March 6, 2025
Herb Sargent on The Legacy of Investing in People
Join us for a profound exploration of faith, vulnerability, and the transformative power of investing in people. In this engaging episode, we sit down with Herb, a visionary CEO in the construction industry, who shares his journey from humble beginnings to leading a successful business with a legacy spanning nearly a century. Herb digs deep into his family's history, sharing invaluable lessons learned from the journals of his grandfather and father, both of whom laid the groundwork for a meaningful company culture rooted in community and trust.
Throughout this heartfelt conversation, we examine the importance of empowering individuals and fostering a culture that celebrates growth. Herb recounts personal experiences battling self-doubt and the inspiration he found in the community that ultimately redirected his life. His candid reflections on mental health, particularly the challenges he faced, shed light on why creating spaces for vulnerability is essential in today's work environment.
We also delve into Herb's proactive workforce development initiatives, illustrating how teaching employees invaluable life skills can lead to holistic success. This episode invites listeners to rethink their approach to leadership, emphasizing that true success relies not just on profits but also on the dignity and well-being of those who contribute.
As we wrap up, Herb leaves us with a powerful message about the significance of faith and the promise of leading with love and compassion. Whether you're in a leadership position or just beginning your career, there's something here for everyone to ponder on their journey to making a positive impact. Tune in, get inspired, and discover the lasting change that comes from investing in people. Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share this transformative experience with others!
Connect with Herb at:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/herb-sargent-29a791152/
Make yourself a priority and get more done: https://www.depthbuilder.com/do-the-damn-thing
Download a PDF copy of Becoming the Promise You are Intended to Be
https://www.depthbuilder.com/books
00:00 - Introduction and Early Days
05:30 - The Impact of Investing in Others
12:00 - Insights on Community and Faith
20:00 - Documenting a Century: The Anniversary Book
31:06 - Lessons from Personal Journals
41:06 - Teaching Life Skills: Beyond Work
51:06 - Embracing Vulnerability in Leadership
01:01:06 - The Promise of Faith and Transformation
01:11:06 - Conclusion and Call to Action
WEBVTT
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There were no highways, there were no roads, literally just horse and wagon trails.
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Because my life is so damn amazing, herb, and it would not be this amazing had it not been for the people that decided to invest in me.
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People that worked with me.
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They bet on a three-legged horse and I was like, why would you bet on a three-legged horse?
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But they did.
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I spent the better part of a half century running away from God and when my life got upended, natasha, our CFO, was the one that said to me you need community, like you had to come to church.
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What is going on L&M family If you can't tell.
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I'm like jumping for joy and I was kind of nervous and all riled up about today's interview because this is the second time I got to spend some time with him.
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He's been very generous and he's a baller like he's an OG.
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I send out a questionnaire of like, how do you want me to introduce you?
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And evidence of him being an OG was just Herb, and I love that because he's been there and he doesn't need to do need all the showers of praise, but I'm going to do it anyway.
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So Mr Herb has 45 years in the construction industry.
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He's impacted hundreds and hundreds of careers, which is one of the things that really caught my attention about the way he operates his business and his forward thinking or at least maybe legacy mindset of what he's doing in the construction business.
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And even though he's back where he started, he is the ceo of sargent.
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He's got tons of experience.
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I know we're going to get some beautiful, beautiful nuggets about what that is and if you're new here, this is the learnings and missteps podcast, where you get to see how real people just like you are sharing their gifts and talents to leave this world better than they found it.
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I'm Jesse, your selfish servant, and you're about to get to know Mr Herb.
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Mr Herb, how are you doing, sir?
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Hey, jesse, so glad to talk to you again.
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I'm really disappointed.
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I saw you posted somewhere that you took somebody out with those famous tacos you promised me, but we couldn't make it work that day I was hoping to get back to San Antonio for those tacos, but I did appreciate you taking time to meet with me on a Sunday afternoon.
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Yeah, that was awesome.
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Yeah, that's one of those things missed opportunities that I'm going to have to check off the list because we ended up connecting on a Sunday and that taco place Eddie's Taco House they're closed on Sundays thing on a Sunday, and that taco place Eddie's Taco House, they're closed on Sundays.
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So somehow or some way we're going to make it happen.
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But you were ultra generous with your time.
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We hung out, had dinner, you shared some insights not some like lots of insights and you know, for me as a, we'll say, a budding entrepreneur, having that time with you really, I'll just say, boosted my confidence and solidified the ground underneath my feet to say, ok, I'm not doing this entirely wrong, especially with somebody of your stature.
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To gift me with that much time and that much insight was amazing.
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Well, I don't know about my stature, but I will say this I felt like it was my privilege to spend the time with you and hear your story, because it's a compelling story too.
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There's a lot of really great stories in this business.
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You know that are ground up stories, right.
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Yes, yes, yes.
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So, speaking of stories in the business, everybody wants to know how easy is it to write the 100th year anniversary book?
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You know I'll be honest with you.
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It's been easier than I thought it was going to be.
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Really Good.
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I have these fits and starts where I pile a layer on it every day for four weeks and then not touch it for a month and then work on it again.
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So I just started on it again today I'm so fortunate that my grandfather kept a journal, my dad kept a journal, so I had those assets to fall back on and those kind of carry me in overlap to the time when I started in the business.
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So you know, and of course my knowledge of the business, my firsthand knowledge, is much denser than his.
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What I'm finding is, the further in time I get the closest to now we get, the denser and denser the information becomes.
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I've got to figure out the right balance because I want't I want to be careful that I don't give the early history the short sheet.
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You know, I want to make sure everything gets represented right.
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But frankly, some of the more recent history in the company has been, at least to today's people, some of the most important.
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So I've got all the background information that I really need to write it.
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Yeah.
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So what's it like?
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Like going through your grandfather and your father's journals.
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What is that experience like?
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I just have no concept.
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Like that seems pretty, it feels like it would be intense.
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It can be.
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Yeah, my granddad, my grandmother, was very ill Shortly after they had kids.
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She had some mental illnesses as well as some physical illnesses and it shows up in his journal and while he had health that came in every day and actually really helped.
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He took her everywhere he went.
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If he drove to Florida he'd load her in the car and drive to Florida.
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They usually drove even as wide all that much.
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So reading some parts of that, you know his life and how difficult life must have been for him with five children, and his wife was really I'm going to say this about Wright with respect to her but he couldn't depend on her being there because of her illness.
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It was pretty severe and the fact that he built this business starting at a time when really there were no highways, there were no roads to speak of, I mean literally just horse and wagon trails.
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And he built this business in that period with five kids and that situation.
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It really tells a story about a guy that was not only really ingenious in his own way, really humble guy, super humble guy, but just a guy that never got overexcited.
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He was so level and in fact I was reading earlier today one of the New England instructions in the story and the writer was kind of saying, like we're trying to picture Herb on a job site where he's, you know, demeaning and swearing at all the men, like apparently they had witnessed elsewhere, and like we can't picture this with this guy.
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So a lot of this stuff is really great and he was such a great mentor to me.
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Uh, he passed away around.
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I think I was 43, so I knew him a good long time of my life, uh, and we spent a lot of time together so yeah, you've got a collection of journals that your grandfather wrote, a collection of journals that your father wrote.
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Was that kind of a practice like hey, let's document our thoughts so that we can pass it on to the next generation, or was it just something that kind of worked out that way?
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I think it just worked out that way.
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I don't think either one of them thought, you know, like in 1943, when my grandfather started his journals been in business 17 years but still a very small business I don't think he thought anybody was going to be referring back and writing the 100th anniversary book and that this would be handy to them.
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At the time I don't really know what his thought process was.
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I don't really know what his thought process was and there were some periods across the decades where you know, he'd miss nine months of a year and he'd pick it up again and say sorry, I missed the last nine months or something like that.
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Yeah, yeah, they were mostly factual things.
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Like my grandfathers were really only four or five lines.
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So they're just like here's what happened.
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Today my dad has gotten into more detail, but still factual stuff.
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It wasn't neither one of them were like how they're feeling or not, like journaling in a therapeutic sense.
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It was more journaling in just kind of a record-keeping sense.
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But my dad's are much more detailed, much his could take up half a page, but he frankly I was going to say he had a little going on, but I guess technically he did, but he had different technologies to help him, like the telephone, the computer, the automobile, the airplane, that my grandfather did not have early on.
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Wow, and so being able to take that snapshot, or a snapshot of back then, what are some consistent things that transferred to now, with or without the technology?
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There's got to be some like human dynamic stuff that they're like yep, it was the same then as it is now.
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That's such a great question and when?
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I can't remember if I've told you this, but before you get to know we're going to do the L&M family member, shout out.
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This one goes out to Miss Claudia.
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Miss Claudia says I had a wonderful opportunity yesterday to join a group of industry rock stars in their pursuit of continuous improvement.
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Jesse's time management workshop is just what I needed to get 2025 started with the right mindset.
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Claudia, thank you for taking the time to leave that message, because it just made me happy, because I don't want to waste people's time and I'm glad that you had a good time and folks you already know hit me up, leave a comment, leave a review, so that I can take the opportunity to shout you out in the future and so that you boost my ego just a little bit, not too much, just a little bit.
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I just love to know who's out there listening and getting value from these conversations.
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My dad and my uncle sold the business in 1998.
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And then I bought it back in 2005.
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And when we were combining my company with that company, we had a two-day retreat and one of the questions was okay, like, the tools we have today to work with don't even resemble what they had back then.
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Like it was small cable shovels and two-yard dump trucks.
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And now we're dealing with, you know, sometimes 50, 100, 50, 200 ton excavators, 60-yard load trucks.
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We have GPS now.
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Back then it was tape measures and the hand level in great states.
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What we were building back then was roads and airports primarily.
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There were no landfills being built.
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Back then there was barely any commercial work being done of any scale, so it was almost all infrastructure type work.
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Compared to now, we build landfills, airports, highways, commercial data centers right, I mean stuff like this and we've even drained it.
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So the tools we had then and now are totally different.
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What we've built then and now are totally different.
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And so we realized that and we said okay, what has been the same for all these years?
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What has been the same?
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And basically what we came up with is we need to invest in people.
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That's one of the same things, because Herb was a very staunch investor in people.
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We have to do the right thing, regardless if anybody's watching or not.
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We've got to do the right thing.
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We've got to always hone our craft.
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We've got to get better every day at what we do, and these are our values.
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We've got to win in the field, and winning in the field means everybody.
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This part of the project wins, regardless of where you are.
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If you're the owner, you feel like we're going to show up with a spirit of execution that says we're going to win this for you.
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And those are the four things that we wrote down, that we codified as our core values.
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Nice.
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The one thing that really comes across is invest in people, and I say it really comes across because I'm totally biased in that direction, right, I know that.
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Great, and because my life is so damn amazing, herb.
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And it would not be this amazing had it not been for the people that decided to invest in me, and there were periods of time when it was a bad investment and they did it anyway.
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I say, mike, you know people that work with me.
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They bet on a three-legged horse.
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And you know I was like why would you bet on a three-legged horse?
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But they did.
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And so when you recognize that wait a minute, I'm a three-legged horse, I better run my ass off.
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I mean that investment in you propels you to do things more and better and you want to respect that investment that they're putting in you and not let them down.
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That's to me a big yes, yes, no, that's exactly right.
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I'm like, okay, they see something, I'm gonna try like hell, just so they don't they ain't wasting their time.
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And it turned into something.
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Yeah, now, philosophically, I think most people would say, yeah, that's a great idea.
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But when it comes to operating a business, I mean you're saying it's one of your four core values, but you're not just saying it, because you have a whole workforce development program that can not just go to this class, but you help build careers and lives, like that is part of the system within your organization.
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That's a different thing than saying we believe in people, we're going to invest in them, and so, in terms of developing that thing because we know where it came from and I applaud you not just for listing that Maybe you have the time horizon to say what was true then, that is true now, which is brilliant, and maybe a lot of organizations don't have that, but there's still a level of commitment and sacrifice and courage that a leader has to make to actually invest dollars that help develop, nurture and groom people.
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Was that just an easy press of a button?
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What was that like for you?
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So, to be fair about our values, you know there have been periods in time where we have not been very good at them, or there have been, there has been a year when all our jobs didn't necessarily live up to those values, right?
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So, just to be fair about us, there was a period where we did not invest in people that much, and I will tell you that I've said this and posted this online my biggest mistake of my career is going through the Great Recession and not being at an altitude.
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We were flying low, not being at an altitude that allowed us to see 20 years ahead, and instead of investing in people during that period because we didn't have the financial capacity to do that like we wanted to we were, frankly, just trying to keep the plane in the air for the next mile frankly, just trying to keep the plane in the air for the next mile and so we did not invest much from late, let's say, 2010 to 2014.
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And it became clear to me that, you know, if we were going to be an organization that was durable, that was going to be sustainable, we need people, and in 2010, 10% of our people were under 25 years old and 34% were under 40.
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So 66% were over 40.
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And in 2015, I think it was, I sat down with one of our regional managers, kevin Gord, a real good friend of mine.
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He and I started laboring together in 1983.
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And I said to Kevin I need to do something different, we need to bring some people in and I need you to be our guy, our workforce advancement guy that goes to the high school and brings people in and we're going to try to do 15, 20 people a year and bring in immediate high school grads and and try to try to build our workforce back up.
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And and he said I don't think that's going to help us next year.
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And I said Canada, it's not next, it's not for next year, it's for 2025.
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It's for this year that we're in now.
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And so now our under 25 component this is field work only is 25% versus 10% in 2012.
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It's at 25% now and our under 40 component went from 36% almost 56%.
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So we're in that range.
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So that's in a growing workforce number, right?
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It's not like we just said well, let's let all the old guys you know die off or hit with all the old guys.
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That's a growing component of the growing workforce.
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And I created Kevin and Pete Parizeau in our office, and my team, eric Ritchie and Tasha Gardner, for believing in that investment.
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When those investments started to gel in people, that's when we started really to take off as a company again from 2018, 19, 20, 21 to now.
00:18:10.711 --> 00:18:33.130
And we've really just started taking off as a company and I've shown our corporate altitude from 2005 to 2025 at the Build-A-Lit Area in our old summit and, you know, showed our people getting smaller and smaller and smaller through the recession and then we kind of came out of the recession.
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It shot up a little bit, but then we outgrew our people and so I said, all right, now's the time we got to invest and as we grow, those people and they become players that were, you know, in the AAA I use a lot of sports analogies AAA baseball players we had them playing at the big league level for a while, but now they're playing at the big league level because we've really focused a lot of attention on them came in from high school and put them through this academy.
00:19:04.469 --> 00:19:11.095
We had Two people in specific I can think of that are both senior forward for us.
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They'll be superintendents before long and you know these guys, they came out of high school Just needed a job.
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Right and our guys Pete and Karen, they'll bring them in and they start.
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They're teaching them how to cook chicken.
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They teach them how to go get groceries you know how to get lunch and breakfast on 50 bucks a week and they literally make the budget out.
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They take them to the grocery store, they buy the food, they come back.
00:19:38.176 --> 00:19:38.356
Wow.
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And they put together lunches.
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They teach them how to check into the hotel and not track dirt all over the place, how to be respectful, check into the hotel, how to set up a checking account, making sure that public health accounts are set up, and it's so much more than just what we can get out of them.
00:19:57.770 --> 00:20:01.048
It's really the way we see it.
00:20:01.048 --> 00:20:13.313
There's the professional piece that most companies are interested in, there's the relational piece, the financial piece, the physical piece and then the mental piece.
00:20:13.313 --> 00:20:21.031
You know we wanted to have margins of safety across all five of those, if we can.
00:20:22.374 --> 00:20:26.424
My goodness You've probably heard stories over and over and over, and you may have heard it yourself.
00:20:26.424 --> 00:20:27.147
I know I have.
00:20:27.147 --> 00:20:31.730
The biggest stress I had in a marriage was financial early on.
00:20:31.730 --> 00:20:44.787
Yeah Right, and it's okay if we can figure out the financial piece and make that go away as a hill we've got to shed blood on, you know, between our families.
00:20:44.787 --> 00:20:55.042
If we can make that in a way we can focus on the other things that really matter, like our relationship, our children, our families, our friends, that sort of stuff.
00:20:55.042 --> 00:20:56.548
That's the way.
00:20:57.681 --> 00:20:58.041
Yeah.
00:20:58.041 --> 00:21:03.099
So two things huge, one division, right.
00:21:03.099 --> 00:21:25.945
Like the foresight to play the super, super long game Cause I love that Like this ain't going to help us next year yeah, you're right, this is for 10, 15 years down the road and like just the courage that that takes real courage to to make that decision, cause I'm sure there were more than one, at least more than one person saying what the hell are we doing here?
00:21:25.945 --> 00:21:27.767
This isn't solving our problem right now.
00:21:27.767 --> 00:21:36.907
Second, you don't just have a workforce development program, you have a program that develops the whole person.
00:21:37.670 --> 00:21:57.294
Based on what you told me, because, man, you know, when I hit traveling jobs you may have never heard this story before from anybody, but the first time I got hit for some traveling work, they gave me the per diem before I went to like so that I could pay for my hotel and all this stuff.
00:21:57.294 --> 00:22:00.164
And guess what it lasted me?
00:22:00.164 --> 00:22:01.509
One night it was gone.
00:22:01.509 --> 00:22:07.345
I went and had a blast and I was eating bologna and ramen for 10 days because I just had.
00:22:07.345 --> 00:22:08.528
No, it was party money.
00:22:08.528 --> 00:22:14.486
It was like I had no right force, right, like I was thinking about right now I got a few hundred extra bucks.
00:22:14.486 --> 00:22:19.628
I'm gonna have to sleep in the truck now and I'm gonna eat bologna and this is what it's gonna be.
00:22:19.628 --> 00:22:36.715
It's easy because I've been in in this position where I said, well, it's not my fault, they don't know how to manage their money, and so for you guys to take ownership of that and say let's teach them how to be successful with this bucket of resources that they have is tremendous.
00:22:37.340 --> 00:22:38.707
I've seen it too many times.
00:22:38.707 --> 00:22:41.848
I had one of our one of our employees been with us over 50 years, came to me probably four years ago.
00:22:41.848 --> 00:22:44.116
One of our employees has been with us over 50 years.
00:22:44.116 --> 00:22:47.396
He came to me probably four years ago.
00:22:47.396 --> 00:22:50.386
He said if you gave me $150,000, I could retire.
00:22:50.386 --> 00:22:53.905
The guy is close to 70.
00:22:53.905 --> 00:22:58.905
I said you've had a 401k for decades.
00:22:58.905 --> 00:23:06.746
He said my son's wife had cancer and I drained all my money.
00:23:06.746 --> 00:23:24.105
Yeah, and so that story is repeated over and over and over stories like it, and so we're trying to teach people through the risk or health savings account, put money away for health through the risk or health savings account.
00:23:24.105 --> 00:23:32.935
Put money away for health Because if you don't need it now in your 20s, 30s and 40s, you're going to need it when you turn 60s and 70s and this is almost just like another retirement account.
00:23:36.362 --> 00:23:39.836
They can put money in every year, rematch the money.
00:23:39.876 --> 00:23:44.772
Wow, Just another retirement account that they can have another $200,000 to $200,000 in that account.
00:23:44.772 --> 00:23:51.111
So if they're going to need it someday, right, you and I are going to need it someday for healthcare.
00:23:51.111 --> 00:24:00.384
And so we're trying to hit them on every and I think, almost to the point where they become tone deaf to it in a way.
00:24:00.423 --> 00:24:03.873
but we try to hit them with all these things at once.
00:24:03.873 --> 00:24:06.026
We try to okay, now, what about this?
00:24:06.026 --> 00:24:21.082
And Karen and Pete and Kendall and Tim, our workforce advancement guys, when they go out on the field they talk to these young guys about this stuff and if they don't have it set up, they go okay, let's go in the office, we'll call the NATO office, we'll get this set up.
00:24:21.082 --> 00:24:23.005
And they take the time to do it.
00:24:23.005 --> 00:24:36.621
I mean it's just such an important thing because, man, I've said this my whole career If somebody comes and works in this business for 20, 30, 40 years, I mean they're taking a lot out of their body.
00:24:36.621 --> 00:24:37.684
You know that.
00:24:39.048 --> 00:24:43.951
They ought to be able to retire with a surplus of dignity.
00:24:43.951 --> 00:24:57.645
I mean they ought to be like this guy that came to me and he knew he wasn't going to get $150,000, but that's not very dignified for him.
00:24:57.645 --> 00:24:58.910
I feel bad for him.
00:24:58.910 --> 00:25:07.625
Now we'll do what we can to help him through retirement, work him where we can, but I'd rather have.
00:25:07.625 --> 00:25:14.214
It's like the same thing of managing hazards versus managing injuries.
00:25:14.214 --> 00:25:19.290
When we're managing hazards, we're investing attention.
00:25:19.290 --> 00:25:22.625
When we're monitoring injuries, we're paying attention.
00:25:24.368 --> 00:25:27.013
Yes, oh, my God, I love that distinction.
00:25:27.521 --> 00:25:34.351
It's a huge difference and when we're paying attention to injuries, our attention is off the management piece.
00:25:34.351 --> 00:25:37.964
We're over here and that's when you know.
00:25:37.964 --> 00:25:40.250
That's when we cream inside the head or something.
00:25:40.250 --> 00:25:43.730
We end up taking all our management time and putting it in injury.
00:25:43.730 --> 00:25:46.224
So the same thing with finance.
00:25:46.224 --> 00:25:48.171
It's the same thing with all these other things.
00:25:48.171 --> 00:25:56.574
If we can learn I think I heard it put we need to stop pulling people out of the river and go up river and figure out why they're falling in.
00:25:57.039 --> 00:25:58.183
Yes, yes.
00:25:58.183 --> 00:26:04.366
Well, it's getting in front of it again and so it's proactive approach to OK.
00:26:04.366 --> 00:26:07.993
What can we do preemptively to create the conditions we want?
00:26:07.993 --> 00:26:12.070
If we don't do that, we're going to be in a reactive state.
00:26:12.070 --> 00:26:14.680
That is not beneficial for anybody in the long term.
00:26:14.960 --> 00:26:18.286
We're paying it but there's no return on.
00:26:18.286 --> 00:26:19.749
It's like paying taxes.
00:26:19.749 --> 00:26:25.018
It's like Tony bills that money's gone, there's no return back on it.
00:26:25.018 --> 00:26:29.224
Right, but if you don't, so it's investment versus paying.
00:26:30.009 --> 00:26:30.290
Yeah.
00:26:30.290 --> 00:26:40.545
Now for for the folks out there that are listening to this and saying, yeah, sure, that's easy for you to say now how many people do the sergeant employ right now?
00:26:41.510 --> 00:26:43.298
Right now we're around 525.
00:26:49.630 --> 00:27:00.079
now, right now we're around 525, baby 525, and when you, when y'all made the shift to say, okay, we're going to invest in our people that you started developing, because I'm sure the, the workforce development program has evolved over time, every year it changes.
00:27:00.401 --> 00:27:07.973
I mean literally karen and pete take a look at every single year and we survey the people that go through it, every piece of our training.
00:27:07.973 --> 00:27:12.210
They survey what went right, what went wrong and we make adjustments.
00:27:12.210 --> 00:27:14.638
Those guys, it will not settle.
00:27:14.638 --> 00:27:16.695
But I interrupted you.
00:27:17.991 --> 00:27:19.096
No, no, it's beautiful.
00:27:19.096 --> 00:27:21.397
That's actually a phenomenal point.
00:27:21.397 --> 00:27:24.117
So the question you're 500 now.
00:27:24.117 --> 00:27:26.238
You started this a while back.
00:27:26.238 --> 00:27:28.817
How many people did you have back then?
00:27:29.519 --> 00:27:30.763
We were about 325.
00:27:31.990 --> 00:27:38.807
Okay, so 60-ish percent of where you're at now, and so we're not talking.
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