From Concrete Laborer to Inspector: Jobsite Reality, Risk & Costly Mistakes | Julian Finelli

Rishi Srivastava (00:41)
Today our guest is Julian Finelli. Julian, welcome.

Julian (00:44)
thanks for having me.

Rishi Srivastava (00:45)
The first section is here on your career path and industry entry. You didn’t start in construction. What pulled you onto a concrete job site at 29? And what shocked you most on day one?

Julian (00:58)
⁓ well, I have a useless college degree. And, ⁓ in addition to that, I had a few personal instances and catastrophes that led me to living in Western North Carolina with family. I needed some work and it was a tight time around here. And the only place that was hiring full time was, this commercial concrete firm where, where a friend I’d made worked and

So I started there and I had no idea what I was getting into. What shocked me most was the pace of the work. Because I had done farming previously and I had thought, that’s the hardest work there is. I quickly found out how wrong I was. That and how many dangers are ever present on a job site that really kind of become background.

which isn’t a good thing once you’ve been on one enough. Every job site is a hazardous place that I’ve ever been on.

Rishi Srivastava (01:50)
How did moving from political science and preservation work into concrete labor change how you think about work and value?

Julian (01:59)
so when I was doing land trust work, which was rural preservation, it was about what could be preserved. I was focused on how I could make conservation come across as necessary whenever I was talking about it, either with, someone who was going to prospectively ease their land or somebody who had, especially somebody who had bought ease land and wasn’t, ⁓ wasn’t particularly happy that, there was a

conservation easement in perpetuity on it. And also how my work could increase efficiency so that everyone, because I was on the stewardship side, which was basically looking after land that had already gone into conservation easement. so doing everything I could there between site visits and filing paperwork and everything else, reviewing the legal documents.

to try and give space for more land to be preserved by the people who wouldn’t have to take up any of my slack or that if I could cover something they were doing. Then I felt like was selling my soul getting into construction because I now work on projects that I would have actively tried to prevent from existing before.

And when I started construction, was about first self-preservation, just keeping the job because a lot of people get hired and a lot of people get fired. From an environmental standpoint, which I’ve always had in my mind and even in industry-like construction, I still kept, I tried to reduce material use, be efficient, not just for whoever I was working for or for the job itself, but also for the ecological cost of it.

⁓ But the focus primarily became what I could do to ensure things were done correctly and safely, which meant a lot of. ⁓

doing my best to learn from other people and to keep aware of what was going on around me.

Rishi Srivastava (03:42)
Yeah, construction is a tough business.

What did your earliest, toughest construction job teach you that still shapes you how you operate today?

Julian (03:51)
That’s one of those hierarchies that has recency bias. It’s whatever. I don’t know how many people have said this is the worst job site I’ve ever been on, you know, about every job they’ve been on. But the first place I worked at, which I won’t name, I’m grateful that they gave me a job and

Bad jobs will also give you lot more life lessons than good jobs will sometimes. there was a lot of, oftentimes there was a lack of planning. Lack of planning leads to you rushing, which leads to errors that can only be solved slowly. we used to say about ourselves, work so nice we do it twice. And.

having to do something over again, then they’ll really be a rush if somebody hasn’t learned their lesson and oftentimes they don’t. And it creates a degradation of the final product. And oftentimes people will get hurt or do things that they shouldn’t be doing that will lead to a lack of integrity later. So I once saw a patch on somebody’s vest on a large job site.

that said slow equals smooth, smooth equals fast.

Rishi Srivastava (04:50)
Mm-hmm.

I like that.

Job site reality versus drawings. You described blueprints that look like Da Vinci sketches and field execution that feels like stick figures. Where does that gap create the most risk?

Julian (05:05)
I would say it creates a lot of risk. Risk can be a broad number of things. There can be physical risks and I’d say a lot of that is caused by assumptions. Assumptions always increase risk and I’d say there are assumptions that are made by engineers and architects about feasibility of a project or a part of a project and so often those people have

not stepped on a job site. I worked on a bridge project that had to be redesigned four times because they used a cookie cutter bridge design and they hadn’t actually visited the site and there were things such as a two foot water main where they wanted to put the bridge which would have been nice to know about.

the year and there’s assumptions that happen in the field to assumptions that the way it has always been done will work now the fallacy of the competent past.

Rishi Srivastava (05:53)
Mm-hmm.

Julian (05:53)
and that whatever way somebody prefers to do it.

is also going to be the best way and that creates risks of missing things on the plans. creates risks of missing out on opportunities to save money. It creates the risk of you having to do something over again. If there was anything that I would hope for and I know it’ll never happen, it would be a unified drawing set where

the architects and the engineers and all the civil people get locked in a room and they come up with one set of drawings that where all the measurements are the same on all of them for because sometimes the floor will be different depending on whether it’s if you look at the architectural drawings or the structural drawings and then you have to make that call in the field sometimes because you can’t get a hold of anybody or someone says figure it out and

Rishi Srivastava (06:43)
Wow. ⁓

Julian (06:44)
And we’re deciding

how big the building is, and we’re usually just splitting the difference. then the domino effect of that on all the other trades. And then they’re like, those concrete guys, they don’t know how to measure anything. Well, we have to look at both sets of plans. So that that would be my construction.

Rishi Srivastava (07:02)
Nice

That’s tough. Yeah.

How much improvisation actually goes into building something that the public assumes is perfectly engineered?

Julian (07:12)
It’s only perfectly engineered on the drawings. I’d say there’s more improvisation than I can even know about or imagine because I’ll see people do things but I’m not there for every instance of improvisation for every trade. A lot of times those improvisations are from you know, at the behest of or the directive of the general contractor superintendent because

they’re trying to get things done too with all those different sets of plans or whatever circumstances may arise. An inattentive GC will allow these issues to remain after the keys are turned over and then people start delaying to get beyond that one year warranty.

There’s a guy who became president before he was president, was commander of armed forces in Europe during World War II, Dwight Eisenhower. And he talked about this for military operations, but I apply it to construction and a lot of life. says, plans are useless. Planning is essential.

Rishi Srivastava (08:07)
Mmm. I love that. know, even if your plan’s wrong, yeah.

Julian (08:09)
Yeah, because there things. Yeah, you’ve

gone through enough planning where you can figure you might be able to figure something out. And things come up. I can’t name a single project of any kind I’ve been on from a utility pad to a soft drink warehouse where there was not improvisation and deviation from what was planned.

Rishi Srivastava (08:18)
Mm-hmm.

What’s something about construction that outsiders fundamentally don’t understand until they’ve lived it?

Julian (08:38)
How many in small indignities there are on the job site, just the nature of working outside in the real world. I’d say for anybody who likes to criticize somebody when they see them, especially like road work, when you see someone on the side of the road doing nothing, there’s often a reason for that. Sometimes people are having a meeting. Sometimes people are at lunch. Sometimes people are at the water cooler, but all that’s on display. I remember

crossing the road to a bridge from where we had a bunch of materials listed and some car drove by and screamed, get to work at me. And like, I wouldn’t come to you during your off to the water cooler and do that. You just happened to see me because you’re driving. The cold, the wind, hot days where it rains for 20 minutes and it’s steaming on you. Just.

the effect on your skin. It’s the little things that add up that you can only really know about. Because everyone wants to go out, you know, they’ll do Habitat for Humanity for a day and feel like there’s some kind of construction hero.

It’s when it’s like five in the morning or earlier and you’re getting up to go pour concrete and you know you’re not going to get lunch that day and the anticipation of things like that. Those kind of small indignities that you’ve I had no appreciation before I did the work.

Rishi Srivastava (09:45)
Yeah, you know, those indignities, they’re easily seen by people for construction, like for office people, you’re not seeing them.

Field knowledge and authority. You work with people who may not write clean emails, but understand concrete better than anyone. How do you learn to differ to field wisdom?

Julian (10:08)
⁓

As somebody who was raised as a quote unquote intelligent person and education was very valued in my house growing up and then to be told I’m stupid by somebody who misspells a bunch of things in text or had to ask me how to spell a four letter word, there’s a little bit of a…

Jadenness and frustration there, but I had to get over myself. I think we’ve been conditioned to value screens over the physical world and especially coming up diplomas over trades.

There were no political scientists jobs out there for me ever, even though I was told there would be because if I went to college, it would be a panacea. I think a lot of people, especially in this country, in my age group were raised that way. I think people associate book knowledge with competence and that’s definitely not true. We both know unintelligent people with master’s degrees or higher. Some of the smartest guys I’ve met can

They can’t write an email, but they can look at a set of plans or not even have a set of plans and figure out how to fix something on the fly in their head, doing the math, seeing it play out and.

me telling somebody was just like, that’s never going to work because of this. And

I was wrong a lot and they knew what they were doing. the only exception to that is the kind of arrogance that occurs in all fields where somebody will tell you, how long I’ve been doing this for, which is a way of saying that, I have a lot of experience, even if I don’t know what I’m talking about. So you should shut up.

I remember a particular experience there with this guy who had been doing bridge work since the 90s and he was just a Just terrible at tying wire and I told him you should do it like this. You know how long I’ve been doing that so I’m

I don’t like to do this, but I had to show him up and then Foreman was right there. was just like, it was taking them like 20 seconds to tie and I did it in three and they looked, Foreman looked at me and they looked at him and I was like, Remember that later when I screw up.

Rishi Srivastava (11:58)
Hahaha!

What’s been the most humbling moment where experience completely outweighed education?

Julian (12:04)
Would you say humbling for me, for someone else or both?

Rishi Srivastava (12:07)
I Yeah.

Julian (12:08)
So for me, it was being hurried to get these forms fastened. Then there are these large aluminum forms that we would use to prep large walls. And you have to be both fast and do it exactly 100 % correct. And I knew that because I’d watched somebody make an error where somebody not doing something that

would have taken 15 seconds costs three days of grinding and took that wall for a profit to a huge loss with just missing a pin. And that’s exactly what I did. And it was on a small wall, but I had to sit there and hear about it and watch this concrete bow out on this wall. And then it basically becomes an emergency and a lot of improvisation of

driving equipment into the wall very gently to get it to set back while trying to jam a pin in something that with concrete pressure behind it that wants nothing more than to burst apart. And there wasn’t much I could do. So I just kind of had to sit there watching the fruit of my ill labor cause a lot of problems for people and just getting a lot of side eye for my super.

I watched this happen to somebody else on that same bridge that was redesigned four times. When the engineers redesigned the bridge, they never accounted for how to support some of these beams next to these baskets, which were going to be support structures without going into too much detail.

the engineer was on site and he was telling the foreman, it’s like, don’t get to tell me I’m wrong. And it turned out he was wrong.

Rishi Srivastava (13:32)
Mm-hmm.

Julian (13:33)
We were able to solve it with a pretty simple, you put a giant slab of concrete on there and was it with with some metal sticky out of it and we’re able to screw into that. But until we figure that out, it was a big emergency from somebody who swore they couldn’t be wrong. And that’s happened to everybody.

Arrogance can cause delays because that guy admitted his mistake instead of trying to make everything work. You could have been a day ahead.

Rishi Srivastava (13:55)
How do you earn credibility on a job site when you are newer or when your role makes you unpopular?

Julian (14:02)
When you’re newer, I’d say when somebody tells you something that you think you already know, say, OK, and go do it the way they said instead of saying, I know, because it’s really easy to assume that you’ve got a handle on it and then you don’t. It’s happened to me a number of times. That and being willing to do the dirty work and especially when you’re new, that is what you’re going to get.

dealt with. There was a plumber on this job site I was on for a long time who thought I was there only to shovel because that’s all he saw me do. And they said, oh, they always give you the dirty work. I’m like, until there’s somebody newer who shows up, it’s I guess it’s going to be me. And it makes you appreciate the machines that do the work for you once you’ve done it by hand. I’d say for somebody who’s going to be unpopular on a site such as an inspector potentially or a safety guy.

I think it’s important to be willing to be unpopular. People who go out of their way to make friends will inevitably miss something that they should have been paying attention to. Having the humility to not think that you know everything while standing your ground. It’s very easy to… Just like referees are probably susceptible to boos and sports, you’re susceptible to wanting to be liked and wanting to please somebody.

I’ve had somebody, you know, cuss me out all over the job site and then somewhere else where I had to meet him later. He’s like, I was like, sorry, we got into it earlier. Said, ah, well, you’re doing your job. If you weren’t doing your job, you would have just told me what I wanted.

And I’d say for both roles, not knowing everything. Because people who know everything, they can’t be taught and they make the most mistakes.

Rishi Srivastava (15:43)
love how you split the new versus being unpopular. Now the next section is on third-party inspections and accountability. For listeners unfamiliar with it, what exactly is third-party inspection and why has it become unavoidable in modern construction?

Julian (16:02)
A lot of the reason it’s become unavoidable is codified into North Carolina law and a lot of most other states that you have to have a third party inspector. And that is the legacy of people cutting corners and getting away with stuff or getting in tight with inspectors or, you know, all sorts of not necessarily planned collusion, but collusion nonetheless, where everybody decides it’s okay when it’s not. And

Yeah, that happened once. You know, as an isolated incident, that’s one thing. If you have it happen multiple times, you have a building collapse. And that’s happened plenty of times this century in the special inspections era. But since the 1980s, I can’t specify here in North Carolina, there have been specifications for special inspections. And if your project is of a certain significance or size, then

will be under their purview.

So there’s no escape.

Rishi Srivastava (16:52)
Who actually pays for inspections and how does that financial relationship shape pressure and expectations?

Julian (16:59)
Usually, I’d say more than 90 % of the time, it’s the owner of the project who hires us.

Usually they want things to be done right, but sometimes the owner has a representative there. There’s a large retail conglomerate that I won’t mention that I was on a job site for where they were both critical of how many hours I was spending there and also were increasing the number of things they wanted me to take a look at. And so they’re trying to have their cake and eat it too.

⁓ Sometimes you get pressure to let things go when somebody has been dealing with the same problem for a long time. This happens especially on soil compaction on poor soil sites when somebody goes and buys cheap land and then starts excavating and discovers why it was cheap. you know, people say, ⁓ you know, trying to use their knowledge or

the illusion of knowledge about a subject that you might not have to say why this should be okay or we should let it go. This happens all the time when there’s junk soil and so we’ll say, but you have this many a feet of fill on top of it that will get there with this. I’m not there to… If we were just going to assume everything’s okay, I wouldn’t be here.

And so even the people who are paying for all the work sometimes want it to just want you to let things go.

Rishi Srivastava (18:16)
Yeah, that definitely makes sense.

Julian (18:17)
I

Usually it’s contractors who want you to cut a corner and then the owner is the one who has the concern about the, you know.

the integrity of it.

Rishi Srivastava (18:26)
Have you been ever forced to cut corners?

Like as an inspector, let people cut corners.

Julian (18:33)
Sometimes you have to and it’s not about let necessarily because I don’t really have the power to stop anything

It’s more I let somebody know that this is going to be out of spec and it’s at their risk. And usually I’ll write it up. If it’s something that is just, you know, some people will get really pedantic. You need 98 % compaction. I’m like, well, I’m sorry, this is 97.49 and that rounds, that doesn’t round up. Where if it was one 50th more of a percentile, the project manager would let it go.

things like that. Try not to do that. Sometimes these specs are a little excessive for what is really going on. Nobody needs 98 % compaction for where they’re going to put, you know, grass. But

Everyone likes to feel like they’re doing more with a higher standard.

Rishi Srivastava (19:19)
You’ve seen situations where inspectors are pressured to look the other way. How do you handle those moments in real time?

Julian (19:26)
That can be difficult because, as I said earlier, everybody wants to be liked. But being the good guy will ultimately make you a bad employee.

You know, a of times people will ⁓

challenge your sense of expertise. They’ll challenge, your understanding of processes. You basically just have to have a backbone and decide that you’re not going to get run over and that if somebody has a disagreement, then they’re going to have to take it to a higher authority.

Rishi Srivastava (19:53)
Yeah. The last section here, Julian, is on money, risk, and consequences. Can you share an example where a small observation or sketch had massive financial implications?

Julian (20:05)
Yeah, and I didn’t know it was gonna happen ahead of time. I was on, there was a large project going on with a lot of very poor soils for that same retail conglomerate. And what they wanted to do was place ⁓ caustic lime or quick lime on the soil to kind of cook all the moisture out of it, because there were several underground rivers and a lot of…

wet clay to make it feasible to build on and put additional lifts on. And so they asked me to draw a sketch of this maybe two acre area where I thought it was the worst. And I’m a guy standing there in the field and I’m just kind of doing my best. like, it’s about here. It’s about here when I’m drawing it out. And the next day I go to this meeting where

grader is and the general contractor is and the liaison for the builder and the corporation is there and all these other people who are concerned with it and it’s my sketch on the table and they’re basing their lime purchase based on this this sketch I’m like boy I would have been a little more accurate with that because this is this is a seven-figure purchase you know me me jerking my finger a little bit

Rishi Srivastava (21:14)
Wow.

Julian (21:15)
drawing this angle is a several hundred thousand dollar difference because they’re talking about how many millions of pounds of lime they’re going to put down. And that was a lesson that day of because it’s easy to just go through a sketch and decide, yeah, this is close enough. I need to be a lot more careful with this. Now it was all fine in the end because it turned out that

the entire area and beyond it needed a lime. But that could have really, if I had overshot it, that could have led to some nasty phone calls.

Rishi Srivastava (21:46)
How often do on-the-fly decisions on site quietly cost or save hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Julian (21:53)
I’d say a lot of times failing something will prevent a domino effect. For example, there was somebody who, apropos of nothing, some labor on a concrete crew decided that they wanted to rake easier. And so they wanted to 50 gallons of water per truck, which if you don’t know anything about concrete, and even if you don’t, is a horrible idea, which will just turn it into gray water.

And I had asked somebody about that and they said, oh, it’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. I’m like, well, I’m testing it and it won’t be and it’s not. And they got about 90 yards in before the superintendent figured that out and then asked who told to add all that water to the truck. everyone was silent.

And so had that been prevented earlier and had there been more attentiveness, they could have saved having to redo that entire slab.

Sometimes quick decisions to hurry forward with something will cost a lot of money catching things before They go wrong. I’ve seen somebody send back the wrong truck They got the wrong mix delivered and if they had applied it they would have had to take it all out But they were paying attention they ride the ticket they realized they had a non air mix when they needed air and So the concrete company ate it instead of the contractor which

If you had to take out all that would have been at least five figures.

Sometimes people being overly rigid in inspection from my end will kind of miss the spirit of the inspection. When I was on the other side of this, somebody in my position came up to me in the super and said, hey, your rebar failed because we had ran out of one size of bar. So we used a size bigger, which for what the engineer would think.

and the architect would think would be fine. You’ve got more steel in it. And somebody wanted to get technical said, well, this deviates from the plan so it fails. And so I hate this phrase, but using common sense, ⁓ paying attention to the bigger picture

can also help save or help save or help somebody spend more money from the inspection standpoint as well. Because ultimately we had to go and replace all that bar the next day and not do anything else in it. There’s the domino effect on the rest of your job. Everything’s interconnected.

Rishi Srivastava (24:14)
The last question here is, if owners and finance leaders truly understood one thing about job site inspections and materials testing, what should it be?

Julian (24:25)
Allowing the proper time and latitude for proper material testing for it to be accurate for it to be done correctly Will lead to proper material analysis and will ultimately lead to a more sound project with fewer surprises it’s when somebody skips inspections which happens all the time or Decides that you know calls us late after the most important part has happened

kind of like that adding all those gallons of water to the concrete incident. It ends up causing a lot of issues later down the road.

And if you do things soundly, you can have it verified by an engineering firm. It will ultimately lead to better reputation, better project, better end product for whoever the owner is.

Rishi Srivastava (25:06)
Yeah. I love your anecdotes and energy, Thank you for taking this time, Julian.

Julian (25:13)
No, happy to do it.