The Story Behind FieldCon and Why the Industry Needs It

You hand your team a tool that works, they tell you it's brilliant, and then it sits in a corner until the end of time. That gap between knowing and doing is where most people systems die. This episode is the story of what I built to close it.

Simple is not the same thing as easy

For 15 years I've helped owners free themselves from the day-to-day by putting the right people in place and building systems around those people. The feedback on our tools is consistent. Brilliant. Game-changing. Outside the box. And none of it is difficult. It's simple stuff.

Simple is not easy. That's the whole problem.

I've watched teams look at a tool, nod, agree it's exactly what they need, and then say the four words that kill everything. "When I have time." They set it aside. They promise themselves a reminder system. The tool never sees the light of day again. And here's what stings. Those owners still get results, because the thinking changed. If the doing changed too, the transformation would be exponential.

The client who felt the meter running

A couple of years ago a client was graduating from our program. We had the chance to keep working together and he told me straight. "I just can't do it." He said it felt like sitting in a taxi with the meter running. Investing, paying, and not moving.

He wasn't wrong. He was a small business owner who didn't yet have a team he trusted to implement. He was growing into it. Some pieces worked. The big tools, the ones that change everything, sat on the shelf. He asked if we could do some of that work for him.

That was never the business I set out to build. I never wanted to be the agency that holds you captive and says if you want to engage your own people you have to keep paying us. I wanted to teach you to fish so you can feed an army. That conviction is the same one behind the Core Fit Hiring System. Done with you, not done for you. But his frustration was real and I had no good answer. My team and I sat down and came up with fancy Google Sheets. It still required effort from them. It solved nothing.

AI first means freeing people to do what people do best

Then the world changed. I started dabbling with artificial intelligence and started thinking about what AI first actually means. Here's my version. Automate what computers are good at so you free up your people to do what people are good at.

Some things people do better than AI. Some things AI does better than people. The question I ask now is simple. Can AI do this to our standards? If yes, we explore it. If no, we go find the person who does it to our standards. I'm in the people business. Relationships, connection, coaching, mindset. Maybe someday a machine handles that. Not anytime soon.

A CEO asked where the mobile version was and nobody had an answer

I was talking with the CEO of a large construction contractor. They were six weeks into rolling out new software to connect with employees, run more thorough performance reviews, and document everything. She sat down and asked where the mobile version was. There wasn't one. You do it at a desktop.

Her response is the reason FieldCon exists. She wasn't about to tell her foremen to pull crews off a job site and sit in front of a computer.

I grew up in the trades. That's my world and my heart goes out to the people who build incredible things in it. So I put my head down, mapped a project plan, and built a version. It was okay. The more I listened to her vision, the more it clicked with what we already teach. Three weeks later I called her for a demo. She brought in her whole team. Then company after company told me the same thing. There's a need for this and nothing exists that does it.

What we actually do is help leaders connect so trust gets built

Strip everything back and this is the work. We help leaders connect with their teams to build trust. Better connection, more trust, better results. A more effective team, a more effective company, and an owner who finally says I have people I trust to run this.

That's where the name came from. Field Connect. FieldCon.

I used to call it a passion project. Not anymore. The industry needs this.

Take a performance evaluation. I think it's simple. You sit down, you talk through your differences of opinion, you move on. Without training, skills, or a process, it's hard. FieldCon captures how the employee is doing and how you think they're doing through a short assessment, then builds the evaluation for you. Word for word what to say, what to bring up, how to talk about growth and career path, how to keep them around long term. People tell me what used to take 90 minutes per employee now takes 15 or 20. Companies that ran annual reviews moved to quarterly. I believe in quarterly. Annual reviews deliver feedback 11 months too late, which is exactly why I built the Corfit Conversation to run every 90 days.

I built it for two guys on a tailgate

Here's the part I almost forgot to say on the recording. I built this so two guys sit on the tailgate of a pickup on a job site and run a fully documented review. Nobody pulls out a phone and starts typing while staying present in a conversation. So we made it voice first on top of mobile first. Hit record, read what's on the screen, have the conversation. It records, summarizes, transcribes, and documents everything for you.

Next review you look at the difference and ask what changed, what got better, what got worse, where we go from here.

More is coming. Employee onboarding. Connecting with people early so you stop getting ghosted on day one. I've lost count of how many owners have told me they made an offer and the guy never showed. There's a way to fix that, and I'd rather make it easy than keep telling you it's simple. Our vision is impacting half a million employees, because every one of them has a spouse, kids, and friends who feel it too.

Your Monday move

Go to fieldcon.io and sign up for the free field test. One manager, one role, five employees. Run the whole process. Hand it to the manager who hates reviews most and let him take it for a spin. Then connect with me on LinkedIn and tell me what you thought. I want your feedback and I want to make this the best tool the industry has.

If you want more on where this thinking started, I unpacked the retention side in Why Your Best Employee Quits Without Warning and the leadership side in "We Do Not Have People Problems" And What That Really Means.

And if you want the full playbook for attracting and keeping the right people, grab my book "Hire Better People Faster."

New episodes every Wednesday.