Stephen Zasadil: Download Your Safety Companion Today! - POPDCAST TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Stephen Zasadil, creator of WSRCA’s Safety Companion App. You can read the transcript below or listen to the podcast.

Intro: Welcome to Roofing Road Trips with Heidi. Explore the roofing industry through the eyes of a long-term professional within the trade. Listen for insights, interviews and exciting news in the roofing industry today.

Megan Ellsworth: Hello, welcome to Roofing Road Trips. My name is Megan Ellsworth here at rooferscoffeeshop.com, and I am so excited to be talking about the Western States Safety App today with Steve. Steve, hello. How are you?

Stephen Zasadil: I'm doing very well. Thank you for reaching out and having us on here, Megan. I appreciate it.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah, yeah. We're so excited to have you on and really excited to get to know what's going on with the safety app, and I just think it's so cool that you guys did this. Let's dive right in and just have you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your roofing industry journey.

Stephen Zasadil: Okay, my name's Steve Zasadil. I started in safety around 2008, teaching first aid and CPR classes to construction crews. Around 2011, I went straight into full-time consultation for OSHA compliance, job site inspections, things like that. One of my first clients that I picked up on my own was ABC Roofing Supply up in the High Desert in California. Through them I ended up meeting different roofers, and it's just been kind of a relationship over the last, I guess I'm getting old, it's like 13 years of just construction safety stuff. Yeah, it's been a cool ride.

Megan Ellsworth: That's awesome. That's awesome. So what's your background with OSHA?

Stephen Zasadil: Again, I started back in 2008 with just first aid, CPR stuff. Then when I switched over to OSHA consultation, obviously I had to study a lot to be able to answer questions of guys that have been in the industry for a long time, so I kind of developed a thing that if I didn't know the answer that I'd find out, then get back to you within the hour. I was never afraid to say, "I don't know," which I think gave me a lot of credit because sometimes you get answers that may not be correct, and I'd way rather be correct all the time and not know sometimes.

In doing that, I learned a lot, and then I got my CHST through the Board of Certified Safety Professionals in 2016. That was a lot of studying, kind of a big test. Then, from there, I just worked with different OSHA divisions all over Southern California, Arizona, Nevada, pulling site permits, like height permits, things like that, dealing with OSHA actually on job sites through inspections, unfortunately some accident investigations. Yeah, worked back and forth with OSHA a lot over the years.

Megan Ellsworth: That's really cool. I feel like that is obviously a great background to have when you're working within the Roofing Contractors Association.

Stephen Zasadil: Sure.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah, so what was the inspiration behind this new app?

Stephen Zasadil: At a couple companies I'd worked with before, there was some attempts at writing a safety app, but either they didn't work the way that the client wanted them to, or they were kind of clunky, not really user-friendly. Then a couple of years ago, Joel, with Western States Roofing Contractors Association, asked me if it'd be something that we could do is write an app because they'd been thinking about it and talking about it. I was like, "Well, it's definitely something that we can put together," and they actually did a lot of the heavy lifting as far as making the app what it is.

I put it together and built it, but I got to send out all the information to the board. What they did is they spent about six months really like I asked them to [inaudible 00:03:59] can you try to break this and make sure that if there's something that doesn't work, that we can fix that? Then we met a few more times throughout the process of building it, and they had input and changes here and there. This is how it works on job sites as far as roofers are concerned, this is what we want, and now we've got this app. I think it's pretty fantastic. It works really well.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. Wow. That's great. Kind of going off of that, what does the app offer? On the job site, what would a contractor use it for?

Stephen Zasadil: Say you already got the app, you're signed up with it and you show up on the site, and the first thing that you're going to want to do is enter the information of the job you're on for your emergency action plan. It's kind of an OSHA requirement for every job site, doesn't matter if you're a roofer, framer, whatever. It's a requirement for each crew to have information on the site that they're on. There's an onsite inspection where you can enter in that information.

It uses GPS inside the app to actually map where you're at, so you enter in the address of where the work that you're doing. Then you can go through and say, "Okay, well, yes, I have my safety documentation. I've got my map to the nearest hospital. My fall protection stuff is in good condition." That's one side of it, just when you show up, it's already there for you.

Then we've got toolbox talks inside that you can take a picture inside the app of all the guys that attended the toolbox talk, which is a requirement for your weekly trainings. We've got onsite inspections [inaudible 00:05:36] requirement, equipment inspections, which are a daily requirement. You can do all that through the app. Then instead of having paperwork that either gets lost, gets damaged by weather, rain, materials, construction, you have really clean hands all the time so you never smudge paperwork, right? This makes it so that you can't lose it, and then you can just send it off to your respective safety people or the superintendent of the job site who's requesting it anyway. You can do all that stuff, and it happens in real time. So it's really good.

Megan Ellsworth: Wow. Oh my gosh. Well, I feel like that is just groundbreaking for a contractor. That's just great. Kind of going off onto a different path, have you ever experienced or know of anyone that has experienced anything dangerous or harmful on a job site that could have been potentially avoided with this app?

Stephen Zasadil: Sure, so we'll go with kind of an easy one. Nobody was hurt, thank goodness, but there was a fire on a reach lift. Had the inspection been done, which you can do inside the app, they would've caught that there was a leak. What ended up happening is that leak went down onto the running motor. The running motor caused that leak to ignite. Side note on it was would they have done the inspection correctly, they would've seen that the fire extinguisher that was on that piece of equipment was empty. The fire itself ended up totaling the machine.

Nobody got hurt, but had they had an app like this, they could have gone through, done the inspection and saw, "Oh, you know what? There's a leak. Oh, in fact, this fire extinguisher isn't even valid for us to be using." Had the app been in use, the inspection would've caught the leak in the first place, and then secondary would've caught the fact that the fire extinguisher wasn't going to be able to be used in case of a fire. Again, luckily nobody was hurt, but small things that end up being really big things, especially with construction, all that stuff is, it's heavy, it's hot, it's sharp and as far as fall protection goes with roofers, gravity always works.

Megan Ellsworth: Mm-hmm. Yeah, gravity's always doing its job.

Stephen Zasadil: Right?

Megan Ellsworth: You kind of went over what the app does. What can people expect from the user interface of the app?

Stephen Zasadil: Okay, so it's actually pretty easy. When you sign up with the app, you put in your email address, it's going to send you a verification email. If you don't get it directly, check your spam folder just in case it went there. Once you're in, you can set up your profile, throw a picture of yourself up there if you want, but from there, it's actually all just a big kind of charcuterie of safety stuff. It says workshops, inspections, toolbox talks and then so the workshops, you can go in and do roof walking, heat illness training, fall protection training.

It's all inside the app. There's the documentation of you doing the training itself, but it also has the information that you cover so that when, say, OSHA comes out to a job site and says, "Hey, did you cover that you have to have fall protection above six feet in the location that you're at inside the app?" "Yes, we actually talked about that this morning. Here's the workshop that we talked about. Here's the sign-in sheet that we have for the guys. We were all here. We talked about it. We're good to go." In the future, we're going to be adding more pieces of equipment for training. We update the weekly toolbox talks. Well, obviously weekly, I think we're up to 200 now that we've got.

Megan Ellsworth: Oh my gosh.

Stephen Zasadil: Yeah. By the end of this year, we'll have 204 toolbox talks that I personally went through and wrote and then vetted through the Western States guys so that they can make sure that it's in line with roofing and, yeah, pictures. It's a pretty big app.

Megan Ellsworth: That is so amazing. I'm just thinking all of our R-Club members, this is just a game changer for contractors on the site and off the site. On a rainy day when you can't get up on the roof going through some of those extra toolbox talks, wow.

Stephen Zasadil: Yeah.

Megan Ellsworth: So, kind of going off of that with who can use the app? Do you need to be a Western States member to download and get logged into the app?

Stephen Zasadil: The app is exclusive to Western States members. When this podcast comes out, what we're going to do is we're going to open it up for a couple of weeks so that anybody can download it and check it out. As far as value-wise goes, the cost of being a Western States member, it should be like 695 for the entire year for your company. Once you have that membership, you can actually have as many people on your crew using this app at the same time, and there's no extra cost for it.

It actually is part of your membership benefits. If you [inaudible 00:10:46] like that, typically it's between 20 and $45 per user. If you've got 10 guys, and that's per month, so if you've got 10 guys, you're spending $400 a month just for the app, and you don't get all the other benefits of Western States. The whole point of it was to make it so that it's a value added service, but safety is the most important thing. Who cares about making money if you can't spend it on your family, or if you don't have a family, spend it on yourself and have fun. If you're hurt, quality of life's everything.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. Yeah, that's so true. Where is it available to download and what kind of devices are people able to download on?

Stephen Zasadil: I wrote it so that I use it on any type of Android tablet. You can get it off the Google App store. You can use it on any iPad, iPhone device. You can get it from the Apple Store. Also, if you have, say, like a Surface Pro or PC, you can use it there too. There's a bunch of different places you can download it. Obviously, like I said, the Google Store, the Apple Store. If you go to the WSRCA website, there's QR codes that are listed on the website itself that you can just hold your phone up to and it'll direct you right to the download spot. Our website, snksafety.com, has the same QR codes where you can download it. It's really easy to find, and we're trying to make it as available as possible.

Megan Ellsworth: That's great. That's great. Yeah. I mean so many people, there are definitely apps that are only available to Apple users and vice versa with Google or Microsoft users, so it's great that everybody and anybody can download it. For all the people out there listening, like Steve said earlier, they're going to open up the app once this podcast is published, and so anybody out there can download it, check it out, look at the toolbox talks, make a profile. So everyone should be hopping on that. Steve, is there anything else to add that people should know about the app?

Stephen Zasadil: As far as the app goes, I mean, like I said, it's cross-platform so it doesn't matter what device you're using. It's really easy to use. Everything looks the same, whether you go from iPhone to your PC and vice versa. Western States Roofing Contractors Association, they put a lot of time and effort into it. The reasoning behind it is to keep guys safe, which I think should be the ultimate goal of any industry is to make sure your employees stay safe and feel like they're in an environment where they want to go to work and feel good there, and at least fulfilled for the day of work, and then come back and not be worried about safety issues the next day.

Megan Ellsworth: Mm-hmm. That's great. That's great. Thank you so much for chatting with me. I'm so excited about the app and it's live and ready to go. People can download it right now, so everybody go out there and get it and start using it, watch those amazing 200 toolbox talks. That's insane, actually.

Stephen Zasadil: And counting. Yeah.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah, and counting. Well, thank you, Steve.

Stephen Zasadil: Absolutely. Thank you, Megan.

Megan Ellsworth: Yeah. All right. Everyone, this has been a Roofing Road Trip. Thank you so much for listening. Make sure to hit subscribe and follow so you get notified every time we upload a new podcast. Go out there, download the WSRCA Safety App right now. It'll be linked in the footnotes of the podcast, so you can go straight to the Apple Store or Google Store and download it. We'll be seeing you next time on Roofing Road Trips.

Outro: Make sure to subscribe to our channel and leave a review. Thanks for listening. This has been Roofing Road Trips with Heidi from the rooferscoffeeshop.com.