Twenty years on the truck. Still riding shifts today. People who know me only through the companies find this confusing. They ask why a person who runs seventeen American businesses would keep a shift, drive to the station on a weekend, and go into a house that might come down on him. I have answered the question quietly for years. It is time to answer it out loud.
The simple answer first
The simple answer is that I love the work. I loved it the first year and I love it the twentieth. The work is real. The people are real. The consequences are real. Almost nothing else in an adult life is like that, and once you have it, you don't give it up without a good reason. I have not found a good reason.
Founders like a work that has a scoreboard. In the fire service the scoreboard is a house that is either still standing at the end of the shift or is not. Or a patient who is either still breathing when the truck rolls out of the driveway or is not. Not a graph. There is no version of the scoreboard where you get credit for effort. You either did the work or somebody else's family paid for the fact that you didn't.
Most business work looks nothing like this. It is a set of judgments about the future with feedback loops of weeks or months. The fire service is a shift that grades you at the end. Some months I need that grade more than the businesses can give me. I am not embarrassed to say so.
The deeper answer
The deeper answer is that the shift keeps me honest about what an emergency is. Founders spend most of their day treating annoying problems like emergencies. A vendor is late. A launch email had a typo. An investor has a follow-up. All of these are treated with the intensity of a fire. None of them is a fire. Most of them are not even close to a fire.
After a real call, you can't come back to the office and treat a slow vendor like an emergency. Your body won't let you. You will look at the calendar and cross most of it out. You will answer emails shorter. You will hold decisions until you have the right information instead of jumping at the first plausible answer. The shift trains you to save your intensity for the calls that need it.
The founders I know who are the most exhausted are the ones who treat everything as urgent. They can't help it, because they have never had a calibrator. The shift is my calibrator. If I am about to escalate something at the office, I ask myself whether the same energy would be a reasonable response to the last call I ran. If not, I take a breath and handle it like the small problem it is.
The work is a classroom
The fire service is also the best classroom I know for leadership under pressure. Nothing in business school teaches you what it feels like to give a bad order in a house where three of your crew are on the other side of a wall. Nothing in business school teaches you what it feels like to make a good call that still ends badly because the building didn't care what you decided.
Both of those experiences change how you run a company. They make you slower to give orders, quicker to say what you actually mean, and much more comfortable with the fact that a good decision and a good outcome are not the same thing. Founders who confuse the two burn out their teams and their families. The fire service won't let you make that confusion for long. You will get corrected the hard way.
My officer years taught me more about running a business than any other work I have ever done. Every command decision under time pressure, every debrief where the crew told me what they saw that I missed, every quiet moment in the seat of the rig after a bad call, all of it stacks into a way of thinking that I use every time I sit down with a leadership team at one of my companies.
The town does not care what else you do
In the fire service, nobody cares about your businesses. They care whether you show up for the shift. They care whether you clean the tools and check the meds. They care whether you take the training seriously and whether you can be trusted at 3am on a call where a family is losing everything they own.
That flat treatment is a gift. It is impossible to overstate how valuable it is to have a place in your life where your money and your press don't matter. Everybody at some level has that place. Family. Church. A weekly game with old friends. The shift is one of mine. When I put the turnout coat on, I am the same rank I was the year I started, and the same age as the guy next to me in the rig, and the crew grades me by what I did on the last call, not by anything else I have going on.
Founders lose this fastest. Money buys you a lot of things, and one of the things it buys you is a bubble where everybody defers. That bubble makes founders worse over time, not better. The fire service pops the bubble every shift.
Twenty years in
Twenty years is long enough that I have watched the service change. The calls are harder now. The mental health of the crews is a real conversation now instead of a whispered one. The tools are better. The training is better. The public gratitude is more inconsistent than it was ten years ago, but the internal culture of the service is stronger. It is a good time to be in it, even if it is a harder time to be in it.
I am not planning to leave. I know some day the body won't let me run the calls I want to run and I will do a different kind of work in the service. Until that day, I am on the truck. My companies get the rest of my time, and somehow both the truck and the companies have grown better because I refuse to give up either.
What I tell founders who ask
Founders sometimes ask if I would recommend the fire service to them. The honest answer is only if you want to serve. Not because you want the calibration. Not because you want the character arc. Because you want the town to have somebody who will show up.
If you show up for that reason, everything else will come. You will get calibrated. You will get better at leadership. You will get a place in your life where your money does not matter. You will get a crew of people who know you as a person and not as a founder. All of those things are byproducts. If you go in for the byproducts, you will be found out fast and you will make everybody's life harder.
Serve if you want to serve. That is the only reason that holds up over twenty years. Everything else is decoration. The town needs firefighters, not founders in costumes.
The shortest version
The shift is real work with a real grade. The shift keeps me honest about what an emergency is. The shift is the best leadership classroom I know. The shift is the one place my money does not matter. The shift makes me better at both jobs, not worse. I will keep it until the body won't let me. Some of you should find your version of the shift. Most of you should not, unless the reason is service. The town needs the real thing.