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The SiteVisit
Leadership in construction with perspective from the job site. A podcast dedicated to the Construction industry. Construction professionals, General Contractors, Sub trade Contractors, and Specialty Contractors audiences will be engaged by the discussions between the hosts and their guests on topics and stories. Hosted James Faulkner ( CEO/Founder - SiteMax Systems ).
The SiteVisit
From Dirty Jobs to Dignified Careers: Reimagining Construction Work with Ryan Englin, CEO at Core Matters
The mental health crisis sweeping through construction has reached alarming proportions, with suicide rates among workers soaring to five times the national average. But what's driving this crisis, and why aren't more industry leaders talking about it?
Ryan Englin, a 15-year veteran consultant and author of "Hire Better People Faster," brings powerful insights into the hidden struggle of construction workers and the leadership failures that perpetuate it. After growing up with a blue-collar father but choosing a different path himself, Ryan offers a unique insider-outsider perspective on what's really happening on job sites across America.
"People don't leave jobs; people leave people," Ryan explains, challenging the common industry complaint that "nobody wants to work anymore." He highlights how construction companies frequently overlook fundamental human needs – from basic respect to social connection – that could transform their workforce challenges.
Beyond addressing mental health, the discussion dives into provocative territory about how the construction industry has failed to adapt to the changing workforce landscape. While knowledge-economy jobs evolved to offer remote work, flexibility, and clear advancement paths, many construction companies still operate on outdated models that fail to demonstrate they value their people. Ryan offers actionable strategies for construction leaders to create workplaces where people not only want to work but want to stay.
Whether you're a construction business owner struggling with retention, a field leader trying to build a stronger team, or simply interested in the future of the industry that builds our world, this conversation will challenge your assumptions and offer fresh perspectives on making construction careers both successful and sustainable. Listen now to discover how caring about your people might be the most profitable business strategy you're not yet implementing.
PODCAST INFO:
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Ryan, how are you doing today?
Speaker 2:I'm fantastic.
Speaker 1:I have a halls in my mouth right now, so you're going to hear clicking on my teeth.
Speaker 2:You all right.
Speaker 1:Good for the voice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, especially if you're doing this a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, how many podcasts have you done in your Titans of the Trades? Just over 100. That's quite a lot, and they're typically an hour long.
Speaker 2:No, no, these are construction. This is for construction guys. How long does it get from one job site to the next? 15, 20 minutes?
Speaker 1:Oh, I see, I see the strategy. That's cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I want to be able to finish one before they get out of the truck.
Speaker 1:And there's also the download thing right, Like if it's over a certain amount of time that you have to download it.
Speaker 2:Oh, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, because you'll see streams versus downloads, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's kind of a thing there too, when it's over an hour and over a certain memory size, anyway I used to do shows that were over an hour and, um, people were like, hey, can we just get to it faster? Like that was the feedback I got. So I'm like, all right, let's just jump in and let's rip the band-aid off and get it done.
Speaker 1:So you uh about um. You have your consultancy core matters and you, you are a uh uh, a speaker, a podcaster, motivation uh, strategies, et cetera. How long have you been doing it for core matters? Almost 15 years Veteran.
Speaker 2:You know what they say Everybody's an overnight success. After 15 years, nice, I'm still still like where is that? I like it? No things. Things are going great and, um, the the amount of time I've spent near the industry and around the industry, it's, it's almost one of those things that not having grown up in the industry, I think gives me an advantage, because I see things that people that grew up in the industry didn't. I grew up in the trades, but I didn't grow up in construction.
Speaker 1:Okay. So when you say grew up in the trades, how did you manifest that?
Speaker 2:My dad was a blue collar owner operator. Oh, he was.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you grew up in the family, but you didn't do it yourself.
Speaker 2:I didn't do it myself. No, I mean, I knew how to rewire motors, I knew how to you know plumb things, I knew how to do a lot of stuff in the skilled trades. My dad taught me, yeah, but I never did it as a profession. Gotcha, okay, I went the college route because that's what you're supposed to do.
Speaker 1:You're an insider, you're an outsider insider, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, that's six years of my life. I'll never get back, so I'm not a big fan of college anymore. No, it's changed a lot, yeah yeah. But I learned a lot and I learned a lot, and I think a lot of what I learned in college and in my corporate experience I'm able to pull in today and I think that's what makes what we do so different for the industry, because they're not used to that when we got on the call originally a few moments ago, we were talking about all the things that people aren't talking about in construction.
Speaker 1:I'm so um, uh, there's lots of landmines around. People think that they're going to step on and it's actually less than they think, but it's the worry that business might go down or they might have a client or a customer or somebody that says, hey, I heard you said this thing, so yeah, but let's get into it. Welcome to the Site. Visit Podcast Leadership and perspective from construction with your host, James Falkner.
Speaker 2:Your host, James Falkner Business as usual, as it has been for so long now that it goes back to what we were talking about before and hitting the reset button you know you read all the books, you read the email, you read Scaling Up, you read Good to Great.
Speaker 1:You know I could go on. We've got to a place where we found the secret serum. We found the secret potion. We can get the workers in. We know where to get them.
Speaker 2:One time I was on a job site for a while and actually we had a semester concrete and I ordered a Korean-Finnish patio out front of the site show. Yesterday I was down at Dallas and a guy just hit me up on LinkedIn out of the blue and said he was driving from Oklahoma to Dallas to meet with me because he heard the Favorite Connect platform on your guys' podcast.
Speaker 1:Home. It crush it and love it, and we celebrate these values every single day. Let's get down to it.
Speaker 2:You know, it wasn't too long ago that I had someone tell me hey, I can't post that, I need help, my clients will leave. Like, what are you thinking? What are you thinking? What do you mean? Oh, is that my cue?
Speaker 1:That's a perfect gap, don't worry about it. Okay, that's where the music will come in, and I love what you just said there. That's going to be good, all right. So, ryan, let's get back into this, that example. You're saying you think they're going to lose clients because they've said something, or something like that. Take me through that. What do you think is the main fear of people? To not speak up or to not talk about difficult things? What do you think that motivation of that is? Is it a myth?
Speaker 2:I think people are so good, we're so good at justifying what's going on in our business and it's not me, it's never me, it's always outside factors right, that we tell ourselves these stories that aren't real. And what I've learned over the years is that every single client of mine wants me to succeed. And when I work with a contractor, every single client that they have whether it's an owner or a GC they want them to succeed because their project is dependent on that construction company's success. And if you just raise your hand and say, hey, would you be able to help me? We can't do that because we're men, we don't ask for help, we don't do these things. And it really is this mindset of if I can't figure it out, I shouldn't be asking for help, because asking for help is weakness. Yeah, if I tell somebody I'm short-staffed and that project may not get done on time, I just raised my hand and said I'm weak, I can't handle it myself, and I think that's something that's missing in the trades.
Speaker 2:You know we talk about what it takes to get people to want these jobs or to want to stay in these jobs. You know what people want us talking about Is us caring about them being in these jobs, you know, if I hear one more safety briefing about, well, this is our policy and this is how we do this and this is how we do that, you know, those guys walk away and they go. The only reason we have all these safety briefings and all these safety policies is because of OSHA, because my boss is afraid that OSHA is going to walk on the job site and shut them down. That's the only reason. But you know the real reason we have all this safety stuff? Because we want you to go home at the end of the day and be able to play with your kids. We want you to go home in better shape than you came this morning, not worse. But we don't talk about that. I don't know why we don't talk about it, but we don't talk about that.
Speaker 1:So what do you think of the, the masculinity quotient, or the? And it doesn't necessarily be need to be a um, I mean being masculine. I listened to this on podcast. It's like a behavioral set. It's not necessarily rooted in, you know being.
Speaker 2:Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying we got to feminize the trades or anything like that, I'm not saying that. But we live in a society right now where we are more connected than we've ever been, Yet we are more lonely than we've ever been. Yeah, I just went to a men's night at church and they said that 57% of men 57% don't have a best friend. Yeah, I read, I heard that the other day. Right, I mean what?
Speaker 1:And you need three.
Speaker 2:They do not have someone they can go to when they need help? And I'm sure you know this, but in the trades the suicide rate five times national average. So what people are saying with this is you know what? I'm just gonna end it because I don't know how to fix it. Nobody cares about me anyways, so what's it matter?
Speaker 1:So where do you think that this here's the interesting part about the and this is not something that anyone's proud to talk about, but I think we need to have real conversations about this In terms of the suicide rate of construction, there's the huge spectrum of construction jobs and positions, all the way down from sweeping a job site, all the way up to being a PM or being a VP. So when you see the distribution of the suicide occurrences, they're probably lowered down on the distribution there, right on the site side. And then on top of that, what do you think are the main factors of the unhappiness, to a point that somebody might be thinking those things on the job site? And the next question is is that inherent in construction or is it inherent in jobs that perhaps on the lower scale of distribution, were not plan A?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm just going to say I'm not an expert in this. By no means am I an expert in this. But think about just the industry in general and I adore the industry but for a lot of people, they either got into construction because that's what dad did right, they just followed in dad's footsteps, that's what a best friend did and he's like come with me. Or we see this too they didn't make the best life choices as a teenager, got set back in other career paths and said you know what? I'm going to go this construction route because they'll accept me. You know, we don't talk about second chance programs in SaaS platform world, right.
Speaker 2:Nobody wants somebody to be a programmer, but we talk about that in construction and so if you just go from that, we know that a good percentage of the men that are out there working in construction right now didn't have the best upbringing, made some bad choices in their life Okay Right, and that stuff perpetuates into other areas of life, whether it's relationships, financial, whatever. So there's this huge burden on especially field workers that have struggled in life and then what we do is we put them on a job site. We do not create opportunities for them to have friends at work. We do not create opportunities for them to get some R&R or take vacation time.
Speaker 2:I mean, I met a client. I've got a client a few years now. When I first met him I said how long do I got to work for you to get PTO? Five years, Five years before you give me one paid day off. You know what he says to me. He goes, and our average guy is only here about three and a half, so I never had to pay PTO. Like in his mind it was a win, I see.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'm thinking, you don't even give these guys a day off to go rest. And he's like well, they just want to work crazy. They'd work seven days a week. They'd work all of this overtime if they could, because that's what they grew up in, that's all they know. And so when you stack all of these things on top of them and then they're working crazy hours, they're not getting to spend time with their family, they don't have a lot of friends, because men in this country are lonely. We don't have other men to spend time with. You stack all those things on top of each other and it creates a real recipe for mental distress.
Speaker 1:And that's what I think is going on. So where does so?
Speaker 1:there's obviously a financial investment there on the company side, because time is money and their projects need to be, are on a schedule, etc. And if the let's say a sub let's, let's just talk as a sub trade. For instance, you were hired by the prime contractor, you've won the bid, you're going to start the work and there needs to be an alignment of values from the developer who hires the prime contractor, who then again has the tendering process, and that may be part of it. What do you do to maintain mental health on your construction site? Well, one of the things Because it needs to go down the value chain.
Speaker 2:It has to. Yeah, and I can't tell you how many times I've heard. So we work with a lot of subs more than we work with the primes, because that's where the front line's at.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the things that we hear that these prime contractors expect of the subs and the way they treat these guys and some other stuff. You're right, they're definitely down the value chain. One of the things we've done and this is a shout out to a good friend of mine, ron but we've started to introduce marketplace chaplains to our clients. I don't know if you've heard of them, no, what's that? So they've got 2,200 chaplains all over the country. You know what a chaplain is? No, so the military has them and there's large organizations have them, but chaplains are. Think of it as someone you can just go to and have a real honest conversation with. It's completely private and you can just pour your heart out to somebody. A lot of chaplains are based in a faith and so there's a faith component to it as well. But what marketplace chaplains does is they come out and they look at all your job sites and they say you know what? We got two chaplains that aren't far from here. We're gonna have them come visit your job sites twice a month and these guys go out and gals go out and they just introduce themselves and say, hey, I'm here if you ever need to talk, I'm here if there's anything I can do for you. They don't work for the company, so it's a lot easier to confide in them. And one of the things I love about what they do is they actually extend that benefit to the immediate family. So if your kid's going through something, they can actually reach out to a chaplain and have someone to talk to no-transcript. It can create a major, major uptick in not only the mood of your employees but the productivity of your employees, because happy employees are more productive employees.
Speaker 2:Just to know that there's someone that they can talk to and I think that the bottom line of this is people in the trades, especially construction. They just want to know that their boss cares about them. Just for a minute. So you care about me and I was just talking to a company and we care way too much. We take advantage and you know there's a balance. But here's what I know is that they're not getting credit for the things they do. They're just being taken for granted and it's because we don't want to talk about that stuff. I can't tell you. I mean, I've sat in rooms with superintendents talking about how nobody wants to work. Everybody's entitled, everybody's lazy. I'm like your crews. No know, you're saying that about them. Do you think that might be part of the problem?
Speaker 1:So on the on. So you're a recruiting specialist and when I say that in terms of how how to be recruiting, in terms of recruiting strategies, like what do you say to these companies in terms of positioning and the employer value proposition and who they are as a company, et cetera, Like I mean this is, this is a huge piece of this Um. But when you, as you go, I think you you kind of nailed it, uh, when you were saying, like how people get in construction, it's also how um companies evolve over time. They started off just as a person who can do something and then they ended up with a company, they ended up with employees and they end up with doing tax returns and all the stuff. So those are the companies, that sort of the you you know five to 30 employee kind of companies that are like so redlining all the time. They're like you want me to do what? Pro D, Pro D, what Like I honestly I'm dealing with the client, I'm dealing with this, I'm dealing with these guys, I'm doing all this stuff.
Speaker 1:I'm putting out fires and I mean you obviously see, that is that there's no bandwidth. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I talk about this a little bit in my book. I share a story about this. Tell us about your book. What's it called?
Speaker 1:Hire.
Speaker 2:Better People Faster.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool and people can get that on Amazon.
Speaker 2:Yeah audio book. It's available. Okay, cool, we'll put that in the link. Here's the thing about the exact story you just talked about. I'm in the trades, I'm working for some Yahoo, I walk away and go. I can do this better than he can.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Walk away. I wake up 10 years later I got 40 trucks, I got 60 employees and I'm like what did I do? And I'm really good at building stuff. That's what I do. I'm amazing at working with my hands and finding guys that can work with their hands and build stuff, but no one ever taught me to run a business Right. No one ever taught me how to be an amazing leader. No one ever taught me about company culture. You know, I talk about my dad and his story. I watched my dad struggle his entire career and it wasn't because he was a bad person or a bad person to work for. No one ever taught him the skills of doing this stuff and building effective teams.
Speaker 2:And that's what I want to do, and I think it all starts with two things. Have we built a company that people want to work at? In other words, when they see your website or they see your truck or they hear about you, they go. That's different. I want to be a part of that. I'm excited to be a part of that. Oh, you mean, you're not hiring right now. I'll wait, I like that. That's one. They want to work there. And then, when they do work there, they want to stay. They wake up every morning and they go. You know what? I know that the grass isn't greener anywhere else. I know for a fact that there is no better opportunity out there for the than the one I have right now. I'm excited to wake up tomorrow and go see James at work, cause I got a friend there and you know we're going to go grab drinks afterwards. Like I'm excited about that, are?
Speaker 2:we in a we engage people.
Speaker 1:Are we in a bigger, better deal economy? All the time People are like, hey, there's always grasses greener on the other side.
Speaker 2:Oh, I don't think the grass is when we build that kind of organization. There is no grass on the other side.
Speaker 1:No, I get that, but those are few and far between. Yeah, but we can make them. I'm not saying you can't Just saying for the average company that is trying to hold on to employees or recruit new ones that hasn't employed what you're talking about, which they should, I'm not saying they should, it's totally plan, plan, awesome plan. But how do for those companies that haven't done that kind of thing? Are most of their employees thinking bigger, better deal Somewhere else?
Speaker 2:So I just had an HVAC tech at my house yesterday I won't name names and he's come out to my house a few times over the last couple of years. He goes. Man, today's the last day you're going to see me. I said, really what's going on? He goes. I got another job down the street, pays $2 more an hour, gives me an extra week of PTO. And I just looked at him. I said, so problems with your boss. And he said he said no, no, no, a couple extra bucks an hour and extra week of PTO. He goes and there's a little thing of my boss and I said, really what's that? He goes. I'd rather not say oh, that big.
Speaker 2:That big. Here's what I know. People don't leave jobs, people leave people, and we know this. So if you have a problem with people not wanting to join your team, it's not about they don't want to work for your company. They don't want to work for your company, they don't want to work for you, they don't want to work for your leaders. If people are leaving for a dollar more an hour, two hours more an hour, they're not leaving your company. They're not Disloyal because they want to make an extra buck or two. They're leaving because they don't see a future with you or they don't want the future that they do see.
Speaker 2:That all goes back to this mental health, the relationships, the feeling cared about, feel like I belong, I've got friends and I know people are listening to this. Going that costs money. I'm not going to be able to be profitable. There's no way I'm going to be able to afford it If everybody's just hanging out being friends all the time. I'm not saying you go, set up ping pong tables and Xboxes. That's not what I'm suggesting. I'm not saying you go set up ping pong tables and Xboxes. That's not what I'm suggesting.
Speaker 2:Give guys 15 minutes at lunch without beating on them to just say, hey, let's do a fancy football league, let's just have a little fun. Let's just do men's stuff, like stuff that men do for fun. You know what? Schedule a golf outing on the weekends. You know, start a golf league. Hey, anybody can come do it. We're just all going to get together on Saturday morning we're gonna go play golf. Create opportunities for these guys to create friends at work. Create opportunities for them to feel like they belong there and people will want to work there and people will want to stay.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I'm, as you're talking this, I'm visualizing the job site. I'm visualizing this charismatic person that's talking to the rest of the frontline crew crew leader, maybe, foreman, perhaps that's a pretty, you have to have a pretty special person. I'm thinking look, there's the owner, and the owner has a mandate Look, I want you to do fantasy football, I want you to do that with all your crews. Tells the five different foreman look, this is what we want to do. Those five foremen need to be wizards at inspiration, they need to be wizards at having enthusiasm and they need enough bandwidth to be able to do those things, to be able to push off the fact that maybe the prime, the PM of the prime, is showing up at the job site that day and is going what are you guys doing? You realize we're behind schedule. You're talking about fantasy football and not saying that that's not what's happening. But that would be the myth that the owner might think shit.
Speaker 1:if I do that and I've got these guys saying that there, what's it going to look like for us? He knows, from a macro point of view it should look good, but not everyone gets it. Not everyone's on the same playbook playbook. So do you think that there is? I like the idea. At least there's a new lexicon of terms, this chaplain concept oh, not concept, it's real, but I haven't heard that term before. So I think there needs to be a new movement in terms of language, in terms of what is acceptable, what is not. And also, I continue to struggle with the term mental health, because to some people who haven't dug in and figured out what that term encompasses, they think it means I'm crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like I need to go to a psychiatrist. I need to be on medication because of chemical imbalances in my brain. That, to some people, that's what mental health means.
Speaker 2:Oh, because that's what the media is portrayed as. The media is great at spinning things.
Speaker 1:Well, because that's what the media is portrayed as. The media is great at spinning things Well. I think construction in general has found ways to add more color to what mental health means. However, here's an example and this previous podcast people can listen to. Where I brought this example is there are frontline field workers who you said might have not made good life decisions and they end up on the job site. And here they are and they have a whole backdrop of stresses that they might not be talking about, but there's only so many things that people can have in their attention at a single time.
Speaker 1:And they've got three spots that are crowded and screaming at them that you don't even know about while you're working with that person on the job. So you have that person there who is dealing with those things. But then you have the GC owner, let's say okay, the prime contractor, who is totally underwater because he misquoted all the materials, maybe because some tariff thing changed and suddenly everything's more expensive. May not have been his fault, I'm with you Totally out of their control, right? And that person has their own three things screaming, has their own three things screaming.
Speaker 1:Okay, so now we have two elements of life stresses situational stresses that are thinking that person might be like if I don't I'm talking about the higher management, gc owner, prime contractor is thinking you know, maybe I don't know how I'm ever going to get out from under this rock, what am I going to do? This is my whole life, everything's counted Like. It's feeling very similar to the person who's thinking how do I get further in my life? How do I get out of this situation? What do I do? They're both dark, really dark.
Speaker 1:But when we talk about mental health and construction, we're not going all the way up the value chain, we're only talking about the field level and I call BS on that. Yeah, because so, and then let's so. Let's just say, for all intents and purposes, we nail somehow through programs, um, the entire mental health calculus. We figured it all out. We've got programs, it's all working, everyone's happy.
Speaker 1:We now have a price per square foot problem that financially pushes everything out of reach for everyone, because nothing is free. So where we are and I'm in Vancouver, which is this is like one of the worst scenarios for this we have field workers who are working on a project. They work on it in a proud way. It's the transfer of passion from a developer all the way down to hey, now you go build this thing, it's my dream. You're not going to get part of it, we'll just pay you whatever we can pay you. They have to do that and they know they will never be able to afford to buy that and live in it, or even rent it because it's so expensive $1,000 to $2,000 a square foot here to $2,000 a square foot here.
Speaker 2:Well, so now you bring up one of my other rants about the trades and about the world we live in right now. You know it's so interesting to me that we live in a world where we value the attorney more than we value the plumber or the framer or the excavator operator the people that build the infrastructure in which we live. We do not value them as much as we value the attorney, because the attorney is going to keep me from doing something stupid or get me out of trouble. The attorney exists for the sole purpose of fixing things or keeping things from going bad, and we value them at five, six hundred, a thousand dollars an hour. Yet the person that laid the networking cable for you and I to have this call right now yeah, we scoff when they're like I need to make more money, I can't live here.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We're like are you? We have? We've seen this. We have job sites that we can't get people to because they're in a very expensive part of town and the guys aren't going to drive 70, 80 miles to get to that job site.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because you don't have contractors or frontline craft workers living near that job site. They got to drive across town for two hours. Like I'm not going to do it for what you want to pay me.
Speaker 1:Well, they don't get paid for that two hours.
Speaker 2:They don't, they don't. So what we're saying is we don't value your time, but we value the PM's time, because we'll let the PM work remote three days a week. We don't want them to be in the car all the time, but we don't value the time of the craft worker, and that's where I think we have a. That is where we need to make a big shift.
Speaker 1:So is this a governmental shift we need to make? Because if you put this to the private sector to have to fund this whole thing, everything's just going to become more expensive In everything, Because you know what Human energy is the same as fuel energy. It's the same thing. When fuel costs go up, everything goes up. Food gets more expensive, everything does when the energy it creates to build infrastructure goes up, and that's the human energy. The food costs go up because the warehouse costs more.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, I'm not a big fan of government involvement in this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:Why not oh?
Speaker 2:Why? Why not? Well, how do they pay for it? They either turn on the printing presses and there goes inflation, or they tax us more. Like how do they pay for this?
Speaker 1:No, because I think what's happening now is that what we were paying for is now being scrutinized to the fact that we might actually pay for things that matter Reappropriation of funds that have been wasted in the past are now going to a place perhaps like this, because we do realize and this is the same with Canada, same with America is we do realize that we have to get our act together when it comes to making things, building things and supporting the right things. Otherwise, we're going to wake up. We're going to have India and China on our doorstep and they're going to be knocking and we go. Oh, by the way, we control going to wake up. We're going to have India and China on our doorstep and they're going to be knocking and we go oh, by the way, we control everything. Now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's kind of globally macro. We could get into the whole. How do you?
Speaker 2:balance a budget at the government, but we're not going to talk about that. But no, I think that it's. We need to change the narrative. Okay, Construction is an industry that turned a blind eye to the rise of the knowledge worker.
Speaker 1:Yep, I agree with that.
Speaker 2:Construction is an industry that said, well, that's not going to affect me, that's not going to impact me, and we ignored it. And if you think about what the newspapers and the libraries did in the late 90s and the early 2000s, they're all gone now Because they ignored it. They said that's not going to happen to me. People are still going to want to read their newspaper with the coffee, like, yeah, they get to on their phone. They didn't think about this, and the construction industry did the same damn thing. In what respect they ignored the rise of the knowledge worker. You know I can go work from home and make $22 an hour answering customer service phones for Amazon. I live wherever I want, I work crazy hours, but I get to do it from home. Well, I know a lot of companies. I can't even get started in the trades for more than $17, $18 an hour, it doesn't matter where.
Speaker 1:I live, then why would they do it?
Speaker 2:That's my point. And so, as an industry, we didn't say wait a minute, we've got to solve this problem of the remote worker. We've got to solve this problem of the remote worker. We've got to solve this problem of this is our competitor. I'll never forget one of my first podcast episodes, Gosh, this was four or five years ago and I was talking to this guy. He was the president of Nari remodelers industry and I said you know what? Who's your biggest competitor right now? If you're paying $24 an hour or less, he's like well, it's the guy down the street. You know the other remodeler, he's the one that's going. No, it's Amazon and Target, because I can get a job working in an air-conditioned warehouse for $24 an hour. That's four or five years ago.
Speaker 2:We ignored the fact that people value things like an Amazon same day or being able to contact a customer service rep who's sitting in their house. We ignored the fact that technology boomed and gave an opportunity to knowledge work and as an industry, we ignored that. We said it's not gonna matter to us, because people that wanna work with their hands wanna work with their hands. We did nothing to protect the industry's image. We did nothing to change some of the poor perceptions of the industry. We did none of this stuff. We completely ignored it. And now we're waking up and going. 40 to 60% of people in construction right now are retiring within the next 10 years and the amount of people coming in isn't even close to a fraction of what we need to support the infrastructure in this country. It's not even close to a fraction of what we need to support the infrastructure in this country. It's not even close, because it's not just the new stuff we're building, it's all the stuff that's breaking, that got built 40 years ago, that we got to fix. Now too, yeah, totally. And we've ignored that. And we have an entire generation of people that said you know what People in construction? We could probably reach out to most employers and say this they just don't give a damn about me, they don't care. You want me to prove it?
Speaker 2:During COVID, what did we do? We segregated people into essential and non-essential. That's what we did. Now, if you were in the trades, most of them were essential. But what happened? We had all this extra influx. We had governments, we had states saying we got to fix the infrastructure, we're going to fund all of this construction work, everything else. Covid went away and we went back to the way we were. Nobody cares anymore. And all of a sudden, we don't have the funding that we did. We don't have people willing to pay $300 to get a plumber out to fix their toilet, because you know what? I'll just YouTube it and I'll figure it out myself. And so all of a sudden, people have said, well, if they don't care about me, then I'm going to go do something else. I don't think we have a hiring issue in the trades. I don't think that we have a labor shortage in the trades. I think there are plenty of people that would do this work if they just felt we cared about them just a little bit more.
Speaker 1:Do this work, if they just felt we cared about them just a little bit more. So what are the factors of caring about somebody? Sentiment, income. What are the factors?
Speaker 2:Now, how many times have you heard? I've heard this a lot how many times have you heard a foreman or a superintendent said you know what you got to leave your crap at home? How many times have you heard that this isn't severance? We are human beings. We don't get to turn it off when we walk onto the job site?
Speaker 1:No, I get that, but what about other jobs? Everyone has to shut it off too everywhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but there can be an element of support in that. Hey, you know what? Why don't you take the rest of the day off? And the guy's like, well, I don't get PTO for another two years. Well, that's why we give people paid time off so they can go get their act together, so they can go take care of stuff. But in the trades we don't do that. We say, hey, if you're not here to work and turn your wrench, you don't get paid.
Speaker 1:So do you think that there is an industry self-esteem that is kind of lacking?
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:So how do we does there need to be a? Who's the who's the kind of lead who would you say is a, is a lead influencer in construction that is driving the people aspire to listen to and, like you remember her sort of the rise of the Jordan Peterson's, if you will yeah, Like who is that in construction that's making people listen and maybe people stand up for themselves and coming, getting people to come together from a conceptual point of view, Cause it seems splintered to me, oh, it is Absolutely.
Speaker 2:I mean, maybe NCCR is working on it through build your future. But you have to remember something these organizations and these people that are working to be this unified voice, they all grew up in construction, so they're doing the stuff that they knew how to do and they're hoping they can figure out a better way to do it. Well, we needed some people to come from outside and go here's what we're doing, like, I love build your future and I love what they're doing. And I love how they recognize the fact that we have to bring multiple trades together, because if, if, my, uh, if my foundation guy is short staffed, my framer can never get to work, my plumber can never get to work. So we have to bring them together and say we got to solve this problem and I love what they're doing.
Speaker 2:But then they create baseball cards to hand out to kids in high schools and they put billboards on the freeway. That's not where the kids are today. Kids are online and, yeah, they might do a little bit of stuff online, but they're not doing the stuff online that needs to be done. They're thinking kids are going to hand out baseball cards of what it's like to be a plumber or an operator. Yeah, that's not enough. Like we got to think differently about this and it's not the kids that are the problem.
Speaker 1:Well, I guess this okay, let's get to that in a second I guess the signal from what those guys are doing the baseball cards and the billboards at least there's effort it might not be directed in the right way or the approach might not be that modern, and maybe it's like they get to drive by the billboards like, oh there it is, wow, our work is in front of us. We've seen that it's like it's the. You ever heard that old adage the best ad ever didn't make it in the magazine because the boss's wife didn't like it. It's kind of that same thing. It's like it's up there for everyone who isn't, who, it doesn't matter if they see it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but, um, so let's talk about what you just said there, um, about the when parents, and you can talk to this yourself in terms of what your experience was, because you were telling me that you went to college and your dad was in the trades and so the, the paradigm of where you're not going to go into construction son, daughter, whatever um, you're going to go get an education, that whole calculus.
Speaker 2:Do you think that's changing or do you think that's super sticky still? I think there's pockets where it might be changing, but I think, if we look at a macro level, it's not changing. I mean, there is more talk. Not everybody follows the media. Not everybody is on the news. People stay away from that. They get in their little echo chamber and they only hear what they're supposed to be hearing. But I think, macro level, kids are still going to college. Parents are still lining them up for that. Parents are still lining kids up for knowledge work, because knowledge work is cool, knowledge work is respectable. I can go to the country club and brag about my kid who's now working for Google or Apple or Facebook, but I'm not gonna go to the country club and brag about my kid who's working for some construction contractor that no one's ever heard of.
Speaker 1:Okay, so here we go the parents. The career path of the child is a signaling feather in the cap of the parents. So let's just get into this for a second. We're now in a time where meaning and purpose with adults is at an all-time low. Everyone's looking for a thing, for some kind of zip, like something that, oh, why don't I focus on my kid's career? Wow, maybe I can start to feel good about myself from that, so that then, if they go well, wait a minute, you want to go into the trades. What do you hang on? A second Someone at your school came and told you that this is an opportunity for you and sidestepped me.
Speaker 1:Who's been telling you for a while that I wouldn't be proud of you if you didn't try and get as most out of your life as possible for one, that I provided the opportunity to be able to give you enough bandwidth to be able to do that I didn't have. And it's all about that, more than it is about hey, you know what we're going to need to build a lot of stuff in the next 20, 30 years and that 16, 17-year-old could be doing some amazing stuff. And it's getting less dirty, dangerous and dull on a daily basis. Construction is becoming really, really exciting with robotics, ai. There's so many cool things.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'll never forget the first time I did a crane simulator. Oh, it was the coolest thing. And they're telling me, yeah, these new cranes, like they're gamified, like it's fun to operate a crane. All of a sudden I'm with you, but I love how you describe that thought form of the parent and that so-called conversation. I don't know that people would articulate it that way, but the behavior reflects what you just said. Absolutely. The behavior is there and and that's where I think we have the problem because you can get into the trades and after a four-year apprenticeship you become a journeyman or whatever path you go down, you can make 60, 70 grand a year, but we don't. You know, we talk about the money and we talk about how good it is, but we don't talk about how cool it is because, frankly, it's not cool.
Speaker 2:If you're in the trades, like I'm, so ingrained in the construction world, I just think it's the coolest stuff. And the things that I've seen, the things I know, is just the coolest stuff, like I geek out about it. But if I'm not, you know what my experience with construction is? I'm going to be late getting to my job today because they shut down the road. That's my world for construction. Oh, my house is behind because some GC can't get their act together and get these contractors together. That's my experience with construction it's all negative.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. So there's one other, like when you look at um, there's an example I had on a number of podcasts ago. I had a uh, there was a facilitator for trades and construction and construction opportunities who was putting this program together for high schools, and this person, uh, I had a call with this person and he told me that he got an email from a mom that said how dare you provide and influence my kid to think that they would go into construction?
Speaker 1:I did not give you the permission to do this. Wow, okay, so that's something that actually happened, that this person told me. Now I have to think also from the mom's perspective. Sure, we got to look at, like, why is she thinking these things? In this particular example, it could be a dad, it could be whatever, but just in this case it was a mom. So I just watched a um, the new uh surgeon general just did a speech yesterday or this morning, I think. I just saw it on YouTube and it was talking about processed foods and how the medical industry, how it's all super backwards. And then I look at the average diet of the person on the job site. It is a to-go food culture.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:So you look at the mom and the mom's saying well, my little Johnny is not going to go and take a crap in a plastic box and is not going to eat Subway his whole life because I don't want that for my child. You can understand what she means Like, think about that. Moms are super protective. They're like bear moms. Right, they're going to do that and you can't blame the mom for that, but you do have to. So I think that the entire industry needs a shakeup. I think, in general, our social discourse and diet and our lifestyle everything needs a shakeup.
Speaker 1:So it's not just, you know, specific to construction, but you know, having um, the one guy, um uh, john Luca, who I had on, uh, this was on that panel in the building show in Toronto. He's like we treat people on site like animals, yeah, and we can't do like, here's your food you don't talk about. You know how great something tastes. It's more like just it's empty calorie crap.
Speaker 2:What do we do? We call them hands. Right, they're the hands.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but you know what when?
Speaker 2:their hands don't work anymore, I go get another set of hands, but this all goes back to how we started. People don't believe you care about them. If they don't care about them, they're not going to care about you. And when somebody makes an opportunity for a dollar more an hour, they're going to be like beats the heck out of this, but you were saying that before we got on the call.
Speaker 1:You know to have great conversations about construction, but yeah, but we need to start doing things. I think everyone can just talk. Yeah, yeah. I wonder, like, when I heard this surge in general thing, I thought, wow, subway's in trouble. When I heard about a processed meat, that's all they have, yeah, right, like what's going to happen here? Do you think they're not going to fight back for this? Do you think they're suddenly going to have like stuff that's not like sodium nitrate food? You think that's? You know they're not going to have cold cuts anymore? No, like what is going to happen. This is going to be insane. So I think in construction it's like okay, well, why don't we be as an industry? We have the ability to be the leaders and it's not. As I was saying earlier, construction is not going to be this old school picture from when they were building the Empire State Building.
Speaker 2:The guy you know having lunch on the beam, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's not that anymore. It's not. It's not. It is using robotics, it is using drive by wire. It is like using cool equipment. It is. It's awesome, right, and this is only going to get cooler and entre new. Everyone you were mentioning about the, the attorney. That is worth three to four hundred dollars an hour. Well, you know what it's? A lot of these lower-level attorney jobs. Yeah, sure, if you want someone to show up in court for you, represent you, okay, that's going to be there for a while, but you want a paralegal? Done. See you later. Ai. Hello, it's going to take a while before Elon's Tesla humanoids are going to be sitting because of the change in environment.
Speaker 1:The built environment is changing every five minutes, right, and you're going to trip over that shit unless the camera footage is updated every five seconds. So we're going to need to have humans doing this stuff for quite a while.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have a client that does reinforcing steel, they do bridge work and they're doing robotics now and everybody was like, oh my gosh, this robotics is going to replace it. No, what it did was it allowed the men that knew how to do the iron work to go do the real iron work? Cause this robot all it does is lay down and it just puts down decks. That's all it does. So sick, I love it, you know, but it's cool to watch. It's cool to watch. But I'll never forget that same client was on Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, actually, mike. Rowe is one of these guys right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, he's. He could be the guy. I think he's doing a lot of good things for the trades. He really talks a lot about getting the kids in schools and education and everything else, but I really do think that he's still missing out on the parents. Have you interviewed Mike?
Speaker 1:before what have you interviewed, mike?
Speaker 2:I have not, I have not. We should go find him, we should, we should Well, so I mean, but think about this for a second, think about this for a second. We create a TV show to showcase construction jobs, agricultural jobs, these really cool jobs. And what do we call it Dirty?
Speaker 1:jobs, great for marketing. What did you just tell every mom in?
Speaker 2:America, yeah, good point. And we do this all the time. We come up with these taglines and these slogans. I'll never forget there was this plumber in Arizona. They're the smell good plumber. I mean, that's just a knock at the entire industry, except for them, of course.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And how many times Ben Franklin does this. You know they have a tagline about you know, if we're not on time, it's free, or something like that. What are they doing? They're telling everybody in the industry we're not on time, right, and this is what the public hears. And then we wonder why people don't want a dirty job. I don't want my kids to have a dirty job. Why would I want my kids to be dirty all day? And then that's it. I don't explore it, I don't look at it for them, I don't go, wow, they could be really good at this. They can be very successful. They could be an entrepreneur. I mean, the trades is probably one of the easiest industries to get into, startup and grow into a CEO because you can start your own company. Yeah, it's one of the few out there that you can do that, but we can't get past the fact that they're dirty jobs. So you know our kids aren't going to have a shot at it.
Speaker 1:So when you go into, can we just talk about you and what you do for companies? Obviously you have your podcast and you. So what are the, what are the main things that you hop in there and you kind of put your cape on and you go fix for people or at least set up for them?
Speaker 2:Well, first thing we got to do is stop the bleeding. Everybody, every contractor out there, is bleeding in some way or another. They don't have enough people coming in, so jobs are behind. They got jobs that aren't profitable. They've got rampant turnover. They've got toxic leaders.
Speaker 2:Whatever it is, we come in, we assess, we stop the bleeding. First thing we got to do because we can't get them to pay attention to that next level stuff like becoming the employer of choice, and that's step two we have to become the employer of choice. We have to be so prevalent in our local community. We have to have a reputation that is not tarnished by the rest of the industry. We have to have people that are out there bragging about how amazing we are, and we have a process we take our clients through it's called the choice framework to become the employer of choice and then, once we do that, we've got to get people performing. So now we start looking at your organization and, as we start designing the organization and understanding who reports to who, we make sure everybody's clear on what's expected.
Speaker 2:One of the biggest complaints we get when we survey teams, especially in the field, is I don't know what my boss expects of me, cause today it's this and tomorrow it's that, and I have no idea because no one's ever sat down and had that conversation. We just don't do that in the trades. We just say, hey, go get to work. And then when they're not performing, we tell them they're not performing. What's that phrase? No news is good news. If I'm not yelling at you, that means you're doing a good job. Wow, Anybody that's got children know that doesn't work. You've got to encourage that positive behavior. You have to reinforce that positive behavior and if you don't, you're just going to get more of the negative behavior. So let's get really clear on how to have those conversations and let people know they're performing.
Speaker 1:So how do you think so, when people are bringing on or talking about positions they have available in their company, what are some like techniques that you can think of that, like interview techniques when they have a candidate, for instance?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the interview is my favorite part. I love the interview. I love interviewing people. It's so much fun. I love getting to build relationships.
Speaker 2:Keep in mind that the interview is a sales process, Except you're the buyer. As the owner, you're the buyer. Your job is not to stand there and sell your company. They're standing in front of you. You have to decide if you want to invest in them, if you want to buy them, buy their time. Right, that's what we do. I give them money, they give me their time. I'm the buyer, which means they have to sell me. But too often we're so desperate we show up. You're like, yep, they can fog the mirror, we're good. And you hire them and they don't work out and it's like nobody wants to work. Well, if you would have taken 10 minutes to have a conversation with them, maybe you would have found out what motivated them. Maybe you'd have found out why they're leaving their old job. Maybe you would have found out why they want to make more money or why they want to work for you. And if we just focused a little bit more on the why in the interview, it creates such better opportunities for everybody.
Speaker 2:The flipping of the power dynamic there, turning into the buyer rather than the selling. Do you think people will hear that message in a way and then exploit that message and say things like why should I hire you? Is it that kind of message we talk when we're doing sales teams which we don't do a ton in construction anymore, but we have sales teams. One of my favorite interview processes is to ask them about their past performance. Tell me about a time you were top performer, tell me about some of your big wins and share that. And then you just pause and you look at them and you just say you know what, I'm just not here in top performer. And you just stop Like you've got to sell me and now I just rejected you and told you no, all in one sentence. And if you're in sales, guess what? You got to be okay with both of those. So I want to see do you squirm your way out? Or do you actually sit down and have a conversation with me? And we see companies do that a lot, where they they get to a point where that confidence level shifts and they're no longer worried about if I don't hire this one, there won't be another one, because that's where they're all at right now.
Speaker 2:We just had a conversation with a company. They have somebody. I asked him. I said who's the problem on your team? And everybody pointed to the exact same person. So, foreman, nobody wants to work for him Completely toxic. If one guy that's figured out how to work with him kind of Nobody else wants to be on his crew. So why do you keep him? Well, because we can't replace him. There's plenty of people out there that want to do this work, I promise you that. But maybe they don't want to do it for you, or maybe they don't want to come work for you because you've got this toxic person. But see, they don't have the confidence yet. And once you have that confidence, it's really easy to walk away and say you know what, there'll be a better one.
Speaker 1:Do you think that the archetype of that one foreman that's just toxic or is disruptive in that way? Typically those people are very talented too, right, and that's the hard part is that their output per minute is so high. It's just like, oh no, oh, you can't do it, I'll do it. That kind of person, right? That person that know it all, but super talented. And that's the rub all the time, because you're thinking, ah, okay, well, yeah, I mean Orion comes to me and says, wow, there's lots of people that could fill this position. I can tell you that you say that to them and they go and in their mind they're like, yeah, but the person does this, this, this, this. That's too much work for me, because it is work for the recruiter, which is often so.
Speaker 1:What do you think of? Like? I've seen a bit of a disconnect between recruitment managers talent, talent people so not as the third party, but somebody who works in an organization, who is hiring people that there's a disconnect between what they do and then what the boss expects, and then exactly what happens. They're like this fake thing in the middle. That is not a true representation and they don't have a lot of charisma to begin with. They're just kind of like phoning it in and I mean, do you see that quite a bit, oh yeah, and here's why Recruiting is not an HR activity.
Speaker 2:We give it to HR because it's people-related, but recruiting is a marketing activity. Think about that for a minute. You've got an open opportunity, you're posting it on a job board as an ad and you're saying come work for me. That is marketing all over the place. Yeah, but we give it to an HR person who grew up in a world of compliance and checkboxes, and then they lack charisma, they lack connection, and then they are the representation of our company to the rest of the world and it's no wonder we struggle. So one of the first things we do is if they don't have Usually HR people don't like recruiting anyways. And so if they don't have usually HR people don't like recruiting anyways. And so if they don't have a recruiter, we'll help them find a recruiting coordinator who's usually like an inside sales rep or a customer service rep. Those are the people that do amazing at recruiting, but they don't think about that. They think, oh, I got to hire an HR person and that just doesn't work. So recruiting is a marketing activity.
Speaker 2:I want your listeners to hear that. Give and that just doesn't work. So recruiting is a marketing activity. I want your listeners to hear that. Give it to your marketing team. They'll do a much better job?
Speaker 1:Yeah, actually I have. At SiteMax I have one of our CSMs recruiting another CSM right now Doing the first interview. He is a senior CSM, but the point of that is because they're going to talk the same language, they're going to ask different questions than I'm going to ask. I'm going to do once we got a short list, I'm going to do the cultural fit and make sure that you know is this person an a-hole or not? Do I want this person in my company? Yeah, I got to do that part.
Speaker 1:But, I really, really want our person who's living and breathing that position all the time to be talking the language, and then there's no surprise, also when the person gets here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I heard so many times. I'll bring together the superintendents. I'll say all right, what can recruiting do better? Start sending us quality people. What do you mean? They're not sending quality people Because there's this belief that if we need someone new on the job site, we just let the recruiter handle everything. The recruiter doesn't know. And so I say, good, define quality people so I can look out for them. They're like well, why aren't we having that conversation Like what does quality mean? Let's focus on that, figure that out.
Speaker 1:Cool. Well, I think um you and I can talk for hours on this stuff. I love it, you know, um, I think we, you know doing, we're both in the hundreds of podcasts. I mean, yeah, god, the amount that I've done, it's up there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's crazy so the amount of conversations we've had. It's really cool to sit with you and be able to exchange with you like this, and it's very easy, by the way. So you make that very easy. So thank you very much. Maybe we should do a follow-up. What do you think let's?
Speaker 2:do it.
Speaker 1:Let's do it Okay, Ryan, People can get you on LinkedIn. Is that your preferred?
Speaker 2:That is my social platform. I'm Gen X, so I'm just kind of stuck on the business platform. But yeah. Linkedin and then corematterscom Perfect Okay, and if your listeners are interested in an autographed copy of my book, they can go to corematterscom. Slash free book and for shipping and handling, I'll sign a book and send it to them. For the old S&H.
Speaker 1:I like it. Okay, that's awesome. Well, thank you very much, ryan, it's been a pleasure All the best.
Speaker 1:I'm going to see you out there. I can't wait to see you again. Well, that does it for another episode of the Site Visit. Thank you for listening. Be sure to stay connected with us by following our social accounts on Instagram and YouTube. You can also sign up for our monthly newsletter at sitemaxsystemscom slash, the site visit, where you'll get industry insights, pro tips and everything you need to know about the site visit podcast and sitemax, the job site and construction management tool of choice for thousands of contractors in North America and beyond. Sitemax is also the engine that powers this podcast. All right, let's get back to building.