From 19-Year-Old Laborer to Project Manager: Dusty Stasch on Cost, Weather Risk & Leading in the Field

Rishi Srivastava (00:41)
Today, our guest is Dusty Stasch from Ellingson Companies. Dusty, welcome.

Dusty Stasch (00:45)
Thanks for having me.

Rishi Srivastava (00:46)
First section here is on your background and career path. You’ve been with Ellingson since 2008, starting as a 19-year-old laborer and working your way up through foreman, operations manager, and now project manager. How has seeing the business from all those levels shaped the way you think about cost, risk, and profitability on a job?

Dusty Stasch (01:10)
Yeah, so from a cost aspect, when you’re a kid at 19 years old, you don’t think much about it. You just want to go out and have fun and go home at the end of the week and get your paycheck. So as I evolved into a foreman position,

I started to think about it a little bit more. I also kind of always had the understanding of just power through and get it done at all costs type of philosophy, which looking back probably wasn’t my greatest move ever. you know, once I started being more of a superintendent and then definitely when I became operations manager.

looking at the costs and the decisions that we make in the field and how those directly affect ⁓ so many things. So I would say the, especially like the profitability, right? It’s one thing to get a job done. It’s another thing to be profitable at it. So.

for quite a while it was just get the job done but as we grew those types of ⁓ philosophies don’t really go. yeah.

Rishi Srivastava (02:13)
Seeing your growth all the way from a laborer to project manager is impressive.

Dusty Stasch (02:18)
It was quite the ride, I’ll say that. Probably wasn’t ready for a lot of the positions I had. But, you know, hard work, perseverance, here we are.

Rishi Srivastava (02:27)
Yeah, you one code is if you’re scared and you don’t jump, you’re going to stay where you are forever. When it’s most scary, that’s when you need to jump.

Dusty Stasch (02:38)
Yeah.

video on my LinkedIn of

me jumping off the cliff. So that’s how I try to approach it.

Rishi Srivastava (02:45)
yeah, yeah, you wanna tell us more?

You want to us the story behind that video?

Dusty Stasch (02:51)
Yeah, I can. So for years and years, I would go on vacation with my family, my wife, and I would worry about what’s happening when I’m not around, You know, are we being profitable? Are we doing the job right? Are we going to the right jobs? How’s the flow of everything? I just have a really hard time relaxing. You you think about work.

two, three days while you’re going there. Maybe relax for a day or two and then you start thinking about work again. And so you don’t really enjoy it. I never did. I’d say about a year or two ago, I finally morphed my mind to trust my people. Trust that I’ve trained them. Trust that they know what they’re doing.

and that I did my job to help them succeed here. so having that mentality has definitely helped me be able to relax on a family vacation now.

Rishi Srivastava (03:37)
Yeah, lesson well learned. Next question is, when you started, there were about eight people in the office. And now you are at 80 to 90. What did that growth look like from your perspective? And how did it change the way you plan work, manage crews, and understand the financial impact of every decision?

Dusty Stasch (03:59)
So, I mean, it was a fast ride. I’d say about 2012 is when it really took off. So, I mean, as far as managing crews from 2008 to 2025, it’s a whole different world on the types of people we have, management styles. So.

I was able to adapt at that and I feel like if you don’t adapt, you’re going to be left behind. So managing our crews, know, trusting them, ask, try and get their buy-in, you know, talking them about plans.

the more you can get their input and their buy in, the better off we’ll be financially and from a production standpoint.

⁓

So the financial aspect of it though.

Rishi Srivastava (04:45)
We’ll you later.

Dusty Stasch (04:47)
Like I said earlier,

when there wasn’t as many people, could just kinda…

do what we needed to do to get the job done. But now when you have all these people here, our financial decisions definitely impact more than just what we thought was our pocket. It’s our accountants, it’s our HR team, everyone.

Rishi Srivastava (05:08)
Yeah, yeah, your responsibility to deliver a successful project has grown enormously.

The next section here at Dusty is on operations, scheduling, and job performance. You describe yourself as the glue between sales and operations. What does that look like day to day?

Dusty Stasch (05:27)
Yeah. All right. So our salespeople, they obviously sell the projects to our customers. And then once that’s sold, you know, there’s the stuff in between and then it’s operations. They’re going to go out and, and, do, do what we, sold to these customers. So my role is to balance what sales might,

promise or make their customers expect and making sure that operations is ready to execute the job successfully, right? So just talking with our salespeople, if there’s any changes that might be going on, if there’s anything our customers might like and not like, you know, just so we have a good understanding because, you know, our word is…

is everything, especially in this business, right? I ⁓ always like to say, we could do 200 things perfectly right, you know, but we do one thing wrong and people are gonna remember that forever, right? So, we’re not perfect by any means, but ⁓ try to live by that philosophy. So, I’ve been around this business for…

Rishi Srivastava (06:13)
you

Dusty Stasch (06:33)
18 years now. So I know how our customers are. I know the job. Been on the operations side of things. So being able to use that knowledge to kind of bring the two together has definitely been beneficial.

Rishi Srivastava (06:49)
Most of your projects are measured in days or a few weeks, not multi-year jobs. How does that speed change how you forecast, schedule, and keep a job from going into the red?

Dusty Stasch (07:03)
Yep. logistics is a huge thing.

I use Microsoft Project a lot to kind of keep everything in one area for schedule wise.

I would say I have a lot of good help. A lot of people that know what they’re doing.

So communication, making sure we’re all on the same page, making sure I can get a schedule out to people as early as possible so the operations team can start planning how they want to execute things. And then just communication. When we see jobs are going bad, you know.

We just gotta ask the question, like, okay, do we need to stop? Do we need to just rethink how we’re gonna go about this? What are we gonna do? I think it’s funny, I don’t know if it actually is, but I always joke, if we’re gonna lose money, I wanna make sure we’re losing money together.

when we don’t have those conversations and we just keep, you know, doing the old philosophy of go, go, go, go, go. And then on a three day job, we did that and we’re only, you know, 20 % done with it. And we still have four more days out there. It’s hard to come back from that. So the more we can talk about things, the better.

⁓ And just make sure we have all of our ducks out there too. know, try not to have any secrets. Because yeah, we got to coordinate materials, we got to coordinate equipment, survey. And when you have as many crews as we do, it’s a lot to keep going.

Rishi Srivastava (08:24)
Yeah, especially the short duration, know, one or two day here and there and suddenly you’re losing money on a project.

Dusty Stasch (08:27)
Thank

Yeah, yeah, it doesn’t take much to go the wrong direction, that’s for sure.

Rishi Srivastava (08:36)
When leadership sees some jobs way up and others way down on a report, how do you explain the reality of field conditions, timing and weather to people who mostly see numbers on a screen?

Dusty Stasch (08:49)
The best way that I can describe it is, know, I’m a field guy, operations guy at heart, right? So I know what it’s like to be out there. I know the conditions are not favorable. I also know our group of people pretty well. We have a lot of gritty guys that just put their head down and

do the best they can every day of the week. So it’s not a lack of effort that our jobs are fading. Honestly, weather is the biggest factor. Once it starts getting wet, everything just goes a lot slower like it does everywhere else.

We’re working in egg fields, so we’re working in black dirt.

We’re working where people don’t plant for a reason. So it’s wet. It’s not super good conditions. So when it rains as well, it just adds to it. But it’s not from a lack of effort. We’re not out there just going at 50%. We’re going full bore.

Rishi Srivastava (09:31)
Mm-hmm.

field conditions. It’s hard to explain to pure finance people sometimes.

Dusty Stasch (09:52)
It really

is because until you experience it, I don’t know, being knee deep in mud, I don’t know, and then it’s raining too for all day and you’re outside and yeah, it’s a tough one.

Rishi Srivastava (10:07)
The next section here, Dusty, is on weather risk and real-world variables. In your world, weather is a massive financial variable. Can you share an example of how weather turned a job from good to bad or vice versa, and how you adjusted operationally to protect margin?

Dusty Stasch (10:26)
Yeah. So I would say.

There’s one job that really sticks out the most. We’ve been trying to get this job done for probably two years now, but every time we go there, it’s not the right time. So we were going to go there this, I think the last week of May. It had been a good May, it was dry. And about…

three, four days before we were gonna start with our lift stations and dirt work. It had rained, I don’t remember exactly how much, inches out there. And it just completely destroyed being able to go out there. And I feel for this guy, we’ve been trying to do it for a couple of years now, but timing just hasn’t been our friend. So.

I would say that

Rishi Srivastava (11:07)
you

Dusty Stasch (11:07)
it can be perfect and in a matter of a day, our jobs could go, the conditions could go south real quick and either we’re not gonna go there or maybe we’re gonna stay there and get it out as long as we can to be as profitable as we can. So as far as keeping a margin,

The best way to go about that is really monitoring, our foreman’s time cards, right? we, know exactly how much we need to get done in a day, in an hour, for all of our cost codes. So if we’re seeing that we’re not getting it, you know, we need to throw up the red flag. so they might be hitting their numbers. We get rain now.

Rishi Srivastava (11:40)
you

Dusty Stasch (11:44)
their numbers are cut in half. So that’s where we have a conversation. is it better that we just don’t work for a couple of days? So we’re not unprofitable or should we just leave this area and go with somewhere where it’s dry? And that’s always a case by case basis.

Rishi Srivastava (11:58)
Working with farmers, how do you manage expectations, pricing and scope in a way that protects both the relationship and profitability?

Dusty Stasch (12:09)
being honest, it’s much better to tell our customers right away what we’re thinking rather than over promise. Because if you over promise something and we can’t deliver, they’re not usually all that happy with us. So.

I would say the more we can talk communication, I’ve probably said it probably 10 or 15 times now, the more we can communicate with our customers, the more…

Well, for one, the relationship aspect, right? Like we make a personal relationship with all these customers we’re dealing with. You know, our sales manager always says sales makes the initial contact, they get the first sale. Operations is what gets our repeat customers. you know, customer appreciation is at our forefront.

So we try to treat their fields with respect, you know, if we’re going to be making a mess in there, know, stopping, say, hey, you guys good with this? Do you want us to stop? Again, just keeping them in the loop as much as they want to be. Some of them want to be, you know, involved a lot. Some of them just say, just, you know, I trust you, go do what I hired you to do.

I would say just a lot of clear expectations on how we’re going to go about a project so they understand what to expect and they’re not caught by any surprises or anything.

Rishi Srivastava (13:25)
Yeah. expectation management is so important.

Dusty Stasch (13:28)
It really is because, I mean, again, these guys are farmers. know, they, we deal with a lot of…

guys that have a lot of land to guys that don’t have a lot of land, you know, and just treating everyone with the same amount of respect. I don’t know, just kind of how we go about it. Doesn’t matter if you’re the biggest guy on the stage or the smallest guy, know, we’ll give you the same.

Rishi Srivastava (13:51)
Yeah. And according there is a quote, whether it’s a winning job or losing job, you treat them the same.

Dusty Stasch (13:57)
You

Rishi Srivastava (13:58)
The next section in Dusty here is on customer relationships and field reality. Sometimes the real world deals or adjustments you make in the field don’t match what finance expects from the rate sheet. How do you navigate that tension and what should CFOs and controllers better understand about those on the spot decisions?

Dusty Stasch (14:19)
Yeah, so…

I would say…

We try to make the best decisions we can when we’re in the moment. I try not to make hasty decisions by any means. I try to always think about any decision I make, especially when it comes to winning or losing on a job. So I would say there’s a lot of things that are happening at once.

lot of different people in your ear, whether it’s a customer or a salesperson, someone on the operations side. customer might want us to finish the job no matter what. Sales might want to change a couple of things. Operations might have a couple of guys that don’t show up for work that day or that week or who knows what it might be. And so there’s a

Rishi Srivastava (14:59)
Okay.

Dusty Stasch (15:02)
lot of variables going on at once, or they can be. So we’re not just out here making random decisions without any thought put into it.

Rishi Srivastava (15:06)
you

Dusty Stasch (15:15)
And know, kind of what I alluded to earlier too, it’s we’re all, everyone’s out there, know, giving their best effort.

And if it’s not showing up on a report the right way, that’s because I didn’t do my job, right? So I know our operations people can, they’ll just keep going. But if I don’t, you know, monitor it close enough,

Rishi Srivastava (15:29)
Okay.

Dusty Stasch (15:35)
and ask the question, well, that’s on me for letting it go red. So, and I’ll always take full responsibility on that.

Rishi Srivastava (15:43)
And you’re showing the great leadership. It’s always the leaders fault.

Dusty Stasch (15:48)
Isn’t that the truth?

Rishi Srivastava (15:50)
Hehehehe

Drain tile is a niche industry with fast moving variables. What are the parts of your work that you feel finance teams often misunderstand or don’t see it at all?

Dusty Stasch (15:53)
you

I would just say the speed, all the decisions that go into where we go with our equipment or our crews, why we’re going to this specific region with this plow and this crew specifically. Maybe one of our crews really excels more than the other.

He’s at one bad job way up here and we’re going to take him to another job that’s two and a half hours away. Well, why didn’t you just take him to the job that was 20 minutes away? Well, because this person’s skills are required at this job instead, and that happens a lot. I try to place our crews where they’re going to succeed the most based off of, just call it talent,

So I would say there’s usually a reason for all of my decisions or our decisions.

Rishi Srivastava (16:56)
You know, when you just purely look at numbers, it’s very hard to decipher the thought process that you had when you made those decisions.

Dusty Stasch (17:06)
Yeah, no, and that’s why I get asked the hard questions because I have good understanding of how jobs are going.

Rishi Srivastava (17:18)
The next section here is on tech stack systems and reporting. You rely heavily on HCSS, Esri GIS, Microsoft Project, and Power BI. How do these systems fit together and where do you see gaps that slow down accurate forecasting?

Dusty Stasch (17:35)
Alright, so HCSS is our time cards. That’s what our foremen are doing. That’s how we track our day-to-day costs and quantities. So using HCSS to…

read their time cards and you know, if you, they all put notes in there, right? And I know how much they should be getting in a day. And as soon as you open the time card and it’s like, okay, yeah, we’re, we need to talk about this. So I would say HCSS is probably the easiest thing just to look at and understand if a job’s going.

well or not well. The ESRI, the GIS, that has completely changed our world. I love that program. I don’t know if I could do my job without it at this point. ⁓ So, at, we have a lot of jobs, know, in the hundreds. And so, we have them all on a map on GIS there.

Rishi Srivastava (18:16)
Okay.

Dusty Stasch (18:26)
And I can see all of our line work. I can filter it to what season, what crop. I can see everything a lot easier so I can make better decisions on where to take crews. yeah, GIS, it’s huge. We used to have paper maps too. And we just do everything digitally now. So it’s been a huge…

Rishi Srivastava (18:40)
Yeah, yeah. It’s huge. We used to have paper.

Dusty Stasch (18:48)
huge success for us. Project, Microsoft Project, I think it’s the outcast of the Microsoft family, but I use that. That’s where I house every sole job that comes in. It’s how I can forecast revenue by month or by week.

So yeah, I can classify it however I need. can separate it all out. Yeah, I can see how we did the week prior on it. it’s a very powerful tool that I don’t know. I personally like Microsoft Project.

I think we could maybe update one day, but we’ll see. It works for what we’re doing with it, I’ll say that. ⁓ I would say Power BI though, that’s something relatively new for us.

Rishi Srivastava (19:24)
Thank you.

Dusty Stasch (19:34)
And that definitely just helps watching the costs because it goes off of our HCSS time cards. And so all I have to do is just pull up and open a report. And I’ll say where we’re at. So Power BI has definitely helped kind of keep my finger on the pulse a lot better. So very powerful tool.

Rishi Srivastava (19:54)
Yeah, generally in your line of work, what’s the labor versus material split on a job?

Dusty Stasch (20:01)
the labor and material split as far as ⁓

Rishi Srivastava (20:03)
Yeah,

like labor, material, and equipment, if you are open to talking about that, how those fits look like in a typical job for you.

Dusty Stasch (20:11)
I would say…

3070 maybe?

Rishi Srivastava (20:13)
Okay, 30 is… 40 is labor. Okay, and 60 is equipment and materials. Okay.

Dusty Stasch (20:14)
4060, 4060.

Yep.

Rishi Srivastava (20:21)
GIS gives you a map of all active jobs. Can you share an example where that view helped you make a better decision about routing, logistics, or crew assignments?

Dusty Stasch (20:35)
Yeah, so just being able to see what’s next on the agenda. I’ll look at GIS, I’ll look at Microsoft Project, what jobs do we have that we can go to. I get that off a project and then I can then look at it on GIS to see, I try to stay in groups, right? I try not to make.

too many long hauls, aside from what I talked about earlier, sometimes we just need to do that. But try to keep everyone close and stick with everyone in clusters and GIS has just really helped that. I would say it has definitely helped on our mobilization. So we have a full-time fleet of heavy haul trucks and they move a lot of pieces of equipment every day, every week. So the easier I can,

help them, the better, the more profitable it be because sitting equipment isn’t, isn’t making any money, so.

Rishi Srivastava (21:24)
You guys track equipment like maybe some sort of hardware on them to track where they are or how much they’re used.

Dusty Stasch (21:32)
Yep, we have HCSS Telematics. We use Telematics on our equipment. that’s what, and that’s a whole different side of our company too, our fleet side. It’s a huge beast of the amount of equipment we have.

Rishi Srivastava (21:46)
The last section here is on leadership, people, and operational discipline. You mentioned your leadership style, calm, steady, and disciplined. How does that translate into fewer mistakes, less rework, and better financial outcomes on jobs?

Dusty Stasch (22:03)
So I always think to myself, if somebody is coming to me with a problem and I’m like, yeah, I agree. We’re in trouble. I don’t think we should even continue on. It’s not going to work. If they’re coming to me with that and I answer with that kind of mentality, then all their hope is gone.

Being the calm and the steady, you know, just, I think people can feel comforted by that. And when they’re, hairs on fire and you can bring a calming presence and just ask questions and, you know, come up with a solution together, people respond really well to that.

So if we’re all on the same page and people aren’t just going 100 miles an hour because they think the world’s coming to an end, obviously that’s less likely for mistakes, less rework.

which comes down to more financially profitable.

having that leadership style where people feel comfortable to come to you with a problem and you’re not going to get, jumped on because you didn’t do something right. Okay, let’s address that something went wrong. Let’s have a conversation about it and how are we going to fix it moving forward to make sure, it doesn’t happen again. So I

very big into that as far as the leadership style.

Rishi Srivastava (23:19)
Yeah, let’s say I am one of your employees and my job’s not going well, there’s some big trouble, right? And I thought about it for a long time and I care. And I’m really worried, I’m scared too. Maybe I’m not seeing all the possibilities, maybe I’m missing that one out of 100 possibility that you can see.

Dusty Stasch (23:36)
Yeah,

no, that’s a good point too. I get a handful of phone calls where, you know, they’re out there living it, right? So they’re just seeing what they’re seeing. And then I can bring up a fresh idea. Like, I didn’t even think about it like that. and then they, I love helping people when it comes to problems. That’s one of my…

Rishi Srivastava (23:56)
Mm-hmm.

Dusty Stasch (23:58)
One of my favorite things to do is to be able to help people when they have a problem. So when I get those phone calls and I can actually help someone, that’s what makes me happy.

Rishi Srivastava (24:08)
Yeah.

The last question here is on, As you moved from Foreman to PM? Was there a moment where it just clicked and changed how you operated?

Dusty Stasch (24:20)
Yeah, I would say, when I was a foreman, I was pretty rammy. We worked a lot of hours. We worked a lot of days. We worked on a lot of conditions. Had really good crews throughout the years that accepted how I went about things. I also tried to get their buy-in on it, but it wasn’t sustainable doing that.

for anyone in my eyes. So I would say kind of taking that step back from just go, go, go, go, go to more, okay, let’s look at a bigger picture. Let’s weigh out our variables. Let’s figure out, should we be doing this? Should we not be doing this? I would say probably when I became

operations manager there is when it clicked like, okay, there’s a lot of different worlds here. It’s not just the operations out in the field. So we need to take a step back, think about everything. And I would say probably my first month end meeting is when it all

kind of came together. So that was a handful of years ago. when I experienced that, you know, when you have VPs and controllers and directors and whatnot, and you’re going over the spreadsheet there and you see, ooh, made the wrong decision there, made the right decision here.

that so I would say probably my first couple of month-end meetings is when it clicked. I’m not just playing around anymore, I’m in the big leagues you could say.

Rishi Srivastava (25:39)
they probably.

So.

You’re

playing with the big boys in the big league. You know, sometimes it’s very easy to second guess your decision when you have the benefit of hindsight. hindsight is always 20-20.

Dusty Stasch (25:51)
Right, right.

Yes,

yes it is. yeah, it’s always, the gosh, I should have done it like this and we would have been done this, you know, differently. So.

Rishi Srivastava (26:10)
Yeah. Dusty Thank you so much for coming on to the show. I had a great conversation with you.

Dusty Stasch (26:15)
Yeah, no, I appreciate it, Rishi. Take care.

Rishi Srivastava (26:17)
Thank you.