Faith-Driven Leadership: How CW Matthews Built a Culture That Cares for the Whole Person
What happens when a construction company decides employees are more than just laborers?
You clock in. You do your job. You clock out. That’s how most people experience work. But what if your workplace cared about your marriage? Your faith? Your struggles outside the job site? CW Matthews, a heavy highway contractor in Atlanta, Georgia, decided that caring for employees means caring for the whole person—mind, body, and spirit. In this conversation with Ray Rodriguez, Vice President of Human Resources at CW Matthews, we explore what happens when a company leads with faith and genuine care.
Building relationships, not just roads
Ray has spent 30 years at CW Matthews. He started as an HR generalist under a mentor who cared about him like a son. That experience shaped how he leads today. The company employs 2,000 people and maintains a culture where faith isn’t forced but openly welcomed. They hired a part-time pastor who officiates weddings, conducts funerals, and shows up when employees need someone to talk to. They pray at company events. They share their beliefs without apology. And the response? Employees keep asking for more. The more they share, the more people want to hear. It turns out people are hungry for workplaces that acknowledge their spiritual lives.
The real measure of success
Matt Merton, CW Matthews’ chairman, said it plainly: “I don’t care about building roads. I care about building good men and women.” That philosophy drives every decision the company makes. They measure success not by the bridges they build but by the quality of people they develop. When you treat employees as image-bearers of God instead of just laborers, everything changes. Ray shared how this approach creates buy-in across the company. People lean in when they know you genuinely care about their lives beyond the job. In an industry struggling with suicide rates and overdose deaths, this kind of leadership isn’t just nice—it’s necessary. Because when you know what’s going on in someone’s life, you can get them the help they need before it’s too late.
Episode Summary:
Ray Rodriguez reveals how CW Matthews is revolutionizing construction culture by caring for the whole person, not just the worker. Discover why hiring a part-time pastor transformed their company and how faith-driven leadership is saving lives in an industry plagued by suicide and addiction.
This episode was recorded live at the Dirt World Summit, where construction professionals, heavy equipment operators, and industry leaders gather to build more than roads. As VP of Human Resources at CW Matthews, a 2,000-employee heavy highway contractor, Ray leads with the belief that employees aren’t just assets; they’re image bearers of God who deserve care for their mind, body, and spirit.
Key Takeaways:
- The construction industry faces a devastating mental health crisis, with suicide and overdose rates 16x higher
- Hiring a pastor transformed employee care at CW Matthews in unexpected ways
- Authentic faith sharing is about real-life struggles, not religious doctrine
- Total human health means caring about marriage, parenting, and spiritual life, alongside job performance
- Every employee is an image bearer of God, deserving divine value
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Daron: It was just a feeling. I don’t even know how to put it into words. That faith was driving the decisions and I knew that they had my best interest at heart and they cared about me. Created on purpose and for purpose. Hey, welcome back to the Dirt World Summit podcast and we are live here at the Dirt World Summit third annual and we’re sitting down with Ray Rodriguez. Ray, you’re with CW Matthews down in Atlanta, Georgia.
Ray: That is correct. Atlanta. Yep.
Daron: And thanks for taking the time to be part of the podcast today. And I have to go back in. We were just starting kind of dreaming about starting the Rogue Collective and everything we’ve been doing. You were what I would say one of our very first persons of peace. So you think you heard me speak at the first very first one. Yeah. And then we connected out at Knife River out in Oregon. And you sat down and said some very nice things and affirming things to me and said, hey, you know, and we came down and spent a weekend with you guys in Atlanta with Jason Richmond. And some of the things you just shared and affirmed in me was, I don’t know if you knew how meaningful it was to me, but obviously an outsider and it wasn’t a part of the dirt world. Like, and I’m like stepping into this and I’m like, I feel like an imposter, you know, cause I’m like, I don’t know if I have anything to, you know, the value to add. I don’t know if I’ll be accepted. And when I was talking to Jason, he’s like, okay, like there are, you know, thousands of companies. He’s like, there are a few of what we would consider like gold standard companies. He was like, CW in Atlanta is one of them. So when you sat down and, you know, said kind affirming things to me, it was like the welcome door of like, okay, maybe I can be okay in this industry. So I appreciate it.
Ray: Well, it’s crazy because that first time here, I can remember going to the morning, you know, Bible study basically, right? And being sort of taken back that there were so many people there, right? And you don’t realize this industry, faith is an important part. I mean, a lot of folks that believe, you know, that there’s good people in this industry and then you realize, well, golly, they’re very similar to me and it has a lot to do with faith. But now, you know, I don’t know that we’re gold standard. We try real hard. You know, it’s interesting. It’s like Facebook, nobody’s really putting all their failures on Facebook. Look, my kid won a trophy. Everything’s wonderful. But we do certainly try to care about our people and share our faith and lead in that way so that they understand that we’re this way because of what we believe.
Daron: So give us a little context for you. What’s your role there at CW? Maybe somebody that has no idea what CW Matthews is, just watching the podcast, listen to the podcast. Give us a little intro.
Ray: So we are a heavy highway contracting company. We’re based in Atlanta. Our market primarily is the state of Georgia, although we do have a little some work, an office in Jacksonville, Florida. So we’re growing regionally a little bit now. But, you know, anything you see along the road, we do it. We build bridges, we move dirt, we pave, we do concrete paving, we have 27, well, 30 asphalt plants. And that’s pretty much what we do. We’re family owned and operated and have been since 1946. We’re about 2,000 employees strong. A little bit about us.
Daron: How long you been with CW?
Ray: I’ve been with the company 30 years in May, last May. 30 years.
Daron: Where did it start for you?
Ray: So, golly, I was working for a friend and I had been connected through a consultant and that consultant met my prior boss here, Matthews, and he said, I’m looking for somebody because I know a kid. Of course, I didn’t know anything, came in green as a gourd, but I was fortunate to work for a gentleman, his name was John Ross. And he basically took me under his wing and we connected in an interview. We both went to the same college. John was, he passed away back in 2009. But he was just, you know, a huge part of why I stayed with the company. He cared about me and he was a strong Christian and just, you know, took an interest in me and sort of treated me like his son. He had all daughters. I guess I could kind of say maybe I was like his son. I hope he felt that way about me. But so that connection just grew and grew and he helped me advance in my career.
Daron: What was your first job there?
Ray: I was basically an HR generalist under John. And it’s funny, I talk about, he was an attorney and he was an excellent, he was very good at communicating, especially in writing. And so I would, back in the day, we’d have paper memos and I’d give a memo and it was like an English teacher. I’d show him my memo and he’d take a red pen and like mark it up and change it and put words in it. Here you go. And so over the years I got a little bit better, a little bit better, a little bit I’m still not quite to the level he was, but it’s crazy how you don’t know what you don’t know until someone actually just kind of says, hey, let me show you, help you. Yeah, yeah.
Daron: So 30 years with CW, always in HR and now your role is?
Ray: So I’m the vice president of human resources and that’s sort of morphed over the years. You know, as a smaller family company and as we grew, it necessitated more positions, right? But when I started, I was an HR generalist. I was kind of the safety manager. I was over payroll. And now I, you know, as we’ve grown, I have an HR team, I have some dedicated high school recruiters that only recruit for students coming straight out of high school to try to get them in the industry. I have a couple marketing folks. I’ve given up the safety part, even though I’m still involved in a lot of the employee training. Still manage employee benefits and payroll, I have, like I have a staff and then we’ve expanded into South Georgia and Florida. So I have a couple of folks down there that report to me. So it keeps me pretty busy going back and forth, everything under the HR umbrella, the piece that I didn’t really know I didn’t have was the marketing piece, right? We don’t sell to the public. We are low bid contractors. So really our advertising is to find people that want to be a part of a good company and grow with us. And that’s everything. We didn’t realize what we didn’t know about marketing. I’m horrible on social media, so if you try to go see what I’m doing on social media, there’s not a whole lot going on there. My wife says I’m a lurker, and I just kind of scroll through Facebook, but I don’t really do a whole lot. You know, so that’s kind of what I do in a nutshell. There’s a lot of little things along the way. Employee training, we have a training program for leadership, which I kind of, I don’t run it, but I’m coordinated, I guess is the way to say it.
Daron: So let’s take a, let’s jump in the time machine. Let’s go back to high school Ray, right? Was the dream when you were growing up, like I’m gonna eventually oversee a ton of people in the HR department of a large civil construction company.
Ray: Yeah, well, I still don’t know what I wanna be when I grow up, fair. But it’s interesting that question was asked last night and I don’t even really know what I wanted to be. I think I wanted to be a professional athlete. I love soccer. I was a pretty good athlete, but it’s kind of like one of those things. I wanted to be a fireman, a policeman, or an athlete, but I was pretty good at sports. I don’t know that I had the drive that it took. I think I knew I wanted to be it in my head, but I didn’t really have it in my heart. And so no, I didn’t see myself in human resources. You know, I grew up around construction. So my dad was in the construction industry. He was on the office side. He was an accountant, field office manager for a really big building construction company. And so I was always around it and I enjoyed it. And so when this opportunity came along, I was bilingual and I had somebody that cared enough to teach me. So I just grew with the company. I don’t know that I’m the most conventional HR guy you’re gonna ever meet. A lot of the things that we do, we just do because it’s the right thing to do, not necessarily because it’s what we’re supposed to do or required to do. And so, no, I didn’t see myself here, but I ended up in a great place with a good company that cared about their employees and I stayed. I said yes when they asked me to, right? Can you do this? Yes. Did I know how to? No. I figured it out.
Daron: What was the faith component for that Ray? Is that something that’s been there your whole life or something that came on later in life? Did you see, did you perceive it as kind of God guiding you towards a purpose in that? What’s the story there?
Ray: I would say that I am not the strongest person in my faith. I go to church, I’m involved in my Sunday school class. I think it was just being surrounded by people that were good, that cared. And then you could tie it back to the fact that they were Christians. And I can remember, I talked about John, who brought me to the company, but John and his boss, who was the executive VP, and then Bob Matthews, the owner of our company, they all taught a Sunday school class together. And I just thought it was kind of interesting. And when I came to the company, yeah, I was a Christian, yeah, I went to church, but I didn’t really realize what it meant. And I’m still growing today, but it just, it was just a feeling. I don’t even know how to put it into words that that that faith was was driving the decisions and I knew that they had my best interest at heart and they cared about me and that’s how it kind of impacted me and made me stay where I am. It wasn’t about you know money. It wasn’t about I was I just loved being a part of something that clearly had meaning.
Daron: Well, one thing that really, you know was beautiful to me, you around the time I got to spend with you guys at CW, you allowed me to come down and be a part of the employee Christmas banquet and speak there and like got to meet you guys have a pastor that’s on, you know, part time staff and does some Bible studies with the crew. And what was interesting to me is you guys are, you’re not force feeding anything. You’re not forcing anybody to be a part of anything in that way, but there’s a real openness to allow people to take care of their spiritual life as a part of CW. And I think I was telling you earlier, it’s like when we started the Rogue Collective, a lot of the vision was like, I wanted to be able to be impactful in the marketplace, but knowing like, I’m not gonna come in here and push religion, but I am gonna bring a very spiritual message and allow people to really begin to move into that journey, right? And I kind of thought I was gonna have to sneak in. And all of a sudden, you know, I meet you guys and all of a sudden it’s like, there’s a hunger, there’s an openness here to say, you know, we’re not trying to tell you what church you got to go to. We’re not trying to tell you exactly how you have to believe, but we are going to care for the mind, body, and the spirit, you know, of our people. You know, I was blown away at the Christmas, you know, deal. I did what I do. And then you know, one of your execs gets up and basically explains, here’s what we care about at CW. And I mean, it’s basically, you know, a gospel presentation. So you guys have led like that. Is that something you’ve got a lot of pushback and employees being like, Hey, separation of construction and church and state. I mean, what’s that journey been like?
Ray: It’s crazy because we get that question a lot. You know, the reality is that we don’t get any pushback at all and we don’t push it on our employees. We pray at events and we share our faith and we share who we are as Christians, but no one’s saying, hey, we have a Bible study on Thursday mornings. If you don’t go, you’ll never have any pressure from us to go or not go, right? It’s simply by choice, but it’s interesting that the more we share, the more they want us to share. We seem to get employees asking for more, not someone saying, why are you talking about this to me? It’s the complete opposite. It’s been very, very interesting to see how the more we share, the more they want to hear about it. And it’s just, it’s a great thing. And I’ll go back to early days. You know, when we do a Christmas breakfast, you know, we’ve had, we had you, right? You know, it’s not preaching to them, it’s just sharing our beliefs. And we don’t, you know, we’re not necessarily opening the Bible and saying, everybody turn to this page and we’re going to tell you why this story is pertinent to you in your life. It’s more about how it impacts my life. And then you can see it. You can compare yourself and say, golly, that’s interesting because I feel that same way. Right. And so it’s absolutely one of the things that’s very key to who we are as a company. And our employees love it.
Daron: Yeah. Well, I think it’s something too of understanding. And I think you guys have understood this. And I want to help a lot of business owners and marketplace leaders understand it’s like, you know, my origins were in the church. My dad was a pastor. I grew up, you know, I was a local church pastor, you know, for the first, I don’t know, I guess 15 years or so of my professional career. And we get access to people for a day, an hour, you know, maybe, you know, if they attend regularly, which now is like maybe two to three times a month, like I might get three hours of your life to try to make an impact on marketplace. At minimum, you’ve got access to life for 40 hours. I mean, in the dirt world, you might have access to them for 50, 60, 70. 40 on a good day, on a slow week. So you have the majority of the people’s life that you’re impacting, that you’re influencing, the culture you’re creating that’s like, they’re almost probably with their work family more than they’re with the real family in a lot of ways, right? And so to say, hey, you know, we’re gonna have this much impact on your life, but we’re not gonna create an environment where you’re as a whole person, you can be developed, a whole person you can grow. Every part of your life can be impacted and enhanced in that. And so I think it’s just you guys beginning to put your toe in the water and experiment and offer that. It’s realizing, we have an opportunity, but I feel like when I was around you guys as a leadership team, it’s more than it’s an opportunity, but for you guys, it felt like it was a calling or was a responsibility of something we can step into. What are some things you have seen like benefits, I mean, maybe a story or two of the way that it’s enhanced employees’ lives and just culture in general?
Ray: I’ll give you an example, a simple one, and you brought it up. We brought on a part-time pastor. He is an employee of the company. And it started that we had a fatality on one of our job sites. And we brought in somebody to console and pray with the employees that wanted to pray. But he was a stranger. And so there was a lack of a connection there or a relationship there. And so we, credit to Dan Garcia and Michael Bell, that run our company, they said, you know, we need to have somebody that our employees know and trust and will open up to. They had this idea and we hired Pastor Todd on. Well, you know, we didn’t know how it was going to go. You know, since coming on board, he’s, he’s, he’s officiated weddings for employees. He’s done funerals for family members of employees. And he gets, you know, called like, he has this amazing relationship with our people and, and, and they’re using him in ways that you, you know, we never even anticipated, right. And, and, and so just that little bit of him being a part of their lives in so many different ways, not just, let me tell you about the Lord, right? It’s like, hey, I’m here if you need me. And he’s just in here. You want to talk to him? He’s there to listen. And it’s amazing the impact is that, you know, I forget how, I think he’s done a couple of weddings, but he’s, when an employee has a family member that’s struggling, he gets a call and he’s just there to help. It’s kind of crazy how it’s become just an everyday part of our company that, you know, call Pastor Todd, he’s there if you need him. And they do.
Daron: What I love about it, you know, I think in religious church circles, I heard somebody say this in a couple of months ago, and it made a lot of sense to me of like, when we talk about sharing your faith, sometimes we’ve boiled that down to it means, well, when you share the faith, you’re sharing like, you were a sinner and Jesus died for you. You hear like, here’s these beliefs you have to accept, right? Like check the boxes. And if I told you that, like I’ve shared my faith. The reality is you shared principles and concepts, right? But what this person helped me realize is when I’m sharing my faith, it’s not, these are the principles and the attendance I believe about the Bible. Sharing my faith is, I had the situation, like, we’re in a relationship and we’re talking, we’re working together and I’m saying, man, I had this issue in my marriage and my understanding of God’s love for me and what it was like, I had the faith for this to work through in a situation. I had a situation with my kids, right, where I didn’t know it was, I had a situation with my finances, like all these real life areas, you know, the connection I have to Jesus brought me to a level of faith where my life, function, my life worked, my life was blessed. And it’s sharing my faith is, you know, we’re having coffee, you know, at a break or whatever. And I’m telling you this story of this is what’s real in my life. And so I’m sharing my faith with you, not saying, Hey, I need you to believe this to be in our club.
Ray: Absolutely. Exactly. And that’s, that’s why I think it’s so well received. It’s, it’s, it’s not, Hey, I want you to join my church or to believe, believe exactly what I believe, but I just want you to understand that the reason why we all have the same problems, and I’ll go back to the Facebook analogy, you know, we really all do, we just, you think everybody doesn’t have the problems you do because all you see is their Facebook world, right? You know, I have fights with my wife, right? You know, arguments, right? Passion and conversations. And I’m never right, but that’s okay. That’s good as your marriage contract. But it’s really just more about how it helps you move to the next day, right? And understand that there is someone out there. That faith is what helps me get through it, right?
Daron: I talked to one of the leaders at Gayther Electric, a large electric company up in Indianapolis in Indiana. And they have this phrase they use, I think they stole from somebody else. They talk about for their culture, they want to focus on total human health. And I thought, man, that’s a great title. That’s a great idea of like, man, you know, we’re providing for families, we’re providing somebody an income and occupation. Like we’re doing these things and we’re thinking about different elements of health and whatever. And like that idea of like, well, if we have one of the greatest influences on them, what if we started thinking about them as a total human being, not just an employee, what does that look like?
Ray: You know what I mean? It’s interesting because it’s very similar to the way that we’re looking at our employees. And so recently, past year or so, we’ve changed our chairman of the board. So Bob Matthews has stepped back and his son-in-law, Matt Merton, has taken over. And Matt will be the first one to tell you, and he said it in front of our employees. I don’t know anything about building roads. I don’t really care about building roads. I care about building good men and women. And that’s really his mission for this company is how do we help our employees be the best possible version of themselves that they can be in work and personally. And that whole personal piece is the part that’s, you know, really the challenge because everybody understands, I want you to get better at your job so that you can grow and maybe take this next position. But I care about you as a person and I want you to have a good marriage and I want you to be a good father, a good mother. That’s really foreign in the industry and that’s, but that’s how we end up getting buy-in in everything we do as a company. And let me be clear, not everybody buys in, no, we’re not perfect, but when you care about your employees, it’s amazing how much they’ll lean in. And so that whole concept of just growing great men and women is really the center of all the decisions we make as a company. Yeah, we got to make money or we don’t have a company, but everything is looked through that lens. And we’re not going to say one day when we look back, when we built that road that makes us a great company, we’d rather look back and say, look at where Ray is as a person in his life. And how successful his kids are, his marriages, that means so much more to us than actually just saying, hey, I built that road or I built that bridge.
Daron: One of the things that comes back to that, understanding those, does faith, you know, influence that? What’s like, oh if I believe, if the Bible is true and I believe it, so every human being is made in the image of God, which gives them, you know, amazing divine value, right? So how am I going to treat that employee if I see them as someone who’s an image bearer of God, not just he’s a laborer? He’s just this, she’s just that. And those things begin to filter through in that. Maybe in closing, Ray, so one of the things here that I love that BuildWit’s doing in the dirt world is wanting to make the dirt world a better place. And that means, I still echo it from Gary Smallday all the time, life is relationships, everything else is the details. How you build the road, how you build the bridge, the detail. How are the relations, how are we caring for people? And one of the things that BuildWit’s talking about a lot that I love and why I’m so stoked to be partnering with him is there’s a pretty huge human problem in the dirt world. I mean, not only is there such a massive need for being almost a half a million laborers needed for current workload, these kinds of things, but when they shared this data with me last year about one of the top leading industries in suicide, I think they said yesterday 16 times the rate of overdose deaths in the industry. Okay, we’re making money, we’re building stuff, but it seems like it’s happening at the cost of people’s lives. And that’s not like being safe on the work site. It means something’s happening in their life that their life is not working. So for what you guys are trying to do at CW and kind of what you see, if you can kind of look into your crystal ball of the future of what you see and what you would hope to see, do you feel like if we can start really spreading this kind of vision and seeing other companies say, hey, we’re going to care about the mind, the body and the spirit, like the life of our employees. Do you think that’s a part of the answer to the future?
Ray: I think absolutely. And I think the challenge is that this industry has been male dominated. We don’t share our feelings, right? It’s not okay to show weakness or to be vulnerable. So it starts with just letting people know you care and making them feel comfortable enough to share with you. And then that opens up that conversation. But yeah, it’s a huge issue. And the president of our company, Dan Garcia, is a huge relationship person. He’s wired that way, but he’s challenging our foremen, he’s challenging our superintendents, he’s challenging our officers of the company to care about their employees. And I’ll give you just a simple example. You got a guy who works for you for five years and he stops coming to work. And you go to the foreman and you say, hey, where’s this guy? He’s like, I don’t know, he just stopped coming to work. You’re like, do you know that he didn’t get hit by a bus? Do you care enough to know what’s going on in their lives? And in just having a relationship with your people, not looking them as assets or tools to get a job done to be successful, to make money. When you start looking at it that way and you have that connection with your people, hopefully you avoid the situation where somebody is, you know, maybe it’s overdoses or God forbid takes their life, right? Because if you know what’s going on in their life and give them an opportunity to share with you, maybe you can get them the help they need or be that person that says the one thing that gets them to tomorrow.
Daron: Well, what I love, Ray and I, you know, love every opportunity I get to do anything with you guys. And that’s one thing is I’m drawn to be part of the dirt world because you look at the history of humanity, you look at the history of how Jesus works, you look at the history of great Jesus movements. They always started on the fringes. They always start in the places that people will feel for God. And I think you look at what’s with the construction industry. These are great people. They’re hardworking people. They’re the backbone of America. And I think a lot of them feel like they’re forgotten. They feel like they’re on the fringe. And for me, that’s a target rich environment of God saying, I want to do something here. And I’m excited to be able to bring Rogue Collective into companies, to be able to be a part of the dirt world, to come in and say, God’s created you on purpose and for a purpose. God’s not against you. He’s for you. And God is near you, not far away, like right here in the dirt. And I just want to commend you, you know, you and Dan, the whole team. I love it that you’re not coming off saying like, yeah, we are really the best. You know what I mean? And more from it. We’re doing a good job. But it’s not, you know, it’s everything we do is perfect. You’re humble about it, but you guys are taking risks. And I think you are laying foundation and maybe we can say clearing the ground for other companies to come alongside and say, man, we have wanted to care about the soul of our people. We’ve wanted to inject more of a culture of love, but we needed someone to give us permission. And usually it’s the person with the most courage that goes first and they clear the way. And so, man, I’m praying and hoping that what you guys have done at CW is clearing the way for us to be able to allow God to come in and create a culture of love, create a culture of servanthood, create a culture of redemption and healing for people. Because I think there’s an amazing opportunity. So just thank you for your leadership. Thanks for being on the podcast today. And I look forward to finding ways to walk with you guys and see what we can do because there’s an amazing opportunity and there’s a lot of people that need to find that love and find that healing.
Ray: Thank you and appreciate you having me on.
Daron: Hey, thanks for downloading this episode of the Daron Earlewine podcast. And until we talk again, remember God’s not against you, he’s for you. He’s near you not far away and he’s created you on purpose and for purpose.