Human First Safety Leadership and Scaling Culture with Derek Cox

I took maybe a unique path. Like I said, I got in a lot of trouble. I didn't finish school. I'm very open about this. It's not a secret I got in a bunch of trouble. I ended up getting my GED good enough diploma and then had a desire to move up. But it really never happened until I got married. My wife, when we got married, had a bachelor's degree and kind of pushed me in that direction. Welcome to the Canary Report, the podcast where risk leaders, safety professionals and operational executives come for real world stories and smarter strategies to keep people safe. I'm your host, Michael Zao. In each episode I sit down with exceptional leaders who are transforming how risk and safety are managed. Whether you're a leader of a nationwide EH&S program in a high risk industry or you champion workplace safety across 200 retail locations, this podcast is for you. Let's get into it welcome to the Canary Report Podcast where risk leaders, safety professionals and operating executives come for real world stories and smarter strategies to keep people safe. I am your host Michael Zao, founder and CEO of Yellowbird. Today. Joining me is Derek Cox, the Safety Director of Man Mechanical Co. Inc. Derek is a amazing human being. I am excited about today's conversation. He and I had a great pre call. I think this is going to be a fun discussion of two believers in human beings. First, kind of a mindset which I love. Giving you a little bit of background and kicking off his introduction. Mann Mechanical is a leading mechanical contracting firm in the Southeast of the United States. Derek's career spans two decades, which is hard to believe because he looks much younger than I am in construction safety. He's got extensive experience in managing H Vac, plumbing, process piping and a variety of other projects from hospitals to office buildings and mission critical facilities. He has the wonderful opportunity to see the creations that his company is involved in on a daily basis often and that's a real pleasure for him. And I will say that he is a no nonsense safety kind of a guy. He's a believer in being technology first, human first, but also listening to the feedback that he gets. And that as a person is an amazing way of describing somebody. And with that I am going to say welcome. Hello Derek. Thank you Michael. Appreciate you having me on. My pleasure. So I guess the first thing I want to kick off with after that long winded intro is I want to first start at what we always do which is about the human behind the business person that we know on LinkedIn and in all the wonderful things that you do tell us about your family and your life at home right now, where you are, where you reside, and maybe a little bit about what you do in your free time, what you do for fun. So I live in Atlanta, Georgia, actually, just west of Atlanta, about 60 miles. I commute quite a ways to work every day. I got a wife, we're coming up next month, will be 22 years. Somehow she has stuck it out with me. And I got two great kids, a daughter, Addison, she's 13, and my son Austin is nine. So both great kids, do really well in school, really proud of them. That's great. I mean, your house is full, 9 and 13. Are they into anything that's fun, that keeps you busy? Any kind of athletics or any kind of hobbies or anything that they do. My daughter loves theater. She reads a lot. Not super athletic, so I stand about 6 foot tall. She's about 5, 10. At 13 years old. She's a tall girl, loves theater, loves acting, singing classes, just loves that. And my son is a soccer, Soccer is his thing. He likes to go outside and play. He's more athletic and less of a reader. And he's nine, right? Is that what you said, nine years old? Yes, sir. Yeah, well, you know, I don't know a lot of nine year old boys that are readers quite yet. And getting him out there burning off that energy as a young boy is probably the best thing that you could possibly do. And you said that your daughter sings. Obviously she's, you know, coming into her own with her height and she's probably uncomfortable around that. I can understand that. I have a lot of friends and family who are quite tall and it takes time to adjust to that kind of stuff. How's the acting and the singing giving her confidence? And is her voice something that is that she wants to pursue or is this just an area of she's learning? I think it's an area of interest. She really enjoys it, you know, and hopefully she builds on it and grows into it. She, she sings much better than I do. So she can hear tone and pitch and that's better than my monotone singing voice? Yes, well, you know, we all can't be singers and I am certainly not one of them. Not that I don't try mostly by myself because nobody else wants to listen to it. And your wife, does she stay home or is she working or in a normal career job or what's her story? She's school teacher, high school, chemistry, biology, sciences. She has a PhD from University of Georgia. So very educated. And I think 21 or 22 years into teaching. So she loves the students, loves the area we live in and teaches there. So it's really good. Oh, that's fantastic, man. I mean, I often say, and we'll talk about this today as we go into the journey of health and safety and just leading horses to water, as the saying goes, that we're all teachers. And I think that in the industry that we serve and the people we serve, those who are really inclined to being a teacher or a coach are the people who are really most impactful. Does your wife really enjoy, as she always enjoyed being a teacher and kind of coaching and mentoring, not coaching as in athletics, but just mentoring these young brains, these young minds? I think she does. At the end of the day, of course, like any career job, you know, when you deal with 100 kids, 100 teenagers a day, you're dealing with kids with problems. You know, high school, it was quite a while ago for me, but there was a lot of drama. So at the end of the day, she loves those kids. Well, I have a 16 year old daughter and a wife who's very active in that 16 year old daughter's life in a wonderful way. She's very successful as a young lady because of my wife's involvement. But yes, there is a lot of emotion that goes through the house when dealing with all of this stuff. You know, it's teenage years for boys and girls, but particularly with girls is challenging. And then now she gets another hundred of them at school. So wow, that's quite a thing. So where did you grow up and how did you end up in the world of safety and particularly at man? So I grew up, my dad was military. I grew up on military bases for most of my young childhood. I think we were 12 when we moved off base. A lot of a real culture shift from Department of defense schools, DoD schools, to you know, Paulding County, Georgia, where it's. I don't know what the population was back then, but it was very rural. One high school, a couple middle schools. So really rural and really different. We lived on about 2,000 acres with maybe six other houses in our neighborhood, quote, unquote. Wow, that must have been quite an experience. And were you off base or was that on the base you were on there? So that was off base. We didn't own the 2,000 acres, but we lived in just an area with about 2,000 acres and maybe six to eight homes and not many friends to pick from versus living in basically an apartment community or a condo community on base. Just a real culture shift, I imagine so and so from that perspective, it sounds like a rural was a farm kind of environment. And so did you have, you know, livestock and horses and stuff like that? Were you able to go out and do that kind of stuff or what were you into as a kid? So I was into a lot of trouble as a kid. Yeah, that's what I did. That was my hobby. Well, like I said, nine year old boys need to burn things off. Soccer is a better avenue, but we all have our paths much better than my choices. We had a lot of fun, a lot of unique things. Some things you can't do on a military base that you can, you know, you can run through the woods behind your house. You can't do that on a military base. And we love to play war because we grew up military, so we had my dad's gear and we would, you know, run through the woods and build forts. So not too far off in that sense, but just in the community and people being around it was a lot different. The schools were much different. The books I had in seventh grade were the same books we used in fifth grade. So on the DoD basis, the fifth grade, it was that far behind in public school. Wow. So yeah, this was quite a culture shock. And then did you end up going to university or when you went through high school and got out, what was your path like? So I took maybe a unique path. Like I said, I got in a lot of trouble. I didn't finish school. I'm very open about this. It's not a secret I got in a bunch of trouble. I ended up getting my ged, good enough diploma and then had a desire to move up. But it really never happened until I got married. My wife, when we got married, had a bachelor's degree and kind of pushed me in that direction to like, hey, she didn't really say it, but you know, just encouragement of, hey, you know, you better do something better. So I went to a failed nursing school. I've got a pilot's license and an aviation degree and then got into safety after technical school. I'm a union plumber by trade, so went to trade school. A lot of different paths there. I think that is not only I appreciate that you are speaking about this openly and that you're proud of your background. You should be. It's what makes you who you are. And that journey, even the trouble and even the figuring it all out, that's life. That is the journey of life and that is what makes you who you are. And how you can talk to people and kind of relate. The fact that you've been a union journeyman plumber and that you've been. I did not know you were a pilot. So you weren't on, you know, 152s, 172s, little Cessnas. Right. I've flown a little bit bigger, but nothing much. A couple of twin engines. When you get in the union hall, you spend five years in an apprenticeship, and you turnout is what they call it when you get out of school and you're making good money. Back when I turned out, it was like $20 an hour. That was really good money back then. But they call it the golden handcuffs. I was always looking, you know, it's cold outside. When it's cold, it's cold, and when it's hot, it's hot. And I was looking to get out of that. So I went through aviation, through that route. Finished school right. In 2008. So right when the economy went down and I stayed on that path doing some flight instruction. And my wife called me one day and said, hey, guess what? You know, I'm pregnant. I said, well, I guess I better get a real job. So to the union hall I went, okay. And so after that. So let's keep on. Let's. I'll get to Man Mechanical in a moment. So where did you go after that? So was that when you started at man, or did you have another step between. So a few stints between there and man. A lot of learning. My personality has completely changed. I used to be really direct and really straightforward. Nobody likes that. Well, I will say a lot of people don't like that. They like you to beat around the bush and, you know, pat them on the back and shake their hand. So I learned a little bit throughout my career as a plumber. With that, worked on a job in Atlanta and met this guy named Barry Darnell. I don't think he's in safety anymore, but he kind of steered me through this path. Really great guy and just kind of steered me into safety. You know, I've seen it was an opportunity to grow, to talk to people, to build relationships. So I started down that path. I worked for a large, actually worldwide concrete pump company, and they were good to work for a lot of learning experiences and left there and came to Man Mechanical. Now, were you in their safety group at that point? Yes. Yes. And were you all over the world, part of that safety team? Were you traveling and all that kind of stuff, or were you kind of regional? So my title was Regional safety manager. But it was all over the U.S. i think they've got some offices in England and Ireland, but I just stayed here in the us so before we get on demand specifically. So you said that they're kind of a concrete pumping organization? Yes, sir. So that had to be very interesting in the learning the safety elements around that process, because I've watched that process many, many times. And when you're in this industry, it's kind of like the white car thing. When you buy a white car, you walk around and everybody has a white car and you're in this industry, everything is safety. Right? Like you can't look at a construction site or a tree trimmer or a person painting and not think about if they're following protocols and if they're doing that the best way they could be to keep everybody safe. All that kind of stuff. It's sickness. I've often thought that that process seemed very challenging to train people. Well, it's much more dangerous than people think. And I won't speak too much about the company, but it's a very dangerous job. You know, you think about it, you've got a guy that gets up at one o' clock in the morning to go to work, he drives to the yard, gets a concrete pump, he drives an hour and a half to the job site, he gets out and they're throwing dunnage out for their outriggers. So there's potential injury. You know, they go from static to moving. A lot of injuries with that. And then they're, you know, walking around on rebar at 2 o' clock in the morning every day when they may pump concrete for 14, 15 hours and then drive that 90,000 pound truck back to the office. So those bases, so the rebar is crossed and, and which by the way, in its own right, the machines that do the rebar winding, high pressure, they have themselves a safety regimen that's very important to follow. But then how deep are some of these foundations? Like if they're walking on the rebar filling, and of course they're in their concrete boots that go up to their knees. But if they fall through that rebar, how far in down do some of these things go? It varies. You know, most of the time Most slabs are 4 inches thick. But if you're on an elevated slab, it could be, you know, some of those beams are four or five feet deep. And then you have these mud mat pores that are five, six, seven feet deep. So it's a ways to go, but they don't have to fall far. It's just the, you know, trip and get my leg caught in between some rebar and fall and it's a, you know, a twisted ankle, a broken leg. Oh, absolutely. Now, is there any standard around? And we'll keep going. I'm just kind of an interest point for me. So is there a standard from a industry perspective or OSHA or other regulatory specification for that particular area of construction? Like do they need to be tied off? If. I mean, if you're on the ground, but technically you're standing on a surface, but you could theoretically go six feet into concrete. Hope you don't. Is there a requirement to tie off? That's a excellent thought. I never actually thought about that. But I mean, it makes sense because there's a hole bigger than 2 inches. Right. Something can fall through there. As far as concrete pumps themselves, there's no OSHA standard for that. They use a ASME standard, I think. I don't want to quote the standard. I can't recall it, but it's ASME standard on concrete pumping. And then there's. I think it's the American Concrete Pumping association, acpa and they kind of. I don't want to say regulate, but they're like the industry standard for concrete pumps. Like they'll come up with a training, they come up with a certification. There's a lot of groups like that. And I find it to be fascinating in this industry. You know, everybody references OSHA and EPA and you know, msha, but there are a lot of standards that we all have adopted that are not technically governmental like that, you know, flagging and flagger training with atsa. There's a lot of best practices that become almost stated as a law that aren't. It's quite interesting how industries can adopt. I think it's a good thing. I mean, because if you don't have a standard, how do you know that you're doing well? Right. Like, how do you know if there's no test and no grades? Well, it's funny, that's a whole nother dialogue. You got the general duty clause too, right? For any recognized hazard. Exactly. That's the all encompassing. Okay, so then, you know, run me through man and what you all do and just kind of a big picture about. The. Most people are not familiar. I apologize. Hopefully that is not insulting to man mechanical. It's. We have a pretty big listenership and many are not in the Southeast. So tell us about you guys. So man mechanical. We. I don't want to say small we were a small company. And over the years, course I've grown. I've been here for almost three years. When I signed up, they had a safety manager. But I just want to say he just probably didn't have the experience he needed to run a safety department. We had about 100 people working for us. So within three years now we have about 250, 270 somewhere around there. Seems like it goes up every day. We do a lot of data center work. That's the big thing, you know, data centers, pharmaceutical, a lot of clean work, hygienic work. We'll do some university work. Helps keep us going. We're a woman owned business, so minority owned. That keeps us with opportunity. So we try to diversify, if you will, to keep our numbers right, to keep our growth right. That's awesome. That is fantastic. I think a lot of people have mixed emotions about the programs around women owned or other, you know, disadvantaged communities. I'm a disability owned business. You know, I was born on one hand and I'm a big advocate for the power of disability and the power of difference. And I wish it wasn't necessary, but it is because at the end of the day, giving the opportunity to those who may or may not have an equal advantage or equal opportunity I think is a wonderful thing. I'm happy to hear that you're proud of being a woman owned business and that it is growing and successfully growing from 100 to 200. That's a great testament of taking a program like that and making it thrive. So that's a really cool thing. It really is. So when you're doing the kind of work that you're doing in data centers specifically, we do a ton of data center work. We place people for durations, 12 months, sometimes nine months, sometimes a week depending upon at Yellowbird. But data center is a big part of our business. So what aspect of data center build outs are you all doing? You're a subcontractor, I imagine, to the gc and you know, what are you all doing in that space? So we do all the chilled water. The rarely is there steam. You don't need heat in a data center. There's enough of that, but it's the chilled water piping. So one of the projects we're on right now we use this pipe called Aqua Therm. It's a plastic pipe with a fiberglass center and it bonds together with heat like a fusion joint. And this goes, they call it liquid to chip. So first of all, the pipe doesn't have to be Insulated, so that saves cost right there. But it goes directly to the server and there's some kind of heat exchanger in the server where oil actually goes to the chip. But the liquid water we're pumping in there, that's chilled, will cool the oil and cools the chip. So it's very interesting. Yeah, it really is. I was in the data center business in 1996. It was one of my first jobs and I spent a lot of time in data centers. You know, raised floor with, you know, pressurized air flow and through the floor ducts going into the. And now you hear about all this other technology and all the data center growth and I'm actually curious that one of these days maybe I'll come out and visit you in Atlanta. You can go and take me to one of these places I'd love to see today because it's been 30 years, it's been 25 years. So I imagine it's very different today than it was back then. Much different. We're actually doing one data center. They're building these temporary deployable structures. So it looks like a chicken house. There's no chilled water in it. It's all evaporative cooling, which is just forced air going through there. But it's a tent. It's literally a tent like a chicken house. And that's where they're building data centers now. Just because it takes so long to build the concrete structure and the permanent infrastructure for it. It does make a lot of sense. And the military has been doing it, as you know, in your upbringing, for years. And my background after getting out of data center world was in Satcom satellite communications. And there I've supplied Internet access and voice and data to many portable data centers. It's been done for years and years. And as you imagine, the military has done very well at containerizing portable data center infrastructure. And I can understand how that could be really valuable in today's world where the growth is just enormous. So how many full time employees you said you have? About 200 now. How many programs are in operation at any given time, how many locations and so forth? Probably 12 to 15 at any given time. We've just expanded into North Carolina, so yesterday we opened the office. So it'll, you know, we're painting it and getting it all fixed up. But we have the property now. Got a couple of jobs up here. So yeah, about 12 to 15 big job sites. There's some small service work going on continuously. Sure. Now, on your. From a safety training and surveys and oversight perspective, Are you having to travel to all these various locations personally? Are you spending a lot of time on the road or is. What does your team look like internally? So we try to, you know, the technology part of this is trying to force our foreman to have control of the safety. Right. Like it doesn't matter if I'm there. You should be controlling the safety. So I don't travel a whole lot out of state. We've got two jobs in the Carolinas right now. We're, of course, look to more and I'll be traveling more at that point. But I do go to the local job sites in Atlanta. My goal is once a month to hit every job site. You know, it's interesting. One of the use cases that we've been doing a lot of for construction is doing safety supervisor walks and doing them once a week at every location. And if you think about the practicality of that, for you to do once a week at every location or even have somebody, it's a pain in the keister. But knowing that somebody is going to be keeping an eye and having a pro, a Yellowbird professional who knows what your expectations are and going through and even having some things highlighted and being able to see that they're being addressed week over week. I found that that's a really interest play because it's difficult. As you say, your goal is to be on every site. You know, spending time once a month on every location or something to that effect. That's a lot of travel and being away from the office and being away from home, and it's kind of a burden on the whole business. So it's a interesting way of contemplating when you're doing these visits, what's your goal? Are you doing trainings or surveys or just meeting folks? My goal is a relationship with everybody. There's 270 people. I can't remember everybody's name, but there's certain people that stand out. I'm looking for some hazards. I've got some new safety people, some new foremen. So we'll walk through and talk about different hazards and how to address those. So my goal out there really is just to make sure that we're building that culture. It's not really to point out every single thing that's wrong. It's to let them lead a little bit and just observe. Yeah, I think it's actually a really powerful thing. You bring up an interesting point on the foreman's. It's very difficult to be a foreman for so many reasons. People don't have nearly the respect that they should for how difficult the job is. And you've got a lot of moving parts, you've got a budget to make, you got a timeline to make. And you also need to make sure everybody comes home safely and that you're being a steward of your employee while doing all that other stuff. And I've often found it so difficult. Even if they know that things need to improve, if they have to be the person that's pointing it out, they've changed the dynamic of their own relationship with their team. It's kind of the same with you. Like, if you go out and even if you see things, you have to make an active decision. Is it something important enough that I need to point it out right now, or do I want to build this relationship and note it later? Because you're there all the time, and so, or occasionally, it's such an interesting dynamic that you have to contend with. I think it's probably the reason that you have learned to communicate differently than you did when you, as a younger man, maybe a little less direct, because you start to understand they are not going to take that well if I hit them between the eyes. If we all do stuff wrong. Right. But people want to hear what they're doing. Right. And they want to be appreciated. So that's the biggest thing. Absolutely. It's funny, I always. I tell our customers we're doing like 120 locations on monthly surveys. For one of our customers, it's actually fire assessments, firewalks, and it's going to turn into 220 monthly. So it's actually a pretty exciting opportunity for us all across the country. And I said, you know, I want you to find three to five things that you can be proud to reinforce that they're doing well. Put it on the survey and highlight it, point it out. This is great, all that stuff, right? Because I think it's an important part of the journey of, you know, are you going to be the parent that says, man, you got a 95 on that test. Congratulations. Let's go up for ice cream. Or are you the person that looks at it and says, man, you missed five points? What's going on here? Why are you such a loser? It's like, I got 95% right? Come on. Right. You know, and this industry tends to almost be an industry of the 5%. And it's a shame. It is. We have a couple of clients that, like, for, you know, they require a number of observations on a job site. They require the foreman do an observation, and then Their team does observations. Our safety guy does an observation, and I tell our guys that they're to do nothing but positive. So, you know, these observations are. I don't care if it's somebody wearing their safety glasses or somebody tied off on a lift, but we are not to turn in negative observations. And it just reinforces the fact that, like you said, there's 95% of the people out there are doing what they're supposed to be doing and are never appreciated. And then you've got 5% that are knuckleheads, and you got to get out there and help them, coach them a little bit, lead them to water. And even if the statement is, you know, over the period of 30 days, we observed, you know, over 75 of our workers tying off on an MEWP on a scissor lift, and we only observed three that did not and are addressing that. It's the same statement, but you're like, yeah, that means 75 of them did really well. And we're addressing the three. But I don't think a lot of people have learned how to communicate, and certainly this world is not making it any easier. You have a lot of people that I think they look at the safety as the crime and punishment is what I was always told, you know, and that worked 25, 30 years ago, it worked. You know, hey, if you don't do this, I'm going to throw you off the job site. We're dealing with a completely different society now, a completely different culture. It is so different than when I came up and I try to, you know, all these old cats that are work with us. I'm like, hey, man, it's not the same. We have to treat people differently. We can't talk to people the same. We can't yell at people. You can't cuss at people. You got to tell people they're doing good. And they like to hear that. Yeah. And even if they are not doing well, you'll always be able to find something that is going well. You know, everybody talks about the S sandwich, but reality is, there's a reason why you say something positive, give a little bit of feedback, and end with something positive. I think it's a little disingenuous at times, but I would rather have that than have somebody yelling and screaming. Right. I'd rather, okay, focus on, you know, one positive for every negative or two positives for every negative. Well, at least you got your mindset somewhere in the right place from internally. So where is your headquarters? Is it actually Atlanta? It's in Decatur, which is basically Atlanta. It's right there. So it's right outside the perimeter. And infrastructure wise, who do you report to under which organization? I always find it fascinating because safety can go under operations, it go under administration. It can go straight to the CEO or owner. Like, where are you in this? It's funny, I don't feel like I report to anybody. And I don't know, maybe that's odd to say I'm held accountable. But I see we have an operations manager who's. And let me say, this man, Mechanical, wanted to start a safety department because some people got hurt. Three people got hurt really bad. Drove up, you know, the recordable rate. These were serious injuries. And they said, we need somebody to come in and help with this. Right. We're trying to grow, we're trying to get bigger. And I've got backing from the corner office, from one corner office to the other Corner office and 100% backing. I've got almost no budget. I can do whatever I want within reason. But we're a team. You know, we work together. We, the labor coordinator, the operations manager, the CEO, the vice president. We work together to project management. We're a team. You know, we're going to make it safe together. That's. That's fantastic. Well, it's a big testament. I'm very impressed to hear that. Everybody that you don't know, and that's actually a good thing. I mean, I'm sure there's an org chart and somewhere on the org chart, you're going to be under either ops or administration, but you have a place on the org chart. The reality is that whoever you're reporting to sees the value of what you're doing. You're putting in the right actions and they're supporting that. And from my perspective, I think that's a wonderful thing. So as we wrap up our chat today, looking ahead, everybody's in this whole 2026 mindset of what does the year ahead look like? You say you have no budget. It's funny because when most people say they have no budget, it means they have no money on your side. You mean that you're not restricted by the framework of a budget, which I thought was a. It's a different way of looking at it and it's a good thing. So are you going to be building a larger team internally as you expand? What does, what does everything look like for you? We are, are growing astronomically. We're thinking third quarter next year, we'll have full time safety in North Carolina right now we have four people under me. We're planning on adding some more and there'll be some flexible space in there. So we're starting a new program called the Safety Champion program where it's not necessarily a safety manager, but it's just somebody who, you know, when there's a question about where they can tie off at or what's the proper fall protection that they go to this person and he, he or she knows. Love it. I think that's fantastic. Goes without saying, but I will because I'm being self serving. But obviously we can help you in your expansion as well as development of these programs or even doing, seeing how they're going. You know, that's what we do. But again, I have no idea if you're even a customer. It doesn't matter to me. I love the fact that you're on the podcast and we're having such a nice conversation. So well with that, Derek, thank you so much. I've enjoyed this. I hope that this was an enjoyable conversation and I look forward to having a great future of working and next time on the podcast as well. Certainly will. Thank you, Michael. I appreciate it. Thank you. That's it for today's episode of the Canary Report. This conversation helped you reframe how you think about risk and safety. Please do me a favor, hit, subscribe, leave a review and share it with somebody who needs to hear it. We're building a new category of safety and risk leadership, one that's faster and smarter leaders who aren't just empowered by tech, but whose wisdom is accelerated by it. To learn more about how Yellowbird's cutting edge platform is empowering leaders to solve workplace safety and risk challenges faster, smarter and at scale, visit goyellowbird.com don't forget to subscribe to our Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Yellowbird pages to stay up to date. Until next time. Lead with clarity, know first and act fast.