Modernize. Grow. Take the lead.

Leave a legacy.

In your twenties, you looked at your career as an open possibility toward greater things. You were idealistic and eagre. In your thirties, you moved upward and sometimes onward, trying out various roles for various companies. In your forties, you settled in and made some good strides. Maybe you directed some crucial projects or mentored the new wave of twentysomethings entering the workforce. You did a good job—or even a great job—of things, and you were proud of your accomplishments. 

But right around the 50-mark, you started asking yourself if it was enough? Did you do what you set out to do all those years ago? Did you make a difference? Had you self-actualized? When you go, will people notice that your contributions mattered?

Making an impact takes courage

Month over month, quarter after quarter, you pushed the needle up. You delivered positive results for your company. But doing a great job, though praise-worthy, isn’t something that will stand out years from now as a memorable thing. Because your results are individual. Your drive to succeed is of personal benefit. 

Legacy is bigger than one person. And it lasts beyond one person’s time.

Want to leave a legacy?

Be kind to your people. Treat your team well and invest in them. Empower them. When you enable your team to succeed, you create a rippling positive change; those who model your behaviour contribute to a virtuous cycle.

By caring about those around you, you create positive change for others so that others carry that torch into the future.

The most visible way to care about others is to fix a significant problem on their behalf. But fixing major problems takes courage. Many times, that problem is a process that doesn’t work. Slow processes create bottlenecks throughout your organization. And bottlenecks create cascades of stress throughout divisions. 

Streamlining workflows not only increases productivity, but it also reaches multiple levels of a workforce. It impacts many people. But streamlining workflows isn’t easy—transformative fixes seldom are. And yet, the fixes that matter most are the ones that create employee happiness. They decrease stress, save time, boost efficiency, and increase revenues.

Being the one who unclogs a jam of magnitude creates impact. 

Leaving a legacy means being the one who turns a giant flashing amber pause button into a stable green play button. But the decision to set things in motion for the better often gets pushed off. The simple reason is that the beginning is the hardest part. The noise of current-day urgent demands takes focus away from the future. But legacies happen when “how it can be” finds a place in the daily grind.

The enormity of legacy

If you’re a facility manager and retirement is something you’ve started thinking about, your legacy can be to transform how your company manages its drawings.

Volume is usually the biggest initial stumbling block. You feel that there’s simply too much to tackle. But changing how you manage drawings doesn’t have to be a system you design from scratch. It doesn’t have to be one person handling thousands of pounds of paper. It doesn’t mean one person alone needs to find what’s missing. Because documents go missing over many years, hiding amid thousands of yards of square footage, on disconnected CPUs and dusty, locked-away CDs and DVDs. It comes off as too daunting to be worthwhile!

But it isn’t daunting. And it is worthwhile.

Transforming drawing management processes within a company is as easy as deciding to hire someone else to do it. Someone with decades of experience handling that very thing—from the beginning right through to the end. 

That someone is DCM. And we’re actually a great team of someones.

The beginning requires a hands-on accumulation of all assets. Our team of specialists tackles paper chaos and digital disorganization every day. This part is dirty work. But once all assets are centralized, digitization begins. That is a multi-step process that ends with all drawings in the right format in the right place, managed by a drawing library that’s searchable. 

The hard part—the one that garners praise at the end—is deciding to embark on this process by hiring drawing conversion professionals. It’s realizing that hiring a drawing management company to manage your drawings will pay back dividends immediately and for years to come, saving your company hundreds of thousands of dollars after you’re gone. What you leave behind is a cloud-based system that makes finding and sharing your facility’s engineering drawings a clickable affair that takes mere moments. 

That’s something everyone in an organization notices. That’s something that gets talked about by the water cooler years later—“Remember when we used to have to go to that dark room in the basement and sort through hundreds of rolls of blueprints?” 

Your legacy is your gift to current and future team members. That gift is efficiency, ease-of-use, retrievability, and shareability of digitized documents. It’s lower stress, higher productivity, better decision-making, and more time to devote to future profit-generating goals.

The legacy you leave behind is one of modernization. So take charge! Make the call. Put your name on transformation and help your organization move into the future. 

Inspire your team, then pass the torch.