OnAire Episode 7 | Real-World Lessons in Safety Culture and Change
How do you turn safety from a checklist into a shared mindset?
In this episode of OnAire, we sit down with the Environmental Health and Safety Manager of a leading building materials distributor that specializes in doors and millwork. He shares how he helped lead a cultural shift across multiple locations by starting with people, not policies.
He did not force compliance. He built relationships first. From working the production floor to riding along with delivery drivers, this safety leader focused on trust and understanding before introducing change. His approach proves that real progress in safety comes from listening and aligning, not just checking boxes.
If you are a safety professional, plant leader, or operations manager trying to create lasting change, this episode gives you the real playbook.
<In this episode, you’ll learn
- Why safety initiatives often fail and how to gain real buy-in
- What to focus on in your first 30 days as a new safety leader
- How to connect safety goals to operational priorities
- How they measured success and what results looked like 30-, 60-, and 90-days post-install
- The mindset shift that made safety part of the company culture
- A simple way to link safety to quality, efficiency, and trust
“If we are going to do something for safety, it has to help quality, efficiency, or the work environment too.”
This episode is not about selling a product. It is about what it takes to lead meaningful change inside a busy, high-demand facility. You will walk away with insights that apply in any industry and any organization.
Episode Transcript:
Hey, we’re back! Welcome to the OnAire Podcast. Thanks for joining us. I’m Jordan.
And I’m Taylor.
And here we are again. Today we are talking to Andy Rice from Reeb. Not Andy Reeb from Rice. We’ve had that debate this week trying to keep it straight. But his name is Andy Rice from Reeb.
Yep. He is an EHS professional. And we learned several things about him. And I even had a little venting session about my inability as a craftsman around my own house.
We had a little therapy session for you there.
Yeah, and he even opened up about some of his struggles, too. What’s interesting is, we did talk a little bit about the haunted house that is McDonald’s playground, or something like that, about how he got into safety, and just comparison and whatnot. But, I do agree, they’ve all been shut down, and they’re all gone.
They’re all gone. And Chick-Fil-A’s are fading, too.
All the play places are. It’s scary.
That’s because kids play on their screens. I’m starting to sound crochety and old. You’ll find out real soon when you start putting those tablets in front of those youngins to babysit themselves. Follow us for more parenting tips and advice here on the OnAire podcast.
That might be OffAire.
Anyway, enough about us and parenting, because that is a whole different podcast but not he one you’re here for. So, without any further ado, welcome to our guest, Andy Rice from Reeb.
All right. Today on the podcast, we’ve got Mr. Andy Rice. Welcome to the podcast, sir.
Thank you, thank you.
All right, so let’s jump right in. Tell us about you, and not just work Andy, but we want to kind of get to know Andy, Andy. What’s Andy like? Where’d Andy come from? How’d you get to this point? And I’m sure there’s probably some career stuff laced in there, but tell us about Andy.
Sure thing. Yeah, so I grew up on a farm just outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania. It’s about an hour north of Philadelphia. My mother’s side of the family, I was in a feed cart feeding cows since I was three or four years old. Got the pictures to prove it. And on my dad’s side of the family, was custom homes construction. So, building houses, so I was either on the job site or on the farm since I was a kid.
While maybe not directly, I think it was what eventually led me here and into the safety world because, between job sites and construction and farms, they can be pretty dangerous places. So this is where I ended up. Going through school, I always thought I’d be an architect. That was where I was headed.
Then I realized that three out of the five-year degree program was dedicated to art classes, which is not me at all. It was all computer-aided design and building floor pans and I can do some rendering, but that was about it. So, looking for a different major, stumbled across Occupational Safety as a degree. And sort of wrote the history from there and fell in love with the operations and safety side of manufacturing. So, I’ve been in global companies to startup companies in my whole career, and I’ve really found a sweet spot here sort of in the middle with Reeb and building the safety program from the ground up.
What were some of the operations and different types of products that you were working on for some of those earlier companies as you kind of grew?
I’ve been in lots of different industries, food and beverage. So basically, the largest beer producer in the world. So, go from making beer to making doors. And after that, I worked for a very large over the road truck manufacturer. So, another global company, largest production site in the globe, about a million and a half square feet under one roof and managing safety in that environment before I came to Reeb.
So, getting into safety, it sounds like you just kind of stumbled into it. Was there anything leading up to or from your childhood? You were talking about being on the farm and your dad being in construction. Was there anything that stood out to you when you got to that point of saying, hey, I’m not taking art class? Was there anything you were like, man, I remember this, and so I went on the occupational safety route?
Yeah, I was any other teenage boy at the time and going through spring orientations for college and I was already accepted to the school and took a tour, sort of had to go through all the different degree programs inside of that college or that school for industrial technology. One of the programs was safety. They gave us a tour of the whole building, and the four labs that were dedicated to occupational safety. One of them looked like somewhere between a haunted house and a McDonald’s play place, and in the description they said that’s how we do confined space rescue training.
So, they can shut off the lights, they can smoke it out, they can change the configuration all around. And so, one of the courses there, basically you get to figure out how to get people out of confined spaces and/or work in them safely. And then across the hall from that was what looked like just a regular chemistry lab. And then during that description, they said, well, that’s our fire lab. So again, as a 17 year old boy at the time going, so there’s two whole semesters of learning how to set things on fire make them explode and then put them out or not make them explode? That was pretty cool. So, that was sort of the draw and the moment I’m like, hmm, I could do that. It was a very small program and there were only two schools accredited at the time in the state of Pennsylvania. And I think I graduated with
15 others in my year. So, very small school, very kind of niche major. But then you look out at the job market and you go, well, there’s a lot of companies that need it and look for it and it’s very transferable. One thing for me that kind of stood out was, in safety, no matter where you are, you’re in every facet of the business. So, I’ve always been a very hands-on person. I think that’s what ties back to the job site and the farm is, just always out there doing it. And from end to end building a house, from end to end raising cattle and livestock and working the fields, you have to see all of it. You have to know how each piece works. And safety was kind of that draw in manufacturing. In every role, I’ve been a part of every department that makes the operation work from procurement and raw materials processing all the way through shipping finished products.
So, when we’re thinking safety, because we’re in like this narrow little wedge of an operation like yours at Reeb, we’re thinking combustible dust, we’re thinking fire and that sort of thing. But talk to us about that whole spectrum of safety and where does your mind go when somebody says, I’m a safety manager, with your experience and where you’ve been in your career? What elements, what process, what does safety mean? I mean, it’s so broad.
Yeah. And you know, I had a college professor that I really, really looked up to at the time. And one of the first quotes I ever heard from that stuck with me for the last 10, 15 years is safety. You know, what you learn in school, the goal is that you can be an inch deep, but a mile wide, right? You got to know a little bit about everything, because as you said, in operations, whatever role, whatever company that I’m working in, you’ve got to know what is safety on processing inbound materials and sometimes that’s combustible dusts, right? In grains and inbound materials, raw materials. Sometimes it’s just dock safety and how to unload a truck safely when you drive a forklift inside of it. Training operators and all the way to what we’re talking about with combustible dust. And, great, we can have dust collection so that it’s not on the floor, but we forget about that dust sitting up in the rafters.
What are the potential negatives of it? So, you have to know a little bit about everything. And the biggest piece, for a safety manager, for myself, is how do you take those things that come up, be ready to respond to whatever happens throughout the day, and go, what are your resources, and be able to apply those in the best ways for the company.
Yeah, that’s a great perspective because I feel like, we even have to think about especially, I mean, you having worked with SonicAire, all the industries that we’re in. I mean, we definitely have a little bit of that. We try to be the dust expert, but definitely, it’s different everywhere, right? We got to know a little bit about grain. We got to know a little bit about doors. We got to know about caskets and all these other crazy things. But that is a great perspective in how you can approach it.
I will say, I’m an operations guy, and you safety folk don’t always get the best kind of reputation with operations fellas. So, I mean, how do you deal with that? Because it’s not always efficient, right? And it’s always expensive. So, how do you deal with that being the safety manager or the EHS manager with Reeb? How do you handle it? Especially, from my understanding, you really built the safety program for them. How do you kind of mitigate those things and get people to buy in? Like, we understand, everybody wants to go home safe. They want to see their loved ones at the end of the day. But how do you propagate that kind of culture? Because, to be honest, we’ve heard great things about how you lead. And so, I just want to know, I want to learn, how do you do that?
Yeah, one of the most important things to me is building relationships from every level of the organization. So, when I first started with Reeb, it was about six to eight weeks where I didn’t touch my computer. I didn’t work in an office. I worked every line. I worked in each department. We have our own drivers that deliver to our customers. I took trips out on the road, delivering our product, meeting customers, what we were talking about before, right? That end to end, you know, where is safety going to come up? But I didn’t introduce myself by title, just by name, learn the people, be able to have that conversation. So, in the end, once I finally did get into this role, and we are starting to build a safety program throughout the organization, and go from just, everybody looking out for themselves and each other to an actual compliance organization where we’re working with regulatory bodies to keep people safe. It allowed for, when we have to go and make a change or, hey, we shouldn’t do that, is to go through and be able to say, hey, John, you remember my face, right? And I know what you have to do. I know how you’re doing it. I was out here doing it with you two weeks ago. So now, when we go to make that change, it’s, I understand a little bit about what you got to get done. I know a lot about what we’ve got to do to be in compliance and make sure that the T’s are crossed, the I’s are dotted. Now let’s work together to make it happen and bring it into practice. And, for me, when we talk corrective actions, if we’re doing something, whatever that might be, if we’re doing something for safety, it’s got to tick some other box, right? It’s got to help quality. It’s got to help efficiency. It’s got to help productivity. It’s got to help make a better workplace somewhere else to get that buy-in. And then the sales pitch is, hey, this is going to help our overall product quality. Hey, this is going to help our overall efficiency. And it’s a compliant way to do it.
There’s so much wisdom in that. Relationship first, and then making sure that you’re helping them through achieving the objectives that you’re going for as well.
Definitely have to be a good sales guy.
A little bit, right? And it’s about being the good sales guy, right? Not the used car salesman that we think about. And that’s why at the core of it, it’s got to be relationships based. And that’s why I’ve loved Reeb, loved building the program. And we really are a people and values-based organization. Safety is one of our core values. It’s the top one. We talk about it in all meetings. And it’s cool for me to see from where we started, seven, eight years ago, to where we are today. And I’ve got vice presidents and directors that have come to me and, hey, I was talking about safety, I gave a safety reminder to this completely non-operational meeting the other day, and somebody had a question. What should we do? What is the right thing to do that way?
So now that conversation, our weekly toolbox talks and reminders and one-pagers that we send out to our teams, we’re getting questions back and they’re related from work to home, all over. And how does this apply outside of work, and how do we tailor those to be effective with the team members and make it make sense.
So, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the video or not of Simon Sinek. He’s this TED Talk guy, and he’s got this thing where he calls it the golden circle. And he draws these three circles, and on the outermost he says it’s the “what.” Everybody knows what they do, and then the good companies know “how” they do it, and then the great companies know “why” they do it. It sounds like you guys have got that figured out. If you can talk about Reeb for just a minute, let’s talk about what you do, how you do it, and then you touched on core values, and let’s get into those core values and that “why” for Reeb.
Absolutely. So, starting with the “what.” What I do: I am the brand safety manager, is my title, right? I know what I do. And I’ve got responsibility for environmental health and safety and security for all of our operating locations. So, seven locations up and down the East Coast all generally doing the same things. And then we’ve got site safety managers that report to me at our largest locations.
What exactly does Reeb do? Because some of the folks listening and watching may not be familiar with Reeb.
Absolutely. So, the simplest way to put it is we take door slabs, so the actual piece that swings, in different styles, different variations from a couple different actual manufacturers of the slab. And we pre-hang that door to the customer specifications. So, if you need custom hinge locations, if you need a custom bore location where your handle set will go, all different heights, cut downs. We’ll make tiny little trapezoid-shaped doors or attic access and crawl spaces. So, any kind of customization to pre-hang a door. And so, that applies to every door in your house except the garage door. Interior, exterior, double doors, all the fancy stuff from complete high-end, sketched on a napkin, to a regular hollow core door into your bedroom.
Yeah, let me tell you, I’ve hung some doors.
I’ve heard your door horror stories.
And let me tell you, I think you guys are doing God’s work as far as making these things easy to hang. I just think I’m not very good with my hands when it comes to this kind of thing. It’s still kind of difficult. Maybe at some point if Reeb were ever to go out of business, it might be my fault. I’ve invented some new way to hang a door. I just feel like at this point, as far as how innovative we’ve been, I just feel like doors should be automatic. Like, I shouldn’t be getting the shims and all this. But let me tell you, a pre-hung door, man, it changes how you’re able to do things. And so, from me to all of Reeb and you especially, thank you. I just want to say thanks. I changed some doors. We just had a baby, and so I had to cover up some stuff and put some doors up. But man, that was more of a headache than I thought I was getting into.
Yeah, and you know, a pre-hung door is great because even harder than hanging them and shimming them, getting them all square and ready to go so they swing right, is getting those hinge pockets in the right location and making every little mortise and sit flush and close nicely and, yeah. So, I can build you a pre-hung door, but hanging it, I’m good.
That’s where the fun starts.
That was kind of the “how” and the “what.” So, can you tell us a little bit more about the “why?” So, here at SonicAire, core values is a big part of our story. I think it’s why we do what we do. And you even mentioned that safety was one of your core values. And the way that you went about describing it is kind of a telltale sign that it’s sticking, and that people are actually believing in what you’re talking about. Because it’s coming up in meetings. Like you have people that are actually engaging with this thing. It’s not just a word on the wall. We talk about that all the time. We have our four core values, and they come up all the time, like almost daily. And so, how has safety become part of Reeb and why is it a core value? Do you have other core values? I love talking about this stuff. So you can give me all the core value stuff you got.
Yeah, that’s super important to me and, you know, Reeb initiation, right? Years and years ago back in the 60s when the owners took over, established those core values, and safety was that number one. Integrity is in there too. Those two things kind of guide my day on a day to day, right? Whether I’m working on a big project or having one small conversation about how we empty a trash can, right? It’s all the same, and they’ve got to translate to everybody inside that organization. You know, there’s a theory: there’s no wrong answer to that question. There’s no stupid question. I go back to my interview with Reeb eight years ago now. Somebody had asked me in that interview: So, you’re coming in and applying for the safety manager position? Who’s your customer as a safety manager? And it seemed obvious to me and apparently wasn’t. But I said, everybody in the building. And he sort of framed his response as, that’s right. If you’re in a management role, if you’ve got folks looking up to you and you’re leading with influence and you’re showing folks the right way, especially in the safety role, the customers are everybody inside the building. And we take care of the folks that are in here. We take care of the guys working next to us throughout the whole organization. Everyone else takes care of the customer. Taking care of the outside customer, the folks buying the doors, the folks hanging them, maybe not so well, but hanging them. We take care of everybody around us. It’s just natural. It just happens that we take care of the folks outside the organization.
Yeah, it’s kind of this, flip things on its head a little bit, the conventional way of thinking about who the customer is. Well, it’s the outside customer, it’s the one paying the bills and that sort of thing. But no, if you take care of the people inside, they’ll take care of what’s outside. And it is absolutely the truth.
Yeah, and safety is at the core of that. And I’ve had that conversation where, if we need to think about, well, we’re just making doors. Right, we’re just making doors. But that’s their safety as well. I mean, when we lock our door going to bed at night, when we lock our door going away on vacation, is it stable? Is it solid? Is it well constructed? And is it, you know, built right that it’s going to keep anything bad out? Are your kids going to stay safe inside of that house?
So, if we take that a step further, and this is OnAire, if I can put this on a platter, we obviously have to talk about dust. So, what was the thought process? How did we get connected, and what was it that you were like, okay, we’ve got a combustible dust problem?
Absolutely. So in the process, we don’t necessarily generate as much dust as the folks manufacturing the door slab, but we receive indoors, we have CNC cutting machines, every workstation has miter saws and table saws and panel saws and all the stuff that makes dust, right? You’re chipping out little pieces, sanding and getting everything prepped.
And we have very large, in all of our locations, centralized dust collection systems, and they work great for getting right on that drill head and pulling the dust out of there. But we’re still seeing dust accumulating in the rafters. Just in my background and staying up to date with OSHA, OSHA has a national emphasis program on combustible dusts and mitigating them specifically in woodworking facilities.
Obviously, for grain industries, there’s others, and plastics industries, there’s some more. But we’re focused in the woodworking industry, that’s our industrial codes that we’re going to be on that list somewhere for enforcement and let’s be ready for that. So, what generated that conversation, it started really with, hey, should we improve our dust collection? Is there ways to get that better that we’re getting 95-98 % of the dust? And the costs to do that, the difference to get there, it was a lot of money for the little tiny bits of improvement. Because you’re talking about the larger particles and putting it on every miter saw, at best you’re going to get 70 or 80 % of that dust, and typically it’s less than that.
Okay, so where do we have more value? And so, naturally, then started looking at high dusting contractors that would come in and do ceiling cleanings. Had a couple of them done just to get us at least to a baseline, see how long this is accumulating, how long does it take to get to a level over an eighth of an inch, a 16th of an inch, a 32nd of an inch, and monitor that. And those are quite pricey. And even worse, they’re interruptive. You have to shut the shop down or do it on off shifts. It interrupts our prep work. So, we run production throughout the day, basically anywhere from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. we’re running production. So, to do that on an off hour, it works, but we’ve got to move everything out of the way and they’ve got to get scissor lifts in and boom lifts in and vacuums and making sure those are intrinsically safe, and all those different tasks because it’s combustible dust, or potentially combustible dust, it adds huge costs and impacts to the business. I had actually done a tour at one of our suppliers that manufactures door slabs in the US and saw some fans up in the ceiling, and kind of asked him, hey, what’s that for? And they said, oh, those are our SonicAire fans. Let me get a little more information on that. And I’d seen SonicAire in a magazine or an article somewhere, mentioned for combustible dust, but never looked too deep. As soon as I saw them, saw the lack of dust up in their ceilings, because I was able to get up on one of the mezzanines and they were kind of pointing it out, I had to look some more into this. So, I had reached out just via the website, got some information. And at the same time, my safety manager down in our North Carolina facility was like, hey, these guys are right up the road from us. You mind if we reach out? I think it could work pretty well for us. So, that was all probably about a year ago at this point, and we’ve got two of your systems working in two of our facilities and two more slated for the next couple of months.
Yeah, that’s awesome. Shout out to whoever that was for the great testimonial as you were on the site. No, that’s a great story. And honestly, it is one that we hear quite often. I mean, that is really what we’re trying to do. Like you guys are good at making pre-hung doors. You can’t make me figure out how to hang it, but you’re good at making pre-hung doors. And we want you to continue to do that because that’s where you make your money. That’s how you keep people safe. That’s how you accomplish your why. And when you have to stop and clean, or pay somebody or do something else, you’re introducing all these other risks, and you’re not doing what you’re good at. And so that’s really what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to keep you doing what you’re good at. So that’s great to hear. And you guys took advantage of one of the full-service installation projects. Can you kind of just talk us through how that went and what that was like and how you got from start to finish working with them?
Yeah, and did you guys ever consider doing it yourselves? Installing the fans and then how’d you make that decision? That sort of thing.
Yeah, just circling back, you say, we can’t make you figure out how to hang it. So, we’ll have to make an OpenDoor podcast and we’ll team up with the OnAire podcast, and we’ll put you guys on hanging a door, and you can show us all the wrong ways to do it. And then our field service technicians will come in and show you how to do it the right way and give it a solid lesson.
I will gladly be the dumb guy to hang a door.
Love it. So yeah, installation for us, obviously we had a quote and loved all of your sales reps along the way offering the different packages, explaining the process. Again, go back to beginning of our conversation with being the sales guy or that that mentality. I loved the authentic genuine conversation with them and getting that set up. Very transparent with, hey, this is what installation costs if we do this much versus a turnkey installation. So, we had those laid out, open choice, whatever makes sense to Reeb and our organization. So yeah, we did end up going with the Platinum installation package, basically turnkey service. Utilized your installers, the commissioning, all that hands on.
So, the decision was really founded in that we could do electrical, we can do mechanical, we’ve got contractors for that in all of our locations that help us out with other projects. But again, go back to interruption to business, right? So, we did night shift installation, most of those contractors are not going to do off shift stuff. And electricians are separate from the mechanical installer. So okay, we’ve got a week for hanging the fans mechanically, getting them all set up and mounted in the right locations. And we’ve got electricians that’ll come through and wire it all up, mount the panel, get everything tied in. And then another week to come back and do the commissioning. And then, what if there’s an oops? What if we have to move a fan seven feet? Which we did have to do in one of our projects. Having one crew, one point of contact, one person to say, stand there all at the same time, as soon as we get it hung up. Is that the right location? Should we move it to that side of the column? And that overnight decision, yep, let’s move it to the other side of the column. Don’t have to call anybody back. Don’t have to run out and get to the supply house in the middle of the night. They had it there. One crew ready to go and make that change for us all within the week of installation. So off shift, really, we had zero interruption to business doing the turnkey installation, which pretty much makes up the cost difference that it would have been to go any less than a turnkey install.
That’s excellent. So then what happened next? Talk to us about the startup process. What was that like for you guys?
Yeah, and I’ll throw a shout out to Emalee if I’m allowed there. She was phenomenal, coordinated the project, our kickoff meeting set up between Darrell and the installers, myself, our corporate maintenance manager, my counterpart in the maintenance side, maintenance leads, supervisors, the site safety managers, the production managers, coordinated all of it.
Going into the first round, I’m going, we’re going to do this in a 30, 40 minute meeting, right? There’s a whole lot of things for us to talk about and a whole lot of unknowns. She’ll probably laugh at me for saying it, but she held our hands very well, guided us through, made it super simple. Yeah, it was pretty cut and dry. So, then the second installation, very simple.
But yeah, everything from, do you have this breaker? What size breaker? What amperage? What locations? Where is that going to be in relation to the panel? Utilities that are in that area. Who’s going to have access? Who do you want to have access? Where do you want disconnects mounted? Everything. You guys had submitted a plan. We worked together to get the layout drawn up of it. And she walked us through every question. And I’m struggling now to think as I talk, if there was anything missed, and I can’t think of anything that we got to go, we should have covered that in the kickoff. So that means we were well prepared.
Yeah, Emalee started as an office manager for us. She came out of the restaurant industry and we quickly saw, we had our own little renovation project going on here at the time, and she managed that well, and we quickly realized she had some gifts and talents even though she could barely pronounce the word conduit at the time, she has found her way into now speccing breaker sizes and panels and things like that.
Oh yeah. And for us, again, like you were saying, this is a core value thing. Our “why,” one of the things that we want to do is develop internally. The people that are behind the camera right now all started in different jobs. We started doing different things. And it’s really about who we are. It’s a great testament to hear that the team is taking care of you. Even our two sales guys who are Pennsylvania natives, cutting straight and dry with you. It’s great to hear that. I think you worked with Andy and Rob. So that’s a great testament to you guys having a successful installation story, because that’s what we’re looking to do. You said it was full turnkey. We want it to be like a white glove service. We don’t want you to have to get up and move around. We want to take good care of you. And when there’s bumps along the way we want to fix them and make them right.
Absolutely. It was a great experience end to end. As it goes, this is a first for us. It’s a new system. It’s not a piece of door making equipment. So, there’s naturally some… What is this all about, right? So there was about a week of, you know… Those fans… Yeah, that’s keeping the dust down, huh?
And you know, after the initial install, we ran them for 24-7 for about a month. Not to speak to results yet, the air just feels clear, right? And we’ve multiple times had comments from customers that come in, and we give tours quite often to our customers, and even their customers coming in, said, man, for a wood shop it’s not very dusty, right? It’s actually pretty clean for a wood shop. In the back of my mind I’m going, this is dirty to me, unacceptable, but okay, thank you. But now, genuinely, the atmosphere just feels cleaner, less dust. And the dust that is there is on the floor, and we can sweep that up and get to it. It’s not up in the rafters hanging out on fans
That’s awesome. That’s great to hear. And we’re proud of that work. And so we’re thankful that you were able to have a great experience, and seeing the changes and the improvements. But I don’t want this to just be some huge SonicAire commercial. We’ve got our own things. But whatever. So as a safety guy, and we’ve talked about dust mitigation and techniques with the SonicAire fans. But let’s zoom out a little bit and talk about dust management in general. We just did a podcast talking about, what are the things that we need to look for to know that there’s a dust problem or whatnot? Can you kind of point to that? You as a safety professional, how do you raise awareness and talk about dust safety? Because a lot of times it’s just like, go clean that or something. But it is a combustible risk. So how do you educate or roll out a program? I know OSHA has got the national emphasis thing. How do you get somebody involved?
If you’re talking to other safety managers, what would you tell them, and how would you guide their process?
That one-to-one conversation for me is sort of the challenge, again, going back to where we started, that safety doesn’t always get along with operations. But you still have to get by, right? The end goal is my job doesn’t exist if the company doesn’t exist. But at the same time, the company doesn’t exist if we’re working out of bounds on safety, if we’re not keeping people safe. And so, the one-on-one conversation in that relationship is, how do I take OSHA, and all of the government jargon, and translate that into great, that’s all good. What do we have to do? What does this look like inside of our shop? What does that look like at Reeb? And take the regulations and what it says about doing dust hazard analyses and getting out there in the shops and boil that down to, yeah, but what does that look like for one individual team member on one production line on a daily or weekly basis? And so, in part of that journey, just before we even started really talking SonicAire, it was, okay, how do we take a layout of our shop that shows all the lines and workstations and those kind of things, and split that into what is a reasonable area for somebody to clean in a 15 minute period? And then how many of those are there? And then how many people will that take?
So, speak operations language. So, say, all right, it’s going to take four labor hours to clean every day. We’ve got X amount of people. This is how long it takes to clean the shop. We can either divide that by four people for an hour or sixteen people for fifteen minutes each, and that starts to make more sense. That’s how you get that translation, go, okay, so to be compliant, to get adequate housekeeping, to keep combustible dust at a reasonable level, to stay out of any classification range, this is what we need to do.
And so we went through that process. We have those assigned. We have folks cleaning and following that routine. And you sit back and even myself as the safety manager, sit back and I go, man, we’re doing great. That’s awesome. And then you look up. Oh, nobody’s working up there. We’ve still got to clean it though. And so that’s where that conversation started is, man, we can do the best job we can on the floor, but if it’s settling up in the rafters, now what? We’ve still got the same hazard, and it’s like we did nothing. So that’s when we started looking at the high dust things, and that’s the conversation around, hey, this SonicAire system, it’s a once and done…there’s an old commercial: set it and forget it. And, you know, we’ll take that once and look at the payback period versus doing cleanings probably every quarter, at least three times a year in each of our facilities, that’s a lot.
Was this ever driven out of concerns from like insurance or a fire marshal or OSHA inspector? Was this purely an initiative on Reeb’s behalf and on your behalf as a safety director?
Yeah, so we had had a conversation with OSHA in one of our areas, one of the regional area directors for OSHA around combustible dusts. And we’ve had our dust studied that the commingled dust that we’re producing are not to an explosible category. So, generally speaking, the dusts that are down on the floor and inside of our dust collectors are not an explosible dust. We’ve had that lab tested. We do it every couple years just to maintain that. But we still want to do the right thing. And where we do have, when we go up into the rafters and we sweep some of those ultra fine dusts off the rafters, that is the dust that is combustible and is explosible. So that’s what we were targeting. And again, that’s where we get to a 32nd of an inch, thickness of a paper clip. How often do we have to clean to keep that level out of the rafters? It would be at least three times a year based on what we’re producing now. And that’s a congregation of fiberglass dusts for exterior fiberglass doors, foam insulation that’s inside of exterior doors, wood dust, particle boards, all those kinds of things. All the internal components to a door get turned into that fine dust, ride the heat waves up, and settle down on any surface that’s up in the ceiling.
That’s right. The hidden dangers.
And if I could just tag onto that, was there anything like, you know, we just had the big standard change with NFPA 660 and you were mentioning your DHA. Was there anything in those two kind of things that also helped point in this direction?
Yeah, I mean, so we have NFPA 664, 660, we’ve had them reviewed, we have copies of them on hand. The biggest place where we look into them and compare them to our standard is around dust collection systems. You had also mentioned, where does insurance play into it? We’ve had that noted in insurance loss inspections before. And they do a couple of our facilities every year. When we told them, hey, we just started talking to SonicAire they said, that’s great. That’s awesome. And, a little aside probably, but still related to your question. When we installed the system in our Rhode Island facility, we had notified the local fire department. And the fire chief had come out and looked at the fan system, checked it all out. And said, that’s awesome. Of all the facilities inside of our zone, and the amount of dust that you generate is, or was, now, one of the most concerning to us. So, the fact that that’s going to be mitigated, keeping combustible dust down out of the ceilings, fighting a fire in our facilities. It’s a bunch of wood, right? And there’s a lot of risk there. It made them nervous as a local fire department. So that’s a big value to us to be able to inspire some confidence in the local responders that, hey, we took one of their scare points away.
Yeah, that’s great. And typically, we have the opposite. A lot of times we’ll get a fire marshal or a local fire department involved. I mean, it’s education. It’s the same hurdle that we get with any customer because, you’re doing what? You’re hanging a fan and it’s going to blow the dust? So, it’s a difficult conversation. But it’s like you said, we’re really creating that air barrier and keeping it out. And you know, you can even feel it when you’re breathing in the shop. It feels different. Something has happened.
Yeah, I mean the SonicAire panel tying in with our fire alarm system was the big one to them. That was the first question they asked is, well, you got a bunch of fans, are they feeding the fire? And once we showed the tie in to our fire alarm panel, that any issues that go on in that panel, the fans kick off. That was when the conversation changed and was all positive.
That’s awesome. Game changer. So did you have any expectations or benchmarks set in your mind to say, or Reeb as an organization to say, hey, this is a successful project. When we get to this point or when we’ve achieved this, we know this is a win and this is successful for us. Can you talk to us about that?
Yeah, and it’s a fairly simple one. It’s a success if we don’t have combustible dust accumulating in high surfaces in the building that we can’t reach. And so, most of our equipment tops out at about eight to maybe 10 feet tall. And so, we kind of established that as our like, if it’s on there, we can reach it, right? We have brooms, have shop vac attachments that’ll go off the top of the machine.
So, if we can keep any accumulating dust below 10 feet, it’s a success. And so, with the two projects we’ve got running now, we’ve seen that. We’ve hit that checkpoint to say, hey, this is working, right? And you shared that feedback, and that’s sort of where we started and wanted to see that for 30 to 45 days with those two projects running, be able to do a test at that point. We’re going to be coming up on doing a 90 day check as well and make sure there’s no more accumulation. But so far, all signs point to, we have zero accumulation after the fans. So, everything under 10 feet we can take care of, but we seem to be hitting that mark.
Excellent. Great to hear. Did you have any internal hurdles to clear, or any obstructions going into these projects to where you had to kind of sell it and convince folks internally?
Sure. You know, safety is one of our core values. But again, operations still makes the money, right? And so a cost avoidance department like myself, I’ve got to do a little more justification because it’s straight-up spend. We’re not making money back. It’s a cost avoidance measure. It’s a compliance measure.
So obviously that’s there, and being able to take some of the high dustings we had done from outside contractors and put together the return on investment. What’s the payback period? How long, how many of those cleanings would we have to do to essentially pay for the SonicAire fan systems? And when that turned out to be basically less than a year, it was sort of the no-brainer and it made sense financially, so then it was just sort of looking at the timing and to say, what’s the right time to pull the trigger on this, get them started, and what’s the right way to go about it? And our North Carolina facility got them first, right down the road from you, so if there was any issues I could go up and put my arm around Rob and bring him down and say, hey, we got this problem, what are we going to do?
And then our Providence facility, since we’ve been looking at and we’ve been talking to OSHA up in that region. Let’s start there as well and see what we can overcome and quiet that conversation. Take those two as a benchmark going into the rest of our facilities.
Yeah, what you talked about there with the ROI. That’s often a hurdle and a hard conversation that I have with a lot of prospective clients is, what are you doing now for compliance? If your current spend on your dust accumulation levels is, well, once a year we get the leaf blower out and we blow it all down, there’s probably not a good ROI calculation on SonicAire from a pure cost standpoint.
But for somebody like Reeb who’s taking safety seriously, where it’s one of your core values, and you’re bound and determined to provide a safe workplace for your employees no matter the cost, and you’re doing it the right way, there’s a huge ROI. It’s almost immediate for something like a SonicAire system.
Yeah, and business interruptions aside, third-party contractors aside, we go, okay, so even if we just blow it down, right? Don’t pay somebody to go up and hand clean because that was one of our stipulations was that it all had to be negative pressure: vacuums, sucking the dust up, wiping the dust down, but not knocking it down. It is the only true combustible dust in the facility at that level, so it’s got to be negative pressure, intrinsically safe equipment. But if we set that aside and just said, go ahead, blow it all down with a leaf blower, knock it all down and we’ll sweep it up. It was, we can do that, but that is shutting down every source of ignition, every source of power, sealing between operational areas and doing that the right way is going to be far more interruptive to the business. And, not to mention, whoever’s in there sweeping up these fine dust, as soon as you touch them it’s a cloud. So, respirators and Tyvek suits and all the all the ways to even do it the wrong way the right way didn’t make sense either.
Yeah, it’s a good way to put that.
That’s a great way to phrase that. So, what would you say, kind of last words here, I guess, what would you say to someone who’s considering a fan system? They’re looking at their options. They know they have a dust problem and know they need to do something about it. What would you say to them?
Really, I think it’s: quantify the problem. Understand exactly where your problem is. What can you do, and what do you need to do? It’s, again, the fancy regulatory jargon of, do your DHAs. Okay. But understand, in real terms in your facility, boots on the ground, what is the problem you’re trying to address? If it’s just clean, if you can’t get team members or equipment to clean up the floor or dust collection equipment, a SonicAire fan system isn’t really going to help a whole lot. You’re just going to get more dust on the floor than up in the ceiling, which is probably going to extrapolate the problem, make it worse. So go attack those, go take those on first, and then start talking to SonicAire.
And at that point, once you’ve got some adequate housekeeping measures to be able to address the dust, and you’ve got the buy-in from the team, the SonicAire fan system is going to make the most sense. I’m always for hands-on getting it myself, seeing it myself. It’s probably some kind of therapy problem for me to go work out. But then I’m going to be saying, come see ours, take a tour, see what it looks like, and what would that look like in your facility? Is the fan going to be noisy? Is it a quiet environment? Is it a clean room? Are you in a Class I or Class II Div 1, Class II Div 2 location? You’re going to have some different hazards to work out, but come see ours. What would that look like in your facility? And do that that comparison, because that’s sort of what makes the most sense to me. I’ve got to see it to fully understand or comprehend.
So yeah, understand the problem, understand where you’re at, what you can control. And once you get to that point where you’ve got practices and procedures, kind of in the routine, and you’re looking at, all right, now how do we put the stamp on and hit 100 % complete? That’s when you get to SonicAire. That’s that last 10, 20 % to get to, hey, we’re comfortable with combustible dusts in our facility. You guys got us to the finish line there. We can only get so far on our own.
That’s awesome. And honestly, just a true testament to what the process is. With everything, I look at Lean Six Sigma stuff, and you’re looking at it from the safety perspective. The first step is, you have to define what the issue is. And we have customers come to us all the time, and they’re like, hey, man, I’ve got this dust problem. We’re like, do you have a collection system? Are you getting the process stuff? No, well, let’s probably start there, and then we’ll talk. OK?
Because we can’t solve all the problems. And like you’re saying, we’re there to get rid of that fugitive dust. And so, getting you across that finish line, I think that’s a great kind of picture of how we’re helping our customers solve the problem.
Yeah, in that same conversation, talking to branch managers and operations managers saying, No, no, no, we’re going to go and custom-fabricate a hood to go over top of the drill bit and get better collection on the side and move the port around and make it bigger or increase suction. And it’s like, okay, talk to any of the engineers for dust collection systems. They’re going to say, at best, we’ll be 90 percent, maybe 95 in a closed type of sealed environment. But for running high speed production where we’re making seven, eight hundred doors to a thousand doors a day running through production, you’re not going to keep up, right? You’re not going to be able to adjust for a two-foot-wide door to a three-foot-wide door and every two inches in between. And the customized stuff that comes down, and those odd-shaped doors. You’re never going to get 100 percent. So figure out how to get to that 70, 80 percent. And you guys helped close the gap. Get the fugitive stuff that you don’t see every day.
Yeah, I love to tell customers, capture what you can, capture what’s reasonable. But there is a law of diminishing returns. And so, let us take care of the rest.
Well, Andy, we really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for hanging out with us for a little bit and telling us some of your story. I really appreciate the clarity and transparency in the whole process. And thank you for being an advocate for us and an advocate for your people. And thank you for making my life a little bit easier by hanging some of those pre-hung doors.
That’s right. Thanks, Andy. We appreciate you taking time today.
Absolutely. I appreciate it guys. Cheers to the future, right?
That’s right. Thanks for joining us for another episode of OnAire. I’m Jordan.
I’m Taylor.
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