The Fire Protection Podcast: Episode #76 – A Firefighter’s Perspective on the Fire Protection Industry

sts, we listen to comedy podcasts or I listen to a lot of golf podcasts and business and whatever’s going on in the world, but there wasn’t really any.  

Chris Logan does a great job with the sprinkler one, and I think we all have our daily jobs, and I don’t necessarily want to talk about that.  

It’s like, all right, let’s talk about, I want to bring on people that obviously have respect within the fire industry, and just we go to these conferences all over the US, and maybe one time a year you get to hear your mentor speak or Jim Pauley at NFPA speak, but if the podcast, you can connect weekly or monthly with people, right?  

Jeffrey Pirro: And people like a conversation. The long-form format in podcasting has obviously been the route people go, and I think you’ve hit the right notes.  

Drew Slocum: Yeah, appreciate that. So I know you pretty well, Jeff.  

Let’s let the listeners know who Jeff Pirro is, how you got your start and what you’re all about.  

Jeffrey Pirro: Yeah, appreciate that. Well, one thing to know, I’m the son of a 30-year career firefighter who retired about 10 years ago in the town I grew up in of Utica, New York.  

Went to college in some form or shape, been in communications and sales for about 20 years, been a volunteer firefighter at the Defreestville Fire Department for 10 now a Lieutenant, and I’ve been here for four.  

And all of those have along the way informed how I’m able to talk about not only this particular market or industry, but fire protection in general, specifically as it relates to people that I talk to for work on a regular basis, which are fire protection contractors, because of course, Inspect Point is the software that they’re considering or using.  

Drew Slocum: Yep, yep. Yeah. So let’s go way back. Your father was a firefighter out in Utica.  

Do you have any memories of that?  

Jeffrey Pirro: Oh yeah, a ton.  

I mean, some of my earliest memories of my dad for Fire Prevention Week, which takes place in October, I think it’s the first or the second week of October.  

He used to come to our school, Our Lady of Lords, and he’d show up with the mayor and they would do a presentation and they would sit, and that was always cool because then you’d see the big red truck.  

I can remember times that we spent Thanksgiving and Christmas there on shift with him because the station he was mainly at throughout his career was right around the corner from where we lived.  

So he’d drive maybe a half mile, and we’d go down, and you, I mean, Drew, I don’t know if you’ve ever had a firefighter cook for you, but…  

Drew Slocum: Oh, I have.  

Jeffrey Pirro: Yeah, dude. I mean, you’re talking chef-level meals, right?  

I mean, and little shout out these guys, a lot of them are also Italian, or if you grew up in Utica, you’re almost Italian by default.  

That’s how the type of city it was. But we would spend, we’ve spent some Thanksgivings and Christmases at the fire department.  

I remember every year, they’d have a Christmas party. In fact, in his fire department, specifically station three on Arthur AV in Utica, they still had a pole that they had only decommissioned by the time I was early, young enough to remember it.  

But they used to let us slide down the fire pole.  

You’d wrap your legs around and go to the first and the second floor, and then you’d get down to the bottom and they had this old RC Cola.  

It was just a lot. And he’d come up and visit, or one of the specific memories I have is I woke up, so I delivered newspapers as a kid.  

It was my first job. My parents insisted I get a job.  

I was like, I forget, 11 or 12, I mean, it was around that age.  

And I did that for a number of years. We woke up and heard a big explosion.  

We didn’t know it was an explosion. Sounded like a piece of furniture falling on the ground.  

Long story short, my dad was heading to work as that happened.  

And when we went outside a house down the street had had a gas leaking in the basement, they did not know, of course, they did not have co detectors.  

They did not have the appropriate tools that would’ve warned them.  

So what happened was the basement fills with natural gas, and this was in really the end of winter, and the boiler kicks on.  

I mean, that’s how saturated it was, that little flame from the boiler.  

They eventually found out or, through the investigation, discovered that the boiler kicked on.  

Unfortunately, that particular event didn’t turn out the best it could have for folks, but I saw my dad in action, and that’s just always been something that’s been in my mind, it is for a lot of the guys I talk to.  

I mean, we have a lot of firefighters that do side work.  

Some of them are doing fire alarms, and a lot of them do extinguishers, extinguishers.  

Kitchen hoods tend to be the model of choice for the firefighters.  

They may be active still, and they have different schedules, whether it’s one on three off or two on two off, and a number of different constructions.  

So they’ll inspect extinguishers, kitchen hoods, things like that. That’s an excellent business market for them to get into that sort of public service mind has always been there because my dad went off to work and my mother, she was a stay-at-home mom.

Just give her a little shout-out. I mean, it’s not like she didn’t do anything.  

She was a stay-at-home mom raising three boys. She eventually went off to become a biller at a nonprofit and she would collect record amounts of money on behalf of the patients where she worked.  

And so yeah, that’s sort of the background.  

Drew Slocum: You say that I’ve been involved in fire protection, not on the firefighting side, but obviously been tied to that with just working in New York City and the FDNY and back to one of the best meals I’ve ever had.  

Friends of firefighters brought me to ladder ten one year, my wife and I, and Ladder 10 is the firehouse where World Trade Center’s at and had all the action and oh man, it was one of the most, I don’t know, it was emotional places to be, but, and the stories they had and everything, but the food was incredible and it was just a regular night.  

They’re just making Italian obviously that night. And I don’t know, I had never experienced anything like that.  

So it’s kind of one of the highlights of my career is just being able to go there and hearing the stories around nine 11 and all that.  

Jeffrey Pirro: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll tell you, probably the best memory I have with my dad, just to give a shout out here, is I isn’t from when I was a kid, it was from after I’d become a volunteer firefighter for a number of years.  

This took place about eight years ago. We were at a diner up in Half Moon, Half Moon Diner, and it’s me and my dad, my brother, his family.  

So it was like six to eight of us and we’re sitting at a table and a guy next to us, World War II veteran in a wheelchair, mechanical, mobile wheelchair is eating with a couple of people and all of a sudden he starts to choke.  

And through that process, we realized not only was he choking, but then he had a heart attack, so we had to get him on the ground.  

My father’s the one that put him on the ground. I did chest compressions while he did rescue breaths.  

And I say, that’s a good memory one because I had heard through the grapevine later on that even as a 92-year-old, he had survived when the fire department showed up.  

So if I can give a little plug for that, that was an amazing experience.  

But two things out of that. One, I know for the podcast, for anybody watching, they’re interested in fire protection.  

They’re probably fire protection contractors or in the industry, many of them are probably firefighters or have family who are.  

But if you have ever thought about joining the Volunteer fire service, we had a critical need for volunteer firefighters here in New York State.  

We have a website called Fire in you.org. You can go and visit, but anywhere else, volunteer firefighters are absolutely critical and necessary to the protection of communities where they can’t afford or don’t have enough municipalities to justify a paid department.  

Of course, I’m lucky enough to live in a town where we have a paid department and then also volunteer in the town next door.  

But without that training, without that regular behavior of knowing CPR, I mean, I’ve been around people who’ve done the Heimlich Maneuver for other folks at restaurants, et cetera, et cetera.  

I mean, it’s just a critical and important skill and it’s an important part of a community.  

So anybody who’s ever thought about volunteer firefighting, there’s a role for everybody.  

You don’t have to be a big strong ax wielding person carrying a hose and you can do a number of other things.  

There are things outside hitting hydrants. There are support functions that we need.  

There’s fire police who keep the scene safe. So a little shout out for that.  

The experience I had as a firefighter allowed me at one point to do something pretty amazing with my father, but that only came because I chose to be a volunteer firefighter.  

And I would encourage anybody who’s thinking about it to really consider just Google, talk to your local fire department.  

They probably have a Facebook page or some other way to contact them, but it’s a critical need.  

Drew Slocum: Obviously get involved.  

And I’ve actually thought about doing it myself here locally, just knowing people from the industry, going back to my Stillwater New York days, and Jeff Mahar was the chief, his son was my age and I knew him my entire childhood.  

But then I grow older. He works for the biggest fire sprinkler company in Albany in upstate New York.  

So I’m like, oh man, there’s this tie to from the firefighting and volunteer to the actual fire protection community.  

And I don’t know, I’ve never seen that in any other industry where, I dunno, it’s giving back.  

And Jason Webb, who I just had on, he’s obviously big into that.  

And John Johnson, who John’s been variety of companies in the industry.  

I think he’s a comtech now, but even Chris Logan, the fellow podcaster, right? He does.  

He’s a volunteer firefighter himself and owns a fire protection company up in Canada. So it’s interesting.  

Jeffrey Pirro: And I’ll tell you, I mean more to your point, just to build off of that, these skills that you learn coming into the volunteer or paid fire service aren’t only specific to the fire service.  

So obviously in part, when I interviewed with you and Pat for Inspect Point in part, that was important because there was an experience with fire protection that informed likewise in the reverse.  

General Electric, formerly headquartered out of Schenectady, New York still has a present there.  

The past fire chief of the town I live in now, when he retired, got hired there to be their fire chief on that campus or for their buildings, and they brought us in and that was able to do a demonstration and they ended up subscribing to Inspect Point.  

But that relationship only occurred because I knew some folks through the fire department and we had been communicating prior to his retirement and that encouraged him when we also got another call from another local manufacturer called GlobalFoundries and met with their T team, their emergency response team, and that team had been given some assignments that involve inspections of fire protection systems beyond other certain tests and inspections that they do that are adjacent to that.  

I would say I met with eight to 10 guys, and I think almost all of them, if not all of them, are volunteer firefighters up in the Saratoga County area.  

And so we got talking about that. Of course we knew a lot of folks in common and then, I mean that’s a regular occurrence where these are very adjacent industries.  

Firefighting and fire protection of course. I mean, how many times have I gone on fire alarms and you have to go to the panel or you have to know what a zone is.  

You have to be able to read the map to understand it. What type of device are you looking at?  

Same thing with sprinkler systems, if you get a flow alarm or something like that.  

So these are all, obviously there’s a lot of cross pollination between firefighting and fire protection.  

Drew Slocum: Yeah, they enhance each other, right? Fire protection’s there to save lives, get people out of the building.  

It’s there to protect the property too. And the thing is, it just enhances, the firefighters initially knocks down the fire or sometimes puts it out.  

The thing is firefighters are still needed to come in, make sure everything’s set, because those systems aren’t just initial kind of knockdown of the fire, right?  

Jeffrey Pirro: I mean, I’ll give you two examples. I mean the residential fire sprinklers, we don’t have a lot of those in our district just yet, but as we all know, the residential fire sprinklers as they come on board, because there are groups and organizations promoting that for New York to requirement to require it.  

Obviously there’s the other side that doesn’t want that. It’ll probably end up somewhere in the middle, but it’ll allow people to get out in a safe amount of time.

And that’s the whole concept, protect life and property, stabilize the incident.

That’s what we want to accomplish on the fire ground.

So the concept there is let them get out of the house for residential, for commercial, I mean we’ve even seen an e-bike catch fire.

So I know we had been talking about you and I before this about the NFSA sprinkler save submission that I meant.

We got a call for a structure fire, a building on fire. It doesn’t have to be a big conflagration.

We show up and it’s an e-bike, right? We know it’s an e-bike, we’re told it’s an e-bike.

We get into basically what’s sort of like a community room for this apartment complex in our district.

The sprinkler, the single sprinkler head above that particular e-bike in that storage unit contained the fire it allowed us to set up.

So we set up a primary in a secondary hand line.

Obviously if it gets bigger than that, we’re going to take action.

But the sprinkler flowing, contained it, nothing else went off.

And then we basically just sat back and wait for the local hazmat unit to get there to take care and properly dispose of it.

So I mean, fire protection systems, keeping them in working order, keeping them up to date, keeping them modern, the proper and appropriate service and inspections, testing and maintenance, that’s critical to supporting what it is we do.

We should be the last line of defense as the fire department.

Things should only have gone wrong enough for us to be there.

Otherwise, if you have a fire alarm, if you have fire sprinklers, extinguishers, how critical can a portable fire extinguisher be in an instance where you have some sort of small fire that can be extinguished prior to it getting larger.

So again, not only cross pollination, but they just work well together.

The fire protection systems in the fire department.

Drew Slocum: Yeah. Yeah.

Funny enough, you mentioned that I was talking with the guys at Amerex the other day. Great.

Obviously extinguisher manufacturer, suppression manufacturer, and one piece of data that I think a lot of times fire alarms, there’s data on that within the fire ecosystem, how often fire panels are going off, how much the remote central stations alerting you.

There’s data around how often that’s happening. There’s also data around when sprinklers are going off.

We’re trying to collect more data in the industry of like, Hey, when you reported, if you did not report that sprinkler putting out that e-bike fire, that might’ve not have gotten grabbed.

So we got to as an industry start grabbing more of that data.

Alright, obviously fire alarms there digitally recorded, but the sprinkler systems, and when I was talking with Amerex, they don’t know how often a fire extinguisher is in use because a manual, you’re putting out a fire, you’re probably tossing that extinguisher out and get a new one or recharging that.

So that part of the industry doesn’t know how often they’re used, right?

They’re required definitely commercially, they’re really pushed on the residential side, make sure you have extinguishers and working smoke detectors, but you don’t, again, there’s no data around that.

And anyway, by you reporting that sprinkler incident, it’s critical to just learning more about how well these systems are doing.

Jeffrey Pirro: And plus I think it’s a great thing that the sprinkler organizations like the NFSA, this was specifically their sprinkler saves email distribution.

We’ve communicated it to other things like that have been communicated. I think.

Does Viking have a sprinkler saves as well?

Drew Slocum: Yeah, I think they have sprinklersaves.com.

They started that when I was there working for Viking, and it was really what it, obviously you could log it, but it was essentially it pulled news feeds from around the US of all the different saves.

Now if it’s not reported, it’s not going to pull it. Yeah,

Jeffrey Pirro: Right.

So obviously the promotion of operable sprinkler systems, fire alarm systems and the proper usage of fire extinguishers and kitchen hoods, right?

I mean, how many people, as wild as it might seem, because also I’ve worked in restaurants as a kid you worked cook and server and bartender, all that.

How many people would know, I can’t remember any time at any restaurant I worked at where if there was a proper kitchen hood, how many people know that within, I don’t know how many feet it’s supposed to be, but right nearby is going to be a handle.

You can pull ours in the fire department, you pull and you twist it or you twist and you pull it and it’ll activate the kitchen hood system if it’s not already activated.

And this kind of information, not only that they exist, but how they impact your regular and daily life.

I mean that’s what our customers at Inspect Point are doing.

I mean that sort of gives me, honestly, it feels to me a little bit of the juice I get from just being here is that we’re contributing to something that is meaningful.

And that might sound, I don’t know how it sounds, but I mean that’s how I feel about it is that the people we’re talking to are for-profit companies oftentimes.

A lot of times they’re facilities management, but either way they’re contributing to the preservation of life and property through the proper operation and maintenance of fire protection systems.

And I mean I think that’s a critical thing to focus on.

And then being able to highlight that they work on a regular basis when they do well and why?

Because when they don’t do well, then you got a bigger problem. Maintenance, that's an important thing.

Drew Slocum: Traditionally design and getting them into buildings was the big thing, but if you’re not maintaining, you install this, sometimes it can be pretty expensive to get it installed with the fire alarm system and suppression system, all that.

And if you’re not maintaining that on the correct frequencies, all that money is just tossed out the window and it is there for a reason.

Going back to your lithium-ion battery scooter or e-bike fire, how are you guys being trained on the ground and for lithium-ion battery fires, and I guess it probably depends on what size battery and all that, but do you guys have a protocol or has that changed over the last few years?

Jeffrey Pirro: Yeah, I mean we regularly do a drill at my fire department where we’ll invite in heavy equipment and machinery.

So the local transportation agency, CDTA, for instance, will bring over one of their electric buses.

We will also have a Tesla there, although we haven’t been able to get anybody from Tesla yet to train us.

But you’ll have somebody there that knows about the wiring underneath or even the e-bikes.

And really most of it boils down to if things are on fire, we’re going to put water right, put the blue on the red when it comes to e-bike specifically once the fire is contained and at least extinguished or maintained to such an extent that it’s not expanding, we’re going to get the hazmat department involved.

So the faster we can get, when I say the faster we can get away from it, what I mean is the quicker we can put the blue on the red and then get the hazmat team in there really to take care of that.

That’s the whole goal.

And it’s a big deal. I mean, we live in a bedroom community of about 12 to 13,000 people.

We have two fire departments. So I’m in the North Green Bush Fire District, there’s the Defreestville Fire Department.

My department alone probably runs about 400 5500 calls a year. A lot of what are called smells and bells.

I would say probably about 10% of our calls are for things on fire, whether in our district or a neighboring district.

And the reason I’m mentioning that is because as a sort of bedroom community sandwiched between two cities here in the northeast as was everywhere in the United States rental and condo housing townhouses, I mean that’s being built.

I mean, I think we have two or three projects having been approved already in the town.

That’s just going to mean more people of a generation that have these devices.

I mean, just look at anything that you can put in your house now as well.

So the concept is that with that, it’s becoming much more of a critical need for the fire department to understand.

And thankfully, we do a good job. We have a number of, I mean longtime firefighters, everybody’s hooked up with the fire service somehow with a paid or career in our department meeting, we can stay ahead of a lot of the training or in touch with a lot of what needs to get done.

We run a very tight professional operation. I mean, I regularly say I’m lucky because you hear a lot of, unfortunately, you hear some not so great stories.

Our department doesn’t happen to fall into that category. We’re pretty well run department.

One of those things is making sure we’re prepared to know how to respond to these types of situations in addition to everything else.

But yeah, I mean, where do you go on an electric bus to isolate the power source or to identify it and one of the buses, it’s going to be in the back of the bus.

You might go on thinking it’s in the front. So there’s a lot of things like that that we are training on regularly that is a focus for us and that thankfully we know how to handle it.

I think one of the big things I learned this past summer, FDNY did, and FDNY has a lot of data on lithium ion battery fires, and over the last five years it’s been a pretty serious issue.

A lot of it’s their delivery service. There’s a lot of e-bikes and there’s a lot of illegal operations where these e-bikes are being charged and whatever.

So they’ve had issues and actually I think the results from 2024 were pretty positive for the FDNY, but one of the things that they talked about, yeah, you have your EV cars and things like that, but those are pretty high technology, higher priced.

They have software built into ‘em. The biggest culprits is your electric scooters, your e-bikes, even your little toys.

And a lot of it has to do with not listed, not UL listed or not approved charging or the battery packs.

They’re illegal battery packs. So if you’re using anything lithium ion, I am obviously hyperfocused on this in the fire industry, but I’m hyperfocused on any, I don’t leave the battery’s on the charger.

I make sure it’s an approved charger. The CEO of Viking, right?

James Lenville I mentioned earlier, he had unfortunate had a fire, everybody got out fine, but it was lithium ion battery fires, the CEO of one of the biggest sprinkler companies in the world.

And so this is, nobody’s immune to this, so you just got to be conscious of it.

Jeffrey Pirro: And not specifically about lithium ion batteries, but I think there’s an important point you made that I wanted to highlight, which is to know where you’re buying from and know who you’re buying from.

And the reason I’m saying not about lithium ion batteries is my brother went on, Amazon bought, I think he got smoke detectors for his house and I think he even got some extinguishers.

They show up and I’m not as hyperfocused as you are because this is something that you have a background in every day all day.

But as far as fire protection, I was checking them out to see if they were just what they were.

They were a brand I hadn’t heard of. And I’m looking at, I’m like, there’s no UL listing on these.

There’s nothing. There was some other agency that is not based domestically here in the States anyways.

And I was like, dude, you can’t use these. I was like, these are not something that you want to take advantage of.

He bought cheap instead of good. He got what he got.

Thankfully he returned them and got better quality of both types of things.

But yeah, I mean you have to know where you’re buying from and if you’re going to buy things that have lithium ion battery, make sure at least it comes from a manufacturer that’s a brand name or reputable.

Drew Slocum: Yeah, I have a lot of stuff’s going lithium ion these days, so it’s tough.

So back to your kind of, I guess your volunteer firefighting and you mentioned to me of, because I had this idea of all right, if you knew a lot about firefighting before you got involved in Inspect Point, you learned a lot about fire protection systems.

But I’ve always thought it’d be cool to bring the knowledge transfer from the fire protection over to firefighting and then vice versa firefighting on the fire protection side to see what they’re interacting with every day.

And a lot of people in the industry know that, but I’m always like there’s a training or learning opportunity between both segments and I know you guys need to do training every year.

So any ideas there?

Jeffrey Pirro: Yeah, I mean we’re required to have at least 104 hours worth of training a year.

So basically it’s the same standard the paid departments are held to.

And yeah, we do a lot of, I mean my department specifically is known as a fast department for our mutual aid agencies.

So it’s firefighter Assist search team or Firefighter Fire Rescue and Search, I forget the specific acronym, but basically if we show up to an event and something happens where they have to send in a team to extract a firefighter who’s found themselves in a difficult position, that’s part of what we would do.

And everybody sort of trains on that, but that’s sort of one of our primary things.

The reason I’m mentioning that is because we train on that a lot.

What we don’t train on a lot necessarily at this point in time and we have had training on it, is what is a sprinkler system?

So I’ll give you an example of why that matters.

A large insurance company, a national brand, has a server farm in our district.

If we get any call for that particular building, and it’s a five story, I mean I would say it’s maybe the length of a football field, five story tall, a big building.

So it’s not very tall, but it is very wide and we’re required prior to entering under.

Now it’s a canopy, I think it’s 30 or 40 feet we’re required to be on air prior to getting under that to go in because it could be a situation where there’s been a co system has been activated or some other system that would deprive of us deprive, deprive us of oxygen.

Does anybody know why though? Does anybody in my department, and I’m sure people do obviously, but I guess what I’m saying is you might look at any department and say, do they know what’s actually in there?

Do they know what halogen is? Do they know why you would use CO2?

Do they know when these certain other types of systems would be used?

Or alternatively we show up to a fire alarm. What is his own no in loop? Why does it matter?

How does it map you to the problem?

We had a flow alarm a couple of years ago.

A sprinkler head had frozen and popped off, and a local retirement community, the vestibule, the heat turned off, the sprinkler had frozen and popped off.

Right now it was, I seem to remember it was, and you’ll know more about this than me, but I seem to remember it was like orange PVC pipe.

It felt like…

Drew Slocum: It’s CPVC. Yeah,

Jeffrey Pirro: CPVC. Yeah,

Drew Slocum: Blaze Master.

Jeffrey Pirro: What is it?

Drew Slocum: It’s called, there’s a trade name Blaze Master, but there’s a couple of different brands.

Jeffrey Pirro: Yeah, gotcha.

So I just remember that, and it froze and popped off.

So when we get there, there’s not only a sheet of ice, but the alarms are going off.

There was a water going actually. So we had to send a few of us around the back to get to the sprinkler room because this vestibule bisected the building.

So rather than go through it, we had to go around and it was like two feet of snow too.

It was kind of annoying. Well, thankfully one of the guys works for a mechanical contractor.

We got in and he knew right where to turn it off.

Right now I would’ve known where to go eventually. I do this every day and I talk about it and I’ve seen it before, but his ability to get right to that to turn it off was only a component.

Both of the training that he’s received in the volunteer fire service in the past, but also the fact that he does this for a living.

How many of our new guys, and we’re blessed to have new men and women who have volunteered for the fire department.

How many of them would know that at this point now they’re brand new, so they’re just learning how to put, I say the blue on the red stuff and the appropriate and safe ways to do that.

But as they’re grow in their career, when is that going to take place?

Right now for our department, obviously that’s in our control, but that’s not a standard.

The volunteer or any fire service has regularly and it’s important. Those things are there to protect us too.

We go in, it’s meant to protect us.

Drew Slocum: Yep. Yeah.

And I think there’s an opportunity for local fire protection companies that using Inspect Point and everybody else to just talk to your local volunteer, go in. It’s kind of fun too.

You might get a nice meal out of it, go in an hour every quarter for and just have different people go and just chat about new technology and just share ideas…

Jeffrey Pirro: For something that we encounter every day, both as civilians and in the fire service anyway.

And plus, believe it or not, two hours a week for 52 weeks a year.

I mean, there’s a lot of ideas and we always have drill.

I mean, it’s always stuff for us to learn more about or sharpen our skills on because even though you’ve tapped a hydrant once, you keep doing it until it’s muscle memory, until you can do it in your sleep.

With that being said, variety is good too. And I guarantee if a sprinkler fire alarm company, even an extinguisher company reaches out and says, here’s how to train people on extinguishers, they’re going to welcome that because not only is it a change of pace, it takes a little bit of work out of their day because they don’t have to plan for a drill in a particular day or week.

And it’s important just having a knowledge of where and why these things are there and who controls them.

We know a lot about building codes. We, we train on the types of construction.

You have to know the difference between type one and three and five and what’s going to burn or balloon construction, where’s the fire going to go?

We train a lot on fire behavior, right? Airflow directing a particular reading the smoke.

I mean, these are all things that obviously we’re talking about fire protection systems, but those are all things that are a component of understanding fire processes, which would simply just be another version of that.

And my fire department, we’re lucky. Again, I’m very proud to be a member of this department.

It is just a good department. Everybody there is real high quality, real trained up and motivated.

We’re even asked for instance, to go in the opposite direction.

We’re asked by our community, the 42nd infantry division of the Army, they have a unit in our department protection area will go there once a year to train them on the extinguishers, right?

So yeah, I mean I think anybody listening to this podcast, if you’re a fire protection professional that isn’t in the fire service, consider joining.

But two, if you have a fire department nearby, give them a call offer to do an hour’s worth of training on what a sprinkler system is, how a fire alarm control panel operates.

Guaranteed they’re going to at least be interested. Plus, they’re probably really good people.

I mean they’re, they’re people like you. They got a job, they’re doing something else during the day and then this is something else they’ve commit to.

We all have secondary activities I hope a lot of people are involved in, so they’ll gladly take somebody else doing a little bit of their work for part of the time.

Drew Slocum: No, that’s great. I think it’s a good promotion to do.

And during our talk here, I have to have another podcast on this because I don’t even know if you know about this, Jeff, but it got released, the New York Post put a piece and New York State is trying to propose sprinkler bill.

Again, all these states try to do it all the time and the home builders bash it.

And this New York Post thing was like, oh, they’re going to require fire sprinklers in homes for one, any new build.

It’s not old building, it’s anything newly built. And yeah, they were quoting 30 to $40,000 a year to put in a residential sprinkler system.

And that’s absolutely absurd. So the post is, the post the media is the media.

So New York state legislatures promoting this bill, I think it’s great for the safety of our community.

It’s great for the firefighters because they’re safer going to a new construction with a lot more flammable materials than stuff was built a long time ago.

And the cost of a residential sprinkler system for a one or two family home is not even close to $40,000.

It’s like the cost of a granite countertop. It’s probably five to 15 grand for a $300,000 house.

And it might not even be that, right? So I don’t know that’s come out recently.

I’m probably going to do a whole podcast on it, but it’s sad to see whatever.

There’s different interest out there. The home building, they don’t want to give up more cost to their home, just add the price onto it.

I just don’t understand. A lot of states have it. Maryland’s got it. I think California’s got it.

South Carolina weirdly, I think has a law and it’s new homes.

It’s if you’re buying a new home, spend five to 10 grand to protect that building and your family.

I really don’t understand the negative aspects. And I guess the home builders just don’t care and it’s going to affect their bottom line.

Jeffrey Pirro: Right. I mean in a district like ours, I mean we have new houses being built all the time where there’s parcels and then you get one of three houses you can choose from and they’ll build that model with certain modifications.

But if you talk to that couple and say, Hey, for an extra three to four grand, would you want a sprinkler system that whose design is to allow you to escape?

It’s not meant to actually put on the fire, it’s meant to give you an opportunity to get out of the building, but by virtue of the fact it’s water, it’s going to have some fire extinguishment competency.

Drew Slocum: Oh, totally.

Jeffrey Pirro: And so also, would you like to save the things you’ve worked hard to put into this house that you built, maybe heirlooms and things like that.

And then talk to any and who’s building these properties.

It’s not usually it’s of a generation where perhaps they’re just starting families, recently married, starting families, young kids.

You look at any mother and father and say, Hey, your room is going to be 15 feet down the hallway maybe from where your baby or your kids sleep.

Would you want a sprinkler in between to protect that area so you can get them and get out?

I mean, it’s almost common sense in some sense for what you’re going to get.

And then your insurance company, just to put that in, how are they not going to love it?

I know if there’s an issue with a system and it breaks and then there’s a claim or whatever, but overall it should reduce the cost of our entire society for fire.

I don’t know. It’s just shortsighted in my opinion.

All you have to do is go to YouTube and look at any organization that’s done a side by side burn of a what’s called a room in contents fire.

They have these trailers and they’ll put in things that are, as they were manufactured a hundred years ago, where there were more natural organic carbon materials versus today’s modern synthetic materials.

They’ll start a fire at the same time. And I mean it’s not even close.

The fire spreads a lot faster. The smoke is a lot blacker getting what are called ethyl methyl bad stuff.

I think NFPA does probably the one that’s the most popular that I’ve seen.

And I mean the fire starts at the same time.

And if my memory serves me correctly, you’re like seven, eight minutes into the fire.

And whereas the fire is getting pretty bad on the side with furniture and things that were of a hundred years ago, the room on the right is, I mean it’s what we would call a surrounding drawn.

We wouldn’t even go into that environment unless they were required to protect someone.

So residential sprinklers to my mind makes sense. I’m not fully informed on all the policy angles, so I don’t want to be seen as saying that it should get done or shouldn’t.

Drew Slocum: But I mean I think it makes sense for sure. Just from a common sense standpoint.

Builders have more money essentially. But I’m going to do a piece on it because near and dear to my heart in New York state.

Anyway, Jeff, this has been awesome. Yeah, I guess we’re going pretty long here.

I can talk to you for hours.

Jeffrey Pirro: We can keep going…

Drew Slocum: You got anything for me?

Any questions for me? I usually, I never turn it around that way, but…

Jeffrey Pirro: Well, one question I had for you, Drew, is with your background, actually very similar, right?

You had a background in fire protection right now, engineering, right?

You went to RPI, you had an engineering background, but you were working for Viking, right? Is that right?

Or you were working for Tyco at the time?

Drew Slocum: I got hired out of school with Tyco manufacturing the dry valve.

Didn’t really know what a dry valve did, knew how to put it together, knew the components of it.

Obviously I moved around Tyco. I was actually the environmental health and safety and fire manager for one of their plants.

So obviously all the OSHA rules, but all the fire safety rules that we had in that factory.

So funny enough, we weren’t making fire protection equipment there, but again, we had to do annually and quarterly inspections.

And that was under my operation at the time. And then I moved around, got into the fire sprinkler pipe side out in Arizona and then worked my way into New York City and the fire suppression side, sprinklers suppression and working with the F-D-N-Y-A lot and Nassau County and upstate and New York.

So yeah, it’s always been fire, weirdly enough. And I don’t have any ties to the firefighting community back then, obviously I do now.

Jeffrey Pirro: Right.

Drew Slocum: Yeah, it’s been a great industry and great career.

Jeffrey Pirro: But how has that engineering background, that process and build background really informed how you guys led the product to where it is today?

I do a lot of demonstrations obviously. And Spec point is people say, oh wow, that just makes sense.

And maybe some of that has a little bit to do with how I understand them and I show them the product, but I couldn’t show them something.

I couldn’t make sense out of something that doesn’t make sense if it were black and white like that.

So how do you think that engineering and process background helped you sort of guide the product to where it is today?

Because I mean it is incredibly well organized and it’s the workflow that business operators, but that comes from an engineering, of course, software development background.

I mean there’s folks there as well. We would shout out to Pat and Phil and don’t want to leave Jen out.

You can’t have people who aren’t supported and customers leaving that.

But how do you think that engineering background informed the build of a fire protection software?

Drew Slocum: Yeah, my background is manufacturing industrial engineering. So I got a Six Sigma Black Belt within Tyco.

So that’s like process improvement. So looking at a current state of how you do a business operation or manufacturing process and not cutting the fat out, but just optimizing that workflow to make it either more profitable or making it compliant, more compliant.

So I think that background of industrial engineering and process improvement, you look at a certain process, Hey, where could we improve this?

And within Inspect Point it was like compliance is number one, but if we can drive deficiencies, which then drive revenue, which then drive the rest of that reoccurring revenue model, that’s huge.

And it has been for the last 10 to 15 years is that service and inspection model and it’s highly looked at in the industry.

So it was really great timing, but you look at pieces of that process and where it breaks down.

So that’s all part of that kind of Six Sigma lean mentality and change management is implementing a new process or a better process.

And what are the key stakeholders? It’s those technicians. It’s the fitters, it’s the field team. That’s the critical part.

The back office is, I always say one A because they’re a critical part of that too.

So if you can improve on their daily lives and daily tasks and make it easier for them, everything just is much better workflow down the line.

So you get the data, you get it out to the customer, your customer’s happy, everything’s compliant, everything’s fixed, and you’re making money.

So it’s like you focus on those key components to the beginning of the process and then again, continuously improving that too.

And Inspect Point’s been great at that is every month we want to hear the feedback from our customers and we put that in the loop into our product and really focus on the fire protection industry.

Absolutely. Which not a lot of other companies out there are fully focused on fire like us.

Jeffrey Pirro: No, no.

But here’s the benefit of all that, aside from you just built a great company and I honestly wake up.

I do love being here. It’s just a great company, it’s a great product, great culture here.

But here’s the thing, when you focus on a common sense process, and that’s why I’m asking because that engineering background, I’m not a nice set level anything.

I can take an ax to a door or a saw to a roof, you know what I mean?

That kind of thing. But people in between where we’re at in terms of skill level, which is a lot of fire protection contractors who understand these things and more, they’re able to get into the product and use it pretty easy.

And that’s where I think the part of the software excels within the industry that we serve is that the people we’re talking to use tools all the time.

It’s just, again, it’s the difference between a nail gun and a hammer.

If you’re using a hammer and you want to use a nail gun, there’s a product out there for you.

And that’s what Inspect Point is, we’re the nail gun in that instance.

And so I think that engineering, that’s why I asked, I’ve always sort of been curious about was the process intentional?

And it always felt like it was that this was just a built over time intentional platform for that.

So the only other question I have for you is when are we going to get you into the volunteer fire service?

Drew Slocum: I talk to the chief occasionally in our town, and he knows who I am.

So it’s just a matter of time. I don’t know if I want to be running into any two-alarm fires or anything anytime soon.

I think probably a little too old for that, but I could probably add some value to help with just the overall, there’s a lot happening with Compliance Engine here in the state of Connecticut, so I would like to see that more involved because even my kids, my kids’ school or boys’ school, it’s only like five-year old school.

It’s not even, they don’t have sprinklers in there. How is that not in the building code? It’s absurd.

There’s a great security system, great fire alarm system, but there’s no sprinkler system. It’s kind of wild.

Jeffrey Pirro: How old is the building?

Drew Slocum: It’s only five years old. I mean, that’s a building code issue. But anyway.

Jeffrey Pirro: Well, we’d love to have you, Drew.

Drew Slocum: Thanks.

Jeffrey Pirro: You know what, it’d be good for the boys, right?

So they can get on trucks and I’m sure your department has a Fire Protection Day community.

Drew Slocum: Oh, they’re really active. Cool, man. Well, thanks again, Jeff.

And we will get this out here at the end of February. So appreciate all the time today.

Jeffrey Pirro: Yep, absolutely.

Appreciate it. Appreciate you having me on. Thank you, Drew.