“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 keep