There Is a Difference: Tony Stall on Experience, Leadership, and the Evolution of Construction

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Experience alone is not a superpower but experience with self-reflection, continuous learning, and proven results is. We know this to be true because we have seen it firsthand through our relationship with Tony Stall, a business development executive we a lifetime of success. We appreciate Tony agreeing to be featured in this edition of There is a Difference. He is insightful, generous, and thoughtful in his answers to our questions and his work as a leader in the industry. Please meet Tony Stall.

Well, my name is Tony Stall, and I’ve been in the construction industry for roughly 35 years now. I started as a salesman in Connecticut for a small company called Synergy in the Eve’s business. I moved to the West coast and managed an operation out there. I was relocated to Rhode Island for Synergy. They moved to Florida when they were purchased in 1997, so I switched horses and became part of the Dryvit team. I had 20 years of executive experience with Dryvit running sales, marketing, business development and the international business largely in Latin America and Asia. And then the parent company of Dryvit incorporated Dryvit into some other companies within the organization, and I was asked to prematurely retire, which I was happy to do because it was the eve of COVID and that seemed like a good year to not have to work.

So after that I worked on the West coast for a stucco manufacturer called Western Blended Products. Good friend of mine who owns that company. Enjoyed setting up distribution and working with him for a while. I did a one year long international consultancy for Solomon Colors in the decorative concrete and concrete additives business, and then joined a little company called MTI in Iowa for a year as… I’d known them for 25 years from my relationship with them from the Dryvit days. And now I’m with a company called Advanced Building Products, a manufacturer of entangled net technologies located in Maine. Throughout it all, I’ve been able to stay living in Rhode Island, or at least where I wanted to live. Some of that included the West coast, which was nice. I was able to accommodate my wife having a job opportunity out there, and my kids who went to school on the west coast. We kept our house in Rhode Island and here I am sitting between my kitchen and living room again, gainfully employed and enjoying what I do immensely.

Do you have an anecdote to share from your career?

 

I don’t know if you can find an analogy in that except perhaps if you were an athlete and at one time you felt you were joining the big time, you were competing at the highest level. And you do that for a while and then you realize at a certain point, you can’t quite run with the kids anymore. They’re just bigger, faster, stronger, but there’s still a role for you within the game. And I feel like there’s a little bit of that that’s affected my career. As you get older, you slow down a little, but where you lose a step in speed, perhaps you gain two steps in smarts. If you can outthink a less experienced person, you can outplay them without necessarily spending as much energy and time doing it. And I think that really talks about the value of experience, especially in an industry like construction.

I went to a RANA Conference last week, which is the Rainscreen Association in North America, and I felt at one point like I was sitting in a retirement folks’ home. You looked around, and including myself, all you saw were bald men’s heads. But you realize that in that room there’s a tremendous amount of experience, and when you listen to the speakers, what comes out of their mouths is so much more than a TED Talk. It’s the value of what they’ve learned over 30, and even 40, years in an industry, watching it evolve from a fairly simple industry 40 years ago. 40 years ago, we built a house by putting up some plywood, a layer or two of building paper and then nailing down some shingles on top of it. And because the house could still breathe, it worked fine. Moisture intrusion was not a consideration in the eighties.

And as we made things more complicated and had higher, loftier goals of no air infiltration and more insulation, and we tightened up those houses, and we added more components to that original mix. In order to enable it to do that, we complicated things. And a 35-year-old today doesn’t know what it was like then, doesn’t know how things worked then. An older person has seen the evolution happen. And some people say, “Well, it was good in the old days, let’s just leave it alone.” And other people say, “Some of the stuff from the old days worked pretty well.” So how do we blend new technology, especially, technology innovations, new materials, in a way that works to meet today’s goals? And if I were an architect or a developer or somebody building a building, I would really value the experience of somebody who understood how things got from here to here, and perhaps how to make them more efficient.

I’ll use an analogy too. I rode the train from Philadelphia back to Rhode Island, Amtrak. And my ticket was printed because I like printed tickets. I am holding the ticket. I know it’s there. First time I ever had a ticket on my phone, my phone died while I was online waiting to check in, so that created a lot of anxiety, so I don’t like tickets on my phone. The guy next to me, of course, had his ticket on his phone. He was 30 years younger. The conductor comes up and asks for tickets. So young guy next to me shows his phone, which has a QR code on it, which the conductor scans. I show my paper ticket, which has a QR ticket, which has a QR code on it, which the conductor scans. And then you know what he did next? He gets out his little book of paper tickets, they look like little movie tickets, and he tears one off and he punches a hole in it and sticks it up in the luggage rack for both of us.

And I laughed and I said, “With all the new technology out there, like the ways we just showed you our tickets, you guys are still punching those little cards and sticking them in the luggage rack?” And he said, “Yeah, we’ve never come up with a better way.” And I thought, that’s the construction industry. Some things are just done the way they used to be done because there isn’t a better way. There might be a newer way or something that involves a technological advantage or something with bells and whistles that’s kind of cool, but nothing is better than the guy tearing a little ticket off, stamping a hole in it and putting it in a luggage rack. That enables him to do his job most effectively. So he collected the tickets faster, but he still puts his little ticket up there to remind him where we’re getting off. And I thought, that’s so how the construction industry still works.

How do you define experience?

 

Yeah. Well, I think experience in my mind is, I’ve been there before, I’ve seen this before, I’ve dealt with this situation before, and so from learning from that, I’m able to deal with that same experience again, perhaps in a better way. So when you talk about learning from experience, in my mind that’s what it is. You recognize an event… It’s like a little kid puts his hand on top of the stove. Now if you’re a good mother or father, you keep that from happening. You’re minding him in the kitchen and you don’t want him putting his hand on the stove. Now, when I was a little kid and I reached for the stove, I got spanked because I was being warned not to put my hand on the stove ever again. So once you learn from an experience, you say, okay, how am I going to avoid that same, in this case, bad experience again by doing something differently, by changing my behavior? And it works just as well for positive events.

If you’re pitching and you throw a fastball on the low and outside and the guy swings and misses badly, so what do you do? You throw the same pitch again and you make him prove he can hit that pitch until you stop throwing it to him. So it works from positive reinforcement too, but… And how do you gain experience? You have to have the experiences in the first place. You can read about things and think you’re ready, but people in the fighting game will say, what did Rocky used to… Or no, Mike Tyson used to say, “You don’t know how to fight until you’ve been punched in the mouth.” You can read about getting punched in the mouth or how to avoid getting punched in the mouth or what it feels like getting punched in the mouth, but until it really happens to you, you haven’t experienced it, and therefore you don’t have the same visceral reaction to, okay, is this happening again? How do I avoid it? How do I deal with it? How do I make it a better experience for me and also the stakeholders around me?

If you’re in construction and you’re in construction sales and marketing, you learn to talk to different stakeholders. There’s architects who drive specifications and details, there’s contractors in the field who speak a different language and relate to you differently. On my first job, I was told, “Go call on this contractor in Norwalk, Connecticut and show up at his office at six in the morning.” And so I did. My first day on the job, I showed up at this guy’s office at six in the morning and he basically said, “Who the heck are you?” And I told him, “I’m your new Synergy sales guy.” And he called his brother and he said, “Hey Tommy, put this kid to work for a week out in the field. Have him mix mud or something or carry buckets around.” So that’s what I did for the first week. This contractor who I was supposed to be his sales guy, and I thought, well, he’s going to give me orders and I’m going to go make calls with him and I’m going to be important, he said, “Oh no, you’re going to learn a business first. Go out and mix mud.”

I don’t know whether that happens anymore today, but it was a valuable experience for me and it taught me more than just understanding how the material I was selling worked. It also gave me a very healthy respect for the day of the contractor who is installing and applying the material. And if you’re going to be effective in your job, you got to be able to interact with all levels, all sorts of people. And these weren’t people that I’d grown up with or gone to school with, but they were great guys. And it was, at that time, all guys. They were plasterers, they had a trade, they had a skill, they spoke kind of crudely and rough and bossed me around, but they were funny. And when they saw that I wasn’t afraid to get dirty, I went from being a college boy to an okay sales guy. The next week my boss gave me 50 architectural binders and said, “Go call on architects.” And I said, “What do you mean go call on architects?” He said, “You’ll figure it out.”

And back in that day, Shawn, this is the late eighties, there were no tools. You traveled by car, you didn’t have a cell phone, you called the office once a day and got your messages, and if you made five calls in a day, that was a good day. And so the value of that experience is, make sure that your calls count. Because if you’ve only got time to do five, you figure out pretty quickly, hey, I got to stay in the same area or the same building, or I’ve got to make sure I have appointments, and you’ve filled in your day with other stuff. I think today people think that activity equals contribution. So if I send 200 emails a day, I’m busy. I’m 40 times busier than that guy that used to make five calls in a day. It’s like, but what do you really achieve? And I think that that experience is important because you and I both get these random emails and texts and calls from people that you just wonder how do they keep their job? Because this isn’t effective. It’s not screened.

The tools today let us screen things so we can find out much more effectively who we need to see. There’s tools like LinkedIn and Google and ways to find people in advance and touch base with them. It makes you much more effective, but you have to be organized and really understand the value of a face-to-face meeting. It’s not just a Zoom call to say, “Hey, who are you and what do you do?” You should know that before you get on the Zoom call. So again, you’ve got the benefit of an old world, the discipline to really ferret out where real opportunities are and where the fish really is in the pond, to combining that with new technologies, which can make that initial skill more effective. But that skill is still the same. But if you let the technology define the skill, sometimes the value of the skill is diminished.

You go to a trade show today and you see a lot of people dressed in a uniform in the booth, and many of them are younger because companies, they’re hiring younger people and they want them exposed, which is great, but you walk in the booth and they don’t know what to ask you. It’s kind of a case of, “Hey, have you seen my product?” It’s like, “No, I haven’t seen your product. That’s why I’m stopping in your booth. Why don’t you tell me about your product?” And the first question that I would ask somebody is, what do you do? Before I tell you about what I do and what I make, tell me what you do. Because try to relate that. I’ll try to relate what I do and what I make and the services I provide to the way I know your business works.

Now, an older person with experience can do that because he or she has had experiences with those types of businesses. But if you don’t have that experience, all you can do is stand there and say, “Hey, have you seen my product?” And again, the engagement isn’t there.

Do you have a situation where being experienced presented a barrier in your work?

 

I think the initial barrier is, sometimes with people who… Well, I’ll give you two barriers. If you’re looking for a job, it’s an absolute barrier. And I’ll go to my grave swearing up and down that ageism is a thing. I’ve participated in interview processes, let’s say in the last 10 years, where the resume is sent, the initial email exchange is made, even a phone call happens and there’s an extreme interest. And then when you get on the Zoom call and they see that you’re who you are, you’re not a kid, you can almost hear the air go out of the room. And you have a great chat because everybody’s polite and professional and you feel real good, and at the end of the chat, “We’ll be in touch.” And then you get a letter a week later that says, “You’re not exactly what we were looking for.”

They do it in a legal way where you can’t say you were too old. So that’s a huge barrier, I think. Many times, I… But that’s when you’re looking for a job. When you have a job, I think the barrier sometimes is, the same way… It’s hard to explain. I think people look sometimes at you and think, “Here’s a nice old guy. I guess I have to deal with him. I’ll be polite because I was taught to be polite.” But you have to cross a threshold of, “Hey, I still have a lot of energy. I’m engaged. I know what you know. I may know more than you know. I’m also going to ask you to tell me something.” So you sort of level the playing field. Sometimes I think younger people look at more experienced people as, “Oh, this guy’s going to be like my dad. He’s going to tell me everything I’m doing wrong and a way to do everything, and not be open to the fact that I’m here too.” I don’t know if that makes sense. But I don’t find it’s a barrier at all.

Another barrier might be staying out past 10:30. It used to be… I was with a group when I was working at Solomon Colors and I was at the World of Concrete and all the guys were going to go out after dinner and I was invited and a couple of us just said, “Nah, we’re good.” Because I knew where that was headed, and that’s not my thing anymore. And so you learn your limitations. I’m not part of that social group either. You realize that it’s a different… You’re truly in different generations. There’s a mutual respect when it comes to the professional world, but you have to learn at a certain point where you belong. So I don’t know if those are barriers or just because of experience, you come to realize what reality is and then make the most of it. I have a number of friends who are retired and they all wonder why I’m still working. And I say, “Because I can’t imagine my life not working.”

When I was 10 years old, I started mowing lawns because my dad said, “If you want money, you work for it.” That’s what we learned. So I mowed lawns. Hell, I still mow the lawn because I’m not going to pay somebody to do something I know how to do. But I enjoy it. I really can’t imagine getting up in the morning and not turning on the computer and looking at my emails and going to meetings and meeting people and… Travel is worse today, nobody plays golf anymore, so some of the fun has gone, but I still get off on seeing old friends, making some new friends, and just feeling like I’m part of the industry and the team that I’ve been in for 35 years. It’s a great feeling. I enjoy it. I don’t ever look at it in a bad way. So as long as that’s the case and someone’s willing to pay me, I’m good. Sometimes I think I’d even do the job if they weren’t paying me, but don’t tell anybody that.

What do you see for the future of building products in the construction industry?

 

Boy, that is a 64 million dollar question at this point. On the macro scale, we’re hearing about these challenges today. Yesterday, somebody was talking about extended life mortgages. That may or may not be a great idea, and I don’t want to get into the pluses and minuses of that, but the fact is that younger people today are having a harder time purchasing their own home. And when you and I were 30 years old, if we didn’t have our own first home, we were shortly going to have one, and we knew that we had access to one and there was plenty of housing stock, and we had the ability, on the salaries we made at the time, to afford to buy a home. And in my mind, that’s as American as apple pie, home ownership. Today, I think that many people the same age are wondering if they’ll ever be able to own a home. So that’s something that has to be dealt with, and that’s obviously going to affect construction.

I don’t like the idea of real estate investment trusts buying all the single family homes because they’re the only ones that can afford them. That doesn’t work emotionally or from a society standpoint for me. Now, that being said, we’re still going to strive to make homes energy efficient. My world is energy efficiency and keeping moisture out of a house, so it’s the building envelope. I’m not a concrete foundation guy. I’m not an interior person. I’m sure the challenges are all there. How do we introduce new ways of doing things that satisfy the demands of the market and all the stakeholders in it, while, at the same time, the talk has been, do we have enough labor to perform a lot of the traditional tasks that need to be done? We sort of agree that many of those traditional tasks still need to be done. 10 years ago, I think that there was more worry that the labor force wouldn’t be there.

I think today we’re seeing a lot of companies and a lot of institutions investing in labor, in training labor, in teaching skills. I know that kids today don’t look at learning a trade the same way as they did 10 or 15 years ago. 10 or 15 years ago, there’s no way I’m going into software, I’m going to make a boatload of money my first day out of college. I think today kids, say young people between 15 and 25, I think they view that a little bit differently. Like, “Hey, a trade might not be a bad thing. It’s kind of cool. There’s technology involved.” So it’s not just something my grandfather did and my father has a whole bunch of tools sitting in the garage that I never learned how to use, it’s actually a necessary role to play in an economy. It’s interesting. It can pay well in an age where really a lot of jobs don’t pay well. So it’s going to provide a living wage and more to people who learn these trades. And I think the trades are still necessary.

I just can’t see carpenters being replaced by machines doing everything in a mechanized fashion. And I don’t think people want that right now. 10 years ago, I think people thought, “Wow, that’s really cool. That’s where it’s going, and that’ll be fine.” But with the onset of AI and all of the questions that it brings to mind, and what do you hear about AI every day? “Oh, it’s going to take your job.” And it is going to take some jobs, but it can’t take all the jobs because if it takes all the jobs, we end up in Andrew Yang’s world where everybody gets paid a thousand dollars a month to sit around and do nothing, and I don’t see that happening. At least I hope that doesn’t happen. So I think construction trades many of the middle… It’ll be like the train ride I took. There’ll be new ways of doing things and there’ll be traditional ways of doing things, and it’ll sort itself out.

And in my mind, the traditional way of doing things is still a person with a tool, whether it’s an old fashioned tool or a brand new tool, completing a job and gaining satisfaction from doing it and earning a good living while doing it. I still see construction as requiring that. I don’t see construction as being all automated concrete pours with machines and all automated prefab modular construction. It’s not aesthetically pleasing enough, for one thing. Architects hate modular housing because it looks like modular housing. It looks like eastern Europe in the days of the Gulag. Nobody wants that. It’s cool, and maybe you can build some things like that. Like for example, portable housing for homeless people. Maybe that’s a great place to build modular and portable housing and little tiny houses because everybody deserves a place to live and shouldn’t be living in a tent on the side of the freeway. So maybe there’s an evolution of technology, maybe it’s less aesthetically pleasing, but it’s something that’s created that’s truly needed and in demand.

But when you’re talking about a single family home, not everybody wants their house to look like the house next door. And that’s why there’s different cladding types, and that’s why there’s different colors, and that’s why there’s architects, so they can design different details that gives you that… Nobody wants to be anonymous in their own house. They want to have something that’s unique and is an extension of their own personality, and I think that carries over to big buildings too. My world is more in the residential and the housing world, but if architects just wanted to build out of glass, then every building would be glass, and they’re not all glass. All those materials that have been out there for 50 or more or a hundred years, they’re still in use. We’re trying to make them better. Moisture still affects them. We still haven’t figured out how to make something that moisture can’t affect and wind can’t get around, so we still have that challenge of how to put it all together.

And so yeah, there’ll be elements of construction that are still the conductor punching the ticket and sticking it in the luggage rack, and there’ll be elements of construction that you show your phone and he scans it, and that gets you access to being on board. I think it’ll be a blend, but lots of things in play. And it’s a complicated question. It’s a fun question to discuss, but you need a lot of time and a lot of wine maybe.

Do you have any advice for us just in general?

 

One of the things that I might have done differently in my career would have been to have been more open to new opportunities. I think because my background is all in sports, I have a certain… I’ve been married for 35 years, I have a certain sense of loyalty. And loyalty in some respects is good. But if you’re too loyal to a company when you can truly see that your path has risen to the level where it kind of expects you to be, maybe that would be an opportunity to explore something else. I’ve really enjoyed the last six years of my career because I’ve had the opportunity to work for and with four different organizations. Yes, still within the construction community. So the value of my experience and the people I know have remained largely the same. But I’ve gotten the perspective of fourth generation family, first generation family, no generation family, sort of small organizations where for the most of my career, I worked for very large ones.

So I guess my advice might be, be open to where the universe wants to take you in a career. You’re not likely to leave an industry. It would be very unlikely for me to leave the construction industry and go work for Boeing, because that’s a whole different realm. But the more people you know, the more opportunities there are. I think being open to those would probably… It might be a more rapid career path, but it might also help you find a place where you’re truly happy. And people talk a lot today about work-life balance. When I started my career, there was no work-life balance. Everything was work. If you were told to be somewhere at five in… I was told in my first job, “You don’t fly on company time. You only fly on personal time.” Now if you told somebody that today, they would say, “I’m sorry, I don’t think this job is right for me,” Because that’s not the expectation of people today.

Back in that day I was like, “Okay, that’s fine.” So I was up at three 30 in the morning for six o’clock flights all the time and came home at midnight. Now, you lose a lot of family time when you do that. So I think that’s a good thing today, that there’s more work-life balance. But as someone who’s… But many, many younger people today don’t know what it was like as an athlete to be screamed at, as an employee to be screamed at and told, “This is what you do. You don’t have an opinion here.” Today I see a lot more openness and exchange, which is great. Your opinions are valued. We’ve been to many meetings where nobody wanted to hear your opinion. “This is the way it is. I’m the boss. I make the rules. You do what I tell you to do.” So you don’t need environments like that anymore. I’m sure they still exist, but I think if you get into an environment where you truly feel not valued, not respected, get the hell out and find one where you do.

And so if that’s advice, maybe that’s advice to myself because I finally did that, but it saved somebody else from having to go through an unpleasant environment. I wouldn’t say any of my environments were unpleasant, but there was certainly a way of being treated. And that goes back to that question about women in construction, because when I started, Shawn, there were no women leaders, really, in construction. And honestly, I think women make excellent business leaders, if not, in many cases, better leaders because they have more empathy, they have more empathy and more emotional intelligence than most men, and that’s a necessary skill to have or quality to have in any role.

Thank you, Tony.

 

You can watch our interview with Tony on the Draper DNA YouTube channel. Simply click HERE and enjoy!