Flagship Features Kevin Barton, Sr. VP of Operations

Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to another episode of Flagship features. I’m Amelia Beamer here with Don Toole who is our Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing and we are joined today by Mr. Kevin Barton who is our Senior Vice President of Operations. Thanks to you two for being here today.

Pleasure. Awesome, well Kevin we have a few questions for you today uh but why don’t you start by just telling us a little bit about yourself and your history with Flagship. Absolutely my name is Kevin Barton obviously I uh I’ve been in the facilities industry for 20 plus years um I’ve been with Flagship for 10 of those years it’s been an amazing 10 years holding a couple of different positions primarily a Director a VP and today a senior VP of operation so I have responsible responsibility for all janitorial operations across the country so 26 plus states 4,000 plus employees so quite a large operation that keeps me on the go and I’m in a hotel room today I am for 200 days a year I like to live out in the field I think that’s important that our our teams you know see the leadership in the field and understand the challenges that they go through I’m there to remove obstacles for them and so that’s what I try to do. And Kevin let’s have a little fun here can you tell me um what your favorite part about working for Flagship is. At the end of the day we’re a people business and there’s nothing more amazing than watching somebody go from a janitor to a supervisor to an operations manager to you know an area manager there’s nothing more special than that you’ve not only changed their lives you’ve changed every person uh every life in their family that’s special um that’s what I love about what I do and Flagship lets me do it . Kevin couple things that I wanted to kind of get hit you with what questions here is that uh the first one is you talked about uh room for growth talk about what some of the experiences you’ve had that you’ve seen us as we have had growth what what’s some of those key highlights that stand out to you and and really showed how we projected forward. Yeah I mean it’s it’s um the growth is not um just about growth around Revenue it’s growth around creating opportunity and upward trajectory for the employee base and that’s one of the things that I love about what I do you know Flagship Fosters entrepreneurship within its individual contributors they give you and I try to lead this way I try to give people the autonomy to manage their particular business units um to shape those units certainly it’s within the context of how we operate with as an organization but when you give people the freedom to make smart decisions um to challenge them um that’s what really creates the opportunity for them to grow. Speaking of growth and change Kevin can you talk a little bit about you know you know day operations that um throughout your tenure perhaps touching a little bit on technology and how that has changed day-to-day operations as well. Yeah absolutely I mean um certainly our technology around chemistry gets better the equipment that we’re using gets better um but we’re also starting to see you know the introduction of of co-robotics or robotic autonomous scrubbers um I and and vacuums I think that those are a game changer I think that you know as that technology becomes um more prevalent uh the cost point will come down the ROI will become shorter and that’s going to be very important to the industry um certainly with the introduction of smart restroom technology or frequency management within um online Performance Management Systems allowing us to see the frequencies in which our employees are in and out of particular areas like restrooms or break rooms and things like that um also with the ability to in in our airport environments to look at passenger traffic data in and out of restrooms um to be able to plan our labor to move our labor strategically based on you know particular flight banks and and things like that. That makes us better it makes us um fine-tune our operations specific to our clients and gives us better leading and lagging indicators because the the client environments change so how we need to change our operation is client specific and that technology helps us to do that faster So that’s all the time that we have for today I have learned so much from this conversation thank you for being here Kevin. Thanks Kevin we really very much thank you guys have a great day.