Mashona Marsh is the Facility Manager for Subsea 7, a global leader in the delivery of offshore projects and services for the energy industry. Mashona has been in the facilities management industry for over 28 years, building his strengths in strategic planning, communication, facility and human resource modeling, and resource coordination.
Before joining Subsea 7 in 2001, Mashona worked in facility services at Mercer and was a Site Manager for Alliance Strategic Business Services. He attended the University of Nebraska at Omaha and won the gold medal for 110m high hurdles at the 1975 Nebraska State High School Track and Field Championships, setting the record at 13.8 seconds.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Mashona Marsh discusses the work Subsea 7 does and his role as Facility Manager
- What is the biggest challenge Mashona is facing during the pandemic?
- How the power outages in Texas affected Mashona
- Mashona’s background as an athlete — and the perspective that helped him achieve his goals
- How Mashona got into facilities management
- The culture surrounding Mashona’s name
- The benefits of being a facilities manager and Mashona’s advice for those looking to enter the industry
- Mashona’s powerful philosophy: take time to solve issues
- How Mashona succeeds in his career: don’t panic!
- Mashona talks about his past DJing experience
In this episode…
How do the best facilities managers solve the most difficult problems?
As a record-breaking athlete-turned-facilities manager, Mashona Marsh has lived through some challenging obstacles. His biggest piece of advice for working through them? Look beyond the hurdles. There’s often a fear of failure when you come face-to-face with a big task, but when you keep your goals at the forefront, you’ll push through whatever comes your way.
In this episode of Watching Paint Dry, Greg Owens is joined by Mashona Marsh, Facility Manager for Subsea 7, to discuss the challenges of the industry and how to overcome them. Mashona shares how the pandemic affected his work, advice for achieving your loftiest goals, and how being thoughtful and composed can help you become the facilities manager you’ve always dreamed of. Stay tuned!
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Greg Owens on LinkedIn
- McCarthy Painting
- McCarthy Painting Contact No.: 415-383-2640
- McCarthy Painting Email Address: info@mccarthypainting.com
- Mashona Marsh
- Mashona Marsh on LinkedIn
- Subsea 7
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.
We’ve been in business since 1969 and served companies such as Google, Autodesk, Abercrombie & Fitch, FICO, First Bank, SPIN, and many more.
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 0:02
Welcome to the Watching Paint Dry podcast where we feature today’s top leaders, industry experts and more to discuss issues affecting facility managers and property owners. Now let’s get started with the show.
Greg Owens 0:22
Hello everyone this is Greg Owens with another episode of Watching Paint Dry the podcast where we’re we’ve been interviewing facilities managers, property owners, business owners, and all the support services to this entire industry of of facility management really. And this podcast like all our podcasts are sponsored by my company McCarthy Painting, it was actually started by my Uncle Fred McCarthy in 1969. Here in the San Francisco Bay area, I started working for him when I was 16 years old in the company and actually doing the painting. And nowadays it’s a it’s a lot different company back then it was just him and I painting and then we’re a little bit bigger, We service the entire San Francisco Bay Area. And we both both in the residential and commercial space. And a lot of the commercial work we’ve been doing has been for startup companies like Zooks and spin and then legacy companies like Chase and Guru and other companies like that. If you want to find out more, go to McCarthypainting.com And you can request an estimate or see what our services and I’m really happy to have Mashona Marsh on our podcast. He is the facilities manager at Subsea 7. I want to say sia but it’s Subsea 7. And that is a company in the oil energy space, which we’ll find out more about how are you today?
Mashona Marsh 1:58
I’m doing fine. I’m off work today. Have a good day so far.
Greg Owens 2:02
Oh, would you get Friday’s off? Is that typical? Or is it just today?
Mashona Marsh 2:06
We work? nine hour days during the week and we’re off at noon every Friday.
Greg Owens 2:11
Oh man that’s great. Yeah, you know I so tell us a little bit like flex time or something like that.
Mashona Marsh 2:16
flex time sometimes people work over it kind of depends on what you’re doing for the day but I normally get off at
Greg Owens 2:23
night. That’s great. Yeah, we we try to do that. But then like work seems to be filling all times of the day lately. Broadway, the way the economy is going? How is things in you’re in Houston? How are things in Houston in general with the pandemic? Where are you guys at? I love finding out my news from when I had these podcasts about what’s going on around the country.
Mashona Marsh 2:45
Well looks like of course, they still got people getting shot, you know, getting booster shots, and regular shots and to get people to get their first shot doing pandemic, which some people have it, but me and my wife of course, we’ve got our shots in the booster shots. I know quite a few people that have gotten their shot so and you know, school was started back and that seemed to be going really well here. There’s really not really any problem with the kids mission school year as of right now.
Greg Owens 3:14
That’s great. That’s great. So things are feeling more and more back to normal for you guys
Mashona Marsh 3:18
are normal. Yeah. Especially with the traffic.
Greg Owens 3:21
Oh, yeah. Well, that’s that’s crazy. I don’t know about you. But like here in San Francisco Bay Area are skyscrapers are still still only at like 20 to 30% capacity. But traffic is that like 100% or more? Right? rebrand me make Right? Which is really odd. Is that Is that something similar like that happening in Houston.
Mashona Marsh 3:42
But it’s pretty similar. We work in three days a week, and it’s kind of a work of sci fi basically. But there’s a three day flextime you can pick the three days of the week at work at at the building or are enough to at home, but the traffic is still pretty heavy, regardless of do we have that flex time over three days? We find that out. But we still really did.
Greg Owens 4:04
Yeah, right. Right. Right. And the last time I was in Houston was pre pandemic, that there was a lot there was a considerable amount of traffic, it’s it was starting to feel more and more like LA where, where there was traffic on both sides of the freeway coming and going, right? Yeah, but um, so tell me a bit about the company you’re working for now and your role there. It’s great to have somebody in the energy space on the podcast, right?
Mashona Marsh 4:28
My company Subsea 7, we like piping OSHA, say when shale oil and chemical when they find oil and gas at the bottom of the ocean, We’re what you call the plumbers. We go in and put in the pipe flow lines up to the reason flowing platforms. Plus we also have our regular ships, we don’t have barges, which we transport some of them products into this into the pipeline and then to
Greg Owens 4:55
the right and so so this is you guys will work for any of the big oil companies then as a sort of a subcontractor where you’re laying the pipe that they need on the site or
Mashona Marsh 5:07
right on the shape of where she works seabed, the surface. So you’re on the seabed, relate them flow flow flow line pipe, right to the regular rate flow and reason platform.
Greg Owens 5:17
And that way they can get the oil from the from the ground up, up through the water to a barge or to a ship that doesn’t get
Mashona Marsh 5:25
the door where I bring the shirt right, or Chevron and basically all the big Oh,
Greg Owens 5:30
wow, man that is that is some complicated logistical going on,
Mashona Marsh 5:35
we have robots that people are coming to guys on the ship, and there’ll be in front of a big jam screen. And they have a joystick, where they’re sitting there like look like a video game, we really watched it and they’re wheeled in and moving things around and expected the pipe recording. There’s a little robot that goes along the pipe, like look like it’s disparagement to the bottom of the ocean. And it’s going along the pipe making videos stopping zooming in, zooming out, then it keeps going.
Greg Owens 6:04
So the robots are inspecting the pipe on the seafloor
Mashona Marsh 6:08
on the safer route, especially after we put in the construction. When there’s a hurricane. We’re one of the companies that go in there and fix that pipe, take it out, boom, put it back in, basically inspect it or
Greg Owens 6:22
inspect it, check it out, make sure it’s not leaking oil is getting into the ocean. Man notice that guy? I don’t go off. What? Yeah, what I’m really excited about is that my there’s a future for my nephew who who’s playing video games all day long, right? He’s a, he’s 11 years old. So it’s, it’s great that he’ll be able to, because he’ll be good at that right to man, those little? I wouldn’t be good at that, I would, it would be fun for maybe an hour. And then I would be like, I need to move I need to get out of this room. He could spend like 10 hours straight, right? Like looking at something like that.
Mashona Marsh 7:00
That would be perfect for him, you know, to look at all the different pipelines and say, I’ll be working, you know, they draw them up, you know, and go from there drafting from their video screen. They just caught on on the pipe and move things around.
Greg Owens 7:15
Yeah. And that’s interesting, because I have some friends that used to be working in the oil industry. And they would they were divers where they would they would do those visual inspection man. No work was That’s hardcore, like divine.
Mashona Marsh 7:30
Right. We should have a shallow water where we’ll go with the divers, but we’re out of that part of this in the deep
Greg Owens 7:37
water. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It mean it’s the that that stuff’s labor intensive, and only a few people can handle that kind of diving, deep work and that kind of thing. Right? And then my one particular friend, he was welding underwater too, which was, that’s a whole nother world, right? And what so what kind of infrastructure? Do you guys have facilities wise that you’re managing.
Mashona Marsh 8:02
So we have a four story building? I think we have basically, I would say 80% of the building. The other 20% is other for more smaller company. And I facilitate basically the fourth floor, the second floor, which we have the entire floor and a half of the first row. And we pretty busy with you know, all the different office up in the office nice and off of office once in a different service.
Greg Owens 8:29
Right. And are you guys back to 100% at the office? Or is it sort of based on what people’s needs are?
Mashona Marsh 8:37
We’re back at 100% of the office but we’re working on a three day shift where they’re on in office and other two of course they’re at home work from home, but I’m a hands on guy I’m there every day five days a week? Yeah, because my job requires me to be there for all the building needs and dirty ones and all the different services
Greg Owens 8:57
right right. Yeah, totally the building the building never sleeps right?
Mashona Marsh 9:03
Right. I’ll take care of services basically the office me coffee services. Oh, man. Oh, we have cool cars. I take care of the shipper and receiver. Also any building magnets, which I really don’t handle the actual hands on. I’m kind of the facilitator which I take care of make sure it’s all done complete.
Greg Owens 9:24
Yeah, it’s that’s that’s super common these days. We don’t see the once upon a time there was facilities managers that would actually do a lot of the mechanical work that’s been more and more rare, where it’s gotten so specialized right, it’s really hard to both manage and manage different crews and be mechanically inclined to like do the HVAC or, or fix plumbing or something like that. I mean, of course, you could do little things. But it gets tough. People don’t quite understand that that those fields become so specialized
Mashona Marsh 9:55
where we are building tech that takes care of basically all the Office move, right versus me going out there, you know, fixing the bathrooms and you know, fixing the blinds and things like that. Yeah. That’s done for Formica.
Greg Owens 10:10
Yeah, yeah. And I know me, like when I get into like any kind of plumbing project or something like that, that I’m doing personally, it’s like five trips to the most we don’t know enough. And I don’t have all the tools and I don’t have all the parts, right. So it’s like, it’s good to stay in your lane in a lot of ways, right?
Mashona Marsh 10:27
Well, you can always go go, you know, things to see if I can fix it. If not, I’ll call a contractor out. But I’ve gotten a whole lot better about fixing things at my home. Coming forward. Money as everyone else
Greg Owens 10:39
has also. Right, right. Right. And you’re like, how hard could it be? This kid on YouTube could do it? Yeah. Yeah. And it’s, you know, it’s an interesting world. That way, I know that when I was a kid growing up, and this is in the 70s, and early 80s, it used to be that I would get like, new tricks to riding a BMX bike from the magazines that came in, right, like you’d watch them, you know, you talk to your friends, you experiment with your friends, but every once in a while, you’d see something in a magazine, and you try to replicate, like, you know, this, this trick for you see in it, which is incredibly hard to do, right. And nowadays, you can like, watch some kid in Japan on YouTube and, and be able to like, wow, and slow it down and get every little detail what they’re doing. Right. Right. It’s pretty, it’s pretty amazing. It’s also I don’t know about you, um, it’s hard for me to look at those and emulate it. Right. Like, it’s not, it doesn’t come as intuitively as it does to my nephew’s kind of grown up.
Mashona Marsh 11:44
Right. He’s used to the techniques and all that, right. Where, yeah,
Greg Owens 11:47
like, like watching a video and then like emulating that, what the right. And I think that’s a good skill. Like, it’s a good, it’s a new, it’s a new, it’s a newer skill. And maybe there’s people, you know, my age that are doing that, too. There’s probably about there, but it’s, it’s definitely I find that there’s others that are better at it,
Mashona Marsh 12:05
or something I’m not gonna try my best.
Greg Owens 12:09
Right, right, right. And what so, you know, this has been a super challenging last, like, since this pandemic, what amor, there’s been a lot of challenges being a facilities manager, what is the biggest challenge for you now, right? So we’re not, we’re still in sort of this pandemic, we go kind of go in and out. And there’s times where it feels better than other times where it’s not going so great. But what’s going on for you guys, as far as challenges were or what
Mashona Marsh 12:37
the building, when the pandemic started, of course, everything was working, you know, different coffee services, I handle all that. And you know, things there’s normally used on a normal basis course, when the pandemic started was working. And then people left, that was just me and it guys, for the last 5% of building, things start to leak and it wasn’t working. Because it’s like, just like a car. If you don’t drive it, it’s not gonna run, it’s not gonna sound good. It’s not gonna turn good. So a lot of things were this night, breaking down, of course, I had to maintain all of that still calling the service about the services was short, with time, and help. So things kind of just added up. And I just made my list and walked around and made sure everything’s working. So when they did come back, things were kind of on the positive side was still some things are working,
Greg Owens 13:28
right. Yeah, people don’t realize that about buildings, buildings and vehicles. And I use the term hanger rot like plane that just sits in the hangar starts to grow super fast, like it won’t be air worthy, really quickly, if it’s not being used on a regular basis, right. And buildings and houses and things like that are the same way. It’s always amazing to me how much damage is caused by not having sort of human beings coming and going through a building and using it right, right, right. And as long as little, lots of little things go wrong to
Mashona Marsh 14:02
right. Now that they’re back, everything is pretty much work. And there’s kind of two parts to have the basics though, with people using them kind of breaking things. And things I do have one problem is when people make coffee sometime they push the button twice. And that’s what I call a Three Mile Island. It just flows everywhere. And of course, I got no sir. I know. That’s fine. Right? What I do have a note of just push the coffee button once and we won’t have that problem.
Greg Owens 14:27
Right. Right. Right. Yeah. There’s a lot of training. Yeah, there’s a lot of training the humans how to use things to
Mashona Marsh 14:35
run right, some simple as that, you know, you hit it, it makes a little noise, it doesn’t hurt or push it again and you get a double.
Greg Owens 14:41
Yeah, you know, it’s funny because like we used we’ve done a lot of retail painting. And I remember the manager was talking to me about the baseboards and how damaged they were. And he’s like wow, if I can just get the customers from stop banging up these baseboards, right? I got he’s like he doesn’t even know While they’re doing it and I’m like, not the customers into your night cleaning crew, I think we need to get a vacuum with some bumpers on it because they’re hitting. Yeah, like something like this is something’s up with the vacuum cleaner because this is not good. It’s it needs to be replaced with something a little bit. You know, Jim Moore
Mashona Marsh 15:21
Jennifer had other work to do. You can tell they hit things
Greg Owens 15:25
off alone. Either that or they’re just angry, right? They’re coming in at night, late night. They’re not happy about this.
Mashona Marsh 15:32
I’m sure. San Francisco.
Greg Owens 15:36
I do. Yeah. Right. I mean, I’m just have you been to San Francisco?
Mashona Marsh 15:40
Oh, no. I have some cousins in Vallejo.
Greg Owens 15:43
Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I’m on that side of the Golden Gate Bridge and a lot of ways that that’s northern Cal north of San Francisco. And I’m about 45 minutes from from Vallejo. Yeah. Hi. Okay.
Mashona Marsh 15:55
I’ve never been there. But I know I haven’t been Diego recently about six months ago. Yes. And I like Southern California a little bit better. But yeah.
Greg Owens 16:07
Yeah, I was just in Venice Beach and in Southern California is a special place. It’s it’s really nice. Along the beach. I mean, I find the beach down there is just absolutely right. Yeah, here it’s a bit colder and but it’s still very beautiful. I mean, today’s a nice, beautiful sunny day just had a bunch of rain, which is unusual for us. And this time of year we get usually get a little bit of rain, but not this amount. How did the when we when did Texas freeze was that this year,
Mashona Marsh 16:38
that was this year in February where of course we went through the part where the power went out. Mm hmm. What you saw on TV was real. The power went out then was that was like below 30 for like three days and power will come on, and then cut off, like cut on and off. Me and my wife came over I did make coffee to the stove, which we had a gas stove. So we wouldn’t go out and pour coffee through a filter. And we had hot coffee. Oh yeah. Like you really couldn’t cook because it was dark at night and it was cold during the day. And the cooking was hard. What do you have to clean the dishes? So you got paper
Greg Owens 17:20
plate. And that was three days, right? Three or four days,
Mashona Marsh 17:24
three days and three days of cooling off and power will be off dusty at night was extremely cold. It’d be blowing smoke in the house. And you look outside everything was frozen like he was up north. Oh, wow. That is they started the cloud and one of the backgrounds is people’s Facebook.
Greg Owens 17:41
Busted. Yeah, because people people don’t realize like because like here even here in the Bay Area most of our pipes are are buried in the walls or buried underground right they’re insulated right and then some other parts of the country where they don’t experience freeze weather they don’t do that,
Mashona Marsh 17:59
you know, pipes here they’re not in some underground foot irrigation but I’m running the walls of your garage so that’s when they were busted right on the side right all part of my only property in my hand was my sprinkler system in the back had a problem with the pipe there but other than that my house was fine. There was a lot going on you go to Home Depot there was like chaos where there’s running out of piping material and you were running out and had to wait so it
Greg Owens 18:28
was pretty bad was pretty bad must have been fantastic for generator sales for January
Mashona Marsh 18:33
sales right there. They have a Hot Lotto now but we don’t have to go through the this winner come on up because there’s got a little cold spell just
Greg Owens 18:42
huh. Yeah, that did anything. Did that affect your the company you work for?
Mashona Marsh 18:49
Oh, no, there’s no effect. We was all for like one or two days because everyone’s had problems at their home. But they didn’t affect our work or anyone getting there. Of course they want to make sure you take care of your home and things like that before you come to work. Right? It didn’t disrupt anything that I remember.
Greg Owens 19:05
And I want to touch on your, your your speaking career and and those kinds of things. So saw that on your personal website, and you’ve been an athlete your whole life.
Mashona Marsh 19:16
I’ve been an athlete my whole life. Because you saw my website. The speaking engagement really didn’t kick on hopefully maybe this this well, this podcast will give me my back up there. I didn’t kick off the way I went by I haven’t given up because I was a touchdown in high school. And I’m from Nebraska, St. Omaha, Nebraska. Yeah. And in Houston 32 years, and I was three tips off the National High School record in 100 110. Highs back in 75. And I still hold my high school record this year was 46
Greg Owens 19:49
Oh damn right and you’re on you’re still Are you still competing? Are you still running every day? What what is
Mashona Marsh 19:55
it? No, I’m not competing. I run have a bike in the house that I ride arrived at observe some time. Yeah, I’m thinking about getting back out there running again. But no, that’s not what I’m doing right now.
Greg Owens 20:06
Right. Right. Right. And yeah, I mean, it’s it’s such a great I, I’ve gotten opportunities to be out in speak publicly. And the topic has been mentorship, right? Talking about mentorship because mentors have been very important my life, right. And because I wasn’t good at school, I wasn’t good at high school and those kinds of things. But I was good at if I met somebody, and I really liked what they were doing with their life. I wanted to learn from right into that. And it’s been it was, it’s been a lot of fun. I’ve had some great opportunities to speak at different places around the country about mentorship, which has been very fulfilling, but then COVID happened of course, and and not entire. Fun business. Right? Disappeared. Yeah. Definitely challenging.
Mashona Marsh 20:56
I would like to get get back into hopefully, one day speaking to the children at the high school. Yeah. Goals, that’s my website shows and kind of basically, kind of goes over the obstacles that you have to live to live to try to make it right.
Greg Owens 21:15
And what’s your thought? On my
Mashona Marsh 21:16
website on yours?
Greg Owens 21:18
Um, we I’ll put the link to your website on the podcast. Okay. Yeah. Sounds better. That’s it. Yeah. Then and, and tell me a bit about like, your process with goals. Because that one is like, I find that even people, even six successful entrepreneurs have a have a struggle with setting goals. It’s something like, when you state your goal, and you’re trying, you’re actually stating the exact requirements of how you’re gonna fail, right? Because if you don’t meet that goal, so then people don’t want to state their goals, right? Because they’re, they’re afraid of that backlash, right? So what’s, what’s your thoughts on it, it’s a very fascinating subject.