Our FireTech team recently sat down with Danny McLaughlin, Head of Product at ETR LLC.
Danny began his career as a firefighter/paramedic and instructor, right outside of Orlando, with Seminole County Fire Department. In 2017, he made a shift, joining REV Group Orlando as a brand manager, eventually becoming their Director of Sales for five brands. During this time, Danny experienced a lot of different markets and gained deep knowledge about his customers and their needs. Last year, Danny took a leap of faith to join ETR where he leads the new specialty product line called 1st responder “FLEX”, which they’re manufacturing. The FLEX line was launched last fall, and is an adaptable, modular, and reconfigurable vehicle body born from a desire to give departments more flexibility with their units
A typical day as the Head of Product is all-encompassing. He is involved with the product design, the operations, the production line, building out a dealer network, getting customer feedback, and making modifications to the product – all in the name of growing market share and ensuring continued success after product launch. Danny’s extensive background working with ambulances and his new position with ETR made him the perfect person for us to speak with about the way our industry interacts with new products and emerging technology.
Keep reading to hear from from Danny:
HiViz: What are your customers like? Who are they?
Danny: Our FLEX customers are a mix of fire and EMS agencies, a few law enforcement agencies, and some utility companies. We also sell AEV, Horton, Wheeled Coach in varying capacities in Florida and Georgia, which are mostly fire/EMS-based customers.
HiViz: When a department is looking to spec’ an ambulance, what aspects are the most important to them?
Danny: Three things:
- The crew’s safety and their comfortability because they’re going to be in the trucks for quite a bit of the day.
- Patient safety and the ergonomics of how the truck is actually laid out to fit the patient care that’s going to be done.
- Consistency standard across the rest of their fleet.
HiViz: How much importance do your customers place on warning and scene lights for ambulances?
Danny: Lights and graphics are pretty high up on the list as far as the overall look of the vehicle. They usually start with the baseline of the truck — talking about the safety, the components, the structure, and the standardization aspect. They want to get those fundamentals covered.
Then, depending on the chief or the administration, they put their individual touches and expertise on the graphics, paint, and ambulance lighting, because it’s how they put their stamp on the truck. It’s what everyone (the public, the rest of the departments in that particular city or county) see, so it’s common for departments to take a lot of pride in this aspect.
HiViz: That makes sense! With ambulance lights specifically, what do customers tend to prioritize?
Danny: Customers want the ambulance lights to look clean and have a nice finish to them but still function the same, if not better, than the previous trucks that they’ve had. They also want the ability to make adjustments to the ambulance lights if they need to and have different modes for different situations, like daytime vs nighttime or visibility going into intersections.
Flash patterns, as a means of communicating what they’re doing, are important too. For example, they want a different flash for when they’re parked on-scene vs. when they’re transporting a patient. These needs differ greatly across the county. In terms of flash patterns and functionality, how someone’s able to program the lights, the ease of programming, the ability to change programs, and how it incorporates with the rest of their build, are all key factors in the decision-making process, along with the durability and warranty.
Generally, I think each agency or decision maker in that process is going to have their own particular things that they’re going to be focused on.
HiViz: If someone is spec’ing an ambulance for the first time, what advice would you give them when it pertains to EMS scene and warning lights?
Danny: I would probably want a baseline knowledge of what they’re currently using now and talk through some scenarios with them. For example:
- Was there ever any time when you were on scene that you wanted more light or has your current experience always felt adequate?
- Did you ever have any issues with the fleet where you had to replace your ambulance lights on a regular basis?
So, I start off by asking a ton of questions like these to get at least a baseline of where they currently stand and then try to route them in a particular direction that I think would be beneficial for them.
I think in this industry in particular, you need to ask a lot of questions, because every single agency has different requirements and needs and you really need to develop a good relationship with those departments to get an understanding of what truck is the best fit, what ambulance lighting products are the best fit, and what layouts are the best fit. These are important factors that I don’t think any salesperson should make assumptions about.
HiViz: Are you seeing any new trends in terms of spec’ing ambulance lights?
Danny: I wouldn’t say that there’s a clear trend, but I think people are more open to the opportunity of change then they have in the past. Everybody’s a little bit more open to new companies, new options, and new ambulance lighting options that are coming out. They’re willing to try new things, whereas in the past, they were more limited on options. I think you’re having a newer generation of administrators that are coming in wanting to have fresh ideas and wanting to have the ability to put their stamp on the trucks moving forward.
So with all things considered, functionality and aesthetics are pretty close to one another in terms of priority.
HiViz: That’s a great point! Can you give me some more examples of the types of questions that you would ask someone in that scenario?
Danny: I’ll start from the front to the back of the truck. One of the things that I would talk about first are the crews. So, if I’m a new salesperson in a territory, and I have no idea who this agency is, it would be poor judgment on my part to automatically start making recommendations without actually learning about the department. For some departments, the crews sit in the ambulances for 12 hours a day.
I would start by talking about what the crew’s shifts look like. What happens to the truck when it gets back to the station? How many calls are they typically running? And then, you can even break down the types of calls that a crew runs, because then as a salesperson, you would understand the optimal layout or why a crew has the layout they have and maybe make some recommendations on what they could be doing in the future to resolve past pain points.
You can also evaluate any press that’s been published in the last one to five years, because a lot of decisions would have been made based on that press. Maybe there was an accident or a bad encounter with a patient that, you know, unfortunately happened and they’re having to make changes to their trucks based on that.
When it comes to sales teams and the dealerships, I think it’s part of our due diligence to really dig into those things to make sure that they’re actually getting the best truck, the best ambulance lights, and the best layouts for those agencies on the front end. Customer warranties are also important. For instance, how easy the process is to get their warranty taken care of, because they can’t have their vehicles out of service.
Serviceability is also key, because like you said FireTech, they want to get their vehicles back. If something does go down, which it’s inevitably going to, they want to be able to get it turned back around and get it back into service as quickly as possible.
HiViz: What are the biggest differences between spec’ing ambulance lights vs a fire truck?
Danny: They are completely different, because the fire truck is typically the vehicle that’s going to have primary responsibility for illuminating the scene with its emergency vehicle lighting package. Especially on large multi-agency or multi-vehicle responses. On Ambulances, the crews often work on their own, and the majority of the calls the primary need is to illuminate a walking path for a stretcher or a patient to walk to the truck. When the incident gets more complex or the needs are grater than just a walking path and general task lighting, often the Ambulance will be joined by other responders as a part of an expanding incident scope. The goal is almost always to get the patient to the ambulance, then provide care inside the truck as opposed to being forced to work around it.
With fire trucks, even when we’re doing fit out guides, crews want to know how far that light is shining out so they can evaluate how much task lighting they will have away from the rig. Think about it this way; the house on fire will never get up and walk to the back of the rig. The car wreck is always “outside” the fire truck, and the crew is always going to be working away from the vehicle. The functional role of the fire apparatus is to work around scenes and incidents where there is a lot of geographic or subject matter complexity. On an ambulance, the majority of the job revolves around working on people contained to a stretcher. So I think fire trucks and ambulances kind of go hand in hand where with an ambulance, the crew may have to take a stretcher and walk a ways away from the ambulance, but that if it’s on a scene, like with fire trucks, the fire trucks can light it for them.
HiViz: This is a slight tangent, but one thing that Sam, our CEO, has said from his time working on an ambulance, is that doing truck checkoffs and finding ambulance lights that were basically like fish bowls full of water was super annoying. Is that relatable to the customers that you work with too?
Danny: For sure. So that’s going to be a big problem, either from the way the ambulance light was installed, the poor construction of the light, or maybe from bad gaskets.
When there’s water in a light, especially to the point where it’s not functioning as a warning light, the truck may or may not be fit for continued service. If the defect is impactful enough to have to send the truck for repair, that crew then has to then drive it to wherever they have to take it, take all the stuff out, put all the new stuff in a new truck, and then go back into service again. As a result, they’ve wasted hours of their day all because of a light being full of water or condensation.
These are all things that decision-makers will come in and understand. For example, how many times the truck was out of service and why. If it’s a consistent problem that the ambulance had lights and the warning lights were out of service, for X and Y reasons, that’s where I would say they would definitely be looking for other options.
HiViz: Okay, so if someone is trying to decide what type of warning lights are right for them, what sort of things would you talk to them about?
Danny: Unless they have a really upfront preference, the brand doesn’t typically come into the conversation. We’ll typically ask if they’re going to be sticking with the same vendor or not or if they want to change. That’s typically one of the things that’s going to be brought up.
Another thing is talking about the lens color and the LED colors. A lot of the time, they might want to change that, or they might want to use hybrid lights that have the scene light incorporated into the warning light.
All of that is really important, especially for an ambulance dealer and a manufacturer, because those things need to be known upfront for the harness layout as far as making sure the side skins are cut out correctly. I can’t tell you the number of times that those questions weren’t asked the right way, and we had to change the side skins because it was the wrong size light and the wrong light was in the order.
HiViz: Okay, let’s talk about the FLEX unit specifically. Can you tell us about the design and how you guys came up with it?
Danny: The design was put together a little over a year ago. That’s where we went patent pending with one of our extrusions. It’s a four-sided extrusion. It’s a two-by-two with channels on all four sides. The initial idea came from a chief who had a truck with a fiberglass topper on the back with a big slide tray. With those, you have limited access to a lot of things that are on the backside, and this particular chief dropped a glove off the back and then couldn’t close the slide tray, so they were stuck on scene. They then had to radio into the smallest person that was on duty that day to be able to crawl in up and over the equipment to remove this glove and come back out, which took a little over an hour to get done.
The design of the FLEX truck was something similar to a light rescue. It has six roll-up doors, three on each side, with a rear canopy door on the back. The inside of the truck is built completely out of this extrusion, which allows customers or departments or agencies to customize the interior based on their needs. So maybe today they want to use it as a command truck, and five years from now they want to make some changes to it on an ambulance or an apparatus. You’re kind of stuck with the configurations that you have; the next time you change anything would be on a brand new truck.
For FLEX, what they’re able to do is actually, make adjustments to the interior configuration based on those needs. So maybe that command truck changes into a logistics truck, and they can actually change the entire interior setup to fit that particular requirement and then put it on a brand new chassis and keep it on? Taking that a step further: maybe a hurricane or some other natural disaster hits and the layout needs to be changed? In an hour’s notice, you can completely change the truck so you can go on a scene and do what you have to do for whatever’s happening at the moment. We wanted to provide all departments with different versatility options for this style of truck.
Let me be clear. This is not the truck that’s going to replace a fire apparatus. It’s also not a truck that’s going to replace an ambulance – please don’t put people in the back! But this is something that would offer a lot more storage for different departments based on EMS, fire, and law enforcement, and it’s really going to be based on what they’re looking for.
For example, we have fire departments looking at it to use as a command truck. On the EMS side, folks are using it as a first response, kind of like an emergency management unit for their computers and slide-outs, stacking a lot of their equipment that they would need for an emergency management scene.
I have a large city in the Midwest looking at it as a bomb and arson truck. So, it’s pretty versatile and I don’t really pigeon-hole people in that setup. They have full capacity to make the configurations as they need to, and it’s no wider than the chassis body and it’s no taller than the cab height. So even in bigger cities where they have to pull these trucks into parking garages (in places where you can’t get an ambulance, you can’t get a light rescue, and you can’t get an apparatus), you can get this vehicle in there to at least to get initial response to a patient or a scene while waiting for the rest of the crews to arrive.
We’re trying to make it set up so departments big and small can have something similar to this at a very reasonable price point, and then they can configure it based on their needs and what they’re looking for. And FireTech lights are one of the pickable options for these units!
HiViz: Anything else you want to leave us with?
Danny: I love working with you guys. I like what you guys have done with your emergency vehicle lighting in general. I think you’re always innovating and do a good job of getting the information out there when you do. I’m excited to see what the future holds for you guys.
Our FireTech team had a blast sitting down with Danny to learn all about the ins and outs of spec’ing ambulance lights and hearing his insights on the emergency vehicle industry. We hope you found this insightful and helpful as well. If you’re interested in learning more about FireTech’s ambulance lighting products, you can browse our product line, here.
