yeah, it was huge. It was huge but it also showed me that, this is a portion of facility management that sometimes people don't look at, what you're doing on site really does make a difference because sometimes facility managers and depends on the building or the company. Facility management can be looked at, as you're managing the building, but also you're doing like the budget. In other companies you're just working on the pumps, you're working on the back of house, that's it, you're the facility manager. But it goes to show that anything that you do on site, and you do correctly, it really has a lasting effect on multiple things. It has a lasting effect on your tenants and how they feel, it has a lasting effect on the quality of the building, it has a lasting effect on the budget, which is huge. Those things that you're doing that pump that you fixed or that pump that you greased today, it might seem routine, but that small thing saves you so much money.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And the hassle of having to deal with someone else coming out with an emergency repair and we all know the emergency rates for vendors can be through the roof.


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

That's for sure and I will say that's another thing too.  It's one thing being smart on what you're doing, the other is having the right vendor. So for me, it's always you RFP, you get three bids, but the lowest bid is not always the right bid, you got to get the right bid and if the bid is in the middle, but they're going to do right by you, I'd rather pay the money to sleep at night. We were able to bring in really strong vendors who came in, kind of looked at what wasn't done, and just fix it and it was great and there was a huge turnaround in the building.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, it's certainly one of the things where you get what you pay for. If you're looking to pinch pennies on that front, you're just going to end up paying that much more whenever you have someone else come out and have to fix their problems they created.


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

Exactly. And to be honest, and I don't mean this in the wrong way but I find that sometimes to be the wrong lens and it's a very old school lens of okay, we always got to save money, I get you we do, we're going to make the right choices. But are we saving money just to save money and have continued problems? Or are we investing like that has to be a level of investing into your building.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Pennywise and a pound foolish? So looking at your career at having the experience of both the residential, and then the mixed building that you're at with WeWork, what were some of the biggest takeaways and what piece of advice would you provide someone that is getting into the facilities management space?


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

What I've always told people who I've helped to develop is, keep ahead about you. Listen, facilities management, there's always going to be something different, which is why we get into the industry. It's always something different. You're not in a cubicle, you typing numbers, it's always something different every day, but keep your head about you. It's about especially when you have a team under you be like a duck, like you're calm at the top, your legs might be going a mile a minute under that water, but you're calm because your team is looking for reassurance, so be calm, and honestly a lot of it has to do with just making really good decisions. Even sometimes if you make a mistake, if you made the decision with the right heart nine times out of 10 it's going to be fine. Like just keep your head about you don't get freaked out. There's a huge issue, keep your head about you make good decisions, and it's all going to work out in the end.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, and one last question. I like to ask everybody who or what has made the biggest impact on your career.


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

So that would be from my first company. I had the privilege to work for this gentleman, his name is Irving. He was one really gave me my shot. He saw that I was really strong and he gave me my shot. He was like listen, Danny, I'm going to give you your shot and I'm going to tell you this most people don't get this but if you do good, all the doors are going to open for you and you know what, his belief and I'll be honest with you, his mentorship gave me a lot of good. One thing in construction that I learned, and then I learned from it, and then I use it a lot with Irving was in construction, you'll notice that most of the older guys who are there, they don't want to mentor the younger guys. Why? Because the other guys always think they know everything and there's an annoyance. So it's like, Hey, you got to do it this way. Now, I think I'm going to do it this way. Who wants to be bothered with that? So when I was being mentored in construction, the first thing I would always ask my guys, like, how would you do it? And that says, they will look at me like, if I was crazy. How would you do it? Well, what do you mean how would I do it? Yeah, well, you've been doing this a long time, I don't want to waste my time bumping my head just tell me how you would do it. After I learned how you do it, then if I need to make any changes, I can, but I just need to and that's what helped me. So with Irving, when he would come, he would give me a lot of good advice. He was basically insulating me and teaching me of some of the mistakes that young people make in the country. So for example, we were going to these huge meetings with investors and everything else. Danny, don't say anything, just be quiet. Listen, because the first thing that a young person wants to do when they want to meet, they want to talk to show how smart they are to say, Hey, I should have a seat at the table. Just be quiet. Listen, because as you're listening, you then get a lot of the information that next meeting, you'll be able to give really good feedback. So I learned a lot of good habits from Ernie, he taught me a lot. He taught me when it comes to the building, when it comes to our customers, we do the right things by them. It's always about the service and that's kind of the focal point of how I've done things and that's how I've always developed my team's like, listen, it's about our customer base, whoever that is, whether it's residential, whether it's an office doesn't matter. If they're not happy, then we're not doing our job. So let's just do the right thing, always forefront doing the right thing and everybody tends to be happy and that Irving was the one who helped me out the most. Aside from giving my shot, he really showed me really good presets and a lot of years of experience that helped me to kind of jump very quickly.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Mm hmm. Yeah, everyone I'm speaking with that answer that question, they always have one person in mind that mentor them and really took him under their wing and that is critical for anyone trying to move up in their career.


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

It's so critical. For me with my construction background, I didn't tell you what I did in construction. What I did was I worked for plumbing and HVAC vendor. I started doing just at home, and like install stuff like that and then I moved over to full construction. I did full construction plumbing. My first project was a hospital, which anybody who does construction, especially when you're doing plumbing, you already know, during that pipe hanging it, it's an animal, it's hard work and I will tell you that what I learned in construction was aside from getting good mentorship, there, a lot of times guys don't want to mentor you and I find this a lot where it's almost like they're scared for you to take what they have, which is so silly. It's such a silly boy process and I always tell myself, you know what, God, if you give me the opportunity to mentor people, I will mentor them and I will give them everything because for me, knowledge is free and that's honestly what I did and a lot of times in my residential company that I worked for, for 10 years, I was able to develop people who were started out as porters who were cleaning, and they are managers now, because for me, it's about this two different types of people, there's people who want to be mentored, and there's people who just want to stay where they're at, both are fine. But if there's a person who wants to be mentored, give that to them, provide that and nine times out of 10 when you provide that level of opportunity people don't forget that because you've changed their life, you've changed their family's life, you've opened up opportunities that they wouldn't have had before. I do my best not to be a bottleneck as a manager. I do my best to kind of look at okay, these are some areas of potential, let's start really magnifying that and also, especially when you're developing a person, they're going to have sometimes bad habits. That's okay. But it's about what you magnify. I always like to magnify the good, we will work at the change on the armor, those small little things will work on those. But Let's magnify the good part because you can't always just focus on willingness to this. We're all human. We're looking for something. 


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

I couldn't agree more there. With someone interested in getting into facilities management, what's a big piece of advice, what the first step would be getting into facilities management.


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

There's two avenues, you have the avenue of doing schooling first and then applying which is fine. Then you have the avenue of people who have kind of gotten into it, whether it be word of mouth or they were working in the building and got promoted into facilities management. My suggestion would always be there has to be a marriage of both. There has to be a bit of schooling but there also has to be a level of hands on because I've worked with people who were Master Plumbers but couldn't let a pipe so there has to be a really good marriage on both. There has to be that hands on, because those experiences, those tough times, those are really big opportunities for you, those tough times will never leave you. If you had three pumps that went down out of nowhere. Building has (inaudible 30:37) of condenser water system, nobody's getting air conditioning, once you fix that problem, you're never going to forget that. So when you see something that's similar to it, you're already on top of it, okay do this, this and that okay. Done. Don't run away from adversity or challenges. It's important, these are the things that teaching you that you're going to never forget, and you'll be able to pass this on to the next person you develop, so has to be a marriage of both hands on and schooling. For me, don't be scared to take a position that you seem low on when you're breaking into a new industry. That's okay, I did. To be quite frank, in 2009, when I took that it was in New York, it was a non-union building at the time, I was making like $13.50 at the time in 2009. But you know what, I looked at the growth, and it quickly changed for me.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

You kind of leave the ego at the door and with the right company, once you lay that foundation of who you are as a person and the work ethic. What happened with you, I mean, three months later, you got a promotion, another three months, got another promotion, another three months, you got a promotion, so it's really just getting your foot in the door and leaving the ego at the door and  that's a great example, your career there.


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

We all have to cut our teeth somewhere and sometimes you might start in a company where there might not be any growth. Where might be, this is the top, that's okay, but they can't take away your experience and you take that experience, you go to the next place. It's all about getting your foot in the door and being okay with that. I met with a lot of young men and women because I hire both and nine times out of 10, they're like, Oh, well, I want to be where you're at, okay, you want to be where I'm at, Okay, grab a broom and grab a mop because that's where you're going to start. In order for you to be successful, where you're at, you've had to go through the progress. There's a process to this thing and every step that you're currently taking is preparing you for the next step, and the next step, and the next step. So there's no circumventing line just jumping from the top, because if I did that, I would have failed miserably. But by going through I learned, okay, and that's how I was able to be extremely successful and the job that I'm currently at. So it's been great.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, and when you're managing people, it's tough to just be that guy that points and says, do this and you yourself can't do it. It makes managing that much more difficult. So having gone through the entire progression of start out with the bottom and moving your way up is definitely helps out even managing people.


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

And to be honest, when it comes to management for me, I've always had a huge bind with my staff, because they know I'm never going to ask them to do anything that I'm not going to do. If I'm asking you to do it, it’s because I absolutely do it and there's times where Listen, when something happens is all hands on deck. I'm in there with you. Let's get this done. I’m not here to just point oh, jump. Jumping in there with you, let's do this. Let's get this done and that’s what really then propels them and stuff. Okay, if he's doing it, then we definitely come on let's go.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yep, absolutely. Well, Dan, definitely appreciate the time here this morning as pleasure talking with you and learning more about your background and your progression up through the ranks and certainly appreciate the insights.


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

Oh, thank you so much for your time and even giving me the platform to kind of just talk about my background. I appreciate.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Absolutely. Well you have a great rest of your week and we'll talk soon.


Speaker: Daniel Santiago  

Okay, sounds good. Thank you so much.


Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Take care. 


Outro:

Thanks for listening to another episode of the modern facilities management podcast. Make sure to subscribe for future episodes and visit our website stratumcommunity.com for more facilities management content


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