"We're actually a trucking company": How one construction firm rethought compliance from the ground up

A few years ago, I had a realization that changed how I think about my job—and how our entire company thinks about itself. We weren't just a construction company. We were a large trucking operation that happened to do construction. The regulatory environment is getting more complex, so you need to start acknowledging this now. Client expectations on safety are going up, and the gap between companies with real compliance infrastructure and those running on gut instinct is only going to widen. Once we accepted that, everything started to fall into place.

I've been with Emery Sapp & Sons (ESS) for 18 years. I came up as a heavy equipment operator, drove lowboys for eight years hauling heavy iron, and landed in DOT compliance because nobody else was doing it, and our scores showed it. Today, I manage compliance across roughly 800 vehicles and over 1,700 connected devices, covering job sites that range from single-day bridge grooving jobs to $800 million, multi-year highway projects. If that sounds like a lot to keep track of—it is. But we've turned what used to be chaos into something closer to organized chaos. The difference is real-time, accurate data. Here's what that journey looked like.

Construction companies are trucking companies. Most just don't know it yet.

We’re a construction company with a large, complex trucking operation built into it. We didn’t realize that for a long time. The people running job sites are busy with tasks like weather windows, pour schedules, and project deadlines. This means that fleet compliance often feels like somebody else's problem. But the FMCSA doesn't care whether you're hauling concrete mix to a job site or freight across I-70. If your vehicles are over 10,000 pounds crossing state lines and inside many states, federal Hours of Service (HOS) rules apply.

We realized this the hard way. Our FMCSA scores reflected years of not treating compliance as seriously as a trucking company would have. On larger bids—the $100 million-plus design-build projects and government contracts we compete for—clients look at safety scores as closely as they look at your cost estimate. A weak safety record takes you out of the running before you've made your case.

In construction, we work when the weather lets us. Crews push 18 to 20 hours when conditions are right. The mentality is "sleep when the project's done." But HOS rules don't flex for industry seasonality. Without real-time visibility into every driver’s hours, you're either guessing or gambling. With the Samsara Connected Platform, our compliance team sees exactly where every driver stands, makes smart shift rotation decisions, and keeps people in compliance without killing project momentum. Since prioritizing HOS, we've improved our FMCSA score by 11%.

Have a plan before the data starts piling up

When we first deployed Samsara's Dual-Facing Dash Cams across our larger truck fleet, we knew we had problems, but we didn't know how bad. Once those AI Dash Cams were running, we couldn't unsee what we were seeing. The initial driver reaction was predictable: Big Brother is watching so they can fire us. 

But this wasn't the case at all. We wanted to make our existing drivers better and protect them. The cameras work both ways. When a driver gets hit, and video proves it wasn't their fault, that footage becomes their best defense. Once that clicked for our drivers, buy-in came naturally. The numbers followed: a 65% drop in mobile device usage, a 25% reduction in at-fault accidents, and a 40% year-over-year decline in DOT reportable incidents.

My advice for anyone starting out is to establish your point of view first. Understand the data you will receive, and set up your policies and procedures for how to deal with those issues upfront, instead of scrambling on the back end trying to figure it out after the fact. Don't throw cameras in trucks and hope for the best. We did exactly that, and it cost us a year of scrambling. Build the playbook first. What does a seatbelt violation trigger? How many events before a formal coaching session?

Don’t just focus on the negatives, but have a plan to reward the good behaviors you see. Having a system in place to recognize and reward positive performance—along with using video footage to exonerate drivers when they aren't at fault—is one of the most effective ways to build trust and show your team you are investing in their success. 

Figure that out before you flip the switch, and you'll be in a stronger position from day one.

One source of truth for everything in the field

Once vehicles were dialed in, the next gap was asset visibility. We were running a separate provider for tracking heavy equipment, and it wasn't reliable. Trackers were dying. Locations were off. We needed one platform showing our trucks, trailers, and heavy iron in one place, with data we could trust.

Today, we have about 930 Asset Tags deployed on everything from trailers to GPS survey units worth $10,000 to $20,000 each. One use case people outside construction wouldn't expect: tracking our nuclear density gauges. These are federally regulated instruments for measuring asphalt compaction. The person responsible must produce their location on demand when an inspector shows up. Failure is a potential criminal violation—we're talking possible jail time. Having an Asset Tag that tells us exactly where they are is not a nice-to-have—it’s absolutely critical.

Now I can open the Samsara dashboard and know where 800 vehicles are. I can check HOS status for every commercial driver without a single phone call. I can pull IFTA mileage by state for an upcoming audit in minutes instead of hours. That hour a day I've gotten back isn't just time savings. It's the hour I use to get ahead of the next problem instead of reacting to the last one.

Construction companies need to shift before regulations get tougher

Regulatory complexity and rising client safety demands require action, but you don't have to do everything at once. We started with GPS and e-logs, moved to cameras, and expanded to asset tracking—each layer connected to the others. The hardest part isn't the technology. It's the culture shift: accepting that if you run trucks, you run a trucking operation, and operating like one keeps your people safe, your scores clean, and your bids competitive.

The data doesn't lie. But you have to have a plan for what to do with it once it starts coming in.

Learn more about Emery Sapp & Sons and how they used Samsara data to take action to transform their operations, achieving an 11% improvement in their FMCSA score and a 40% year-over-year decline in DOT reportable incidents.