Why Clients Still Rely on Reliable Fire & Security 60 Years On
Reliable Fire & Security’s Debra Horvath, Vicki Caniecki and Tina Studzinski discuss the company’s operations and the challenges and opportunities inherent within today’s fire/life-safety industry.
Debra Horvath has led Reliable Fire since 1998. As company president she has guided the firm to $11.5 million in revenues in 2014, and has her sights set on 20% growth this year.
How do you ensure smooth and congenial interactions with the AHJs?
Studzinski: We nurture those relation-ships in places like the city of Chicago. Every class that graduates to become fire inspectors is brought out here to Reliable, and we take them through our building and show them all the different types of fire protection. We let them touch things and play with them. Our salespeople will do a mini seminar for them. They spend a whole day here. We work with them really close, as they’re new and coming out, to nurture that relationship.
Horvath: One more dimension is that we have an employee who’s been with the company for 40-some years; he’s part-time but serves as our AHJ liaison. He meets with fire departments all over the city, in the suburbs and the counties, and continues to create that relationship and the continuity between Reliable and the AHJs. He’ll bring them doughnuts and bagels; they love him! Because of his relationship with them they know who Reliable is.
Studzinski: Besides visiting them, he plays an important role in the fire inspectors’ outings, and the chiefs’ association outings. He’s very present in all of those different associations.
Let’s talk operations. How are Reliable’s personnel working smarter and more efficiently today than five or 10 years ago?
Studzinski: Just recently we’ve made a lot of changes technology wise. With assistance from some of our service technicians, we’ve gone to a cloud-based environment for all of our service orders and inspection reports. We switched to Office 365. We’re trying to become paperless. Our technicians are now using tablets. At customers’ locations, they have the customer sign the service order, secure an E-mail address, and E-mail the inspection and service reports to the customer before they leave the site.
We’ve outfitted all our technicians with smartphones so the communication between the office and technicians has grown quite a bit. What helps with this process is that it has not just been internal office people implementing improvements. It’s a group effort. One of our security technicians wrote the program for us to put our service orders and inspection reports in the cloud. It’s exciting and fun. They like being a part of it.
Caniecki: In moving to new technology, we have seen an increase in faster response times. Discrepancies coming from service calls, inspections or whatever, now with doing everything paperless and electronically, it gets there quicker as opposed to waiting for technicians to come in-house. Those can be addressed quicker than previously.
Horvath: It’s important in life safety to have our customers’ fire alarm systems, suppression systems and fire extinguishers work when they need to work. We have a tracking system that allows us to follow when a deficiency comes in, when it’s quoted and when it’s sold. If it’s not sold, we have a process to follow up with the customer to get it sold. We actively measure that so nothing gets lost between a technician and a customer or a salesman and a customer. Our response time to demand service is usually the same or next day.
Inspections and testing are prominent RMR fire offerings. What are some other leading opportunities?
Horvath: The three services we concentrate on are fire extinguishers, fire alarm and sprinkler service.
When we look at a customer, a customer that has 20+ fire extinguishers will have also a fire alarm and a sprinkler system. So it’s important to go forward with the strategy of looking for customers with 20+ extinguishers. It’s not that we don’t service customers with fewer than that, but in terms of adding the additional revenue and contracts to our customer base that is where we focus. On average, once we have them, customers stay with us for 10, 12 years.
The sprinkler service by
far, over the past five years, has been our highest growth area. In Chicago, sprinkler contractors are all union, which Reliable is not. So we do the inspections. However, if there are any repairs we need to contact the mechanical contractor we partner with to handle it as a subcontractor to us on the sprinkler systems.
Lastly, we’re really going to be working on emergency lights because for every one fire extinguisher there are three emergency lights. It’s as simple as pushing a button when our technicians are there to see if the bulbs are working. If they’re not working, it’s because a bulb is not lit, a bulb is burned out or a battery needs to be replaced. That is a market that really needs to be tapped into.
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About the Author
Scott Goldfine, Contributing Editor
Scott Goldfine is Marketing Director with Elite Interactive Solutions, Inc. Prior to joining Elite, he served as Security Sales & Integration’s chief editor for about 25 years.
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