Take 10 with Bart Chambers
Welcome to our interview series, Take 10! This year, in an effort to give insight to key leaders in the FinishMaster family and learn more about their daily activities, we are featuring a different team member every month. Check out the sixth entry below and stay tuned for more interviews each month!
Name: Bart Chambers
Title and Department: VP, Information Technology
Years with FinishMaster: 3 years
Location: Indianapolis Home Office
1. What are some of your day-to-day responsibilities? I provide leadership and direction for the technology team to ensure availability, stability, and security of all our information technology systems.
2. What do you enjoy most about your job? That FinishMaster is big enough we can do really great things to make a difference for our team members, vendor partners, and customers, but it’s still small enough that everyone can contribute and really feel like a family.
3. What are some of the challenges in your job? There's always something new in technology and we're always looking to capitalize on technology to make our customers more profitable and our team members more efficient.
4. How has your work with FinishMaster impacted your life? It has definitely made me a happier person. The FinishMaster culture really creates an environment where everyone is open to working together. Different departments contributing together positively makes for a happier IT department.
5. What is your favorite Core Value and why? Embrace Change. We can't all want everything to be faster, cheaper, better, and not expect our customers to feel the same. If we embrace change, we can make it work for us. And technology is all about embracing change. There is always a new idea, process, system to keep moving forward.
6. If you had to give one piece of advice to people just starting in their career with FinishMaster, what would it be? Get to know all your great team members! I have been lucky to have so many people invested in my success. All the opportunities to visit customers, follow the processes at our distribution centers and branches, and better understand how everything comes together to support our customers have been invaluable.
7. Outside of work, what do you enjoy doing? My wife and I like to go to music festivals. Most of them happen over a long weekend so it’s easy to schedule and a great time to just be together and watch a few good bands.
8. Tell us about your family. I have been married to my wife Kris for 19 years. We have two daughters, one in 6th grade and one in 10th grade. Our youngest plays soccer and our oldest rugby so we tend to spend most of our free time at practice or games.
9. What’s a fun fact about yourself? My wife and I met in college where I was doing tech support for the classrooms and she was taking all the calls and coordinating our work. She learned early on about the IT schedule that requires nights and weekends to get things done.
10. What is your favorite food and/or the last movie you watched? Just watched the new Spiderman movie with the family. The special effects just keep getting better and it’s really fun to see my kids interested in something that I would have loved at their age too.