The Business Case for Safety with Silvi Materials’ Colby Ankeney

Welcome to The Safety Meeting by Novara. One of the questions that I hear from safety professionals more than almost any other is some version of: “How do I get leadership to actually care about what I’m doing?” When I sat down with Colby Ankeney, Director of HSE at Silvi Materials, I got one of the best answers to that question that I’d ever heard.

In just three years, Colby transformed Silvi’s safety program from the ground up, cutting injury rates by 70%, reducing severity by 88%, and delivering over $600,000 in annual claims savings. He did it with a lean team, a data-first mindset, and a firm belief that safety and good business are the same thing.

In this conversation, we talk about how he made the case to leadership, how he thinks about ROI, and what he’d tell any safety pro who’s trying to move the needle but struggling to get traction. Let’s jump into it. Colby, before we get into strategy, I want to set the scene. When you came to Silvi Materials, what were you actually walking into? What did the safety program look like?

Yeah, I mean, the Silvi brothers took this over from their dad. It was a very small company. And as you grow, hats are just kind of transferred to people, or you have a capable human on your team, and they may take environmental, they may take safety. Maybe those duties are spread.

So they really had never had a real safety, quote-unquote, person until about the mid-2010s, and they really only had one person. I came on board in 2022, and we’ve seen tremendous growth. The company’s almost doubled in size since then. And we basically had really archaic processes. We were not really optimizing data.

But really, more than anything, we hadn’t decided what kind of data we wanted to keep. So we had all these Excel sheets, and we were tracking tire accidents here and backing accidents there and all these things. But you really couldn’t see what was happening, you couldn’t pinpoint hotspots, and you couldn’t give good information to ownership to say, “Listen, this is going to be what helps us.”

So that is essentially what they brought me in to fix. And I was more or less an army of one to start. I had an admin person who came from HR to help out, and I inherited a dispatch guy who I retrofitted into a safety person, but that was it. That was the whole team for 600 people.

Okay. So essentially, you inherited a system that wasn’t actually a system. A lot of data was being collected in isolation, but there was no real way to see the full picture. And from that starting point, you had to figure out what you actually needed before you could ask for anything, which is a pretty interesting leadership challenge on its own. It seems like you figured out that you’d need more people, but didn’t have them yet. How did you make that case to leadership without yet having that data to back it up?

So when I came in, even in the interview process, I was like, “Look, guys, we’re already big enough. We’re going to need some headcount.” And the Silvis were really agreeable to that. But ultimately, I came in and I said, “I don’t know how I’m going to optimize it, so I don’t fully know what we have. I know some of the issues, but we’re going to have to dig into it more.”

So the first thing I did is I came in and did more or less a gap analysis, and then I picked some easy wins and said, “Listen, if I have a person, I’m going to have them do this and this, and we should expect to see a 15% reduction in our claims cost in this region, because this is how I’m going to maximize our claims management strategy.”

Oh, okay. I love that. You came in with a projected outcome before you had the proof, and used that projection to earn the resources to go find it. That’s a very different posture than waiting until you have the data to ask for help. And actually, it connects to something bigger I want to dig into, which is how you think about the safety department as a whole. You’ve talked about running your department like a leg of the business rather than just an isolated safety silo. That’s a different model than I think a lot of safety pros are operating from. Where did that come from for you?

I’ve really been given a lot of autonomy to build that kind of culture here. And luckily for me, my operations folks, my sales folks, my quality folks, they give me a lot of energy towards these things. It’s an asset for us, and it’s a selling strategy to our customers. We’re going to give you quality products, and we’re going to give you the service that you’ve grown accustomed to when you work with a company like ours, but you’re also going to know that we’re just going to do it right the first time. There are not going to be any injuries. We’re not going to hurt your people or our people. We’re not going to cause issues in the community, right?

So that is how I approach safety and environmental claims. It is a leg of the business, and to be the best business you can be, you’ve got to be really good at this.

A selling strategy to customers, I don’t think I’ve heard it framed quite like that before. The idea that a clean safety record isn’t just internal compliance; it’s actually part of what you’re delivering to the people you work with. And I think it may have been a long time ago, but I do remember in another episode we recorded where one of our partners, I think it was from Two Six Advisors, was talking about how having a good safety program helped one of his clients win more contracts because having an actual EHS program in place was something that a lot of the people they were looking to contract with had as part of their SOP and needed when they were being presented with a job.

So, it’s definitely something that maybe not a lot of safety pros are thinking about, but I think a lot of companies are adopting more and more as part of what they want to see when they’re presented with a bid on a contract. And speaking of contracts and winning bids, let’s talk a little bit about what this meant for you financially, because the numbers are pretty striking. What has this approach actually meant for Silvi’s bottom line?

Yeah, I mean, we are having a tremendous amount of success, particularly in our workers’ comp claims, but just in accidents in general. And just in the benefits we were paying for people on light duty, we’re saving $500,000 to $600,000 year-over-year.

At this point, we have had at least $100,000 in gains every year for the last four years. So for me, it’s a way I can go in and prove my theories correct, right? Money talks in business, and ultimately I can walk in and say, “Listen, we’re having an impact. We thought if we did A, B, and C, we should have an impact here, and did it or did it not?”

And that’s really the life I live. Too often I feel risk and compliance people will get set in their ways, like, “This is the way I like to do things,” whereas I don’t have that at all. If it’s not working, we just change. And so to me, I really use the data to pinpoint what I want to be impacted, and then I go find a way to do it, and then I check my work to see if it happened.

And this is just one way to show our claims management processes have really improved here across the board. This is a huge team lift for the entire company. I rely a lot on my operations people and my field safety people. The amount of work that they put in to get to all these places is incredible. It really is a huge lift, but it directly impacts the bottom line of our company being self-insured. And like I said, our workers’ comp rates have dropped and held flat. In a world where rates are always going up, it’s a pretty incredible achievement.

Whew, $100,000 in gains every year for four straight years. And you said something that I want to come back to, actually, that if it’s not working, you just change. That sounds simple, but in practice, it’s actually pretty hard to do, especially when you’re talking about programs that took real effort to stand up. You had a specific moment where you had to do exactly that. You were making a decision at one point to stop doing truck inspections entirely and redirect those resources. That takes confidence. Walk us through how that played out with your leadership.

So sometimes an exercise is really just to check a box to make sure it’s not a problem. I had a suspicion. We were, like many companies, just not doing our DVIRs the way that I felt gave them the attention they deserve. And we had done this whole campaign; our fleet operations group did this whole campaign. They helped train all of our truck drivers. It was really our whole ready-mix operations and our fleet operations together putting all these resources into it.

So I sent my guys out there for a year, and I basically said, “Listen, I need you to go out. We’re looking for deficient DVIRs, and we need to know if there’s a problem.” And we did it for the year, and we really just weren’t having that many findings, but it was a tremendous amount of time for my employees. So I went to leadership and essentially said, “We shouldn’t be doing this anymore. This just isn’t bang for our buck.”

We were able to shift, and I transferred all of those resources to job site inspections, specifically coaching drivers in real time. I took the same amount of time and just put it somewhere else. And this last year, we had a 25% reduction in our at-fault job site accidents. It’s too soon to know the exact number on our claims cost differential, but it will be real. And on top of that, my drivers felt supported.

It was a better use of a resource, and it had the intended effect that I thought it would. But like I said, there again, we did it in a way where I can test and make sure that the gains were real, and they were what we were expecting to happen. That’s essentially your ROI, and I can show that. And then on our rolling claims numbers, I’ll be able to show where this has started to impact that.

Right. You checked that box, you knew it wasn’t an issue, and you moved on without treating it like a failure. That mindset seems to run pretty deep in how you build your team too, and I want to ask about that. It sounds like you really lead your team through constant adaptation. You’ve built a team culture around being willing to reinvent themselves and reinvent a process. How did you create that?

I have a saying for my team: you should be a “love your spouse, love your kids” kind of person. That is, for me, the core of what my team is. We are all family people; we’re super into our kids. I’m not a person who says, “At work, we’re family.” We are absolutely coworkers, but we are closer than strangers, right?

But that camaraderie and vibe of “we’re not going to let each other fail because we have shared interests and we all know that we’re good humans”, we feel bound to each other. We feel obligated to help each other out. I’m really lucky my team just doesn’t have egos. If you do have one, you usually work yourself out of it pretty fast. There’s just something about the way that I build teams that we just have such good vibes; I really can’t describe it any other way.

But what happens is, I’m really blessed, people work really hard, and a lot of that also is you have to be willing to reinvent yourself, willing to change, and willing to tackle new things. And I also think that naturally creates some energy within my team because people are always being pushed to be better. I really believe that my team can do anything, so I get really excited to tee them up for a new thing.

So when I go into those meetings, I’m not like, “Hey, guys, truck inspections were a failure.” I’m going into that meeting like, “Listen, you crushed that. We checked that box. We know that’s not an issue. I’m going to use your time a lot better, and we’re going to go have a meaningful impact on something.” And my team is always really excited about that. But yeah, it is just a core thing inside me that the bar is forever moving up.

No egos, shared stakes, and a bar that keeps moving. That’s a hard culture to build, and an even harder one to sustain. So let’s bring it back to the broader picture, because everything you’ve described, the team, the mindset, the pivots, they’re all in service of being able to make that business case, and that’s where I want to land. What would you say to a safety manager who knows their stuff but struggles to translate that into a language that leadership actually responds to?

So, I do feel like I have a slightly different approach than a lot of people. For me, while I think fundamentally we can all agree that there is no price tag on safety, that is something we can all fundamentally agree on. But I can also fundamentally agree, though, that you need groceries, but it doesn’t mean you can just go spend any unplanned amount of money on groceries, right? You have to make sure you eat, and we need to make sure you’re getting healthy food, but we also need to make sure we’re making good decisions. I always use the expression: you can’t use a bazooka on an ant.

And the truth is, most things with safety don’t require money. It requires compassion, working together, and refining a process. We can all agree guarding is guarding, right? You have to build guards. But generally speaking, once you get past the conditions phase in a safety program and everything has guards, not a lot of things really take that much money.

And then you really have to decide, and I choose to approach things, like you said, like a leg of the business, if there’s not going to be an ROI, is it going to have an impact? I mean, if it’s not going to save us money, save us time, or help our operations folks, then why are we doing it?

Because at its core, I believe efficiency and safety are the same thing. So if you’re telling me we’re going to be safe, my brain instantly thinks that means we’re going to show up on time, we’re going to have our tools, they’re going to be inspected, and we’re going to have a good plan before we start. All the paperwork is going to be done in advance, everyone is going to know what they’re doing, and we’re going to plan for contingencies. What that also means is we’re going to do that job once. The customer is going to be happy, we’re going to give them good quality and service, and we did it safely as well. That’s part of it.

So to me, I talk about money a lot, and I know it makes some people uncomfortable, but I think you need to shift from “there’s no price limit on safety” to “we’re not going to use bazookas on ants.” And I’m really lucky I’m not a person who gets distracted by shiny things. I like simple processes that work, that people can replicate, where there’s a lot less chance of error. So to me, it’s about what you need and making sure when we fix and improve something, we do it in a way that is sustainable and we never look back.

I also always use the expression: when I take an inch, I never give an inch back. And that’s really how you have those year-over-year gains. Everything we do is sustainable. I’m not doing something in a way that’s going to add a big burden, and subsequently, we’re making the company money; we’re not costing the company money.

Okay, I love that. “You can’t use a bazooka on an ant.” That’s a super powerful analogy, and I think that could be used in a lot of scenarios, and I’m sure it will help the safety pros that are listening. Before we wrap up, there’s one more thing that came up in our conversation that I think is worth sharing. It’s a really practical question about when you want to change something that someone else built, and how you handle that leadership conversation when you say, “I don’t know if this is something that we should be doing,” but the rebuttal is, “Oh, well, that’s always how it’s been done.”

Yeah, so I think anytime you’re looking at a legacy process, especially in a family-owned, small business like ours, you have to be mindful that someone who is still there, or even above you, might have created that process. You also need to give some grace, in the sense that maybe that process worked really well at the time because you were a different company.

So I come in loaded to that with, “Hey, I’d like to abandon this, but I’m going to do this instead, and this is what the expected outcome is.” I never approach something as, “That’s a failure. Stop.” I always approach things as a checked box that we needed to check, and we now know that data because I don’t do anything arbitrarily.

From there, I pivot to what I’m trying to accomplish next. So for lack of a better way to explain it, we took the inch, and we’re never going to get that inch back. Now we’re looking for the next ground we can grab. And that’s really how I approach it.

I get a lot of support. My boss is phenomenal to me in that regard, and he gives me a lot of autonomy. I have a lot of support from the other guys at my level as well, just giving my thoughts and ideas energy and trust, obviously.

Colby, this was a great conversation. I think the thing that’s going to stick with me most is that, like I said, you can’t use that bazooka on an ant, not only for safety pros, but I think it’s applicable in lots of different conversations. But bringing it back to your point that efficiency and safety are the same thing, that every inch you gain, you can never give back, that’s not just a safety philosophy. It’s good leadership.

Okay, so if this conversation really resonated with you, there’s a part two coming. We’ll go deeper on the data and systems side of how Colby actually built this program, the forms, the dashboards, the workflows. Same guest, but a lot more on how it actually works in detail. Stay tuned.