Brian Fielkow & Associates – Safety Is the Accelerant: Brian Fielkow on Why Safe Companies Grow Faster

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 own trucking company, and he calls it the wrong one. 

Brian did not arrive in safety the usual way. He started out practising business law in Milwaukee, where meeting clients across a range of industries taught him to look for patterns. He went to work for his favourite client, a three generation recycling company, helped grow it, and sold it to Waste Management. After leaving Waste he bought his own trucking company and built it into a trucking, freight brokerage, and logistics business, and it was there that the role of safety came into focus for him, not as a compliance exercise but as the business itself. He has since written three books on the subject, most recently Making Safety Happen. 

In this episode of The Safety Spotlight, Brian makes the case that there is no safety culture sitting separate from company culture, and that the safest companies have an advantage precisely because they are not spending their time cleaning up messes. Safe outcomes, in his view, are a reflection of leadership quality. He is careful to add that the best run company can still have a bad day, and that every organization he has led or advised is a work in process.