A Safer Workplace Adds Profit with Gavin Coyle

Greg: Gavin Coyle, great to have you on the podcast. Appreciate you coming on.

Gavin: Greg, I’m delighted to be here and thanks very much for asking me onto your podcast. I’m very excited. Obviously keeping a close eye on yourself and all the good work that you’re doing in construction. So well done you.

Greg: Likewise, Gavin.

Greg: This is why I wanted to get you on mate. So, Interesting podcast topic today and before people switch off we are talking about safety but safety in a way that’s actually going to make you more money in your construction business. I want to get that in early because safety in construction is sometimes people’s eyes just glaze over and The blinkers go on a little bit, but I think it’s really important.

Greg: First of all before we go into How are we going to make you more money in your business? Let’s first talk about why you’ve got into [00:01:00] safety initially, Gavin. What started your journey? Because it’s quite a bit of a story that you’ve got here.

Gavin: Yeah so I had left school and went straight into construction as a labourer working for a very successful Irish company in Ireland, who were at the forefront of a lot of hyperscale construction that was going on.

Gavin: In Ireland, because the American multinationals were moving into Europe in a big scale. And obviously Ireland was a tax advantage and still pretty much is today. So they were using Ireland as a land base. So you had Intel. Hewlett Packard, Warner Lambert, which is now Pfizer GlaxoSmithKlineBeach, like, the list is endless.

Gavin: Any of the top, like, even today, LinkedIn, Facebook, you know, they all have their sort of headquarters pretty much in, in Ireland as well. Sorry?

Greg: All the big boys.

Gavin: All the big boys. Yeah. So in fairness, like it [00:02:00] was a very exciting time because there was a lot of construction going on that had to be built and these were not small projects.

Gavin: These were massive projects. So in fairness to them, they brought a lot of models with them and we would have been behind the curve in terms of health and safety as a country. The framework wasn’t bad. It had been updated. It was 1989, was the latest version of that update but it didn’t require a full time health and safety officer.

Gavin: And especially on a project, but the American guys were like, you’re going to have to have out in safety person full time. Whether you like it or not, because we don’t want. Our brand damaged by the fact of the fatality on the project. And you can see the, you can see the rationale behind it. So a bit of a culture switch.

Gavin: And I got the finger pointed at me cause I’d just come out of school. And well, you’re, you’re the school that just have to come out of school or left school. So you’re doing the job. It wasn’t qualified was thrown into the deep end, but went to the first meeting and then kind of got [00:03:00] a great. Sort of grasp for what they were trying to achieve and, you know, it was an opportunity for me as well to sort of, you know get involved with a career that’s probably nobody really was doing at the time.

Gavin: And so that led on to the fact that that company then started using me on all of their other projects across Europe. On any construction projects, I was basically managing the safety and overseeing the safety on all those projects. So I was learning on the job. And yes, I did go to college I’m part time as well.

Gavin: And I was doing night school, doing some legal studies as well. But then one day I was on a particular job that we were having a lot of problems with and I wasn’t there full time, but I was trying to be there as much as I can. It was a hotel and one of our own guys fell down a whole head first and died from his injuries later in the ambulance.

Gavin: So, or sorry, I went in the ambulance with him to the hospital. And he fought for his life in the ambulance and then unfortunately we lost him about a day later. So in around [00:04:00] the same period of time, my own brother tragically drowned along with three of his friends. So four drowned on the day, but a surfer managed to bring back one of the guys to the beach and revived him.

Gavin: And the guys were literally had just finished their school exams and they were throwing a ball waist high to each other just as you do, no drink, no substances involved or anything like that. And a freak wave came in and the current swept them out to sea. So from a personal point of view and from a career point of view.

Gavin: To traumatic events that kind of shaped my life choice to stick with safety or not stick with safety. So I stuck with it. And to this day I have a company that’s outsourced as health and safety managers and professionals all around the world to manage large scale projects like the likes of power stations and wind farms and utility projects for governments.

Greg: Wow. That’s you know, certainly a heavy [00:05:00] story there, Gavin, that you’re telling us and I think anyone, if anyone had experienced that sort of stuff, you can see why you’ve got your passion there for safety and wanting to see it right in construction. And this is why I wanted to get you on really, because there’s, there’s people that doing safety for a job and there’s people that are absolutely passionate about it.

Greg: But you’ve taken it a little bit further, haven’t you? Safety. So you’ve obviously chosen that as a career, been shaped by, some of the personal experiences that you’ve had, but you tackle safety from a slightly different angle. Yeah, so I just want you to tell us your view of safety and and the perception that you have of it.

Gavin: So a lot of my discussions with senior managers, directors, board of directors has always been about the commercial strategy and where the company needs to be and safety didn’t really form a major part of that and unless obviously reputational damage came into the conversation and You know, nobody wants to be known as an unsafe company.

Gavin: So it’s by being around [00:06:00] individuals and leaders that I was absorbing, the context of what was important to them in terms of the commercial reality of, yeah, safety is important, but we’ve got to win jobs. We’ve got to, make money on these jobs and how do we do it with all boats floating together rather than you have this sort of bolt on afterthought of, well, we need health and safety.

Gavin: So that’s because there’s a health and safety officer. And now there’s a conversation about, well, I didn’t factor in that the safety officer was going to cost me. 70, 000 a year plus a car and all the rest of it and now this safety officer is telling me I need to have all the best gloves and the best clothes and this list of stuff is just going and next thing it becomes a friction.

Gavin: model within the game. I was very intrigued by that. That’s, unfortunately for the safety officer, they were getting pinned with unfairly. I felt sort of, the finger pointing that down saying you’re, you’re causing, you’re costing a lot of money for this company. It’s not really there.

Gavin: It wasn’t, it’s not really their structure that there [00:07:00] was inside. In a, in a reactive zone where something should have been done up front to sort of set the scene for the cost of safety. And yeah, there’ll be ups and downs, but that’s the same in operations as it is in safety. It’s not there, there’s not, there’s no uniqueness about that.

Gavin: So I wrote a book called Workplace Safety on a Budget, which is basically a self. Guide to how you can call costs on safety throughout your business and still hold a high standard of safety. So a bit of a kick back on that as well, because we had safety people saying that you can put, all just on safety into the same context of a conversation.

Gavin: So if anything, it got people talking, which is what I wanted to do was get like, you know, it’s a very sort of, Highlighted sort of title workplace safety on a budget. It can be done. Safety can be done at a very lean sort of a [00:08:00] model. And I’m very passionate about, the fact that safety should be seen as not just a compliance center, but also a profit center.

Gavin: So let’s, let’s just talk about

Greg: that for a second then, because I think a lot of people listening to this, some people will really be into safety and view it seriously and implement it. Others will be thinking, this is going to cost me money. There’s, you know, the safety is going to slow me down. It’s going to slow my guys down.

Greg: They’re going to get frustrated by all these, all this red tape. Yeah. How do you, how do you, What argument do you have against that? Then if people say, well, you know, it’s just, it’s just going to cost me a lot more money. There’s no two ways about it. What’s, the answer.

Gavin: So, the way I look at the model is.

Gavin: Every part of every individual department within every construction company or every company in general has a touch point of safety. So we probably don’t recognize it as much as probably we think safety [00:09:00] is just this one department that is, costing the company money, but like safety is also in, for example, the HR and recruitment department.

Gavin: So let’s look at that as a scenario. So why would safety be involved in HR and recruitment? Well, you’ve got to train these people. So that’s a cost. So there’s a safety induction course probably to be done, or there’s upskilling to get them to a certain skill level to be done. So how do we look at that just as a, as an antidote?

Gavin: How do we look at that from a point of view of Well, how do we save money on that? You know, so what are you doing currently in terms of upscaling these people? Are you, have you got a model that says we want these people ready made so that we don’t have to introduce training? So let’s have a conversation about that.

Gavin: So I’m thinking spreadsheets the whole time. How do we measure this in terms of what we get now? So maybe if we pay the person the extra couple of thousands. dollars or euros or pounds. Do we get a better rounded person [00:10:00] that we don’t have to spend this training on? So it’s a great conversation to have because I talk about competency and say, well, why would you not pay the extra 10, 000 and get Gavin Coyle up the road?

Gavin: Who’s an expert plumber who has got 15 years more experience than the 10 grand less. person. And there’s, it’s amazing when you have that conversation because owners are going, well, I don’t have the budget to stretch an extra 10 grand. You don’t have the budget to stress an extra 10 grand, but look at the value add that that person is going to bring to you.

Gavin: They’re going to bring all this experience, all this competency, and they’re going to operate at a higher level because you have a value system that pays people, Above probably what your competitors are paying, but what the return is much more powerful than what your competitors are doing. So your client now sees that you’re, employing top people here.

Gavin: Now you’re going to, you might kiss a few frogs, but in general, what we found or what I’ve seen with even with our [00:11:00] clients is when you put an A team together, these A team people generally hold each other A team people accountable and hold them more accountable to the values that they hold themselves.

Gavin: So they have no problem saying to somebody else, Hey, by the way, What the hell are you doing with that wall like that, that the plaster work on that wall needs to improve? ’cause like, I’m not gonna be on a job that, somebody turns around and says, well that was a shit show. You know?

Gavin: So that’s just a small antidote. That’s only, that’s only in recruitment. You go back, you can go back to procurement. So how do you procure safety? What way are you becoming safety? So are you buying in bulk? Are you buying, are you hedging? On safety equipment and safety PPE and stuff like that, so that you’re not sending a guy with a credit card down to the local hardware or B& Q or whatever it is to say like, Oh, here, just use the credit card.

Gavin: No, you know, no sort of. Discipline [00:12:00] or manners on how to purchase buy. So like, you can go through every facet of every company and you can do this kind of methodology. You don’t need me. No, everybody, you don’t even need a sort of a financial guru to do this for you. It’s common sense stuff, but obviously the book breaks it down bit by bit.

Gavin: To try and tell people how to, be lean, but then also you need to look at automations and how do you put in some software technologies that you can sort of automate these processes so you don’t have to have a reset button every time you start a new project.

Greg: Yeah, I think you’ve made some really good points there.

Greg: I think first of all, just the point about, paying extra for people that are a little bit more competent or training them so they become more competent. I think that’s, it’s always a false economy, isn’t it? It’s just to get the cheapest person in that’s going to do something. It never, never, ever works out.

Greg: So I can certainly, certainly see the value in that. And I can also see the value in how it helps you recruit the right people [00:13:00] too, because you’re right. I think if someone, looks at you as a company and looks at your sites and think this is a mess, like, I don’t want to be working on a site like this.

Greg: It’s certainly going to hit your brand from a recruitment point of view, isn’t it? I’m not going to work for this outfit. They’re, they’re useless. So yeah, I can, I can, I can see all of that. I think that they’re really valid points. How, how then do you get a company that becomes aligned around safety then?

Greg: So how do you get the whole organization thinking about this? Because I think one of the problems with safety is that there’s, there has to be a driver that’s driving it forward. And often that falls on, you know, that might be the business owner that says, right, you know, come, we’ve got to be safe as a company.

Greg: But as soon as you take your eye off the ball, it sort of falls, it falls apart around you. So how do you get the whole company aligned around having this safety culture?

Gavin: So one of the international issues with health and safety is the very fact that there is not a safety discussion at the boardroom level.

Gavin: And so safety is usually at the middle [00:14:00] ground or middle management now. There is an argument to say that some directors obviously, or a director will have a responsibility, and the owner would have overall responsibility for safety. But I’ve been in meetings, boardroom meetings, at very high levels with multinational companies, and safety would probably just be about a five or ten minute, discussion at the start of the boardroom.

Gavin: And then it’s about how many branches are we going to open up? How many more staff do we need? Where are we on GP and NP? You know, where are we on scale? What are our competitors doing? What’s their advantage? What’s, the budget for the, for next year and stuff like that. So you kind of think it to yourself.

Gavin: Safety is not being discussed here. So the only way that I feel that we’re going to break that model and the only language that we need to use or we can use to sort of get this as a sort of a global movement, if you like, is to talk about money and how safety can save you money. So we had, for example, a compelling case study that we’d [00:15:00] done with a 50 million turnover business in the utility sector.

Gavin: And when I went out and looked at the model that they were using and the people that were using and did over 100 people that were working in trenches. And when I spoke to a lot of these people, they are actually highly competent overhead power line workers. And I was just blown away. So like, what are you doing in the hole?

Gavin: And they were saying, well, look, the company came to us and said, we’ll just have to win a government contract. We’re going to give you as a rise. We’re going to ask us to do this particular task, which is a less competent job. Based task than what you’re used to, but, you know, it’s going to be less risky for yourselves.

Gavin: Yeah, it’s going to be in the trenches, but you’ve got as many years work here as you want. And, the pay is going to be substantial. So we all shut our mouth basically and gone on with the job. But my attitude was, [00:16:00] hold on a minute, there’s really good people that actually specifically do this particular task.

Gavin: So I had to have the sort of strategic challenge conversation with the boardroom and say to the guys, I really need you to rethink how you operate your work. Because I believe there’s an opportunity here for you if you’re to take these guys out of the trenches. And get them to do what they’re really good at.

Gavin: There’s a massive opportunity for everybody here. So they were like, okay, tell us more. And I was saying, well, look, if we just go out to tender, there’s about four or five companies in industry that do this specific work. And they were like, no, can’t be bringing in anybody else here. They’ll cozy up to our clients.

Gavin: And then they’ll try and start taking work off us and sort of, sort of this massive bias in their psychic. And now the conversation became about, well, if you’re good enough to do what you do and you excel in the industry, [00:17:00] as you say, you do, why do you have to worry about this small man or small company that just is just those trenches, just this trench work, like they’re never going to get to the level that you’re at.

Gavin: So we spent four months having that conversation. Pretty much to try and break that bias out of the whole boardroom. So you can just see how insulated. The the mindset gets at boardroom level. We don’t change things. We don’t move things the way they are. Everything’s fine. We’re in a solid, we’re in a sort of, you know, Blinkered view of where we’re going with the company.

Gavin: And we have this strategy and it’s clear and we’re all aligned. Hold on a minute, guys, there’s better ways to do your business. And we got them convinced because what we were saying to them was, or what I was saying was You know, all the equipment that requires to do this job, the amount of various requires to do the job, how much resources and how much time and effort money it takes to do this job.

Gavin: And you know how to do it safely. So now you, when you go to the [00:18:00] tender stage, you can actually pinpoint. a saving for your company because you can obviously bring these guys in and that will save you that time, effort and money. And you now become more focused on the customer because you’re not focused on the guys in the trenches as much.

Gavin: And you’re going back to your core business. So we got there and eventually, and they appointed a really good contractor who went from something like 25 people to 200 people because he won that contract. So now we have a really good trench contractor on board with this company that is going to form, you know, pretty much an alliance with this company.

Gavin: And then the company client that I was advising was able to go back to their clients. And say to their clients, you know, this pipeline of work that you have, we can start calling down that pipeline now because we’ve got the expertise of the guys in the overhead power lines that can actually facilitate and get all those projects done so that it’s a win win.

Gavin: So they [00:19:00] started getting more and more work in. The managing director at the time was like, minimum of a million you made for us, Gavin, on that decision in what you’ve done. And we continue to make money on that. And then we were able to open up more doors with more clients because we had the capacity.

Gavin: And I talk a lot about capacity as well to deliver more jobs because we freed up all of our guys in that area. So that’s kind of looking at spreadsheets and then looking at reality.

Greg: That’s interesting. I mean, that’s a, that’s an amazing story. I think anyone would would love that. Wouldn’t they? An extra million in their pocket for implementing something like that.

Greg: And it’s just amazing, isn’t it? Sometimes how you, you’re right. You can get those blinkers on in business. And sometimes you do need someone to come in with a bit of an outside perspective and say, actually, you haven’t considered it from this point of view. You’re missing something here. Yeah. And that’s what I think you’re obviously able to do with your company.

Greg: You can, you can see ways that you can actually make more profit in business. If you You know, if you view it from a different viewpoint [00:20:00] or use resources in a different way, which I think is quite a skill.

Gavin: Well, the one thing that I, I struggled with, to be honest with you Greg, was I struggled with the small to medium enterprise market because I had built up a premium model in our own business and that works really well and we’re really successful with it.

Gavin: But if somebody came to me that was like, you know, less than, 20 employees or 20 contractors or whatever I struggled to meet their price points. So the dilemma came from me was it’s great having all these conversations, but then when you actually meet some of the owners that are really struggling in the SME construction market, I’m struggling to try.

Gavin: Yeah, I can give them all these little tools and techniques and stuff like that to tweak the business, but the business wasn’t mature enough or wasn’t at a scale that you’re going to make a big enough impact. So then I had to rethink my own sort of modeling and then say, well, how can I help these people?

Gavin: So we set up a website called [00:21:00] gavin coyle. com and what we said we would do is we’ll give them free courses, safety courses, their awareness courses, they’re not competency based courses, and then we’ll give them all of their documentation for free. So we set up a load of risk assessments and meta statements and construction plans Transcribed And anything that they needed to get done for free we made it specific to construction.

Gavin: And then we said to them, right, it’s just like, you’re going on to Facebook groups, you’re going on to WhatsApp groups and you’re putting messages out. Hey, anyone got a Rams document for, I don’t know, doing a piece of paving on the side of a road. And then everybody was like, DM me and I’ll send you something I’ve done last week, whatever it’s like, Oh my God.

Gavin: So, pulled all of our resources together, got everything into a professional format and said, there you go, you can have it for free because the way we looked at it was you’re downloading it off the internet or you’re taking it off these channels and with the best will in the world, you’re trying to do the [00:22:00] right thing, but let’s just commit to a professionalized structure first.

Gavin: And hopefully at some stage you will say to yourself, I need to get more serious with safety because I’m starting to see that my clients. are pushing me to have more safety or I need to sort of protect myself against, an insurance claim or whatever it is. So we’re there at the entry point. So the entry point in the UK is something like 280 per month.

Gavin: And we give them a health and safety manager. That is dedicated to their business for 12 months, and that’s like very small scale. I think it’s 550 or 500 a month for somebody that’s more mature than that. So at top end, you can have a health and safety manager with 25 years experience, degree qualified.

Gavin: At 500, 550 a month, and, we’ll take care of all the paperwork and we’ll take care of all the sort of act as your competent [00:23:00] person route, and it took me months to figure that model out because the price point, I just couldn’t, couldn’t figure out where to find that price point at a point that doesn’t cause me risk adds value to the customer, but at the same time solves the problem for, for the customer because let them crack on to what really caught us.

Gavin: And let us take care of the safety is kind of the mantra. But I will have a conversation with them as well and tell them it’s not my remit for to employ competent people because this is a common conversation that comes up at the, at the onboarding stage is, well, I need you to go out and make sure that the lads are doing this and make sure that, hold on a minute.

Gavin: That’s not the case. I need you to employ good people that know what they’re doing and that are experts in what they’re doing. And then from a, from a paperwork point of view, we’ll solve that. And from an observation and a monitoring point of view, yes, we’ll oversee things, [00:24:00] but it’s on you to employ good people.

Greg: 100%. Let’s just talk about those, those packages that you’ve got. Cause it’s a really interesting model that you’ve got there. And literally you’re, you’re helping the whole spectrum, aren’t you? You know, from potentially a one man band right the way up. So let’s just talk about the, the free resources first of all.

Greg: And obviously we’ll put the, in the show notes, that link so people can have a look at that. Who is that perfect for? Like what sort of, size business is the free resource is going to be useful for?

Gavin: So overall, the business model overall will be up to about 15 million turnover. So in the free entry stuff, it’s for the person that doesn’t have time, energy, and it’s not really focused.

Gavin: And maybe he’s only started the upland health and sorry, a construction company, maybe he’s a carpenter. Decided to grow as an independent trades person and said, look, I’m gonna, you know, I’m going to float my own boat here an independent contractor. So it can be a one man band [00:25:00] right up to you know, 10, 10 people, depending on the appetite for the individual.

Gavin: So we’re, we’re kind of saying, look, We know you’re not ready now, but just go into that space and cover yourself for the time being with this model, with this free model. There’s free courses that you can get certified to say that you’ve done a course on risk assessment, for example. At least do that. At least do that.

Gavin: And I know that we’ve got some backlash of people. Oh, you can’t be doing that. Yeah, it’s not competency based courses, but at least get people doing something rather than just ad hoc stuff or reactive stuff. And then there’s a problem and then it’s bang Facebook. Anybody got a contact for a safety officer?

Gavin: I’m after having an accident on the job. Blah, blah, blah. You know, just. It’s good housekeeping. Put the measures in place, front load it, then you don’t have to worry about it. And when things start getting a bit better, you get a bit more efficient with your time and with your business, then start looking at how [00:26:00] can you scale this up.

Gavin: So, really the guys that we have. if they were in general industry would be getting anywhere between 000 a year salaries if they were full time employed. So I’m just reusing our resources that we have on our premium model and then what I’ve done is I’ve figured out how to Make it efficient to the price point for an SME so that, yeah, we don’t give them the whole hoax and sort of let’s get together that we would give our premium clients, but we give them enough over them and to be there so that they have that sort of done.

Gavin: Okay, fine. And it’s not becoming a drag on the business because you can now budget for safety because, you 12 month sign up. So you now know how much it’s costing you. So work it out yourself. 12 months by 500, you know, it’s, it’s a fraction of the cost of what it would cost you for a health and safety [00:27:00] officer.

Gavin: Even coming out of college, you wouldn’t even get someone at that rate.

Greg: No, of course not. So, so that, that’s great. So, let’s imagine businesses listening to this. We’re generally business owners are going to be somewhere between about a million to 10 million, something somewhere like that. So they’re going to fall right across the range of these brackets.

Greg: You’ll get some that will just want the free resources, but then there’s others that are trying to step up. So let’s just talk to the ones that are trying to step up a little bit and maybe want a little bit more than just the free resources. What are the benefits of Having a health and safety advisor as part of your company, apart from the obvious, as in, we want to just cover our backs here and, make sure there’s no accidents on site.

Greg: What, is it going to help them with tender opportunities? Like, just talk through some of the other benefits of why they should have someone.

Gavin: So firstly without going into the sort of like the legal framework will tell you that you have to have a competent person to act as your health and safety officer or health and safety person for your company.[00:28:00]

Gavin: So. It’s not quite the case of us sort of just trying to help you out and just support you. It’s a legal requirement that this is in place. So maybe a lot of people that we initially on board, they actually didn’t realize that they had to have this. And it’s not just good practice. It’s a, it’s a legal requirement in many jurisdictions.

Gavin: So that’s the first thing. The second thing is, what we will do is, we, when we assign the safety manager, safety manager then scopes out that company and makes all the documentation specific to that company. And then we take off all of our logos and put all their logos on it. So now they have their own bespoke package.

Gavin: So then we get to the end of the 12 months and say, you know what, I don’t need Gavin Kyle anymore. I have this sorted. I’ll do it myself. Fine. That’s no problem, but you’ve got 12 months of good, solid, professional information for you. And as well as that, when you go back to your clients and this, and they will say this to you, who is your competent person for health [00:29:00] and safety?

Gavin: You say, well, I’m using Gavin Coyle. Here’s all the certs. Here’s all the documentation we have. And by the way, We have this, these guys are on standby to us whenever we need them, crisis management, support, risk assessments. So what we, what we realized Greg was that we have over 500 documents in our library.

Gavin: So we spent months upon months upon months pulling together all the best documentation and then refining it and making it more specific to every trade and discipline within construction. So we’re not resetting the button ourselves. We have this documentation that we can download and then just make specific to the company.

Gavin: And then we just work. We put an account manager for you that is dedicated to your company within your region. And that’s your, that’s your, that’s your go to person for everything for health and safety.

Greg: Yeah, that’s fantastic. So I know from my own experience, I run a quite a large construction company in the UK.

Greg: Well, not large compared to what you were doing Gavin or advising with, [00:30:00] but it was reasonably large in the residential sector. But the bigger we got, we started working for local authorities and the paperwork was, they wanted more and more off of us. And you definitely had to have someone that you could put forward as your health and safety representative.

Greg: But more than that, we did actually have a big problem on site. Once we had a big accident. And it was quite scary, actually, because you thought, you didn’t know what was going to happen. Were you going to get sued? You know, fortunately, the guy was, he was off work for a while, but he was okay.

Greg: He didn’t, kill himself or anything, but it was still dangerous. And, but what was scary for me was then, am I now liable as a director for this? Have I done enough to have prevented this accident? And our health and safety advisor come out there. She did a site. Audit after, looking at the site after the accident that taken place, looked at all the paperwork that we had, which fortunately we did have in place.

Greg: Cause we had them on board and, really after that, the facts, I mean, you want to go through your business without having accidents, but the reality is it’s going to happen at some point and you have to protect yourself. Don’t you, as a, as [00:31:00] a director, the bigger you get, you can’t just wing it and think you’re going to get away with it.

Greg: So I think, as companies start scaling past the million mark, they’ve really got to start thinking about, that investment in, in health and safety advisory. It’s not really an option, is it? It’s sort of a must.

Gavin: Yeah, it’s a must.

Greg: But

Gavin: what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to make it, it’s not sexy.

Gavin: I know safety is not sexy. We’re trying to make it accessible and easy and remove the friction out of the. The communication and the context of the relationship between the construction owner and safety. We’re trying to harmonize it and make it integral into your overall business so that it’s not becoming everything about your business.

Gavin: It’s just, it’s integral into your business and it just has momentum and has a process and a system. And. I’m very conscious about people about how good they are at what they, what our core discipline is. And I love to see people just focusing on the core discipline. And if you’re a really good carpenter or a plumber or [00:32:00] electrician, like that’s your safety should be in the part of that, as, as how you carry out your task, you shouldn’t need a safety officer to tell you how to do, you know, plasterboard.

Gavin: For example, you shouldn’t need me to tell you, you need manual hand in training, or you need to know how to lift that plasterboard properly, or to use mechanical aids, whatever else. Let’s get beyond that. Let’s go beyond that conversation and let’s discuss about getting you in a position that makes you successful so that you’re not getting distracted.

Gavin: By paperwork and stuff like that allows you then to concentrate and focus on doing that job in the best quality to the best safety standards that you can do. And the platform that we built was an integral part of that because when they sign up in the platform, we’ve built a whole encyclopedia of every terminology that has been used in safety.

Gavin: As of today, so if someone’s in a meeting and says to you, by the way, we need you to look at CDM and you’re going, [00:33:00] hell, CDM, you can go into the dashboard, type in CDM, and then we have a whole glossary of what that definition is. Then we built in safety alerts. So every week they get safety alerts of what’s happening in industry.

Gavin: If there’s been a fatality or if there’s been changes in legislation, then we have all the courses online as well. And we’re building courses. Some of our customers come back and says, oh, can you do. We do mainly do roof works. Can you do something on roof works? So again, it’s not a competency based course, but we went away.

Gavin: We, we built the video at our own cost. We put it up on, the platform. So there you go there. And it’s there for everybody else as well. So we’re constantly trying to create this ecosystem of a need a want, and then, it’s accessible on the dashboard. Then we have webinars. So you can go in and look at prerecorded webinars on the dashboard.

Gavin: You can go in and download over 500 documents. So if we don’t have the document that you need on that day, so someone might say, oh, well you need a permit to work for that. [00:34:00] Instead of saying, oh, ring the Safety Ox. Went to the dashboard and just put in Permit to Work. And a Permit to work document ready to go.

Gavin: Put your logo on it. Download it. There you go. There’s the permit. So again, it’s getting speed and efficiency and process into the system. There’s loads more other products in the dashboard, like we’re even doing safety officer coaching. So if you get to the stage. Where you say, do you know what, I think we need, we need to take a safety person on and that Gavin Coyle model is good, but it’s not really going, I really want somebody full time.

Gavin: Fine, hold on to us and we have a safety officer coaching mentorship program where bring in somebody on an entry level and then we’ll work with that person to get them to the next level for you.

Greg: Wow, yeah, sounds like a really comprehensive package there, Gavin. So if anyone wanted to learn a little bit more about your book, first of all, Gavin, how would they get access to that?

Greg: I mean, we’ll put some links in the show notes, but is it, is it on Amazon or how would they

Gavin: get

Greg: hold of

Gavin: that? It’s on Amazon. Yeah. Workplace Gavin Coil, workplace Safety on a budget, [00:35:00] and you’ll get us on Amazon. Gavin hyphen coil.com is the SME construction Go-to to manager Safety. And then from a premium point of view for utilities, wind energy, and power stations, it’s co group.

Gavin: So coen group.com is where we’re at on that. And then obviously the podcast is, I’m the gaffer, but that’s a construction podcast. It’s not a safety podcast. Awesome.

Greg: Gavin, thanks so much for your time today. Really interesting conversation and it’s nice to see safety from a different perspective there.

Greg: So thanks for your contribution.

Gavin: No problem. Great. And best of luck to you as well. Thanks very much for having me on the show.