Dave Stockton is the Senior Facility Manager at Brinker International, a global leader in the casual dining restaurant industry. Dave has over a decade of experience managing high-risk, high visibility projects with changing priorities that are characterized by significant financial and business impact.
Before his current role at Brinker International, Dave has worked in various facilities and management positions at companies including TDIndustries, Lone Star Steakhouse, and Topgolf.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Dave Stockton and Greg Owens discuss the pandemic’s impact on supply chain issues, labor shortages, and changes in the economy
- What does a typical day look like for Dave in the restaurant industry?
- Dave’s favorite software tools — and what he loves about being a facilities manager
- How to make sure your various customers are happy
- Dave’s plans for navigating future regulations
- Advice for those looking to make a career transition into facilities management
- How Dave began his journey in facilities management, and why culture is so important to him
In this episode
Have you ever wondered what a typical workday is like for facilities managers in the restaurant industry? Are you thinking of beginning a career in facilities management, but not sure where to start? Dave Stockton, a Senior Facility Manager for restaurant chains across Texas (and beyond), is here to tell all.
According to Dave, you don’t need a technical background to get into facilities management. However, you do need to be flexible and multifaceted. Dave says that every day brings something new, which means it’s vital to keep up with technology trends, work through unforeseen emergencies, and deal with difficult markets — all while keeping the customer happy. So, how does he do it?
Dave Stockton, Senior Facility Manager for Brinker International, joins Greg Owens and Katrina Stephenson in this episode of Watching Paint Dry. Together, they discuss the dos and don’ts of working in the restaurant and facilities management industries. Dave talks about the challenges of the restaurant labor shortage, how he juggles various tasks across the field, and his advice for anyone looking to begin their career in facilities management. Stay tuned.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
- Greg Owens on LinkedIn
- Katrina Stephenson on LinkedIn
- McCarthy Painting
- McCarthy Painting Contact No.: 415-383-2640
- McCarthy Painting Email Address: info@mccarthypainting.com
- Dave Stockton on LinkedIn
- Brinker International
- Corrigo
- Sheetal Ohri on the Watching Paint Dry podcast
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by McCarthy Painting, where we serve commercial and residential clients all around the San Francisco Bay area.
If you have commercial facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area and need dependable painters, visit us on the web at www.mccarthypainting.com or email info@mccarthypainting.com, and you can check out our line of services and schedule a free estimate by clicking here.
If you have commercial facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area and need dependable painters, visit us on the web at www.mccarthypainting.com or email info@mccarthypainting.com, and you can check out our line of services and schedule a free estimate by clicking here.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:03
Welcome to the Watching Paint Dry podcast where we feature today’s top facility managers, property managers and property owners talking about the challenges and opportunities of managing hundreds of 1000s of square feet of real estate and how to beautify and improve their properties. Now, let’s get started with the show.
Greg Owens 0:31
Good afternoon or good morning whoever the case may be. This is Greg Owens with the Watching Paint Dry podcast where we are continuing to talk to facilities managers, building owners, property managers and all the support industries including contractors in this entire industry. This podcast is brought to you by McCarthy Painting. And McCarthy Painting is my company and we were started in 1969 1969 by my uncle Fred McCarthy, and we service the entire San Francisco Bay Area. If you’d like to learn more about McCarthy Painting and the things that we do both interior and exterior painting projects, give us a call or check our website out at McCarthypainting.com. And I’d like to introduce Dave Stockton of Brinker International, the senior facility manager for Brinker. And they have 1600 restaurants in the across 31 different countries. And it’s I’ve eaten at Chili’s many many times Chili’s cook Bar and Grill and Maggiano’s Little Italy I have not eaten but we’ll have to check that out soon. So Dave, tell me like how are things going? You were just talking and saying that you were having to manage the whole entire state of Texas all the Chili’s down there? What’s going on in your world? And how are you holding up?
Dave Stockton 2:00
Well, I’ll tell you where we’re just kind of, you know, COVID has changed our scope of work that we have to do for our restaurants so drastically because of Well, right now supply chain issues are one of our biggest issues. And not to mention the fact that, as I said earlier, we have a guy out that’s on our team with COVID right now for the past two to three weeks. So I am, I’m just barely treading water right now. And dealing with the issues down there picking projects up in the middle. We all know how hard that is at times to pick up projects in the middle of a project. It’s you just have to figure out what’s been done so far before you jump into that. But I’d say the biggest thing right now for us is supply chain, getting parts getting equipment when we want to replace a piece of equipment that struggle is is real. I mean, we’re looking at 16 to 20 weeks on certain pieces of equipment, pieces of refrigeration equipment, and some outside equipment.
Greg Owens 3:05
Yeah, I mean, it, you know, even hit affected us massively. And I don’t realize how it’s affecting every industry, we keep running out of paint and paint products and materials for paint products, and then special parts every once in a while. But it’s but that actually running out of pain hurts us the most right? Because, you know, we’re trying to get out there and get projects done. And then all of a sudden, they’re like, No, we don’t have any pain and won’t be here for two or three weeks. What’s what is going on? In with you guys? What do you what have you guys uncovered or seen why there’s the supply issues still going?
Dave Stockton 3:40
Well, it has to do with labor shortages. I believe they are 100% right. I mean, right now in the restaurant business even getting truckers to deliver product I saw communication come out recently where they’re looking for volunteers to drive vans around the Dallas Fort Worth area to deliver product to our restaurant. Now in the Dallas Fort Worth area, we have approximately I’d say 70 restaurants and you know trying to keep them fully stocked for our guests is is that’s that’s a struggle as well. Right. boils down to manpower and not having people to make the equipment and then in you know, price increases have been rampant with with almost everything. I don’t know if you’ve seen that on your side of things.
Greg Owens 4:25
Yeah, we just got an announcement saying paints going up by like 20% or something like that. Because I think what their main reason was that they need to make up for all the losses they’ve had this year. Yeah, you know, these challenges. I was like, Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, yeah, that’s not fair. Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, yeah, it’ll be interesting to see if they have record profits. Then this year too. Because of that, right? It’s happened or in the past, I’ve seen that kind of thing. So the labor, restaurants and labor were struggling with labor and where, you know, looking for constantly looking for carpenters and painters and that kind of thing. You guys looking for cooks, restaurant employees, what do you see happening that what what where did they all go? And why aren’t they coming back to work
Dave Stockton 5:16
yet? From what I’ve asked the same question. I mean, you know, whether it goes down the whole road of, you know, any I’m not going to get political on that and in a response, but I don’t know what those people are doing. You know, even in my department alone, well, we’re down, we’re down a few headcount as well, we we’ve requested additional headcount for this this fiscal year. So hopefully, our fingers are crossed that we get that, you know, it’s it’s where everybody has to run as lean as possible. And then, like I said, when we lose someone, right, you know, as we have right now, due to being out sick, it’s it’s a, it’s a, we’re at full tensile strength, our team is in it, anything more could cause someone to snap a rock. I don’t know, I really can’t answer where the people went. Or is there just that much more work now? With with the, with the economy booming? I don’t know.
Greg Owens 6:20
Yeah, the economy is booming. And what I see is like a lot of people that like the gig economy is booming, too. And so I’ve seen like, even restaurant workers and my own some of my own employees, just leaving and going off on their own, right, and being able to pick up jobs and make enough and, you know, and my high tech friends are all still traveling the world in a lot of ways, right from the San Francisco Bay Area, they’re, they’re just still having fun in different parts of the world. And, you know, working from there, it’s an interesting moment in time, for sure.
Dave Stockton 6:52
It really is, I mean, you know, we’ve all become pretty flexible, and where we can work. I mean, if you’re in the, in the type of capacity that, you know, like, like myself, I’m remote, I’m based out of my home. So I could essentially work anywhere but you know, as far as productivity goes, I’m probably most productive sitting here at my desk, having multiple monitors being able to multitask and, and work that way. But, you know, getting out to visit restaurants to to restaurants pay, you know, to look at capital expenditures, you know, larger projects, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s pretty tough sometimes to try and get out there when you’ve got your phone’s constantly ringing while you’re trying to capture that information while you’re out in the field.
Greg Owens 7:38
Yeah, and I can only imagine how it is possible that you are managing so many different restaurants and restaurants, you know, my experience in the restaurant industry is things are breaking all the time. They mean it’s being used all the time walkthrough a little bit of like, what a day looks like for you, in this industry.
Dave Stockton 8:00
Probably to start my day is to to, you know, restaurants or you know, restaurant managers are in those restaurants till two, three in the morning at times. And so, you know, when, when the, at the end of the day, you know, there’s a whole lot of that comes in overnight. So I start my day picking out what has come in overnight, making sure that we work within the crago workorder network, here at Brinker. So picking up those service calls in seeing what has come in have they been assigned to the rec vendors have they have the restaurant managers chosen chosen the correct asset, you know, that’s super important to ensure that the service request is dispatched to the proper vendor. So just checking through all of those things and then going into the emails that come in overnight as well. And then you know, managing quotes that come in from our vendors, our vendors are working at night because they’re all so busy. And here in Texas, we’ve been running around 100 degrees for the past week. So it’s been it’s been the refrigeration equipment walk in equipment and air conditioning you know it’s struggling right now with this kind of heat that we’re having. managing those quotes throughout the day as they come in and then then you know, those be ready for the curveball that that is an emergency that we have multiple of those, you know, per day or you know, they call me a word worries, what do I call for this? My restaurants on fire? What do I do? I mean, you know, I smell gas. It’s one thing to the max, my drains are backing up. What do I do? You know, what do I do about this? So it’s just managing you know, we we have to know who to call for everything in our room.
Greg Owens 9:54
Yeah, and I can only imagine too is like you pick the vendor. And and you have them scheduled Everything but then there’s like a follow up to that, you know, I have to do the same thing with with the subcontractors we have Katrina on this called tos works in my office. And she knows this, where, even though we have the subcontractor going out to the project that we have to call to make sure they showed up at the project that they got, they got what they needed to get done. And then that follow up and that’s a lot of management on that side. Right to even if you’re working with people that you’ve worked with, for a very long time, I
Dave Stockton 10:28
would think, yeah, absolutely. I the way I handle my job is the restaurant teams are my customer and and and i the bit my vendors are true refract reflection of me. And so working out first first thing is to choose the proper vendors and choose vendors that you can trust the high level of integrity and provide a quality product and service to make sure that they’re keeping my customers happy, which are the restaurant teams that’s most important in and know if you have quality vendors in place you really there’s no need for follow up because you know, they’re taken care of I have a pretty important group of vendors here, set up here in the Dallas Fort Worth area. Now I have vendors that are out in East Texas and West Texas and I also have Southeast New Mexico restaurants, some of those remote markets, sometimes you’ve got to choose the best of the worst and some of those markets from time to time, it’s pretty difficult. And then you know, I’m also responsible for five Maggiano’s Little Italy, which that’s a whole different animal that has been thrown on top of us not thrown that we’ve been, we’ve been asked to take care of I shouldn’t say that we’ve been asked to take care of and and I now have a restaurant in Seattle that I’m responsible for as well. And that is a very difficult market to work with inside of a mall. And anytime you have mall management they have to deal with that’s also another hoop that you have to jump through. So it’s it’s just everything everything’s different every day. That’s I I feel like there’s days, you know, pre COVID we were able to get out into the restaurants and and visit restaurant teams provide training, capture some of those capital expenditures, but it’s just more difficult to get out in about nowadays than it was. And they’ve there, they’ve kind of taken an alley cat and trying to domesticate us by putting us at a desk that that makes it pretty tough sometimes. With our things have changed for us.
Greg Owens 12:40
Yeah, that’s a that’s a big adjustment. You can see within your industry massively, it’s how much more you’re doing remotely and not doing site visits and having eyeballs on the ground. How what is there any tools or any software that you’ve come to like in this period of time to make that job easier?
Dave Stockton 13:00
Well, Corrigo is something we have implemented since the beginning of this this calendar year, we implemented that around March April timeframe. And that Corrigo has changed our lives drastically with the amount of communication that we have to say, you know, as far as to send out as far as emails and stuff like that. Are you familiar with the Corrigo network and not
Greg Owens 13:21
know it, but it sounds to me like it’s like a ticket system like work things are put in there. But then they get tracked to completion with a database of all these different functions that you can put into like a calendar and have all the information that you need, and make sure that they have filled out all the forms and things like that, that your company needs. And it’s
Dave Stockton 13:43
it’s essentially a web portal at each restaurant. So so and we choose all the vendors that go into that system. So it’s just basically it’s a web portal go in there, my walking cooler is down. They enter the young they choose to walk into there as the current issue, what’s going on with it is automatically dispatched to the vendor with the expectation of a two hour emergency two hour emergency being that they are expected to at least accept the call within two hours. Well, we have a number of different escalation points and timeframes for that. So then the mandate, the work is completed the vendor invoices through that. So it’s all digital through that network. Now, all the invoices, they’re also paid out of that system as well. So and we can handle everything from the smallest repair to a, I don’t know, $100,000 you know, capital remodel, or some sort can be managed through that system. Right. Yeah, that’s
Greg Owens 14:47
that sounds great. It sounds like a really good way to organize. So it’s been a life changing. Hmm, that’s really good. That’s a good Chrisman for that company. Yeah. Well to get somebody from that company on our product, Because that would be good to chat with. So, in, in a lot of ways, like this podcast is something that I’ve been doing to sort of shine a light on the different aspects of being a facilities manager because I think for some people this is a wonderful direction career choice. And you know, especially there’s so like you mentioned earlier every day there’s something new something different going on, right? And you’re having to completely use like critical thinking and problem solving and be a generalist and know so much about a building and its contents and how it interacts with the people. What else do you are you really enjoying about this industry in this job?
Dave Stockton 15:44
career one thing about it is we have to remain cool, calm and collected at all times where we received phone calls from from managers from time to time in an emergency situation. I mean, the person may be in tears at that point. I mean, they do and they don’t know what to do and, and we have to just, you know, know who to call. My background is HEPA, same refrigeration, I’m a former refrigeration technician you know, that that background and I rely upon that on the daily and having that technical background and knowing how to communicate with the technicians who are out there on the service calls when they call me and tell me what’s wrong. I’m also a former trade school instructor. So I’m, I know exactly what you’re talking to me about and I and there have been times when I’ve asked them Well, did you check this Did you check that was the superheat what is what you’re on any piece of equipment, you know, just to be able to talk to talk with those guys and girls, it’s crucial for the success and what I do before I came to Brinker International is my second time around but prior back in 2007 I made the change from being a contractor coming over the facilities side of things Brinker was my customer and sold service to them and so it’s it’s it’s huge. The technical background is now not everyone has to have that we also on my team have former restaurant manager we have a former area director who is a long long time employee with the company. We’ve got a master electrician we’ve got other HBA same refrigeration guys, we’ve had tile guys, we I mean, just from the trades, this is a great transition point career path for anyone to come into it just someone just as to be ready for a lot of attention from the restaurants. And it’s, you know, any any time of the night. I mean, it’s Friday today, I probably will receive some phone calls this evening with with emergencies. I mean, that’s just what you have to accept that that’s the life that we live, that we’re going to constantly be on call seven days a week, 24 hours a day.
Greg Owens 18:01
Yeah, and I can see you having those skills. Being in the restaurant industry, you having the skills of refrigeration and hva see is incredibly important, right? Because you know that if the refrigerator stops working, the whole restaurant goes down in a way. And, but I also know that for me, I came from painting and I painted for 10 years of my life. And I have all those technical skills. I also have to dial that back a lot when when I’m when I’m dealing with clients when I’m dealing with my employees and stuff because it’s I’ll get too into the weeds of technical stuff too fast and too easy. When I need to be like focused on the big picture. Did you have a little bit of that kind of transition? Well, yeah,
Dave Stockton 18:45
at first I did. One of the things that when you know, technicians like to talk, they like to tell you every detail what and I know you can probably relate to this, you know, I just need to know snippets in the middle and then what’s it going to take to get the job done, you know, I don’t need to know all the technicalities of what you need to provide me I need this walking through or working I need this icemaker repaired whatever it may be I need I don’t need to know what I don’t need to know every loan term and pathway that you’re going to take to get there. Just give me a just some bullets from the middle and then tell me what the cost is going to be and let’s move on to the next issue. Yeah, they like that they have a lot to say.