Episode 201: Fight Fires, Not Software: A New Way to Embrace Fire Service Management with Marcus Edwards

Published 2024-02-29

Episode notes

How is Stationwise setting the bar for integration, efficiency, and user experience in emergency services?

Hello Smart Firefighting Community!

Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy!

Thanks for joining us for our 4 part TSI Mini Series! The Technology Summit International (TSI) , held in Texas from December 5-7, 2023, focused on the practical implementation of technology in fire services. Its aim was to bring together the brightest minds in the fire service to explore technologies that made a real difference in firefighter safety and decision making.

It wasn't just about new tools; it was about effectively integrating them into the everyday realities of firefighting. The summit delved into the root cause of fire service challenges while exploring new ideas and pushing the boundaries of what was possible in firefighting.

In this episode:

How can Stationwise's approach to data integration and analysis transform fire departments’ daily operations?

What are the potential impacts of improved staffing and resource management for first responders’ mental health and well-being?

In what ways can fire departments leverage technology like Stationwise to better prepare and respond to the evolving challenges in emergency services?

Hear from Marcus Edwards - the CEO of Stationwise .

Marcus discusses the origin story of the company and its mission to provide vertical software solutions for fire departments. He highlights the pain points in the industry, such as the lack of interoperability and outdated back-office software. Edwards explains how Stationwise aims to save time and streamline processes through automation and integration.

He also emphasizes the importance of effective communication and collaboration within fire departments. Looking ahead, Stationwise plans to scale up and expand its offerings to other industries while maintaining a focus on the fire service.

So click play now to find out what he has to share! And stay tuned for the rest of our TSI Mini Series!

Head to www.smartfirefighting.com to discover how SFF accelerates innovation for emergency responders, to find out when our next event is, or review our curated resources!

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Chapters

0:00 Intro
0:58 Live at Technology Summit International with Marcus Edwards
1:16 Pitching in the inaugural TSI Shark Tank
1:41 The Stationwise origin story
4:48 The staffing and scheduling problem
5:14 What keeps chiefs up at night
6:29 What interoperability really means
9:35 Fight fires, not software
10:58 Saving time with automation
14:09 Staffing rules are never set and forget
14:47 Fixing fire department email and communication
18:56 The next 12 months for Stationwise
21:26 The story behind the name
23:55 Mental health, recruiting, retention and budgeting
26:41 Ask more of your technology providers
28:22 Outro

Questions answered in this episode

Why did Marcus Edwards start Stationwise?

Marcus Edwards says his father, a firefighter, told him over winter break that fire service software all sucks and suggested he fix their industry. After researching and interviewing fire chiefs at FDIC, Edwards learned that technology and staffing software were key pain points keeping chiefs up at night, with little innovation in cloud-based staffing solutions.

Hear it at 1:41

What problem does Stationwise solve for fire departments?

Marcus Edwards says fire chiefs wanted systems that work together with fewer logins, fewer vendors, and better interoperability. Staffing data sits in silos, and many processes like payroll and overtime tracking involve tedious manual workarounds and double entry instead of automation.

Hear it at 5:14

How much time can Stationwise save a fire department?

Marcus Edwards says even a volunteer agency of 40 to 60 people can expect to save hundreds to thousands of hours a year. The tool automates certification tracking, staffing lists, overtime assignment, and pay code entry, eliminating manual desk work for battalion chiefs.

Hear it at 10:58

What does interoperability mean in practical terms for Stationwise?

Marcus Edwards describes interoperability as systems working together without multiple logins or manual double entry. Stationwise connects staffing data with incident reports to do things like send automatic mental health notifications after traumatic calls or track sleep deprivation from back to back shifts and mandatory overtime.

Hear it at 6:57

What is Marcus Edwards' advice to fire chiefs about technology?

Ask for more from technology providers. Fire chiefs have been taken advantage of by vendors and private equity, he says. Demand best in class technology and real interoperability, accept that innovation costs more and requires time investment in onboarding, and put contract requirements in place like other industries do.

Hear it at 26:41

Transcript

Machine transcript of the published audio. Names may be misspelled and some sections are missing.

Ep 201 transcript

Fight Fires, Not Software: A New Way to Embrace Fire Service Management with Marcus Edwards

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, Marcus Edwards

Source: Whisper medium.en machine transcription of the published Podbean audio (no original transcript found in Drive), lightly cleaned. Speakers were separated by voice clustering and then checked and assigned by hand at every speaker change. Gaps where the model returned no usable text are marked [inaudible m:ss].

[0:00] Kevin Sofen: Welcome to the Smart Firefighting Podcast, where we cover firefighting technology trends and change management. Today, we have Marcus Edwards, the CEO of Stationwise, discussing the origin story of the company and its mission to provide vertical software solutions for fire departments. Marcus highlights the pain points in the industry, such as lack of interoperability and outdated back office software. Marcus explains how Stationwise aims to save time and streamline processes through automation and integration. He also emphasizes the importance of effective communication and collaboration amongst fire departments. A great quote I heard is, Stationwise helps you fight fires, not software. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy the show. The third episode of our mini series here down at the Technology Summit International, sitting alongside Marcus Edwards from Stationwise. Marcus, good morning, how you doing?

[0:58] Marcus Edwards: Doing great, excited to be here.

[0:59] Kevin Sofen: How has your experience at TSI been so far?

[1:02] Marcus Edwards: It's been awesome. We were really fortunate to get a speaking opportunity and talk more about our vision, talking about some bigger agencies and potentially partnering with them, and then also getting some potential customers, which is always exciting.

[1:16] Kevin Sofen: You were part of the inaugural TSI Shark Tank. What'd you think?

[1:19] Marcus Edwards: I was great, yeah. Any chance we get to pitch and talk more about our vision is an exciting time for us and always like some intense feedback from the Sharks. Can't complain with that.

[1:29] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, no, it was good hearing them kind of talk about really grilling you a little bit about what is it? How's it work? What problem are you solving? And I'll do the same on this podcast, Stationwise. Why'd you start it and what is it?

[1:41] Marcus Edwards: Yeah, I can talk a little bit more about the origin story and how it all began. So I went to business school at Stanford and my goal was really to start a company and Stationwise was born then. But my experience before that was being a consultant for Fortune 500 companies. That was actually the advanced analytics trainer. So if you think of billions and billions of rows of data, you can't even open this in Excel. How do you show that in a usable dashboard where Fortune 500 clients who are very demanding can actually make real decisions very quickly? And so that's where I started to form the thesis of, you don't need more data and few industries do, You need to make decisions from that data. So that was my background pre-Stanford. When I went to business school, the goal was start a company. And I focused on both where my skill set and background uniquely were. And I actually focused on what we call vertical software businesses. So focusing on a specific industry was the goal. And so I told my dad over winter break, I've taken out all the loans for business school. I've reneged on sponsorship but I'm not going back to consulting. And I've decided instead to, you know, make sure that I'm gonna start a vertical software company. And he said, that's a lot of loans and I fully support you, but what the hell does vertical SaaS mean? And so I explained to him, we'd focus on an industry and that it had to be one, you know, niche one and we'd go deep there. And he said, ah, well, you're fixing an industry software, you should fix ours because it all sucks. And he's obviously exaggerating, but there is a lot of pain, especially with what I call the boring back-office software, staffing, incident reporting, training records management, integrating all of your data for dashboards. Very little has been innovated on there in the last even 10 years. And so that's where I got pretty excited. We spent a few nights over that winter break going through pictures on his phone. He sent me some screenshots on his next shift, and it was really clear there was so much pain in software in general, and that departments had been asking for one tool to rule them all for a while. So the challenge for us was, especially as a Stanford student thinking of it as in business school, how do you carve off the pieces of this really big platform and start to build that, but as a startup, not bite off more than you can chew? And so I actually researched what is the future of US fire departments as a Stanford student. And then the outcome of that was traveling to FDIC, interviewing dozens of fire chiefs around the US, and really learning that technology is a key pain that keeps chiefs up at night. And staffing and scheduling, despite having so much of the data, so much of the information, and so much ability to integrate with other tools, again, there's just not been a lot of innovation. There's not a cloud-based staffing provider. So that's why we decided to start there. And after all the research, staffing seemed like the big pain point where we could build a true platform and then integrate with a lot from there. So I've been doing it since Stanford and graduating last year. So I've been a company for just over two years now.

[4:48] Kevin Sofen: And you're just deep in it right now. And so you talked about the staffing and scheduling problem from your user interviews and coming from a family of first responders. What is that problem? Paint that problem a bit more from where you were like, man, this is based on understanding and have these conversations. I really can see this is a problem. It's a problem because X. and explain that kind of pain to me.

[5:14] Marcus Edwards: Yeah, so the questions I like to ask are, what keeps you up at night? Or if you could wave a magic wand and fix one thing, what would change? And often the answer was, my systems would work more together. I would have fewer logins, fewer software vendors, and the interoperability between them would be just much better. And the staffing being a core part of that, where you think of everyone's certifications, where they're positioned, if they're off on vacation, if anything around payroll that you're sending in terms of those pay hours, there's so much information that's sitting in a silo or that could be the foundation of a data platform to integrate with a lot of other tools. And the nice thing there is if you adopt our staffing platform, you don't need to adopt our incident reporting tool when we build it or our training records management. We can integrate with those because we have so much data just handled in such a nice way. So the number one feedback I heard from customers was, make it integrate together. I don't even know what that looks like, but I just know it's painful now. And so that's why we decided on staffing and why integrations are free and priced in for us. That's our bread and butter and creating those custom dashboards that departments need to then say, these are the decisions I want to make, not here's another report to run.

[6:29] Kevin Sofen: At TSI, there's been a lot of conversation around integration, and you've heard this word a lot, interoperability. And it sometimes almost seems like it's thrown around like it's just like a filler word, an adjective, it's just like it's said a bunch, but it's sort of like what does interoperability actually mean and how does that actually come together in practicality in your terms? Like what does interoperability in layman's terms for you and how does that tie into the Stationwise mission?

[6:57] Marcus Edwards: Yeah, so two parts to that. What is interoperability and then I think tactically what does it look like? It is your systems working together without you needing to have so many logins. And most importantly, the data entry, the pieces that are quite painful are done automatically. It's not, okay, I have to do double entry of forms. I have to find manual workarounds for processes and send that to a person who will then edit the Excel file and then submit that to payroll. Very tedious and manual processes that should be automated, not because people shouldn't be there doing the job because they have much more important parts of the job they should be doing. as it ties into the mission, our vision is fight fires, not software. And that's our goal to help take that software burden off of customers' plates, because there's so much pain around all of these different vendors, logins, data entry points. And most importantly, you don't have one source of truth. So your accountability is at risk. You might not know if you get audited where the actual system of record is. And that's a huge problem for chiefs when they think of their accountability. And how do we fix that? Well, again, we're starting with a staffing system, but we're not trying to think of today, staffing tools just send your data at best. They'll send it to the incident reporting tool and they'll send it to the CAD and they'll say, here's who's on each apparatus. That's it, we've done our job. And they might integrate in some level with payroll. That is truly all that I've seen across dozens of departments. In an ideal world, think of your staffing tool and your incident reporting tool working together. or what are two of the biggest challenges the fire service faces? Recruitment and retention and mental health. If you know when folks are staffed, when they're working mandatory shifts versus voluntary, which we track differently, when we know how many sick days they're requesting off, and then also if you layer in the calls they're going on, well, now we know how little sleep folks are getting because they're going call to call, we can take the text from the narratives and start to say, hey, an infant was involved in this call and it's likely traumatic without involving command staff or getting involved with the stigma of mental health, we can send automatic personalized notifications to folks based on what they might need in the moment. And so that's how we start to get into real interoperability. All you did was put butts in seats to staff and have them go out on calls. What we do on the backend, again, because you don't need to worry about it, is start to integrate more than just, here's more data. What are the real decisions we can make about health, about how folks are engaged, and how we keep them engaged and healthy for years and years and make it a real career for them.

[9:35] Kevin Sofen: Well said, and I mean, a few things I wanna break down there, but one of them was the, your phrase fighting fires on software, and within that of the idea of like, how to make this something that a, kind of meeting first responders and firefighters where they're at in terms of this is not something that it's like, oh, you must use this. It's more of that, hey, this is something that can actually save you time. This is something that can actually allow you to. focus on a different task at hand. And they talk a lot about the automation, the reporting process. A lot of people, when they joke about the FHIR service, like you didn't sign up for the FHIR service to be sitting in front of a computer and doing reporting all day. But there's a lot of aspects within the FHIR service that requires reporting and documentation. And some of it, from spending time with first responders, is painstaking. It's miserable. And it feels like a big waste of time. And then there's a lot of these workarounds, and you just kind of double click to get to the lowest common denominator and just push it through so you can get it done and move on to the next thing. Talk to me a little bit more about sort of that saving time and sort of the, those kind of other intangible benefits of like, those things that you're kind of just growing accustomed to because that's the way the system is, but from actually bringing value by allowing you to, again, on that notifications with insights that allow you to do X or some level of reporting, automated reporting that saves you one hour. Talk to me a little bit more about that.

[10:58] Marcus Edwards: Yeah, so our goal is across the board to save, even think of a 40 to 60 person agency. One of our first customers to sign is a volunteer agency in Illinois. So departments of all sizes and budgets are interested in that time-saving piece especially. They currently have zero dollars assigned for budget. They bought a staffing system years ago that was custom built for them. And as far as their budget's concerned, it's free, so to speak. So they're actively increasing their budget for this, really looking for that time savings. And even for agencies of that size, we're looking to try to save them hundreds to thousands of hours a year. Really meaningful gains across the department because there's so much time wasted. Here's one example. Think of a battalion chief going to staff folks today. They will put folks on vacation or they will move them accordingly and it's very much become a desk job. A lot of putting butts in seats and dragging them around and answering the phone call when that inevitably goes wrong because it's very hard to do it correctly 24 seven. So when you think of that job could be made much simpler by having automated certification tracking and understanding who is actually qualified for this position, which is what we built our tool around. And then there are no outside lists, no outside processes. Everything can be done in Stationwise. So when you think of our overtime versus our mandatory list for the day versus here's our volunteer list or our list for vacation, they have wait lists sometimes. So many different staffing lists that dictate who should go in this position that are all either pen and paper or in a tool, but it's not editable as much as it should be or it's an Excel and then they have to manually, again, enter things on the side. So the way we handle it is you just drag someone over from whichever list, click mandatory or click voluntary, we process all the rules on the end so you just see a very simple menu and press a button. the list order will change, you drag someone over, and then we'll also automatically assign the pay code if it's overtime and what we call detail codes. So we could say they're acting out of rank, they have mandatory versus voluntary overtime. So that's how we can send to the payroll tool, here's overtime as a pay code, but you internally can drill deeper and automatically just by putting that butt in that seat, you can automatically understand how many hours and dollars are we spending on mandatory versus voluntary over time, how much are we spending on, you know, if you want to do reimbursements, click wildfires, rimfire, send, that's your dollar amount you spent. Now you can do reimbursements to CalFire much faster, or if you want to get credentialed or to different agencies that you're tracking training for. So a lot of those different internal things we track for dollars and hours just by putting folks in one place, obviously that's a lot to set up and initialize, but that's why we do white glove onboarding, really make sure it works. And we also provide ongoing customer support. That's a huge thing we found is lacking. There are so many phenomenal tools in the industry, but what most fire departments need is a software team that supplements the tool, you know, not just here, set it and forget it.

[14:09] Kevin Sofen: It is not set and forget it takes a lot of action.

[14:11] Marcus Edwards: It's sold to set it and forget it and doesn't usually end up that way or it will work. But then inevitably these staffing rules change, the union policies are renegotiated and that should happen, right? but the tools are not designed for that change and their rules engines aren't flexible enough to say, we're going to adjust, we're gonna make it easy. And then also they don't have the human connection to say, hey, I wanna talk to a human being who speaks firefighter who will then talk to the engineers. And that's how we've designed our company where you talk to me, the son of a firefighter, not an engineer. And then I will relay things to engineers who understand the industry because that's what we train for.

[14:47] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, and one other thing that you talked about and your pitch was the communication side of it. Particularly, I feel like email is the bane of my existence in a lot of ways where it's, I mean, granted it's just become part of our society, our working world where it's like we just have email. But there are a lot of times that communication done mainly through email can be miserable, things are missed. Even if you're very diligent, just you can miss stuff or stuff just kind of gets lost or it goes to spam there goes a clutter or a file is a send or something. How are you approaching that sort of rethinking basic comms and I asked in the business world, I think of Slack, I think of some of these other communication tools. How does that sort of communication component tie into Stationwise?

[15:35] Marcus Edwards: Yeah, good question. A lot of departments use Teams as well. For example, I've seen that more than Slack for fire departments. The real interesting part there is the communication piece wasn't something we were asked to touch. Most customers thought we were gonna, you know, just, it's a very big lift, but replace Telestaff or CrewSense or Aladtech or their staffing solution. What we said is, it's not worth pulling out a very foundational tool unless we're doing a lot more and really making it worth your while. We know the fire service hates change management, we know it's painful, and we really wanna make sure that outcome is 10 times better, not two times better. So the communication piece is actually something we just learn by watching departments use Microsoft Teams or sometimes Slack, WhatsApp is quite common and then email, group text or email or some way of communicating. And the problem just like other tools is it's not designed for the FHIR service. So it doesn't flow down the chain of command. Anyone can respond. If you think of email, things get nested and you're like, why are these people replying to everyone? So the way we've designed our communication piece is really just realizing we'll have a tool because every view we have is built for mobile that will be in every firefighter's hand. So that's a lot of potential to say, we'll just send them as texts. You don't need a smartphone, but we'll be able to say here on this web app, you can log in and get communicated with just via texts, or we can send them as email, or we can also send them as push notifications, but when you open it in the application, then we can track if you've read it, if you've marked something as complete. And so we can track smart messages. So you as the admin send a message and you can say, I only want to resend it to the folks who haven't read this yet. Much easier to do than sending it to everyone. So you never need to reply all again. And you don't have to worry about firefighters replying. They can call or ask a question if they have it. And the battalion chief can flow that down the chain of command. So it's admins only able to communicate much easier. And you don't have to then rely on email. You can still use it or send it from the Stationwise app, But having it all in one place lets you know, again, who's read it? Where is the process at with this communication? If no one's read anything, you're obviously not going to expect someone to show up versus if everyone has. It's something that you can expect them to do. And the nice thing is we've designed this so union presidents are excited about it, very labor friendly. We're not trying to create some police state where command staff can just view every single thing that an end user reads or views. It's really just around those emails or specific messages of Italian chief or admin would choose to send.

[18:12] Kevin Sofen: Stationwise, on a mission to eliminate reply all. Man, that's a good job kind of diving into some of the pain points around comms. And I appreciate the way that you've approached all these little nuances. And you mentioned the boring stuff, the admin stuff, the things that no one really likes to think about, but so critical in day-to-day operations. I mean, you've painted a kind of a high-level picture and some kind of tactical things. but I'm just thinking it's December 2023, where you've been at TSI, you were at that Red Sky Summit last week. What does the next 12 months look like? What's the next 12 months look like? And then what's your five-year vision for where Stationwise will be?

[18:56] Marcus Edwards: Yeah, great questions. Over the next 12 months, our goal is to launch with our initial customers who are just signing, which is great. So we're gonna do our first commercial launch this month and next. And then really we're looking to start scaling up. So we focus on departments with eight stations or less. We're now talking to agencies with two battalions or so, and then our goal by the end of next year, so let's call it the 12 month goal, is to service a very large department. So we've talked to folks at Indianapolis and Columbus and other agencies where that would be great to land a really big flagship department by the end of the year. Obviously we wanna build up and make sure we can scale to them, but from a technology point of view, We're going to be ready for that by the middle of next year. So we want to start that process now, and then really just make sure that by the end of next year, we're known for our customer service for really nailing that integration piece and bringing things together and making sure we deliver on that mission. So that's my goal over the next 12 months. And then next five, even 10 years, really trying to build a company that never has to get bought or sold. A huge part of the problem in the industry is everyone priced as a tool. We're trying to build and price as a platform with a team to support it because we don't want to have to get bought by a PE fund and then sacrifice the service that the fire departments are paying for. So our goal is to create a premium product and to grow it so we can say we're serving the fire service. But as we build other tools like incident reporting, potentially even portions of dispatch, that may be something that we can then say, hey, sell this to police as well. Our goal eventually is to go deep into cities and not to say we're going to take staffing and sell to airlines and hospitals and lots of other industries. I think that was also a problem with other competitors that we saw. So the goal is go very deep with that city buyer, and especially because we can automate payroll, we might eventually build and likely will our own payroll solution where you think of, we can put butts in seats for the fire department and that sends it to a payroll tool. Well, what if we sell to the city manager? let's replace your workforce management tool now you put butts in seats for everyone and we'll sell you a payroll tool so again we're trying to really think of how do you have a lot of solutions all in one at the city level because those are ultimately the buyers in many cases obviously have independent districts and county folks but even they you know need a payroll solution so trying to build more of that again boring back office stuff that isn't as exciting and really make it work and if anything and make it fun.

[21:26] Kevin Sofen: Well, and as I was sitting here looking at your shirt, just thinking of A, the logo, and B, just the word and the phrase, or just the name, Stationwise, how did you come up with the name? I see wise maybe kind of having the wisdom, the wise nature of the station, and am I on track there? What's the basis behind the actual name?

[21:47] Marcus Edwards: Yeah, that was the goal, really, just thinking of, and also the website and domain were available, but the goal was really to show We want to bring that intelligence on the data and analytics side that the FHIR service doesn't need to be good at, quite honestly. You shouldn't look for that one data analyst who's in the FHIR service to do all of the work. They should absolutely have a seat at the table and supplement things. But there's going to need to be collaboration with outside industry. And that's where I come in with my Stanford background. My co-founder joined from Lyft and was very senior in their mapping and localization team. So really trying to bring the best of technology and data analytics to the Fire Service, because we found that's something they have expected of themselves, and we just find there's a need still. We really want to help out there. We might analyze data for the Western Fire Chiefs Association, which is really exciting to say, what are the insights we can get from the dispatch and incident reporting data? And so that's what I see being the real future of how this works together, more of that pushing the envelope on, how do we really think of interoperability, not just sending data via APIs. Once that data is there, how do you transform it and show it in a way that those decisions can get made?

[22:59] Kevin Sofen: Transform it and show it as the decisions get made. And it's not just being APIs, I'm just kind of repeating, because I really love that where some people talk about, oh, if only we could get the data in, data out, and have it be the right standard, that's great. But then there's that being able to synthesize it and have it actually do something with the data. I mean, I just, I appreciate that context would love you in some capacity to expand upon that in any sort of manner in terms of you mentioned the automatic reporting in terms of one was obviously the staffing, but the other one was like if a first responder is going to a particular call and then getting some sort of notification that this was a potentially traumatic call and we need to address it. Any other sort of like quick bullet point examples of like how sort of this software and ultimately the integration of the technologies taking this data and sort of helping provide alerts or insights that you could kind of give some context on.

[23:55] Marcus Edwards: Yeah, I mentioned mental health and recruiting and retention. What's the other thing Chis will care about? Budgeting. So that's where we'll really come in and shine of helping report those dollars in real time. So at first that will look like you can proactively track your overtime budget. So you will know in real time, are you going to go over? Should you ask the city for more money before it happens? At least, you know, that's a much better benefit than having to run reports, happens proactively. The future of that, again, is we take in data from the incident reporting tool in CAD is likely all we'd need. Now we can look at the future and do predictive modeling. And that's where it gets really interesting. So think about, we have all of your staffing data and we know when everyone was staffed, how much they cost and all the scenarios that created overtime, you know, that led to that. We also know all of the calls that they went on, the times that they were there, and then via the dispatch tool, the routes that they took and how efficient they were. If you layer all of that together, what departments are often looking at is, should we open a new station? Should we deploy a new apparatus? Well, it's not usually should, but an if, but a when. So what we can do is say, if you do it in year one, you know what that will cost and you can make some assumptions, but what if you do it in year five? How will your response times go up if you don't do it? And your budget might not go up from those, but it might go up from other things in more overtime. So there's a lot of implications and it's not just a simple black and white picture. What we're building towards is I as the chief enter a few very simple scenarios. I might open a new station. Here's where it will be. Here are the types of units and the staffing that I'm thinking of setting. Let's run a scenario. You hit run and you'll see high, medium, low. What are the dollars that might cost me? That's how you go to the city from a budgeting point of view, but then you also see high, medium, low for response times. So it's not just how much are we paying, but what is the implication on response time? What is the implication on firefighter, physical and mental health? How does this whole picture come together in a forward-looking point of view? So you can budget in one to two clicks and at least have a very defensible point of view that's much more robust than one analyst could have come up with anyway, and then that analyst can spend their time, how do you sell this to the city? How do you frame this data? and the storytelling is a huge part of that process. We wanna, again, help with the software portion, make that data analysis seamless, make it painless, if anything exciting, where you can then go to the city, worry about the politics of it and not the software piece, because that's our job.

[26:22] Kevin Sofen: Well said, Marcus. And to maybe sort of a final closeout here, if you could, sort of a mic drop moment, you could drop the mic if you want, but you don't have to, sort of like a quote, a comment, a question, or what would you say to a first responder or a firefighter listening, any sort of final comments or thoughts?

[26:41] Marcus Edwards: I would say ask for more of your technology providers. I think the position that we're in with dispatch providers being egregious with the fees that they're charging in some cases or even the data not being exchanged freely, let alone the real interoperability I talked about. I think fire chiefs especially have been just taken advantage of by other industries like private equity and sold a vision that wasn't necessarily there. And what I would love for them to say is, what are the best in class for other technology industries? What are they doing? And how can we take advantage of that? That's what Stationwise is trying to bring in, but we should also have competition in that regard. And the FHIR service should really say, we want the best technology. We don't want it to just be decades old, and we really wanna see innovation here. And what I'd also challenge FHIR chiefs to do is, if you want that innovation, it's going to cost a bit more. And then also it's gonna take some time so that time with you telling us your staffing rules or really figuring out how to make it work for your system, it's gonna be absolutely white glove onboarding where we'll help, but with any startup or any new technology company that you'd want to help solve these big problems, it's gonna take time in a relationship, not just, again, a software tool to hand off. So it's a big problem to solve and a huge industry challenge. But I think if fire chiefs from the bottom up say, hey, we're going to be more demanding, we need our things to integrate together. And then we also, you know, in our contract are going to require certain things that other industries have as a norm. I think that would be a huge step in the right direction.

[28:12] Kevin Sofen: Kudos to you, Marcus, and great to have you here on the podcast and then here at TSI and Shark Tank and just excited for what's to come and keep up the great work.

[28:20] Marcus Edwards: I appreciate it. Happy to be here.

[28:22] Kevin Sofen: Till next time. Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Firefighting podcast today. If you enjoyed what you heard and got any value, please drop us a rating, leave us a comment or reach out to us on social media. Have a great day and together we can advance the future of smart firefighting.