I have been a firefighter and paramedic for twenty years. I am still on the truck. Over the same twenty years I have started and run seventeen American companies. Most of what I know about leading people I didn't learn in a boardroom. I learned it at 3am in somebody's kitchen while their spouse was not breathing.
The fire service teaches leadership the way it teaches everything. Slowly, by repetition, under stress, with real consequences if you get it wrong. There is no keynote in a firehouse. There are only calls. You either handled the call well or you didn't, and everybody on the crew knows which one it was before the rig gets back to quarters.
What follows is what I actually use from the firehouse when I am running a company. Some of it is transferable. Some of it isn't. I am going to be honest about both.
The first lesson is tempo
The most useful thing the fire service teaches an entrepreneur is tempo. On a working fire, there is a right speed for every task. Too fast and you skip a step and somebody gets hurt. Too slow and the building wins. The officer's job is to set the tempo the crew moves at, and to change it when the fire changes.
Running a company is the same. Every quarter has a tempo. Launch weeks are one tempo. Hiring is another. Cash crunches are another. The founder's job is to read the room and set the right tempo for what the company is doing this week, not to lock in one tempo forever.
Most founders I meet run one speed. They are always sprinting, or they are always waiting. Both are wrong. A crew that only ever sprints burns out. A crew that only ever waits gets passed. The best fire officers I have worked with have four or five tempos and they switch between them without announcing it. The crew can feel it.
The second lesson is that authority is earned in the first two minutes
When you pull up to a scene, the crew watches how you get off the truck. Not what you say. How you move. Whether you look at the building or at your feet. Whether your hands are already doing something or still in your pockets. By the time you have walked twenty feet, the crew has decided whether they are going to trust your calls today.
Founders think this is unfair. It is actually just efficient. Your crew does not have time to run a full evaluation of your competence before they follow you into a fire. They have to make a snap judgment, and they make it from the first thing they see.
The same thing happens in your company. Every all-hands, every board meeting, every hard conversation, the first two minutes tell your people whether to trust the next hour. If you walk in unprepared, or apologetic, or performative, you have already lost the room. Everything after that is you trying to climb back to where you should have started.
The fix is boring. You prepare more than you think you need to. You know the first three sentences you are going to say before you walk in. You look at the room, not at your notes. Authority comes from a set of small, disciplined choices you make in the first two minutes, over and over, until people start believing them. Not a personality trait.
The third lesson is that the worst call is a training call
New firefighters believe the worst call is a bad one. It's actually the call where you did everything right and the outcome was still bad, because now there is no lesson to take home. You can't train harder to fix a call you already handled correctly.
Founders have the same problem. When a launch fails because you cut corners, that is fixable. You don't cut corners next time. When a launch fails because you did everything right and the market moved, that is harder, because there is nothing to change. The temptation is to invent a lesson that is not there, so you feel less helpless.
The discipline is to sit with the failure that was not your fault and not invent a moral for it. Some quarters will be bad and there will be nothing you could have done. If you invent a lesson from that quarter, you will run the wrong play next quarter and you will lose again, and this time it will be your fault.
The fourth lesson is that you eat with the crew
In the fire service, the officer eats what the crew eats, at the same table, on the same shift. You don't have a separate meal or a separate dining room. The reason is practical, not sentimental. Most of what a crew tells you about how the shift is going gets said at dinner, not at the training board.
Founders lose this the minute they can afford to lose it. Suddenly the founder is having lunch off-site with investors while the crew is eating whatever showed up at the office. You will hear people say this is fine because the founder needs their time back. Sometimes that is true. Most of the time it is a founder losing touch with the exact people they need to run the company well.
The Murphy Door plant in Ogden has a break room. I go in there. I don't schedule it. I don't announce it. I get coffee and I stand around long enough to hear what people are actually saying. Half of what I learn about the business I learn in that room. The other half I learn on calls in the fire truck.
The fifth lesson is what does not transfer
Not everything the fire service teaches is portable. The command structure of a working fire is deliberately rigid because rigidity saves lives when the ceiling is coming down. A company that runs the same rigidity will lose every good person who has a better offer inside a year. In business, most decisions are reversible and most days are not on fire. Rigidity in a place that is not on fire looks like fear.
The fire service also teaches you to run toward the problem. That instinct is useful when the problem is a burning building. It is dangerous when the problem is a slow-moving strategic mistake. Running at a strategic mistake usually makes it bigger. The right response to most strategic problems is to slow down, gather people, and think out loud. The instinct to charge is the wrong instinct there.
I have made both mistakes. I have run a company like an engine crew, and lost people who wanted a workplace, not a shift. I have charged at a market problem the way I would charge at a fire, and made it worse by moving fast on the wrong plan. The fire service made me good at emergencies. It didn't make me good at the parts of a company that are not emergencies. I had to learn those the long way, and I am still learning them.
What I tell founders who ask
Founders sometimes ask me if they should try to get some version of the fire service in their own life. Volunteer, reserve, EMT training, something with real stakes. My honest answer is yes and also no.
Yes, because working with real consequences will make you a better decision maker inside a month. You will find out that most of your business problems are not urgent. You will find out that you were treating annoying problems like emergencies, which is what makes founders exhausting to work for. You will come back from a shift on Sunday and look at Monday's calendar and cross half of it out because none of it is actually a fire.
No, because if you do it for the wrong reason it becomes a costume. The fire service is there to serve the town, not to give founders a hobby. If you show up as a tourist you will be found out inside two shifts and you will make everyone's life harder. Do it because you want to serve, or don't do it.
I keep the shifts because the work matters and because it keeps me honest about what an emergency actually is. Twenty years in, the truck still gets my full attention when the tones go off, and the company gets what is left. Somehow both have grown better because of it, not worse.
The shortest version
Set the tempo, and change it when the work changes. Earn authority in the first two minutes, and do it again the next time. Do not invent lessons from failures that had no lesson. Eat with the crew. Do not run rigid on a day that is not on fire. Do not charge at strategic problems. Serve, if you are going to serve, because the town needs it, not because you want a story.
The fire service is where I learned all of this. Your version might be somewhere else. What matters is that you learn it from a place with real consequences, not from a book, and that you keep going back long enough for it to change you.
If you want the longer version of how partnerships and leadership fit together, the book is Founder Fallout. If you want to hear founders talk about it out loud, the podcast is 90 Proof Wisdom. Both live in the same universe as this essay.