My name is Veronica Gregg, and I have been with Foundever for a little over 23 years. I started the year that Foundever San Angelo opened as an agent taking disconnect requests from the phone company! In those early years as an agent, you were trained for multiple clients and you could take a call for the phone company one minute, then your queue would change and the next call would be for an automotive manufacture credit card!
I worked my way up from an agent to QA, to Supervisor, Acting OM, Assistant Account Manager, ORA, then to Facilities Coordinator. In April of 2019, I moved to a position with the NA Procurement Team as a Facilities Procurement Specialist.
It’s my time as a Facility Coordinator that gave me an Empowered Voice. I originally was to be more of an administrative assistant to the site director, but as time moved on and the company changed, my position did too. By 2019, I had managed the installation of:
- Two new power backup systems (UPS) and a generator
- Remodeled three complete floors
- Remodeled our first-floor lobby and conference room area, creating more office space for visitors and team meetings
- Oversaw projects to revamp our HVAC system and install computerized controls
- Supervised the sites first JDPower certification project
- Complete restoration of the exterior of the building, including all of the glass in the tower
As a smaller town in West Texas, a female Facility Coordinator can sometimes take contractors and other trades by surprise. At times a new contractor would come on-site to bid and comment on my being a woman in a man’s position. Or submit a bid that was higher than the market average presumably, because he didn’t think I knew what I was doing as a woman.
But there were more good apples than bad. I am happy to say I have built many great relationships with our vendors over the years. There have been many times that I have called someone in the middle of the night where they were more than willing to come and help me, not because of just how much money we paid them, but because I made sure to cultivate that relationship so that they would go the extra mile for us.
This is something I am hoping to teach to our newer Facility Coordinators as I’ve embarked on my new journey. As part of my new position with the procurement team, I will be working closely with our facilities teams to help them cultivate vendor relationships, and how to use their purchasing power in the best way possible.
And in this time as a Facility Coordinator, I also received my Associate’s degree in Business Administration from Penn State University. Reading through The Legal Environment of Business while a tech works on your generator at 2 AM is not as bad as it sounds!
I never thought when I walked in the door in 1996 that Foundever was going to become my career and home for over 20 years. Here’s to 20 more…
In honor of International Women’s Day, we’re highlighting the bold and powerful women of Foundever, celebrating that we’re all different, but equal. These are their stories of diversity, balance, success, gender equality and about leading the change you want to see.