Ed Wallace

Ed Wallace grew up in Frackville, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town. He became a CPA in 1982, moved into sales, and spent about 19 years at one company before becoming a VP. Then he walked away to build a training business around an idea he calls relational capital — credibility, integrity, and authenticity, treated as skills rather than personality traits. Twenty years and, by his count, more than 40,000 people trained later, the material works the same way for a contractor standing in someone's kitchen as it does for a Fortune 500 sales team.

Wallace has written multiple books on relationship dynamics and business performance, including Fares to Friends, Creating Relational Capital, Business Relationships That Last, and the number one best seller The Relationship Engine. He teaches executive education as a faculty member at Drexel University's LeBow College of Business and in Villanova University's Human Resources Master's program. His teaching runs in three acts — stories, theory and tools, then process — and it holds to one standard: whatever gets taught has to be usable the moment someone walks out of the room.

On Blue Collar Smart, Wallace sat down with Hugh Hornsby to make an intangible word concrete. He walked through relational GPS, the Fab Five, and the five-rung relationship ladder, explained why he refuses the phrase "leverage your relationships," and argued that nobody actually sells a commodity. He also named what worries him about private equity rollups in the trades. It's a conversation about turning relationships into a process you can run on a Tuesday morning, including what his wife's kitchen remodel taught him about winning at the highest price.