The Career You Found by Accident

Let’s be honest, not many of us grew up dreaming of becoming a facility or asset manager.

You rarely hear a child say, “When I grow up, I want to manage aging infrastructure, negotiate service contracts and explain why the roof cannot wait another year.”

Most of us found our way here through another route. We started in the trades, operations, property management, environmental services, engineering, administration or in my case, a chef.

Someone noticed that we could solve problems, coordinate people and keep things moving. Then, one day, we looked around and realized we were responsible for a building, a budget, a team and a list of problems that never seemed to get shorter.

We may not have chosen the profession at the beginning, but many of us chose to stay.

You Get Noticed for Fixing Problems

Early in your career, being a strong problem-solver matters.

When something breaks, people call you. You understand the building, know which vendor to contact and can usually find a way to keep operations moving. That reliability builds trust quickly.

The challenge is that it can also become your professional identity. You become the person who handles every emergency, reviews every quote and answers every question. It feels good to be needed, but it can prevent you from moving beyond the day-to-day work.

At some point, fixing every problem yourself stops being a strength. It becomes a limitation.

The next stage of your career requires you to look beyond the immediate repair.

Why did the equipment fail? Has it happened before? Is the preventive maintenance program working? Should the asset be replaced? Does the team have the right training? Is the vendor solving the problem or simply responding to it?

A repair restores the equipment. Leadership addresses the reason the problem keeps returning.

Leadership Changes the Questions You Ask

As your responsibilities grow, the questions will change.

You stop asking only, “How do we fix this?”

You start asking:

• What happens if this fails again?

• Who or what will be affected?

• Is this the best use of our available funding?

• Are we repairing an asset that should be replaced?

• Does someone else on the team need to take ownership?

• What information does leadership need to make a decision?

You also learn that technical knowledge alone is not enough.

Tradespeople speak in equipment, parts, labour and practical solutions. Finance teams speak in budgets, forecasts and cash flow. Senior leaders speak in risk, service impact and organizational priorities. A facility leader needs to understand each perspective and connect them.

A technician may tell you that a boiler is short-cycling, parts are becoming harder to find and another repair may only buy a few months.

Leadership may need to hear:

We can spend another $20,000 on repairs, but the boiler will remain unreliable. Replacing it now will reduce the risk of a service disruption and prevent further investment in equipment nearing the end of its useful life.

The facts have not changed. You have translated a technical problem into a business decision.

That ability is often what separates someone who manages repairs from someone who leads facilities.

Your Success Can No Longer Depend on You

Moving into leadership also means becoming comfortable with not doing everything yourself.

This can be difficult- people who built their careers by being dependable and carving out those strong relationships with vendors is hard to give up. You may know the building better or believe you can complete the task faster. You may be right, but that approach does not scale.

If every problem, approval and decision must go through you, you become the bottleneck. Your team cannot grow, and you never create enough time to focus on budgets, capital planning, compliance, contracts and long-term improvement.

Leadership means setting clear expectations, assigning ownership and following up. It means giving your team enough direction to succeed and enough room to make decisions.

Your success should not be measured by how many problems you personally solve. It should be measured by how well the facility, team and systems perform without requiring your involvement in every detail.

A Career Worth Sticking With

The career path to an FM is rarely straightforward. Facility management is likely a career many of us found by accident, but it should not remain invisible.

The profession brings together technical knowledge, financial judgment, communication, risk management and leadership. It gives you the opportunity to influence how organizations invest money, support people and prepare for the future. Where else can you do that?!

The work is not always easy. Budgets are limited, infrastructure is aging and expectations continue to rise. Still, there is value in knowing that your decisions keep a building safe, reliable and ready to support the people inside it.

Many of us entered this profession because we were good at fixing problems.

We built careers when we learned how to prevent them, communicate their impact and lead others through them.

What starts as fixing problems can become an amazing career in leadership. Perhaps the next generation should not have to discover that by accident.