Chris Pepin and Adrian Messer with Progressive Reliability
Industrial Talk is speaking with Chris Pepin, Founder and Adrian Messer, VP with Progressive Reliability about “maintenance debt and finding the right M&R talent”. Get the answers to your “Reliability Hiring” questions along with Team Progressive Reliability unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!
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CHRIS PEPIN'S CONTACT INFORMATION:
Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-pepin/
Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/proreli/
Company Website: https://www.proreli.com/
ADRIAN MESSER'S CONTACT INFORMATION:
Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianmesser/
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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, reliability, adrian, chris, world, company, asset, conversation, industrial, dedicated, person, progressive, professionals, reactive, maintenance, focused, culture, work, scott, pro
Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go.
Alright, once again, thank you very much for joining industrial talk, a platform that is dedicated to you industrial professionals all around the world, because you are bold, you are brave, you dare greatly. You solve problems, you collaborate, and you're making the world a better place. That's why we celebrate you on industrial talk, because you're worth it. And in the hot seat, we have pro rely. And we have two gents. Chris Pippin, as well as Adrian Messer, both are with this wonderful company. And you know, we're going to be talking about, yeah, there is a debt, there is a resource debt when it comes to finding the right reliability professionals to keep your project up and running. So let's get cracking. I enjoyed this. Because the reality is right, let's just let's just lay it on out there, you need to keep that asset, you need to keep that business run, and you need to be able to maintain that asset effectively, so that you can get the most out of it right. And given the changes that are taking place within industry, it is becoming more and more imperative to be able to do that. And do it effectively and finding the right people because it's always a people equation, always a people equation that is necessary to make sure that this asset, your asset, and you you know, you've got that business that is resilient Berlei right there. And we're going to have all the contact information for those two gents, as well as of the organization out on industrial talk.com. Now, we are, as I mentioned, we're creating this platform, this platform is really dedicated to education and and the more and more we work and connect with individuals and connect with businesses, it becomes more and more apparent that education is really necessary, because it's happening, and it's happening so fast. But I think one of the most important component outside of education, which you need to continue to just do is the ability to collaborate is the ability to be able to work with individuals that definitely want you to succeed, they're looking for help. Because every every conference, every organization that I've been to, there's this speed and and the way the speed is happening is that the only way you're going to keep up is with the ability to be able to collaborate, that's that's me. And finally, that innovation component. So you have that education, because it's happening fast, you have that collaboration component that is happening, because it is. And then third, you need to innovate because it never stops changing. And if you're an industry, that is a must, absolutely a must. And pro rely and others within the reliability space, are all dedicated to that all dedicated to this, this, need to educate, collaborate, and of course, innovate in everything that they do. Industrial talk is definitely the place to be able to do that. And, and and if you want to get a hold of me, yeah, just reach out, go out to industrial talk.com Reach out, say, Scott, I want to talk to you. And we need to tell your story, we need to be able to amplify that story. Because you are the heroes in this, this, whatever this industry world is, you're the heroes, you're making lives better, you just are not just here, but around the world. Thank you very much. All right. So I was broadcasting from smrp, the Society of maintenance and reliability professionals and of course, I know Adrian from that wonderful organization. And and what they're dedicated on is definitely the profession of asset management, asset reliability, maintenance, and the tools associated with being able to do that effectively. And to gain the insights necessary to be able to affect the maintenance in a way that keeps that asset are up and running. So SMRP If you're in a maintenance, if you're a reliability professional that is an organization that you must connect with smrp.org Anyway, a part of that is there is this ever focus on keeping those assets up and running as I continue to say, but the reality is, is that there's this resource debt, where do you find the right people? How do you retain the right people? What are we and Proreli has a wonderful model to be able to identify and procure those, those valuable and I mean valuable members of your team to be able to help you succeed and and there's no other way of getting around it. You need to be in the reliability game. And you need to have those the members to be able to do that. So Proreli that's P R O, R E, L i.com. Go out there. All right, let's get cracking with the conversation. Because it's, it's a, it's a good one. So here's Chris. And here's Adrian. Hey, welcome to industrial talk. Thank you, we have Adrian. And we have Chris. And we're going to talk a little bit about something a little bit more advanced in the world of reliability in the world of finding skilled professionals really focused in on your, your benefit, and this is the team, this team does it right then and there. Before we get into that conversation. Let's do a little background check. That sounds sort of overwhelming. But let's do a little background into Chris, give us a little 411 on who you are, Chris.
My name is Chris Pepin. I'm the founder and managing partner here at Progressive reliability. Been in the talent acquisition world for over a decade, and really, really passionate about the services that we've created here.
Well, that was pretty cool. That was quick and simple. But you can make it faster there. Right? Yeah, you can trust me. Don't give us a little background, Adrian.
Yeah, sure. Adrian Messer here with progressive reliability, serving as Vice President of executive services. Been in the maintenance reliability space for nearly 20 years. Fairly new here to progressive reliability as of April of this year, really enjoyed it, though. Met a lot of people talk to a lot of people. And it's fun, being able to help them be a resource for people looking for a solution or looking to make a next kind of move in their career to a better job and a better better environment.
The URL is pro rely that's PR, o r e l i.com. So make a note of that listener find out more connect with these two, wonderful and just team and the team at pro life. Okay. Here's the deal. We've had a number of conversations revolving around reliability, there's a ton of conversations and the conversations sort of involved in, hey, how do I manage that asset? What do I do? What are the strategies? Why is it important? And all of that? But sadly, there's a there's a human component there, right? So take us through about progressive reliability. What happens? What what makes that process? sort of unique? Can you do that there, Chris?
Sure. I think one of the first thing said of the year, that makes us unique, because we have a very big not to do list. So there's a lot of companies that do a lot of things, they have a lot of services, and we stay incredibly simple and therefore incredibly focused and powerful. And that is we purely work with maintenance and reliability professionals and professional and executive roles, finding them the right job. So Reliability Engineers, planners, schedulers, folks, everybody else's assists with that vibration analysts. That's the core of the folks who work with under our tire jobs, and then all the other companies competencies that support that. So we can find contract Reliability Engineers for special projects, we can find a team if you need six or eight, specialized tradespeople or craftspeople to support an initiative, we can get them there on site within 30 to 60 days. So we really that's, that's just the simple one, two punch of what we do within reliability, finding professionals, making sure they're plugged in making sure they're as qualified as possible, and eliminating all the noise on everything else.
Adrian, how. So? What is the problem that exists out there today in the reliability world, about managing and finding? I mean, come on, you know, these reliability professionals, really skilled individuals that have dedicated a lot of time, energy and effort and education to do and to deliver their crafts real well? What is this? What's the challenge out there?
Though, the challenge I quickly quickly realized when I started in this that the challenge was, you have, say a company's internal HR internal recruiters who are non technical people. They are tasked with finding highly technical people. So the challenge is, in most cases, they don't know where to look, they don't know the right questions to ask and they don't know how to find technical people. So that is the biggest challenge. So for us, you know, we look to really try to streamline the hiring process. You know, where we're most successful is when we partner with a company's internal HR, where we've got good communication, we've got good feedback, we've got good clear job descriptions and Everybody's kind of on the same page. So that's really what we're about, we want to really try to improve the candidate experience on their end as far as you know, their interviewing their, their feedback that they're getting from these potential offers, and in turn improving a company's own internal hiring practices.
That's a great point. Because, you know, if somebody said, Hey, Scott, I need a reliability engineer, right off the bat, if I'm an HR person, and I've got all these other things that I've got to sort of deal with, I wouldn't I wouldn't know. The questions I wouldn't it that would be a tough one. So is it safe to say that if I'm a company, and I recognize the need to manage my asset better, and and I don't have really the skill set? Can I go to progressive reliability and just say, Hey, guys, I have this, here's my asset, here's my business right here. Take me through that. And help me really try to identify and and find resources that make my business better. Is that Is that something that you have those conversations Chris,
do all the time, you know, we've got a 45 day process where we come in, we do, we set up the search, we get all the parameters, we have our internal process around it, and you should within within three weeks of the initiation and the search should have talked to five people through us. That's just that's how we do it. Because again, it's it's all we do. And that's our focus. Just first year doing this, I wouldn't say it's easy, or that we make it easy. You know, internally, it's still a difficult thing to do. However, it's what we do. It's what we do all day. So we find efficiencies, just by running through it over and over again. And we get the right people with the right culture match.
So you show it progressive reliability. You go on site, I'm company, I'm Alpha Company, and you come on side, you hear what I have to say. And then you have to do sort of an assessment is that is that what I'm hearing about just where we stand to sort of the as is assessment of my business from a reliability perspective, and then develop a plan of attack going forward? Is that what I hear Adrian,
pretty much, and it's no different. So it let's say you've got a piece of machinery, you've got a piece of equipment in your plant that keeps having failures over and over and over and over. And there comes a time when people say, Okay, we've got to do something. The same with some of these positions. So we have people contact us who have had these reliability focused positions open for several months to upwards of over a year. And they finally say, hey, we need some help, you know, we've got this position open, you know, we and they come to the trusted resource, they come to the people who they know that can deliver a solution to this problem that they're having over and over and over. So that's really the type of conversation that we have pretty often with with competencies.
So it can be both a macro assessment of the business and Okay, let's look at it from that perspective and come up with a really more comprehensive plan to the micro and say, Hey, your, your, your pump is having a, it's always going down. And for whatever reason it's going down and our our team of maintenance, people are just struggling with it. You can you can work with that one, right, Chris?
We can. So that's why we've got two different types of services, finding the full time person you need, or we need somebody in here for three, six months. And most importantly, the name of the game is knowledge transfer. So we don't want to put somebody in there to kind of create the codependent relationships that a lot of consulting companies do where you're always dependent on them to send somebody and send somebody, we want to get the right person out there. And we want to make sure that person's knowledge base transfers to your team so that we leave the company better than we found them.
Yeah, like that. That makes sense. That's the right way to do it. That is an out as I look at the form that you filled out, because Thank you very much for doing that. Because I like that. It makes me look over here at the other side. Chris, take us. Take us through the definition of what this this we see maintenance debt. define that for us. What does it mean? Yeah,
so this is what happens when facilities have incredibly understaffed for too long. A lot of times, especially in the reliability world, there's reactive and proactive facilities. And sometimes
I want to just lay it out there and I'm gonna pretty confident that's mostly reactive, FYI.
So when you're short staffed on reactive, that means that the brake fixes and the fixing it faster isn't even happening before you can get into your PMS and doing things to get ahead of things before they break. And overall, it just it caught causes a lot of chaos. And actually worse, it causes a lot of churn, people burn out, find another position, they go someplace else. So that constant reactivity, that constant actually being woken up in the middle of the night, to be brought back out to the plant to do a fix, that sort of thing wears people out in in, in the post 2020 work world, it's really chewing people up fast. So we want to help facilities, again, we can't work with everybody. So we're looking for the kinds of organizations and those kinds of cultures that want to get towards proactive, that want to take good care of their people that want to keep their people because, again, we want to leave our clients better than we found them. Importantly, take good care of our candidates, we kind of get people Yes, yeah. So that's, that's the piece where I wanted to flip it. Scott, you mentioned about the job description, a lot of companies are great in terms of advertising, here's what the job means to us the company. But there's four to seven job openings for every qualified person. So you need to start focusing on what's in it for the person, we kind of take the opposite approach and finding the best people out there and getting them tied up with the kind of roles that are going to further their career and build up build up on them. That's the kind of talent pool we want access to, as opposed to constantly just filling heads and charging fees. I mean, this is this is a really, really big shift in workforce that's taking place right now, not only do we have a generational one, but we have an entire new look at the way work happens in the last two to three years. So we you know, we want to make sure that we're playing an integral role in that we're putting people in healthier environments.
If I had a nickel every time I the conversation revolved around culture. And this is sort of interesting. And I think you guys are sort of balancing your, your on that. In a good sense. You're, you're you're walking a tight line, and they're tight line is, Hi, I'm, I'm a company. Yeah, I think I think reliability is important. And then I give me somebody that can do that. And then you put yourself out there and you, you work with individuals say, hey, go into this company, and do x, y, z, because they want to do that. You, Adrian, you have to vet that company to see if they're truly serious, because, again, if I had a nickel every time somebody says, Hey, we they say it, but then it just, you know, implodes on itself, and they go back to reactive, and that's just sort of the status quo, and we feel comfortable there. How do you how do you sort of manage that?
Yeah, I'm like you I wish I had a nickel for every time I've had a discussion with somebody who's looking to get out of a toxic work environment. Yes. culture. And, you know, again, when I first started in this, it surprised me. But then I thought, well, I really shouldn't have but you would think that people would only be making moves to for economic reasons, you know, for a better pay better salary. But the conversation is always centered around culture, work life balance. And, you know, there are a lot of companies out there that oh, yeah, they say that they do reliability, or we Yes, we are reliable. But there's a difference between actually putting action to that and just saying that we are reliable, or that I see reliability looking, you know, I
said, I'm gonna look at, y'all know, if you're looking at it's like, net.
Yeah. So you know, it's very rewarding, very satisfying to be able to take somebody who is looking for that better culture, that better work environment. And if they're in an environment where it's very reactive, where there's no reliability, and that person knows that there are better ways to do things, it's rewarding to finally place that person in the right environment that fits, you know, what they're looking for. And in turn, yeah, getting a little bump in pay. Now, the people that we place, granted, you know, they are making moves for increased pay, on average, about 20%. More with that move, but, you know, again, they're getting better culture, better work life balance, and they're put in a better position to where they can thrive and further grow and develop their reliability skills and their place in the industry.
So you can't avoid the conversation with me. Company the same. It might be a part of your, you know, 45 day process here. Why? Why did you why did you do this? Why did you wait so long to get here? Why Why? Why are your your why is your team leaving? And what? And you got to you got to fix that? Are you just going to continue to have that continued problem, just just, you know, festering the whole time. Do you have that conversation
there? Scott, there's a script. One of the first questions is why is this position of Rainer? Yeah, so we definitely want to understand and sometimes we just got a great client, flagship site. They need somebody right now. And the person that was in the role got promoted. It's like gap. That's what we work with. So that's working for we find out that or sometimes we'll find out, hey, somebody got promoted to this role. They, they didn't quite have the chops for it. So we need to go outside, but we promoted somebody from within, it's like, okay, so fail, you know, you want to groom people from within somebody didn't have it, we're keeping them, we're moving them in as different places, that works, too. So those are the kinds of things that we're sniffing out when we take on and assess it well, because we have a very thorough commitment in terms of our process. And our reputation is on the line with everyone we take. So we have to, you know, we're vetting each other. When we move at
that job that Chris just referenced, that's an example of one of those that the job would have been open for about a year, they finally threw their hands up and said, Hey, we need some help.
What Oh, I gotta ask them, What did they say? We don't know why. Why was it open for a year? What were what were they doing?
They actually were doing everything. They've got one of the best job descriptions we've ever seen. No way. Yeah, they do. So here's, here's the challenge, though. It's an old quote, that I love. If you have more than three priorities you have not. And so this is what happens a lot of time to HR, even in large organizations that have a dedicated recruitment team. There's so much demand for hiring constantly that how do you prioritize? It's it's kind of based on where's the noise, right, it tends to get reactive. Whereas when we come in on retained search, or we come in on a focus project, this is all we have to do. This is where we are we dedicated team member, we have somebody you know, with, with these kinds of retained searches, got a team member who spends half of their day on the roll until it's closed every day. That's what they do. It's just a matter of force and volume sometimes, you know, and the other thing is, we have, frankly, an exorbitant amount of tools. So you know, before we started this conversation, we talked about software, I have no less than seven subscriptions and data access, I've you know, we've got sources for work their entire day, all day, just finding names, numbers and emails for potentially qualified people for us to call through. So a lot of it is frankly, it's not sexy, it's just a volume of work that we put to and dedicate to something that an internal team just doesn't have. That's it's just it wouldn't, it wouldn't make any sense for a company to apply that much. Unless they were doing what we're doing every day. And because we're so specified more we are, it tends to work.
The EC, that's, that's great. By the way, I have not received an email or a call from anybody from progressive liability asking me if I've kind of hurt. Well,
when was the last time I saw your resume before we got on? There? Pick it up.
Yeah, please. Now. Hey, this is Noah.
Already profile? Just got. We've done our homework.
Yeah, absolutely. Let me ask you this. And I'm going to change sort of direction. Real quick. There's a couple more questions when asked, there is this necessity to sort of infuse youth to inspire? Young you know, it, you know, it's one thing to have that old crotchety guy like me, who's been around for a long time has got that wisdom and everything? Do you guys find the necessity to try to figure out how to sort of bring in the new talent to to help that whole process too, as well, Chris? All right, Chris, go ahead. Tell me about that. Sure.
We look at trajectory. So it's, it's not necessarily age, because wisdom can exist at any point, you know, within somebody somebody's age. I mean, there's 20 year olds that are far wiser than the curmudgeons. You just mentioned. So did you
really see me when I was young? Yeah. So I mean,
that's, that's one thing that we always look for is trajectory. So it's not necessarily about a perfect resume or perfect background, we want to find people with what kinds of questions to ask, what kind of questions are they asking on the interview? What are they looking for? What's important about the next role that they're taking? You know, those are one of the things I we really like when people are qualifying us and asking us the right questions around the job, which we're going to start releasing this information as well, because everybody needs to know just how to interview in terms of how's this role, right for me, here's where I want to go, here's what I want to do. That is the thing we look for. And if you can find it early, it's fantastic. And that's where we try to pair people up with right organizations, we know organizations that are looking for here's another thing, Scott, this is really, really big for us veterans. I mean, you want to talk about a tremendous resource of folks who know how to work know how to show up time and time again, who really know how to lead and who can work in extreme extreme circumstances. Like that's that's a big thing for us is working with our veterans and we work with I work on the board of a group called Operation Are you problem which helps transitioning veterans who are coming out of the services and into the civilian world find find jobs. So that's, that's a really passionate thing for us as well as, of course, finding the right youth and the right people with those trajectories. Yeah,
the biggest thing with the veterans is, you know, being able to translate their skills, what they learned and how they did things in the military to, you know, public, you know, to industry, you know, they may have a term that means, job planning, or pm or inspection, but in the military, they call it something else. So we kind of work with them to to look at their resume, and be able to translate, okay, this means that in our world,
yeah, common lexicon is a big deal. Now. There is no bigger fan of reliability out there. And then me, I really enjoy many of the conversations around that profession, asset management, maintenance, all of the strategies love it I and what you have just sort of laid out is a completely needed lead needed solution. What are the roadblocks? I mean, I'm, I'm all if I had a business, I'd be talking to you guys. But what are the roadblocks Adrian
time, you know, in the current job market the way it is, you know, it's a job seekers market. So if we go out, we find quality people, we submit them over for the job. So we're tasked to feel, you know, if that person hasn't been given any kind of timely feedback in you know, 24 to 48 hours, it's very likely that that person will lose interest, and they've got another offer waiting. So time is of the essence. So when we're working and kind of venting and onboarding, the companies that we work for, you know, we really stress you know, time is of the essence. So that's really our biggest roadblock. And our biggest challenge is just making sure that these people that we're working for work, you know, they're tasking us to fill these roles we deliver, we bring them high quality people just provide feedback with them in a timely manner to those candidates before they move on and accept other offers.
Well, that's key. Yeah, you're absolutely spot on about that. I didn't realize that. That? Well, of course, from my perspective, what you are dealing with and working with are, every bit is important. Like from a doctor's perspective, they're just they're just providing their solutions on these assets and trying to keep them working properly. All right, we got to wrap it up. Now. Here's the deal. How does somebody get a hold of you, Chris, if they say I, I really want to be able to reach out to these guys, what's the best way to get ahold of you?
LinkedIn is popular. So if you're looking for us on the socials, that's when we live on, we haven't quite gotten around to the Tick Tock and the Facebook's of the world. So right on LinkedIn, PR o r e li Yeah, we'd like to keep it professional. So that's it. I'm short and my initials Cp at Ro rely.com. If you want to reach out straight to me, otherwise, the whole company, we're all first dot last. AT Proreli.com. You can email any of us. We stay. We stay up on top of it.
All right, Adrian.
Got it with me. Yeah, same with me. I'm on LinkedIn every day always checking activities and messages. So I would absolutely love to connect up with listeners via LinkedIn, just look me up. And you can also find my contact information on there. And like Chris said, is just first name dot last name AT Proreli.com.
You guys were great. Thank you. This was a very, very, from my perspective, a very important conversation. I see that progressive reliability, providing a pretty decent roadmap on how to how to navigate these waters and find it because it's always a human. It's a human conversation. So you're, you're providing an incredible solution. Thank you guys for being on industrial Talk. Thanks for having me. All right, listeners. We're gonna wrap it up on the other side, we're going to have all the contact information for both Chris and Adrian. So if you're not reach out to these two gents, you will need not be disappointed. How about that for just getting all tongue tied? All right, we will be right back. You're listening
to the industrial talk Podcast Network.
All right. Thank you once again for joining industrial talk. And absolutely. Thank you. Thank you very much for your support. We're creating this platform. This platform is dedicated to industry professionals all around the world. Thank you for what you do. Your story needs to be told. And it needs to be amplified. And also a hearty thank you to both Chris and Adrian. Proline is the company and yes, you need to manage your assets. And yes, you need to find the right individuals, the right professionals to be able to make that happen in a big way. Proreli.com We're going to have all the contact information as I indicated out on industry Real talks, a look for their podcasts, look for their conversation, and boom, you'll be able to reach out to them because I'm just telling you, you need to have these guys in your back pocket to help you succeed in managing your assets and making sure that your business is truly resilient. All right, be bold, be brave, daring greatly. And again, we're going to we're building a great platform, and you're going to hang out with people because we want to collaborate, you're going to hang out with people like Chris and Adrian, and you're going to change the world. We're going to have another great conversation shortly. All around reliability. Absolutely. As well as all of manufacturing, you name it. It's here on industrial talk. So stay tuned. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly.
Transcript
Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go.
Alright, once again, thank you very much for joining industrial talk, a platform that is dedicated to you industrial professionals all around the world, because you are bold, you are brave, you dare greatly. You solve problems, you collaborate, and you're making the world a better place. That's why we celebrate you on industrial talk, because you're worth it. And in the hot seat, we have pro rely. And we have two gents. Chris Pippin, as well as Adrian Messer, both are with this wonderful company. And you know, we're going to be talking about, yeah, there is a debt, there is a resource debt when it comes to finding the right reliability professionals to keep your project up and running. So let's get cracking. I enjoyed this. Because the reality is right, let's just let's just lay it on out there, you need to keep that asset, you need to keep that business run, and you need to be able to maintain that asset effectively, so that you can get the most out of it right. And given the changes that are taking place within industry, it is becoming more and more imperative to be able to do that. And do it effectively and finding the right people because it's always a people equation, always a people equation that is necessary to make sure that this asset, your asset, and you you know, you've got that business that is resilient Berlei right there. And we're going to have all the contact information for those two gents, as well as of the organization out on industrial talk.com. Now, we are, as I mentioned, we're creating this platform, this platform is really dedicated to education and and the more and more we work and connect with individuals and connect with businesses, it becomes more and more apparent that education is really necessary, because it's happening, and it's happening so fast. But I think one of the most important component outside of education, which you need to continue to just do is the ability to collaborate is the ability to be able to work with individuals that definitely want you to succeed, they're looking for help. Because every every conference, every organization that I've been to, there's this speed and and the way the speed is happening is that the only way you're going to keep up is with the ability to be able to collaborate, that's that's me. And finally, that innovation component. So you have that education, because it's happening fast, you have that collaboration component that is happening, because it is. And then third, you need to innovate because it never stops changing. And if you're an industry, that is a must, absolutely a must. And pro rely and others within the reliability space, are all dedicated to that all dedicated to this, this, need to educate, collaborate, and of course, innovate in everything that they do. Industrial talk is definitely the place to be able to do that. And, and and if you want to get a hold of me, yeah, just reach out, go out to industrial talk.com Reach out, say, Scott, I want to talk to you. And we need to tell your story, we need to be able to amplify that story. Because you are the heroes in this, this, whatever this industry world is, you're the heroes, you're making lives better, you just are not just here, but around the world. Thank you very much. All right. So I was broadcasting from smrp, the Society of maintenance and reliability professionals and of course, I know Adrian from that wonderful organization. And and what they're dedicated on is definitely the profession of asset management, asset reliability, maintenance, and the tools associated with being able to do that effectively. And to gain the insights necessary to be able to affect the maintenance in a way that keeps that asset are up and running. So SMRP If you're in a maintenance, if you're a reliability professional that is an organization that you must connect with smrp.org Anyway, a part of that is there is this ever focus on keeping those assets up and running as I continue to say, but the reality is, is that there's this resource debt, where do you find the right people? How do you retain the right people? What are we and Proreli has a wonderful model to be able to identify and procure those, those valuable and I mean valuable members of your team to be able to help you succeed and and there's no other way of getting around it. You need to be in the reliability game. And you need to have those the members to be able to do that. So Proreli that's P R O, R E, L i.com. Go out there. All right, let's get cracking with the conversation. Because it's, it's a, it's a good one. So here's Chris. And here's Adrian. Hey, welcome to industrial talk. Thank you, we have Adrian. And we have Chris. And we're going to talk a little bit about something a little bit more advanced in the world of reliability in the world of finding skilled professionals really focused in on your, your benefit, and this is the team, this team does it right then and there. Before we get into that conversation. Let's do a little background check. That sounds sort of overwhelming. But let's do a little background into Chris, give us a little 411 on who you are, Chris.
My name is Chris Pepin. I'm the founder and managing partner here at Progressive reliability. Been in the talent acquisition world for over a decade, and really, really passionate about the services that we've created here.
Well, that was pretty cool. That was quick and simple. But you can make it faster there. Right? Yeah, you can trust me. Don't give us a little background, Adrian.
Yeah, sure. Adrian Messer here with progressive reliability, serving as Vice President of executive services. Been in the maintenance reliability space for nearly 20 years. Fairly new here to progressive reliability as of April of this year, really enjoyed it, though. Met a lot of people talk to a lot of people. And it's fun, being able to help them be a resource for people looking for a solution or looking to make a next kind of move in their career to a better job and a better better environment.
The URL is pro rely that's PR, o r e l i.com. So make a note of that listener find out more connect with these two, wonderful and just team and the team at pro life. Okay. Here's the deal. We've had a number of conversations revolving around reliability, there's a ton of conversations and the conversations sort of involved in, hey, how do I manage that asset? What do I do? What are the strategies? Why is it important? And all of that? But sadly, there's a there's a human component there, right? So take us through about progressive reliability. What happens? What what makes that process? sort of unique? Can you do that there, Chris?
Sure. I think one of the first thing said of the year, that makes us unique, because we have a very big not to do list. So there's a lot of companies that do a lot of things, they have a lot of services, and we stay incredibly simple and therefore incredibly focused and powerful. And that is we purely work with maintenance and reliability professionals and professional and executive roles, finding them the right job. So Reliability Engineers, planners, schedulers, folks, everybody else's assists with that vibration analysts. That's the core of the folks who work with under our tire jobs, and then all the other companies competencies that support that. So we can find contract Reliability Engineers for special projects, we can find a team if you need six or eight, specialized tradespeople or craftspeople to support an initiative, we can get them there on site within 30 to 60 days. So we really that's, that's just the simple one, two punch of what we do within reliability, finding professionals, making sure they're plugged in making sure they're as qualified as possible, and eliminating all the noise on everything else.
Adrian, how. So? What is the problem that exists out there today in the reliability world, about managing and finding? I mean, come on, you know, these reliability professionals, really skilled individuals that have dedicated a lot of time, energy and effort and education to do and to deliver their crafts real well? What is this? What's the challenge out there?
Though, the challenge I quickly quickly realized when I started in this that the challenge was, you have, say a company's internal HR internal recruiters who are non technical people. They are tasked with finding highly technical people. So the challenge is, in most cases, they don't know where to look, they don't know the right questions to ask and they don't know how to find technical people. So that is the biggest challenge. So for us, you know, we look to really try to streamline the hiring process. You know, where we're most successful is when we partner with a company's internal HR, where we've got good communication, we've got good feedback, we've got good clear job descriptions and Everybody's kind of on the same page. So that's really what we're about, we want to really try to improve the candidate experience on their end as far as you know, their interviewing their, their feedback that they're getting from these potential offers, and in turn improving a company's own internal hiring practices.
That's a great point. Because, you know, if somebody said, Hey, Scott, I need a reliability engineer, right off the bat, if I'm an HR person, and I've got all these other things that I've got to sort of deal with, I wouldn't I wouldn't know. The questions I wouldn't it that would be a tough one. So is it safe to say that if I'm a company, and I recognize the need to manage my asset better, and and I don't have really the skill set? Can I go to progressive reliability and just say, Hey, guys, I have this, here's my asset, here's my business right here. Take me through that. And help me really try to identify and and find resources that make my business better. Is that Is that something that you have those conversations Chris,
do all the time, you know, we've got a 45 day process where we come in, we do, we set up the search, we get all the parameters, we have our internal process around it, and you should within within three weeks of the initiation and the search should have talked to five people through us. That's just that's how we do it. Because again, it's it's all we do. And that's our focus. Just first year doing this, I wouldn't say it's easy, or that we make it easy. You know, internally, it's still a difficult thing to do. However, it's what we do. It's what we do all day. So we find efficiencies, just by running through it over and over again. And we get the right people with the right culture match.
So you show it progressive reliability. You go on site, I'm company, I'm Alpha Company, and you come on side, you hear what I have to say. And then you have to do sort of an assessment is that is that what I'm hearing about just where we stand to sort of the as is assessment of my business from a reliability perspective, and then develop a plan of attack going forward? Is that what I hear Adrian,
pretty much, and it's no different. So it let's say you've got a piece of machinery, you've got a piece of equipment in your plant that keeps having failures over and over and over and over. And there comes a time when people say, Okay, we've got to do something. The same with some of these positions. So we have people contact us who have had these reliability focused positions open for several months to upwards of over a year. And they finally say, hey, we need some help, you know, we've got this position open, you know, we and they come to the trusted resource, they come to the people who they know that can deliver a solution to this problem that they're having over and over and over. So that's really the type of conversation that we have pretty often with with competencies.
So it can be both a macro assessment of the business and Okay, let's look at it from that perspective and come up with a really more comprehensive plan to the micro and say, Hey, your, your, your pump is having a, it's always going down. And for whatever reason it's going down and our our team of maintenance, people are just struggling with it. You can you can work with that one, right, Chris?
We can. So that's why we've got two different types of services, finding the full time person you need, or we need somebody in here for three, six months. And most importantly, the name of the game is knowledge transfer. So we don't want to put somebody in there to kind of create the codependent relationships that a lot of consulting companies do where you're always dependent on them to send somebody and send somebody, we want to get the right person out there. And we want to make sure that person's knowledge base transfers to your team so that we leave the company better than we found them.
Yeah, like that. That makes sense. That's the right way to do it. That is an out as I look at the form that you filled out, because Thank you very much for doing that. Because I like that. It makes me look over here at the other side. Chris, take us. Take us through the definition of what this this we see maintenance debt. define that for us. What does it mean? Yeah,
so this is what happens when facilities have incredibly understaffed for too long. A lot of times, especially in the reliability world, there's reactive and proactive facilities. And sometimes
I want to just lay it out there and I'm gonna pretty confident that's mostly reactive, FYI.
So when you're short staffed on reactive, that means that the brake fixes and the fixing it faster isn't even happening before you can get into your PMS and doing things to get ahead of things before they break. And overall, it just it caught causes a lot of chaos. And actually worse, it causes a lot of churn, people burn out, find another position, they go someplace else. So that constant reactivity, that constant actually being woken up in the middle of the night, to be brought back out to the plant to do a fix, that sort of thing wears people out in in, in the post 2020 work world, it's really chewing people up fast. So we want to help facilities, again, we can't work with everybody. So we're looking for the kinds of organizations and those kinds of cultures that want to get towards proactive, that want to take good care of their people that want to keep their people because, again, we want to leave our clients better than we found them. Importantly, take good care of our candidates, we kind of get people Yes, yeah. So that's, that's the piece where I wanted to flip it. Scott, you mentioned about the job description, a lot of companies are great in terms of advertising, here's what the job means to us the company. But there's four to seven job openings for every qualified person. So you need to start focusing on what's in it for the person, we kind of take the opposite approach and finding the best people out there and getting them tied up with the kind of roles that are going to further their career and build up build up on them. That's the kind of talent pool we want access to, as opposed to constantly just filling heads and charging fees. I mean, this is this is a really, really big shift in workforce that's taking place right now, not only do we have a generational one, but we have an entire new look at the way work happens in the last two to three years. So we you know, we want to make sure that we're playing an integral role in that we're putting people in healthier environments.
If I had a nickel every time I the conversation revolved around culture. And this is sort of interesting. And I think you guys are sort of balancing your, your on that. In a good sense. You're, you're you're walking a tight line, and they're tight line is, Hi, I'm, I'm a company. Yeah, I think I think reliability is important. And then I give me somebody that can do that. And then you put yourself out there and you, you work with individuals say, hey, go into this company, and do x, y, z, because they want to do that. You, Adrian, you have to vet that company to see if they're truly serious, because, again, if I had a nickel every time somebody says, Hey, we they say it, but then it just, you know, implodes on itself, and they go back to reactive, and that's just sort of the status quo, and we feel comfortable there. How do you how do you sort of manage that?
Yeah, I'm like you I wish I had a nickel for every time I've had a discussion with somebody who's looking to get out of a toxic work environment. Yes. culture. And, you know, again, when I first started in this, it surprised me. But then I thought, well, I really shouldn't have but you would think that people would only be making moves to for economic reasons, you know, for a better pay better salary. But the conversation is always centered around culture, work life balance. And, you know, there are a lot of companies out there that oh, yeah, they say that they do reliability, or we Yes, we are reliable. But there's a difference between actually putting action to that and just saying that we are reliable, or that I see reliability looking, you know, I
said, I'm gonna look at, y'all know, if you're looking at it's like, net.
Yeah. So you know, it's very rewarding, very satisfying to be able to take somebody who is looking for that better culture, that better work environment. And if they're in an environment where it's very reactive, where there's no reliability, and that person knows that there are better ways to do things, it's rewarding to finally place that person in the right environment that fits, you know, what they're looking for. And in turn, yeah, getting a little bump in pay. Now, the people that we place, granted, you know, they are making moves for increased pay, on average, about 20%. More with that move, but, you know, again, they're getting better culture, better work life balance, and they're put in a better position to where they can thrive and further grow and develop their reliability skills and their place in the industry.
So you can't avoid the conversation with me. Company the same. It might be a part of your, you know, 45 day process here. Why? Why did you why did you do this? Why did you wait so long to get here? Why Why? Why are your your why is your team leaving? And what? And you got to you got to fix that? Are you just going to continue to have that continued problem, just just, you know, festering the whole time. Do you have that conversation
there? Scott, there's a script. One of the first questions is why is this position of Rainer? Yeah, so we definitely want to understand and sometimes we just got a great client, flagship site. They need somebody right now. And the person that was in the role got promoted. It's like gap. That's what we work with. So that's working for we find out that or sometimes we'll find out, hey, somebody got promoted to this role. They, they didn't quite have the chops for it. So we need to go outside, but we promoted somebody from within, it's like, okay, so fail, you know, you want to groom people from within somebody didn't have it, we're keeping them, we're moving them in as different places, that works, too. So those are the kinds of things that we're sniffing out when we take on and assess it well, because we have a very thorough commitment in terms of our process. And our reputation is on the line with everyone we take. So we have to, you know, we're vetting each other. When we move at
that job that Chris just referenced, that's an example of one of those that the job would have been open for about a year, they finally threw their hands up and said, Hey, we need some help.
What Oh, I gotta ask them, What did they say? We don't know why. Why was it open for a year? What were what were they doing?
They actually were doing everything. They've got one of the best job descriptions we've ever seen. No way. Yeah, they do. So here's, here's the challenge, though. It's an old quote, that I love. If you have more than three priorities you have not. And so this is what happens a lot of time to HR, even in large organizations that have a dedicated recruitment team. There's so much demand for hiring constantly that how do you prioritize? It's it's kind of based on where's the noise, right, it tends to get reactive. Whereas when we come in on retained search, or we come in on a focus project, this is all we have to do. This is where we are we dedicated team member, we have somebody you know, with, with these kinds of retained searches, got a team member who spends half of their day on the roll until it's closed every day. That's what they do. It's just a matter of force and volume sometimes, you know, and the other thing is, we have, frankly, an exorbitant amount of tools. So you know, before we started this conversation, we talked about software, I have no less than seven subscriptions and data access, I've you know, we've got sources for work their entire day, all day, just finding names, numbers and emails for potentially qualified people for us to call through. So a lot of it is frankly, it's not sexy, it's just a volume of work that we put to and dedicate to something that an internal team just doesn't have. That's it's just it wouldn't, it wouldn't make any sense for a company to apply that much. Unless they were doing what we're doing every day. And because we're so specified more we are, it tends to work.
The EC, that's, that's great. By the way, I have not received an email or a call from anybody from progressive liability asking me if I've kind of hurt. Well,
when was the last time I saw your resume before we got on? There? Pick it up.
Yeah, please. Now. Hey, this is Noah.
Already profile? Just got. We've done our homework.
Yeah, absolutely. Let me ask you this. And I'm going to change sort of direction. Real quick. There's a couple more questions when asked, there is this necessity to sort of infuse youth to inspire? Young you know, it, you know, it's one thing to have that old crotchety guy like me, who's been around for a long time has got that wisdom and everything? Do you guys find the necessity to try to figure out how to sort of bring in the new talent to to help that whole process too, as well, Chris? All right, Chris, go ahead. Tell me about that. Sure.
We look at trajectory. So it's, it's not necessarily age, because wisdom can exist at any point, you know, within somebody somebody's age. I mean, there's 20 year olds that are far wiser than the curmudgeons. You just mentioned. So did you
really see me when I was young? Yeah. So I mean,
that's, that's one thing that we always look for is trajectory. So it's not necessarily about a perfect resume or perfect background, we want to find people with what kinds of questions to ask, what kind of questions are they asking on the interview? What are they looking for? What's important about the next role that they're taking? You know, those are one of the things I we really like when people are qualifying us and asking us the right questions around the job, which we're going to start releasing this information as well, because everybody needs to know just how to interview in terms of how's this role, right for me, here's where I want to go, here's what I want to do. That is the thing we look for. And if you can find it early, it's fantastic. And that's where we try to pair people up with right organizations, we know organizations that are looking for here's another thing, Scott, this is really, really big for us veterans. I mean, you want to talk about a tremendous resource of folks who know how to work know how to show up time and time again, who really know how to lead and who can work in extreme extreme circumstances. Like that's that's a big thing for us is working with our veterans and we work with I work on the board of a group called Operation Are you problem which helps transitioning veterans who are coming out of the services and into the civilian world find find jobs. So that's, that's a really passionate thing for us as well as, of course, finding the right youth and the right people with those trajectories. Yeah,
the biggest thing with the veterans is, you know, being able to translate their skills, what they learned and how they did things in the military to, you know, public, you know, to industry, you know, they may have a term that means, job planning, or pm or inspection, but in the military, they call it something else. So we kind of work with them to to look at their resume, and be able to translate, okay, this means that in our world,
yeah, common lexicon is a big deal. Now. There is no bigger fan of reliability out there. And then me, I really enjoy many of the conversations around that profession, asset management, maintenance, all of the strategies love it I and what you have just sort of laid out is a completely needed lead needed solution. What are the roadblocks? I mean, I'm, I'm all if I had a business, I'd be talking to you guys. But what are the roadblocks Adrian
time, you know, in the current job market the way it is, you know, it's a job seekers market. So if we go out, we find quality people, we submit them over for the job. So we're tasked to feel, you know, if that person hasn't been given any kind of timely feedback in you know, 24 to 48 hours, it's very likely that that person will lose interest, and they've got another offer waiting. So time is of the essence. So when we're working and kind of venting and onboarding, the companies that we work for, you know, we really stress you know, time is of the essence. So that's really our biggest roadblock. And our biggest challenge is just making sure that these people that we're working for work, you know, they're tasking us to fill these roles we deliver, we bring them high quality people just provide feedback with them in a timely manner to those candidates before they move on and accept other offers.
Well, that's key. Yeah, you're absolutely spot on about that. I didn't realize that. That? Well, of course, from my perspective, what you are dealing with and working with are, every bit is important. Like from a doctor's perspective, they're just they're just providing their solutions on these assets and trying to keep them working properly. All right, we got to wrap it up. Now. Here's the deal. How does somebody get a hold of you, Chris, if they say I, I really want to be able to reach out to these guys, what's the best way to get ahold of you?
LinkedIn is popular. So if you're looking for us on the socials, that's when we live on, we haven't quite gotten around to the Tick Tock and the Facebook's of the world. So right on LinkedIn, PR o r e li Yeah, we'd like to keep it professional. So that's it. I'm short and my initials Cp at Ro rely.com. If you want to reach out straight to me, otherwise, the whole company, we're all first dot last. AT Proreli.com. You can email any of us. We stay. We stay up on top of it.
All right, Adrian.
Got it with me. Yeah, same with me. I'm on LinkedIn every day always checking activities and messages. So I would absolutely love to connect up with listeners via LinkedIn, just look me up. And you can also find my contact information on there. And like Chris said, is just first name dot last name AT Proreli.com.
You guys were great. Thank you. This was a very, very, from my perspective, a very important conversation. I see that progressive reliability, providing a pretty decent roadmap on how to how to navigate these waters and find it because it's always a human. It's a human conversation. So you're, you're providing an incredible solution. Thank you guys for being on industrial Talk. Thanks for having me. All right, listeners. We're gonna wrap it up on the other side, we're going to have all the contact information for both Chris and Adrian. So if you're not reach out to these two gents, you will need not be disappointed. How about that for just getting all tongue tied? All right, we will be right back. You're listening
to the industrial talk Podcast Network.
All right. Thank you once again for joining industrial talk. And absolutely. Thank you. Thank you very much for your support. We're creating this platform. This platform is dedicated to industry professionals all around the world. Thank you for what you do. Your story needs to be told. And it needs to be amplified. And also a hearty thank you to both Chris and Adrian. Proline is the company and yes, you need to manage your assets. And yes, you need to find the right individuals, the right professionals to be able to make that happen in a big way. Proreli.com We're going to have all the contact information as I indicated out on industry Real talks, a look for their podcasts, look for their conversation, and boom, you'll be able to reach out to them because I'm just telling you, you need to have these guys in your back pocket to help you succeed in managing your assets and making sure that your business is truly resilient. All right, be bold, be brave, daring greatly. And again, we're going to we're building a great platform, and you're going to hang out with people because we want to collaborate, you're going to hang out with people like Chris and Adrian, and you're going to change the world. We're going to have another great conversation shortly. All around reliability. Absolutely. As well as all of manufacturing, you name it. It's here on industrial talk. So stay tuned. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly.
About the author, Scott
I am Scott MacKenzie, husband, father, and passionate industry educator. From humble beginnings as a lathing contractor and certified journeyman/lineman to an Undergraduate and Master’s Degree in Business Administration, I have applied every aspect of my education and training to lead and influence. I believe in serving and adding value wherever I am called.
