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In the second half of my conversation with Ed Stelter of Faulconer Construction, we dug into the topics he's most passionate about today: data and AI in construction, what makes great leaders, and the company — and projects — he's proud to be part of.
Garbage in, garbage out: data and AI in construction
When I asked Ed about AI and data, his first response was, "Got a couple hours?" Ed spent about three years leading Faulconer's data strategy, and the biggest lesson he learned is one every contractor should hear: there's a lot of lack of integrity in company data. He shared a meme that sums it up — ask a room who wants to be a data analyst and hands shoot up; ask who wants to clean data and nobody moves. Ed has even heard VDOT say they have volumes and volumes of data but very little information.
Ed's data journey started back when he became chief estimator. He dumped the company's bids into a spreadsheet and broke them down by size, market sector, and public versus private, calculating hit rates in each area. The gut feel was there, but it had never been on paper. Around 2020, Faulconer added a CRM system and started tracking clients and bids more accurately — and diving into those data sets opened Ed's eyes to how often information was entered wrong. His take on why is refreshingly honest: it's not necessarily anybody's fault, but it's everybody's fault. When humans enter information, there's a lot of opportunity for error, and if nobody is checking the data or using it to drive decisions and give feedback, the people entering it stop worrying about it. It becomes a vicious cycle. (Telematics data, by contrast, he finds "pretty daggone good.")
Ed became a little obsessive about getting things right, with help from colleagues like Christine Cunningham, quite the perfectionist, who worked alongside him to rein things in, clean things up, and standardize. He also compared notes with Travis Tuning at Luck Companies, who started in data the same way — curious, poking around on his own before it was ever his job title. Travis told Ed it took Luck about seven years before people quit bringing spreadsheets to meetings and started relying on internal dashboards as fact. And when dashboard data looks wrong? Ed says 98 times out of 100 it traces back to either a human entering something wrong — like getting cute and typing a character into a number field — or a hiccup on the Microsoft side.
The payoff is transparency. Ed can tell you, practically to the minute, how many people work for Faulconer and their tenure, broken down by labor type, office, or trade — operators, laborers, concrete finishers — along with financial and safety information. He told a story about a recordable suddenly showing up on the safety dashboard: it turned out a superintendent had clicked a "recordable" box on a small incident where a skid steer bumped into something. Because the data was visible, the anomaly was spotted, dug into, and corrected quickly.
All of this matters even more in the age of AI. As Ed put it, AI learns off the foundation of your data — and if that foundation lacks integrity, your answers from AI are going to lack integrity. The quality of your AI experience is directly correlated to the quality of your data. Getting value out of AI takes intentional work: context engineering, metadata enrichment, verified answers, trigger phrases, and readable naming conventions. His example: Faulconer uses Vista as its ERP platform, where a field like "JCCD" contains a bunch of cost data — but AI doesn't know what JCCD is. You have to coach it. As I said on the show: junk in equals junk out. As auditors, we're big on internal controls and processes that make sure data gets entered correctly, and data is only worth analyzing if it's useful — useful for making informed decisions on a daily basis, not six months later.
Ed is part of an AI peer group with about six other construction companies, facilitated by Nate Fuller of Placer Solutions — who, as it happens, was one of my earliest podcast guests. Ed admits he sometimes feels panicked that Faulconer is behind, but through those conversations he's realized they're actually on the early front of the curve. My take: if you're even thinking about AI right now, you're ahead of most. I don't see a big push for implementing AI in construction yet, at least in West Virginia — but AI is progressing so rapidly that if you don't start now, it's going to be impossible to catch up.
Ed also shared a concept worth remembering: the productivity J-curve, where performance gets worse before it gets better. The classic example is the electric motor. When it first arrived, factories simply swapped it in where the central steam engine had been — with belts still running everywhere — and productivity didn't budge. Only when someone realized motors could be broken into smaller units and scattered across the manufacturing process did productivity take off. Ed sees the same pattern with Faulconer's data strategy and the wholesale software platform changes they're making now: the results won't show up right away, but the fruits of the labor will come.
And what about the fear that AI will take jobs? Ed thinks it will replace some jobs — some will become obsolete or be pared down significantly — but there are jobs that will exist tomorrow that we don't even know about today. He predicts data curation will take off as a profession, with humans making sure data sets are curated accurately. He also believes that maybe toward the end of his lifetime, the job site of the future — at least for grading — will run twenty-four seven, autonomous equipment working day and night like ants, stopping only to fuel or repower, with far less human oversight than today. It's already starting: Luck Stone's Bull Run quarry in Northern Virginia runs autonomous haul trucks with no driver, and we swapped stories about Waymo's running all over Phoenix. Ed also shared the old saying that the factory of the future will have a man and a dog — the man to feed the dog, and the dog to make sure the man doesn't touch anything.
I shared my own first AI experience: after seeing colleagues reveal that 90% of their internal training presentation was created with ChatGPT, I fed my own presentation idea into it — and it produced about 70% of what I'd already built from my own brain. Nate Fuller's response when I told him that has stuck with me: you're always going to need somebody for that other 30%. Trust but verify. And Ed added a point I love: as AI levels the playing field for the written word, the differentiator will be the ability to personally connect — face to face. He doesn't see AI ever replacing that. Technology evolves whether we like it or not. AI is here, so it's best we get on board and work with it instead of against it.
The people-profit connection: Ed on leadership
I've had some big names on leadership on this podcast — Rob Jones from Echelon Front of Extreme Ownership, and Wally Adamchik, the Firestarter. So I wanted to know where Ed, with all his years in construction and all his Foundations Podcast conversations, sees the best leaders getting their traits.
Ed's answer starts with what he calls the people-profit connection: if you connect with your people, the profit will follow. Sure, you can be a hammer, treat everybody like a nail, and still have profitable times — but Ed doesn't see the long-term sustainability in that. For him, leadership boils down to your connection with people, doing the right thing, and the golden rule.
It's a theme that runs through nearly every successful firm he's interviewed. When I asked what traits successful construction companies share, his answer was immediate: the people they surround themselves with, without a doubt. At Barnhill, the family feel is legitimate — Ed has heard how Mr. Barnhill would walk job sites asking everybody about their families, calling wives and children by name. At Lee Construction Group, Arlene Lee talked about how important the people were. At Sussex Development, Harry and Raleigh Davis kept reiterating that it's the people working for them and the excellence they deliver every day. Litchfield had key relationships that took them far, and the same with Mark Orrock. And it's not just employees: many of these firms point to close alliances with their accounting partners, banking partners, and legal partners. I've seen the same thing in 27 years of public accounting — I once told a gentleman taking over a company through a purchase plan, when he asked "what do I do now," to surround yourself with good people: a good CPA, a good project manager, a good insurance person. Not many firms are successful riding solo.
Ed also had great advice for people earlier in their careers, drawn from his own playbook. When he was newer to the industry, his strategy at presentations and conferences was simple: think of a question, raise your hand, stand up, introduce yourself, and ask it. Someone once asked him, "I'm not really important at my company — what should I do?" Ed's answer: how do you lead when you're not in charge? Keep raising your hand. Stay engaged. People notice, and pretty soon they're pulling you into their circles — asking you to serve on a committee, then a board, then an executive committee. Volunteer and participate, whether in an industry association or your community. Ed has lived it: he's been involved with what he calls the whole alphabet soup — he just rotated off the board of the Virginia Transportation Construction Alliance, where he served as president (interestingly, Faulconer's owner Jack Sanford was president of the Road Builders Association some 23 or 24 years ago), he's been involved with the AGC of Virginia and economic development organizations, and he was the founding president of the DBIA Central Virginia chapter. It's also, he notes, one of the things that matters most when your company sends you to a conference: be present and be engaged.
One more thing Ed emphasized: always remain curious. He's constantly learning — reading, listening to podcasts and books. Leaders need a strategic mindset, good people around them, and the ability to inspire, motivate, and align resources so people have the tools they need to succeed. I added my own two cents: a leader has to be approachable, and you can't lead silently. The best leaders in construction aren't sitting back in the office barking orders — they're out in the field, even if it's just walking the job site, showing people at the highest level that they care about the quality of the job.
Ed was candid that this is the one thing he doesn't like about his own role: spending so much time on the get-work side means he spends essentially no time in the field getting to know the people. With over 700 employees now, it's pretty impossible to know everybody. But his gratitude is genuine: it's the men and women out in the field, delivering projects with excellence, on time and with quality — in the heat, the cold, the dust, the wet, and the mud — that make Faulconer who they are. As he put it, he could talk to clients until he's blue in the face about how great the company is, but if the proof isn't in the pudding, they're not getting the next job. Letting people know that they matter — that's a big part of leadership too.
Eighty years of building: Faulconer Construction
Before we wrapped up, Ed made sure we talked about the company he works for. Faulconer Construction has been in business eighty years as a family-owned company. They're a heavy civil, full-service site contractor working pretty much throughout Virginia and North Carolina, and currently doing work down in Charleston, South Carolina as well. The company employs about 700 people across six main offices — potentially seven, with Charleston possibly becoming the seventh. In North Carolina, Cary is the main office, with additional offices in Charlotte and Jacksonville; in Virginia, headquarters is in Charlottesville, with a small office up in Culpeper and one down in Salem. Ed is optimistic about the road ahead, too: he believes the longer-term economic forecast for their type of work is pretty healthy, driven by the demands of AI, power, and EVs, coupled with our aging infrastructure. Repairing, enhancing, and improving infrastructure is going to carry this market sector for many more years — hopefully, as Ed joked, well into and beyond his retirement.
When I asked Ed about his most memorable projects, his answer surprised me a little. He doesn't go home and dream about the Target Distribution Center, the Walmart Distribution Center, or the roughly $75 million truck climbing lane Faulconer added as a third lane on I-81 in Christiansburg — even though those projects are pretty epic and big. What really excites him are the water resource and environment-related projects. One of his favorites was the Dell at the University of Virginia: a stream there ran underground through a box culvert beneath a large area of the university, and Faulconer daylighted it — bringing it back to the surface and putting in a big pond in a really beautiful setting. Another favorite was a public-private partnership (PPEA) project for the town of Christiansburg: a roughly $20 million park with four multi-purpose fields, a million-dollar adaptive-use playground, several commercial parcels out front, trails all around the site, and a dog park. It's a place where families are going to go, where a lot of smiles are going to be put on kids' faces.
That said, Ed hasn't lost sight of why the roads and utilities matter too: making sure that if grandma gets hurt, she can get to the hospital quickly; that when people turn on the water, it's clean and drinkable; and that when they flush the toilet, it goes somewhere it can be treated properly. All of it is hugely important — but it's the projects that put smiles on people's faces that make Ed smile and that he's most proud of. And in the end, it comes back to people: what matters most to Ed is that he and his team can bring opportunities to the table so the men and women of Faulconer can come to work, make an honest living, and contribute to the community by making it better.
That wraps up my conversation with Ed Stelter — check out his Foundations Podcast, and until next time, keep building, America.
