Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Ed Stelter of Faulconer Construction — a longtime friend of the folks here at Brown Edwards and a client of our firm. Ed is Faulconer's vice president of business development, but he's also spent years leading the company's data strategy and hosts his own construction podcast. In this first post, I want to share Ed's remarkable journey through the industry and the story behind his Foundations Podcast.
Ed's construction journey started over 40 years ago. He grew up in West Palm Beach, Florida, where his father — an agricultural chemist who traveled all over the Southeast — kept a wood shop at home and spent his weekends building things. In high school, Ed took a summer job as a laborer with Worth Builders, and later worked for a garage door company hanging and servicing doors and operators.
After community college and a degree from Appalachian State — where he also met his wife — Ed landed in Virginia. He had a passion for old homes and historical restoration, sparked in part by his grandparents' house, built in 1848 by James Madison's great nephew on land adjoining Montpelier in Orange County, Virginia. Answering a newspaper ad, Ed went to work for Charles McRaven of McRaven Restorations, restoring old log homes and doing blacksmithing, timber frame, and stonemasonry. He loved the craftsmanship, but after about two years he realized there wasn't much room for career advancement.
So Ed started noticing the construction company names on the pickup trucks around town and shotgunned out resumes. That led him to Jack Sanford, the owner of Faulconer Construction, who offered him a job on the spot more than 30 years ago. Jack asked if he could start tomorrow; Ed insisted on giving his two weeks' notice first.
Faulconer put Ed out in the field, and he calls those first two years probably the most valuable of his career — learning what it took to do the work and what the different pieces of equipment were. His first job was the Target Distribution Center in Stuarts Draft, Virginia, a tremendous building with about 40 acres under roof. Ed loves to tell the story of the day a superintendent got on the radio asking for a "pan." Ed had no idea what that was — he kept expecting someone to show up with a cookie-sheet-looking thing in a pickup truck. Instead, a big Caterpillar 621 rolled in, and Ed learned that a pan is a scraper. As I told him on the show: if someone ever says they need a pan now, he knows exactly what they're talking about.
From the field, Ed moved to a job in Charlottesville closer to home, then to a VDOT project. After a particularly wet spring left him without hours on rain days, he asked the office for more work — and they offered to let him help with estimating on rainy days. That changed the course of his career. Faulconer at the time took a cradle-to-grave approach where the person who bid a job also managed it, but Ed saw the problem: working an estimate meant neglecting operations, and managing a project meant delaying the estimate. The company eventually split into operations and estimating departments, with Ed taking the role of chief estimator for quite a number of years while his colleague David Galloway led the project managers on the operations side.
Estimating evolved into business development — Ed's natural strength. He's always been drawn to the "get work" side of the business: developing relationships, putting together strategies for pursuing work, building partnerships, and finding the right subcontractors and engineers. When Faulconer moved into design-build work, Ed was put in charge of what they called innovative pursuits, including unsolicited proposals to localities under Virginia's PPEA and PPTA legislation — a lot of work and a lot of risk, but a lot of fun when they go well, and they've been really successful for the company. About three or four years ago, new president Steve Bowers asked Ed — who had been chirping in his ear about the company's disparate, disconnected data — to take on Faulconer's data strategy, which he did for about three years. Then, as of earlier this year, Ed officially took on the title of vice president of business development, returning to his strengths of building relationships and putting together teams.
As I told Ed, he's hit the entire spectrum at Faulconer — a Swiss Army knife of sorts. But he was quick to deflect the credit: "There's a lot of things I don't know," he told me, adding that he owes it all to the men and women out in the field who make the work happen. He can't sell the company if they're not out there performing.
Before I ever launched Constructive Conversations, our construction practice leader, Billy Robinson, told me to go listen to Ed Stelter's Foundations Podcast. I won't say Ed was my inspiration — I didn't know about him at the time — but he's definitely one of the building blocks I tried to build this podcast on.
Foundations Podcast, which Ed started at the beginning of 2022, is about the history and stories behind the companies that built the buildings and put in place the infrastructure we use every day. The idea came from podcasts Ed loves — especially How I Built This, which interviews founders and owners of all kinds of companies. Ed admits he became a bit of a fanboy listening to those backstories, and he thought it would be cool to do something like "How I Built Virginia."
He had a few people in mind from the start: Jack Sanford Sr., a true Virginia gentleman who was at Faulconer when Ed started; Sterling Williamson of S.L. Williamson; and Jack Horn of Martin Horn, who was always on Ed's list — but Jack Horn passed away before Ed ever captured his story. That loss got Ed moving. He talked it over with his wife, who told him to go for it. He stopped by Martin Horn's office to talk with Doug Horn, Jack's son, and visited Blair Williamson at S.L. Williamson. Both said yes, and S.L. Williamson became his first episode. For getting started, Ed reached out to one of his favorite shows — the Mill House Podcast, a father-son duo of Andy Mill and Nikki Mill who interview young and crusty old fishing guides. Nikki Mill graciously told him what worked for them and what recording equipment to get. Ed made a few modifications, skipped video to keep things simpler, and just went for it.
His original goal was about six episodes a year. He hasn't always hit that — he has a day job, after all — but to date he's done around nineteen episodes, featuring companies like S.L. Williamson, Litchfield, Cedar Mountain Stone and Jamon Contracting, Charles McRaven (the log home restorer Ed once worked for), Barnhill, Harman Construction, Orrock, Shirley Contracting, the Luck Companies including Luck Stone, Lee Construction Group, Wayne Brothers, Wagman, MEB, SB Cox, Landford Brothers, Nello Teer, and most recently Sussex Development, which he recorded live at the AGC winter convention. One fun detail: there's no episode 13. Just as many buildings skip the 13th floor, Ed set the number aside and titled it around triskaidekaphobia — the irrational fear of the number thirteen.
The stories he's captured are remarkable. One that stuck with me was Nello Teer — no longer in business as a construction company, but at one point doing work worldwide, including a $450 million Air Force base in Israel. The founder started out with a team of mules after losing his hand at what Ed believes was a brick manufacturing plant, borrowing or renting the mules from a relative — and that team of mules went on to build what Ed recalls as seventeen sections of the Blue Ridge Parkway. As Ed puts it, it's the grind and the hustle: these folks stick with it, persevere, and the success they achieve is remarkable. I call what he's capturing "white whisker wisdom" — the way generations learn from the ones who came before — and it's invaluable.
Ed is respectful of his guests, too. His deal is simple: he records the conversation, sends it over for approval before publishing, and if a guest decides they don't want it aired, he'll respect that. Fortunately, he's never had to pull one yet. As for a dream guest list — he still hasn't done Faulconer Construction itself, and Gilbane is at the top of his list. His oldest son works for Gilbane down in Tampa, and Ed didn't make him listen to the podcast — his son found it on his own, and Ed believes it helped spark his interest in the construction industry.
You can find Foundations Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon, or at foundations-podcast.com, where every episode is posted with links to the shows. Which episode is his favorite? Ed says that's like picking a favorite child — impossible. They're all great, amazing stories.