Elevate Construction

Jason continues the total participation series with the third installment: how visual systems are what actually make total participation possible. He walks through a recent conference room visit where a lean engineer had pulled the foreman huddle plan, the PPC, the variances, the inspection tracking, the logistics maps, and the phasing maps into a single visible workspace. He shares the DPR thirty...

Jason continues the total participation series with the second episode in the sequence: how to actually create the culture that makes total participation possible. He shares the St. Louis project assessment story with a company that had touch plan, pull plans, zone maps, and roadblock maps all in place, ready for Takt. Then he gets honest about how easy it is to get triggered by a single four star...

Jason kicks off a series on total participation, recording on the way to the airport for a project assessment trip to St. Louis. He credits Paul Akers for distilling this concept and walks through how Paul implemented total participation in his own facility, where everyone, from leadership to the floor, cleans bathrooms, runs morning huddles, takes before and after lean improvement videos, and par...

Jason takes on a culture problem he finally put words to after a recent project walk: too many leaders are spending their energy on CYA (covering their own backside) instead of finding and fixing problems. He pulls in Paul Akers' eight wastes and 5S system, the principle that the only real problem is when you think there are no problems, and a memorable (and admittedly off the rails) Lady Gaga Bad...

Jason records through allergy raspiness and shares a moment of clarity from a recent Takt simulation he ran with Spencer Easton in Indianapolis. After watching a team go from 16 minutes in round one, down to 9 to 11 minutes with Takt, and finally to 4 minutes 55 seconds with Takt control, he points to what actually made the difference: the huddles, pre install meetings, first run studies, and mock...

Jason records through allergy fatigue to take on a hard truth that holds builders back from promotions every day: your work does not speak for itself. He shares the story of a senior superintendent who had all the technical skill but didn't get the general superintendent role because he didn't share, mentor, or build influence. He pulls in Brendon Burchard's High Performance Habits on influence as...

Jason shares a sharp lesson from a recent Takt control simulation he ran with Spencer Easton at Shield Sexton, where he watched a superintendent making a commitment on behalf of a trade partner. He paused the simulation to teach a foundational principle: trade partners must make commitments directly to each other, look each other in the eye, and use their own emotional capital to build trust. He f...

Jason records exhausted from Indianapolis on four hours of sleep to make a pointed case that most superintendents are missing: even with Bluebeam, Plan Grid, and the iPad, you still need a printed half size set of drawings. He walks through his ritual of breaking out the set, packing taping the front and back, taking the bundle to Staples for colored pencils, highlighters, and pens, and turning th...

Jason records from a Marriott in Indianapolis at almost one in the morning to respond to a LinkedIn post defining respect in construction. The post said respect means engaging and empowering the people closest to the work so that they can assess the current condition, create solutions, and standardize what's working. Jason takes issue with every "so that" in the sentence. He walks through why we e...

Jason records this one without an outline because he's fired up, and what comes out is a passionate, occasionally ranting episode about the single thing he keeps finding missing on construction projects: a visible plan all the way to finish. He shares the recent listener story of a leadership team that couldn't show the sequence to substantial completion, walks through every excuse he's heard for...

Jason uses the Titanic iceberg scene as a powerful project management case study. He walks through what went wrong on the ship layer by layer: the telegraph warnings from other vessels that were ignored, the missing binoculars on the lookout perch, the captain going to bed at full speed through iceberg fields, the lack of contingency plans, and the failure to know that breaching five compartments...

Jason records from his shed office, back home from Hawaii with good internet again, and lays out one of his most personal leadership convictions: energy is the center of leading teams. He pulls in Sun Tzu's Art of War on military energy, the recent back to back superintendent boot camps he ran with Brandon Montero, a story about driving a smaller engine up the sand dunes with his son, and the reco...

Jason records from Hawaii during his vacation week and shares a phrase he picked up from Fred Ster, one of the best builders he's worked with at Oakland Construction: "Don't go to sleep on that submittal." He explains what "going to sleep" actually means on projects (wishful thinking, automation of the wrong things, false consensus) and uses the parable of the ten virgins as a fun analogy. Then he...

Jason records from an Airbnb in Hawaii during a long overdue week off with Katie and takes on a popular but flawed industry rule: the 6 6 6 6 rule, which says the PM should be six months ahead, the superintendent six weeks ahead, the foreman six days ahead, and the crew six hours ahead. Jason makes the case that those numbers are far too short for any project that actually wants to flow, and he re...

Jason sits down with his wife and Elevate Construction CEO Katie Schroeder for an honest, sometimes vulnerable conversation about women in construction. They open with a LinkedIn post that drew thanks from women in the industry, then wrestle with the harder question of how to support women in construction the right way: speak up or stay quiet, recognize or treat the same. They share the Hensel Phe...

Jason reads the full recommended book list from the upcoming Elevating Construction Senior Superintendent in response to the steady stream of requests he gets for reading recommendations. From Brendon Burchard's High Performance Habits to Patrick Lencioni's full stack of leadership fables, from The Goal and This Is Lean to Mindset and The Captain Class, this episode is a comprehensive personal lib...

  Jason sits down with his daughter Effie Lee Schroeder for an honest and personal episode about the truth nobody admits out loud: nobody really knows what they're doing. He opens up about the fear of running Elevate Construction with 11 kids, the constant scariness of growing a business, hiring people, watching the bank balance, and trusting the team and faith. He shares verse six of the hymn "A...

Jason walks listeners through a virtual tour of a high profile $240 million DPR Construction project in Phoenix, Arizona, that hosts the Elevate Construction superintendent boot camps. From the immaculate entrances and morning huddle pavilion with music playing for the workers, to the BIM 360 Glue kiosks, room kitting drawings, color coded pallet system through the hoist, and the foreman crew prep...

Jason records from the road heading to a boot camp simulation, fresh off a week with Petticoid Smith, and takes on a topic the industry quietly dismisses: checklists. He uses three powerful comparisons (pilots, doctors, and his own CFO who has never missed a payroll in ten years) to make the case that a simple, well crafted, lesson learned checklist is one of the most overlooked tools in construct...

Jason records from the car in Jacksonville, Florida, on the way to a job site to talk about something most teams overlook: the construction entrance. He opens with the story of a Starbucks bollard in Springfield, Illinois that ended up covered in over 300 stickers, all because the first sticker was never removed. Then he walks through a DPR project site so beautifully maintained at the entrances t...

Jason records from a Marriott bathroom in Jacksonville, Florida (totally clothed, fully legit) and takes on the things that are always late in construction: exterior skin, elevators, switch gear, air handlers, and long lead items like Italian tile. He shares the story of Ryan Young pushing to start exterior and elevator coordination meetings during design development, walks through the detailed pr...

Most foremen and superintendents think their job is to run around solving problems all day, but that's not leadership, that's chaos. In this episode, Jason draws a hard line between reactive and proactive leadership and explains why "busy" often means you're doing low-value work that should be handled by stable systems. You'll learn how proactive leaders plan ahead, build standard routines, use bu...

A construction company doesn't just sell a finished building, it sells the capability of the people who build it. In this episode, Jason reframes the question "what is our product?" and argues that your foremen and field crews are the product, which means they should be developed, protected, and improved like any other core offering. You'll learn how treating crews as the product changes how you h...

A construction company doesn't just sell a finished building, it sells the capability of the people who build it. In this episode, Jason reframes the question "what is our product?" and argues that your foremen and field crews are the product, which means they should be developed, protected, and improved like any other core offering. You'll learn how treating crews as the product changes how you h...

Swing capacity isn't free labor sitting on the bench, and it isn't running crews so tight that one hiccup tanks the whole system. In this episode, Jason explains swing capacity as the ability to shift and swarm existing resources to protect flow when bottlenecks hit. You'll learn how workable backlog gives crews a safe place to go when they finish early, so they don't start work out of sequence or...