FDIC 2024

May 16, 2024
Events
Chelsea Lassen

What a wild ride this year’s FDIC International was!

The journey started bright and early the Saturday before the show, with a portion of our team hitting the road at 5am to get our vehicles into the staging lot and ready for move-in the following day.

The early morning/long drive combo was a little less painful than anticipated because our finance & admin team put together bags of snacks, sweets, and swag specifically tailored to the folks traveling up in each car – how cute are they?!? Thank you, Morgan and Jenea, <3. This kicked the trip off with everyone in high spirits and the drive was mostly uneventful (other than a disastrous mayonnaise situation for some of our crew when stopping at Jimmy John’s for lunch). We landed in Indy mid-afternoon, with plenty of time to get our booth flooring into the building and walk the staging lot, where all the fire apparatus and ambulances live until they can be moved into the convention center, to take stock of all the rigs and look for our warning and scene lights among them.

A moment of perfect synchronicity in the staging lot that afternoon gave us the chance to do a night shoot with Huber Heights Fire Department later that evening. More on this in a future post, but this was a big deal for us because our Technical Sales Engineer Lee Shaffer, worked with this crew several years ago on a custom lighting spec for this rig. With the long lead time on new truck builds, it’s always super exciting for Lee (and the rest of us!) when he gets to see his hard work come to fruition in real life.

The next few days were full of booth set up, prepping the marketing content for the rest of the week, making Sam do tons of TikTok’s, cooking team dinners at our AirBnB, and keeping Executive Sales Manager John Marino properly fueled with plenty of black coffee throughout the days. We got spoiled by South-Central Regional Manager Dan Davis’s Texas cooking (y’all gotta get his taco recipe), cookies and ice cream sweet treats (the marketing department requires this; it’s the rules), and a couple days of wonderfully warm weather.

Additional waves of team members started arriving on Tuesday night so they could attend the Fire Apparatus Manufacturers’ Association (FAMA) meeting the following day. If you aren’t familiar with FAMA, check it out: it’s a nonprofit association made up of those working in the fire apparatus industry to advance and protect the fire and emergency services community. They have many incredible resources for those in the community, host several member meetings a year in (very desirable) rotating locations around the country, and always bring everyone together during FDIC. During this year’s meeting, HIViz CEO Sam Massa hosted a roundtable discussion on electric fire trucks. The panel comprised of Chiefs whose departments are using an electric fire truck from E-One, Pierce, or Rosenbauer. The big takeaway: while many had initial hesitations about using EVs, after adjusting to the change the crews became a big fan of them.

Our marketing and sales team also spent a large portion of Wednesday creating content to share with all of you down the road – plenty of cool rigs and lighting setups to show you, as well as the introduction of some fun new things including our fake reality tv show, “Following FireTech.”

Thursday morning came bright and early for some of our crew, arriving on-site at 6:30am to continue shooting content. This time with we shot with our friends at Horton on this awesome new ambulance for Broken Arrow – the first of its kind. The rest of the team joined a few hours later and we got ourselves show-ready.

Opening day of FDIC always arrives with a flourish of excitement. As every vendor readies their booths in the final moments before doors open, you can feel the anticipation on the show floor as if everyone drew a collective breath. For our team, it’s the precipice of months of work coming together across departments and partners in the industry, readying products, designing the booth, putting together all the marketing and sales strategies, all coming down to those three crucial days.

Once doors opened, the rest of the show went by in a blur! A few times a day, Sam climbed on top of the hummer in our booth to deep dive into our new warning lights, the FireTech OMEN Warning Lightbar and HiViz Connect Guardian Warning Lights, our new smart warning lighting system known as HiViz Connect, and his vision for our software-enabled connected hardware as the future of warning light technology. After soft launching these products at FDIC last year, it was really exciting to have the finished products to show off in our booth and around the show.

Later that night, we sponsored the Fire Fowling event powered by our friends at Haas Alert and had a great time figuring out this very unique (and definitely made up?) Midwestern “sport” known as Fowling (a combination of bowling and football, in case you didn’t know).

Fun Fact #1: We built a fall protection system (aka a bungee that tethered Sam to the top of the hummer) to make sure OSHA didn’t get mad us for allowing Sam to stand on top of the hummer.

Fun Fact #2: The microphone headset Sam wore for these presentations was affectionately dubbed his “Britney mic,” in honor of the headset Britney Spears would wear on tour in her heyday.

We also had the very exciting opportunity to announce our new integration with Pierce’s Command Zone, as shown on the Ten-8 rig in Pierce’s booth. In case you missed it, the HiViz Connect Smart Lighting System now integrates with the Pierce Command Zone Advanced Electronics System. This streamlines customization and lets you pick flash patterns, colors, or brightness directly through Command Zone at any time. All in all, there were three emergency apparatus units at FDIC 2024 sporting the new FireTech OMEN Warning Lightbar, HiViz Connect Guardian Warning Lights, and the HVC smart warning lighting system: A Pierce Enforcer for Ten-8 Fire and Safety, a Polaris UTV from Skeeter Emergency Vehicles, and the Broken Arrow Fire Department’s Horton Ambulance.

If you weren’t at the show, you may have felt like you were there: our marketing team live streamed all of Sam’s speaking engagements as well as tours of the show floor hosted by various sales team members (shout out to Dan Davis, Joe Caughey, and Lee Shaffer) and reached thousands of our friends at home.

Here’s a roundup of some of other notable memories:

Our sales team gave out endless swag to our customers.

National Fire Division Manager Joe Caughey tried his hand at presenting to the crowd atop the hummer, and crushed it!

Our crew took a DIY approach to setting up and tearing down the booth: here’s what it looks like when you do it yourselves!

Sam set off the fire alarm in the AirBnB while cooking breakfast for the team on the final morning.

Speaking of food, many team dinners were had in the AirBnB.

Even when we’re at a trade show, our day jobs don’t stop. Here’s Sam finding odd spaces to work:

John challenged us to many push-up competitions (WE GET IT JOHN. YOU ARE VERY STRONG. YOU WIN!)

On the 8-hour trek home, we stopped at our favorite road trip gas station (Buccee’s, obviously) to refill the trucks with DEF and stock up on jerky snacks. Sam was very proud of himself for saving $.10/gal on very cheap DEF. That is, until it put the ambulance into “limp mode” and wound up stranding the crew at midnight. In true FireTech form, we got to work: jumped under the truck to dump the cheap DEF, refilled it with name-brand DEF, did a manual regeneration, and finalllyyyyy arrived home at 2am on Sunday. Let’s all be sure to remind Sam in the future that sometimes, it is worth it to spend the extra $0.10. 😉

All of our days are dedicated to helping first responders work more safely and effectively after dark, so your tech is never the reason a call goes bad. This year’s FDIC was a landmark moment for our team. We got to reconnect with all of our friends and colleagues across the industry, and seeing the culmination of 13 years of hard work coming to fruition in the form our lights on your trucks all over the show (nearly 40 rigs with our lights on them!!) was incredible. Thank you all for your support over the years – you all are the reason we do this! See you next year!