001 - When Every Minute Counts The World of Turnarounds with Grant Stead

When a billion-dollar facility shuts down, every minute counts. 🚧 Orion Matthews and Grant Stead explore the art of turnarounds—how to rebuild critical systems, manage thousands of people, and use AI to keep the world’s biggest assets online.

In this episode of The Major Project Podcast, host Orion Matthews sits down with Grant Stead, founder of Stead Global, to explore what happens after the build — when billion-dollar assets go offline for critical maintenance. Known as turnarounds, these high-intensity shutdowns are among the most complex operations in heavy industry, where every hour offline means millions lost.

Grant unpacks what it takes to plan and execute these massive events: managing thousands of workers, maintaining safety and culture at scale, and rebuilding critical systems under relentless schedule pressure. The conversation then shifts to how AI and data are reshaping document control and field execution across major projects.

🎧 You’ll learn:

• Why turnarounds are the most dangerous and decisive phase in a billion-dollar project’s life cycle
• How culture and cadence drive both safety and performance
• The hidden costs of poor resource planning — and how to avoid them
• How AI-driven document management tools like Doc Ultra and Stoic are redefining project execution

📍 Guest: Grant Stead — Founder & CEO, Stead Global

🌐 steadglobal.com | LinkedIn: Grant Stead

Learn more about the world of high-stakes, billion-dollar projects at majorprojectpodcast.com