“If you wear a tie and you drive the big truck and you don’t get your hands dirty, I don’t think you should be leading the marketing when you’re going into a new project.” That is Peter Murphy Lewis, and host Ryan Glick liked the line enough to put it at the top of the episode before the theme music.
Glick normally runs either an industry news show or an interview with someone attached to land development. He flags this one as a departure. It is a marketing conversation aimed at developers and home builders, including the many who, as he puts it, do not necessarily make it known they are doing these projects. The question underneath it is how story helps you attract and keep people, and Lewis does not hedge his answer: story is “the most effective, most efficient, most affordable way for you to move the needle when it comes to labor shortage.”
Lewis is the founder and CEO of Strategic Pete. Before that he spent years in Chile, where a Rotary scholarship sent him for a master’s degree and he ended up hosting a Spanish-language television show he compares to Dirty Jobs, working more than 100 jobs on camera. He was raised in a banking family. “I know how to type better than I know how to use a hammer,” he says. That is what he brings to construction: not a builder, but someone who has been filmed failing at the work and watched what it did to the people who are good at it. Our article on a five-part business storytelling structure picks up where this conversation leaves off.
Key Takeaways
1. Story is the cheapest lever a builder has on the labor shortage
Lewis will not soften this one. “I will fight anybody to the end on story is the most effective, most efficient, most affordable way for you to move the needle when it comes to labor shortage,” he tells Glick. His framing is that shortages bite hardest where the work is “underappreciated or misunderstood,” and that the repair is to the narrative rather than to the pay band. He puts the stakes in the audience’s own terms: “we can’t break ground without bodies or without boots.” Every tactic later in the episode follows from that premise.
2. The people you need are not searching for the job, so search cannot reach them
On the episode Lewis puts it at more than 70% of people under 40 getting their news on TikTok and YouTube, which is why he treats short video as the channel and job boards as an afterthought. “If I don’t want to be a construction worker, I’m not going to Google to become a construction worker,” he says. Ads, SEO and AI answers only catch people already looking. Video reaching someone who was not looking is what lets him show something they misunderstood about the trade and “start to change your opinion.”
3. The new crane is the wrong hero and the man with 42 years on site is the right one
Asked what gets too much attention, Lewis goes straight at the corporate video. “If you’re showing your new truck, you’re showing your new crane, you’re showing these guys in perfect uniforms walking across. That is not going to attract the person.” He describes a healthcare partner who had just put $10 million into a building and told him: “I don’t care if you show off the kitchen and the living space. I know that the story of the janitor and the maintenance man who’s been there for 42 years is what you’re going to capture.”
4. Drone footage over a site with a music bed is the industry’s most common non-story
Glick names the format he sees most from developers: aerial progress footage, background music, everybody doing it. Lewis answers with a house purchase. He bought in April 2025 and still recommends his agent, Jeremiah, unprompted, on Facebook and Nextdoor, for nothing. The brokerage has never once asked how to build a narrative around a customer who behaves like that. “I see their ads and I see their newsletters, another drone footage of a house that’s trying to sell without putting Jeremiah in it. Congratulations on wasting money on marketing.”
5. The same footage that recruits also builds the multiple on the way out
In the lightning round Lewis is asked whether story is more about attracting people or keeping them, and he refuses the choice. Equally important, he says, plus a third job: “building up the multiple around your business.” He points to the healthcare partner he says is moving a portfolio toward a half a billion dollar business. Instead of turning up to an exit with decks, “they’re not going to have 120 PowerPoints. They’re going to have a 10 minute video that shows how these people think differently than anyone else.”
6. Your first camera operator is the funniest person already on the crew
The tactical list ends with a person rather than a budget. “Whenever I walk into a scene with cameras, before the cameras turn on, I always say, who is the funniest person in this room that’s going to feel shy when I turn on the cameras?” The room, he says, unanimously points at the same face. Befriend that person, hand them a camera, promise that none of it has to be published, and let them shoot for a year. “It doesn’t have to be you the face of the company,” Lewis says.
Rapid Fire Q&A
Q: If you had to explain to a high school senior why construction is a meaningful career, what would you say?
A: That it is the invisible backbone of what makes America great and of the town they live in. You might not be willing to contribute to it yourself, Lewis says, but you had better respect it, because none of the good things around you exist without it.
Q: Are the trades becoming more respected or less respected right now?
A: On the rise. “I think that five years from now, we are going to think of trades completely differently than we do today,” Lewis says. He reads it in the backlash against higher education, and in the arithmetic of overpaying for a degree you may never use.
Q: Do young people care more about pay, purpose or flexibility?
A: Purpose, then flexibility, then pay. Lewis does not expand on it, but the ranking matches the rest of the episode. Someone weighing 50 or 60 hours a week against a trade they do not understand yet is not usually moved first by the number on the offer.
Q: Is storytelling more about attracting new people or retaining the ones you already have?
A: Both, equally, and then a third thing. Story also builds the multiple around the business, Lewis argues, which loops back and helps with the recruiting and the retention, and matters most on the day the owner wants to sell.
Q: What is one trait every strong operator seems to have?
A: Retention. A good operator keeps their team, Lewis says, and then adds the catch: “if you’re not amplifying that voice, you’re doing a disservice to the rest of the people in your community who want to come work for you because they don’t know how great you are.”
What This Means for Developers and Home Builders
Start with audience, not with cameras. Lewis calls the question of who you are actually talking to more important than anything else he says in the episode, because developers tend to make content that impresses other developers. His test is cheap: ask the youngest person on your team whose judgment you trust what they watch, show them a clip on your phone rather than emailing it, and watch their face. He runs three separate YouTube channels for three audiences, and notes that a nursing home video he says drew 8 million views was never aimed at the owners who hire him. “I only need 100 people to see that,” he says of that audience.
Then make the budget smaller by splitting it. Lewis would spend the first dollar on strategy, not execution, and would split it with a peer 500 miles away who is not a competitor. Two firms sharing one strategist for four sessions halves the cost and gives each of you a second opinion in the room. “If it’s not a hell yeah by both of you, then it’s a no.” The same logic covers execution: rather than paying $2,000 a month for one part-time social media person, pool it with another firm, or partner with a trade school within 20 to 50 miles that already has students who understand these platforms.
What you film is a success case, told by the person it happened to. Find a project from years back that changed something for a family or a town, pair that person with the frontline worker who built it, and let the two of them carry the piece into your next project. “Go find the Peter and let the Peter do the talking for your company,” as Lewis puts it, describing the neighbors in his Kansas town who complain about new duplexes without knowing what the last development gave them. That is the shape of the work in Strategic Pete’s documentary video production services: real people on site, not a script.
None of this requires you to market publicly, which is Glick’s own point to his listeners. Plenty of developers keep their projects quiet, and story still does the internal work: pride on the crew, and retention. Lewis’s clearest evidence is a partner he filmed about a year and a half ago who used to have a staffing shortage and told him recently that she now has a line of people applying and no longer pays recruiters. If you want that footage to work for recruiting, culture and eventually a sale, treat it as brand story video production rather than a one-off recruitment ad, and start this week by naming the person on your crew who should be holding the camera.
Listen to the Full Episode
This conversation is The Power of Story in Land Development with Peter Murphy Lewis, episode TLP147 of The Land Development Podcast, hosted by Ryan Glick and published on 3 March 2026. Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts.
