Safety at Clayco: It’s Personal
Date Posted: April 28, 2025
Posted In: Ideas,
by Bob Clark, Founder and Executive Chairman, Clayco
At Clayco, safety is personal. Every time an employee gets hurt on one of our jobs—whether it’s a scratch, a pinched finger, or something more serious—I treat it as if it happened to a member of my own family. In fact, everyone at Clayco is family.
I started this company in 1984 with no formal engineering degree and no prior construction experience—just a deep love for architecture, innovative buildings, and cranes. Before Clayco, I worked as a journeyman painter for my father’s industrial painting company, where unsafe business practices led to frequent injuries. I found this completely unacceptable.
When I entered the construction industry, I was shocked by how widespread the acceptance of serious accidents (and even fatalities) was. The industry viewed them as an unavoidable part of the business. From the moment Clayco was founded, we took a strong stand to avoid unsafe practices at all costs.
A Culture of Safety Innovation
Although we at Clayco have had extraordinary results in our safety program, we recognize that constantly improving our safety procedures and standards is essential in our industry. We continue to develop innovative solutions and management processes that have helped shape safety behavior across construction projects in North America. While we don’t take sole credit, I will say that our relentless push for safety reform has been recognized by the Associated General Contractors (AGC), the insurance industry, and even our competitors. We have openly shared every lesson we’ve learned to accelerate industry-wide safety improvements.
My personal safety journey began at an all-day training session at the Wood River Oil Refinery in Alton, Illinois. While many attendees grumbled about spending eight hours reviewing basic safety protocols, I was fascinated. At the time, hard hats were the bare minimum, and safety glasses were far from standard. The oil industry, notorious for unchecked fatalities and injuries, was finally starting to take notice—and so was I.