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I'll be honest with you — coming up on two years hosting Constructive Conversations, I've had a lot of good conversations. But my recent episode with Alex Shaw is one that I've kept thinking about long after we wrapped up. Alex is an advisor in the Risk Performance Group at Scott Insurance, and he's been working with contractors and other industries on risk management and safety for around 12 years. He came to us through a mutual connection — Scott Insurance and Brown Edwards work together on several projects and clients, and Alex's colleague Mike Philhower had been recommending the podcast to their team for well over a year. I'm glad Mike finally made the introduction.
What made this conversation so good isn't that Alex told contractors what they wanted to hear. It's that he challenged some of the most taken-for-granted assumptions in the industry — starting with the idea of "safety culture" itself.
The Problem with "Safety Culture"
Alex has a different way of looking at this. He points out that we don't talk about "finance culture" or "HR culture" or "legal culture" — so why do we isolate safety as if it's a separate organism inside a company? His argument is that what actually drives great safety outcomes is a company's core culture: whether people genuinely care, whether there's a mindset of continuous improvement, whether there are guiding operational principles that inform how the work gets done every day.
In his view, "safety culture" has become a kind of cultural appropriation — an attempt to bolt something onto a company's DNA rather than growing it from within. Safety, he told me, should be an intentional byproduct of culture. Get the culture right and safety follows. Try to engineer safety onto a broken culture and you'll mostly just spin your wheels.
That framing resonated with me. As a CPA who works with a lot of contractors, I know that the best-run businesses aren't running separate programs for every discipline. The culture of doing things the right way runs through all of it.
The Safety Industrial Complex
Alex has a name for the ecosystem that has grown up around workplace safety: the "safety industrial complex." It includes tort law, the insurance industry, regulatory agencies, and a few others. These entities, he says, have effectively outsourced safety to a set of rules, standards, and compliance checklists — and convinced companies that following those guidelines is the same as being safe.
He backed this up with a number that genuinely stopped me in my tracks. Despite millions of superintendents and foremen completing OSHA 10 and OSHA 30 training in recent years, 22 new OSHA regulations being introduced over roughly the past two decades, growing insurance carrier requirements, and the safety profession itself projected to grow 13% in the next ten years — the fatality rate per hundred thousand workers in construction has hovered around ten for decades. It hasn't moved.
Falls have been the number one cause of occupational fatality in construction for fifteen years running. Fifteen years. If we've identified the problem and we keep doing more of the same things, Alex's question is the right one: why do we expect a different result?
His answer is blunt: more compliance doesn't equal more safety. More low-resolution training doesn't equal safer workers.
What Alex Actually Did Before He Became an Advisor
Part of what makes Alex's perspective so credible is where it comes from. He didn't arrive at risk advising through a classroom. He started working at thirteen years old — his first job at a video duplication factory in Lynchburg, Virginia, followed by landscaping, construction work with a company called Coleman Glass Construction, restaurants, physical therapy clinics, and arboriculture. He's done roofing and roof repairs with his brother. He's ridden along with fuel haulers, run press brakes in manufacturing plants, done firewatch for mechanical contractors, and unloaded rail cars at mining operations.
When Scott Insurance's leadership told him to go spend time with clients and get to know their businesses, it fit exactly how Alex already thought. You can't be a competent advisor if you don't understand how the work actually gets done — the people, the tools, the culture, the politics. So he goes to work alongside them. That's how he learns.
High-Resolution Training: What the Best Companies Actually Do
So if compliance-focused, low-resolution training isn't moving the needle, what does? Alex's answer is specificity. He calls it high-resolution training — and the best-performing companies he works with have made it a priority.
He described one construction client that runs about 3,000 compliance-based trainings per year — but also 12,000 technical trainings focused on how to actually use the tools and do the job. That client has an OSHA incident rate of 0.10 in an industry where the typical rate is 1.9, and their loss rate per hundred dollars of payroll has stayed under fifteen cents for roughly thirteen years.
He also talked about a tree care company operating in an industry with a fatality rate of 17 per hundred thousand workers — a genuinely dangerous field. Over 25 years, they had managed only one serious injury. They ran weekly Thursday technical training sessions focused on the specifics of their equipment: chainsaws, loaders, chippers, rigging configurations, rope types, canopy anchors. They maintained Slack channels where workers in the field could post photos or videos asking subject matter experts to weigh in on a rigging setup in near real time. That's not luck. That's a system.
Alex drew a comparison that I think every contractor should sit with: elite special operations teams spend roughly 75% of their time training and maybe 1% executing missions. In most workplaces, that ratio is completely inverted. We're on mission 99% of the time and training the other 1%. He's not suggesting the workforce stop producing — but where companies can close that gap, even a little, the results tend to be significant.
Sharpen the Chain
My favorite moment of the whole conversation was a story Alex told about a work day he had a couple of weeks before we recorded. He's part of a group of about five friends who, once a year, rotate through each other's properties to knock out projects together — a kind of organized work swap. This time they were out in Rocky Mount, just south of Roanoke, felling seven big white oaks.
It was hot — in the nineties — and at some point Alex ran his chainsaw into the dirt. The chain dulled almost instantly. Suddenly what had been cutting cleanly was grinding and struggling through the wood. He still had trees to finish. He had a choice: keep grinding, or stop for five minutes and sharpen the chain.
He sharpened it. Five minutes later, he was cutting cleanly again.
The parallel to companies is obvious once he makes it, but it's one that a lot of businesses miss. Sometimes you have to take a guy with 25 or 30 years of field experience out of production and turn him into a trainer. It feels like giving something up. What you're actually doing is sharpening the chain — transferring knowledge in a way that makes every other worker more effective and safer. Alex has seen companies of all sizes figure this out creatively. An HVAC contractor with around 50 employees runs weekly training sessions each Thursday, with an experienced senior employee hand-selecting the participants based on what they need. You don't have to be a large company to do this well.
The Power of Storytelling
One pattern Alex has noticed across the best-performing companies he works with: they tend to be prolific storytellers. It's not a coincidence. Storytelling is how human beings have always transferred knowledge — body language, facial expression, points of emphasis, demonstrating something in action rather than just describing it. When companies rely on binders full of SOPs (he mentioned one Northern Virginia contractor with 400 pages of procedures that, realistically, nobody reads) or off-the-shelf digital content, they lose that dimension entirely.
Alex's observation here was one I kept turning over: people don't need to be taught as much as they need to be reminded. If you design your organization to remind people, to tell stories, to share what they know with each other in real and specific ways, you'll outperform any compliance program.
I mentioned my own experience with this — my first year in public accounting taught me more than four years of college. There's no substitute for learning from people who are doing the work and can show you what it looks like in practice. Alex sees the same thing on job sites every day.
How to Actually Change a Culture
I asked Alex directly: if a contractor comes to Scott Insurance with a broken culture — or no real culture at all — how do you help them change it? His answer started with a principle he carries into every engagement: treatment without diagnosis is malpractice.
He's worked with more than 70 businesses over the years, and his first move is always to go spend time with the client. Get into the field. Do the work alongside them. Understand the organizational priorities, the personalities, the internal dynamics, who makes the decisions and who the people in the field take their cues from. Every company is different, even if they're all in construction.
From there it's a deep dive into the mechanics of how the business is actually designed: meeting cadences, measurements, accountabilities, incentive programs. Organizations, he says, are perfectly designed for the results they get. If the results aren't where they should be, the design needs to change. And that starts at the top — when the head of a company genuinely has the will to do this, that's who everyone else takes their cues from.
Cultural change, he reminded me, typically takes three to five years. There's no shortcut. But for companies willing to commit, the payoff — in safety outcomes, risk performance, and the kind of ownership culture that attracts and keeps great people — is real.
Guiding Principles Worth Keeping
When I asked Alex for a parting word for contractors who want to do this better, he shared the guiding principles his own team at Scott's Risk Performance Group operates by. Three pillars:
An emphasis on learning. Learning is the prerequisite to improving. Knowledge for its own sake has value — but it matters most when it's paired with action.
A bias for action. Knowing what to do is only half of it. The harder part — and the more important part — is actually putting it into play.
Community. This work is hard to do in isolation. Design your business to learn and act together — both within your own team and alongside other organizations you can learn from and be encouraged by.
And over all of it, his overarching encouragement was this: don't let the safety industrial complex convince you that anyone else understands your business better than you and your people do. The intellectual capital to improve your risk performance is already inside your organization. The job is to leverage it.
