“The way most construction companies work is, you know, the pre-com people, they are, their KPI is, how much work did you win? And it's like, well, You know, it's, you can win a lot of work that's not very profitable, and I'm not saying their only KPIs should be how did the job do, but like, let's look at that more across the board.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Russ Walling
Insight
Russ Walling: Learning to Work Hard Later in Life Is Very Difficult
“It's very, very hard to take somebody who doesn't have the experience of working hard and have them finally figure that out later in life.”
Russ WallingFeb 3, 2026▶ 7:47Episode 818 | What Does It Take to Be Successful? with Russ Walli...
Insight
Russ Walling: Focus on Standard Rules Rather Than Solving Every Exception
“There's rules and there's exceptions, right? And most of the time, if you follow the rules, you're in good shape. Stop focusing on the exceptions.”
Russ WallingFeb 3, 2026▶ 13:26Episode 818 | What Does It Take to Be Successful? with Russ Walli...
Insight
Russ Walling: Engineering Degrees Reinforce Risk Aversion Through Deterministic Thinking
“School just reinforces that, especially with an empirical degree, right? Engineering degree. It's real simple. You either got the answer right or you didn't, right?”
Russ WallingFeb 3, 2026▶ 19:09Episode 818 | What Does It Take to Be Successful? with Russ Walli...
Insight
Russ Walling: Fix workplace mistakes before analyzing how they happened
“So let's fix it first, and then once we get past it, create that space, it's fixed, everybody's feeling better. Okay, now let's talk about how we got here. Like, what did we do wrong here to make this happen?”
Russ WallingFeb 3, 2026▶ 27:00Episode 818 | What Does It Take to Be Successful? with Russ Walli...
Disclosure
Russ Walling: Firm avoids public works to focus on relationship-driven clients
“I always tell, tell everyone we want to work with people who want to work with us, not who have to work with us. So like one of the things we don't do a lot of public works because in public works, you throw out a number, whoever's lowest and has the scope, th…”
Russ WallingFeb 3, 2026▶ 34:04Episode 818 | What Does It Take to Be Successful? with Russ Walli...
Disclosure
Russ Walling: Capped downside justifies open collaboration with new partners
“I tell my people all the time, you know, yeah, we're exposing ourself here. Someone could screw us over with this. If they do, the damage will be X, and then we just won't work with them again, right?”
Russ WallingFeb 3, 2026▶ 38:03Episode 818 | What Does It Take to Be Successful? with Russ Walli...
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.