Why we're starting Granite Safety from inside the job site.

5,070 U.S. workers died on the job in 2024 — a fatality rate of 3.3 per 100,000 full-time-equivalent workers (BLS Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 2024). Construction recorded 1,032 of those fatalities at a rate of 9.2 per 100,000 — the fourth-highest rate among major industries. Falls killed 389 construction workers in 2024 — about 38% of all U.S. construction fatalities (Construction Dive / BLS, 2024).

Fall Protection — General Requirements (29 CFR 1926.501) was OSHA’s most-cited standard in fiscal year 2025 with 5,914 violations. That is the fifteenth consecutive year at #1 (OSHA Top 10, FY2025).

We know what kills construction workers. The training that prevents it exists. So why is the same standard the most-cited violation fifteen years running?

I am writing this from the trailer.

The training is not getting to the foreman

I run safety on the Athletics’ new Las Vegas Stadium — a $2 billion, 33,000-seat domed ballpark on the Strip, built by the Mortenson-McCarthy joint venture, opening for the 2028 MLB season (ESPN, December 2025). I run a parallel program at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, the venue slated to co-host the 2028 Olympic Opening Ceremony with the LA Memorial Coliseum. Between those two jobs and the ICRA-aligned hospital work my company runs, I see what is actually breaking.

The training is not getting to the foreman in a way that sticks. Not because the foreman is lazy. Because the OSHA outreach industry — ClickSafety, 360training, Vector Solutions — is structured around a course catalog, not a job site.

A worker buys an OSHA 10 card on a sale. Mails them a piece of plastic two weeks later. The card gets lost in a glove box. The owner asks for it at the gate. There is a phone call. There is a verification request. There is a delay. The worker goes home that night.

Meanwhile the actual safety risk on that job — a connector who is shaky on tie-off geometry, a foreman who has never run a non-entry rescue plan, a crew that is genuinely soft on Subpart R perimeter cabling — is invisible to the system that issued the card.

Why the incumbents do not solve this

The legacy OSHA outreach vendors are content companies. ClickSafety markets a 500-plus course catalog on a Magento commerce stack. 360training operates a 6,000-plus-course multi-vertical CE marketplace. Vector Solutions is a federation of acquired brands serving K-12 to municipal water utilities. None of them are platforms designed for the way a U.S. construction site actually runs.

You can verify this by reading the customer reviews. The complaint pattern across the legacy vendors is not “the courses are wrong.” It is “the system is glitchy, kicks me out, lost my progress, mailed my card late, the verification process is a phone tree” — operational failures of a software product that was bolted onto a course catalog after the fact.

I have nothing personal against any of those companies. They built a real business. They are real OSHA-authorized providers. The cards are real. But they were built around the catalog, not around the foreman who has to run the talk on Tuesday morning.

What we are building, and why it has to come from the trailer

Granite Safety is platform first. It exists because the catalog model has run its course. We are building six features and we are building them tight:

A Knowledge-Gap Engine that reads the way each crew member answers — flags the weak topics before recertification, before the inspector, before the incident.
Toolbox Talks On Demand — site-specific, OSHA-aligned, generated in seconds against your project, your hazards, your equipment, your last-week incident. Not a generic, undated PDF.
An Incident-to-Training Loop that turns a near-miss logged by a foreman into a routed retraining assignment with documented sign-off — the way a real safety program is supposed to behave.
Verifiable Certificates with a public verification URL printed on every card. The owner, the GC, the inspector, and the insurer confirm in one click. No PDF chase.
OSHA 10 / 30 plus the specialty courses — Fall Protection Competent Person, Confined Space CP, Subpart R Steel Erection, ICRA 2.0 Healthcare Construction Infection Control. Taught by people who actually run the standards.
Bulk Crew Enrollment — buy seats, assign a foreman, push a course to a 40-person crew, watch progress live. Built for multi-employer construction sites, not single-seat consumers.

The reason this has to come from the trailer is that every feature on that list is a feature you only specify correctly if you have run a near-miss investigation at 6:45 a.m. on a stadium that has to open in 18 months. The bench writing this curriculum has done that. My co-founder Fred Wilton holds the BCSP CSP — the gold-standard credential for occupational safety in the United States. He was Western Regional Safety Director at Clark Construction supervising 14 safety professionals across $1.2 billion a year of West Coast work, and he was the lead Site Safety and Health Officer on the $480 million Camp Pendleton Naval Hospital. We know what an audit-grade record looks like because we have built them.

The math

Here is the math that drove me to start this. OSHA’s Office of Regulatory Analysis estimates a $4–$6 return on every $1 spent on workplace safety prevention (OSHA Business Case for Safety and Health). The National Safety Council put 2024 U.S. workplace injury costs at $181.4 billion (NSC Injury Facts, 2024). The federal OSHA inspector workforce dropped to roughly 736 full-time inspectors covering 130 million U.S. workers as of mid-2025 — about one inspector per 177,000 workers (Business Insurance, 2025).

In other words: prevention pays back. The injury cost is enormous. The federal enforcement bench is small. Owner-driven safety programs — the kind a foreman runs without an inspector standing next to them — are the system that has to work.

That is the system I am trying to make better. Not by selling more catalog. By writing the platform from the inside out, with the people who run the highest-stakes job sites in America. The bench. The credentials. The discipline. The verifiable record.

Foundation 50

We are taking the first fifty signups into a Charter program before public launch. 30% off Year One, locked for life. Beta access. A 30-minute strategy call with me — your highest-risk crews, the audits coming up, the gaps in your program. Nothing is paid today. Cancel before launch with no obligation.

If your job site has been waiting for a safety platform that was actually built for it — come build it with us.

— Joe Henricks Founder, Granite Safety OSHA 500 · BCSP ASP · BCSP CHST · CICTI Instructor · 2025 ASSP Safety Professional of the Year