FM Careers Spotlight Interview: Matt Garner, Chair

• How did you get into FM?
• Can you tell us the variety of contracts you've worked on?
• What do you think are the essential skills for a career in FM?
• What are the main challenges you've faced in your career?
• What advice would you give to aspiring FM professionals?

Michelle: I'm delighted today to have Matt Garner join me for our Careers in FM Spotlight series. Matt is a current Vistage Chair and a CEO coaching, and for anyone that doesn't know Vistage, Vistage are a CEO coaching and peer advisory business, great business we've been involved with in the past.

As well as that, Matt is a senior consultant at facilities management consultancy Litmus Partnership. Prior to that, Matt was chief executive of Gov Facilities Services and before spent many years at the Sodexo. Latterly as MD of the government schools business across the UK and Ireland. Welcome, Matt.

Matt Garner: Thank you very much. And thank you. Thank you for the intro and makes me feel old.

Michelle: Definitely not. Definitely not old. So, Matt, when we've been doing these, these spotlight series, in the past, we've just been finding out a little bit about people's career journeys into FM really. So very excited to hear about yours.

Matt Garner:Okay. So, I probably like lots of people in FM ended up in FM before it was even called FM. So, I graduated as a building surveyor in the early 90s. And went to work for a local authority in what was called the maintenance department at the time. And it only really became FM as an industry in the sort of mid to late 90s.

So, I've been in FM as we know it for 25 years. Was it a choice to go into facilities management? No, but it's been a fantastic experience because of the amount of variety.

So, you know, I've gone from looking after and had schools and local authority-maintained housing and police stations and things like that into capital projects, into working, you know, across the UK and Ireland.

Met some amazing people. Not without its challenges. And I think at its simplest for me, FM is all about people providing services for other people, and helping organisations to improve their outcomes by providing great space for their people to be able to do what they do.

Michelle: Yeah, absolutely. So, you've touched on some of the variety. You've worked quite a lot across the education side of that, haven't you? And that in itself brings variety into the mix. Can you talk a little bit more about some of those contracts and the differences of things that you have been involved in?

Matt Garner:Yeah. So, there's two elements to the variety. One is in the variety of services that you look after as a facilities manager. You know, I come from a construction hard services background, but I've also looked after catering contracts and student accommodation and, specialist decontamination units for the NHS and worked in pathology, none of which were anything really to do with construction.

So there's that element of the variety that's kind of kept me interested over the years, but there's also the variety of the types of buildings that you work in as a facilities manager that I've worked for on temporary buildings for things like London Olympics.

I've worked in grade one listed buildings. I worked in the laboratories. I’ve worked in high end offices across cities in the UK and Ireland. Pretty much everything, military barracks. That's quite interesting. Prisons as well.

There's a strange correlation between prisons and schools, actually, they're quite similar to look after in lots of ways.

But again, that was quite a fascinating experience. Just understanding how those buildings were for the occupants within those buildings. You know, some pretty famous sites, you know, Dartmoor Prison and then I look back on my education experience and working with the likes of Eton College and organisations like that, but also those much smaller where multi-academy trusts where they've got lots of schools and some of them are quite small, and they bring with it their own challenges.

So, for me, it's been the variety of it that’s kept things interesting and never quite knowing from one day to the next what's going to happen. And realising pretty early on in my career that there's always somebody who knows more than I do.

The interesting thing is learning and listening to other people's experience and helping other people be really good at what they do.

Michelle: Great. And on the skill side then, how do you feel through your career you developed skills and what skills do you feel were really, really necessary? For a career in FM?

Matt Garner: There's a technical element of it which as one progresses a career that probably becomes less important. What becomes more important is people and your ability to work with a huge variety of people, from your own frontline staff through to senior leaders in businesses, and to be able to actually interact with people in a meaningful way.

That journey into leadership is probably harder than becoming a chartered surveyor. And, you know, learning how to be a leader is difficult.

And I think it's a skill you need to learn. It's not something, it doesn't just happen by osmosis because you've worked with somebody who's really good. You are therefore going to become a really good leader.

I don't think it works like that. I think you have to develop yourself as a people manager. And you have to develop a degree of either competence or conscious incompetence in areas of facilities industry that you're not an expert in. It's really easy to say, well, you know, I run 12 different services across a big estate, but you only ever going to be an expert in 1 or 2 of those.

So it's that kind of knowing where to go for help, for expert advice, because there's always somebody who's been there before.

Michelle: And you've been involved in a number of PFI contracts as well with the school, haven’t you. You know, very topical, obviously. Now with, PFI hand back and everything
that's going on there. And a lot of talk around the skills that are needed for that today. The, you know, the softer side skills that really come into play. Did you find that, particularly when you were dealing with those contracts then?

Matt Garner: Yeah, PFI gets a bad rap. I think as a country, we've forgotten that we invested in a whole load of infrastructure, and we've got to pay the mortgage back.

So, it does get a bit of a bad rap, but you go back to what I said earlier is, set aside the contract, which can be complicated in 428 pages. Actually, is still about people providing services for other people. And I think sometimes as an industry, we get a little bit fixated around contracts and compliance and payment mechanisms and service failures and the commercial element of it and the legal element of it.

But maybe just forget sometimes that actually this is about people doing things for other people. That's not to say you can ignore all of the contractual compliance stuff, because therein lies disaster.

But it's about a balance between, you know, technical service delivery, compliance, contract management and engaging people. Because if you haven't got any people, you can't deliver the service. If you can't deliver the service in the PFI. That's quite painful.

Michelle: Yes. And dealing with a number of different stakeholders and you know that collaboration and making sure all different stakeholders are working together in the best way possible.

Matt Garner: Yeah, I'm sure anybody who's had any real involvement in PFI will be able to cite examples of where really is a partnership, and it's a public private partnership, and everybody's aligned and everybody's working together.

It doesn't necessarily mean they agree all the time, but they are working towards a common goal. There are others where the relationships have got to a certain point where they are, they're toxic. And I've seen really bad behaviour by the public sector, by the private sector and by anybody and everybody who's been involved in PFIs in a it can get a little bit personal, it can get a little bit nasty and that's not a good place to be.

Michelle: So probably leads to some challenges actually, nicely. What would you say the, the main challenges, that you've faced in your career and perhaps could you give some tips? On what you feel has helped you to progress and grow?

Matt Garner:I think the challenges have been the variety. You go from being an expert in a certain field into much more general management and service leadership. And that it does take a mindset shift to move into that space.

You know, when I did my degree and graduated and, you know, can even remember that far back turned up in an office and thought, right, I've got a degree. I know everything. Took me about an hour to realise that I didn't know anything at all.

And if I were to spend time with the people who'd been doing that job for 20 odd years, I learned way more from them.

So, challenge for me has been around recognising my own gaps in my own knowledge and then being humble enough to listen to other people and ask for help when I when I don't know the answer. I think another challenge as a facilities manager or in the facilities industry is that we try and be everything to everybody, but just be really clear about what it is you are, what you bring and what your service is, rather than trying to be brilliant at absolutely everything because you can't be brilliant at everything.

Much as it came as a surprise, you can't be brilliant at everything and you have to choose what you're good at doing and recognise that and recognise what you're not so good at doing.

Michelle: Yeah.

Matt Garner: And the, you know, the people element has and continues to be a challenge because people are people and, you know, one person's perception of a situation is very different to another person's perception of the situation.

Particularly when you're trying to deliver services, particularly in a PFI where those contractual requirements might have been written 20-25 years ago and the world's changed and the world's moved on.

You said any sort of tips and pointers? I think one thing I learned was read the contract, know your contract. Because everybody will have a perception of what you should do.

Particularly on the soft services, when you’re looking at cleaning or catering. Lots of people will have an opinion of what good looks like.

So read your contract, understand what you've committed to do, deliver on what you said you were going to do. And if you're not going to do it, hold your hands up. Say “really sorry, can't do that at the moment because of these reasons”. And just be honest about it.

And I guess the final thing for me is understanding your customer. Understand the consumer.

We did a really interesting piece of work at Sodexo when we rebuilt the school food offer, and that was actually going out to interview a bunch of children because they were our consumer.

And funnily enough, they had a very different perception of what a good school meal looked like than we did as adults. And the adults who are commissioning our services had, but if we weren't providing a service and met the needs of the consumer, we really weren't achieving very much at all.

So, you know, let's listen to your consumer build your service around the insight that that gives you rather than develop something that you think is brilliant, but nobody wants to buy.

Michelle: Yeah. Advice then for aspiring FM professionals out there. You got any advice that you would give?

Matt Garner: Embrace the variety. Believe in yourself. Find something that really excites you and whether it's a particular service or it's a particular, sector or it's a particular type of building or whatever it might be.

Find something that gets you up and running when things go a bit wrong. Because they do. And accept the fact that things won't always go according to plan.

Michelle: Yeah. Okay. Well thank you so much, Matt, for your insights into your career and, tips for the future in FM. Really appreciate your time. Thank you.

Matt Garner: Thank you so much. Bye.