Fire Protection Podcast

John Mackey, CEO of The Mackey Group, is back for his yearly state-of-the-industry catch-up with Drew. John advises fire and life safety owners and PE-backed platforms on M&A and growth, and his Mackey Report pulls industry research and investor-conference analysis into one set of benchmarks for what good looks like in this business.

The M&A story has a new layer. The platforms that were acquiring five years ago are mega platforms now, and a second tier of companies founded eight to twelve years ago is on the same path, with many preparing for an exit in the next 18 to 36 months. By John's count about 85 percent of the market is always either growing or getting ready for a transaction. One analyst he cites in the report asks what inning M&A is in, and John puts it in the middle of the game.

Newer contractors are building differently. They pick their field service software and ERP first and grow service before installation, the reverse of the playbook from six or seven years ago. That opens up the tech stack. QuickBooks runs out of room once you need job costing, the big platforms are struggling to choose between NetSuite and SAP, and John's tech stack guide comes down to one rule: understand your workflows and let them drive the software. Drew adds the piece many field service tools don't fully cover, inspection and compliance, and makes the case for a good implementation partner.

The back half turns to labor. Technicians with 40 years or more in the field are retiring, and John sees AI shortening how long it takes a new tech to learn the job, as long as they still get hands-on time pulling wire and hanging pipe. He came back from NFPA without seeing a new widget, while hazards like storage at 50 feet, lithium-ion batteries, and data centers keep growing. CEOs at the bigger platforms tell him that without data centers they wouldn't have any construction right now, and he counts 140 data center permits pulled in Texas alone. They wrap with a pitch for the trades and the fall show schedule.

The Mackey Group: https://mackeygroupllc.com 

The Mackey Report: https://mackeygroupllc.com/the-mackey-report 

Inspect Point: https://www.inspectpoint.com 

Timestamps

0:00 Cold open

0:18 Intro: episode 99 with John Mackey

2:16 John's advisory work doubled after NFPA

3:33 Mega platforms and the second tier forming under them

4:21 How much M&A runway is left, and what inning we're in

5:58 New contractors start with service and technology

7:09 ERP, the tech stack, and letting your workflows lead

11:32 Where inspection and compliance fit

12:31 Inside the Mackey Report

14:38 The labor gap and AI on the jobsite

17:39 AI in technician onboarding, and why field time still matters

19:51 What was missing from the OEMs at NFPA

22:02 Data centers, pharma, and 140 permits in Texas

26:17 Why it's a good time to get into the trades

27:22 Fall shows and the road to episode 100

31:17 Outro

Grant Lobdell is back on the show at a moment when the whole industry is paying attention. The fire at Gabriel House in Fall River, Massachusetts put a hard question in front of every contractor: how do recalled sprinkler heads stay in buildings for decades, and whose job is it to catch them?

Grant runs the lab side of Dyne Fire Protection Labs, now an NFPA Global Solutions company, and his answer starts with an honest observation: contractors handle the routine work well. It's the tests that come due 20 or 50 years after install that fall to the wayside. Dyne's whole stance is that the easier the test is to do, the more likely it gets done.

From there the conversation goes inside NFPA 25. Grant walks through how testing intervals actually get set and why they keep changing edition to edition: dry sprinklers moving from 10 to 15 to 20 years as failure-rate data came in, quick response intervals stretching as the technology proved itself. The committee isn't trying to make life difficult. The intervals are a data-driven decision, and the data keeps moving.

Then the hard part. Recalled O-ring sprinklers are not specifically called out in the standard today. As Grant puts it, if you hand him an O-ring sprinkler and it passes the test, it technically meets the standard, even though the failure rate says otherwise. He expects that to be a hot button in the next revision cycle. The codes, as the saying goes, are written in blood.

The back half is a live walkthrough: how Inspect Point structures sprinkler head data down to the individual head, tracks the right test frequency for whatever NFPA 25 edition each building is on, projects what's coming due across every building in a portfolio, and submits heads to Dyne for testing in a couple of clicks. Grant's team sends a kit, you fill the box, and the lab report lands in your inbox.

Drew brings two of Inspect Point's own onto the show this time: John Ryan, a senior solution engineer who came up through the product and engineering side, and Jimmy Snowden, who leads the support team and spent years as a technician and inspection manager before joining the company. If you've caught their monthly customer session, "Coffee with Jimmy and John," this is the same back and forth, now for the industry at large.

The heart of the conversation is data. Everybody is talking about AI, but Jimmy and John make the case that the payoff depends on what you capture and how. Plenty of companies record building data. The advantage shows up when you capture clean, standardized data at the system and asset level: manufacturers, model numbers, recalls, test dates, how an asset has performed over time. Lock that in and you can ask real questions, like how many buildings had an extinguisher that wasn't inspected last year, and start making projections instead of digging through PDFs and spreadsheets that were never built to be searched.

From there they get into the new features built on that system and asset model: fully custom question sets, components and attributes you can take as granular as you want, barcoding down to an individual cylinder or valve, fire pump curves, and the AI agents on the way.

The back half turns to codes and compliance. John talks through healthcare and the Joint Commission's January 2026 change that simplified fire-safety documentation, and why a transition everyone braced for went off quietly. Jimmy walks through the 2026 edition of NFPA 25, including a residential sprinkler head testing gap he spotted and ran past CASI, NFPA LiNK's AI assistant. And he closes with a sharp theory on why NFPA 25 is the most complex standard in the trade: a sprinkler system is full of water, and water can destroy property the same way fire can, so you're protecting against both.

Join Drew, John, and Jimmy for a real look at where fire protection data, AI, and the codes are all heading.

Topics covered:

0:00 What's in this episode
1:44 Getting John and Jimmy on the mic
2:16 Meet John Ryan
3:33 Meet Jimmy Snowden
4:27 Favorite systems: dry systems and valves
5:32 "Coffee with Jimmy and John," their monthly customer session
10:13 No two fire protection companies are alike
11:07 Why fire protection is different: each system, its own code
14:13 The real AI unlock is system and asset data
15:28 New features: custom question sets, components, and barcoding
17:48 Putting AI to work: prompts, projections, and agents
23:50 Healthcare and the Joint Commission
24:24 The January 2026 change that simplified documentation
31:16 Inside the 2026 edition of NFPA 25
32:12 The residential head testing gap (and asking CASI)
34:22 Why NFPA 25 is so complex: fire and water
36:15 Wrap-up

Shawn Mahoney of NFPA's Technical Services team joins Drew for his fourth time on The Fire Protection Podcast, and this one covers a lot of ground before landing on a problem the industry keeps stepping over: construction-site fires.

You've seen the headlines. A light wood-frame building goes up mid-construction, and the whole thing is gone, like the Denver complex that took a 238-unit building with it, or the South Park fire in North Carolina that killed two workers. Shawn's point is blunt: we already have the standard to prevent this. It's NFPA 241, the Standard for Safeguarding Construction, Alteration, and Demolition Operations, and it's been around since 1930. It's referenced by NFPA 1, NFPA 101, the IBC, and the IFC. "The biggest issue is people just aren't using it," Shawn says. The code isn't broken. Enforcement is.

Drew and Shawn dig into why adoption is so piecemeal, what real enforcement looks like (Boston shuts a site down if the fire prevention program manager isn't there), the legislative push after the North Carolina fire, and what the Fire Prevention Program Manager actually has to do day to day.

Before that, they preview the NFPA Conference & Expo in Las Vegas, including Drew's Tuesday session on AI and fire protection, how AI has reshaped the codes world through NFPA LiNK, CASI, and the new Notebooks feature, and why data centers and small nuclear reactors are creating fire-protection problems in towns that have never seen anything like them.

Join Drew for Episode 96 for a real conversation about why the standards we already have only matter if someone enforces them.

Topics covered:

Levi Rock got laid off for three weeks when COVID hit, and it changed how he thought about job security. In 2020 he started Red Seal Fire Protection in Windsor, Ontario, and grew it to 17 employees in five years by keeping it simple: show up when you say you will, turn reports and deficiency quotes around within 48 hours, and get out of the way so customers never have to think about their fire protection.

In this episode, Levi joins Drew Slocum to talk about building a service-first fire protection business. They cover the recurring-revenue membership model behind it, why he says no to most new-installation work, how Red Seal uses social media to educate property managers and recruit fitters, and how Inspect Point replaced their PDF forms with consistent, faster reporting. They also get into the gap between NFPA 25 and the Ontario Fire Code, why contractors and AHJs need to communicate more, and why human expertise still beats generic AI on fire code.

Episode #95. The Fire Protection Podcast, powered by Inspect Point.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:31 Welcome and why Levi's on the show

02:56 From sprinkler fitter to founder during COVID

07:50 The edge: speed, communication, 48-hour turnarounds

11:30 Moving off PDF forms to Inspect Point

13:35 Capturing asset data to power AI tools

15:42 The membership model and predictable budgets

20:02 Marketing fire protection and recruiting techs

23:32 The AI content problem and fire code accuracy

25:54 The fire protection education gap and training AHJs

28:34 NFPA 25 vs the Ontario Fire Code (and ULC 536/537)

33:11 Training the next generation

34:13 What's next for Red Seal

37:19 Wrap-up

Ray Fremont Jr., president of General Air Products, joins Drew to talk about the air supply side of dry pipe sprinkler systems. General Air Products has been building air compressors for fire sprinkler systems since the 1960s, and the Fremont family has been in the compressed air business since the 1930s. Ray covers how dry system air supply has changed over the last century: plant air compressors and schedule 40 pipe, the shift to thin-wall steel, nitrogen generators, and a newer vapor corrosion inhibitor technology called Vapor Pipe Shield that creates a molecular barrier on the inside of the pipe. They also dig into some real problems: most dry systems leak well beyond what NFPA 25 allows, jurisdictions are a decade behind on code adoption, and air compressor maintenance still gets skipped. Ray previews a new digital monitoring device that tracks compressor cycling and flags system issues before they turn into failures. It's the kind of predictive data the sprinkler side has never had.

Dr. Roger Reiswig, Industry Liaison at Johnson Controls, joins Drew for a conversation spanning nearly 40 years of fire alarm industry experience. Roger started as a Simplex technician in 1986 and now represents JCI across NFPA, UL, FM, and international organizations including the European Alarm Association (Uralarm).

Topics include how countries outside the US often adopt NFPA codes faster than US states, the differences between European EN standards and NFPA/UL requirements, Europe's mandatory smoke detector replacement cycles, the new 40-foot ceiling allowance for smoke detectors in NFPA 72, remote and automated inspection technology and its UL listing challenges, how UL and NFPA standards push each other forward, the birth of NFPA 3 and NFPA 4 for integrated testing (now showing up in building codes), Canada's ULC certification model, and the history of carbon monoxide detection moving from NFPA 720 into NFPA 72.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Cold open

Learn more about Inspect Point: https://www.inspectpoint.com

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Bob Marshall, CEO of Whisker Labs, joins Drew Slocum on Episode 92 to discuss Ting, the IoT sensor that monitors home electrical systems for arcing hazards before they become fires. In this episode:

Bob also shares the personal story behind founding Whisker Labs and how their fire safety team works directly with homeowners and electricians to find and fix problems before they cause fires.

0:00 - Paper documents, hydrant flow testing, and lost inspection data

04:59 - Deficiencies are not a gotcha game

8:47 - Ontario Fire Code limits and NFPA 25 enforcement gaps

15:23 - Strategic planning and involving Al

20:20 - 2025 highlights, consistency, and "what I'd do differently"

24:05 - Current state of the fire protection industry

40:27 - Notable fire incidents & what we learned from real sprinkler activations

46:20 - Closing thoughts and Chris's podcast

Timestamps:

00:00 Why 2025 fire protection data matters

02:47 2025 fire protection industry report preview

06:28 Why fire protection businesses need a tech stack

08:42 Inspection dollars vs service proposals

11:46 Deficiency approvals and compliance platforms

17:05 Common fire inspection deficiencies

24:53 NFPA questions and inspection data quality

29:42 Growth of regional fire protection companies

36:40 2026 outlook and Al in fire inspection