Meet the 50 Facilities Leaders to Watch in 2025
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Facilities teams often focus on what goes wrong, which overlooks the people and relationships that actually drive performance.
Sarah Doherty, Regional Facilities Manager at CAVA and winner of FM Appreciation Week's Prioritization Award, explains how her operator background shapes her people first approach.
She strengthens results by training teams, building trust, and using patterns in equipment failures to plan ahead and prevent disruptions.
In facilities management, success is often defined by what doesn't happen: the quiet days, the equipment that never fails, the dining room that runs without a hiccup. But measuring the work by what stays invisible leaves out the part that matters most. Much more than just a checklist of technical fixes, facilities management is a people-first discipline where trust and empowerment do more to lift performance than any tool in the toolkit.
That's the philosophy practiced by Sarah Doherty, the Regional Facilities Manager at CAVA responsible for over 90 restaurants across the Southeast and Midwest. Her background has forged a clear vision for what drives success, earning her recognition that includes a recent Prioritization Award during Fexa's Facilities Managers Appreciation Week.
"It's all based upon the people. If we're taking care of our teams within the restaurants, that in turn helps us and our vendors and our bottom line," says Doherty. It's a simple formula that forms the core of her strategy: take care of your people—who Doherty calls "interior customers"—and they take care of the equipment, which leads to better service and a healthier bottom line.
Walk a mile: "I do this for the teams because I was that team at one point," Doherty continues. "I maintain that operator and facility manager mindset to ensure I'm always putting myself in their shoes." But what does that people-first philosophy look like in practice? For Doherty, it’s about empowering teams with concrete tools and training.
The accountability toolkit: By teaching them the specifics of how to help the facilities department succeed, she fosters a culture of ownership that strengthens the entire operation. "We train our teams on the CMS platform, showing them how to take a good picture, where to find models and serial numbers, and making them understand that they have accountability and ownership within their space. When they have that ownership, it makes them take care of things even better."
But the tools only work, Doherty insists, because of the trust they are built on. In her view, human relationships are the foundation of any effective process. Building that partnership requires a level of authenticity that reframes the team from service providers into genuine partners.
Be yourself: "You need to be authentically yourself. This is a people business. If you treat vendors as just vendors, or the restaurant team as just crew, you won't earn their trust. In facilities, you are their lifeline to keeping the restaurant open, and they need to be able to trust you no matter what. If you're authentic, they will," Doherty says.
In a field that's constantly changing, Doherty balances immediate needs and long-term strategy "with grace." It’s about spotting patterns in the data to identify when an asset has reached the end of its life and planning for its replacement years in advance, avoiding costly emergency closures.
Proactive, not reactive: "If we've serviced one piece of equipment 10 different times, we have to recognize that it has lived its life. We prioritize assets by looking years ahead. For example, we are already planning for 2026 by identifying equipment to change out preemptively to prevent closures," explains Doherty. She treats recurring breakdowns as signals to plan ahead, using them to time replacements early enough to keep restaurants running without interruption.
Looking ahead, Doherty sees technology as a tool to empower her people even further. As innovations in AI begin to reshape maintenance, she envisions a future where tedious tasks are automated, freeing up her teams for higher-value work. The rise of predictive AI agents holds the promise of making strategic asset management even more precise.
It’s a development that would bring Doherty's philosophy full circle, automating the exact pain point she trains her teams to manage. "AI is going to take so much of the tedious work off our plates, and I’m excited for the day it lets us focus on the decisions that actually move the business forward," she concludes.
