The Power of Transparency

Paul Liles runs a construction company in the Carolinas, and he's watching his market explode while simultaneously running into a wall. Not a physical wall—though he builds plenty of those—but something harder to solve: counties literally running out of sewer capacity. "If we're out of sewer capacity, we're definitely behind on education facilities, municipal facilities, fire and EMS stations," he tells host Michael LaVista. It's the kind of infrastructure crisis that sounds abstract until you realize it's actively stopping private development projects from breaking ground.

This conversation goes deep on what happens when growth outpaces planning by an order of magnitude. Cabarrus County, North Carolina planned for 10,000 to 12,000 new residents in the 1990s. They got over 100,000 instead. That miscalculation created both Liles Construction's biggest opportunity and its thorniest constraint. The municipal and institutional work is booming—schools, fire stations, the unglamorous backbone of a functioning region—but the labor to build it all is still catching up from a near-death experience during the Great Recession.

What makes this episode compelling isn't just the business problem. It's how Liles Construction solved it by doing something most companies avoid: radical transparency with employees about the company's financial reality.

The eight-year gap that nobody planned for

Liles Construction has an internal metric: it takes eight years for a field engineer intern to become a superintendent. Some do it in five, others in fifteen, but eight is the average. That timeline became a problem when the construction industry essentially went dormant from 2010 to 2014. "People left the industry. It was kind of dead and people were being told not to go into the industry from skilled trade standpoint," Liles explains. The comeback started around 2018, which means the first class of post-recession workers is just now hitting that superintendent threshold.

The gap isn't theoretical. It's a missing generation of skilled workers right when the Carolinas need them most. Charlotte is exploding. The Greenville-Spartanburg area is adding industrial capacity around BMW and Milliken. Retail triple-net and out-parcel projects are up. But traditional office and urban infill work has "taken a noticeable hit," forcing Liles to reorganize around divisions that can pivot with market volatility.

Retention became existential. You can't afford to lose anyone when replacements won't be fully productive for nearly a decade. So Liles had to answer a hard question: what makes people stay?

Opening the books changes everything

Most construction companies guard financial information like nuclear codes. Liles Construction does the opposite. They share net profit targets with every employee. They break down how much margin they need to hit bonuses, fund growth, and keep the lights on. "We're very transparent with where we need to be from a gross profit standpoint, from a net profit standpoint, and our employees see that," Liles says. The result? Field teams started caring about the same numbers the executive team obsesses over.

This isn't feel-good corporate transparency theater. It's a forcing function. When a superintendent knows exactly how much margin erosion kills the bonus pool, they make different decisions on site. When a project manager understands the net profit threshold, they push back on scope creep differently. Liles reports "extremely low turnover" as a direct result, with superintendents he first worked with in high school still on the team decades later.

The transparency extends to succession planning. Liles tells employees explicitly who's being groomed for leadership and why. No backroom deals, no surprise promotions. "If you're transparent about those things, I think it just, it goes back to that trust thing," he says. Trust turns out to be a retention tool more powerful than ping pong tables or free snacks.

Treating field staff like the revenue generators they are

Here's where Liles Construction breaks from industry norms in a way that matters. Most construction companies treat field staff as cost centers and office staff as the professionals. Liles flips it. Their field engineers and superintendents get the same professional development, the same communication cadence, and the same strategic context as project managers and estimators. "Our field staff are really the folks that drive revenue and profit in our company," Liles says flatly.

This shows up in how they structure advancement. Field engineers can become superintendents without ever moving to a desk job. Superintendents can advance to senior superintendent or leadership roles while staying in boots. There's no invisible ceiling that forces technical experts into management roles they don't want. The company built parallel tracks because they realized forcing everyone through the same career funnel was hemorrhaging talent.

They also stopped pretending balance was achievable in construction's seasonal crunch. Instead, Liles acknowledges the summer and fall sprint openly, then creates real recovery time in winter and early spring. "We want to make sure that that they have time to decompress and spend with family, especially in those off quarters," he explains. It's a small thing—honesty about the work's actual rhythm—but it prevents burnout better than generic wellness initiatives.

Why credit tenant retail became the safe bet

While municipal work booms, Liles Construction invested heavily in their retail division, specifically targeting smaller national credit projects—think Chick-fil-A, Starbucks, chain pharmacies. The reason is pure financial pragmatism. "It's a lot easier to get lenders and investors on board for those" than for speculative office projects when everyone's shouting that office is dying.

This is strategic defensiveness, not visionary pivoting. Liles watches the macro trends—remote work killing office demand, industrial shifting from spec warehouses to interior upfits—and allocates resources accordingly. The divisional structure (retail, municipal/institutional/educational, industrial) exists specifically to absorb market volatility. When one sector dips, another usually compensates.

The sewer capacity constraint actually helped clarify priorities. When infrastructure literally cannot support new private development in some counties, you double down on the infrastructure build-out work that unlocks future growth. It's playing the long game while competitors chase projects that can't physically happen yet.

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Paul Liles makes transparency sound simple, but implementing it requires conviction most companies don't have. This conversation reveals what changes when employees know the real numbers, understand the strategy, and see their actual path forward. Subscribe to The Digital Transformist wherever you get podcasts to catch more conversations that go beyond surface-level business advice.