I didn't cause it.
I paid for it.

In this business a piece of paper isn't just paper. It's evidence. And evidence can be used against whoever made it. So if you're a contractor, a supplier, a plant or an engineer, the safe move is to create less of it and keep less of it. Everything you hold can get turned around on you. Nothing you never wrote down can.

I've been in construction thirty years. Concrete and stucco early on in California, and concrete specifically for the last five. On residential work I watched the batch ticket get handled like a hot potato. It shows up with the truck, somebody signs for it, and everybody on site quietly knows that whoever's holding it is the one who can get pointed at later. So it moves. Then it stops moving. And nobody goes looking for it until the day it's the only thing that could have answered the question.

On commercial and high end work it was different, and that difference is the whole story. There the ticket got kept, because somebody was required to keep it. Same document. Same trade. Sometimes the same crews. The only thing that changed was whether the system asked anybody to hold on to it.

Then I came to Tennessee. I brought thirty years with me and the standard I'd built my name on, and I didn't cut a corner. And I still got the callbacks. Surfaces scaling and spalling on jobs I knew I'd done right. I couldn't make it make sense. Figuring out why is what put me here.

It started at Pumas Concrete. Pumas was the first client of my marketing company, Luz Digital Marketing, and my title there was Director of Operations. I ran their marketing: the website, a CRM, their social media and Google. And I taught their crew to pour the way we did it out west. They bought the hand tools. They changed how they poured. So I wrote it down for them, and I called it the PUMA Structural Integrity Protocol, because I made it for Pumas. I named it and I wrote it. Pumas put it out in December 2025. It's still out there, and it should be. That was their company, and that was my first version of working this out. The old article told a contractor what to pour. PSIP doesn't do that.

My first plan was the wrong one

I left Pumas in February 2026, and here's the part most founders would leave out. I didn't leave to build a standards body. I left to grow Luz. The plan was to take what worked at Pumas to other contractors and pool builders, show them how to pour the way we did out west, market the ones who did it, and sell the leads.

Waterscapes Backyard Resorts brought Luz in next, to build their marketing presence in early 2026. Pumas and Waterscapes both paid Luz for that work. It was marketing, done before PSIP was a certification body, and none of that money went to Performance Structural Standards Group. You should hear that from me, so it's here.

Then the book got deeper. I'd already been writing it, and the further I got, the more I saw the problem was way bigger than me. It wasn't just happening on my jobs. The materials were changing for everybody in the trade. And a contractor who never learns the new way of doing it, and can't prove to the homeowner he did the job right, is doing his customer a disservice, even if he doesn't know it yet.

I looked hard at what happens to a lead site when the contractors paying it are the same contractors it's rating. I dug into how real certification bodies are built, and the rules they run under care a lot about who's paying whom.

Then I had a long conversation with a man who has spent his whole career in concrete. He never put it in these words, but by the end of it I understood something. I wasn't building a marketing company. I was building a standard. And a standard is the one thing that could actually help this industry.

So I walked away from the plan. Not just from Pumas. From the lead business and from the agency I'd teamed up with to build it, all of it. I couldn't be the one writing the standard and the one marketing the contractors who meet it. So the standard went one way and the marketing went the other, even if it meant the agency never turned into what I'd set out to build. That was before PSIP had certified anybody or taken a certification fee.

PSIP certifies the record of what was poured. Same four letters as the old article, different company, different document. PSIP now means the Performance Structural Integrity Protocol, and Performance Structural Standards Group is the company that issues it.

Two companies have agreed to help me stand up the PSIP app, and you should know what that is. Pumas Concrete on the concrete side and Waterscapes Backyard Resorts on the pool side will be the first to test it when it's ready, so I can find what's wrong with it and fix it. That testing hasn't started yet. I'm grateful they're willing to do it. Today I don't work with either company, I hold no stake in either one, and there's no other arrangement between PSIP and either of them. As of October 2026, neither one is certified, neither one has paid PSIP a fee, and neither one has been issued a PSIP certificate. If that changes, it'll say so here.

It wasn't just me

Once I started looking past my own jobs, I found out it wasn't just me.

Beginning in 2018, Texas lost coal fired power plants in quick succession, and the fly ash that residential shotcrete relied on got scarce in the regional supply. You couldn't see that change from the job site. And when the jobs started coming back, the records that would have answered which materials went into which pour on which day weren't being kept.

That's the whole reason this protocol exists.

Nobody in this chain was careless

Every link in the chain made a defensible business decision in the moment.

The builder didn't write the mix. He hired a sub. The sub didn't run the quarry. He bought from regional suppliers. The suppliers didn't control what was available to them. Every one of them did the reasonable thing with what they had.

And the homeowner, who didn't document anything because nobody told them to, ends up with the least protection of anybody.

There's usually one person on that job who sees trouble coming before anybody else does. The guy standing on the slab with a trowel in his hand. And most of the time, he doesn't say a word. Here's why.

Why a good contractor keeps his mouth shut

Say the drawing's wrong. Say you've poured enough of these to know it's going to give you trouble.

Build it exactly the way it was drawn, and if it fails, you're still the first phone call. But the drawing isn't yours. Somebody else's name is on it.

Or speak up. Use what you know. Do it the way experience tells you it should be done. Now there's no drawing to point at, no engineer's stamp, and nobody upstream of you. The trail starts and ends at your business.

So the safest thing a contractor can do, in the system the way it's built today, is keep quiet and build it wrong.

I don't think a single person in this industry wants that. It's just what the incentives produce, and I don't think most people have ever said it out loud.

A record with a hole in it

A record with one party missing isn't a record. It's a record with a hole in it. When something goes wrong on a job, the questions go wherever things can't be explained. Nobody's hunting for somebody to blame. A gap is just where the unanswered part of the story sits.

So filling in your own piece works for you. It takes you out of the guessing.

Same goes for speaking up. If what you recommended is written down, dated, and acknowledged by the person who made the call, you're not exposed for having said it. You're on the record as having said it.

What we're actually proposing

Not a new rule and not a new authority. A record everybody adds to and everybody can stand behind.

• The ready mix producer documents what was batched and delivered, and what's actually available to draw from.
• The admixture supplier documents how the product is meant to be used and under what conditions. Dosage. Placement method. Drum truck or volumetric. Temperature limits. And where that guidance doesn't exist yet, that gets recorded too.
• The engineer of record documents what was specified.
• The finishing contractor documents what was placed, in what conditions, and how it was cured. And what he recommended, and what got decided.
• The homeowner gets all of it, in plain language, while the job's still moving, and makes the calls that are theirs to make.

Conditions are wrong today. Here's what your contractor recommends. Here's what it costs. Do we stop or do we go? That's a decision made with the facts in hand, instead of a discovery two years later.

Nobody's being asked to open up a formula. I'm not asking a chemist to hand over what he spent twenty years developing. The question isn't what's in it. The question is how it's supposed to behave in the field, in the truck it actually showed up in, on the day it actually got placed. And if the honest answer is that nobody's run it that way yet, then that's the answer, and it goes in the record too.

Every one of those parties already knows their own piece. None of them has a reason today to write it down where anybody else can see it. That's the one thing we're trying to change.

What I think happens next

This part is my opinion.

Insurance carriers don't wait on a verdict to change how they write a policy. They change what they ask for and what they charge, based on what they just watched happen.

So here's what I'd sit with if I were still running a crew. When an underwriter is deciding what to charge you, or whether to write you at all, what are they going to want to look at? How many times you've been sued? Or whether you can show what went into every job you poured?

I know which one I'd rather hand them.

The part that makes it work, or doesn't

This is the worst it'll ever be. But everybody has to take part.

If one party documents and the rest don't, the hole's still there, and the questions still go to the hole. It isn't solved for anybody until it's solved for everybody.

But if everybody documents, every pour teaches the next pour. We'd finally have something this industry has never had: a way to find out what actually works, at scale, from real jobs, instead of from arguments.

Concrete fails. It always has, and it'll keep failing on some jobs no matter how good anybody gets. What doesn't have to keep happening is that when it fails, nobody can find out why, and the bill lands on whoever documented the least.

It stops when everybody in the chain puts the potato down at the same time. One company can't do that. Neither can one plant or one contractor. It takes all of us.

I built this, and I'm handing it over

You're being asked to put your work into a record, so you deserve to know whose hands it ends up in.

Not mine. Right now it's still mine, and I'd rather tell you that myself. No seat on the Council is filled yet. Until it is, Performance Structural Standards Group controls the standard, and every change to the certification standards list, the exam, or the passing mark gets published with the date it was made, starting with the standards list published October 2, 2026.

Once the Technical Advisory Council is seated, it holds full authority over every mechanical and scientific decision in the protocol. I don't override them. I appoint the founding group one time, when it forms, and after that the Council decides its own seats, its own succession, its own removals, and how it's structured. I'm out of it.

That's not me being modest. A standard that depends on the man who wrote it isn't a standard. It's a brand with a good story attached. If a homeowner is going to trust a PSIP record twenty years from now, it has to keep working when I'm not the one running it.