Do the Right Thing Every Day: Jay Prock’s Family Business Revolution

Anthony Codispoti : Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today’s guest is Mr. Jay Prock. He is the president and owner of Tidewater Staffing, a company founded in 1992 and based in Chesapeake, Virginia. They specialize in providing workforce solutions for ship repair, manufacturing, warehouse and logistics employers in the Port of Virginia.

Their mission is to connect job seekers with the right employers while ensuring transparent hiring processes, background checks and drug screenings. Now Jay has been with Tidewater Staffing since January of 2011. First as a last nine years as president, he holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Florida Southern College. And under his leadership, the organization has provided flexible staffing services without hiring fees, helping countless individuals find meaningful work. Jay has also been recognized with honors like the top 40 under 40 and the Francis R. Sharp Executive Leadership Award for promoting employee safety.

His focus on health, safety and organic growth shows his acclimat to team development and long term success. Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, AdBak Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. Imagine being able to give your employees free access to doctors, therapists and prescription meds in a way that actually puts more money in your staff’s pockets and the company’s too. As an example, one recent client with 450 employees boosted net profits over $412,000 a year. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at adbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, President of Tidewater Staffing Jay Prock. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Jay Prock: No, Anthony, it’s great. Happy to be here. I appreciate the invite.

Anthony Codispoti : So Jay, you’ve spent what appears to be almost your entire working career with Tidewater Staffing. How did the opportunity first come about?

Jay Prock: I used the term thoroughbred, maybe even unknown thoroughbred. Tidewater is a family company. Currently, my sister and I operate it, but it was founded in 92 by my dad. He put me through all kinds of fun challenges and looking back on it, a lot of things that were grooming for this position. Probably one of my favorite stories is really about his beginnings and how he got into template labor.

He was a janitor for a company called Abacus around here when he graduated from University of Georgia and he went to his boss at the time and said, hey, I think I understand what you’re doing and I like it and I’d like to be a part of it. Of course, at the time he’d had all four of his bottom teeth and two of his top teeth knocked out from rugby. He had long hair and a beard and Thumbel said, that’s okay, I’ll give you a chance, but you got to do these things. You got to fix your teeth, cut your beard, make me a promise that you’re going to stop chewing tobacco and we’ll give you a go. That’s what dad did.

Shed up the next day with a clean haircut, a Dennis slip, a solid oast that he wouldn’t chew anymore and the opportunity came his way. Flash forward, he built the business on the waterfront, doing a lot of fire watch and stuff for a company around here called Metromachine. What’s fire watch? Fire watch is a position for hot work on board vessels.

When somebody is welding or fitting or doing any kind of work that generates spark or uses an arc, NAVSEE standard items requires that a person overseas that work on standby with a fire bottle. That’s where dad built the business from was that entry level position and then kind of worked his way up from there until Thumbel came in and said, hey, I got good news and I got bad news. He said, well, what’s going on? He says, good news is we’re going public. Well, great. Happy day.

Payday for Mark Frock. He says, bad news is you ain’t coming with us. Yeah. He said, well, what do you mean? What’s going on?

Thumbel said the acquisition team or the equity investor or whatever it was, they weren’t interested in stomaching the risk of waterfront business. And that’s a big part and a big concern of what we do. And when you mention health and safety in my leadership style and that Francis R. Sharp Award actually comes from our workers comp provider, that’s a big deal keeping people safe on the job for us and happily expand on that later in conversation, but it’s something that’s always forefront in mind. So the risk wasn’t appealing to the acquirers of abacus. And so Thumbel funded dad’s payroll and thought for sure he’d never get out from underneath of them because the terms were so strict.

But we, as a family, are capable of operating a really thrifty and fiscally conservative operation. And so he organically got to a point where he didn’t need Thumbel. So he got traditional financing and continued to grow the business. He started with about two, three hundred in.

Anthony Codispoti : So he split off at this point. Okay. Yeah. So he split off and Thumbel, he funded the payroll initially and then you guys kind of find a way to break off from that.

Jay Prock: That’s right. Flash forward to about 2010. Dad called me up and said, hey, you know, we’ve got this family business and everything that I understand about family business transitions is that it’s going to take about five years to make this happen. I was doing real estate in central Florida at the time and got to looking at numbers and thinking about stuff and family legacy and everything else.

And he said, if you think there is a possibility, now is the time. So I packed up all my stuff, grabbed my girlfriend at the time who’s now wife and mother of my four kids. You know, just a few short months later, I was throwing boxes in a container and checking in crews on the yards and, you know, working in the business.

Anthony Codispoti : Had you prior to that phone call ever thought that you were going to get involved in the business? I mean, you were off kind of doing your own thing. Had the seed already been planted before that? Or did this kind of call come out of left field? He knew it was coming.

Jay Prock: I had my head down and I was grinding. I didn’t have any real serious job prospects out of college because I graduated in 08. And central Florida was one of the hardest hits, one of the hardest hit markets for, you know, for the fiscal crisis at that time. So what I was able to do was scoop up a bunch of, you know, very affordable properties. I mean, I was scooping up properties for 20, 30, 40K at a time. And I found a finance partner that, you know, helped me do that.

Started with three doors, but it was me laying the tile, running the insulation, doing the plumbing. I mean, I’ve been shocked more times than I have count. I was trying to do electrical stuff, but I learned a lot. And actually part of the series of conversations with dad was he was like, look, you know, I’m happy with what you’ve done down there. And, you know, even if everything goes to you know, heck in a hand basket, you’re always going to be employable. You’ll always be able to have a job.

You’ll always be able to put food on a table. Now look at our tradesmen now. And I think about that too, you know, they go through a lot with the ups and downs and the challenges of their work. But man, they are never really out of a job. It’s just a matter of whether or not you can pay them enough to do it. Okay.

Anthony Codispoti : So what is what is the landscape of your industry look like now?

Jay Prock: Landscape of the industry. There’s a lot of M &A. There’s a lot of acquisitions happening. I’m finding there’s money that I didn’t realize that was out there, you know, the Carlisle group and StellX and some of these big major equity investors are coming into the market that we hadn’t seen, you know, really prior to maybe five, six, seven years ago. That’s been one of the things that’s been changing the market here in a way that is a little bit different on unusual packaging, two, three, four, five companies at a time and taking that package and re-flipping it.

Specific to staffing. It’s all about the people. It’s all about the relationships. It’s all about making sure that we can and a big part of TIE Boarders’ role is stitching together each of these contracts. As one vessel comes in, they’re going to need a ton of employees. The contractors that get the work on, say, the Oscar Austin might not have all the work on the baton, but they’re both going to be in port. And what we try to do is we try to keep the town here in the port by keeping that town busy and working. So whether it’s on the Oscar Austin with a particular flooring contractor or the baton on a different flooring contractor, when one contract ends, it’s our job to stitch the employees’ jobs together such that they can continue to provide for themselves and their families.

Anthony Codispoti : That has to be a huge logistical challenge because you’re not really in control of when those jobs sort of become available, right?

Jay Prock: A million percent, yeah. There is some transparency with things like sand.gov and public announcements of particular contracts and that sort of stuff. So we try to do a lot of watching on that, but really, again, it comes down to even our personal relationships with our customers.

Even just yesterday morning, I spent an hour, hour and a half on the phone with a customer who had a competitor poaching people off of his deck plate, trying to get them to go on to other jobs and whatnot. So we work through that problem. We come up with a couple of strategies and solutions and keep it marching forward. But that’s a prime example of how Tidewater’s quality and connection to its customers and its associates serves us not only in the short term of solving this particular problem, but the likability and trust that is built from those exchanges continues to serve when the new flashy people on the street come in and think that they can get in the ship repair market because they see what we do and they think that it’s easy.

Anthony Codispoti : These people trying to come in are the people that have experience in staffing, but not specifically in shipbuilding staffing. There are some nuances in this particular industry that they’re just not aware of before they get into it.

Jay Prock: Big time. And it’s for as big of an industry as it is, is a very tight knit community. Everybody has a tendency to know everybody else, especially the big players that have been around a long time. And for better or for worse, this thoroughbred has been around about 14 years old.

Anthony Codispoti : So I want to go back to when the thoroughbred came in and this, it was Dad’s show and you’re kind of learning the ropes, kind of working your way up, learning the business from the bottom up. What was that transition like for you?

Jay Prock: You know, I understand in McDonald’s, they make even the manager’s flip burgers. So I was willing to take that kind of on the chin. And I learned a ton about logistics and the way that the freight movement industry works. At the time, that was a newer sector of business for us.

And I, to this day, remember the names and faces of the people and the customers that really chewed me out and gave it to me good. What were you messing up, Jay? Oh, man, if you had a misdeverk, if you put the wrong item number on the wrong card and it went to the wrong truck, you ended up costing the customer and our customers and their customers money because, you know, if ever Ducky is supposed to go to Norfolk and it ends up in Baltimore, you know, that’s a problem for logistics company.

They actually would ask that if you knew that you had a misdeverk to go get it. And there was more than once where if you pack a container left to right, high and tight, you still end up having just a little bit of room at the top of the container. And because I was thinner and a little bit more athletic than most of my counterparts, it was my job to go into sometimes all the way to the back of the container if it happened early in the day.

And find the misdeverts, pull them out. And if I could save it, that container from having to be completely unloaded, I got a couple of good kudos doing that a couple of times.

Anthony Codispoti : That was pretty hot and dirty job it sounds like.

Jay Prock: Oh man, the dirtiest, sorry on the shipyards though. One of my favorites was with a mentor of mine in the industry who has since retired. A guy with a tank cleaning company with big white beard who walked me through the processes behind what it means to clean tanks for ballast tanks or bilge areas in the ships, as well as fuel tanks and what they call CHT tanks or like their human waste tanks, that kind of stuff. The first tank he ever put me in was an oil six tank, it was barge. And they up and down were like, they’d say they suit you up with rubber suits and duct tape your wrists for the gloves so that you can’t get into the oil, don’t get in on you and whatever and being new and trying to learn the ropes and whatever they offer me rubber boots. And I said, oh no, thanks. Well, turns out when you get down on the bottom

Speaker 3: of the barge, there’s six or eight inches of wool six sitting on the bottom and it’s our job to push that stuff across the floor.

Jay Prock: Well, that was the last time I wore that nice pair of boots.

Anthony Codispoti : You learned a lot of stuff the hard way and I have to imagine being able to have those hands-on experiences and mistakes has served you well now when you’re more in a management role and helping to place a lot of these workers and secure a lot of these contracts because you understand the work that needs to be done and the kind of folks that you need to be able to put into those roles.

Jay Prock: Yeah, very much so. And it’s one of the things that we impressed upon our current staff as well is if you get the opportunity, even if you’re specifically assigned to be a recruiter in the office, we give opportunities to each of them to go out to the yards and experience some of the jobs and we have a dedicated safety team of four individuals that do nothing but go on board the vessels and work with our customer safety programs to make sure that we’re walking on both, that people are doing the job safely, that they have the right PPE, that they are in fact doing the job they were sent to do. If I send a fire watch out to a customer and I go out and I find out he’s power tooling or running a jackhammer or doing something different, we’ve got a conversation with the customer that we need to address and we need to make sure that they’re out there appropriately to do that job.

How can I know what job or what PPE to give that person if I’ve never at least laid eyes on or had some kind of personal experience with what they’re doing out there? So very much so. The personal experiences matter a lot.

Anthony Codispoti : And you’ve talked a lot about safety already and we mentioned the Francis Sharp Executive Leadership Award that you said came from your workers comp group. Say more about why safety is such an important part of what you guys do there at Tidewater.

Jay Prock: First and foremost, it’s the right thing to do. It’s taking care of people, making sure it’s a benefits provider. You’re trying to take care of people as well, which I think is super admirable and a really important part of taking care of people includes, making sure they have access to benefits and stuff that they, in my opinion, have earned and deserve. From a fiscal and a business perspective, our largest cost of doing business is payroll. Our second largest cost of doing business is our workers’ confidence insurance.

So keeping people safe is not only the right thing to do, but it also makes us competitively, gives us a competitive advantage when we keep people safe. And I’ll tell you, you know, harkening back a little bit to kind of the difference between dad’s business and our business. Template labor used to be especially in super pair, very much the redheaded stepchild of the industry. You gave your riskiest, the lowest paid, and the most high turnover, and that’s why Firewatch was a thing. For dad, that’s what you gave to the temp labor company. There’s a high powered exec in the industry that dad only got five minutes of time with when he was over at Metro Machine, but the gentleman leaned across the table with, I mean, after a couple of pleasantries and said, you know what, all you temp agencies are the same.

Every so often, you just got to shed your skin. What’s that mean? He had to think about that for a little bit and kind of just said, well, all right, thank you and kind of left. It was really just there to kind of thank him for the business and whatever else. But what that gentleman was expressing was that every so often, workers’ comp expenses got so extravagant for temp labor on the waterfront that they just closed the business, restart it with a new modification rate and start their business all over again. Every so often, you got to shed your skin. That’s how business used to be on the waterfront.

Anthony Codispoti : Because there’s so many claims that get filed, your rates keep going up. And so at some point, you’ve got to close down, open up under a new corporation name, a new EIN, so you can kind of start fresh. So that’s how it used to be. But today, what’s it like?

Jay Prock: Thai water staffing sets the standard for being a safe, respected, transparent, honest company. That always ran it like that. And when dad heard that, that only reinforced his willpower to make sure that he never had to shed his skin. We still operate under the same employee ID number. We merged with another company. So we went from Thai water temps to Thai water staffing. But it’s the same people. Dad set a standard.

Anthony Codispoti : And even… And so what does it look like this focus on safety? Is it just making sure that folks have the right equipment? Is it a different level of training before they’re on the job? Kind of walk us through what it is that you’re doing differently than what a lot of those companies that have to shed their skin do. Yeah.

Jay Prock: Well, so the highest propensity for injury happens for your entry and low or semi-skilled employees. And that is our bailiwick. We do that really, really well. We do high volume and we do a ton of them. And we have figured out a couple of things that help keep people safe on the job. One is appropriate exposure to as much as we can get them to before they get out there. So it started with a guy named Steve Owens who put a tank hole cut out out of plywood in front of a door to get into orientation.

And I just love that idea. Meaning that if you can’t get through this tank hole, it is a safety concern for you to be out on the job. Because if you can’t get in and out of the tanks or if you can’t get in and out of a confined space, you’re going to cause problems for yourself and anybody else behind you. Okay. So kind of step one is experiential learning and screening.

Right. So that concept has expanded to a full blown training facility that we have now. So I have a mock shipboard environment where I have a ladder, a gangway with overhead hazards and a NAVSI standard tank hole that goes down into a confined space. And we learn a lot about our associates before we ever put them on the job. We learn whether or not they’re afraid of heights. Can they maneuver around overhead hazards? Can they wear the PPE? Can they carry the fire bottle? Do they freak out in the confined space when they get down there and have an opportunity to see what a dark hole really feels like? Our biggest complaint from customers used to be that the employees would walk through the gate, look around for a little bit or even start the job and then turn around and walk out. Well, now we’ve spent tons of time, effort and money on the recruiting process, the equipment to get them out there, the time, the effort to make that happen.

And it’s all gone. And the customer is short on people and we look like we don’t know what we’re doing. The other piece of this is that once we find the right person and put them out on the job, we continue to interact with them, not just via phone calls and check-ins and whatnot, but also with our recruiters that are in the office will also go out and do on-site check-ins. So the ones that do the training for the individuals, they run through the Firewatch class or they go through the Ocean Maritime 10-hour course with us. All that training, by the way, for our associates is no cost to them. So that brings people in the door to us that are interested to get a foot in the door opportunity and ship repair.

Anthony Codispoti : So our on-site… No cost to the associate. No cost to the associate. They can come in, they can get trained and when they’re finished with the training, then you’ve got jobs lined up for them. Yep.

Jay Prock: And the idea is while they’re going through that training, we’ve already done the other things that are unique to our industry, like things like access lists. We’ve got to make sure that the boat knows the captains and the ship’s force know who’s coming on their vessel. So we have to submit these access requests ahead of time. Those access requests go from us to our customers, from our customers to Marmac, from Marmac to the vessel. And that whole chain of events takes sometimes a week to two weeks to get people on the list. While they’re waiting for access, they’re going through the training and so the ideal world is they finish all of their training right as their access clears and we get to send them right out to work.

When we send them out to work, that’s where our coordinators who are getting them through the training and the ones that are interacting with them go out to the job site and sometimes they start 5, 5.30, 6 a.m. and we’re taking one handhold, we’re taking the hand from the associate and we’re taking the hand from the customer saying, okay guys, here is each other. You found it, you did it. Great. Task number one.

Task number two, now go do a good job on site. Once they get working and they get the kind of that routine going, they’re in great shape. A lot of our contracts typically last for months at a time because there’s so much work that needs to happen on a vessel. So that’s pretty cool as well.

And then like I mentioned, when one contract ends, we shift them to another. While they’re out there working, our safety team at random intervals will do our own job hazard assessments and we do that in coordination with our customers and with MARMAC. They all have their own representatives and safety programs and Tidewater is one of the few staffing firms that I know of that has the dedicated safety team of professionals that we do.

Sometimes if a customer or if a competitor is doing it pretty well, they’ll have like an OSHA trainer or something on staff, but to have four of them like we do and to have the level of interaction out on site like we do is something that is specific and unique to us. And I’ll tell you, the flip to that is it’s not as profitable.

Anthony Codispoti : You know, I’m just going to say you’re cutting into your margins by having extra, you know, safety staff there by offering that free training to all the associates who want to come in. You know, it’s free to them.

It’s not free to you. You’re paying for a lot more labor on your team, but this seems to kind of tie in really well with Tidewater’s mission statement. Put people to work, do the right thing every day.

Jay Prock: The right thing every day is about making sure that people come home with all their fingers and toes. Now, you know, there are an enormous number of learning experiences I have had with regards to safety and with regards to some, you know, policy stuff and whatnot, but there were two years in particular that were just so brutal for us right as we were making the transition from traditional workers comp to signal mutual. To get into signal mutual, which is our workers comp provider who we absolutely adore and have a tremendous relationship with, you have to be vetted.

You have to be vetted financially and you have to be vetted through your safety programs. You have to be somebody to be there and to be in the club, if you will. All of my biggest customers were there. We wanted to be there, you know, for years, but they didn’t do staffing agencies for a long, long time. We were one of the first.

And we screwed it up. We got in and we had two really nasty incidences where people were in JLG lifts, the kind of boom lifts that extend out and have the basket in them. One of the JLG lifts failed and the arm came back into the machine so violently that it caused a lot of injury to the individual that he was wearing a safety equipment and stuff, but there’s just no way around it. We had that incident and another incident where the lift, the boom lift, fell down. It was really wild that they happened so closely together, I mean, a matter of maybe a month or two apart.

When I do that, it fell down, fell down and it hit his face and had a whole bunch of dental reconstruction and it was just a really nasty incident. I drove our mod rate high and garnered attention we didn’t want. But as things go, you learn from your mistakes and what was a real challenge became a real opportunity that helped transition my leadership style personally from the traditional method of thinking of just sending an item and kind of forgetting to building what is now what I’ve just described to you, a full-blown safety team, a training facility.

Anthony Codispoti : So it was those horrible incidents that led to you saying, hey, we need a new approach here. Exactly. We need to cut our margins and invest more in safety and the people.

Jay Prock: Right. A million percent. There was a shift from the old way of doing things to we can no longer continue to do work in this manner. What do we need to do to improve?

How can we be better at what we do? And the challenge came to me from a gentleman by the name of James Sammons. James has since retired but everybody in this re-knows him and he’s famous for telling you like it is. And boy, I got a talking to from Mr. Sammons and he handed us the first iterations of our job hazard assessments. He helped us build out the framework and build conceptually the safety team.

He met with us monthly and we still meet monthly with the new with the signal representative that we have now. The legacy that James Sammons helped us build from a safety perspective is one that I’ll never forget. And man, when you talk about people that are willing to go out on site and you know spend the time, Sammons and I spent many times in our coveralls walking the job sites, being present, talking to associates, figuring out what was going on and making sure that our customers knew that this was a new day.

Anthony Codispoti : Well hats off to you because I mean it would have been just as easy to kind of like turtle up in your shell and you know hey it’s terrible thing but this is you know risk is the industry but you had somebody give you a good talking to.

You did some self-reflection. You said we’re going to do things differently. It’s going to cut into our margins. It’s going to make us less profitable but it’s the right thing to do.

Jay Prock: And you know what’s funny about doing the right thing is that you know when you when you operate with a good breastplate the universe has a funny way of delivering good things back to you. You know it’s increased our relationships and strength of relationships with our customers. We become the go-to provider and so what ends up originally being a oh man this is really going to suck. We’re not going to make as much money. We’re going to be you know pinching pennies and whatever else ends up being the volume makes up for it and the trust that our customers now have in us versus our competition has more than made up for the sacrifices that we made initially and then followed up five years later because it’s a five-year look-back period for the insurance rates.

Followed up five years later my insurance rates start dropping. Now my margins are increasing every year and now you know that Francis R Sharp thing was three four years ago at this point but you know I’m giving talks at signal events where we just initiated Genetta one of my safety managers into the safety committee officially. You know signal is pointing its customers which are also my customers or you know potential customers.

They are pointing the business in our direction because they know like and trust us to do it the right way. So my latest one I’m pretty excited about this one is something simple something that everybody control and that’s the hard hats. There’s a real stigma in the yards right now that everybody uses traditional hard hats which are cheap and they have the brim and whatever but what they miss is the buckle right.

So you can easily fall off yeah right. So we’ve made the decision to be one of the first companies to mandate that our associates go out in they call them helmets and helmets are the ones that buckle but a traditional hard hat is a four point suspension system kind of relatively cheap polymer for the plastic and whatever else the new stuff the new helmets that we use are thicker better materials there’s six point suspensions as opposed to four point they’re adjustable and they clip on. Now doesn’t sound like a monumental thing on the surface of it but the pushback that a lot of people in the industry have because of their old style hard hats and like they don’t want to give them up and that kind of thing.

We were in a unique position because when we issue PPE to our employees we’re usually their first issue or we’re kind of reissuing or whatever so when we hand them their equipment they don’t get a choice to use their old stuff or whatever so we have the choice do you want to be the company that hands them the old cheap you know gonna fall off likely to only do very little and in time of serious incident do you want to be that person or in our case we forexed the amount of money that we were spending on helmets wow and we give them the high quality stuff but um boy they look sharp and they’re out there and they wear them with pride you know that’s awful neat to see.

Anthony Codispoti : 4x. I mean, that’s a big increase. It’s not like we’re talking 10 or 20%. And you guys are hiring lots of folks each year. And so that really adds up. But yeah, I just, I see this common thread here of doing the right thing, doing the right thing.

And you’re talking about how it’s kind of come back to you in positive ways, right? Your insurance rates start to drop. Your customers now, they can see the difference in the associates that you’re sending them. They appreciate that you become the go-to. It’s got to reduce any kind of marketing and sales expenses that you’re normally spending to go out and kind of drum up the next contract because you’re top of mind for folks now.

Jay Prock: You got it. Yeah, we have a really unique marketing and sales perspective. I’ve tried a lot of things online, all the job board ads and LinkedIn stuff. But none of them, none of those methods and things that I have tried has ever compared to our onsite, our safety people. And really just when I get to go do tours or walk with customers or whatever else, those are the things that seal deals. Again, it’s just such a relationship and personal relationship business that it’s hard to overstate how important involvement is from an executive level and from myself, from my safety managers to be able to communicate directly with our customers face to face. It’s just huge.

Anthony Codispoti : So we’re talking about the customer relationship part of the equation there. And then there’s the associate relationship. You’re bringing in lots of folks, you’re putting lots of folks to work. I’m curious at the scale that you’re operating, what are some things that you’ve tried and found success with from both a recruiting and a retention stamp?

Jay Prock: Higher from the talent pool that you want to put out in the field. So we take people who have that deck plate experience and we turn them into recruiters. I don’t hire, try not to speak in absolutes.

I can’t say never. But rarely do we find success with people that come from other staffing agencies. Because they already know all the answers. They know how to operate. Okay, prime example. I had a conversation with a customer yesterday. He said, no, I know these things can get really heated and people are paid on commission and they, these placements matter and emotions run high.

That’s an interesting point. And one that is worth making now is our comp structure for our recruiters and our coordinators is not commission based. We do training in teams of teams. There are so many moving pieces to what we do that it doesn’t make sense to have a training coordinator pay to commission for a placement or somebody who made or took the phone call from somebody calling in.

Who do you attribute the commission to? And no one of the steps is, you can’t skip them. You can’t put them out on the job if they hadn’t had fire prevention training. You can’t get them in the office if the recruiters not making the calls. You can’t keep them working if they don’t have the right PPE and safety team and checking on them.

Take some village. Exactly. And so that team on teams mentality or that team of teams mentality, I think has set us apart from a recruitment and placement perspective. The other thing advantage that we have over some of our national or multinational competitors is that our payroll is done in-house. I don’t use ADP.

I don’t do any of that stuff. I have a very cost effective and robust applicant tracking system that’s both front and back end. And so if we are missing hours or we are trying to make adjustments for a customer or for an associate, we do it right then and there. I don’t have to wait on California or a week down the road or this, you know, our people live paycheck to paycheck. And if somebody is messing with their money or they have that perception that somebody is messing with their money, we ask a quick way to lose them. And so doing the right thing means taking care of them, you know, from a health and wellness perspective out on site as well as a fiscal perspective to make sure that we get their time and their pay correct.

Anthony Codispoti : So I want to talk a little bit about your focus on environmental stewardship. You know, you guys have supported the Vessel Disposal Reuse Foundation. I’m kind of curious, Jay, how do these conservation efforts tie into your broader business model and mission?

Jay Prock: Oh man, we take care of the waterways that take care of us. So Lynn Haven River now is a local waterway protection and environmental stewardship organization. So is the Elizabeth River Program and then the Vessel Reuse and Disposal Foundation, which by the way that Mike Provost guy, he has taken off.

He’s gotten hundreds of vessels out of the water, derelict vessels out of the water. And all three of those are specific to tide water and important to us because they’re here in the Port of Virginia. You know, when I say take care of the waterways that take care of us, it worked for the waterways.

If we didn’t have the Elizabeth River, the Lynn Haven River, the Chesapeake Bay, if we didn’t have these tributaries and deep water access, we wouldn’t have a business. We wouldn’t have a port. We wouldn’t have the vessels coming in to drop off the containers. We wouldn’t have the ability to service the fleet as it needs, its repairs and modernization. So that’s how and why we chose the foundation, chose to support the foundations that we do.

Anthony Codispoti : Jay, setting aside any humility, how would you describe your superpower?

Jay Prock: Oh, shoot. Oh, man. I think probably the, and this is something that dad taught me a long time ago. He said, you know, what’s most important isn’t always, you know, he was talking about school. It wasn’t necessarily what specific subject matter that you’re learning, you know, whether it’s algebra or chemistry or whatever. It’s the meta of knowing how to learn. I can pick up a subject matter pretty quickly and get a good grasp of most of what’s going on, at least enough to not look like a total idiot pretty quickly. And I think that has really helped me because of how many different things we end up interacting with in a day, whether it be the specifics of tank cleaning, you know, you got to get real micro there.

If you’re not talking, they take tank cleaners language, they’re not going to trust you, right? But I’ve also got to turn around and be able to talk total recordable incident rates on the workers comp side, or be able to go and talk to the banks about our credit line and what sort of covenants they have associated with that and then making sure that we’re staying, you know, in accordance with what their expectations are. I think one of the most challenging parts of an entrepreneur is to be able to switch those hats and to be able to wear them and switch those gears quickly. So if I had to take a stab at it, I’d say I’m pretty quick at learning just enough about something not to look foolish to be able to talk about it.

Anthony Codispoti : You know, it’s interesting you say that. I’ve got two young boys, they’re nine and 10. And one of the things I really want to impress upon them isn’t, you know, did you get all the questions right on the test or the quiz? It’s sort of understanding and developing this process of learning how to learn.

Yes. And it’s a tough message to teach to a 10 or 11 year old. It’s a tough message to, you know, explain to myself or, you know, try to wrap my own head around like, you know, sort of like going through school, there was this trajectory of you learn something just long enough to take the test, right? And then after you took the test, you know, unless it was like a continuous subject like some math or some science course that you were on, like, you were okay, sort of like dropping that retention. But as you kind of get to be, you know, a big kid in the real world, and you’ve got to, you’ve got to be not only learn new things, but then retain the knowledge and be able to put them into use.

And you’re kind of nodding your head, you’re, you know, sort of in agreement. I’m curious if you’ve sort of discovered an unlock or a key that has been helpful to you in sort of learning how to learn. YouTube.

Jay Prock: YouTube and being smart enough to know where your limits lie. My tank cleaning mentor that I mentioned earlier, that ruined my good, my good pair of boots. I was humble enough to go to him and tell him, you know, Doug, you’ve been around this industry a long time. I don’t know what I’m doing. Can you help me understand what’s going on here?

Oh, hell yeah, son, I’m gonna go put you in a tank. But what I noticed was that when you’re willing to be humble and, you know, be willing to learn, others will help you. The YouTube comment is a little tongue in cheek, but is sincere in the sense that you’ve also got to be willing to do some of the lift yourself. And when you do some of the lift yourself, and you bring kind of that homework to any mentor, they appreciate that. When you can show that you’re a self-starter, when you can show that you’ve gotten down the path a little ways, but I’m stuck here, then all of a sudden, you know, doors start opening before you didn’t even know existed.

Anthony Codispoti : So I like a couple of things that you hit on there, you know, with YouTube, with things like chat, GPT and other large language models, there are places that we can go and get a good base of education, you know, without having to sort of tap somebody on the shoulder and ask for help. But having said that, perhaps the even more powerful thing is to kind of raise your hand and ask the experts for help. I’m looking to level up here. I don’t know what I don’t know.

Can you give me a hand? And I think a lot of people would be, I think most people are afraid to ask that question, you know, for a couple of reasons. They don’t want to bother somebody and they don’t want to look stupid. They don’t want to, you know, admit that this is something that, you know, they’re sort of lacking in.

But I think most people would be surprised the number of times you raise your hand and you ask somebody for help, how willing and excited they are to actually give you that help and share that knowledge that they have.

Jay Prock: 100%. I totally back up that mentality in the statements. And I tell you the other ones that get really impressed and really excited about you asking silly or basic questions are the associates. My employees that are out there, you know, man, oh God, Shannon, I can’t remember Shannon’s last name.

Shannon was the son of a supervisor for a decking and coding company and went to Shannon one time, kind of said that, just say, you know, walk me through kind of what you’re doing here. What are you looking for? What’s going on? He says, well, look, when I’m painting this particular portion of the engine room, I can make sure I get under this lip right here because they’re going to pull out the QA guys are going to pull out this mirror and they’re going to look under the mirror and they’re going to use that mirror and they’re going to see whether or not I hit under the lip.

Right. So he walked me through and he was so excited to show me all the tips and tricks and things that he was doing and whatever else to this day. Anthony, I carry a mirror in my cover off.

Anthony Codispoti : Thank you, Shannon. That’s right. Let’s shift gears, maybe kind of look at the other side of the, you know, superpower coin, which is, you know, a lot of times our teachers are like hard experiences, like big challenges. What’s a serious challenge, Jay, that you’ve overcome in your life, whether it’s personal or professional? And what did you learn going through that?

Jay Prock: So I’ll tie a couple of kind of subjects that we talked to together pretty quick. I have a passion for learning new things. One of the things I got into and learned pretty quickly and did pretty well at was skydiving. I have about 1,100 skydives. I’m a delicensed skydiver.

I have two state records in the state of Virginia for large formation skydiving. And as good as I was, I made a mistake one day piloting a perfectly operational canopy in ideal conditions. I misjudged my turn and I slammed into the water. I tore my colon, my spleen, my superior, Ms. Terrick Artery. I spent about five days in the hospital, three of which were in the ICU.

They transferred about a half a blood to me when I was on the table because I went gray. It was a super traumatic experience. The cherry on the top of that experience was a week prior to the accident, we found out that we were pregnant with our first kid. I had to tell my parents and tell his relatives because I was intubated.

I had to write on a pad of paper to them that they were going to be grandparents because I didn’t think I was going to get another chance. What did I learn? Why is that relevant? Well, a couple of things. One, it’s part of my presentation that I give when I describe the importance of appropriate head protection. And so that ties directly into why I feel like I am obligated to do the right thing to take care of our employees’ heads, hearts, and brains. That’s one tie-in. The other tie-in is no matter how good you think you are, you’re only a mistake or two away from total disaster. It keeps you on your toes.

It keeps you humble. If I could pick up the camera and show you, I have a couple of skydiving photos over there. But really, the most important thing that’s sitting on that wall over there is my ER report.

Dr. Martian Nelson, they call me Saturn Blue because I didn’t know my name. And it still sits on the wall right there in my office. And I see it almost daily. And it’s a constant reminder that you need to listen.

You need to be humble. You need to know that there are things out there that might bite you that you don’t know exist yet. The unknown unknowns are the real dangers more often than not. And so that accident was seven or eight years ago now. And I’d like to think that the person I was prior to the accident is a whole lot different than the person that I was post-accident. I think I do a better job of listening, a better job of asking questions, and a better job of pacing myself through decisions and decision making processes. Kind of slows you down a little bit, huh?

Speaker 3: That’s right.

Jay Prock: Save more thoughtful.

Anthony Codispoti : When into that process, did you realize that you were going to make it?

Jay Prock: They keep you pretty drugged up. But I woke up on a table with about 30 staples from the top of my sternum to just above my pubic area. And I realized I was going to make it when I woke up and saw the staples and could look around and realize where I was. By that time, my wife had gotten there. She had just boarded a plane, landed in Florida, got the news, turned around, flew back up to North Carolina where I was to be with me.

My parents got there shortly thereafter. But yeah, I was kind of waking up in a hospital room looking around and being like, oh man, that was kind of the wake-up. Prior to, I remember everything after the accident and the ambulance ride and everything else.

And that’s its own set of kind of funny, some gross stories. But I have memory of the entire event, the ambulance ride. I blacked out when I was being transported from the ambulance into the hospital room or into the hospital where they’re starting the CT scans and stuff. And then woke up in the hospital room afterwards.

Anthony Codispoti : Wow. Like you said, traumatic and also powerful experience that you went through. Where did this fit into the chronology of implementing the safety programs at Tidewater? Is this after?

Jay Prock: No. It was. So that was about the time that we were working deeply with James Sammons and building the foundations. So it was three or four years after I’d taken over. But not quite where we had stabilized, not quite to where I would say we had stabilized our safety culture to where it is now. And it wasn’t until June of 24.

Is that right? Because we’ve been doing almost exactly a year that we have been giving out all of the helmets. So even though I had that experience, it wasn’t until years later where I looked back and think about like, man, it was part of the reason I’m here today is because I was wearing appropriate headgear at the time.

Had I not been wearing appropriate headgear, that could have been traumatic brain injury and or death. The catalyst of all of that, since we’ve talked about catalysts, was a guy named Rashad. Rashad had a piece of metal fall off a vessel that he was working. He was walking underneath. He was in a dry dock vessel is above him. There was work going on overhead and a piece of metal fell from the work that was happening overhead. It hit him in his hard hat and knocked him to the ground. But the problem was when the metal hit him, it knocked his hard hat off. And when he hit the ground, he essentially hit his head a second time. And that was it.

That was another turning point, another moment in my career where it was like, all right, we are through screwing around with this cut rate, cheap head protection. I’ve had my experience. I’ve seen Rashad’s experience. I’ve had other experiences through the years. We are changing this and we are changing it today.

Anthony Codispoti : You kept getting the tap on the shoulder. Pay attention. Pay attention. Pay attention. And then you did. And you put a lot of systems in place now that, I mean, it’s hard to say the number of accidents that you guys have prevented with all the focus on safety that you put in place.

Jay Prock: You know, it’s really funny about that. I’m reading these two books right now by a guy named Dan Heath. I finished one a little bit ago and I’m in the second book called Upstream or something about solving problems upstream, upstream thinking, something along those lines. But that’s essentially what we’ve been doing is we’ve been working to solve problems before they happen. And what’s frustrating about that in a big way is that you don’t get rewarded for the things that don’t happen, or you don’t get recognition for the injuries that didn’t occur. You know, how do you measure all of the accidents that didn’t happen? It’s hard to do and it’s the difference between leading indicators and lagging indicators if you’re going to use safety language, right? Leading indicators are a lot harder to get buy into and that’s really one of James’s initial lessons and one that we still work on all the time. That’s why the first thing he put forth into us was job hazard assessments. Look at the hazards before there’s something wrong. Let’s not be reactive.

Let’s be proactive. So a lot of those ideas are crystallized really well and Dan Heath’s books and I thought I just thought that was a really neat plug. You don’t get credit a lot of times for the things that don’t happen.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah, which is good that you guys have such a strong guiding principle and mission statement of do the right thing every day. I mean, it’s great when you can sort of have those metrics to back up in the extra investment that you’re making. But in instances like this where that’s not possible, you still use that guiding light to do the right thing every day. It’s going to come out good in the end.

Jay Prock: Well, and the big thing too is getting buy-in from all parties, right? So one of the things that we did to draw emphasis on and attention to these metrics were we put basically scoreboards, television screens in every bullpen, every recruiters area that we have. We have four offices and a training facility and so in every recruiters area we put these screens and these screens rotate the three metrics that drive our business.

I can measure only these three things and only these three things and nothing else, not nothing else, but for the most part, these are the things that matter. If you focus on these things as a recruiter, as an employee of time water, life is good. That’s the number of people that we have working, the number of injuries and types of injuries that we’ve had and the number of unemployment claims that we have. And what does that translate to from like a business theory or like what we’re trying to accomplish as an organization, but everybody to work that we can.

Every time we have an open order, that’s an opportunity to change somebody’s life because we’re going to give them employment. Focus on that. Put people to work. While they’re out on work, we want them to stay safe. I want you to know when an injury has happened and I want you to know what kind of injury has happened so that while you are talking to your associates that are getting ready to go out on site, they are aware that, hey man, we had an eye injury this past month, so I’m going to talk to you about eye safety and why it’s important.

I want you to be old and gray and still be able to see your grandkids. That’s the second metric that we put out in front of them. The third metric that we put out in front of them is we keep people working by keeping them off unemployment.

Man, to me that’s so cool on two or three different fronts. We’re doing a service to society and to the community by keeping people working and off of the public dole, if you will. It stitches the contracts together that we’re talking about with our customers, which keeps the talent, the employees here in the Port of Virginia as opposed to taking per diem contracts off to California or up to Bath, Ironworks or wherever else the work might be. If we can keep them working and keep them here and keep them off of unemployment, it means they are staying working and they’re staying in the Port of Virginia and they’re contributing members of society and of their communities. Three things, my staff can accomplish those three things. We got jobs forever, guys.

Anthony Codispoti : I love it. Jay, where do you see Tidewater staffing going? What’s the future look like for you guys? Is it kind of more of the same? Just want to continue doing a great job in the niches that you’re playing in now?

Jay Prock: So I’m a member of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization as well. That’s been a really instrumental group of people and framework for me to explore the ideas and concepts of entrepreneurialism. A lot of entrepreneurs are focused on that kind of exponential, and just grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. What I realized pretty quickly was that we have a really strong business here relative to some of the others that struggle to make it.

We have a really good thing going. It is very difficult to manage businesses at a distance. We have had offices up and down the East Coast at different times and strategically we’ve made the decision to focus on our profitability line and our ability to influence our local port and make the companies operate out of the port of Virginia, you know, the heroes of their stories, because they too are satisfying the ultimate customer, which is the Navy. And if the Navy is not happy and they’re not putting boats here, nobody’s got work. So I say that to say, what’s the future of Tidewater? The future of Tidewater is not one of like coast to coast growth. I’m not interested in taking private equity or trying to balloon up into some multi-hundred million dollar firm. I get asked frequently in different ways and forms, whether or not I’m interested in selling or if I want to recapitalize or do all this other stuff.

We’re in a great debt-free position and we’re in a position where, you know, I can control pretty well what happens here locally. There’s a book I read years ago called Small Giants. I wish I could remember the name of the author, but that was really influential for me from a mindset perspective because what it talked about was small companies that made the strategic decision to stay small.

Small but mighty, like the guys that do it well, incredibly well, but don’t have false aspirations of world dominance. You know, when you talk about the kind of humility and the things that I learned from my accident and from other life experiences, it’s that growth for growth’s sake is not a reason to grow. And that growth can happen in a lot of different ways.

For the future of Tidewater, I hope to continue to be the leading provider in Hanson Roads and to expand opportunity for the communities and the people that we serve here. But I really don’t envision at this time that we’re going to grow geographically. You know, we can grow in processes. We can grow by incorporating new technologies. We can grow by potentially garnering additional service lines.

We should be in the last few months of obtaining a facility clearance, which will allow us to service people with clearances and customers that require that stuff. We are growing by adopting and working with new technologies. I’ve got a training platform, an onboarding platform, where we’ve incorporated 360 videos.

I don’t know anybody else in the industry who’s doing immersive video technology for their onboarding process. We can grow in that direction. I’m working on unlocking potential technologies to augment our fire preventers with robotic devices that can sense fires before they get out of control.

We’ll help our fire watch do the simple things like stay awake, pay attention, augment their ability to do all that. Those are side projects and things that we’re working on and things that I’m excited about personally because it stays within our niche. It enhances everything that we have going on here in the Port of Virginia. I hope to be influential as an organization in the Port of Virginia so that we, as the Port and as an industry here in Southeast Virginia, become the go-to place for the Navy, for large commercial vessels, and for the logistics and manufacturing sectors to look to the Port of Virginia and be like, they have a workforce called Tidewater Staffing.

Anthony Codispoti : I love it. There’s a thread here of just this process of continuous improvement, which obviously has served you very well up to this point and I will continue to do so going into the future.

Jay, I’ve just got one more question for you, but before I ask it, I want to have you tell everybody the best way to either get in touch with you or follow your story or that of Tidewater Staffing. What is that?

Jay Prock: Sure. You can find us on LinkedIn. I’m also probably easy to get a hold of to a fault. You can email me at jayyatidewatersstaffing.com and our LinkedIn profile does a good job of celebrating the things that we’re doing organizationally. We mark it to our associates via Facebook, Instagram, and we do have a YouTube channel as well. It’s where I house the 360 videos and some of the other things that we have going on, but LinkedIn and if you’re looking for me directly, an email will land right in front of my face.

Anthony Codispoti : Those 360 videos are available for the public to watch. It’s not just an internal thing for your safety protocols. It’s like, hey, if anybody in the industry wants to look at these and up your game.

Jay Prock: Big time and I’ll tell you, I’ve got my case and my cameras right over there and what I do is I offer that service to my customers and I say, hey, look, I’ll give you all the videos and everything else, finished product. We do the editing and everything. It’s yours.

It’s ours. It’s really fun to see who participates, who jumps on it and who’s like, no, I don’t want to play that game. It gives you a little bit of a litmus test, but my favorite one, so for all the listeners out there, my favorite one is the scaffolding video. There’s a hanging scaffolding 360 video that we did where the scaffolding is hanging off of the side of a bright orange big Crowley vessel. So the video opens up and you look left and you look right and you’re just kind of standing on some staging.

Yeah, no big deal, right? You look off in the distance. You can see the rest of the port. You look up and you see the bright blue sky. You look down and below you, all you see is water and it is just the wildest feeling. We use that one as a litmus test to figure out whether people are scared of heights.

Anthony Codispoti : I’ll raise my hand right now and admit that I would fail that test in an instant. That’s my Achilles heel. But last question I have for you, Jay. Great conversation today. Love to stay in touch.

You’re from now. You and I reconnect and you are excited because you’re celebrating something. There’s one thing you’re super jazzed about. What is that one thing you’re celebrating a year from now?

Jay Prock: Oh man, that we’re setting records and putting the most people to work that we ever have. That’s the dream, man. Every day we come to work to connect people with opportunities. My all-time favorite thing is when our associates get the full-time job, right? When they end up supervising a crew of Thai water guys, you know?

When the supervisor got there because Thai water put him there to begin with or her. We have so many of those in the Port of Virginia and it’s so much fun seeing them. My hope and my dream is that a year from now I’ve got supervisors all over the place and that all of the associates that are going to work in record numbers are coming home every day with zero injuries. One of the most exciting things that we do speaking of landing supervisors in good places is that we don’t charge any hiring fees. The do the right thing every day aspect lands in that mentality also because we’ve always believed that if an employer finds an employee that they feel is a good fit, that the reason they’re not getting the job should never be because they don’t want to pay the hiring fees to the staffing agency. Guys, that’s not what we’re here for. If my employee is your fit and that’s what you want, you hire that person. Wow.

Anthony Codispoti : Just call me because that’s not how staffing works, Jay. Did anybody ever explain that to you?

Speaker 3: But between that and the commissions and whatever you see, sometimes you got to dig when it feels sagged.

Jay Prock: I would tell you, it’s so fun to be that person and man, we get this all the time when we’re dealing with software companies or like say right there, like man, that’s weird. We’ve never heard that before or we’ve never encountered that. We’ve never had it. You’re not afraid to break rules. That would have a lot of things to say about that.

Anthony Codispoti : Maybe in a different context, but we’ll leave that there. Jay Prok from Tidewater staffing. I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Jay Prock: It was kind of funny. I appreciate you having me.

Anthony Codispoti : Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.