A Message from the Board
Bill Bramschreiber, Immediate Past President
ASCC’s 2024 Annual Conference was Terrific!
ASCC’s Annual Conference is held each September and is always a fun few days of networking opportunities, professional development, and access to learning resources for around 300 concrete professionals. This year’s ASCC Annual Conference was held in Kansas City, Missouri.
You have many choices of events that you can attend, and ASCC’s Annual Conference has never disappointed me. Highlights for me this year were:
ASCC’s highest honor is the ASCC Lifetime Achievement Award. At the opening dinner Mike Schneider, who recently retired (sort of) from Baker Concrete became just the 14th recipient of this award. Mike had over a 45-year career with Baker and retired as their Chief People Officer. Mike is incredibly active in numerous concrete and construction service organizations, including serving as both ACI and ASCC president. Mike strongly believes that it is to every concrete professional’s benefit to share their safety expertise with each other. Mike has been a legendary advocate for improving safety in the construction industry; including on mental health mindfulness, transitioning to helmets to reduce traumatic brain injury, opiate overdose awareness and pain management, and suicide awareness and prevention.
Keynote speaker Donnie Campbell was a math teacher and the high school basketball coach for Jason Sudeikis. Jason credits Donnie as being the major inspiration for his character Ted Lasso for the hit TV series. Donnie gave folksy anecdotes and lessons on how to make an impact by using positive leadership to develop people first through building character and trust. To inspire each of us to discover our “MVP”; your Mission, Values, and Principles, to inspire individuals to reach their potential and teams to reach new heights.
The next day’s keynote speaker was former Team Chaplain and Character Coach for the Kansas City Chiefs Phillip Kelley. Phillip described how his strengths have only been able to come through due to his own weaknesses and failures, including a battle with addiction. Using his acronym for culture, COALture, Phillip detailed his four keys to leveraging authenticity for explosive growth (both personally and professionally); Clarity, Ownership, Attitude, Leadership development.
ASCC First Vice President Cory Lee from Martin Concrete Construction led a panel discussion on Addressing Type 1L Cement from a Business Perspective – How to Manage Your Risk. Many at ASCC and throughout the concrete industry are working to address the various technical issues being seen in dissimilar ways in different parts of the country with Type 1L Cement. Cory has a passion about also getting the word out on how concrete contractors can better minimize their risk from a business standpoint. Lawyer Chris Dunn with Winstead provided construction law precedents, went through dangerous provisions commonly found in subcontracts, and discussed a three-layered defense to protect a concrete contractor during bidding, contract negotiations, and proactive communication and self-protection. Mark McGraw with Sandler Training advised on choosing the best time, place, and how to have difficult discussions about Type 1L. Hint; “The best way to deal with a bomb is to defuse it before it goes off.” Handouts for both Chris’s and Mark’s presentations are available.
ASCC SRMC (Safety and Risk Management Committee) Director Mark Messing from Joseph J. Albanese and Barry Nelson with FactorLab presented on how AI is becoming a powerful disruptive force for construction safety. How apps such as SmartTagIt can be used as a platform to gather tens of thousands of data points from videos of safety meetings such as pre-task planning conversations. Using natural language processing (NLP) technology; analytics can then be derived, calculated automatically, and summarized to allow teams to share this knowledge. This accelerates training and mentorship, resulting in a measurable and significant improvement in pre-task planning leadership and better team conversations. Many safety statistics are lagging indicators such as an OSHA Incident Rate, data such as this gives a leading indicator to allow for improvement to possibly prevent incidents.
ASCC always organizes golf and other fun activities for the closing Friday afternoon of each conference. This year there were tours of the National World War 1 Museum, the College Basketball Experience and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art available.
The ASCC Annual Conference is always a great way to learn and network. Next year we will be in Indianapolis, please join us.