Garrett Hill’s first incident happened on a big construction site in Gainesville, Florida. A worker slipped on scaffolding, hit the side rail hard and thought he had cracked his ribs. The worker turned out not to be injured, and Garrett admits he was the one struggling. “I think I was huffing and wheezing more than he was,” he says. When the general contractor asked whether he had “this, this, and this,” his answer was, “I don’t have anything,” and he called his boss to ask what to do.

About ten years later, Garrett is a Regional Safety Manager at EquipmentShare, a company he describes as “a technology company that rents equipment.” He has about 106 offices to support, spends much of his time on the road across the Gulf Coast, and now teaches the OSHA 10 and OSHA 30 courses. An OSHA 30 was the only training he had when he started.

Garrett came into safety after serving in the Navy, when his father offered two options: work under him in general industry, or work with Garrett’s uncle and learn safety. He chose safety because he thought it would be easier, and found out quickly that it was the opposite. His first job was site safety for a crew of about 80, a role he called “the adult babysitter.” Roughly three and a half years in, he landed his first safety manager title without ever having built a health and safety program or written SOPs. “I could talk the talk, but I didn’t know how to walk the walk at the time,” he says.

“The biggest factor in building a safety culture and being a great safety manager is selling yourself,” Garrett says. “If the people you work with don’t like who you are, the message you send will never get out.” He describes two lanes in safety. The first “lives and breathes the book and thinks safety above all is always the case,” and that was Garrett early in his career. The second, where he works now, treats safety as “a support to the operations teams,” an approach he says operations managers take to much better.

His office audits show how that works in practice. Garrett talks with the general manager, the service manager and the techs, and he rides along with drivers, because “if I’m going to be invested in something, I have to know who I’m investing in.” He has been called “the talker” and “the conversationalist” at the company, and in his words, “I will talk your head off if you allow me.” Crews who know him take more interest in what he’s saying. “I’m not just the safety guy. I’m Garrett,” he says, and those crews are more likely to call him when they spot a problem.

Inside this episode:

• The choice his father offered after the Navy, and why Garrett picked safety
• The promotion that showed him how much he still had to learn
• How selling yourself first changes the way crews take in the safety message
• Moving from living by the book to supporting operations teams
• Running a three-and-a-half-hour new-hire safety orientation for 200 to 350 people
• Consistency, follow-through and the jump from a moderate to a strong safety culture
• Setting boundaries in a job where the phone can ring at 2 a.m.
• Bringing a mentor your own answer along with the question

On site, Garrett says a JHA tends to capture the familiar hazards, like slips, trips and falls, which he calls the fill-in-the-blanks. An experienced safety professional helps a crew zoom in on the actual problems on that job, the ones complacency makes easy to miss. Marc likens the role to a good pair of glasses, and Garrett agrees: “You are the pair of glasses.” He also makes a point of bringing solutions along with the warnings. “I have to give them the answers. I can’t just bring them the questions.”

Garrett describes building a strong safety culture as work that takes time, like “chiseling a lovely piece of art.” For the past two years he has led EquipmentShare’s new-hire safety orientation, a three-and-a-half-hour session for 200 to 350 people at a time, and he keeps it engaging by delivering the content in consumable pieces. As he puts it, “there’s no band-aid” in safety. He sees consistency as the hard part: it’s easy to start strong for a month, and harder to keep a branch on track once your attention moves to the next project.

Garrett also leans on a network of about 10 safety professionals he can call at any given moment, and he explains the value of that network this way: “One mind is great, especially when you’re a strong mind, but when you have many minds, you will be infinitely better.” He is also an ASSP member, and he brought what he saw at an ASSP conference in Anaheim back to that group. “I never just bring these people questions,” he says. As he explains it, “when I go to a mentor, it’s like, hey, this is the question I’ve got. This is what I’ve come up with. What am I missing?” He even welcomes the pushback: “Sometimes I hope they disagree because I’m not certain yet.”

He’s candid about burnout, too. Working emergency services for an environmental company, with 14-hour days and calls at 2 a.m. on a Saturday, was part of the reason he stepped away from that work, and it taught him balance the hard way. “When it hits five o’clock, if it’s not an emergency call from work, I am off my phone,” he says. His evenings and weekends go to the gym, friends or a good meal at his favorite place in Houston.

Looking back, Garrett would tell his younger self to learn early how to sell himself and be more open-minded about safety, which he believes would have taken him “ten times farther.” These days the calls run the other way. Newer safety professionals he mentors at other companies call him about their incidents, and he expects them to bring their own answer first.

If you manage safety across several sites, are new to the profession, or want crews to come to you before a small problem grows, this one is worth the hour.