Paul Lagerstedt: The Uphill Battle of Safety in Construction
With Paul Lagerstedt, https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-lagerstedt/
https://oembed.libsyn.com/embed?item_id=16443119
This week, Tim and Caroline speak with Paul Lagerstedt, VP of Sales at Super Anchor Safety, about why safety in the construction industry is important.
More About the Show
The Build Perspectives podcast shares insider knowledge to build connections and community in the building materials industry. Tim and Carolina are friends, colleagues and former coworkers who love the construction industry and their clients, and want to share their passion and insights to attract future talent to the industry.
In this episode, Tim and Carolina talk with friend Paul Lagerstedt about his background in construction safety and how important it is to utilize safety in the construction industry.
Background of Super Anchor Safety
Paul currently works at Super Anchor Safety, which manufactures safety equipment for the construction industry, with an emphasis on residential or multifamily buildings, and it is really heavily focused on wood-frame. The company started as American Roof back around 1972. The owner of the company, who is now Paul’s father-in-law, started the company when he was 18 and living in the Pacific Northwest. He did tile and slate roofing for most of his career up until the late 80s.
In the early 90s, Washington State started to enforce the fall protection rule really heavily. Washington was one of the first states to take the OSHA 1926 ruling for fall protection and enforce it. Paul’s father-in-law started getting fined by WISHA, which is Washington’s OSHA. He didn’t really know what to do and how to solve this problem.
He knew that by law, he had to provide safety for his workers. They went out and bought the yellow harnesses and white ropes available for his guys, but they didn’t really work right. They were built for building skyscrapers and dams, not residential homes. Plus, once they would get to the job site, there was nothing really to anchor to. Because of this, he started inventing some equipment and patented a permanent roof anchor for residential homes. That is how it all started, and from there, it has grown tremendously.
Paul’s Background and Involvement
Paul has been with the company for 22 years. His family owned a trucking company that hauled liquid petroleum in the Puget Sound area of Seattle. When he was in elementary school and high school, Paul wanted to be a mechanic. He would go down to the shop with his step-dad, where he’d see people rebuilding transmissions and changing tires, which he thought was super cool.
After high school, he went to a technical college and got his AA Degree for Diesel Mechanic. He immediately went to work in the shop, and he loved it. He actually misses it every day because, in that industry, you go to work, something is broken and you get to fix it. There is a sense of instant satisfaction.
However, the problem Paul ran into was that the industry required a lot of night work. Paul had a new family, and the swing shifts weren’t working out. In order to have a day job in the diesel industry, you really have to have seniority, which Paul didn’t have. So, his wife’s father offered him a job at American Roof Factory, where he’d repair forklifts and do general duties — but it was a day job.
From there, Paul worked his way up to the Sales Department and now he is VP of Sales. They are in charge of sales for the company all over North America. They do some into Canada, but mostly in the United States.
Paul uses a lot of things that he learned in diesel in sales. Sales is all about solving problems, at least for Paul and his department. In the beginning, Paul thought the job was going to be fun and awesome because “who doesn’t want to be safe?” He thought the products would basically sell themselves. Wrong.
In the early days of Paul’s work there, people at trade shows would even get angry because Super Anchor was partnering with OSHA to collaborate on reducing falls from height. But safety was not people’s number one priority at that time. It is becoming more mainstream to be safe in the residential industry, but it’s still by no means the #1 priority for the industry.
Paul mentions that when he goes to Texas and drives around with a sales guy, he will look around and see no permanent anchors on the roofs — we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of homes. Driving through Atlanta, Georgia, he’ll see people four stories up on a hotel right next to the freeway not tied off. When you look statistically, falls are the number one cause of death for these guys working on buildings. Part of Paul’s dream is to get falls to number two on the list.
The Uphill Battle of Safety
Paul really wants to see people being safe, but it is a battle every day. What helps Paul is his drive. He is driven to see the work that the company’s done successfully. However, he knows that it’s a very long sale cycle: One to six years is the typical sales cycle.
We are mainly talking about the actual permanent anchors on the commercial roof or on the residential home. The sale cycle isn’t going to get people to wear harnesses. It isn’t the sales process, but the actual getting the anchors on the structures? Well, the builders and even architects need to proactively adopt these practices to protect people in the future.
Seatbelts’ Influence on Safety Culture
Back in 1972, Volvo was the first company to put seatbelts in cars. Before seatbelts, the defacto protection was mothers reaching over and holding their kids in the car. During this time, so many children were killed because they were flying out of the car. It took a cultural change to help prevent these deaths. Back in the 80s and 90s, when you wanted a safe car, you thought of Volvo. They sold safety as one of their main things, and it really helped them. From there, there was a slow ramp-up of safety. Safety takes a really long time because it costs a lot of money.
Think of car seats. If you were driving down the highway and you had your kids jumping around, not in car seats, what would happen to you? People would report you, and you would get pulled over. But 30 years ago, it was mainstream.
With housing safety, it is different. If you have someone come to your house and you don’t have any anchor points or anything to tie off to, but you tell someone to get up there to fix something, they do it. What Paul sees is that the guys get up there because they are told to, and they don’t really have a choice.
With seatbelts, safety is built in our brains and our hearts. You think “I could get into an accident and die,” or “I could get a ticket, and it could really hurt me financially.” Culture has made us cautious when it comes to this. When people don’t wear seatbelts, we think, “Oh, you’re an idiot!” However, nobody says that in construction.
Getting Traction in a Market Where Adoption is Slow
In Paul’s experience, it’s very rare for someone to call and say, “Hey, Paul. I’ve got this company, and I’m having a moral dilemma. I want my guys to be safe, and we want everyone to tie off.” It can happen, but those calls are rare. Most of the time when that call happens, someone falls off the roof and dies. The human body isn’t designed for blunt force trauma, so seeing that horrific scene makes people take the safety seriously.
Fear sells, whether that fear is getting a ticket, OSHA coming around or fearing having to tell an employee’s wife that her husband died and her kids don’t have a father anymore. You’ll basically have to tell them that you rented their husband or father for work, but you didn’t keep him safe and now he’s dead.
Safety does pay, but safety isn’t sexy. Some builders are seeing those things as valuable benefits to their trade partners. Some trade partners and builders will take those extra steps.
Examples of Using Safety Well
There are some shining beacons of safety out there. Many of them are bigger companies where their general counsel of their attorney, their insurance companies, their safety guys or their CEO advised for safety. A lot of this is from the top down. If the CEO says, “I’m firing you if you’re clocked without a harness,” they are building a safety culture.
Multifamily construction projects are probably the best with safety. They are higher profile job sites that are four, five, six, or seven stories tall and a wood frame. So they are on the radar of local safety officials. And the money is built in to the budget to get the proper safety equipment installed. Workers come to the job site to work and see the roof and say, “There are anchors there. This is great!” They truly want to be safe.
Paul talks about a project at Shea Homes back in the late 90s where the safety manager, Ed, called and wanted to buy a couple hundred anchors. He wanted to outfit the division with safety, but he wasn’t going to tell the guys to tie off. Ed was kind of going against what Shea Corporate wanted but it was a steeper pitch. So he installed the anchor points in advance. When the workers arrived and saw the anchors, the PPE flew out of the vans. Guys were tying off and Ed didn’t have to tell them to. He said, “Man, you put an anchor on a house and guys will use it.”
People want to be safe. But also, they work smarter, faster and build a better product because they are safe. They see that people aren’t dying and getting hurt. They see that people care about them.
Safety’s Role for Upcoming Employees
If a boss is telling you he provides anchors for you to tie off to, you feel as though your employer cares about you and your safety. You are more likely to be a more loyal employee.
If an employer is offering you $50/hour with benefits but is not willing to keep you safe, is it worth it? Is it worth you getting maimed, ruining your career or dying? Probably not.
Paul says that if someone asked him, “Would you want your kid to be a roofer today?” Paul would say, “Absolutely, if that is what they really wanted to do.” But Paul also emphasizes that he would ask his kid, “Hey, how’s your harness? Are you being safe? How is the company’s safety program?” He would be genuinely concerned.
Paul’s oldest son went the diesel mechanic route, but when Paul talks to him, he asks about his safety: “How are your safety glasses? How’s your ear protection?” Safely is important when it comes to your kids.
Safety in the commercial industry is a no brainer. You can’t get onto a selling job site without your safety passport. You can’t wear sneakers; it has to be steel-toed boots, long sleeves, hard hats, safety glasses and a harness. Commercials are awesome in that sense, especially with the union. The same laws apply to the residential trades; it’s the same OSHA 1926.502. But, you can go to a residential job site on the nation’s largest builders and it will make you ill, violent and mad to see what they let their trades get away with.
Some builders don’t seem concerned, they are like, “Yep, the trades say they’re going to be safe. Not really our problem.” Paul says there’s no way he’d let his kids work in residential, framing especially, because it is too risky and dangerous unless they are going to a company with a great safety record.
Advice for People Entering the Industry
Tim paraphrases Paul’s advice for people to find a company you want to work for and make sure they are safe and have good safety precautions, then see what jobs are opening and see where they’re training.
Paul points out that he’s probably not the best person to ask because he is so integrated into that part of the industry. He sees the worst of it, and he sees what happens when there is no safety program. It makes him really mad to see what happens in the industry. People are finding someone who is undocumented and putting them into one of the highest risk jobs out there. He estimates that around 95% of the industry is not tied off — there is no science behind this but with his anecdotal experience, this is what he averages.
The good part is that the younger generation didn’t grow up without seatbelts for car seats. So when Paul trains younger guys, they say, “Of course we are going to be safe!” That generation grew up with a safety culture. They don’t want a job if it’s unsafe. With the older generations, if they don’t care about safety, they won’t get a job. If they don’t care about safety, companies don’t want them.
Paul mentions that when you see an 18-year old’s death report, and it says that he was tired off wrong, it’s heartbreaking. He was using the right equipment but he was just tied off wrong. You can use a seatbelt wrong and still be thrown out of the window. People tell Paul to calm down, but Paul is sick and tired of reading about these deaths. In this case, the kid was 18 and had his whole life in front of him. He should have been trained on how to use the equipment, but because he wasn’t, the equipment didn’t save him as it was not tied correctly.
It doesn’t matter where you are from, how old you are, what color your skin is — we are talking about families being affected for the rest of their lives because someone wasn’t tied off. It is preventable, but people die all the time.
Staying in Touch With Paul
Paul loves talking to people, especially those that are looking to solve the safety problem. Feel free to reach out via his website or through his LinkedIn profile.
Join the Conversation
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this week’s episode! Shoot us an email at buildperspectives@gmail.com.