Rental Magazine: Karin, can you talk to me about your path up to this point with IPAF and your career journey so far?
Karin Nars: I joined IPAF in 2010 as a member of council, and then in 2014, I joined the board. I started in the access business back in 2009. Back then, I started at our family business, Dino Lift, in sales. That was a point when the market was crazy with the financial crisis, and my father got very sick, and I thought that I could help out. I was just kind of learning by doing in sales, and I have some language skills that were beneficial. In addi-tion to Finnish and Swedish, I speak English and French and German. So that, of course, helped me in a sales role. It was a perfect opportunity for me to real-ly quickly understand the business, understand the customers and understand how it all works and also gain some momen-tum there.
Rental Magazine: What would you say have been some of your successes along the way?
Nars: My strength has always been listening to everybody and pulling in information. You should not think that you can do things alone, and you have to work together, you have to be a team, learn from others and create a network of people who can support you. Being in a sales role, I feel that customers also liked that I was listening very carefully and trying to learn what they need. I’m also not afraid of doing new things and trying new things. I have a strong belief that you have to be really honest about what you know and then learn from there.
Rental Magazine: On the flipside of that, have you experienced any challenges along the way, such as being a woman in a male-dominated field?
Nars: Of course, and it’s a fantastic opportunity, being the first woman president of IPAF, to talk about this and how we could help other women to see that there are opportunities in our business. We also need to make women who already have careers in our industry visible and highlight them. If they’re not visible, if they are always in roles that are in the background, if they are not in the forefront, people will not know that they are in fact there. We have launched a Women in Powered Access Initiative, and one of the main first things we are doing is sharing stories about women that are in our industry. We let them tell their story and make those visible. The next step is translating all of that into actions. So, we need to also make sure that women are visible in our industry events and that women are also invited as speakers in events. We need to focus more broadly on diversity, equity and inclusion. There are a lot of people who have a hard time to get their voices heard, and when our business is safety, we need to make sure that everybody is listened to and everybody will have a voice and that everybody can express their opinion. Companies should have an organizational culture that allows people to fail and be vulnerable and to bring their whole selves to the workplace. And that goes for everybody; it’s not the gender thing. It’s about everybody.
Rental Magazine: So, what advice might you have for people coming into the industry?
Nars: I’ve always believed a lot in mentor-ship and finding that one person who you have a strong connection with and who you can talk to in an open and honest way because you only need one; you don’t need hundreds of people who support you. It’s good to have somebody you know who has more experience than yourself. They will also learn from you, so it’s a mutually beneficial experience.
Rental Magazine: Very well said. And do you have any goals moving forward that you would like for the organization?
Nars: We have a terrific three-year plan with strategic aims and objectives that talks a lot about digitalization, and we have taken already some huge steps in that direction. It’s also very important that we are always delivering the member benefits that we are supposed to. So, I’m really glad that we have made up a thorough member benefit study now and that we are making actions around that and digging a little bit deeper into those areas where we need to improve. Then, of course, we are working on getting more accidents and near misses reported. When we have the app launched, it will bring us huge opportunities to more easily report near misses. Those are the ones that really enable us to learn and prevent accidents because every single accident that happens and every person that gets killed is one too many, so we need to do those actions before the accidents happen. I also think it’s important to focus on how we can bring more women into the industry and our sustainability objectives, both socially and environmentally.
