hello my name is Gary Shotton and we’re here as a part of Inspiring Better Business and today we’re going to talk about safety first we’re going to talk about it from a little bit of a personal side but also in more detail about your company and you might think well I don’t have a many chances to have a safe safety problem or something go wrong but I think you could be wrong about this so I don’t know of a single company that I could think of that shouldn’t have a safety department and shouldn’t have some training acknowledgement that safety is important now I’m sitting here in my machine shop and I do these recordings when it’s quiet did them to begin with when I had some people in the background but they made too much noise and it would affect the sound and so there’s nobody working behind me because I’m doing this when they’re not in this building but I have 55 plus employees in my company and I don’t want anybody get hurt I don’t want it for my benefit but mostly for their benefit there’s no insurance there’s no there’s no healing process there’s nothing nothing we can do that’s going to be as good as never having the accident never having the problem you know when your owner of a company and or leading a company your employees your workers are going to know whether you really put people first and I think safety is one of those things that obviously in my opinion gives this strong indication when you as the owner slow be become soft or become slack or or not have their best interest at mind and sometimes you got to kind of put on your hard approach to this to be sure even your workers don’t develop bad habits that will be unsafe and we we just think that’s very important here now people first you’ll know it they’ll know it and over time it will pay off good dividends now almost every business will have some safety issues obviously if you have any vehicles on the road if you’re driving anywhere have anybody on a sales driving you for you representing as soon as you move your property in regards to business you’re a safety hazard because our highways are full of people that are not driving safely and you’re set to you safety record there is going to count so there’s where almost all of us are faced we have some industries like this when we have a lot of safety issues and concerns and we were just this morning the crews were putting up a new hoist beam where the pen though the pivot pin had worn down it wasn’t going to fall but it appeared that it was becoming to the point that it was unsafe and when they got into it wasn’t nearly as bad as they thought but we put in a brand new pen and that brand new hinge making sure these hoists that are lifting heavy articles heavy heavy devices heavy pieces of metal like you see behind us if it’s bigger than a man that can pick it up may be bigger than 50 pounds we’re supposed to pick up and use the hoist we instruct our workers never to pick up something that’s too heavy either use the hoist which we always have available or get somebody else to help you that’s a safety concern and when we come down and kind of hard with somebody well they sometimes push back I don’t care we’re going to have a safe company safety first every time we have a meeting every time we have a public meeting we talk about safety something and we believe it open for people to bring up safe issues if you’re in the food industry man I know of a particular restaurant chain that they had some Salmonella type poisoning in their food boy that’ll just wreck that’ll wreck your reputation that’ll sure wreck your sails there’s a company that’s within two miles of here that happen to be an ice cream company and they had some imperfections who showed up and it was put in it and granted it wasn’t that serious but it was serious they put millions and millions of dollars worth of ice cream supervised by the Health Department they a great big pit and put this ice cream that normally would have been sold for millions of dollars into a big landfill safety first safety first safety first I cannot think again of our Lea any business that doesn’t have some safety issues now why would that benefit me well first of all it’s people first they’re going to be more likely to work hard for you more likely to go the extra mile for you more likely to be bringing you ideas be be cost conscious be proactive to help you if they know that you are first interested in them it’s not how much you know but how much you you care is a lot of times the difference between whether you convey that to your workers or not you can’t fake that you cannot fake that we have what we call workman’s compensation insurance that covers us all of our workers everyone’s required by law if someone’s hurt while working at my company we have insurance that covers that and that insurance has a premium and based on the risk of your how difficult your your your type of business is there’s a classification for everything from the possibility of a secretary I guess falling out of their chair while they’re typing that’s not very likely so their insurance premium rate is quite much lower than our machinist who are standing for in front of a very powerful big machine well there’s some standard prices for every machine shop and we’re allowed a modifier that it means a reduction if we maintain a safe history not just talk about it but now we have three four five years of very good at us safety history with very little claims and we actually pay 25% less than the average machine shop is called a modifier because we have safe history and it’s better for me to get insurance people want me we have a a the the our customers our customers want to know whether we’re safe they walk in this is my customers they want to know that we’re maintaining a safe operations here well we have a drug and alcohol policy that’s kind of unpopular in some places even in my industry I’ve been told that maybe that’s being a little too hard no we randomly test our employees not everyone it’s a random process and if somebody is on the property when they make that test we tell that from a urine sample it’s not done by us it’s done by a third party and then we have a road to recovery for those that could possibly have been at work with something that impairs their thought you see if your thought is impaired then you’re likely to make a bad choice that would hurt you we had a gentleman that showed us didn’t have in our company how simple it was that his finger was cut off well that’s that’s minor some people could be sucked into machine and killed at our mission at our company we have forklift training we work at training we have we have ways of through our training videos much like this that we make sure people are trained properly could we have a mistake sure could we have it someone hurt sure but we’re gonna do everything possible to be sure that that doesn’t happen I’ve told many of our workers on on video I am NOT going to make a phone call to their loved ones and tell them that they got killed or seriously injured because I don’t want it to happen I want my workers lives to be protected well I hope you enjoyed this listen then stay tuned and we thank you for being a part of inspiring better business