Fresh out of college with a construction management degree, Bryce walked onto job sites telling field crews how to build based on what the book said.

Fast forward to 2022 when he became a general manager and led his company to their largest financial loss ever at $1.5 million, forcing him to lay off 66 people.

Instead of quitting, Bryce stood in front of the 35 remaining employees, wrote "I'm sorry" on a whiteboard, and owned the failure completely.

We explore how treating people like numbers on a spreadsheet destroys companies, why chasing titles instead of impact sets you up for disaster, and how Bryce turned things around by asking field crews to teach him instead of pretending he knew everything.

He shares his journey through alcohol and nicotine dependence trying to handle stress, the weekend journaling session that saved his career, and why the middleman mindset matters more than any title on your business card.

1. Why requesting to work with the toughest superintendents who didn't respect him became the turning point for earning trust.
2. How treating a 100-person company like a spreadsheet with budgets and assets instead of people led to catastrophic financial loss.
3. The moment where owning complete failure in front of his team changed everything.
4. How to retain Gen Z talent by showing them the impact they're making instead of dangling titles and pay as the only rewards.
5. How building personal power through relationships beats title power every time, especially when you're the middleman holding culture together.

Subscribe to Blue Collar BS for practical advice on running your business better. Leading through failure requires more vulnerability than most people are willing to show - are you ready to own it?

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Steve Doyle:

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Brad Herda:

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Too many trades and construction business owners ignore their accounting until tax season hits, then spend days manually entering receipts from shoeboxes instead of using technology that does it automatically.

We tackle the business operations side that gets pushed aside when you're busy doing the work that actually gets you paid.

Steve reveals his manual QuickBooks process while Brad walks through why people fail to pay themselves properly, the three different rates you should be charging as owner-operator-CEO, and how to stop leaving money on the table with bad estimating.

We explore tactics for building overhead into quotes without overcomplicating the math, why technology like receipt scanning apps can save days of work, and how understanding your customer's busy season changes your sales follow-up game completely.

1. Why paying yourself only after everything else is taken care of means you're getting a fraction of what you're worth instead of paying yourself first.
2. How to calculate what you actually need to charge by separating your field labor hours from your CEO hours from your ownership compensation
3. Why most jobs are quoted wrong because overhead and profitability aren't properly estimated into the numbers.
4. The garage door company example where tactical empathy in follow-up messaging closed the deal after understanding their busy season.
5. Why seven touches before giving up beats three attempts, but only if you change your approach when the message isn't landing.

Subscribe to Blue Collar BS for practical advice on running your business better. If you're still using shoeboxes and spreadsheets to track your money, this episode is for you.

Get in touch with us:

Check out the Blue Collar BS website.

Steve Doyle:

Website

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Email

Brad Herda:

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Email

Starting with a shop vac in a Ford Ranger, DT built a grease trap company that now runs 14 trucks across Washington State with his sights set on going national before turning 40.

He's built a team that runs the business smoothly when he's not there, and employees talk up the company so much they're recruiting people from completely different industries.

We explore how unconventional leadership creates this level of ownership, why creative benefits matter when you can't compete with corporate packages, and what happens when you give people freedom to figure things out instead of controlling every process.

1. Why 13 years of trial and error taught DT that internal communication was the missing piece until hiring a CFO.
2. When employees ask for more responsibility, letting them take it and own it completely creates better results than telling them exactly how to do it.
3. Monthly company shutdowns for yard day and meals show employees you value spending time with them beyond just getting work done.
4. How DT's willingness to admit he screwed up 100 times makes employees want to help build the company instead of just collect paychecks.
5. Why mistakes are inevitable but what you do about them determines whether your team fears failure or learns from it.

Make sure to subscribe to the Blue Collar BS podcast where we talk about the real gaps between generations in blue collar work and what it takes to lead across different age groups in today's trades.

Get in touch with DT:

Website

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Get in touch with us:

Check out the Blue Collar BS website.

Steve Doyle:

Website

LinkedIn

Email

Brad Herda:

Website

LinkedIn

Email