Real Talk on Safety – Perspectives from Five Trades Leaders

About the Episode

June is National Safety Month. It’s a time set aside every year to raise awareness about workplace safety and share resources that can help businesses protect their people.

This year, we did something a little different to mark the occasion. We sat down with five painting companies from across the country — all members of NCG’s Safety Peer Group — and asked them one simple question: what does safety actually look like inside your business?

What we heard wasn’t policy talk. It was real. It was honest. And it had a lot to teach anyone running a business in the trades.

Safety Is Not Just a Rule. It’s a Culture.

Every single person we talked to said the same thing in their own way: safety only works when it becomes part of how your company operates every day, not something you pull out when OSHA shows up.

Chris Barnett, Safety Coordinator at Apap Painting, has watched the industry change over nearly four decades. When he started, safety gear was rare. People improvised. Nobody thought twice about it. Today, Apap runs mandatory monthly safety training and has a clear set of protocols every employee follows from day one.

The shift didn’t happen overnight. But it happened — and it makes a difference.

The Biggest Challenge? Complacency.

If there was one word that came up in every conversation, it was this: complacency.

When people do the same job every day, they stop thinking about what could go wrong. They get comfortable. They take shortcuts, not because they’re careless, but because nothing bad has happened yet.

Hernan Jimenez, Safety Manager at Nolan Painting, put it in a way that might surprise you:

“If you’re being honest, profit, you got to have profit in everything you do. But for some reason, during the last couple of years or decades, we separated safety from profit. Safety is in profit.”

Think about that. A workplace injury doesn’t just hurt your employee, it costs your business. Time, money, reputation. Safety and profit aren’t opposites. They go together.

Jazmin Gonzalez, Project Coordinator at All Covered Painting, sees it from the office side. When crews feel pressure to beat the clock, corners get cut. Her reminder to her team is simple: “The safe way is always the best way and should be the only way.”

It Starts at the Top

You can write all the safety policies you want. But if you’re not living them yourself, your team won’t either.

Hernan’s advice for any business owner trying to build a stronger safety culture? “Start with yourself.”

He described watching a company leader walk through a job site in flip flops and a Tommy Bahama shirt — not wearing any of the required safety gear — while lecturing his crew about compliance. It didn’t work. It never does.

Your team is watching what you do, not just what you say. When you wear the hard hat, they wear the hard hat.

Vicente Verduzco, Director of Operations at MB Jessee, framed it this way: are you demanding the change, or cultivating it? There’s a big difference between telling people to follow the rules and helping them understand why those rules protect them — and the people they go home to.

Keep It Moving

Building a safety program is one thing. Keeping it from going stale is another.

Rumel Perez, Safety Manager at Alpine Painting, says the key is ownership. When your team understands the why behind every protocol — not just the what — they start to take responsibility for it themselves.

Hernan describes his approach as being a broken record: “I am a broken record. I repeat myself a hundred times.” But the repetition works. He walked up to a job site recently and heard one of his veteran painters explaining his exact talking points to a new hire. The message had taken hold.

Raul Marino, Production Manager at MB Jessee, puts it simply: “Safety is never really a finished product.” There’s always something to learn, improve, or update. The monthly Safety Peer Group meetings his team participates in have become one of their best tools — hearing what other companies are dealing with gives them a heads-up before a problem shows up on their own jobs.

We ended every conversation with the same question: what gives you hope or pride when you think about how safety has evolved in your work? The answers were the best part of the whole conversation.

Rumel talked about a family member coming up to him at a company event — not a coworker, a family member — to thank him because their loved one came home every day talking about how safe their work environment felt.

Jazmin shared the story of reaching out to Washington’s Labor & Industries department to find a certified safety trainer who could deliver a full, customized course in Spanish for her crew. She found one. The whole team participated. “Safety is a journey,” she said, “and we still have a lot of work to do, but helping our crews as much as we can and providing them with as many resources as we can is something that I can say I’m really proud of how we’ve progressed this last year.”

And Chris? His measure of success is quiet and clear: “Nobody went off script, nobody did anything stupid, everybody went home at the end of the day, and they were all in one piece. Okay, my job is done.”

Where to Start

If you’re a painting company owner who wants to build a stronger safety culture but isn’t sure where to begin, the resources are out there. The National Safety Council offers a full toolkit for National Safety Month at nsc.org — free materials, weekly themes, and tools you can bring directly to your team.

And if you want a structured framework built specifically for trades businesses, NCG’s Summit Safety Certification is designed for companies like yours. Learn more at nolancg.com.

Your people go home to someone. That’s reason enough.

Listen to the full episode of Out of the Hourglass wherever you get your podcasts.