Sprinkler Age A Publication of the American Fire Sprinkler Association
So, you think you know what your inspectors are doing…. Perhaps one of the most interesting and dynamic changes in our industry during my 48-year career has been the shift by many companies away from new construction toward recurring revenue streams through inspections and testing. While a lot of this shift has been driven by venture capital investments in our industry and other service trades, it is equally driven by the importance of maintaining life safety systems to ensure they will function as intended when needed, while also meeting required codes and standards. Before you stop reading, let me tip my hat to those fire sprinkler contractors who still find new construction, retrofits, and remodel projects exciting and a big part of your work. That said, I believe ITM is perhaps the most important thing we can do to protect life and property in the built environment.
Every aspect of the work we do in the fire and life safety business carries liability. From the people who drive our trucks filled with materials and tools, pipes and ladders on truck racks, plus the inherent job site safety issues and beyond, our world is filled with risk and reward opportunities, and we are open to liabilities both seen and unseen every day. In fact, when I owned my sprinkler company years ago, I would lie in bed many nights with the conscious thought of what someone might have done that day, which would result in a claim or lawsuit in the days or weeks ahead. Fortunately for me, we didn’t have many claims or injuries, but having served as an expert witness in multiple cases, I have seen that nightmare play out for others.
Here at AFSA, we offer a range of training and education programs to support our industry and our members. The one program that always sells out, no matter how often we offer it, is our 20-month ITM Inspector Development Program, which confirms the expanding, profitable ITM market and the need for qualified inspectors to fill the gaps. Personally, I am proud of this program, having teamed up with Russ Leavitt, chairman of Telgian Holdings, to create it when we both had darker and more hair.
Prior to joining the AFSA staff in 2020, my role was training at one of the larger, nationwide, venture capital-owned fire and life safety firms. During my tenure, we developed a two-year training program to train new inspectors needed to perform inspection and testing functions as the department grew across multiple offices and regions. The program was designed to provide a 90-day on-the-job period, between one-week classroom and lab training schedules. The classroom training was (and still is) conducted by a training team, with the OJT component provided by legacy inspectors serving as mentors to the trainees. This arrangement seemed perfect to me and to the firm’s leadership team.
After about nine months, we discovered we had a serious problem. The legacy inspectors were undermining the classroom training sessions, telling their trainees to forget all that book stuff. The problem was, and still is today, that many legacy inspectors had become complacent with their role, were no longer in touch with the requirements of updated codes and standards they should be inspecting and testing to, and they’d stopped writing up deficiencies because they didn’t believe the customers wanted to be bothered with small things, like missing cover plates, painted sprinklers, or bent deflectors. This revelation was disturbing on multiple levels, the least of which was the liability it created for the company. From a business model perspective, the hope was to create at least two dollars of service and repair work for each dollar of inspection service revenue, so we were cheating ourselves out of revenue and profit streams the department was built for in the first place.
The solution was to create a second training program to update and inform our legacy inspectors and those hired from other companies whose standard procedures didn’t align with ours. In addition, we kept everyone up-to-date with code and standard requirements, and the need to document everything, big and small, to limit our liability.
To make this long story longer, we are seeing and hearing this same scenario play out among our ITM Inspector Development Program participants, both during their training and post-graduation. This concerns us greatly for this industry and for our member companies, who believe their people are out there every day doing the right things when no one is looking. We certainly hope that is true and probably is in most cases. However, we have testimonials and photographic evidence indicating that the problem exists.
I have never been one to bring a problem to the table without a proposed solution, so it is my pleasure to announce the introduction of a four-day legacy inspector training program being developed by AFSA’s technical team. The program will include both classroom training on NFPA standards and best practices, as well as hands-on fire pump flow testing and analysis, dry-pipe, pre-action, and deluge valve tripping, and practical application discussions on customer service, scheduling, and stewardship of tools and equipment. This course will be available in Dallas and at any location with a lab for the hands-on portion. It can be made available to individual companies, where AFSA sends one instructor to you rather than you sending multiple people to us. The course is designed for inspectors with more than two years of experience, who will benefit from updated training and a refocus on the importance of their role in ensuring safety in the built environment and in helping mold the next generation of inspectors.
You may think your inspectors are providing a complete, compliant inspection service every day. The AFSA team wants to help you guarantee it, limit your liabilities, and increase your revenue and profit streams. Look for scheduled dates for this new training program on our website, firesprinkler.org, soon, and click on the Education & Training tab, under Programs.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bob Caputo, CFPS, is president of AFSA. He has been an important part of the fire sprinkler industry for over 41 years and is a long-time member of AFSA and promoter of merit shop contracting. He has chaired and served on many NFPA committees. Caputo has written and presented seminars throughout the world on fire protection and life-safety systems and is a regular speaker at AFSA and NFPA conventions. He has developed AFSA education and training materials and chaired two chapters of AFSA—Arizona and Southern California. Caputo is the recipient of numerous awards, including Fire Protection Contractor magazine’s “Industry Person of the Year,” San Diego County Fire Chiefs’ Association’s “Fire Prevention Officer of the Year,” and AFSA’s highest honor, the Henry S. Parmelee Award.