[00:00:13] Dave: Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for listening today. We are excited to be here with you and officially introduce the Beyond Prequalification Podcast. My name is David Tibbetts. I'm the Chief Safety Officer at Highwire, and I'm joined by my colleague Shayne Gaffney.

[00:00:28] Dave: We are going to be your host throughout this podcast offering our listeners insights into. What's going on in the world of prequalification and contractor management? I'm gonna introduce myself in a little bit more detail later, but first I'm gonna turn it over to Shane to introduce himself to you all.

[00:00:45] Shayne: Great. Thanks Dave. Hey everybody. I'm Shayne Gaffney VP of Product and Engineering here at Highwire. Little bit about me. My background is definitely ~non~ unusual I would say for this industry. I don't have any experience in the construction industry. I actually come from a health [00:01:00] and wellness background.

[00:01:01] Shayne: I spent some time as a physical therapist. I did a lot of. Postoperative and also spinal care work. I worked in nursing homes, I worked in orthopedic clinics. I did a bunch of everything. Then I got into cycling, triathlon, and running. I worked with professional athletes for years. Founded my own business, was self-employed for a while.

[00:01:22] Shayne: And then I got into product management and into software. A runabout way through that avenue, which I can get into probably in a later episode. And yeah, I've been at Highwire for almost three years now. I really love working with Dave. Really love talking to Dave. Dave's taught me a lot about the industry and I,

[00:01:42] Shayne: I'm always amazed how deep, but also how wide this industry is and the amount of data and science and knowledge you have to know to be a successful person to work in this, which is also something why I really loved it coming from health and wellness. It's full of data. ~Human per ~human [00:02:00] performance, especially is full of data and construction industry is also full of really nice acronyms and data points and ratios and all this cool, really cool stuff.

[00:02:09] Shayne: And yeah, I have, I. Two kids Grace and Finn. I'll probably talk to you guys more about them at some point. And recently I qualified for the Boston Marathon, so that was a really huge milestone and life goal for me. So I'll be running Boston in April of 2026 and it'll only cost me a few hundred bucks instead of a few $10,000.

[00:02:32] Dave: Yeah, that's amazing. Congratulations on that, Shayne. I don't know if you all can tell by looking at him, but if you can't, Shane is a really fast dude. Qualifying for the Boston Marathon. What a roundabout way to become a VP of product and Engineering. But surely your experience in PT and in health and wellness really helped you get to the point where you could qualify for Boston, which for sure.

[00:02:54] Dave: Uh, For sure. Qualifying time marathon, what, right around three hours? Pretty

[00:02:59] Shayne: crazy. Yeah. I ran just [00:03:00] under three, so it was a 2 57 was my time, so hoping to go 2 55, maybe 2 54 in Boston. We'll see just about

[00:03:08] Dave: an hour faster than me when I finished about 12 years ago.

[00:03:13] Shayne: It's fine. But yeah, that's a little bit about me.

[00:03:15] Shayne: Dave, what about you? I mean, You have a. Super solid experience in construction, and obviously you've taught me a ton of stuff, so tell me about you a little bit.

[00:03:24] Dave: Yeah well, just like you, I had a really clear and direct path to uh, to where I am today, right? Like a lot of, uh. a lot of kids going to college.

[00:03:33] Dave: I really had no idea what I wanted to do. Right. I ended up finishing up my sophomore year, kind of had to pick a major, right? So I chose environmental science and ~um, and uh,~ that's what my degree is in and this is probably, I. More telling about me and what my level of maturity was at that point. I never really kind of found a clear and direct path within environmental science.

[00:03:55] Dave: So I joke a lot about, I would take a class in hydrogeology and then in another class [00:04:00] I would be out in the forest getting a count of grasshoppers versus crickets to support some kind of research that we were doing right. And uh, so yeah. And so how did I end up in safety? Right? So I started working at school in the Environmental Health and Safety office, which as a kind of, internship, co-op kind of deal, wasn't very glamorous going around to the different buildings and labs and making sure fire extinguishers were present and they were inspected and things like that.

[00:04:27] Dave: So that was my first introduction to sort of the world of. Sort of occupational safety or general safety, if you will. After that, I was lucky enough to get an internship at Massport Massport owned and operated uh, and still does Logan Airport and a bunch of other facilities in and around Boston.

[00:04:45] Dave: And um, that was my first introduction to construction safety. In the safety department at Massport, we were responsible for the health and safety of mass port's, direct employees, but we also had a lot of construction going on and we had an owner [00:05:00] controlled insurance program. So again, I was young, I was an intern, but I learned a lot there.

[00:05:05] Dave: I had a really great mentor, Gary Cunningham who just taught me a ton during my time at Massport. And I was lucky enough to be brought on full time after I finished school. That was my path to safety. Certainly didn't grow up wanting to be a safety professional or even really know what safety was until I started working in the field.

[00:05:24] Dave: And ~interesting,~ interestingly you'll, you'll hear that from a lot of safety professionals out there. Yeah. They took a roundabout way to get here but ultimately have become passionate about. Doing the things that need to be done to keep people safe, right? To make sure that workers go home in good, if not better condition than when they came into work.

[00:05:43] Dave: Anyway, after that I was lucky enough to go to Harvard University spent about nine and a half years at Harvard University. Really cool place to work. Worked with a really great team, Jason Edic, Garrett Burke. Another two great mentors for me. And [00:06:00] really we were managing construction safety about a half a billion dollars of construction every year going on at Harvard.

[00:06:06] Dave: Harvard also had an owner controlled insurance program. That program was not performing very well. Lots of incidents, lots of claims. And so Harvard recognized a need to have a better way to manage contractors. And Highwire was born, right? Highwire was born. We'll talk a little bit more about what Highwire does and what we're trying to deliver for our clients.

[00:06:28] Dave: But that was my path in construction safety and um, and joined Highwire about nine and a half years ago now. ~And uh,~ we're trying to continue on with that mission of making sure that. Risks are identified, risks are understood. Plans are put in place, and projects are delivered safely without significant incidents.

[00:06:49] Shayne: That's great. Yeah, and you kind of already alluded to this a little bit, why did, why do we think this podcast? Like what, What did Dave and I have to tell everybody listening. So really the [00:07:00] inspiration Dave mentioned was to really just inspire people to go beyond, that's why it's beyond prequalification, right?

[00:07:07] Shayne: Make sure everybody comes home safely, make sure everybody is conducting their business safely. Ideally, hopefully educate you all of things that either Dave has done or we wanna also have some guests on the show to also tell some of their successes and some of their stories. We also gonna talk about this vision of contractor success and then what it is and also why it's irrelevant and really we think more relevance than ever.

[00:07:34] Shayne: Dave, from your perspective, what is. Contractor success and why does it really matter for this podcast?

[00:07:42] Dave: I think it only matters because it drives everything we do right, Shayne? So it matters a little bit, right? In terms of, for sure, in terms of our product, in terms of the way that we interact with our clients in terms of the mindset of prequalification.

[00:07:57] Dave: And I think this goes all the way back to Harvard, and [00:08:00] I think we're gonna touch on this a lot. Throughout this series, but prequalification is no longer and it, it can't be a pass or fail exercise. We cannot disqualify contractors based purely on prequalification. We have to use it to understand each contractor's unique risks.

[00:08:20] Dave: Um. We have to create a positive perception about what prequalification is. It's a, it is in a lot of ways about making sure that everybody is successful together. If you're an asset owner and you decide to build a manufacturing facility, if you're a general contractor who takes that project on to build that facility on behalf of the owner, and if you're a specialty trade contractor that's bought, hired by that general contractor to deliver a specific scope of work on that project.

[00:08:49] Dave: In order for that project to be successful, everybody needs to be successful. And that means that from a safety perspective, risks need to be managed. Identified plans need [00:09:00] to be in place. The work needs to be delivered safely. And safety is only one aspect of it. Sure. But we just have to remember that prequalification isn't about pass or fail.

[00:09:09] Dave: The reasons that we choose contractors are. Are varied, right? Safety is just one component. Default risk is another component, but there's a limited pool of contractors out there. There's a labor shortage. There's all kinds of reasons why we need to use prequalification to make good decisions, but also to help make sure that everybody is successful.

[00:09:28] Dave: So that's the mindset. That's what drives our company. That's what's gonna be one of the main topics of our podcast. And Shane, you can speak to how it drives everything we do with our product as well.

[00:09:37] Shayne: For sure, For sure. Yeah. I think importantly too, it's. It's not just a one-time thing. It should be this ongoing process of continuous qualification, continuous analysis, to making sure that the contractor you did pre-qualify X months or maybe X years ago, continues to uphold the reasons why you pre-qualified them today.

[00:09:57] Shayne: Yeah, so I mentioned this story, but some of the [00:10:00] things, obviously I want, I actually, it'd be great to have Gary Cunningham, if he's still around, get him on the show. That'd be really interesting to hear from him and how you got your foot in the door. And then obviously we have so many great clients.

[00:10:11] Shayne: We, we, on a day to day who I'm sure would be on the show, but special guests will be a pretty big component of the show as well as things like ai, ~which is actually the next episode.~ So stay tuned for that. How AI is really starting to impact the industry, especially around safety manuals and also risk identification how to get the most out of your inspection programs and also things just very simple.

[00:10:34] Shayne: Take home things like the biggest prequalification mistakes that contractors could make. So things like that are gonna be really paramount to the show. So hopefully you learn more about it and obviously as the audience, we also want you to be involved. If you do have any suggestions or any topics, if you want to be interviewed on this show, definitely reach out.

[00:10:53] Shayne: And with that, you can reach me at shayne@highwire.com. Dave, how can [00:11:00] you get reached?

[00:11:02] Dave: Sure. Very similarly, dave@highwire.com please reach out if you want to participate, if you have any feedback, any comments, if you wanna share any of your own best practices relevant to the topics we discuss on the podcast.

[00:11:14] Dave: One of the best things about the safety profession is that we all like to share, right? When there are best practices and lessons to be learned, we don't hold those close to the vest. We share them. So that we can prevent bad outcomes, right? And deliver the best results. So please reach out at any point.

[00:11:31] Dave: Again, whether you wanna participate or just share your feedback, again, dave@highwire.com.

[00:11:37] Shayne: Great. Alright everybody. Well~ We are very excited. I think we shall have, we should. I also have an excited tab going, how many times we say excited on this podcast. Exactly. We have to say it a lot, but yeah,~

[00:11:39] Shayne: we're excited for what lies ahead and yeah, stay tuned.~ we'll Talk about safety manuals and how AI is starting to impact those in a little bit. ~Thank you. Thanks everyone.