From Chaos to Calm Predictability – Part 1, Feat. Tyler Cormeny and Harry Schmidt

The Overnight Success That Took 15 Years: O’Shea Builders’ Lean Journey

People look at what O’Shea Builders has accomplished in the last 18 months and ask how they got there so quickly. Tyler Cormany and Harry Schmidt, VP and Director of Business Strategies at O’Shea Builders, have the same answer every time: it was an overnight success that took 15 years to build.

That is not false modesty. It is a precise description of how transformation actually happens in construction, and it is the most important lesson any company on a lean or operational excellence journey needs to hear.

The Flywheel in Real Life

Harry Schmidt walked through O’Shea Builders’ revenue history against the backdrop of Jim Collins’ flywheel concept from Good to Great. The pattern was unmistakable. From 1992 through the mid-1990s, growth was steady but unremarkable. Then a series of deliberate investments, each one building on the last, began to compound in ways that only became visible much later.

The first inflection came in the late 1990s when president Mike O’Shea had an epiphany: leadership matters. He shifted his focus to leading the company and finding the right people, and the revenue curve began to bend upward.

The second inflection came between 2006 and 2011 with a series of key hires, including Tyler himself. Mike understood that the who on the team determines the ceiling, and he built accordingly. But the most significant investment in this phase was hiring a dedicated Director of Organizational Development focused entirely on growing people. At a company of 35 employees, that was a bold bet.

The third inflection came in the 2017 to 2019 period with discipline action: structured process implementation, lean principles applied at the project level, and the Last Planner System creating a stable environment where all the previous investment in people could finally express itself.

The fourth leap, Harry believes, will come through intelligent leverage of technology, not just purchasing it, but building the capability to actually use it.

On the revenue scale Harry described, the company moved from roughly 0.2 in those early years to near 0.8 after the people investment, to 1.4 with disciplined focus, and then shot to 2.5 and beyond with the breakthrough of discipline action. In real terms: they roughly doubled the number of professional staff from 30 to 60 full time equivalents and achieved approximately 10 times their revenue from the time the organizational development investment began.

What the Lean Principle of Respect for People Actually Looks Like

Harry was clear that the people phase of this journey is not just a well conceived cultural initiative. It is the lean principle of respect for people applied with full organizational commitment.

O’Shea currently has two people dedicated entirely to training and developing their 60 production staff. Tess, their Director of Organizational Development, and Josh have spent years building the learning infrastructure of the company. The investment looked like overhead. The return has been compounding ever since.

Just before this podcast recorded, O’Shea Builders was notified that Training Magazine had selected them as one of the top 100 training organizations in the world. A regional construction company. Recognized globally for how they develop their people.

Harry also has three people dedicated to business strategy. Five total overhead positions, all focused on making the other 60 people better at what they do. In an industry that typically views any non billable position as a cost to minimize, this is a fundamentally different philosophy.

Why the Last Planner System Was the Catalyst

Tyler made a point that deserves to be heard by every company investing in leadership development without a corresponding investment in operational systems.

O’Shea had been building great leaders and great people for years. And they were not seeing the full return on that investment on their project sites. The reason, Tyler explained, was that they were still managing chaos. Without a stable project environment, the trained leaders had nowhere to express what they had learned. They were applying 21st century leadership skills to a 20th century project management structure, and the structure was winning.

When they implemented the Last Planner System 18 months ago, everything changed. The stable environment created the conditions where the leaders they had developed could actually lead. The superintendents who had been trained to be collaborative, communicative, and crew focused could now operate that way because the system supported it.

This is the sequence that Harry articulated with clarity:

• Build the people through leadership development and a culture of respect
• Create a stable project environment through systems like Last Planner and Takt planning
• With stability established, variation and waste become visible and removable
• With waste removed, flow becomes achievable
• With flow operating, continuous improvement tools like prefabrication, kitting, and 5S become accessible

Most companies try to jump to step four or five. O’Shea earned each step in order. That sequencing is why the results are durable rather than temporary.

The Evidence From the Field

Tyler shared an email from a trade partner who had experienced friction with O’Shea on previous projects. This contractor works on roughly 50 projects per year and has been in the industry for 15 years. After being on an O’Shea project where a senior superintendent was fully running Last Planner and Takt planning, he sent an unsolicited message.

In 15 years, he had never been on a project that flowed and was predictable the way this one did. He described what he was witnessing using the exact vocabulary that O’Shea uses internally, words like flow, predictability, and collaborative leadership, without having been through any of O’Shea’s training. He had simply experienced the project and named what he felt.

That is the goal. When a trade partner who had previously had friction with your company sends you an email saying they have never experienced anything like this in 15 years, the system is working.

The Challenge Harry Left Behind

Harry’s challenge was specifically for companies who have been on a lean journey for six to twelve months and are beginning to feel like they have figured it out. The temptation is to carry that momentum onto the next project and assume the new team will naturally catch up.

They will not. A trade partner who is new to your project has not traveled the path you have been on. A new subcontractor, even if they are a familiar company, may have different people on this project who have never experienced a well run Last Planner environment. You have to go back and pick them up. You have to bring them from unaware to aware before the system can function the way you know it can.

Patience and the willingness to re onboard, re explain, and re invest in each new project team member is not a sign of slow progress. It is what sustains the gains.

The Challenge Tyler Left Behind

Tyler’s challenge was about the tools. Everyone has tools. Software, scheduling platforms, prefabrication systems, BIM workflows. The tools are not the differentiator. The people using them are. If you put a sophisticated lean planning tool into the hands of a team without the culture, the leadership, and the stable environment to support it, they will use it the same way they used the old tool. A hammer used like a screwgun produces the same poor results regardless of how advanced the hammer is.

If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your field teams stabilize, schedule, and flow. O’Shea Builders’ journey is a case study in what is possible when leadership, people development, and operational systems are built in the right order and sustained over time.

The lesson is not that 15 years of work is required before anything changes. The lesson is that the changes which last are the ones built on a real foundation. Start building the foundation today.

On we go.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you know if your company is ready to implement Last Planner or Takt planning?

You do not have to be fully ready. Commit to building the environment that makes the system work, which means leadership engagement, a willingness to train, and patience with the learning curve. The stable environment Tyler described was created by the Last Planner implementation over 18 months of consistent effort, not before it.

What is the right sequence for a company starting a lean journey?

Start with people. Build the leadership culture and the organizational development infrastructure before investing in process tools. When the people are ready, introduce the process systems. When the process creates stability, use that stability to identify and remove waste. Then flow. Then continuous improvement.

How do you justify the overhead cost of dedicated training and development roles?

O’Shea doubled staff and achieved roughly 10 times the revenue from the period when those investments began. The overhead created capacity, capability, and culture that produced returns no billable hire could have generated alone. The question is not whether you can afford it. It is whether you can afford to keep growing without it.

What do you do when new trade partners or team members do not understand your lean culture?

Go back and start from the beginning with them. You cannot expect new participants to catch up to a journey they were not on. Treat every new team member as someone who needs to be brought from unaware to aware before they can contribute at the level the system requires.

How does a company maintain lean momentum across multiple projects simultaneously?

By developing enough internal capability that the knowledge is not concentrated in one or two people. O’Shea’s investment in organizational development created a distributed leadership model where the culture and the systems are carried by the team rather than by any single individual. That is the only way the flywheel keeps spinning across an entire portfolio.