Leadership, Safety, and Construction Insights ¦ with Gavin Coyle

Ciaran Brennan:

All right, Gavin, we’re up and we’re live. Listen, first and foremost, you’re very welcome to the Time Materials Podcast. Thanks for giving us your time.

Gavin Coyle:

Sure, I’m delighted to be on the show and thank you for being on my podcast, I’m The Gaffer. Really appreciate your time and your energy and your insights and very excited about LifeCosts and what it does and how it’s making an impact on the construction industry. So, well done you.

Ciaran Brennan:

Appreciate that. Appreciate that. Listen, this episode is about trying to dig into you, right? Let’s get an understanding of… I always love to start these things off with a bit of a background. How did you start off with… How did you end up in construction, I suppose, force of arms and then into safety? Where did all that come from?

Gavin Coyle:

So, I suppose at a very young age, at an early age, school wasn’t really for me, so I left school early. I actually went in and went into the meat industry on the killing lines at the time. Larry Goodman in Ireland was pushing a lot of beef towards the Middle East and there was really good openings for anybody that, you know, came out of school and didn’t really have a skill set. So, worked in the meat industry for a couple of years and then got a tap on the shoulder to say, look, cop yourself on, go back to school, do your leave insert. So, I did that and I came out and went straight into construction. So, some might say you should have stayed where you were. But at the time, construction was kind of kicking off, really. Nobody really seen what was happening, but the American multinationals were coming into Ireland in a big way and they were using Ireland as a land base into Europe. So, you had the likes of Intel, Hewlett Packard, Warner Lambert, which is now Pfizer’s, GlaxoSmithKlineBeach and Johnson & Johnson. They were just coming in their droves. And so, the company I was working for was a very strong Irish well-known company called Ardmac, who would build out clean room fit outs. And clean room fit outs were something that was very niche in Ireland as well because these areas where, say for example, a chip was being built for a computer, they need to be built in clean room facilities. So, you’re looking at similar facilities to what will be in an operating theatre for a human being. And so, our company was doing that. And they were also doing fit outs of offices and shop fit outs as well. So, they were pretty big in terms of what they were doing. The McAnallans, Kevin McAnallan was the head guy at the time. And he was very focused on processing systems. And he introduced a thing called TQM. I don’t know if people or your listeners might remember that back in the day, Total Quality Management. I have to say, it was just like libraries and libraries and libraries of information. But fantastic, I would say, if you were building a car. But in the construction industry, it’s so dynamic and there’s so many variables and there’s so much intensity of that type of information. It was just unbelievable. But the Americans also brought their models with them. So, they insisted on a full-time health and safety officer on every project, which wasn’t really a thing in Ireland. You usually had a safety officer or a safety person who was the safety person for a company, if you had a safety person, because some companies still didn’t have a safety person at that time in Ireland. And we’re talking in around the 1989 Act, which was in place at that time. So, to put that into context, it was back in the 50s, 60s before the previous Act. It was the Factories Act. And to put it into more context, 2005 was the last time that was given a look at. 2013, they gave it another look. But the real overhaul was in 2005. So, 1989 was still a pretty basic enough Act. It touched most points, but it didn’t cover what was coming down the line with all this work that was happening on construction sites. So, because I was in school and because the guys were busy enough as it was, they just said, Gavin, here, you’re going to do this because we don’t have time to do this. So, went to the first meeting and said, yeah, this is great. What an opportunity. We don’t have an education, a third level education. And this is about saving lives and helping people and making people safe going to work. So, I like the concept. Little did I know the challenge that was ahead of me in terms of trying to win over hearts and minds of people, trying to collaborate with people, trying to understand the paperwork and the complexity of the paperwork and everything else that goes with it. So…

Ciaran Brennan:

In those early days, then I could only imagine because I remember transitioning from site and sites in Ireland to sites in Australia. And I got a massive way opening into the differences in the culture of safety when I went from Ireland even to Australia. And big sites in Ireland had good safety culture. When you get down to the small, medium sites, there wasn’t nothing. There was no safety whatsoever. A couple of horror stories there myself in terms of accidents and stuff like that. But what I found when I did see what I call a proper safety environment is that a lot of times it can be classes. Here comes the bloody safety guy. The enemy, he’s going to slow me down. And I can imagine what that was like even back in the day in the Irish market. How did you get buy-in from people that you need to listen to what I’m saying, you need to buy into what I’m doing here. And eventually this is all going to be better for everyone on the site. I mean, how did you get buy-in from the people on the project?

Gavin Coyle:

Yeah, that’s a great question. And the true answer is I was… I would consider myself a very hard worker when I went in because I had no other option. So I was plastering, I was drywalling, I was mixing plaster. I was there till 10 o’clock at night, up at six o’clock in the morning on site and before this sort of appointment came, if you want to call an appointment. And even when I was doing safety, I was still being drafted back into here. Can you give us a dig out? We have to do a late night shift tonight, Gavin. And all hell has broke loose here. We don’t get this over the line by Monday. You know, something’s going to hit the fan. So like you’re doing what you had to do. You were still part of the cogs of the wheel of the company. So the guys, you know, would respect that. You’d see that they, you know, you weren’t this guy that was just putting on a vest and a hat and going around trying to catch it out. And I think that’s where I broke that barrier was because I had the trust and the confidence of the guys that were around me. And, you know, they didn’t want to let me down when I said, look, I’m getting slaughtered here because these guys have done X, Y and Z yesterday. And it was noticed when it was pointed out. And I said, I’ve shown you this already, but you’re not listening. And so it’s very tribal. As you know, yourself in construction, you know, if you, if you’re part of the herd, you’d run with the herd. But if you’re in and you’re just, you know, sitting on the edge of the bank and you’re not really forming part of the herd, they will turn against you or they’ll run against, run away from you. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s just the way it is. So they’ll play the game up to a point, but they won’t go any further or they won’t give you any more than what, what the minimum will be. But, uh, you know, I had a good way or had a good rapport with the guys. And I just, I suppose from a background, my father had a shop at Ballyferment in Dublin. So it grew up in a shop retail environment where, you know, you had to get on with the customer, regardless of whether the customer was wrong or right. You just had to find a way in the middle to meet people in the middle.

And I think, you know, a lot of that gets lost in health and safety where people put the emphasis on the education. And I agree you need the education, both if the person hasn’t got the, all the ethics and the, you know, the, the characteristics within health and safety to deliver the message in the right context and actually understand the logic of what they’re doing. So it’s a major issue within the health and safety industry that, um, health and safety is generic and people don’t come out and go, right. I want to be a health and safety officer in a food environment, or I want to be a health and safety officer in a manufacturing environment or whatever that is. They come out with a generic qualification, which is why, you know, in my business and call it group, we love taking on engineers because they have a primary degree in engineering, whether it be mechanical, electrical, electronics, whatever engineering it is. And then they’ll do a diploma or a higher diploma in health and safety. And those, those guys are brilliant because they think logically back to root cause the whole time. And it’s not this kind of, well, you know, this is what I think it is. This is what I think is wrong, but you don’t have that. That person mightn’t have the legacy or the information or the circumstantial information to put everything together because they’ve never had a trade or they’ve never worked in the trade. And, you know, we always encourage companies to look internally first when you’re looking for a safety person and see if there’s somebody that they can, they can foster and bring them through the channel. And, and, and, you know, someone might just have a grasp for health and safety, or there might be thinking about retiring and saying, look, you know, I need to get off the tools. It’s too hard on me.

Ciaran Brennan:

I was only thinking like the amount of guys now, like I’m sure heading towards, you know, so I’ll just put a round number on it. Mid forties, fifties, like, you know, they’re starting to get a bit of wear and tear. It is an ideal transition, isn’t it?

Gavin: Yeah. Yeah. And look, don’t be shy of the education today because it’s so more open than when it was for me. Like I went to UCD and it was a battle because my leave insert didn’t stack up to their standard. So then I could only do a year with UCD and then, but then DCU and Fairness were a lot more open and flexible. They were looking at their university as a business operation. And so they were nearly challenging UCD’s, you know, historical academic structure by saying, no, we’re going to go down the business route. And we’re going to go after all the businesses to help them bring their people on board. So I went to DCU.

Ciaran Brennan:

What is that? What is the qualification there? Like if anyone is sort of in that position where they’re, you know, starting to feel a strain of the tools, maybe, or, you know, wanting to get back on the side, if they were sort of forced into an office environment, what, like, what, what is the road ahead if you wanted to say, transition into health and safety?

Gavin Coyle:

So, so the way I’ve done it, and it’s still, it’s still this way today is you can take a day, a week off and do mature learning. So work four days. And then I used to go in on a Friday to DCU and you had your semesters. So you wouldn’t be able to keep probably what four or five semesters in the year. So, you know, it wouldn’t be a full year if you like. So I ended up getting a master’s degree from DCU out of it because it was just, you could just stay on after the diploma or degree and go on up until you get the master’s. And I’m glad I did it because it’s definitely opened a lot, a lot more doors going up to master’s degree level, but you don’t have to do that. You can do what we, what I always say, because loads of people come to me and go, oh, I want to get into health and safety here. There’s money in it and this, that and the other. And, you know, they’re getting in for the wrong reason. If you’re getting in for money, it’s, it’s just, it’s going to, it’s going to break you. You’re going to get in for the wrong reasons, but if you genuinely have an interest in it, I say to people, go and do a course called managing safety in construction. You can do it through the CIF in Ireland, or you can do it through safety companies, training companies, and it’s IOSH approved, which is the International Organization for Safety and Health. It’s kind of like an institute for health and safety. And you get your chartership out of that as well later on. And that’s only like a 10 week course. But if you come away from that course and go, I hear this stuff is not for me. It’s only 10 weeks lost, but it’ll go towards your managerial expertise. If you want to go into the project management side of things, that course will stick. That’ll give you a very good foundation in terms of your CV if you don’t do safety. But if you do that and you come out the other end and go, yeah, now we get a kind of an idea of what that safety thing is all about. I’m ready to go into a two year program, which will be your diploma. And, you know, that’s where my advice and guidance has always been and still is today. And, you know, you can do online courses even today. You don’t have to go into the big three or four universities. You can do this as a distance learning as well.

Ciaran Brennan:

You mentioned the Coyle Group there. So you took the plunge, you took the leap of faith into entrepreneurship and business ownership. What was the thinking there?

Gavin Coyle:

It was a very slow process because, as I said, I started at the age of 17 with our company and we had a fatality actually in the first year. Fourth Seasons Hotel was being built in Bosbridge and I knew it was a problem and the project manager for the company I was working for at the time knew it was a problem and the directors. And we were just. It’s a good, very good lesson, even to even to today and for your audience was the conundrum we were caught was and these were the discussions I was having was because of the complexity of the contract, if we pulled off site, it was going to have a far detrimental effect to the business in terms of fines, prosecutions, legal cases, all that stuff for pulling off site. And the job was just going nowhere and everybody was just not making money on that job. And I was banging the drum at safety meetings and was actually told not to attend any more safety meetings because it was becoming a distraction. But it was coming from the heart because I knew my own guys were exposed to a level. So what we agreed to do was to try and give it as much focus as we can and just try and contain it and try and get through the initial element. So I’ll give you a quick example. Instead of, you know, doing individual hole penetrations in the concrete, the main contractor decided to take out large sections of holes in the concrete and then just shop fix plywood down onto the concrete. So you had water just piling down to the building, MEWPs, you know, driving over this plywood and then, you know, holes all of a sudden appear in different places. Yeah, it was just, it was chaos. The crane driver dropped a pallet of doors from high level, dropped a pallet of granite from high level, you know, just randomly just didn’t hit anybody. But at the time, again, you’re back to, you know, if you look at that now, you go, geez, oh my God, how did that happen? How could that happen? But that’s the way things were at the time. Like building was really rampant up in Ireland and, you know, some companies just weren’t keeping up with the capacity and the veracity of the production. And then when the money wasn’t there, or you were losing money, it was a massive problem. So banging on the door of a cabin that day, and all I could hear outside was Gavin, get out here, there’s a man down. So we went down to the site and the young lad was screaming. He was after falling head first down into a sump pit, which is coming off a swimming pool. And it was just carnage. So I went in the ambulance with him and he fought for his life, like really hard in the ambulance. And he died of his injuries about a day or two days later. He was only a young guy, as was I. And so in around about another 12, 12, 24 month period, I’d lost a brother who drowned in drowning accidents along with two of his friends. But there was like seven or eight of them out on the West Coast of Ireland in Strand Hill. And they were throwing a ball to each other waist high. They just finished their leaving cert and a freak wave came in and the undercurrent took them all out to sea. So four drowned, but one was revived. So there was my brother and two other guys that were pronounced dead down in Sligo. So within the space of about two years, I had a personal tragedy and a career tragedy just thrown at me. And it was kind of like, it was, it was a kind of a reset mode. So look, you know, this whole health and safety thing, if you’re going to do this, like, this is trauma. This is what you’re going to have to deal with. This is the other side of health and safety that people kind of don’t really prepare themselves for. And you don’t know how you’re going to respond to certain situations. And there was lessons, a lot of lessons learned for that out of both cases. And, you know, I still carry them with me today. Maybe not as personal as I did, because a lot of, you know, when you get into a traumatic situation like that, you do carry personal bias with you later on. And it took me a good while to realize that I was actually making decisions that were emotional rather than logical. So for example, if I seen something, you know, somebody doing something stupid on the ladder, hey, what are you doing? Come on, you know, like, so my language has changed over the years, whereas, you know, when you have shock trauma of both scenarios, it tended to wound you in a way that, you know, you were more heightened in your emotions and, you know, safety people, you can laugh at this all you want, you know, but like who looks after the safety person in terms of, you know, having to deal with families, having to deal with trauma, having to deal with the aftermath, even having to deal with small stuff, like, you know, might be insignificant to others, but a chat, some guy just going or a person having a bad day and just saying, look, I’m sorry for shouting off at you. Such and such has happened to me. Then we get in a story about, you know, and you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re an impact for a lot of what goes on. If you open yourself up, some safety people don’t open themselves up and have this steel approach. You hear the stories of, oh, he’s this and she’s that, but a lot of safety people do open themselves up.

Ciaran Brennan:

It comes from the, it’s generally a culture within the business. In my experience, I’ve had two, two, yeah, serious enough accidents, like fell off a roof. My grandfather was actually killed off a roof, working on it as a roof, right? So that’s, there was one in the family that was always an, as an apprentice, I went off the roof. But luckily enough, I only had broken, broken arms. And also I had a grinder, bit of a grinder, the steel part, steel blade in the grinder, hit a piece of steel as I was cutting down a piece of concrete board and a piece of belt, for those who are listening can’t see, but about the size of my finger, shot around the grinder. I was literally, came straight back in and shot me, went straight through and punched it along. So two nasty ones, right? But I think, I think people forget. And, you know, one thing when you, when you hear about these things, people forget that it’s generally the culture, there’s a business culture there where it’s get the job done, get the job done. Safety fellas here, don’t mind them, don’t mind them, don’t mind them. You know, there is, it’s certainly the, it has to stem, I find, has to stem from the top where, you know, you’re, like you’re right in what you’re saying, like who’s, there’s safety on site for a reason, trying to make sure that we do get home at, you know, five, six o’clock, make sure, make sure we are getting home. So was that the thinking then? Was it like, I’m going to set up something, I’m going to do, you know, I’m going to devote, devote my time to this. And I suppose what, what was different about how, how did you, how did you at the time of setting up Coyle Group then, what, like what, what did you start to do differently?

Gavin Coyle:

So being honest with you, I had no aspirations to setting up my own business. I was 10 years with that company. I had a spell in the Isle of Man and the same company came back to me and said, look, come back, we’ve got more work. And I did go back to them. And then I just went, you know what, I’ve learned all I can learn with this company. I can’t go any further on, you know, the rector level wasn’t on the cards. So I just found an actual path to actually go out on my own at that stage, because I didn’t see anything else that I could do that wasn’t any different to what I had achieved, if you know, if that makes any sense. And so I did go out as a co-founder with a business for a couple of years and got a taste of the business life and then said, right, now we know what I wanted to do. And that was, I wanted to supply manpower, safety manpower into the business. And I wanted to do a bit of consultancy and that’s all I wanted to do. I didn’t want to do training. I didn’t want to get involved with any of that stuff, but a consultancy and manpower and supplying of really good people that I knew down through the years. So it built up this network of knowing a lot of the top safety people. And I often said to myself and seen them, you know, working mad hours for contractors that didn’t give them the respect or the value that they should have been given. And they just used them as, you know, what we need safety. So you’ll do, but these guys, the problem is that they don’t have time to think or look or see better opportunities for themselves. And so I kind of, we specialized in Coyle Group towards the utilities, power generation and wind energy sectors. And they were really, you know, wind was coming on. It was going to be a couple of years down the road. Yeah. Both utilities and power was really exciting me because people had assets and facilities at, you know, multi-billion level that needed to be protected. So they had something to protect. So one of the principles we looked at was that we’ll only work for companies that have an asset to protect in a highly regulated environment. And that then gave them more of an emphasis to actually put more time and energy into health and safety. Now, the issue with that for me was you couldn’t just get the RV Joe’s up safety person who had a taxi business last year and has a safety business this year to come work for you. You had to get really high end guys together, which I knew I could get to. So we did that and we were approached by ESB back in the day and they had two fatalities in the space of two years. There was a young tradesman, our apprentice was killed and it was a senior tradesman killed both in and around the space of two years of each other. So it rocked down to the core because everybody that especially, I don’t know about your audience, but especially in Ireland, you know, nobody knew of anybody that worked for ESB and didn’t come home. So that was a massive shock to their system. So I wrote up a strategy as part of a tender document. I went out to tender and we won that tender. So as part of that tender, we were to supply anywhere up to 20, 30 safety people to ESB working within the ESB crews as an ESB representative for health and safety on the grassroots level to help foster the culture, get involved with the guys, put your arms around the guys in the yellow vans and say, how can we do things better? How can we lead from the front with health and safety? And obviously we were taking a lot of direction from corporate level in ESB. It wasn’t something that we had a blueprint and went straight out. ESB had a fair idea what they wanted. We had a fair idea how to deliver it, but we had to sort of meet in the middle and come together with some sort of a common approach to try and get to the guys on the ground and get safety, you know, reset, if you like.

Ciaran Brennan:

Would they be leaning on you then as well, like leaning on you for as well as what’s new in terms of cutting edge technology? And are they looking for you in terms of to provide advice and guidance on that type of stuff as well? Or are you just there literally to provide a service?

Gavin Coyle:

Oh yeah. So it’s a great question, but that was one of the key aspects of us winning the tender was we are kind of like a managed service business as well, where, you know, we don’t just stop at the, there’s the timesheet. We go in and say, by the way, there’s an issue with X. Let’s discuss that and go into it in more detail. And, you know, let’s create a workshop environment to see if there’s a better way of doing that and then come up with solutions as well. And we were a soundboard as well. Not just me, but even the guys on the ground will be a soundboard to senior managers and to the safety team in ESB as in, well, just you’ve great experience. Have a look at this down, you know, on Abbey Street and let us know what’s the best way to put a crane in here and that kind of stuff. So I was conscious enough when we were onboarding those people that number one, I wanted to bring grey hair back into the business because it was one of the things that ESB had said to me was they had lost a lot of grey hair and old school mentality, which was not really replaced because how do you replace somebody with 50 years of experience in the business, you know. And so a lot of corporates will tell you today that they’ve struggled with this, that there’s been a massive transition of losing people of high quality to retirement and to other teams, maybe didn’t come back after the pandemic. And because there’s a massive gap between people coming out of college and getting them up to speeds to, you know, 50 years on the business is a massive amount of currency in the game. And it’s not really replaceable. So models have to be redesigned and redeveloped. So collaboration was a key thing for everybody and still is. If you’re not collaborating and communicating that, you know, if you think you know everything, you don’t and none of us do. And this whole new model of how to do business in general, never mind about safety, is actually being rethought about at the moment. And, you know, I don’t think everybody has it solved. But if we don’t have open communication, dialogue, collaboration, and if there’s not enough equity in the business for everybody, which is, you know, a key part of actually why do we do this? We do it to make money. We do it to put food on the table, to pay our mortgages, to have a lifestyle that we want to have, to live, to actually, you know, have a life outside work as well. Well, then things start going wrong and health and safety tends to get a hit for that. Number one.

Ciaran Brennan:

Yeah! You then also have gone, I suppose, the non-traditional route. I suppose I would look at health and safety. I haven’t seen many companies out there that are doing some of the stuff that you’re doing in particular. I’m talking about the podcast, the book. Tell us about the podcast first. What was your thinking behind getting them? Because obviously we’re doing it here ourselves. A lot of work goes into this. What was your thinking behind launching the podcast, which is great, by the way?

Gavin Coyle:

Thank you very much. So I’m The Gaffer, came about. It was. I’ll tell you one of the key reasons was we were getting approached by a lot of companies looking for help in health and safety, and I couldn’t help them because our cost base to deliver the service at Coyle Group level was so high that if I put some of our guys to work on some of the requests that we were getting, you know, small to medium enterprise guy wasn’t able to come up with the funds to support my cost base in Coyle Group. So I struggled with that for years in that company. I’d give them pro bono advice, and I’d say, here, do this, do that. But you never really were making an impact. And constantly looking at this multi-medium enterprise, and it’s just chaos, you know, in the construction sector. I’m not talking about any other sector or the construction. It’s just, you know, at a better level, it’s more organized chaos. And then at a top level, they really have it going. There is a machine. You can see this great process, systems, people. Yeah, they might be struggling for labour to deliver the products, but they have good models in place. But downstream, I was just looking at it and going, there’s so much risk on the table.  So, like I get passionate about business and so safety just happens to be part of my fabric and, you know, if I’m to give something to somebody at a tangible level, it has to be, safety has to be some part of that within the business environment. So I want people to make money but I want them to be safe. So how do I get to that point? So one of the main reasons for setting up the podcast was, well, I needed to listen to the audience first. So, what are their challenges, you know? What are they experiencing on a day-to-day basis and is there any commonality across? You know, the different countries with regards to it. So, I’m The Gaffer. It’s spread across Australia, Germany, Canada, America. We’ve had guests all over the world on it and it’s kind of taken arms and legs approach. It’s kind of gone, it went way past where I thought it was going to go. I thought it was just going to be a short sort of like, you know, me and another person having a conversation, but it was clear that I, you know, I didn’t have an expertise in developing a podcast. So, I brought on a podcast management company which was, I have to say, a massive first great move because, you know, I applied my own logic, you know. Am I either employing these people in-house to do this for me or I’m going to bring an expert in to do it? So, we brought in the podcast management company to do that, so, you know, right up to the launch everything was seamless because they managed the whole process. They guided me through exactly how I should be, what I should be doing, and here’s what’s happening, Gavin, here’s how it’s going to happen, I give you the whole vision right the way through. Hence, it was like two to three months of planning to get to the point of launch, if you know what I mean, and then once we launched it just, it was just like, it literally is like sitting on a train, you’re just gone and it’s just one guest after the next, so we recorded in Ilford in studios there once a month. I went from one day to two days of recording and then we had to go online because it was just a backlog of people from coming in and I was very clear.

Ciaran Brennan:

How do you select the guests and topics now?

Gavin Coyle:

Yeah, I was just going to say that, it was very clear, I get so many requests now of people that just want to sell their product or sell their service and I get that and I’ve no problem promoting people if they’re going to make an impact and change the construction to help it, but I’m always looking for a point of interest of the individual. So why are you different than another recruitment company? Or why are you different than another software company? You know. And then you get the generic! Oh well, we’re going to do a different, different, our cost base is lower and I said that’s not, that’s not what I’m looking for. Like I want to know, you know, is there something different about you as a person that made you do this? That then we can all resonate with you and say: hey Ciaran actually has a backstory here, which is the reason why he’s doing this. Which is the reason why I believe this fella has what it takes to actually break open the doors and make an impact. And then we start talking about the product and how that solution might come about, so what I have found is we do a lot of discovery calls before we actually appoint or go ahead with a guest and you would have been part of that process as well, where we kind of like get an idea for a feel for the individual. Whether they actually fit with the podcast or not. And so we have refused a good few guests where we felt like we wouldn’t quite blank say that you’re not coming on the show. We just say: “look could you just go away and think about what we’ve just discussed” and maybe “come back to us in about a month or two”. And, you know, you might have a different perspective as regards how the podcast is going to go because the podcast is conversational. So, we try and get into the individual first and, you know, build up the profile. But we have a team around every podcast so, you know, your team might be to have to save money on the cost of labour and materials on a job and, you know, but the point of interest is “did you know Ciaran has this about him that not many people would know and that’s why he’s doing this and that’s why he’s a different person than the normal person that you get”. And that has been a massive breakthrough moment for us because our audience, listeners constantly come back to us and go yeah just like love the format because it’s very structured in that way but it’s subtle.

Ciaran Brennan:

Yeah, and if you weren’t busy enough with all of that there’s a book then as well just to throw into the mix, tell us about the book.

Gavin Coyle:

So, for my sins, I wrote a book called Workplace Safety on a Budget, back to business mindset again. And I’m constantly hearing business owners saying to me that health and safety cost too much money and, you know, we’ve spent a fortune on training here and we still have accidents. And, you know, I paid a safety consultant, 400 or 500 pound a day and I don’t know what I get for that. So, I’m sure your listeners will resonate with all those statements and I’ve heard them over and over again. So, I just like to hear, put a book together and it dispels all those myths. So, I’m basically saying to you if you want to strip out the costs of safety. Here’s where the areas you can strip out where the costs of safety are. But my mantra is if you’re going to do that, like obviously, that money is going to be a saver for your company, so we want you to repurpose that money into better equipment, hire better people, pay them better wages, you know. So, we wanted, we looked at it as like an ecosystem. All the money out of safety, make safety a profit centre for your business and a lot we’ve seen a lot not enough companies deal with that. And so I’ll give you a classic example. I was asked to go in and do a gap analysis on a 50 million turnover business and a top-down bottom-up gap analysis on the business from a safety perspective. And when I went and spoke to a lot of the workers and there was over 100 workers. They were actually employed to do a different job to the job that they were actually doing. And so I said well why did you accept the terms of that considering you signed a contract for a different role. They said, “well simple Gavin, we want a government contract. We were told you’re going to be here for the next 25 years. We got an increase in our salary and the work we’re doing is as less of a competency scope than the work we were doing the work we were doing was very technical and we were highly qualified to do that.” But this is kind of like standard easy stuff it was like working in trenches whereas these guys were overhead power line workers. And I just like blew my mind. This is, I said, this is a classic example of what I was saying about how safety, you can make safety a profit centre for your business. And so it took me four months to convince the board that they should go into tender and they should get a subcontractor who has a specific niche in this area of doing these trench works. Because I said you’ve got the time and materials, you’ve got the productivity charts, you’ve got all the history of how this job is done, so you know exactly how much this job costs you. And once you appoint a proper and a competent contractor to do this it’s going to pull your existing guys out of the trenches which means then you can go back to your core customer base and say: hey you know all those projects that you have on the pipeline push them in. We’ll take them because we have all these pretty much new guys that you’ve taken out of the trenches. And you can put them back into the productivity of the other pipeline work that wasn’t getting done because they didn’t have the capacity but they did have the capacity. But the bias was and the conversation was Gavin, we can’t let anyone else in here; because they will cozy up to our clients and then we lose our clients to these companies. And that’s just nonsense because if you’re good enough and your brand is strong enough and your culture is strong enough, your customer will not leave you. They will go to the person of trust all the time and that has been the case. And I’ve spoken to the directors since like they talk it’s in the millions in terms of that change that they’ve made within the business. It continues to grow in the millions because all the work that they brought in extra and then obviously, they were making money because it was costing them less actually to deliver the other job that they were doing. And of course, then their people became better motivated people because they went back down the jobs that they love and obviously they were able to get a repackage as well. Because, you know, ‘bigger jobs, higher premium’, more money for everybody.

Ciaran Brennan:

You’ve got the, you’ve got the card, you’ve got a podcast, you’ve got a book. What’s the overall vision? What it’s I mean, what does, where do we see Gavin Coyle in 24 months?

Gavin Coyle:

It’s a good question. I definitely have goals and plans. A lot of them are focused around health and family first, that’s been straight. And then second, the business is just keep the relationships open. Keep the business moving at the level that it’s at it’s not a case of taking on the whole world. It’s a case of just being comfortable in your own skin and comfortable with the people and being able to manage the capacity of what you’re trying to deliver.

Ciaran Brennan:

If anyone wants to reach out to you Gavin, we’ll link up the obviously the links into the podcast and stuff. But if they want to reach out to you personally where is the best place to find you?

Gavin Coyle:

LinkedIn is straight away will be the first one. gavin-coyle.com and an email the website is coyle-group.com and the second website for the SMEs is gavin-coyle.com and there’s free safety statements, safety policies, online courses, free rams documents, toolbox talks on that gavin-coyle.com. So, if anyone wants to is getting into building or is in building and doesn’t have the foundational safety paperwork, we’ve developed all that for you on gavin-coyle.com. You can go in there today and download all that information.

Ciaran Brennan:

Brilliant we’ll link it all up but I’m all. Gavin, listen, thanks very much for your time. We really appreciate you coming on.

Gavin Coyle:

Yeah, and congratulations on Time and Materials podcast. Love it and thanks to all the listeners and we wish you the best.

Ciaran Brennan:

Appreciate it. Thanks Gavin.

Gavin Coyle:

Thanks Ciaran.