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PODCAST OPENER
Welcome to the Inside Insight podcast presented by CR Solutions. At Consolidated Risk Solutions, we are taking our expert knowledge of the insurance world and using it to innovate the industry using technology, groundbreaking thinking and a personal touch. Join us as we talk to masterminds both inside and outside of CR Solutions about how the world of insurance is changing, and how we can be sure to grow along with it. If you have to manage insurance in your work, then you can benefit from the interviews, conversations and insights we’ll be exploring to elevate your business’s success.
INTRO (00:43 – 02:22)
Trevor Casey: Beau, we’re back again.
Beau Lunceford: We really are.
Trevor Casey: And this is a good one.
Beau Lunceford: I am so excited for people to hear this conversation. It took us a long time to get this conversation lined up and recorded, but man, all along the way I just kept hearing more and more and more about SafetyClerk and what they were doing in the industry and how they were impacting the space. It just made the anticipation all the better. So I’m hoping that people are as excited about this as we were going into it.
Trevor Casey: The fact that your calendar is so booked up because you’re meeting with so many people is probably a good problem to have, but it also speaks volumes to the value of the company and what they’re doing. So tell us a little bit about our guest today.
Beau Lunceford: Absolutely. Stefano Braganti is a technology entrepreneur transforming the construction industry through innovation and data driven solutions. With more than 15 years of experience in real estate development and construction management in NYC, he bridges the gap between technology and job site realities. As the founder and CEO of SafetyClerk, Stefano is redefining risk management, SAF, safety compliance and operational efficiency through data driven approach. His engineering expertise and deep industry knowledge drive the creation of intuitive solutions that simplify processes, enhance decision making and improve productivity. A passionate advocate for digital transformation and construction, he shares insights on predictive analytics, automation and the future of construction technology. This conversation is absolutely all of those things and I am so excited for people to hear it.
Trevor Casey: Absolutely. Well, without further ado, let’s get into it.
Interview (02:26 – 28:55)
Trevor Casey: All right, everybody. Welcome back again to another episode of the Inside Insight podcast. We are here today with Stefano Braganti, founder and CEO of SafetyClerk. Stefano, how are you, man?
Stefano Braganti: Hi, Trevor. Good, good. You?
Trevor Casey: I can’t complain. It’s a beautiful day. The rain has finally subsided for a little bit, so we’re going. We appreciate you joining us today and talking a little bit about SafetyClerk. So before we get started, give us a little rundown on your background, tell us a little bit about you and how you kind of come to start SafetyClerk?
Stefano Braganti: Good question. So I was born and raised in Italy, a small town on the northwest of Italy, very close to France. Studied in Bologna engineering. Came to New York to do a master and finish my study here. Got hired as a structure engineer designing a high rise structure in New York in 2011. Stayed as an engineer for five years. One of my clients pulled me over to the other side of the fence. So he was a developer. Started working for a developer as a project manager there for a couple of years. After that he decided to start his own construction company. He asked me if I could help him and that’s what I did. I became kind of in charge of this construction company doing mid-rise building in Manhattan and like most of the founder, got a problem that I couldn’t find a solution for that was documenting safety and compliance and improving the way risk management was done. So I reached out to a very dear friend from my hometown that I’ve been known since we were a kid that has been in tech for the entire career and convince him to do something together. And that’s how SafetyClerk actually came along in 2022, three years ago now.
Trevor Casey: That’s really cool. The background from Italy to here and how you started as an engineer. I feel like everyone that we talk to in construction, insurance and safety and compliance, none of them have a background where they went to school for that. They just kind of fell into insurance, compliance, construction. It’s just so interesting that so many different worlds collide in one place. So SafetyClerk does a lot in the safety and compliance space and you guys are really big on tech and integration. Can you give us a little bit of an overview exactly what the SafetyClerk platform does?
Stefano Braganti: Sure. I would say it gives you an easy way to digest and understand how your risk management is going, your compliance and your safety by collecting thousand, maybe millions of data point from job site where you, your workers are daily interacting with the system. And by doing that we’re actually providing solution to digitalization of a lot of ocean and DOB requirements that every worker, every site safety manager, every project manager needs to fill out daily, weekly or monthly. But the overall idea is that we give you an overview on your operation. So whether you are subcontractor working on multiple job sites or you are a construction manager working on multiple job sites with dozens of subcontractors for each job site, you can have a clear view 24/7 live dashboard and insight that tells you what you’re doing good, what you’re doing less good, where to improve, what’s the compliance rate level and what to do to basically get to a better status.
Beau Lunceford: So this is a lot of stuff that’s being covered by SafetyClerk. How did you decide that this was something that the industry needed, this was something that you wanted to pursue in developing?
Stefano Braganti: So how we started is a little bit different. We were not thinking that we’re to be sitting on so many data and so the reality is that we were just trying to figure out a better way to document the training of the worker, to check during the orientation process, worker qualification and see if the worker were trained enough to do a certain job or to access a certain job site to train the worker and document on the weekly toolbox talk or the daily pre shift, all the training that the worker was receiving and collecting a copy of those training. So that’s the way that SafetyClerk started by digitizing process that already exist in reality. All the orientation, the pre shift, the toolbox talk, all this kind of very heavily paper involved process got digitized by SafetyClerk. That was stage one, let’s say. And then we were like, listen, we are sitting on so many data. We have thousands and thousands of worker on the platform daily. We had hundreds of thousands of pre shift being sent weekly through our platform. But now we can actually kind of assess if a worker does the training that is provided. And if he does, he should be rewarded for that and his safety status, his safety score should increase or decrease if he doesn’t interact with that because it becomes a liability for a subcontractor for a construction manager, ultimately for the insurance company that is insuring the project. And that’s why then we kind of change gear a little bit and we really dive deep into the data and try to figure out an easy way to standardize what we do across the different clients that we have and provide them an overview of how they are doing, basically.
Trevor Casey: So with these data points, I know there’s so much data out there. And a lot of people see it and they’re like, what do I do with this? Is your platform customizable where an owner can say, I’m very interested in these safety points where a risk manager might be saying, I want to know who has the highest safety score on the job site. Is it a customizable platform or do you kind of have a streamlined set of data on that dashboard and you show them how to read that data? Or is it, I come to you and say, I’m interested in X, Y and Z, and you pull that data and provide it to me.
Stefano Braganti: It’s a little bit of everything that you touch except fully customizable. We don’t believe in customization for the simple reason that if you customize something for yourself, you cannot really compare your operation to the other operation and see how you were doing. We lost big clients because they were asking us for custom PDF form builders. That’s what I think that digital is. They want to ride the digital wave of stop using paper, let’s get digital. I want a custom builder form. Custom builder form is better than paper for sure, but it doesn’t provide you any data point. It’s just a glorified piece of paper. So potentially you can have a lot of information and a lot of data that are not being captured because they being captured on a piece of paper, on the form, but it doesn’t tell you anything. You cannot make this data speak for you. I give you an example. Let’s say that you have a big operation and again, you know that the reality is a lot of accident happen in construction site, minor or major, but you document all the accident. Either you’re using a piece of paper or a custom builder form to do your incident report that’s unique incident report that is digital, it’s better than paper, but lives somewhere in a folder. If you use a standardized way to collect the incident report that is unique and within your own organization and within other organizations, you can actually now check trains. So you can see I got 25% of the incident report related to hand injuries. So you can figure out that there is a problem and maybe you can push your training towards using better the gloves or there are a lot of faults and you understand that you can improve your training on the faults on the fault protection. So basically by standardizing the way you can have dashboards speaking with you. Also, we don’t collect just data. We always use this data to provide you either insights, either dashboard, either notification. There are so many data point in the universe, but data are useless if you don’t know how to read them. That’s what we do for you. We give you clear way to read the data and act on them.
Beau Lunceford: That’s so interesting because the idea of everyone wants customization, everyone wants something that is special to exactly what they’re looking for. But in doing that, they’re actually robbing themselves of real customized data that could actually help them. It’s just such conflicting mentality. But it makes total sense when you say it that people think they know what they need. But if you customize it and you take out all that stuff, you’re missing out on stuff that could actually be data that could be customized to help you get the results that you’re looking for. And then again like you said, compare back and forth between how you’re doing against other trades, other industries, different things like that. That is very cool.
Stefano Braganti: If I can add something on that, we got some inspiration on this tracker, a book that is tracking you for a lot of people in sport using that. And you get a monthly report at the end of the month that tracks your heart activities and so on. And then you always have this month you’ve been exercising more than 20% of the people within your age group or 80% within the age group. So you can always benchmark it yourself against your peer and that’s what we’re doing. A SafetyClerk is the same. Within the same organization, I can tell you ‘Project A’ is performing better than 99% of the other projects, but also across different organization. Of course I’m not sharing the names of all my clients between each other, but clients that is doing new building mid-rise in New York can benchmark themselves and see how they are doing in compliance and safety with respect to their peers. So they always know at the end of the month if they are doing better or worse than the majority of the other company that are using the system, of course, within the same kind of work and geographic area.
Trevor Casey: That’s so invaluable to a lot of these developers just to know, hey, this has been a successful project or it hasn’t. And they can bench line that and say hey, it’s because of safety or what have you. One of the things that I think I’d love to hear you speak on a little bit is you guys are doing some really cool stuff with “Access control” and “Turnstile” using some of these data benchmarks that you guys have started creating. Can you kind of talk to that a little bit?
Stefano Braganti: Sure. So we work with Turnstile. Again, Turnstile, is not our primary focus. It’s not our core business. Turnstiles for us is just a tool, is a data point that we can play with. So instead of having the standard turnstile where people go in and out and the Turnstile basically company tells you just Stefano is in the job site, Stefano is out the job site. We can customize the setting of the Turnstile to not only tell you if the worker that are within the job site, they have the proper certificate. Also, optimize the daily training that the worker receives the second that they get through the Turnstile, get the incident waiver sent out to the worker the second that the worker steps out of the job site. And then the construction company can actually decide if they want the worker back in if the worker didn’t sign some of the documents that he was supposed to sign. So at any given time you have full control of your compliance level. Because you can see clearly in dashboard how many workers are in, how many are in full compliance, how many they forgot a couple of documents to sign and so on. Actually working with CR Solutions upgrade a little bit these by not only playing with the status of compliance of the worker, but actually we are also playing now with the status of compliance of the company of the worker on the job site. Whether it is standard, project specific job site, general liability or is a CCIP OCIP project program. We can actually work with company like CR Solutions where every subcontractor goes through a vetting process to be accepted or not within the CCIP or OCIP or the project specific. And these reporting are actually connected with our system. So we can alert safety manager, a superintendent or a construction manager organization if a worker of a company that has not been approved try to access the job site. We can actually go even further and lock the worker out of the gate if the company doesn’t have an “Okay to work” status. So if for some reason their insurance expire or they, they actually lost their right to work based on their compliance level.
Trevor Casey: Wow. I feel like everything you’re saying right now is music to a safety manager’s ears because they’re like hallelujah, somebody’s listening to me. I can lock down my site and get these people out of here. That’s really incredible. I’ve seen some of the reports that you guys put out and they’re really beautiful and they’re well put together and made. One of the things I was curious about is you guys have this really incredible system. Do you have an API or any integrations with any other big name software’s where people could say, I use Procore for example and I use that for all of this tracking of my contracts. Is there an integration there? What would people look to you guys for integration wise?
Stefano Braganti: You name it. Procore and Autodesk are the two major project management software that had been used mostly in United States right now, and of course we integrate with them. So any document that we create, beside the fact that every document we create is timestamped PDF so it cannot be forged and can be actually downloaded at any given time. But it also sync in real time with Procore or Autodesk document folder. You can see anything that we do is actually copy in Procore if you’d like. So you always have a record of, of everything that has been done through SafetyClerk.
Beau Lunceford: Everything that I’m hearing just sounds like by participating with SafetyClerk you’re amping up, I don’t know, not your profitability, you’re amping up your workability, I guess. I don’t know what the word. Trevor, you may have to help me with that. I’m working with SafetyClerk, I have all of this data that proves that we are a safety safe company. We are a company that is well trained, we do great work on our job sites. I imagine that has to help with their bidding process of trying to get jobs that we have all of this data that SafetyClerk has provided us to show that we may be a little bit more expensive or we may cost a little bit more in the long run, but we’re the best choice because we’re going to get the job done well and we’re going to get the job done safely. That just feels like such an asset to any contractor, any person who’s out there using this software, this platform for future work.
Stefano Braganti: Absolutely. And not only to subcontractor or construction manager trying to get to work with their client. Lately we’ve been very successful with insurance carrier because ultimately that’s what we’re trying to protect. So all this data, they’re going to give a clear way to insurance company to price their risk of insuring a project versus another to price a subcontractor with respect to another. Because at the end of the day that’s what we track. We track not only safety and compliance, but we track the level of accuracy of the documentation that every of our clients collect through the system. So now the client can go to the insurance company. And actually funny fact, a couple of weeks ago, one of our major subcontractor clients, they have more than 700 workers within their organization and 45 different job site in New York City. They actually brought us together with them to their annual renewal meeting with the insurance company to for us to present what they are doing through the system and insurance company was actually surprised. They didn’t know that something like this existed. And they were like, you guys are putting a lot of effort in really protect your company, protect the worker and be sure that everything that you’re doing is track and data shown. So people can actually show in real time the status of the job site. And I believe that they were able to get some good reduction on the premium because of that. So in that particular case, it’s going to be the future where finally insurance are going to price the risk of insuring different premium similar to what they’re doing on car insurance. If you are a driver, you do a safety text, you can get a reduction of insurance. Here is much more actually because your insurance can say not only you are doing safety procedures, that they are in compliance and standardized. I can actually see how you are doing that live. And I know that if something goes a little bit lower than what I want, you can act right away and improve it. So you can keep your safety standard above the average.
Beau Lunceford: It’s safe driver coverage. But for construction projects, this is amazing.
Trevor Casey: That’s super cool. One thing that you said a few minutes ago, I found interesting just the size of the subcontractor. Let’s say I’m listening to this podcast right now. I love everything that they’re saying right now. I want to improve my safety score, I want a reduction on my premium but I’m a small subcontractor. What is the size of your guy’s clientele? Is there a minimum? Is there a maximum? What does it look like to be a customer of SafetyClerk?
Stefano Braganti: Safety standards should be the same for every work that has been performed. We have a tile company that has five workers as part of their system. They have one job, five workers. We have an exterior restoration company that works with us that they have almost 90 active jobs and hundreds and hundreds of worker. That’s a subcontractor level because we work with both subcontractor, construction manager. With construction manager, we have the small construction manager that only has a couple of jobs with us because that’s what they have, that’s how they run the organization. And we are working with some of the major player in the industry where they have dozens of job site enroll and they run the entire safety programs at SafetyClerk. So it doesn’t really matter. We offer the same level of customer success onboarding towards our customer because at the end of the day it’s a little bit more effort at the beginning for us to onboard the companies but we know that once they are there, they see the benefit from week one from of using the system and they’re going to stay with us for a long time hopefully.
Beau Lunceford: I love that baseline though it does not matter how big your company is. Everyone should be held to the same safety standards. That’s great. And then that last little line at the end of week one, they’re already starting to see differences in their safety. I’m seeing SafetyClerk everywhere right now. And I don’t know if that’s just because I’m excited about this conversation, but now it makes sense why I’m seeing it everywhere because this tool is unmatched. This is incredible usage for people and it’s providing so many different accessibility points from premium to safety to job access. This is amazing.
Stefano Braganti: Thank you. Again, we didn’t believe in one solution as part of 20 different solutions that construction companies to buy. We believe that the company should have a project management system, Procore, Autodesk or whatever other system they want to use. But everything else that is safety, compliance, back of the office, it should not be spread out among 20 different solutions that don’t speak to each other. So that’s why we decide to combine all these tools. You can just have a tool for safety and compliance. You can just do time tracking with us or if you do the two, they are actually part of the same ecosystem. So they speak with each other. So they have benefited that one plus one is not two but it’s actually five. We call it smartness of working together of different tools that usually are sold separately by different company if you are lucky. They’re integrating and speaking with each other. For us, they’re speaking with each other and actually producing much, much more.
Trevor Casey: Stefano, this has been an incredible conversation. Everything that we’ve learned, I think is going to get the industry really excited, our listeners really excited. So thank you for the time and we really appreciate it. Before we sign off, one of the things that we always like to ask people is, what is their personal inside insight? Like, what is it that gets you going, drives you for success every morning? Is it a poem that you heard one time about success? Is it just the idea that every day my software is making people safer to go home to their families? What is your inside insight? What motivates and drives you?
Stefano Braganti: I think it’s improving a little bit, the life of the people touching the software. And I don’t want to be philosophical and say that we are changing life of people, but if the safety director or the foreman of a job site now needs to spend a quarter of the time do something and is doing that much, much better, he knows that he doesn’t have to worry about at that portion of this job, it’s happier. We are trying to reclaim happiness in the construction world because it’s such an amazing industry, but people are always very angry and upset because there’s so much pressure and some of the things that are doing is so antiquated that just contributing a little bit to make that portion of the work that they need to do better in is going to go a long way and improving a little bit their life.
Trevor Casey: I think that’s going to be music to so many people’s ears. And the safety managers listening to this are going to say, I get to walk on the job site and my project managers are going to be happy and singing and enjoying the day, sign me up. Where can I pay for this product right now? That’s awesome. That’s a new insight that we’ve heard and I’m really glad that that’s the way that you think and you’re just trying to bring happiness to people through lightening the load. I love that.
Stefano Braganti: That’s what we’re trying to do. Thank you.
Beau Lunceford: This has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for being a part of this, for sharing your story, for bringing SafetyClerk into existence because as you’ve already pointed out, so many people are already benefiting from this and seeing real difference in the lightning of that load. So, Stefano, thank you so much for being a part of this, for taking the time to talk to us today. Is there anything else that you want to make sure that you say to our listeners before we sign off today?
Stefano Braganti: No, I think I talk a lot. Hopefully, we provide a little bit of overview of what we do and if there is always any question or anything that curiosity or ideas, something that didn’t mention, we really work a lot. We shaped a lot of the software based on the feedback of our customers. Again, I’m a safety manager myself, but I knew very little about some of the operation on the insurance side, for example. So we recognize that a lot of people know more than us in a different field, and that’s what we want as a client, as a partner, to actually shape the software and make it the best possible.
Trevor Casey: We love that. Everybody that’s listening is going to love that. As always, everybody, everything about Stefano and SafetyClerk is going to be in the show notes, so feel free to reach out to him. They’re super innovative and excited to try new things. So, Stefano, again, thank you so much for the time, and we really appreciate it, and we’ll talk to you again soon, hopefully.
Stefano Braganti: Thank you, guys. It was a pleasure.
OUTRO (29:02 – 32:49)
Beau Lunceford: There it is. That’s what we missed.
Trevor Casey: That was a good one. That was a good conversation.
Beau Lunceford: It was so much fun. And I hope that people were able to take as much away from it as we built it up to be because the stuff that we got to dive into, and I really still feel like we didn’t even scratch the surface of all the things the SafetyClerk is doing. If you are at all intrigued by this conversation, if you want to learn more about what SafetyClerk has going on, we highly encourage you to check out the show notes and see those links that we have there so you can get in touch with Stefano and find out about SafetyClerk. So, Trevor, as clean and easy as it is, I think that’s another episode.
Trevor Casey: It is. And honestly, one of the things that I think is very cool about the next few upcoming episodes is that we are getting into the data. This is the season of data. That’s what we should just call it, “The season of data”, because we are just talking to so many cool companies, starting with SafetyClerk and forget to mention the other 30 people we’ve spoken to, that strive for data and success and putting all the things together. But we’re really starting to dive into, I don’t want to give too much away but diving into site control, diving into Al, diving into just integrations. I mean just the amount of data driven analytical stuff.
Beau Lunceford: The word that keeps jumping out to me is analytics. This just world of data driven information. I think that we’re moving out of the times when people were just kind of like guesstimating what could possibly happen. And one of the things that Amy Lamb in our office always says, “It’s all about the risk.” And I think that we’re slowly getting away from risk being such a deterrent in how it is that we manage insurance because there’s so much information out there, there’s so much data that we have to be able to eliminate risk up front and then all that’s left is accidents and those horrible incidents that occur. But as far as we can prepare, we are prepared now.
Trevor Casey: I don’t want to dive down into a rabbit hole because we could literally sit here and talk for 30 minutes about all the stuff we’ve learned. But it is just the amount of technology that’s out there right now, the amount of Al, the amount of different bots that are out there, the technology is available to you to mitigate risk and if you are having catastrophic, insanely high value claims on your job site, there’s a problem and I would hate to say this but I’m going to go ahead and say it, it’s probably your risk manager and the reason I say that is they’re probably doing great work but they’re not using all of the tools that are around them. Looking at SafetyClerk, looking at some of the technology that we have coming up, looking at things that we’ve spoken of in the past, there’s just so much technology, so many resources out there that these catastrophic claims really should be mitigated and really should be non-existent. The really the only stuff we should be seeing is what you said, a genuine true accident. But at that point still should be resolved so quickly.
Beau Lunceford: There’s still stuff that can be done, there’s still action that can be taken and I hope that people who are listening are those risk managers who are looking for new resources that can help make their job easier. It can make their job better. All those things that keep a job site safe and functional and like you and I have said before, get everybody home to their families, all of those things are so, so important.
Trevor Casey: Beau, I don’t want to dive too much longer into this outro. So with that, stay covered.
PODCAST CLOSER
Thanks for tuning in to Inside Insight presented by CR Solutions. If you like anything that you heard today, subscribe, follow and rate the show so that other industry pioneers like yourself can find it. Maybe even share it with someone you think might benefit from this episode. Do you have a question that you want answered or a concept that you need explain, you can email us at info@c-r-solutions.com with the subject line “Podcast Question”, and maybe your question, we’ll make it onto one of our episodes. You can also submit a question via our website at c-r-solutions.com/podcast. There are no dumb questions, only opportunities to learn something new. Now that’s a wrap on this episode. Join us next time on Inside Insight presented by CR Solutions. Stay covered.
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