Dave Cain: Welcome to unsuitable on Rea Radio, the award-winning financial services and business advisory podcast that challenges your old school business practices and the traditional business suit culture. Our guests are industry professionals and experts who will challenge you to think beyond the suit and tie while offering you meaningful modern solutions to help enhance your company’s growth. I’m your host Dave Cain. The workplace can be a dangerous place and without the right training, education, policies and procedures in place, you could be looking at workplace injuries, citations, fines and damaged reputations.
Dave: Today’s guest is well-versed when it comes to protecting companies and people from ensuring that common safety compliance measures have been implemented and managed to teaching employees the Combat Objective Battle Ready Applications, self-defense system for personal protection in the workplace. Wayne Burley does it all. A trainer with MHS WorkSafe, Wayne brings more than 20 years of HR and work safety experience to his role, as well as 36 years of experience in defensive tactics instruction. He has a master’s degree in fitness management from the United States Sports Academy. He was inducted into the United States Kido Federation Black Belt Hall of Fame.
Dave: This guy means business. On today’s show, he’s going to talk about what he’s doing to protect both employers and their employees. Welcome to unsuitable, Wayne.
Wayne Burley: Thanks. Thanks for having me.
Dave: Great. You know, I think in the history of unsuitable on Rea Radio, we’ve done about 185 episodes, you’re the first hall of famer we’ve had on the show. Congratulations.
Wayne: Thank you.
Dave: When did you jump into the hall of fame?
Wayne: It was just about a year ago this month.
Dave: Congratulations. What were some of the attributes to get you elected into the hall?
Wayne: Well, I was nominated for outstanding contributions to the martial arts. I guess if you’ve had a career that span 35-36 years, at some point in time you get recognized for that. I went out to Omaha, Nebraska and received the award there.
Dave: Fantastic. Fantastic. We’ll talk a little bit more about that self-defense training, but I want to talk about some of the things that you do at MHS WorkSafe. Tell me a little bit at first about where’s MHS WorkSafe located. Where are you guys located at?
Wayne: We’re located in Uhrichsville, Ohio. I’m the managing partner of MHS WorkSafe, and we’re a division of MHS, Material Handling Specialists.
Dave: Okay. Okay.
Wayne: Material Handling Specialists. They do everything from selling and working on lift trucks, pallet jacks, racking, anything material handling. I head up the training division.
Dave: Great. Great. I’m going to talk about did you work… You guys work with clients in three areas regarding OSHA, compliance, consistency and sustainability. We shared off mic a couple stories, but Rea & Associates, the manufacturing segment, construction segment are two of our largest practice areas. In fact, on the manufacturing front, we probably have more than 400 different clients in various industry of that area. A lot listeners in that space to this program. Some of our discussion regarding OSHA will be very pertinent to our listeners. Let’s talk about OSHA. What’s that organization? How do they manage the workplace? You’re going to help us navigate that.
Wayne: OSHA has been in existence, a federal program, since 1970, but a lot of companies even today especially… We specialize in companies of around 150 or less employees. They just don’t have the resources. Oftentimes they don’t understand what the regulations are. There’s about 18,000 regulations in the 1910 standard. The code of federal regulations is like any other federal agency. It’s very cumbersome. What we do in terms of compliance, we help companies understand what you need to have done in your workplace in terms of training, who in your workplace needs it, how often do they need it, that type of thing. We help them to be consistent in that with policies, procedures.
Wayne: Oftentimes your practices and your policies don’t match up. If you say you’re doing something, you need to be doing it. We help coordinate that. Then we put the company on a path to sustainability. You have to be able to sustain those programs.
Dave: If I have a manufacturing or construction industry, we use those two industries, we would basically hire your company to come out, talk to us, do some training, some ongoing training. It’s not like hey, come in once every five years. We need to see you frequently because stuff is changing.
Wayne: Right. I have clients that I have on retainer. Once a month I’m on their site whether we’re doing a safety audit or doing safety training. It all starts with the hazard assessment. The hazard assessment is going to take us down the path of helping them understand what their personal protective equipment needs are, whether they need for instance Lockout/Tagout training, as well as standard procedures, standard operating procedures.
Dave: We like to tell stories on unsuitable. Again change the name to protect the innocent if that’s the case, but can you share some stories about some industrial accidents you’ve been involved in and maybe step back and say, Hey, if you guys would have had that training, this may not have happened. Is there anything that comes to mind you can share with our listeners?
Wayne: I could share some experiences where a company by not putting in the effort upfront, the pain of doing things correctly upfront far exceeds the pain of not doing things on the backside. One company in particular that I’ve worked with, they had two injuries. They were hand injuries. One was a hand crush. The other one was an amputation of a finger. In both cases, both employees they recovered, but those two injuries are at the tune of $1.8 million for that company and counting. If you would have put the measures in place, machine guarding, Lockout/Tagout procedures, they would have have been that far ahead.
Wayne: Backing away from severe injuries, if I go into a facility and the fire extinguisher is blocked or it hasn’t been inspected in the last month, if an OSHA compliance officer comes in and finds that, it’s a $12,471 fine.
Dave: This isn’t parking ticket type money. This is big boy money.
Wayne: Big boy money. If they have 10 of those fire extinguishers, multiply that number by 10.
Dave: Bixler, get the calculator. Let’s see what we go there. OSHA, do they just… Can they show up at in any moment?
Wayne: They can show up. The way do that is they’ll show up on site and they’ll ask to see a training record for maybe your forklift three year recert. If the company doesn’t have and cannot produce those records, then it’s going to open up an inspection.
Dave: You mentioned in one of the stories 1.8 million bucks of fines and penalties. It would seem to me that might be one on the low side because that was certainly an injury. What if there would have been a loss of life? What are some of the fines and penalties you’re seeing there?
Wayne: Well, it’s kind of across… If there is a death, sometimes there could be a death and the actual penalties are quite low. It just depends on did the company do upfront what they needed to do, did they provide training for individuals, do they have the records of that training because accidents do happen in the workplace. Regardless of how well a company implements their program, they could have an injury or they could have a death. OSHA’s going to come in and they’re going to look at what was your training, where’s the records, are you in compliance with the frequency of that training. That’s going to dictate a lot of where they go from there.
Dave: Sure. At MHS WorkSafe, one of the things in my notes, you guys offer a workplace safety audit.
Wayne: Yes. We will go in and do the audit. Typically depending on the size of the company, again we’re normally working with companies up to 150 employees, that audit is going to take around an hour, hour and a half and then there’s going to be a report on the backside, but that’s going to give us a lot of information and it’s going to takes us to the training needs. We’re going to find the gaps. It’s essentially a gap analysis.
Dave: You’re looking for job hazard and do the assessments and things like that.
Wayne: Yes. It starts with that job hazard assessment, which is that safety walk through that audit. Many companies they go about things in reverse. They’ll either have something happen and then they call us in or-
Dave: After the fact, yeah.
Wayne: … they want to go down a path and they’re just going down and spending more money than they would need to if they would just have the assessment done upfront.
Dave: We talked about the three areas, compliance, consistency and sustainability, on the OSHA compliance, talked about the pain of the policies versus not doing. What about understanding… I want to kind of understand the cost of hesitation. What if I’m not totally into this? What if my industry has a clean record? My company has a clean record. I’m kind of hesitant to go forward. What advice would you have for me?
Wayne: There is a cost to hesitation. If something does happen… I was just at a client this week doing a shelter-in-place training. One of their employees had been there for 48 years. I asked him, Have you ever had a tornado? He goes, Well, no, but we did have one of the walls blow in one year. I said, Well, you had an event, but you just didn’t have the injury. The cost of hesitation it’s kind of a victim mentality if you will. It’s not going to happen to me. If does happen to me, it’s not going to be that bad. Companies need to get out of the victim mentality and they need to understand that things can happen, things do happen.
Wayne: You have to have a plan. You need to implement that and don’t hesitate to spend a few dollars upfront to save thousands of dollars on the backend.
Dave: This is just a guess on my part, but the fact that your firm works with… Your niche area is companies with 150 employees and less and there’s some smaller ones certainly in there, but the owners, the CEO, those guys are a lot of frontline, they’re involved in a whirlwind, maybe involved in the manufacturing process. It’s probably an area they overlook. Is that maybe an area you’re seeing?
Wayne: Yeah. Sometimes they’ll overlook the safety. A lot of times as the company grows, they do not bring the ancillary programs with it. A lot of people have to many wear hats. You don’t have the resources. I’ve been told actually along those lines where hey, you’re the safety guy. You’re the guy we never think of, but you’re the guy we need the most. Actually I had a plant manager tell me that.
Dave: Workplace violence, every month, every week we read something going on out there, part of violence. I know you guys also do some workplace violence training, some self-defense. You have this thing we had talked about in the opening about Combat Objective Battle Ready Application, also known as COBRA.
Wayne: Yes. Workplace violence is… You have 18 times more chance of being killed in a workplace by violence than you do in a fire at the workplace because again historically we had fires. People died. Today, we do the training. We do the drills. We do all those things. Workplace violence is not an OSHA standard, but it falls under what they call the general duty clause. It’s kind of the catch all. If it’s not covered here, it’s covered there. COBRA, I’m licensed through COBRA International out of Florida. I’m one of 150 instructors worldwide that’s actually licensed to the COBRA brand. The Combat Objective Battle Ready Application, the key there is battle ready application.
Wayne: What we do is we work with individuals, groups and corporations on personal safety and corporate safety. It’s not a martial arts program. Many of us we have martial art backgrounds, but less than 2%, about 3%-2% of the adult population seeks out personal safety. The battle ready application, when you take a course or a program through us whether it’s team building, whether it’s an active shooter response training, it could just be a ladies night out, we have about 11 different programs. Our newest program called CAP, it’s child abduction prevention, it was developed in Australia. I’m the second person in the United States to actually teach that program to a group of kids.
Wayne: It concentrates solely on anti-abduction. That’s a two-hour program. When a person leaves one of our programs, no matter what it is, they’re going to have applicable techniques available to them to use when they walk out the door. Way different than a martial arts program that might take years to develop those same skillsets.
Dave: I want to go back to that, but in preparation for today’s discussion, I went on your website and there’s a lot of cool things on your website regarding the COBRA and some pretty interesting stuff on there. Can you share your website with our listeners? I think they would enjoy going on there and maybe click on here in a few minutes when we do a self-defense demonstration. What’s your website?
Wayne: My website is cobradefensecanton.com. My website mirrors the corporate website out of Florida. Cobradefensecanton.com. You’ll find a lot of, like you said, really good information on there.
Dave: Active shooter response. We’re hearing that more and more in the workplace, in our schools. That’s an area that you do also train?
Wayne: Yeah. We do training. There’s a 15 point checklist if you will that we go through if we’re going to develop a plan for a company. It’s just another emergency response plan just like shelter-in-place evacuation. You have hurricane plans. Well, a lot of companies don’t have a plan because it’s a horrific event if it does happen. They don’t want to acknowledge that hey, this could possibly happen. But yes, it’s a program that we will come in and help develop a plan for a company, but we actually do training where we take people through reality-based scenarios. We get their adrenaline pumping. We help them to be able to function under that kind of stress.
Dave: You’re seeing more and more companies looking at that as far as part of their training. Here at Rea & Associates we have training in software, CRM, marketing automation, how to use the telephone. I think we know where to go if there’s a tornado, but we don’t have, that I know of, any training for active shooter response.
Wayne: At this time of year with the tax season and everything, you could have a person walk in and they may not be happy.
Dave: Well, you had to bring that up, didn’t you? What do you think of that new tax act that went into pack? Did that impact your business much?
Wayne: It didn’t impact my business personally that much.
Dave: But you heard enough of it, yeah.
Wayne: Absolutely.
Dave: But that’s interesting. Bixler, get that on the schedule, would you there? Let’s see what we can do. A lot of companies when they have that, is that mandatory training?
Wayne: It is for some companies. I’ve worked with manufacturing facilities, a lot of churches. Soft targets. Then the other thing is companies that have wellness initiatives like the well-being of employees. Employees have a life outside of the company.
Dave: Right. Right.
Wayne: When you’re at the restaurant, the movie theater, the airport, the church, we give you a path and we empower the individual to take action. That’s the difference.
Dave: Off mic, you and I talked about some of the violence that has occurred with some of the ride share programs. Certainly that’s awareness you talked about. Whether it’s a guys night out or ladies night out, there’s always a danger lurking. I think what your organization does is try to help our employees and your clients respond to that the best they can.
Wayne: Yeah. COBRA, we’re real big on social media and already there’s been information put out through corporate on Uber drivers and what not, what to look for, what to expect, what they should be asking you and what not.
Dave: It’s safety training.
Wayne: It’s safety training. We have a lot of resources. We have an online college. Everything we teach is backed up on video. At corporate, everything we teach is going to be on online college.
Dave: Have you ever done a COBRA training demonstration or self-defense demonstration on a podcast?
Wayne: I have not.
Dave: I don’t know that’s ever been tried before in the history of podcasting. You want to be a first? You want to try it?
Wayne: Let’s do it.
Dave: We’ll see if we can find somebody out in the hallway to come in. You can demonstrate what you’re doing. We have you on YouTube, so we can look at that, and I’ll try to describe the activity to our listening audience. Let me see if we can get… Oh, here comes a guy. He’s head of our production Brad Circone. Come on ahead. Brad has just stepped to the front of the room.
Brad: That’s perfect.
Dave: We’ll see if we can describe. We’ll get the YouTube going. Now, Wayne Burley is going to do a demonstration, a self-defense demonstration. What do we got going here?
Wayne: Well, let’s just do something simple. We’re going to have… Brad, we’re going to have you just put your head on my chest. One of the things, if somebody puts their hand on you, I want to… What we call we want to…
Dave: Hands on chest.
Wayne: I want to anchor. If I trap here and I…
Brad: Oh my.
Wayne: There’s the move and then maybe I just take one finger and I…
Dave: Okay.
Wayne: That would be an easy technique.
Dave: The finger bent way back. I was voting for a little more bend there, but how’d that feel, Brad?
Brad: It still works.
Dave: It still works. Okay. That’s one move. What do we got next? You got something else?
Wayne: We talked about if say somebody would grab your wrist and they’re going to pull you and maybe I don’t want to be pulled, so I’d come to here and just bring Brad down there or something. That might be another technique.
Dave: Yeah. All right.
Brad: I think this is a wrath.
Dave: There was a wrist turn. Now let me just try to describe. Brad, if you’re walking down the street and somebody sneaks up from behind. Wayne, I’m sure you have a couple demonstrations.
Wayne: We could have maybe Brad put his…
Dave: Yeah.
Wayne: Just like he’s kind of choking.
Dave: Yes. Okay. Brad is choking.
Brad: I do this all the time.
Dave: Guys, you got to see this. Go on YouTube.
Wayne: What we want to do here, we want to get our hooks into Brad. So he can’t choke me, I’m going to try to bring his arm back up. This gives me the time and then maybe we do this.
Brad: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Beautiful. That does it. That does it.
Dave: Brad has tears coming down his face.
Brad: That was good.
Dave: Wayne, that was pretty good.
Brad: That was good.
Dave: How does that feel?
Brad: It hurts.
Wayne: Our techniques are designed to be simple. They have to be effective, and of course, you can make them as devastating as you need to.
Brad: That’s a word I might use.
Dave: Devastated. You were devastated? Again, our guest has been Wayne Burley from MHS WorkSafe and COBRA training. Wayne is from Uhrichsville, Ohio. Check out his website. Thanks again for joining us today, Wayne.
Wayne: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Dave: Employers certainly have a variety of reasons to want to bring somebody like you into their business and there’s so many what ifs out there. Through MHS WorkSafe and COBRA, you’re doing a lot to make business a little safer. Thanks for sharing what you can do for our listeners.
Wayne: Thank you.
Dave: Brad’s arm is now in a sling and a neck brace. It works. By the way listeners, if you like to share this episode, go ahead. I’ll wait about five seconds so you can make that determination. Go ahead. Like it. Finally, don’t forget to subscribe to unsuitable on Rea Radio on iTunes or YouTube. Until next time, I’m Dave Cain, encouraging you to loosen up your tie and think outside the box.
Disclaimer: The views expressed on unsuitable on Rea Radio are our own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Rea & Associates. The podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended to replace the professional advice you would receive elsewhere. Consult with a trusted advisor about your unique situation so they can expertly guide you to the best solution for your specific circumstance.