628: Anthony Consigli - Digging Graves, Playing Football at Harvard, Learning From Failure, Taking Big Chances, & Growing a Business From $3 Million to $4 Billion

0:00We executed really well and it started to help make a name for ourselves. There was definitely some risk-taking there, and I think the fear of failure just drove that hell out of us to make sure that they went right. This episode is brought to you by Insight Global. Hiring the perfect culture, skill, and team fit isn't magic, it's expertise. As a true talent and professional services partner, Insight Global offers customized solutions to help you build teams, improve retention, and drive better business results. Go beyond staffing with Insight Global. If you'd like to learn more, go to insightglobal.com slash learningleader.

0:47That's insightglobal.com slash learningleader.

0:54Welcome to the Learning Leader Show. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text HAWK to 66866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off. You'll also receive details about how our book, The Score That Matters, will help you become a more effective leader. Text HAWK to 66866. Now on to tonight's featured leader. Anthony Consigli is the CEO of Consigli Construction. Consigli is a fourth-generation family-led construction company founded in 1905.

1:38When Anthony became the CEO in 1997, the company had 25 employees and did about$3 million in revenue. As of today, they have 2 ,400 employees and will do$3.5 billion in revenue. It's an amazing story of growth, innovation, craftsmanship, and the power of surrounding yourself with great people. I originally met Anthony when he hired me to give a keynote speech to his leadership team in Boston a few months ago. And we hit it all from there. And then I asked him if he would come on the podcast so we could learn more about his story. Man, I'm glad we did. A few things we talked about. What you could learn from being a grave digger.

2:22Interesting part of his life growing up. How his life changed from playing football at Harvard. What those of us outside of the construction world can learn from a project manager on a job site. There are so many portable leadership lessons. why Anthony has set his company up to be employee-owned, the importance of pushing your edges, and then at the end, Anthony tells a great story about what he learned from a hiking guide in Colorado a decade ago. So, so good. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Anthony Consigli.

2:59All right, Anthony, man, it's so good to see you, and it's great to have you here on the Learning Leader Show. Welcome, man. Great to see you, Ryan. And thank you for having me. Of course, of course. One of the rare times I got to come hang out with you in Boston or the outskirts of Boston, talk with your team, and then now get a chance to record because I was fascinated during my preparation for that keynote of learning more about you and learning more about your company. I was really just honored to get a chance to be in the room with you guys. So thank you for that. Well, we were honored to have you.

3:31It was a treat for us. I'm such a big fan of the show. And so it was great to see you in person. Love it, man. Okay. I want to go back in time. You're 14. You have done something that I've never done. And I don't know if I've ever spoken to somebody who's done and that you were a grave digger. You've dug a lot of ditches and cemeteries. One, why was that a big part of your upbringing? And what have you learned from your years digging graves? Sure. So as a small construction business, a big part of our work was digging graves for all of the local cemeteries. And at the time, most of them were by hand.

4:12And my grandfather always said, my father always said, hey, this is a recession-proof business. People are always going to die. And so he did things like that and snow plowing, another recession-proof business. Those were sort of core things that the company did. It was seven and a half feet long, four feet deep, about five and a half, I'm sorry, four feet wide, five and a half feet deep. When you would fill 22 wheelbarrows, wheel them up a plank onto a truck, that was the displacement from the coffin in the box that would go in the ground. And so, you know, we would dig, I don't know, I'm on average three, four, 500 graves a year.

4:52When I would do it after school, I would do it on weekends, summer vacations and such. It was, I'm not going to lie, it was hard. I mean, you know, wintertime, you're out there with a jackhammer to get through the frost. It's cold in New England when it's raining and whatever, you had to get the hole dug. But I would say as miserable as it was at the time, I mean, the stories coming out of it were hilarious. You know, you go out and get the coordinates, map coordinates from a Catholic priest at a rectory or something. You go down and you map it out. And at the time, it seems like, oh, my God, this is a huge feat.

5:29How am I going to do this by myself or with another person? But it's just one shovel at a time, one wheelbarrow at a time, and you just sort of keep going. And there's one story. At one time, we dug a grave, and that night the phone rang at the house, and my father came in to see me. And he says, Anthony, you dug the grave in the wrong place. He said that they had the funeral today, and it's in the wrong lot. and there might have been some yelling and some F-bombs dropped in there. But the next day, he brought me down to the cemetery. We marked the grave out in the right place and I had to re-dig, move the box over and fill the hole back in and do this all while the family was watching, which was really embarrassing.

6:11And I wanted to blame the priest for giving me the wrong coordinates. Catholic Church at the time wasn't known for great record keeping, but that was that's sort of a lost cause. But in any case, grave digging taught you to, when something looks daunting, when something looks like, oh my God, this is a big job to just have a process, one wheelbarrow at a time, a foot at a time, a shovel at a time, however you want to break it down. And to just follow that process and have discipline to it. And it's much the same as like we're going out and building a really large project now, it might look too daunting or too challenging.

6:51It's just like, hey, break this down into little pieces and follow a process. I would say the other thing that it really taught me is that when you make a mistake to own it, it wasn't right to blame the priest for screwing up. I needed to own it. And that's why my father had me go down by myself and fix it. Clean up your own messes. Grave digging taught me a lot of sort of things like that. Again, as miserable as it was at the time, there were great stories that came from it and a lot that I learned. And I am sure you feel this way as a dad, putting your children in positions to where they have to do things that are both mentally and physically taxing helps better prepare you for the future adversity that you're going to face.

7:38And I'm curious to learn more about that, of like how intentional was your dad about that? Or was he just like, hey, this is the work that needs to get done. Anthony, go do it. You know, go dig the grave. Like how intentional are you as a dad of trying to put your children in positions to stress them physically and mentally to better prepare them for what's going to happen in the real world? Yeah, it's interesting. I like I don't think my dad was intentional at all. I think it was like, hey, this is the way I was brought up and you're going to do it too. And it's just, this is what you bought into.

8:14And now I've told him over time, my dad to me and my brothers is like God. He is the greatest human being ever, taught us so much. He put us in some positions that I don't know, you know, you'd get arrested today. And so - Like what? What do you mean? No, I mean, in terms of some of the work that we did and some of the sacrifices, even when When you get into, like, say, playing high school sports, it was like it was still work first and sports second. It was a it was a bit of a sacrifice. When you're a freshman or sophomore in high school and you're playing on the varsity for the first time and you're running on the field for double sessions and you're late and the coach is screaming at you and you have to explain in front of him and the team that the funeral was late coming in and you had to bury a body.

9:03And that's why you're late. It's a bit humbling. And so there were lots of moments like that where, again, it's not intentional, but it sort of taught you that sacrifice is important. In terms of my own kids, like I did, I was much more intentional. I didn't have to make my kids do that stuff, but I did because I wanted them to have the same benefit of learning work ethic, of sacrifice and what it means, but also to be put in challenging positions. And so my daughter, who works for the company now, was working on construction sites when she was in high school, for instance. My son joined my daughter on a project we were building in Harlem, a renovation of a building in Harlem, New York City, tough area.

9:51When he was in high school, he stayed. He lived with her down in the city for a month. He learned the whole subway system. For a high school kid to be working on a job like that and seeing things in New York City that you see is sort of a big learning experience. Oh, yeah. Those things are so important. You mentioned football. We share that and we've had conversations about how impactful that was in our lives. And then you get to the opportunity because of your football skill and your intelligence level, which is high enough in college to go to Harvard to play. What were some of the key learnings you learned from both being a student and a football player at Harvard?

10:30Let me start on the student side first. I would say going into Harvard, I was scary. I come out of a small sort of town. I had this image in my head of either like flamethrowing progressives protesting every cause on the planet earth or monocle wearing blue blood type people that I just wouldn't fit in with. And really what I found was really the most diverse student mix I've ever seen in my life. I mean, it was a kid I played with who had been in an LA street gang. There was another kid who would work in a limestone mill in Western Pennsylvania. Yet at the same time, there was a kid who was fifth generation Harvard, who was just a nice kid.

11:17And that surprised me. And I sort of morphed from a small town meathead where my conversation was limited to how tough Chuck Norris was or Hulk Hogan to being able to be a lot more open-minded, a lot more curious, a lot more conversant on a number of things. And I would say Harvard gets knocked around a bit, especially lately. Liberal arts education gets knocked around a bit lately. And I'm a big believer in it. I took a lot of business courses. A lot of them I may not have gotten a lot from, but then I took a course in Nordic mythology. And what did I learn from that? I mean, I might've taken it because I needed an uneasy grade during football season, but I came out of there being able to tell better stories and understanding rituals and culture and symbols and tribalism.

12:15And like, I use that stuff to this day in my own business. And so anyway, it just, it sort of changed me a bit. And I met the best friends I ever, I still have the best friends in my life from my days at Harvard. So anyway, it really changed me into the person I sort of needed to be versus what I went in with. How about adding on to the fact that you played football there? I mean, that was just an awesome experience. The one thing I'll say about football and the Ivy League in general is, yes, kids might be gifted academically, but they play hard. They train hard. Football is real to them. I'm reading the John Feinstein book about the Ancient Eight right now, and he captures it really well.

13:05But look, everybody, I say everybody puts their fingers on the ground. And you go through the same hard work, the same preparation, the same process. It teaches you resilience. It teaches you teamwork. It teaches you discipline to a process. You learn how to lose. My junior year there, we were 8-2 and won the AV League. And it was just a great experience. The next year, we returned almost everybody and we went 2-8. to this day, we still talk about, hey, how does that happen and what happened? And it teaches you a lot about life. Eight and two to two and eight. Usually the story goes the other way.

13:44We were two and eight. Our guys came together and we worked hard. The next year we won the Ivy League and we were eight and two. So it's for have it go. The reverse is completely backwards. What happened? How did this team of obviously talented enough to win the conference, win the league, then completely goes the other direction the next year? I don't know. We talk about it to this day. Like the talent was there, but I don't know. You know, look, the easy thing to say would be that our heads got bloated and our egos got in the way. But I don't think that was it. I think that we had a couple of games where just things didn't go the right way.

14:23And all of a sudden, people started doubting themselves and we lost confidence. And then I think when things started going the wrong way, we didn't do anything to correct it. We didn't do anything enough, I should say, to correct it. But to this day, we sort of talk about it, me and my friends. And what it's helped me with is understand, like my own company is really just a collection of teams. Like we have about 150 projects at one time, and that's really 150 teams. And so I think constantly about how is this team made up? Do they have the right players? Do they have the right leadership? Do they have the right team dynamics?

15:04Because the success of that team is going to judge how well or how poorly that job goes. And that year of going 2-8 taught me a lot more about teamwork than the 8-2 team did in a lot of ways. Well, that leads me to the construction world. And as I was preparing for our time and preparing for my keynote with your company, I was trying to learn more not only about your company, but about your industry so I could try to be somewhat relatable because that's not an industry that I'm familiar with. And as I was digging in and talking with you, a leader in the construction world has an insane job. and you'll be better at telling this to me, but just the number of people and different incentives and different priorities that person or those people need to gather to build this giant thing is crazy.

16:02Can you walk through just the sheer responsibility of somebody who is a leader while trying to build a giant apartment complex or a giant building in Boston or New York City or all over the place where you guys build? I'd just love for you to detail the sheer amount of responsibility that person has. Sure. It's funny you ask that because just last week I was at some conference and somebody asked the question, hey, name the three greatest leaders that you know. And of course, everybody started naming CEOs or military people, politicians, whatever. And I started thinking about just the people that I worked with.

16:42And if you take a superintendent project manager that might be building a building, as you said, like in South Boston, or like we were building a hospital down in the U.S. Virgin Islands, or say rural Maine, that person has to commute probably over an hour to the job site early morning before most people have even gotten up. They're overseeing 100 or 300, 500 workers coming on the job. Most of them, you know, probably 30 or 40 percent will be immigrants or maybe even non-English speaking. All of them coming from different walks of life, socioeconomic backgrounds. And that person has to align all of them on a daily basis to build something that has never been built before.

17:32It might be some unbelievable design by a world-leading architect, or it could be a hospital that is going to help treat people and save lives. But they're doing it in the midst of organizing thousands of different materials coming from all corners of the planet. They're doing it without knowing what the weather is going to be, what the traffic or logistics concerns are going to be. They'll be doing it with some guy with a tie-on telling them that they're over budget and some other person telling them that they're behind schedule and someone else telling them that they need to work safer. And it's just, you got all of these voices in your ear telling you, you need to do better, better, better, better in all these different areas.

18:17And, you know, you've got to make certainty and predictability out of all this stuff on a daily basis. And then you're going to do it all over again the next day until that project is complete. It's a really hard job. And that's why I think that these guys I work with, men and women, they're some of the best leaders I've ever come across. What are some of the core themes, the core qualities and actions of those project managers, superintendents, the ones leading on job sites, leading a bunch, hundreds and hundreds of different workers for them, some of them who don't speak English? What are some of the commonalities among the ones who are the best of the best?

19:02Obviously, we look to hire for these things, but the best of the best are going to, I call it, have God rails, right? They have high standards, but they know that they have to move the God rails out a bit because they're like leading an orchestra and not every person is going to do things. Hold on. I thought you said God rails. I was like, wait, God, okay. Guard, so nice. Boston accent, guard, Boston accent. Sorry. I love it. Guardrails, high standards. Okay. Proceed. Sorry. I feel like Ben Affleck in the Dunkin Donuts commercial, but yeah, but look, you're leading an orchestra. Not every person is going to play exactly the way you want to play.

19:47You, you have to have some tolerance levels, but you got to hold high standards. You got to have attention to detail. You got to have a sense of urgency because everybody's trying to create an excuse why not to do something. And you have to fight your way through that. You have to have great leadership abilities in terms of fighting through problems and keeping people aligned. So look, it's not that different from the skills I learned on the football field. A lot of these people have them. They have an ability to take criticism and not let it bother them. you took over. Okay. I want to get the timeline, right?

20:26Because the building of your company is an awesome story. It's one of the main reasons I wanted to do this. You became the CEO in 1997. Is that right? Yes. Can you tell the history before 1997? What was Consigli? What was the business? What did you primarily do? How many people worked there? What were the yearly revenues leading up to 1997 when you took over? Sure. So business was started in 1905 by my great-grandfather. He was a stonemason who had immigrated from Italy. He had six sons. They all had a trade. They were all mason trades, concrete, bricks, plaster, et cetera. But four of them went to World War II, fought in the war.

21:10My grandfather stayed back here and ran the business at that point. But the business stayed small for three generations, average around 20, 30 people. You know, most we did was probably a million dollars a year. My father was a heavy equipment operator at the same time he was running the business. And so, you know, I got out of Harvard, we were still digging graves and plowing snow and doing small commercial projects. But, you know, it was about, it was still about 20, 30 employees, you know, and that was the size my, you know, My grandfather and my father wanted to keep it. So one, you become the CEO.

21:49I'm curious why they chose you and why you wanted it. And then how you wanted to change the business or at minimum, you wanted to grow the business, I imagine. So can you talk a little bit about that process of how you got chosen, why you wanted to be the CEO, and then what happened next? Some of your priorities, how you were able to start hypercharging the growth into Consiglian? Sure. My father, I think, always figured that I would run the company at some point. I had grown up in the business and he really liked running heavy equipment. But I would say that when I came into the business, it was like 1990 and we went through a really bad recession.

22:32And they say everybody has their crucible in life. This was really my crucible. We were in tough shape. We couldn't make payroll, couldn't pay our bills. I was 22 years old and had just gotten my now wife pregnant. And there's just a lot of stuff going on in our extended family that was problematic. And so it was a tough few years. And when we got through it, working hard and scrapping and such. But we got to around 1995, 96, and we had stabilized. And my father said, all right, this is a good time to transition. And at the same time, my brother, my younger brother, Matthew, had just joined us.

23:22And I don't think I'll ever forget. I think it was wintertime, and people were out snow plowing, but we had to cover a grave. And so I think we were down a cemetery. And here I am, I got a Harvard economics degree. I have all these visions of what I want to do with my life. And I'm covering a grave. And I think the two of us looked at each other and said, what are we doing? And so I think it was about that moment that like, you know, we had a conversation with my father and he said, hey, this is a good transition point, became CEO. And at that moment, I think, you know, my brother and I decided to give up grave digging and snow plowing and a bunch of the different things that they might've made money, but it wasn't what we wanted to spend our life doing.

24:04And we decided to focus on where do we want this company to go? And so that was sort of a real big moment. It was a big moment for me, big moment for the company, I think. So what happened next? Because it's one thing to say, I don't want to be digging graves. I don't want to be plowing snow. I mean, they're recession-proof businesses. I understand why you do it because in the short term, you're going to be able to make payroll. You're going to be able to make a little bit of money. You're going to be able to run your business. So I could see how it would be hard to give up kind of guaranteed moneymakers, but that's what you decided to do.

24:38So how were you able to have the confidence and the guts to say, we're going to go big here. We're not going to just do these little jobs that basically anybody could do, but we're going to do something more special. We're going to do something bigger. What was it in you that said, that's what I want to do. And then the harder part is actually doing it. So how were you able to make that happen? Sure. So at the time, there was no grand vision of, hey, we want to be a billion, two billion, three billion dollar company. There was none of that. It was just we knew what we didn't want to be. And so but we the first thing we did was we said, OK, we know what we don't want to do.

25:14So we gave those things up. Second is, we started focusing on larger jobs, jobs that could span a year or two years, help us get through a recession if we were to have another recession. And so we took some shots on doing some projects that were a little bit out of our wheelhouse and a little bit bigger than, and they were challenges. I'll tell you what, we planned them real well, we executed really well, and it started to help make a name for ourselves. And there was definitely some risk taking there. And I think the fear of failure just drove that hell out of us to make sure that they went right.

25:56And at the same time, we focused on a brand. We focused on the history of the company, came up with a new logo, and really branding ourself around this craftsmanship and masonry that my grandfather and father and uncles were sort of known for. And then I would say, lastly, we sort of built our team. We didn't know what we were doing, but we went out and we hired some people who did and sort of convinced them or were able to convince them to take a chance on us that we were going to bring this company to a great place and sort of built out our core leadership team in about five years that they're all still here today.

26:42It's 30 years later and they're still with me. I mean, it's a great story of consistency, but those are the four or five things we did at that time that helped us give us a launching pad to start growing the business. It's funny, Anthony, I've had this conversation recently with some others who have sustained excellence over time like you have. And one of the commonalities is you acted and you took action before you were ready. You didn't fully know what you were even doing, but you had the willingness to get after it, the willingness to act, the willingness to do the work, and the willingness to figure it out as you went, as well as you're willing to make the investment in other people that maybe did know a little bit more than you that could help you get there.

27:32And it seems like that combination of things of being able to lean into some of the uncertainty, being able to take on a big job where deep down, you're probably thinking, I'm not even sure if we can do this job. I don't know if we can build this big thing. And so I'm curious about maybe one of those first big jobs. What was it? Can you take us in the moment of an example of a time where you said, yes, you bid on a project and you got it. And maybe even after you got it, you looked around, maybe talked to your brother and say, wait, maybe I almost wish we didn't get it because this is too big of a job.