How a Former Teacher Found Success in the Elevator Industry | Sarah Trujillo
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Summary:
In this episode, we sit down with Sarah Trujillo to talk about how she entered the elevator industry and some of the challenges she faced. As Sarah dug in and asked questions, she became instrumental in transforming the company’s workflow through systems and innovation. Little did she know that it would lead to even bigger opportunities down the road.
Transcript:
Matt Allred 0:00
So, so basically you’re saying, you left, and really just kind of said, You know what, I’m just going to take a different job. And then it was, it was the software company that tracked you down and said, hey, you’ve had not only an impact on your business, but with all your questions and inquiries and ideas for improvement and training, and you know, you’ve, you’ve really made a big impact here. Will you please come work for us?
Sarah Trujillo 0:22
Yeah. It’s beautiful, right?
Matt Allred 0:24
Hello. And welcome to the elevator careers podcast sponsored by the Allred group. I am your host, Matt Allred. In this episode, we sit down with Sarah Trujillo to talk about how she entered the elevator industry and some of the challenges she faced. As Sarah dug in and asked questions, she became instrumental in transforming the company’s workflow through systems and innovation. Little did she know that it would lead to even bigger opportunities down the road.
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Matt Allred 1:06
Sarah, welcome to the show.
Sarah Trujillo 1:08
Thank you, Matt, thank you for having me.
Matt Allred 1:11
Thank you. I’m excited. I’ve enjoyed our past conversations, and honestly, I was kind of inspired, right? Just just talking to you about the journey you’ve been on and some of the things you’ve learned. And so
Matt Allred 1:24
I think there’s something for all of us to learn. And so I just wanted to, you know, start at the beginning, like, how did you find the elevator industry?
Sarah Trujillo 1:32
Well, Indeed, Indeed, found the industry for me. I previously, before my career in elevators, I decided I was going to be a school teacher from a very young age. I did get my Master’s in teaching and taught, and I decided that, like many people, though, what I thought I was going to do my whole life was not what I wanted to do anymore,
Sarah Trujillo 1:57
and I highly valued having more separation when I’m at work, I’m at work when I’m home and call. And so that took me to, Indeed, to find a position that I could essentially do that. And it was in elevators.
Matt Allred
Sounds like with teaching. It sounds like you just, it was just part of your life. It’s like you couldn’t really turn it off.
Sarah Trujillo
You go home and you are grading papers all night, and you’re planning your lessons, and there’s no real separation from one to another. I’m not saying I have separation now anymore, but at that time, my children were very young, and I wanted to when I was at home, I wanted to be with them at home, and so I looked on Indeed. I was looking for, you know, a typical nine to five that I could have that separation. And at the time, I had a few interviews, and one of the interviews was with an elevator company. Mind you, I’ve heard this actually several times in the past. All I knew is the elevators go up and down. I don’t really know anything about elevators, except that they were a device that I press the button and I magically end up somewhere else.
Sarah Trujillo 3:09
And so I went in for the interview, and the owner was the one who had projected and kind of asked me some different questions, and he, like most people I’ve met in the elevator industry, comes from the field and now works within the office. Followed his dad, who came from the field, opened the company, and so it was a family and company. One of his questions was, basically, you need a thick skin, and if you don’t have a thick skin, you’re not going to make it in this industry. So that’s one of my biggest concerns. And my reply to him was, well, I taught seventh grade, and the things that come out of those kids mouths
Sarah Trujillo 3:56
make sure that you have a very thick skin. And he asked me a question in the interview, basically asking me, what, what happens when a mechanic says something to you? How, you know? And I said, if I can handle seventh grade boys, I think I can handle a grown adult and their comments. And he loved it, and he called me back, I don’t know, a day or two later, and said, Hey, I have an offer for you. And are you interested? Well, the position I had applied for did not end up being the decision the position that I had he had asked me, Are you good at computers?
Sarah Trujillo 4:35
Do you type fast and have common sense? That was the requirements for the position that I was applying.
Matt Allred 4:41
Those are critical.
Sarah Trujillo 4:42
Yeah, you know, I have those. I had those criteria.
Sarah Trujillo 4:46
But then soon, working for him, I did a lot of typing up proposals and sales and things like that, but I asked a lot of questions. I have a background in education, and so a lot of my questions were, okay, how does this work? Or what.
Sarah Trujillo 5:00
Here, I quickly learned that the office was not as profitable as working as a mechanic. At this point, I was open with my career path, and can I go out on the field? He did emphasize to me a lot that I was more valuable in the office and that the field and the Okay, then pay me more. Right? Was that your answer. It’s like, hey, find that value game. So where are my opportunities working within the office then? Because right now I’m just typing up a paper screen, and that is not my end goal. I’m much smarter than to stop there. He did let me go in the field for a day. He was kind enough to let me assist with weight. They’re on wheels. But this is a category. Testing is a human duty of a mechanic, and so I had to move 1000s of pound weights from a truck to the elevator, test it, and then move them back. Now, I didn’t perform the testing. I was with a mechanic. It was just more. I did the grunt work, the help
Sarah Trujillo 6:02
and I had to go to the bathroom naturally, and the mechanic told me, all right, there’s a bucket in the van. I said, Okay, I think that I need air conditioner and I need to work in the office.
Matt Allred 6:15
I don’t know if, did that convince you then, I mean. Were you satisfied with the office after that one day experience? Or was it?
Sarah Trujillo 6:23
Oh no, I would always, that’s it. I’m going out there. Or I would, you know, fun banter with the mechanics I’ve done that. I know how to do that now, and so I would always tease. But Yes, Matt, in the back of my mind, that was when I made, I realized, yes, I am not cut out for the field.
Matt Allred 6:43
So how did it develop from there? I mean, it sounds like you were a little under challenged, right? And so it’s like, hey, not only want to make more, I want to do more. I want to contribute more. I want to give more. What can I do? How did, how did it kind of grow from there?
Sarah Trujillo 6:54
I learned quickly that there was a whole elevator world out there, yeah, and I,
Sarah Trujillo 7:01
the owner, was very happy to share his information. He knew, right? And so in the beginning, as I typed up the papers and things like that, I would ask about it. He was a huge fan of photos. He actually had a photographic memory. So he will tell you every single part, every single machine room in depth. And so with that being said, he was growing, and he had sought out a system for his growth because it was no longer manageable on Excel spreadsheets and paper. And so naturally, I was probably 20 years younger, or 15 years younger than the youngest person in the office. And so he said, Are you good at computers? Because I need somebody to introduce this new system and make sure that it functions right. And so I was excited. I have a project now. I’m not just answering phones and typing up documents. And so I quickly had to learn a lot about the industry to understand how our system should operate and how we should input data and things along that nature. And then I quickly learned more and more and more about the different contract types, the different elevator types, and my rolodex of elevator information started expanding very quickly as you are implementing new software that he’s like, Oh, hey, we’re gonna, we’re gonna roll this out. And by the way, you’re in charge of it, therefore you need to learn the business like industry, overnight, yeah. And then, and then teach it to us. Teach us this software. Yep, yep. So then I have to do a lot of, what do you do now? Okay, so this is how they do it in the system, and this is how we’re going to adapt. It’s a company. And mind you, I made mistakes. I didn’t know category test, Category Five required two mechanics. There were, there were things that I had to learn along the way and but I learned it. And you know, when you make a mistake and you learn it, you learn it a lot faster.
Matt Allred 8:59
Sure, that’s how I’m done, right? Yeah, face a few times, and that’s like, oh, that’s why we tie our shoes
Sarah Trujillo 9:06
Exactly. And so I went forward and as I’m and as I’m doing all the software now we took this bottleneck from everything’s in the owner’s head to that is accessible. I can look it up in the system. My coworker can look it in the system. We don’t have to go to and pick my boss’s brain, right?
Sarah Trujillo 9:28
The more tools that we take advantage of in the system, the more I pull out of my boss’s brain and put into the system,
Sarah Trujillo 9:35
the more accessible it is to multiple employees, and therefore we can grow now. We’re not bottlenecking. We are extended and able to
Sarah Trujillo 9:46
have somebody like myself who doesn’t have as much industry knowledge I didn’t work out in the field for 30 years, but I can take the data that he puts together for the next five cylinder replacement, and I can almost then pick and make a proposal very similar to that.
Matt Allred 10:03
Here’s the hard part that I see, is a lot of people culturally, right? It’s like, well, we still want to do things the old way. We still want to use the yellow legal pad. We still want to, did you run into that? And what did that look like?
Sarah Trujillo 10:15
Oh, absolutely. At the time, my boss types like this all right on and dragging and dropping was not the form of clicking something and pulling a file over. And so we had those humps, right? We had somebody who was working out in the field for 30 years has come into the office and has really mastered Microsoft Word. At this point, we’re going to shove a system that has endless possibilities and should use it well. There’s a lot of hand holding, especially if they’re not super technical or have never experienced using the software similar, right? And so yeah, tapped into my teaching and made some diagrams and made processes and eliminate things that were no longer necessary that we had done for years, and that was a struggle.
Matt Allred 11:06
To adopt a new way is, yeah, you probably had a lot of pushback. I don’t want to do it that way. I don’t
Sarah Trujillo 11:12
There was a lot of printing in the beginning, right? Print that, but it’s saving the system. We don’t have to print it. However, for years we’ve printed it. We put in a file, a manila folder. We put it in here. Well, what happens if the system goes down? What happens when the power’s out? You know, those types of questions, right? And so it took a good year to convince and cost analysts, right? How much do we spend on paper? How much do we spend when we can access that information, whenever we feel so, yeah, there was a lot of back and forth and
Sarah Trujillo 11:52
hang ups where, okay, well, the system’s not doing exactly what I want, and when I do paper, I can write on the paper exactly what I want, right? And so, yeah, there were many instances where it was, I just like it the way I’ve always done well, the way you’ve always done it is not going to provide you growth within the company. Or if you want to continue to hand around a clipboard and write down a trouble call or show us call, then we’re going to limit it to one clipboard. We can’t take
Sarah Trujillo 12:24
on that many accounts at that point, right? There’s limitation. And then he quickly, within the next year, saw all of the benefits that this new system added and adopted, realized that the owner, if I don’t adopt it, the rest of the employees, will not. Right?
Matt Allred 12:40
So, so the lot of the pushback you got was from the owner himself versus, I mean, the employees are going to give their own but, but you’re right. If they, if the owner sounds like he had the idea, oh, hey, let’s do this. But, Dang, this is uncomfortable. I’m so much more comfortable with what I’ve been doing, and so I’m kind of dragging my feet. What’d you say, for a year?
Sarah Trujillo 13:00
Oh, yeah, at least, yeah, at least a year. And it’s not really dragging their feet. It’s, I have this prosperous and great company
Sarah Trujillo 13:09
because of the ways that I’ve done it for whatever amount of years, right? And so to take that and flip it upside down, 180
Sarah Trujillo 13:18
Yeah. So that was the time of actually, the joke for Christmas, I got a little plaque that says, “Did you check Liftkeeper?”, which is the software that we
Sarah Trujillo 13:27
use. And anytime somebody would ask me, Oh, do you know so and so’s phone number? Hey, do you know if they paid the deposit for this job? Do you know how many trouble calls or service calls we made in the last three months, something data oriented. My reply, did you check Liftkeeper? Because what am I going to do to provide that answer to you? I’m going to check the system that we just paid for to do that right? And so quickly he realized, rather than asking me, like he’d done for so long, now, it’s all there. And then he realized that those other employees, it’s all there for them too.
Matt Allred 14:05
So he gave you that plaque, and then you could just point now
Sarah Trujillo 14:05
He was on the other side of a wall, so I still had to say it, but it was a joke.
Matt Allred 14:05
And it sounds like you you had an opportunity, not only to help implement it, teach it, roll it out, but, but, I mean, you talked a little bit in previous conversations about kind of pushing back, even on, even on the software developers, like, Hey, why doesn’t it do this?
Sarah Trujillo 14:26
Yeah, so Mark, that the owner at the company would ask me, tell me, explain a process to me, right? Because I’m not part of the industry. I wasn’t in the field. They don’t understand how that works, sure. And so, for example, how the state works and category testing and observation
Sarah Trujillo 14:44
violations and all sorts of words I’d never heard in my life. And so he would explain these processes. Well, I have to take these processes that he’s explaining and convert them to the system, right? Well, if I notice there’s a gap in the system, i.
Sarah Trujillo 15:00
Am the type of person to fill in, yes, right? So I did not know it at the time, but one of the developers that I would speak on the phone with and say, oh, you know you should do this, or, Oh, I have this great idea on that, or learning material would be so helpful in this area. I was constantly in conversation with that company, wanting to improve their software for the other users, as well as myself, right? I’m I want to, I want to improve it for my company, but I also want to improve it for everybody in this industry, because everybody has the same problems, right? It’s reoccurring. And so
Sarah Trujillo 15:38
later down the road, I worked for the elevator company for some years using this software, and covid hit, well, I got the opportunity to work from home.
Sarah Trujillo 15:49
And I think a lot of people know, unfortunately, but people in the office, we do have some perks, and one of them was during covid, we could work from home. And another thing that a system allows you to do, rather than paper, right, right, for sure. And so now that we have this system, I could essentially do my job,
Sarah Trujillo 16:08
several aspects of my job, from home.
Sarah Trujillo 16:11
Well, I want to work from home more often, but covid is over now, or covid calmed down a bit. I also have saved tons of money and gas I
Sarah Trujillo 16:21
had that one hour commute there and back with that, with my children, rather than commuting. And so I’ve gotten that taste of freedom, I guess. And so also during covid, I was from the Chicago area, which is extremely cold and snowing, and I went to college in California, and so I saw a lot of my friends, yeah, they were out taking hikes, and we were bound in our houses, not able to do anything, right? And that huge housing boom we’re all familiar with, I got the opportunity to buy a house in California that costs the same as a house in Chigago,
Sarah Trujillo 16:59
right? Yeah, crazy. So I felt like it was a no brainer, and I did make the crazy decision to move across the country. Well, you can’t manage, oh, I’d worked my way up a bell with their company, obviously, and become like the essentially I went to dispatching I’d done accounting when the accounting person was out or filled in. I did project management, so I’d worked my way through every position at the elevator, sure. So I was pretty well rounded in that view. And so at that point, I was essentially helping the owner run the company. And I had made the decision to move across the country. Well, it’s really hard to run a company when you live across the country, yeah, and so unfortunately, I did have to leave that company that I’d worked for so many years and learned so many valuable pieces of information. I moved to California, and unfortunately, I couldn’t find an elevator company that was hiring, and so I did the next thing, HVAC and plumbing, because there’s a lot of overlap, and I did that for a couple months. But in the meantime, the owner of the software company that we had used had gotten word that I had left, well, I had mentioned that I had had several conversations with him about improvements, and I knew the industry really well, and I had room for training materials and things like that. And so he had contacted me and had
Sarah Trujillo 18:30
offered me a job at that point, like I said, I wanted to work from home. I didn’t want to commute. Now, do I travel with my current position? Yes, I do. I travel a lot. I do one-on-ones with companies and things like that. But essentially, day to day, I’m home three weeks out of the month, right? And so that’s, I can take my kids to school, pick them up, I can modify my schedule a little bit so that I can meet what I need in my personal life, right? And that’s been night and day from working for an elevator company. And at that point, I
Sarah Trujillo 19:06
rose in so many levels that I was, you know, getting there early and leaving there late, right?
Matt Allred 19:10
So, so basically, you’re saying, you left and really just kind of said, You know what, I’m just going to take a different job. And then it was, it was the software company that tracked you down and said, hey, you’ve had not only an impact on your business, but with all your questions and inquiries and ideas for improvement and training, and you know, you’ve, you’ve really made a big impact. Here, will you please come work for us?
Sarah Trujillo 19:34
Yeah. It’s beautiful, right? It’s half luck, half you know, just, I think one of the biggest things I’ve learned in my life is, you know, in this industry, we’re close knit. You meet people five years later, they’re they’re in a different position, looking for different things, and
Sarah Trujillo 19:52
those relationships are what you have to really hold tight, right? And so I was offered a position that I could essentially.
Sarah Trujillo 20:00
Work from home. I was very happy about it, and took it, and I got to take my education. In education, my degree, apply it, make manuals.
Sarah Trujillo 20:13
I train new onboarding customers. I get to speak elevator all day, which I really miss when I went and worked for the plumbing company because I had to start one again and so and then when I’m teaching, I’m not only teaching. I can say I was in your shoes.
Matt Allred 20:29
Sure.
Sarah Trujillo 20:29
I know exactly what you’re feeling or that you are overwhelmed, you are, what you do on a day to day. And I’m here to tell you that there is a solution and there is hope out there, right?
Matt Allred 20:41
I know that you’re creating some of the help, which is the training, right? Because you had said there wasn’t a lot of training in certain areas or certain aspects. It’s like, especially for someone who’s coming from outside the industry, you can’t just assume I know the acronyms, you can’t assume I know the processes. You can’t assume that I know what I’m even thinking here. And so some training, and now you’re creating as a right, and rolling it out.
Sarah Trujillo 21:04
Okay, also beautiful is that the software that I chose to work for, they only do elevators. So
Matt Allred 21:12
Gotcha.
Sarah Trujillo 21:12
My background, working for an elevator company, now, at that point, for five years, was valuable, which is such a close knit and such a very stringent area, how I could actually apply all that knowledge that I’ve learned for years and years and years to a profession still, whereas when I went into plumbing and whatnot, there was a transferable skills, yeah, but that wasn’t 100% whereas now it’s, it’s 100% everything you learned you can break. And I love it. I love talking to a business owner, training an employee and they don’t have to explain anything to me. They don’t have to tell me what a category test is. They don’t have to tell me parts that are on a hydraulic elevator versus practice. I know these things. So it
Sarah Trujillo 21:57
compared to other softwares or other trainers that they would encounter now, all of that back history is pretty cold. It’s only done so they can just focus on, okay, well, my company wants to do this. Or what do you recommend you work with, you know, hundreds of other elevator companies. What? What do they do? And I guess there are a lot of those questions.
Matt Allred 22:16
Very cool. I mean, you obviously have had a very interesting journey, kind of coming from outside. I mean, you said a minute ago, you know, you, you attribute some to luck, but really what I’m seeing is, I mean, you, you really poured yourself into that job, into that company, you learned it to the point where you really became invaluable and and so it was kind of like, wow, where can we find a person that that does and knows what Sarah knows? Well, we’re gonna have to go find Sarah, because she’s got a lot to give through all of that experience. But I’m just curious, you know, through this whole journey, well, in two parts, it’s one of the biggest lessons you’ve learned. And what kind of advice would you give to somebody who you know, maybe they’re stepping out of school teaching, and they’re dipping, dipping their toe into elevators and wondering you know what to do with it? What’s the biggest lesson and what advice would you give?
Sarah Trujillo 23:07
Biggest lesson, never stop learning. You can think you know everything, but guess what? In our industry, technology changes every day, right?
Sarah Trujillo 23:17
You never stop learning about different processes, different tools, different aspects. You stay educated in your industry.
Sarah Trujillo 23:26
And so I will say I’ve seen and experienced a lot of times when somebody’s made that decision, that I’m there, I’m comfortable and ready. Well, you can’t stop, you always have to continue learning. You always have to continue expanding.
Sarah Trujillo 23:42
Don’t ever be satisfied with where you’re at.
Sarah Trujillo 23:46
And then, how does that? How does that go on to the second question.
Sarah Trujillo 23:52
I learned that relationships, they go full circle. You will always meet very valuable people, and come back and revisit them later in your career, multiple times and so creating those healthy relationships when you’re first graduating as a teacher and you’re networking right, finding out what’s out there. Talk to people, find out what they do. Find out if that’s a good fit for you. It doesn’t have to be in the Alabama industry. I just stumbled on an amazing industry that I love, but some people don’t like it. They don’t like working with mechanics who like to cuss a lot. Or, you know, there’s, there’s things about our industry that are just accepted, right that they don’t have a thick enough skin, but I would encourage you to always network, find out what’s out there, and keep that in mind.
Sarah Trujillo 24:50
Just because you went to school and got a degree in something doesn’t mean that you have to continue in that path if you are not satisfied with it.
Matt Allred 25:00
Yeah.
Matt Allred 25:00
Sure, for sure. Now that’s beautiful advice, and obviously you’ve, you’ve lived that out, and you’ve seen the value of, you know, getting to know people, letting them get to know you and trust you to the point that, hey, it’s going to come back around and they’re, you know, maybe they’ll offer you a job. They’ll give you a call and say, hey, I want your help,
Matt Allred 25:21
unknowingly, right? You don’t know. You never know. Sarah, thank you so much. I’ve enjoyed this conversation. It’s been a lot of fun, and I always enjoy talking with you. So good luck to you as you continue to build training and roll out the training and build your career, really.
Sarah Trujillo 25:36
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Matt Allred 25:36
Thank you for listening to the elevator careers podcast, sponsored by the Allred group, a leader in elevator industry recruiting. Please visit our YouTube channel at elevator careers, or check us out online at elevator careers.net.
Matt Allred 25:52
Please like and subscribe and until next time, stay safe.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai