Aug 11, 2026 · 56 min · 12 segments
Ask a room full of employees whose job safety is, and plenty of hands will point at the safety department. Brian Fielkow got that answer when he bought his…
Yeah, yeah, you know, and there's something that you touched on there first, which I think is really important, which is the safest companies are the most productive, right? The safest companies have this innate advantage.
It's not always the case where it's seen that way, though.
Can you talk a little bit about what...
You know, maybe they're what the barrier is for leadership or organizations that don't really see it as they see it as more of an expense rather than an opportunity.
Well, I mean, I like to consider myself an entrepreneur and I understand as an entrepreneur that growth is a lot of fun.
I mean, it gets you out of bed is taking a business, growing it, taking to new taking it to new places.
But what I've seen is that if you have a really good strategy to play offense but you don't play defense, you wind up giving back a lot of your gains, right? So you need offense and defense.
And committing to a business that's grounded in safety lets you protect the organization.
a lot of times we get a –
You know, at a CEO level or a board level,
there's a concern about enterprise risk management, right? But sometimes safety is relegated to a department or to the job of the safety manager when, in reality, safety is a critical piece of enterprise risk management.
Now look, we can admit that the best company, the best run company can have a bad day.
So the stronger the leadership is and the more committed they are to safety, not as a priority, but as a core value, the more employees engage, the more there's effort on process and clarity of process, the more there's internal reviews and audits to make sure that we're doing things right.
Yeah, yeah, you know, and there's something that you touched on there first, which I think is really important, which is the safest companies are the most productive, right? The safest companies have this innate advantage.
It's not always the case where it's seen that way, though.
Can you talk a little bit about what...
You know, maybe they're what the barrier is for leadership or organizations that don't really see it as they see it as more of an expense rather than an opportunity.
Well, I mean, I like to consider myself an entrepreneur and I understand as an entrepreneur that growth is a lot of fun.
I mean, it gets you out of bed is taking a business, growing it, taking to new taking it to new places.
But what I've seen is that if you have a really good strategy to play offense but you don't play defense, you wind up giving back a lot of your gains, right? So you need offense and defense.
And committing to a business that's grounded in safety lets you protect the organization.
a lot of times we get a –
You know, at a CEO level or a board level,
there's a concern about enterprise risk management, right? But sometimes safety is relegated to a department or to the job of the safety manager when, in reality, safety is a critical piece of enterprise risk management.
Now look, we can admit that the best company, the best run company can have a bad day.
So the stronger the leadership is and the more committed they are to safety, not as a priority, but as a core value, the more employees engage, the more there's effort on process and clarity of process, the more there's internal reviews and audits to make sure that we're doing things right.
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