Where Character Matters
The podcast took a the off, so we changed up who was in the hot seat.
It was a real honor to join Kennerly Benraty on his live radio show, Where Character Matters, which aired over the weekend on 93.7 The Ticket out of Lincoln. The show is built on the idea that leadership is less about what you do and more about the journey it took to become the person doing it.
Titles change and the tools come and go, but the person you’re becoming shows up on every project.
Leaders Carry the Weather
Every jobsite has it’s own weather system, yet many of us don’t even realize it. The superintendent shows up hot. The PM who walks in steady. Either can bring the storm, or bring the calm.
So while construction spends a fortune forecasting rain delays, we totally misses forecasting the storm we bring in ourselves.
That’s where Eli Embleton comes in, a man with the unique ability to stay calm under the most extreme pressures. He uses that power to help others move beyond survival mode and into connection.
But in order to do so, he first had to learn to do it for himself.
Garbage In, Sugar Cookies Out
The six most expensive words in business are “we’ve always done it that way.” But for construction, that’s just a Tuesday. And all too often it’s our go-to response for shutting down any conversation about change before it starts.
For someone like Orion, who comes to construction from the outside with genuine curiosity and a unique perspective on data, that answer just doesn’t cut it. Not when we have pigsties of data wrought with hidden variables.
You see, despite the fact construction has survived centuries behind the curve of tech adoption, change is coming.
And it’s coming whether we like it or not.
The Number for What?
Long before Lillie Maximo knew what an estimator was, she knew what one sounded like. Or at the very least, what the superintendents thought of them.
Live from the ASPE Summit 2026 in Orlando, Florida, she sat down to share the stories of that first-hand experience. Experience she puts to use for good by taking complex project information and finding the real story behind the number.
Because it’s that story where most estimates can easily go wrong.
The Expertise You Need Is Already in the Room
There's a side of construction that still seems to believe the biggest gaps we face on the jobsite are technical.
Missing software. Missing integrations. Missing data.
But the gap is so much simpler than that. Before we even get to the captured data, there’s a plethora of expertise sitting in someone's head that somehow never makes it into the conversation.
And how we close that gap just might be the most important innovation of all.
When Nothing Happens Equals Job Well Done
Nobody walks into a building and checks whether it's going to fall down. We just trust that the building will stand there as intended. And the moment you stop noticing a system altogether is a system doing its job perfectly.
That's the trap of anything that actually works. But the invisibility of effort isn't the same as the absence of effort.
So how can an entire organization, made up of 70,000+ members, build themselves around a definition of success that looks like nothing at all?
The Grain Doesn’t Lie
When it comes to art, and the idea of molding stellar creations out your material of choice, there is one common skill that each great builder has.
Patience.
Whether wood or metal, acrylic or oil, every great artist has patience. But we’re not talking about the passive kind. We’re talking about the kind that builds projects people love and cherish for years to come.
Believe it or not, we can learn from this kind of patience. And what we can learn is a lesson construction has desperately needed.
We’re Actually on the Same Side
In construction, the contract has become a secret weapon. Yet while it’s a system designed to pit us against each other, that doesn't have to mean we have to be adversaries.
Instead, when you approach a redline from the place of a shared end goal (completing the project), negotiations stop feeling like an attack. They’re simply two people trying to accomplish the same thing, faster and with less pain.
It sounds super simple, right? So why is it almost never how things actually play out?
Profitable on Paper, Broke in Practice
Your P&L says you made money last year, but for some reason it doesn’t feel like it. That’s because you’re looking at the wrong number. Revenue.
Here’s the thing, revenue is not health. In fact, it never was.
So that number you're proudest of might just be the least real number in your books.
The Realest Superpower on Any Site
Superpowers are awesome. Every one of us at some point has dreamed of flying. Or of having super strength. Or of the “Spidey sense” that warns us of something being wrong before we can see it.
Unfortunately while they may be helpful, none of those can be used to build buildings.
So this week, we had a little fun debating what the coolest superpowers are and whether it’s the power or the person that makes the hero great?
It was a fun conversation, but in the end, the real moment of this debate isn’t about the comics at all.
The Vacation Test
Honest question for you. Would your pipeline survive you turning your phone off for a week?
Not "would things get a little messy," but truly hold momentum and lock down deals while you're away.
For most teams across construction, the answer is no. The good news is, that's not a people problem. The bad news is, it’s a much more difficult problem to solve.
Toughness is a Material. Resilience is a Structure.
If you’ve been around construction long enough, you’ve learned a tough lesson you’ll ultimately carry for life: even the strongest steel in the world still fails. Not because it's weak, but because of fatigue.
Stephanie Lemek has learned the exact same lesson. Only to her, we’re talking about something much more important than steel.
We’re talking about our teams in the field.
The Dinner Party Test
There’s a moment in every contech sales cycle that is tough to ignore. The deck is polished. The features are real. The ROI is documented. And yet, nothing. No sales. No traction.
Many point at the luddites of construction and blame the industry. They call it change-resistant. They call it slow.
But Colin Crook, founder of FractalPR, has a different diagnosis.
Trust Has No Neutral Transactions
There's a lie that runs across many construction sites, and it goes a little something like this: "It’s not a big deal."
Whether it be the missed callback or the days-late follow up, we all too often ourselves those things are trivial. That people don't even notice.
Well, they notice.
That’s why Joel Bennett set out on a mission to teach leaders in construction a unique skill. How to actually operationalize trust.
The Tool Isn’t Impressive, Trust Is
Which matters more, how impressive a tool is or how trustworthy it is? When I sat down with Brian Tracy, who literally co-authored the textbook on managing construction technology, his answer certainly caught me off guard.
“A tool is impressive to me by how trustworthy it is.”
Maybe that’s cheating, but honestly he’s not wrong. And the more you dig in, the more you realize that’s how we constantly miss the point with contech.
The Safety Net is the Saboteur
Four out of five digital transformations fail. That's an 80% strikeout rate which, even in baseball, isn’t very good at all.
And of course, we just love to blame that on the software. The clunky, broken, overpromised software. I get it, sometimes that might be true. But after twenty years of ConTech, it’s become clear that failure is rarely about the tool and more about the back door we leave open.
But don’t just take my word for it. Take from the guy who literally wrote the book on implementation.
You’re Not Hiring Talent. You’re Building a Coaching Tree
Construction doesn't have a talent shortage. It has a coaching tree shortage.
A shortage is something you fix with better recruiting. A tree is something you can only solve with intentional decisions compounded over years.
The challenge for construction right now is nearly half the workforce will retire in the next five years. That means we’re about to quickly learn who built trees and who just built rosters.
Invisible PPE: The Human Under the Hat
We've spent fifty years getting really good at protecting construction workers.
Better gloves, glasses, hard hats and boots. Better harnesses, vests and signage. Even better toolbox talks, incident reporting and stand-downs. We have stacked layer upon layer of PPE and processes in an effort to eliminate the ways someone can get hurt on a job site.
And yet construction loses five times more people to one particular cause than any other physical fatalities.
Suicide.
So either we're protecting the wrong thing, or we're simply pretending that physical PPE is enough.
The Opportunity is There, Explore the Trades
We don’t have a labor shortage problem in construction. We have a story problem.
We talk about demand, stability, earning potential and even long-term growth. But despite all of that, we still can’t attract enough people to fill the need. The opportunities alone aren’t compelling enough to make someone choose construction.
It’s a contradiction that’s hard to ignore.
And that’s where Explore the Trades steps in. Not to simply promote the trades, but to connect the next generation in a way that draws them in.
Pick Your Pain: To Change or Not
Believe it or not, there are two kinds of pain available to you in every major change. Whether it be a shift in process, tech or culture, we actually control our pain.
The first is obvious, the pain of changing. The second is more subtle, the long, slow accumulation of brokenness from choosing to remain stagnant.
All too often, construction chooses the latter thanks to the inherent risk avoidant nature of our industry.
But that mentality is costing us dearly.
