In this comprehensive and insightful conversation, Eric Anderton, host of Construction Genius, sits down with Wes Palmisano, President & CEO of Impetus, a commercial construction startup that rocketed to success. The chat unveils Wes’s approach to leadership development, culture creation, and his strategic blend of in-house and external expertise to drive growth and innovation. Wes also shares his personal strategies for maintaining focus amidst the whirlwind of leading a fast-growing company.
Highlights:
Building a Leadership Academy: Wes discusses how Impetus created its own Leadership Academy, empowering employees to grow into more prominent roles within the company. He highlights the value of investing in people, creating an internal ecosystem where talent can flourish, and the benefit of structured career pathways.
Cultivating a Company Culture: Wes emphasizes the importance of creating a culture that mirrors the identity of the leaders. He stresses that it’s not only about setting standards and values; instead, it’s about nurturing those values consistently within the organization, to the point where it becomes a habit.
Balancing Internal and External Expertise: Wes unpacks how his organization leans on external expertise when needed, despite their preference for in-house resources. He elaborates on how these external consultants bring fresh perspectives and ideas, highlighting the importance of careful selection and gradual integration of external partners for alignment with the company’s culture.
Continuous Growth and Expansion: Wes offers an inside look at the rapid growth of Impetus, from zero to $100 million in revenue in its first 36 months. He describes the company’s journey, from initially focusing on commercial construction to branching out into heavy civil construction and other self-performed capabilities, always pushing for innovation and improvement.
Maintaining Sanity Amidst Rapid Growth: In the midst of an aggressively growing business, Wes swears by routine to maintain his sanity. He shares his personal strategies for keeping a structured day, including exercising, minimizing decisions, and sticking to what works for him.
A Taste of New Orleans: The conversation wraps up on a lighter note, with Wes recommending Peche, a local seafood restaurant in New Orleans that offers a modern, healthier take on traditional local cuisine.
For a deep dive into how a successful construction business operates and navigates challenges, don’t miss this conversation with Wes Palmisano on Construction Genius. Explore the journey of Impetus and find actionable insights to drive your own business success.
Links:
Website: https://buildimpetus.com, https://www.thinkrngd.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wesley-j-palmisano-317681a, https://www.linkedin.com/company/buildimpetus
Restaurant Recommendation: https://www.pecherestaurant.com
Get in Touch with Eric:
Interested in executive coaching? Eric offers invaluable insights and practical advice that can guide your leadership journey in the construction industry. Schedule a quick 10-minute conversation with him through the following link: 10minuteswitheric.youcanbook.me
For more hands-on, practical, and effective leadership advice, be sure to get a copy of Eric’s book “Construction Genius: Effective, Hands-On, Practical, Simple, No-BS Leadership, Strategy, Sales, and Marketing Advice for Construction Companies.” Available on Amazon. The book provides a wealth of knowledge that every construction professional can benefit from. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to elevate your leadership, strategy, sales, and marketing game in the construction sector.
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Scaling Up: Empowering Growth Through Leadership Development And Innovation With Wes Palmisano
Leadership development in construction is what this episode of Construction Genius is all about with my guest Wes Palmisano. He is the Founder, CEO, and Floor Sweeper at Impetus and has offices in New Orleans and Nashville, Tennessee. It has quickly established itself as a Top-level National Player in Construction Services.
The good news is we’re not talking to a theory person. We’re talking to someone who has practiced the art of developing leaders in construction as the leader of a construction company. We kick off by talking about the SAM model of Setting direction, Aligning resources, and Motivating and inspiring the troops. We take a deep dive into his 70/20/10 development model, which includes technical skills, mentoring, and leadership development. We talk about how he has developed a team of teams within his organization and how he balances incentives and reward structures so that a team of teams functions well and shares resources effectively.
We talk about some of the challenges that most leaders face when they go from building projects to building people. We talk about how to motivate internal mentors to develop people and not be afraid of those folks stealing their spot. We also talk about how to hire outside executive coaches. It’s a wide-ranging conversation.
Again, the thing I like about Wes is he’s doing it right now, building a construction company from $0 to over $100 million in a very short period of time. In fact, he’s up to $250 million. He’s going through the process and spending a lot of time and energy on getting the people’s side of the equation right. That’s what this next hour is going to be all about. Make sure that you are taking notes mentally or on paper if you’re not driving and enjoy my conversation with Wes.
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Wes, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
I’m delighted to have you on because we’re going to talk about leadership and you know what you’re talking about because you are the Founder and CEO of your construction company. I’m excited to get an expert here on the show to take a deep dive. My first question here is, what is leadership?
Leadership for us in the way that we always have viewed it and in the way that we like to define it with our teams. Especially in the construction industry, let’s say, is the ability to set the direction for the team around you, to align the resources and all the things at your disposal as a leader to get everyone on the same page and marching in the right direction.
At the same time, being able to motivate and inspire your troops. That’s something that we lean pretty heavily on as we’d like to keep things simple and dial in and focus on something that is not unique to us. We have adopted this from others and it’s a resource that we found but we call it the SAM model. It’s something that’s from my perspective.
We’ve seen it used numerous times around the industry and we’re happy to repurpose things that resonate with us. That SAM model, which has Set direction, Aligns resources, Motivates and inspire is how we like to teach people in our organization to be leaders and to excel at all three of those areas generally works well in the construction industry.
That’s beautiful. I appreciate that. Let’s take a dive into those then. What do you mean by the ability to set direction?
Set direction is being able to communicate the big picture to the team around you to have them understand what the task is at hand and what we’re trying to accomplish. From the perspective of being able to see the big picture, a lot of times in our industry, people tend to dive straight into the details. Maybe they don’t understand the fundamentals of the big picture and the why behind what they’re doing. There’s an opportunity when we talk about setting direction to have people understand this deep why behind what we’re doing. That then starts to create an understanding of the bigger picture, which then allows you to get into the details of the day-to-day task and the things that ultimately aggregate to success down the road.
One of the challenges I know many people have is that they have a clear understanding in their mind about what the big picture is but then sometimes they have difficulty articulating that clearly to others. Is there a particular method that you guys use or a framework that you have so that the leader is able to set out what that big picture is?
Communication skills are fundamental to being able to connect the big picture to the smallest details but we have a methodology as well. This is something that we teach in our leadership academy that we call zoom in and zoom out, which is a concept similar to what you’re describing. We understand the why behind what we’re doing. We understand the big picture but then, we also understand that in our industry, it is about the details.
We have to be able to zoom in to the smallest degree. We have some exercises that we run in our leadership academy that teach some of the fundamentals about how we work together, how we communicate and how a team ultimately translate that big picture vision down to the smallest details and be able to do both, which then backs in our industry and project success.
Also, it ties into scheduling methodologies and how we plan and progress the schedule in the work that we’re doing of the philosophy and tying that same thought process to our scheduling process and philosophies. There’s certainly a lot more detail that goes into that. Looking at it cohesively as a program where there’s this fundamental understanding but then there’s also the process and the methodologies that support that understanding.
Can you give us an example of one of those exercises that you use to work through that zoom-in and zoom-out process?
There’s a team exercise that we always have a great time at our leadership academy. That team exercise is, I want to say the number is 64 different images that are reshuffled up and then handed out to a group. Usually, we have groups of twelve. Each individual is getting five. A couple have six but they’re getting five or so pictures.
That group then has, without showing anyone, so there are twelve people that are just thrown into this chaos and they don’t know how the pictures connect to each other. That exercise then forces them because you can’t show your images to anyone else in the group. Twelve people have this chaos, so they have five different images and they have to start talking through in a timed exercise, how we communicate with each other and what we are seeing.
Ultimately, the goal is to put those images in order. The concept is one of them is starting in out in space as a view of the Earth. The other is the last image is dialed in on a tiny little speck on the surface of the Earth. As they talk through it, they don’t know what’s on each other’s images and what they’re looking at. It starts out as chaos and what you see and witness in that exercise is that certain individuals will emerge pretty quickly as leaders in the group and start organizing people then they start communicating and talking through it.
In fact, the last time we did it in that exact format that I’m describing, the team got it perfect. They worked through it over the course of about fifteen minutes and orchestrated this exercise where they put them face down on the floor and flip over all the cards and see if they were in sequential order as they were supposed to be.
It’s pretty interesting to watch and observe from the outside of how that takes place. Everyone enjoys it because they take away from it. What did we learn? How did we transform what started out as chaos into something orderly? How do we communicate with each other to accomplish that? What started out as this fun game. They learn a lot of leadership lessons.
That’s tremendous. Do you know what that exercise is called?
I don’t. I have no idea. We call it zoom in and zoom out.
I like that because you begin to identify then people who are conceptual thinkers and people who are linear thinkers. In a construction project, you need to be able to do both or at least have a team where you have the conceptual people and the linear thinkers at the same time.
This is usually a varied group and it’s people from our organization. Some may be more field-oriented, some from the project management realm, from our corporate services group, or from office personnel. A broad variety of people are thrown in this exercise together and haven’t worked together in the past. The lessons that come out of that are tremendous.
Skipping the line for a moment to motivate, what do you think the connection is between understanding that big picture then motivating the crew when they’re having to grind through, let’s say, a difficult week?
There’s a connection that can be made there and a great opportunity. When people understand the why behind what they’re doing, whether we’re talking about corporate purpose, at the highest level of the why. People identify with corporate purpose and being driven by that corporate purpose because it’s something that inspires them. That is at the biggest level from an organizational perspective to the project itself.
What we try to do is establish a purpose and a why at the project level, which then again, the team rallies behind the thought process of the work we’re doing is important. I understand why it’s important, which then drives motivation of when things get tough, we know why we’re doing this tough work and we understand the impact that this project may have on the broader community or the people that are going to utilize the building. The people that are going to utilize the road or the infrastructure we might be building.
There’s certainly an importance to the level of work that we do and the physical nature of it translates to some positive benefits in society. There are all kinds of ways to connect this deeper meaning and purpose that then when you get to the point when going gets tough, there’s this thought process that what we’re doing is bigger than ourselves and continues to motivate us to move forward.
The other aspect of motivation that we like to lean into is the people side of the equation. Knowing and understanding your people and what drives them as individuals, we know them. To the extent that you can know them at a deep level, it provides also an opportunity for teams to be tied together and bound together in a unified group.
There are so many lessons on that side that motivate and inspire us that we look at professional sports and high-performance teams. There are so many lessons to be learned in parallels that can be drawn to how we create a similar high-performing culture and holds ourselves to similar standards to what you may see in professional sports. That’s an analogy that we like to talk to our teams about and look at on a regular basis. There are a lot of lessons to be learned that can translate to construction.
What do you say to people when you’re talking about the why and they’re looking at you saying, “Wes, I know why I’m here. I’m here to make some money on this project and to make a profit. This is a business after all.” How do you deal with people who have that mindset?
Within our teams, what we found is that the ones that buy-in and identify with who we are as a business, which as an organization. Certainly, it’s hard to control or the level of buy-in that you may be trying to get with trade partners is usually a little more difficult. That’s where the instances that you describe would come in because we generally find that our teams are pretty bought in and motivated.
We have a high-performance culture and a very strong culture at that. Our teams tend to be dialed in from a cultural perspective. Where we do have struggles on particular projects is, in many cases, sometimes certain trade partners don’t necessarily identify with our culture because they have different perspectives. It’s a challenge to motivate and get people to buy into that culture. We’ve still had a lot of success over time with getting people to understand that we’re there to make money. Both individually and as an organization.
We need to be profitable to continue doing what we’re doing but the money is a byproduct of the work that we do and ultimately, generating success. If we can produce the deeper meaning and the why, certainly the money takes care of itself. You hit the nail on the head and it’s challenging. It’s not easy to have everybody buy into that philosophy but we try. In the instances where we have had challenges in getting cultural alignment and teamwork right on the jobs, there are instances where we’ve had to move on from certain individuals and try to bring in a different team.
That’s, again, the same as the professional sports analogy. Sometimes, as a member of the team in the locker room, that’s upsetting the culture of what the coach is trying to create. That player ultimately exits the organization and they bring in someone different who may be more on board with what they’re trying to accomplish. That becomes necessary at times as well when we have someone who’s completely misaligned with the culture of the team and the job site.
Let’s talk about that for a moment because one of the biggest challenges that many of the clients I work with have is that they say, “Eric, I know that this guy right here is a C-player and he’s not a fit for my organization but we have all of these projects on the books that we’ve got to get built. I need at least a warm body.”
That’s why when I’m talking to my clients, I’m not saying, “You’ve got to fire him today.” I’m going to say, “You’ve got the schedule of games on your calendar, you’ve got to play the games but you’re saying, noted. I note that this guy’s not an A-player and I’m always looking to replace those C-players if I can.” Describe to us, Wes, how you handle that type of situation based on your experience.
Our philosophy on that is, to your point, everyone is always trying to have as many A-players on the field as possible. There are certainly instances where people are not performing to the level of the standard that we would like. That generally is accompanied with a real effort to help that individual grow and succeed.
The number one driver of that is is that individual culturally aligned and philosophically aligned with our organization. In that case, we’ll certainly put a big investment into helping them improve and develop their skillset to ultimately get some reps in, get practice and move towards being an A-player. In other instances, when there’s a cultural misalignment, we would ordinarily move towards trying to have that individual exit. Also, find a place where they’re in a better situation to succeed because they’re not aligned and it’s not doing them justice or us to have that misalignment from a cultural and philosophical perspective.
Where we found the most success as well is having a robust recruiting program into the organization from entry level so that people are trained and developed in our organization and in our culture. Because we have a strong culture, we certainly are an organization that we’ve recognized for a long time now that developing people are within our own systems and our talent development process has paid extreme dividends for us. We continue to double down on that philosophy of internal developing people and having them bought into our systems from the beginning.
It’s interesting. It sounds like what you’re doing is you’re committed to recruiting people at an entry-level position who are a cultural fit and taking those cultural fits and giving them the technical skills they need to be able to grow within the organization if they’re able to do that.
That’s exactly right. We even have a philosophy around how those people are developed as well, which is 70/20/10, which 70% of that development is the expectation is that they’re on the job supervisor is developing the technical skills and capabilities that they need. This is prefaced maybe if I take one step back by the fact that you mentioned, which is this individual is culturally and philosophically aligned with our organization and is bought into our culture.
Once they’re bought in, 70% of that training and development happens on the job working directly with a supervisor. Everyone in our organization has a mentor as well that’s helping them from a career development perspective in addition to their direct supervisor. The mentor of someone other than the direct supervisor. We’ve got this intentional development and a lot of that is happening over the course of the day-to-day.
The other 20% is this intentional. The piece of the mentor I mentioned is intentional. I’ve always got goals that I’m striving for as an individual. There are opportunities for me to improve. Those are identified and coached upon on a consistent basis. The last 10% is our formal leadership development programs that are open to everyone in the organization. We put a ton of time, energy, and effort into developing people and helping them realize their own potential. In most cases, people are capable of way more than they realize on the front end.
In most cases, people are capable of way more than they realize on the front end. Click To TweetHow did you structure your company when you’re describing this? It’s tremendous but the objection I’m hearing from people is, “Wes, that’s nice for you. I don’t have the time to do that.” How did you structure your company intentionally to be able to develop this process, both from the perspective of hiring people who are a cultural fit and then developing them through this 70/20/10 process?
I’ve gotten similar reactions and we have talked about this topic with others in the industry. Certainly, I’ve heard similar reactions, especially when you start to look at our leadership development program that we’ve been working on now over the last few years. It’s been continuous improvement every step of the way over the last few years.
I would say that we’re not that far into the journey yet. Being only a few years into this leadership development academy and having a formal structured program, our leadership development offerings, if I were to pull up or show our catalog of offerings gets people in the industry exhausted. The perspective that you’re describing of how you possibly have time to do this when you build anything.
You’re doing all these leadership development programs and when your people have time to work if you’re expecting them to develop like this. What we’ve found over the years is that it has been a huge factor and certainly, one of the primary factors in our success where people are cohesive, working well together, aligning culturally, and understanding the fundamentals of our process and procedures. At a deep fundamental level have a level of commitment to the organization and the job that we’ve seen big gains and productivity in people’s ability to deliver each of their respective positions.
We see it the opposite way. It’s the honest truth and the investments that we make and the additional time that we put into developing people has paid off for us organizationally in a huge way. The people that are doing a lot of the mentoring and coaching within the organization also see those benefits and are willing to make time for it.
It’s certainly been a shift and a lot of people in our organization have worked in other places before and at times, come in with a little bit of a skeptical perspective. All we try to encourage people to do in terms of other organizations in the industry is to get started, do something intentional to develop, help your people grow, and find opportunities to improve and develop a growth mindset in your people versus a more fixed mindset that I am who I am and this is what I’m going to be.
Instead, let’s focus on, “I can always continue to get better and I’m going to strive to be better as an individual.” The thing that we usually do is to say get started on the journey and we’ll be a better industry for it if we can all start to band together and do something to help our people continue to grow as leaders.
From a soft skill perspective, what is the first, let’s say I want to get started. I’m hearing what you’re saying and I want to take the first bite of the elephant or the apple or whatever we’re eating here. What is the first aspect of soft skills that you would encourage a construction company to focus on in terms of that leadership development?
The biggest gaps that we find tend to be challenges for some people in the industry and I’ll preface this by saying, in today’s industry, which has been a little bit of a shift for the industry over time, is the notion. We’re firm believers in this aspect of, there’s not as much hierarchy in the industry as what things used to be, where you have these strong, dominant controlling personalities that tell everybody what to do. The expectation of how people show up now is way more collaborative. This aspect of teams is what delivers success and let’s leverage everyone’s potential.
That aspect of how we work together and work well as a cohesive team and the ideas and concepts around teamwork are one that we focus on a lot. If you start to think about what makes a good teammate, how do we work together as a team, things like communication are vitally important and how do we communicate and how do we keep everyone on the same page? There are a set of skills around teamwork that are a huge opportunity for people in our industry that ties maybe to some of the evolution of how things are getting done in today’s environment versus how they may have been done 20 or 30 years ago.
That’s interesting. Going back to that SAM model, you’ve got Set direction, Align and Motivate. With this idea of alignment, it made me think of the teamwork aspect. Once we know the big picture and assume we buy into it, what are some of the key ways to get that alignment that you’re looking for?
That alignment is usually talking about resource allocation within our industry and the alignment of the team. Also, alignment of, does everyone have what they need to be successful? There are a couple of things there. At the most basic part is the aspect I mentioned of, does everyone have what they need from a resources perspective? Is the right team out? Are the right people on the job? Do they have the right equipment and tools and resources?
That’s a given and a fundamental side of it. The more soft skills side is, are we creating ownership among the people? Are we leveraging the collective strengths of the team? Are we putting people in the right seats because everyone has their strengths and weaknesses? How do we, as leaders, make sure that we have the right people on the bus? In the Jim Collins version, but then also, is everyone in the right seat on the bus that suits their personal capabilities and skillset?
Getting that team then aligned around the goal. Removing obstacles for them is a huge thing that we always also tries to dial in on from an industry perspective. At the end of the day, construction is this series of obstacles. To the extent that we can remove the obstacles and keep everyone focused on the goal will ultimately be successful.
How do you manage the dynamic or the tension that exists within construction companies when there’s the big team but then there are teams within the team? My project team is building Project X, her project team is building Project Y and we have this pool of resources that we share but it’s limited. I’d like the resources because I want to get my project done on time and on budget. She wants the resources as well. There has to be some sharing and some teamwork across teams. How do you handle that dynamic or challenge in your business?
Our organization is structured pretty much across the board in the way that you described, which is the way we look at is team of teams. They’re books by that name and plenty of resources to study but that concept of team of teams is one that identifies with us as an organization. We don’t have much hierarchy at all or little to no hierarchy in this concept that everyone is there to get a job done. To your point, it creates chaos.
If you look at the models of team of teams versus traditional hierarchy, it looks like chaos. It certainly can be chaotic in this concept of sharing and working together, I think where culture comes into play. The aspect of culture is how are we sharing and working together to produce the greatest outcome. We lean heavily on our team leaders because our organization is a network series of teams.
The team leaders all have these great interpersonal relationships. We spend a lot of time building trust and relationships among the team leaders. Puts them in a position to also understand the why behind what they’re doing, the greater good, and that aspect of sharing versus protecting your own resources or territory starts to open up.
When you’re in this position of a high degree of trust among the team leaders, they become very open to what’s for the greater good of the organization holistically versus my own team or my own silo. I’m looking at the bigger picture because I understand the why behind what I’m doing. That takes those same concepts that you’re deploying at a team level and trying to have that same philosophy and the same set of concepts that unites and makes all the teams work together across the network and the entire organization.
How do you tie your incentive structure to that perspective of team of teams? Again, some companies bonus people based on how they produce. Therefore, they’re incentivized to access and hoard resources as much as possible and it makes sense. How do you handle that?
We’ve got a series of different ways we do it from an incentive perspective. At the fundamental place, everyone in our organization participates in our short-term incentive comp program. Our typical bonus program that many companies in our industry have. In our case, the way we structured it, that short-term incentive is basically broken down. It’s a structured incentive comp program that everyone knows what they would end up getting provided that we meet goals.
If I start at maybe the highest level, we publish company results on a monthly basis to the entire organization. Those results tie to the annual goals. Those are expressed as a percentage of goal. We publish that in an open-book manner along the way so people know how the organization is doing. One-third of their incentive compensation comes from organizational performance.
As we’ve developed different businesses and market sectors, we have infrastructure teams, building construction teams, and different offices. As we started to develop teams, we started to look at team performance and have a third of the incentive comp and be derived directly from your own team. The last third is the individual.
I mentioned that everyone in our organization has personal improvement goals. Those goals are set in conjunction with a supervisor/mentor in the organization early on. Those goals are generally highly personal in terms of what are you working on and what are you developing as an individual. One of those goals is usually a stretch goal but that last third becomes a component of how are you developing as an individual.
For any of the programs to activate the piece I didn’t mention is that there are certain hurdles and thresholds that we have to meet for the program to ultimately turn on and activate, which then protects the organization with this thought process that we need to continue to grow and reinvest. The company is a high-growth business. For us to grow and reinvest, there has to be some threshold of base profitability that the organization needs to reach before we start filling up that incentive comp bucket.
For a high-growth company to grow and reinvest, there has to be some threshold of base profitability that the organization needs to reach before they start filling up that incentive comp bucket. Click To TweetNone of that incentive program kicks in unless those minimums are reached. Am I hearing that right?
It has two different thresholds but at the basic level, that’s the concept. The organizational bucket fills up first before it starts spilling over into the incentive comp bucket.
I like that. A third is the company you’re incentivized based on company performance. A third is your team’s performance and I’m assuming the team is clearly defined so people understand what team they’re on within the team, then a third is your individual performance.
Correct.
Very good.
There are opportunities to do better and multipliers. There are a couple of nuances to that like the stretch goal that I mentioned. Many times, we’ll define a stretch goal ordinarily or an example of that relative to individual performances. Do you identify or bring forward an improvement to what we do because we are a continuous improvement organization? Do you bring forward an improvement that anyone in our organization could do at any level?
You point to something that others around you could then use. You’re creating some improvement or helping to move forward some strategic initiative that impacts the broader organization and creates opportunities for others to learn and grow. That’s the type of thing that we would see as a stretch goal for an individual. They get recognized and get the additional credit associated with doing something that is bigger than yourself is basically the concept.
That’s excellent. It’s a tail as oldest time. You take a highly technically skilled and successful project manager who loves building projects and does it very well, then you promote them into a more senior role where instead of building projects, they now have to lead a team of people who are building projects. What is the biggest struggle that you’ve seen in your experience for people making that shift from being a project manager to a project executive or senior leader?
It’s a tough one. Very few do it but make that transition and leap without some set of challenges. I honestly believe it’s hard to say that there’s some one size fits all in terms of what the primary challenge is because the obvious that everyone is aware of is you’re moving from being self-managed and managing projects to now managing people instead of jobs.
The intricacies of what it takes to show up as a leader and manage an entire team around you is a completely different skillset than what it is to be highly successful as a project manager, as you’ve already stated. We always find that it’s extremely individualized. In our organization, with those very personalized development plans, opportunities, and goals for personal improvement, we are usually trying to dial into the strengths and weaknesses of individuals. Also, knowing the skillset from other instances and/or what has produced success in our culture in terms of the set of attributes and core competencies that makes up a good project executive as an example.
For that project manager and usually across the board, everyone that we’ve encountered. It depends on the individual. You’re dealing with people, so there’s no one size fits all. Everyone has a different set of challenges of what the biggest impediment is for them to make the leap. As much as you try to continue to move people up in their careers, in certain instances people are much more successful and happier managing projects because there are a lot of headaches that come from managing people instead of projects.
We also encourage that in our organization, don’t feel like you have to move up just for the sake of moving up. If you’re fulfilled, there’s nothing wrong with being the best project manager and taking on more challenging jobs, bigger jobs, and different types of jobs. We encourage everyone to continue to grow as individuals. There are opportunities to do that without moving up per se and starting to manage a big team of people. That leap is not for everyone and one that we try to pretty thoroughly vet out before we go there.
I appreciate what you’re saying there, Wes, that each person is different. When you make that promotion, what are the key things that you’re thinking about in the first 30, 60, or 90 days that you want to dial in with that newly promoted leader?
That one is very tough and again, hard to generalize. Those promoted leaders, it’s that same set that we find as I mentioned the core attributes and we try to keep things generally dialed in and pretty succinct. Those core attributes that I started out with around that same model and how they’re showing up leading a team versus the skills that they learned and succeeded with at high-level managing projects.
Those team attributes are generally the things or how we show up to manage a team is generally where we would pull from to say, “This is the opportunity for you as an individual to show up differently for your team.” In that transition, we’ve got pretty active with the mentoring structure I’ve talked about already. We’re very actively working with those individuals on a consistent basis and especially through that type of transition.
It becomes about having the right coach and mentor that works with them. I don’t know that I’ve mentioned that before but we’ve got a large group in our organization that are in new positions because as we continue to grow, we love to promote from within. We’ve got a big percentage of our organization that are doing things they’ve never done before. The way that we handle that in our organization is generally through that very highly individualized career plans, opportunities for improvement, and coaching and mentoring.
We’ve got a large number of people in our organization that work with external executive coaching. We’ve got internal mentors that they meet with. I know your question was how do we find time to do all this stuff? We have to make it a priority and supporting people through that transition is a big part of that.
A couple of questions on that. The first one is about the mentoring. That’s just maybe me but sometimes what people bring up is, “I’m having a struggle motivating my senior folks to mentor others because there’s a fear that I’m mentoring my replacement.” What do you have to say to that?
That’s a cultural thing and it’s another shift in probably the industry. I can certainly understand where you’re coming from with that statement from an industry perspective. Answering it from our perspectiv, as an organization, one of the key factors of leaders being successful in our organization is being humbled.
That Patrick Lencioni’s humble, hungry, and smart model is another thing that we talk about a lot in our organization, which is from Patrick Lencioni’s Ideal Team Player book, which I love, by the way. For anyone in the construction industry, grab that because the parable in the story in the book is told through the lens of the construction industry.
It’s a neat one for our industry but regardless, those individuals do well in our organization. If someone is coming at it from a level of humility that our leaders generally do well and succeed with, what we find is that their goal is ultimately to develop people that are better than them. Some of that comes from a place of humility and recognizing that we don’t know at all. The organization and the greater good is going to be better off if I can develop people to be better than me. That idea of individuals succeeding and moving up and maybe one day taking your place is seen as a win and is celebrated within a culture when it’s handled correctly.
I’m assuming that you can align that idea of celebration when someone takes your place with the fact that, “We’re growing and we have other opportunities. We’re always looking for the right person in the right position as the company continues to expand?”
That’s right. The individuals who are excelling understand and know that they better train their replacement if they want to move up. There’s that opportunity as well of the organization starts at perceived. We look at our organization as an upside-down organizational chart if we were to have one, although, we’ve never published an organizational chart.
It’s another side note but the organizational chart means that we’ve got to develop people at all levels. That upside-down concept is that the core of the business are the people that are doing the work. We’ve got to develop each layer of the organization and if I want to move up myself, I have to develop people around me who are going to do what I used to do. The opportunity for a promotion is generally because you’ve already trained your replacement.
You said you’ve never published an org chart. Tell me why.
We also have a philosophy. I mentioned this before, we don’t use traditional job titles. You won’t find on an email signature, a business card or within our organization a lot of talk about job titles and who’s in what position. Externally, for the sake of a proposal, let’s say. You have to give them something. For the sake of a project proposal, people certainly use the titles of superintendent and project manager.
In a competitive process, you certainly have to be able to delineate who’s who from a client perspective. Those are the instances where we would have more of a project-based structure that is necessary to create some clarity within an RFP. Internally, we’ve never published an organizational chart. To start off with one of our core values is called Sweep Floors, which is this concept that no one’s above any task and we all do whatever it takes to get the job done.
It’s this humble attention to detail. We’re all constantly striving for excellence and we’re going to work together and no one is above any task. From that core value that corresponded to, we don’t care what your title is because we’re all here to ultimately achieve an outcome. We all have a role to play in that collective outcome.
That translated initially to job titles and then to this resistance of pushing against some industry norms of, again, traditional hierarchy. We’re not going to publish and portray ourselves as an organization with traditional hierarchy because that’s not how we operate. We’re a team of teams. If you try to chart out a team of teams and if you look at the team of teams charts that are out there. It’s a mess.
It’s this network or spider web. It doesn’t create a lot of clarity. We’ve generally just stayed away from publishing org charts. It’s been a little bit of a challenge for myself from a leadership perspective because I’ve been challenged along the way that certain individuals feel like, “You can do that when you’re smaller but when you get to this size, you’re going to have to publish an org chart to create clarity.” We’ve continued to resist that. Now, at about $250 million in revenue, we still haven’t done it.
That’s great. An important point here, Wes, is that your business can be whatever you want it to be. That’s one of the privileges and responsibilities we have as business owners. Our businesses are a reflection of us and the culture that we create is because of who we are. Therefore, if you understand yourself like you seem, then you are able to intentionally put that into practice as you’re building your business and you don’t have to be like somebody else.
You talked about the mentor roles and you also talked about bringing in external executive coaching. Some companies don’t like doing that because of alignment issues, not wanting to invest in bringing in outsiders who may bring perspectives that they don’t want to hear. How do you go about picking your executive coaches or any outside resources that you haven’t developed yourself?
We’ve developed those relationships. People that are engaged specifically in external coaching. We haven’t gotten to the point as an organization where we love things being in-house. I’ll start by saying that. We try to do as much in-house as possible and have less consulting. For our organization, we haven’t gotten to the point for that to be a full-time role.
We do have a great two different partners that we’re aligned with. The key there is putting in the time and developing the relationships. That started with coaching a few people. We have one particular relationship that coach is currently coaching about 35 people in our organization. It’s one individual that meets with 35 different people on a regular basis.
This particular individual is in our office a couple of days a week. Call it a part-time, in-house resource is almost how we handle it. That started a few years ago by working with and mentoring a few members of the executive team. That individual was able to gain this deep understanding of who we are as an organization and get aligned before. Along the way, each year, we’ve added a few more people.
It’s almost in the way that I would describe it because I would share some and some of the reservations of the external perspective maybe changing or altering the culture. In this case, we know we’re aligned and it’s a process that we stay up to date with and stay pretty close to as well. We’ve got a trusted resource in that capacity.
You mentioned that you prefer internal resources to external resources. I understand that. What would be 1 or 2 advantages of external resources that you’re thinking, “I always want to be able to tap into that particular aspect of having an external resource?”
The danger of being all internal is that you only know what you know and for that team. Each new member of the team certainly brings new perspectives and new opinions but that team knows what it knows. That’s where I’ve seen us enjoy and leverage the external consulting realm for a variety of different services. It’s just to bring new ideas, new perspectives, and new expertise.
The danger of being all internal is that you only know what you know for that team. Click To TweetWe’re doing that. Our executive team is working with a consultant who’s a national expert on leadership development on this topic. The goal of that is to create better alignment among the executive team. Even the executive team is investing in that same thought process that we look for our people to grow as leaders, we all have to grow as well.
We have someone who’s an external resource that I know that’s not something that we would be able to facilitate or do on our own. That’s a great example of an opportunity to leverage someone externally to help create that alignment among the executive team and help us chart the next chapter. Part of this engagement is to create alignment and help us map out what the next five years look like on our leadership development journey. We’re in the midst of that.
That’s tremendous. Tell us a little bit more about your business, Wes.
We started out over a decade ago. We started in April of 2013 as a very, what I’d call somewhat typical commercial construction startup. I was the founder of the business. I was very lucky to bring in a great core team out of the gate. We hit the ground running and had a period of rapid growth for the first few years. Over the first three years, we had tremendous success. We’re in a fairly small market down in New Orleans, Louisiana. We’re not in a giant city but had tremendous success with a great team. Some good relationships in the market. We went $0 to $100 million in revenue in the first 36 months. It’s very aggressive growth out of the gate then we always had this vision to be a true builder.
We started to expand service offerings and got into heavy civil. It was the next thing that we jumped into. In terms of market sector, now we are doing building, heavy civil construction, which has been a high growth area of the business over the last few years. We’ve also added a number of self-perform capabilities over that same time period and this theory of being a true builder.
Philosophically, we’ve always seen an opportunity for the industry more broadly to improve. Fundamentals and the principles that the business has built on is a great culture, developing leaders, having an impact in everything we do, and the idea of innovation. The industry has a lot of space and opportunity to improve, how we do things, so we’re constantly pushing the envelope, challenging the status quo as an organization.
Even though it’s a little bit of an anomaly because the construction industry used to do things in more of a self-performed model, what I would call a true builder. That was somewhat of the older model. Most GCs gravitated away from that over time. We always saw that as an opportunity to differentiate as well and see tremendous value in the ability to do some of the work yourself as a GC and that self-perform capability and being a true builder as being one of the differentiators.
In a way, I’ve always viewed that to some extent. Even though it’s an older way of doing things in today’s day and age. It’s an opportunity for innovation because developing and retaining a workforce of talented individuals, we believe will ultimately allow us to gravitate into places of prefabrication and new ways of doing things and being able to do something in a factory environment means that you have to have the skilled labor to do so.
Developing and retaining a workforce of talented individuals will ultimately allow us to gravitate into places of prefabrication and new ways of doing things. Click To TweetThat’s where the opportunity comes in to start to leverage some of that idea of being a builder in the space of innovation. We already started down that road as well with an innovation lab, a fabrication facility, and a few other things. We’ve come a long way over the course of ten years. As I mentioned, we’re at about $250 million in revenue. We’re continuing to grow. We have opened an office in Nashville.
We’re working regionally around the Nashville market as well as regionally around New Orleans and the State of Louisiana and a little bit into the Gulf Coast in terms of geographic region. We’re in multiple different market sectors. The team is 230 or so people now and aggressively growing on all fronts in a very broad way across all the different segments of the business that I mentioned are all currently growing.
Your website is BuildImpetus.com?
It is the primary construction company. There’s another website, ThinkRNGD.com, which the links are all embedded within the website as well. That’s our innovation lab and prefab business. We also have our POM foundation. We run a 501(c)(3). That’s pretty embedded in the communities where we do business. I mentioned the Academy, which we call Renegade Academy. Those things, you can get to are or find on BuildImpetus.com website.
I got two more questions for you. One is, how do you maintain your sanity in the midst of a growing company like this? What do you do? Specifically practices or something that you do every day, every week that helps you to maintain your sanity.
Routine is the main thing that I find as an individual that has set me free. From that routine perspective, I try to eliminate as many decisions as possible from the day and go through my days in a very similar manner. The routine of waking up at the same time. I’m a big believer in exercise and the benefits of exercise and keeping your body certainly at the best version of yourself possible things as much.
The shirt you see me in, this shirt is generally what I wear every day. I’ve got a uniform. I eat the same things most days. Those are the things that, for me, I would say are routine oriented. I try to have a pretty structured day. I’m highly scheduled. I’ve got a pretty specific organizational system that works well for me. The pressures of continuing to grow and juggling a lot. I’ve almost doubled down over time and gotten more regimented above my routine and sticking to what works for me. That’s something that I find sets me free to do my best work and be real dialed in and focused over the day.
The last question I’ve got to ask, I’m in New Orleans and I’m visiting, what’s the one restaurant I need to hit?
There are so many.
I know but let’s say I’m going out of my routine, like it’s my cheat day. Cheat day in New Orleans. Where am I going?
There are so many good ones. It depends. What food do you like?
I’m agnostic. I’ll eat anything.
One of my favorites is not far from the office here and they’re a lot of older restaurants in New Orleans that have been around for a long time that are great to visit. I’ll give a little bit of a nod and plug certainly to some of those institutions. There’s a newer restaurant that I love because even if it’s a cheat day, I like to keep things, pretty clean and healthy. There’s a place called Pêche. They do a great job of a modern take called New Orleans Seafood. It’s not the hea3vy fried stuff. It’s generally a little bit of, you could say like a Mediterranean diet type approach but it’s fresh New Orleans local seafood. A great place.
It’s like the fish in French.
That’s it.
Wes, you’ve been tremendously helpful here. I appreciate your insights and thank you for joining us on the show.
Thank you for having me.
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Thank you for tuning into this episode with Wes. It was a great conversation. I hope you found it useful. Make sure you check out that one book by Lencioni about the team player. That’s a good one. Patrick Lencioni is good. You want to check out that book as well. Feel free to connect with Wes on LinkedIn. He’s doing some great work with his construction company and you’ll find it useful getting to know him. Thank you for reading.
Important Links
- Impetus
- Ideal Team Player
- ThinkRNGD.com
- LinkedIn – Wes Palmisano
- www.LinkedIn.com/company/BuildImpetus
- Restaurant Recommendation: Pêche
About Wes Palmisano
Wesley has led WJP since its inception in 2013, launching Palmisano Construction with 11 team members and their first commercial project: Fulton Alley. That first step of his ambitious thought-leading plan marked the beginning of the company’s signature renegade style and cultivation of a culture where everyone could make and break the mold.
With the company’s success and multiple award-winning projects, he naturally looked to push the envelope further. Over the following decade, WJP’s strategy continued to evolve through new ventures in construction, investment, innovation, leadership cultivation, and real estate development—pursuing a vertical integration of service offerings that allow WJP to influence the construction lifecycle and continue applying its renegade approach.
New company offerings expanded to include an Infrastructure division and Self-Perform capabilities in 2015—solidifying the company’s role as a True Builder. Five years later, the RNGD division was created to offer highly customized design work and standard prefabricated elements for projects of all scale. In 2022, Emergent Properties launched as another platform to test WJP’s hypothesis of a truly collaborative approach. The company will partner with Impetus and RNGD to utilize proprietary prefabricated component construction to develop best-in-class mixed-use projects across the southeastern United States.
But changing the industry means nothing without sustaining it, and Wesley knows the impact of investing in the next generation of thinkers and doers. In 2016, he launched Palmisano Foundation, a nonprofit (501c3) that focuses on education programs, initiatives, and driving tangible change in communities. He also launched Renegade Academy—a series of leadership development workshops that help develop the next generation of construction professionals.
After years of raising industry standards, and growing a small team to over 200 people, Palmisano Construction looked to align its name with its visionary ethos—rebranding as Impetus in 2021. That same year, the company expanded its presence to a new market: Nashville.
As a New Orleans native, Wesley grew up in a construction family. Inspired by their commitment to service—beginning with his grandfather, WWII veteran and founder of W.J. Palmisano Contractors, Warren Palmisano Sr.—Wesley looked to follow in their footsteps with his own vision. He earned a four-year Construction Management degree in three years at Louisiana State University, graduating Summa Cum Laude. Before launching WJP, he directly applied his background, education, expertise, and unique insight to over a decade of work, building and managing large-scale construction projects.
Wesley continues to pursue a new energetic future for the construction industry as he leads the family of WJP brands through direction, investment, challenging the status quo, and fostering a culture of innovators to do the same. After all, you can’t create a better world alone. Vision is just an idea until you bring together a group of relentless renegades to help build it.
