207: Strongarm Technologies – The Journey to Keep Industrial Athletes Safe
Welcome back to another week of the Startup Junkies Podcast! This week, Caleb Talley, Jeff Amerine, and Matthew Ward have a chat with Sean Petterson, founder and CEO of Strongarm Technologies. Strongarm Tech is a developer of a safety science platform which uses wearable sensors and AI-driven analysis to collect, analyze and predict insights on industrial workers in order to mitigate the risk of injury, enabling clients to mitigate workman’s compensation claims from back injuries, and increase worker productivity and comfort. In this episode, you will get to hear about Sean’s compelling story and background, critical adjustments made during COVID-19, and insights around company culture. Check out this compelling episode!
Shownotes
(1:14) What is StrongArm Tech
(6:20) How StrongArm Tech saves company’s money
(9:51) Where will StrongArm be in the 3 years?
(12:13) COVID’s effects on StrongArm
(16:26) How insurance helps in StrongArm’s sales process
(19:23) Sean talks about keeping people from all areas of operation focused on the data that truly matters
(22:52) Sean shares stories of how StrongArm has been impactful and helpful to clients
(26:20) Sean talks about the culture of StrongArm
(29:39) Seans shares advice to his younger self
(31:53) Wrap up
Links
Quotes
“So today we’ve transitioned, and Strongarm is the world’s leading safety science company. We’ve had over 35,000 people run through our platform, and we’re reducing injuries now at a rate of nearly 50% year over year.” (5:32)
“So for us to be able to be front that is solely focused on one issue – the industrial athlete, and making them relevant in the future by driving value that is not seen necessarily, is our unique operation.” (21:58)
“We use a core set of values, and those values for us happen to be a cool acronym that ends up being sacred. But those values are things like self-improving, and our ability to stick to those is key for us to hire the same people as we build that scalable business.” (27:15)
“Your value as an entrepreneur and as an individual leader is your ability to synthesize. To disagree with some of the insights you may get, to agree with some of the insights you may get, but to synthesize your own thoughts based on the information that you pull in is hands down the most valuable asset.” (30:21)
The Journey to Keep Industrial Athletes Safe
This week the Startup Junkies podcast was given the opportunity to sit down and talk with Sean Petterson, founder and CEO of StrongArm Tech.
StrongArm Tech is a safety-science company that dedicates itself to creating a better future for industrial athletes. It accomplishes this goal by driving real-time insights from wearable data that is pulled from workers in their field. In more simple terms, StrongArm Tech uses real-time information from safety equipment to keep construction and industrial workers safer on the job.
The company’s mission lives close to Sean’s heart as his father, a construction worker, passed away on the job. Since then, Sean has obsessed over issues regarding industrial workers’ safety. He says that companies spend $250 million annually on injuries from industrial workers, and that number grows substantially to $3 trillion when the spotlight zooms out to show global numbers.
Sean and StrongArm Tech’s first foray in protecting industrial athletes came with the introduction of exoskeletal support for workers. StrongArm Tech created exoskeletons that protected workers’ backs from lifting injuries, and it ended up selling more exoskeletons by volume than any other company in the world.
While the exoskeleton’s success on the market seemed significant, Sean was not satisfied with the progress he and his company were seeing in the field. StrongArm Tech realized it needed to have real-time data that could be tied to accurate metrics of improvement in safety and a dollar-figure to help drive an impact on the industry. With this new understanding, the company built its own algorithms that could be placed on a chipset and installed into the preexisting exoskeletal equipment to predict musculoskeletal injury.
This technology not only proved the exoskeletons’ effectiveness, but it provided insights into the risks that industrial athletes face every day. With this new data, StrongArm Tech pivoted from being a company that produced safety widgets to the world’s largest safety-science company with over 35,000 people running through its platform and reducing injuries at a rate of almost 50% each year.
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, StrongArm Tech saw an opportunity to adapt its platform and assist in ensuring the safety of industrial workers. One of the main things the company was able to do was encourage social distancing on the job. When two individuals wearing StrongArm Tech equipment stand within six feet of each other, they will get a small buzz on their equipment that will grow in intensity as the individuals stay close together.
A second thing the company was able to do was aid in the efforts of contact tracing. The sensors in StrongArm Tech’s equipment can report which individuals have been in contact with each other if one of them tests positive for the virus. This helps companies keep operations running at full speed while also helping protect the workers.
StrongArm Tech has made great strides in ensuring industrial workers’ health and safety, allowing them to keep going to work, spend time with their families, and raise their overall quality of life. For more information on StrongArm Tech, click here.
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