Most Incident
Investigations
Answer the
Wrong Question.

They document what happened. We find why it was always going to happen — and what’s still waiting to go wrong.

70%

of workplace incidents involve systemic failures that a standard investigation never identifies

3×

the average cost of an incident comes from secondary exposure — not the event itself

report filed correctly rarely prevents the next incident from the same root cause

What You Don’t Know
Is Already Costing You

Standard investigations are built to close a file, not protect your business. By the time a report is signed off, the real exposure — the operational patterns, the training gaps, the near-miss history — has already been buried.

Typical Investigation

Identifies immediate cause. Documents the sequence of events. Files the OSHA report. Marks the incident closed. The same conditions remain in place.

VertiCore Investigation
Traces contributing factors across scheduling, supervision, training, and system design. Surfaces the pattern — not just the event. Delivers findings in language your leadership team can act on immediately.

What Gets Missed

Near-miss history. Competing production pressures. Informal workarounds. The unwritten rules your crews actually follow — and why.

What We Deliver
A clear picture of systemic exposure, prioritized by business risk — not regulatory checklist. Findings you can defend in front of a board, an insurer, or a courtroom.

Investigation That Goes
Where Others Stop

VertiCore brings director-level operational experience to every engagement. We don’t outsource analysis or rely on checklists. We embed in your operation long enough to understand how work actually gets done.

Systemic Root Cause Analysis

We map the full causal chain — human factors, management systems, environmental conditions, and organizational pressures. Not just the last act in the sequence.

Exposure Quantification

We translate findings into business terms: regulatory exposure, insurance implications, litigation risk, and operational cost. Numbers your CFO and GC can work with.

Pattern Recognition Across Events

One incident is a data point. We look across your incident history — including near-misses and first-aid events — to identify the pattern before the next serious event confirms it.

Executive-Ready Findings

Every engagement closes with a briefing your leadership can act on — prioritized, plain-language, and defensible. No 80-page binders that sit on a shelf.

Built for Contractors Who Have Outgrown Reactive Safety

This is not generic safety consulting. VertiCore was built by an active construction operations executive to solve the problems that generic advisors can't — because they've never worked inside a scaling contractor.

Andrew Hollaway

Founder & Principal Advisor

Andrew started his career as a contract safety manager and built his way to Director of Safety Operations — accumulating over a decade of direct experience leading safety and operational systems inside construction environments where the stakes are real and the margin for operational failure is zero.

Over the past 20 years, Andrew developed formal investigative methodology in high-stakes environments — building the discipline to conduct structured interviews, establish defensible root cause chains, and produce documentation built to survive regulatory inspection and insurance scrutiny simultaneously.

He spearheaded the full technology transition from AnchoRock to Novara Flex for over 1,400 field employees — building forms, workflow, and dashboards from the ground up, then executing the field rollout as system administrator.

Andrew currently serves as Director of Safety Operations at a major electrical contractor. VertiCore was built from that position — from inside the exact environment his clients operate in.

10+ years in construction safety operations, contract manager to Director level

20 years of formal investigation methodology — Fortune 500 discipline applied to construction

1,400 employees — full systems rollout as lead architect and field administrator

Active practitioner — currently Director of Safety Operations, major electrical contractor

PROPRIETARY METHODOLOGY

The VertiCore 5-Lens Incident Review Framework™

Where competitors review incidents through a single compliance lens, VertiCore reviews simultaneously through five lenses — producing findings immediately usable by your leadership - and defensible in any context they may face downstream.

1

Regulatory Compliance

2

Causal Chain Completeness

3

Claims Exposure

4

Organizational Accountability

5

Operational Correction

Schedule a Strategy Call

Why VertiCore Is Different

Generic Advisors

Generic advisors often focus on surface-level compliance and check-the-box exercises that fail to address the underlying operational risks of a growing contractor.

The VertiCore Edge

We bridge the gap between intent and execution by applying deep investigative discipline and operational leadership experience directly into your field workflows.

Defensible Outcomes

Our findings are built to survive regulatory scrutiny and insurance audits, providing a protective barrier for your business and leadership.

What This Looks Like
in the Field

Two scenarios representative of the work — details anonymized.

Mission Critical Infrastructure · High-Voltage Environment

Two Lives. Two 12,000-Volt Lines.
A Schedule That Wouldn’t Wait.

A forklift operator failed to plan load movements before entering a work zone. The forks made contact with two energized 12,000-volt power lines — placing both the operator and the tag line holder in immediate life-safety jeopardy. Emergency shutdown was executed, cutting power to critical infrastructure serving the site. The event was classified a near-fatality.

The initial investigation focused on the operator: inadequate situational awareness, failure to maintain clearance distances. The recommendation was retraining.

What the investigation revealed: the crew had moved from one job to the next without completing documented pre-task planning at any point during the shift — and had been doing so routinely for weeks. Schedule pressure from the project manager had normalized the shortcut. Workers knew pre-task plans were required. They also knew they would fall behind if they completed them. No one in the chain of command had flagged the conflict or resolved it. The operator didn’t fail to plan because he didn’t know better. He failed to plan because the schedule made it functionally impossible.

Outcome

Root cause documented as systemic — not operator error. Pre-task planning requirement embedded into schedule sequencing so compliance didn’t compete with production. Project management authority to compress planning time formally removed. Near-fatality presented to ownership with full causal chain and quantified regulatory exposure. Retraining the operator, without fixing the schedule, would have produced the same event with a different crew.

Construction · Multi-Site Operation

The Pattern Before
the Catastrophic Event

Three separate first-aid events across two sites in six months — each logged, each investigated independently, each attributed to different causes. No connection made between them.

VertiCore reviewed all three together. Each involved the same task type, the same shift window, and crews who had been pulled from their primary assignment to cover a shortage. The events were unrelated on paper. Operationally, they were identical.

Outcome

Cross-site staffing policy revised. Shift coverage protocol established. The serious injury that would have confirmed the pattern was prevented.

Let’s Talk About
What You’re Seeing

You don’t need to have a formal engagement in mind. If something in your operation is giving you pause — a recent event, a pattern you can’t explain, a feeling that something isn’t right — that’s worth a conversation.

Most Incident Investigations Answer theWrong Question.

What You Don’t KnowIs Already Costing You

Investigation That GoesWhere Others Stop