Ascend Safety helps with compliance and safety

Ascend Safety, a woodworking safety consultant firm that launched in January, shared its various program offerings as an exhibitor at IWF 2022. Formed as a partnership between lead consultant Alec Kinslow and Dustin Giffin of Giffin Interior & Fixture, a custom architectural casework and millwork shop in Bridgeville, Pa., the firm offers several safety platforms that walk companies through the OSHA compliance process with a heavy focus on employee engagement.

“We focus on small- and medium-sized businesses who often don’t know what they need to do with safety until it’s too late, and then you see that excessive cost involved with safety. So, we focus on taking safety and making it affordable, and we do that throughout our education and engagement sessions with companies and business owners,” says Kinslow.

Kinslow and Giffin are familiar with the consequences of safety violations, as Giffin Interior dealt with OSHA several years ago after an employee suffered a shop injury.

“We had started to focus on safety, but it wasn’t enough, and as a result, an employee got hurt. OSHA came out, we got cited and fined, and we were looking to move forward,” says Kinslow. “We linked up with a consulting company that really just focused on the compliance side with programs and training models. It helped us, but it really didn’t because there wasn’t that interaction where we could bounce questions off them. We were compliant, but we weren’t safe. So, Dustin and I wanted to create a safe work environment, and throughout that process we came up with all the things we needed to do, and then we turned everything around at Giffin Interior.”

The shop qualified for OSHA’s Safety & Health Achievement Recognition Program. Giffin and Kinslow thought their success could help other shops, so they began with a trial consultation for a subcontractor last year.

The firm offers three packages called Basecamp, Ascent and Summit.

The Basecamp package includes Ascend 101, a two-and-a-half-day course that covers compliance, OSHA reporting, and hands-on safety demonstrations. The other packages build on Basecamp.

“We can do hands-on or hands-off,” says Kinslow.

The average cost for a Basecamp package is $5,000.

For more, visit ascendtosafety.com.  

This article was originally published in the December 2022 issue.