Welcome And Meet Mark Andrew

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome again to a new episode of Leadership Insights with Co-Fanancial Group. I'm your host, Chad Coe. We go in deep dives, find real leaders in the country and in the world, and we bring them to you. Today it's my pleasure to have Mark Andrew, an author, speaker, fireman, captain, and someone that goes in the fires and fights them. Today we're going to talk to him and we're going to find out what it's like to go in and just experience the hot, the sweaty, and the saving people's lives all at the same time. Mark, thanks for being on the show.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Well, it's a pleasure, Chad. I've enjoyed the conversations you've had with the and the variety of people in leadership and business you've had on as guests.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

So you've been actually a fireman and doing this business for a very long time. Now you're an author and a speaker. But if you'll take me back to maybe your early days, where there was a day in your life you said, I actually want to go into a fire and fight this.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Absolutely. There was. My father was a firefighter. And so I had wanted to do this job since I was a child and just got out of high school, went to the trade schools and the local community college, and picked up some classes here and there, and worked for the private ambulance company for a while, building up the resume and worked for a city that only hired part-time people and it was a smaller town, and just built some experience. And after about seven years, I finally got that call from a full-time department. And that's when Dearborn hired me.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

So, so before Dearborn, where you're a child and you're watching your dad go into fires and experience this, and

From Firefighter Family To Full Time

SPEAKER_01 1:40

you're saying to yourself, I want to be like my dad. What was that like for you as a child seeing him uh experience the life of a fireman and helping and saving lives?

SPEAKER_00 1:53

To me, it just looked like both fun and rewarding work. You're on an ambulance half the time, you're on a fire truck half the time, and you're helping people when they're sick, helping people in their car accidents. When you get to go to fires, there's an adrenaline rush there, and there's a fun and an excitement, plus just the gratification of knowing that these are people's worst days, and we get to kind of be there for them. And so, yeah, just watching him grow up, plus the schedule looked nice. You were never going to get rich, but you would at least have a job and be taken care of.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

And so now, as you transition and it's you and you're doing this job, and it's early on, you're a young man wanting to be involved, and it's part-time in a small community. Share with me your journey to where you're at now.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Oh, it all actually started at that part-time fire department and a prior career at a small airline. I and then it carried on even into my full department. I had some good bosses, but I always remembered the bad management, the bad leadership. Leaders that weren't trained, leaders that didn't care, leaders that didn't understand the job we were doing. They didn't, they weren't experts in the field, they were just bosses because they knew somebody, or bosses because they wanted to just say they were a boss. And I found myself after getting into the career field of firefighting, that I I think I can be an officer and I think I could make this place better and leave it better for the people to come after me.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

So, so I know what it's like for you, right? So, as an example, my wife worked with UPS for 28 years and forever they hired from within. Actually, every CEO needed to drive a truck at one time and work with the UPSers. Today, they have a lady who's the CEO who never sat in the seat. She came from Home Depot. Her philosophies are very different, and she's not in the trenches, and she's not necessarily a partner of the people that grew up there. And so she knew what it felt like to have good bosses or bad bosses based upon their insights. So, for you, you knew the bad bosses because they didn't know what it was like to put on the the 50-pounder however heavy it was outfit and and be sweating and be grimy and and and they just didn't have that. And they would have demands for you as if as if they if this as if they knew more than you. Is that what you're saying?

SPEAKER_00 4:22

A lot of times, yeah. So at the airline, we yeah, we had a lot of bosses that just didn't come up through the ranks. In the fire service, everybody does come up through the ranks, but we had made a bit of a shift change, a career shift change in the late 90s. We upgraded our licensure from basic emergency medical technician all the way to paramedic, which is now just for beyond first aid, it's cardiac drugs and pharmacology and cardiology and respiratory therapy and minor

Lessons From Good Bosses Bad Bosses

SPEAKER_00 4:50

surgical procedures. So that was the difference for me. Uh, none of my bosses truly knew what I did. And the good ones cared to learn as much as they can. And the bad bosses, and it's a common thread in these business talks I'm in, is they they hide away in their office and then just wait for problems to come to them rather than be out there leading and finding problems when they're small. So, those are some of the issues that I dealt with coming up. So I always made sure to stay up on my skills because I wanted to be there for the crew. If anything ever went wrong, I could be a resource for them.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

How many people are on your crew in a typical time?

SPEAKER_00 5:30

At the station I retired out of, it would be eight to ten a day.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

So if you have eight to ten and there's an incident, or there might even be two incidents, how do you manage that? Are you going with them? Are you calling in other people? You know how in the past, I don't know if it was this way for you, but you had to climb down the fire pole, slide down it, and get going as quickly as you could to be able to save people.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

Yes, it there's uh an actual alarm assignment. So we're a pretty busy full-time city. Dearborn is want to say the third largest city in Michigan, and probably the third to fourth largest fire department as well. So it's 150-something people, and it's all full-time, all career. The station I was at would do on a weekday with all the medicals, all the false alarms, all the real alarms, all the car accidents, all the just the calls for service, we would have 20 to 25 calls a day. And so the ambulances would be, you know, they're there's out on medical runs all day long, and then we're going on fire trucks with the medical run team. If it sounds serious, if it's a basic medical run, the ambulance can handle it by themselves. If it's a fire, we're all gonna go. If it's a very, very small fire in a dumpster, just the fire truck will go by itself. And so there are calls that, yes, the the crews just go and handle it because it's minor enough. And there are crew calls that would come in where all of us need to be there. So for me, it always came back to training and preparation because I was never gonna be able to let them go out the door and handle something absent of any supervision if that preparation wasn't done weeks to months or years in advance.

SPEAKER_01 7:09

So, what do you feel? What's the maybe the hardest thing about being a firefighter? Like, is it is it the stress of having to be at 10 places in a in a day, maybe 20? Is it the fact that one day you have to go into this hot fire that's I don't even know how hot is hot, right? I don't even know, like when you're holding the fire hose, like it looks easy because you guys are holding it, but how much does that weigh? Like it just seems to me like there's a whole lot that goes into this that nobody thinks about.

SPEAKER_00 7:37

Yes, and what's interesting is harder the job gets, the more fun it gets. So you've always got that adrenaline when you're working with the Jaws of Life, which is a hundred-pound tool, or you're wrestling that hose at a fire and it and it is getting warm. The job for us gets harder having to manage the overabundance of mundane 911 calls that we go on. It could be simple trouble breathing, it could be picking up homeless people, it could be people that are in a minor fender bender, but everybody wants to get checked out. And so you've got this over saturation of non-emergent calls. And so for the boss, keeping your crew engaged, sharp, well trained, ready to turn a switch and go into a more high-performing mode is a challenge because we could go a couple of weeks and never see a fire or a major car accident, but then all of a sudden we'll have two in one day. And so you've got to go from non-emergent to emergent. And not only that, not have those mundane calls that are just stacking up by the dozens a day where you're down mentally. So you're always staying sharp on the ready for when something goes wrong.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

This is unbelievable. First of all, I just love the idea that when you're in the zone and it's stressful and there's a lot of stuff going on, you're going after it, right? But but what's it like to come down? I think I would imagine emotionally, mental health-wise, you have the emotions of people just wanting to go ballistic, getting angry, figuring out how to relax, maybe being on meds. How how how does the fire department manage all the different emotions that are going into this for them?

SPEAKER_00 9:33

Oh, that's a wonderful question. What we do is we try to make the fire station

Call Volume Training And Staying Sharp

SPEAKER_00 9:40

a comfortable home away from home. And so when you come back, you hang out with your crew, you can have some space to go to your and hang out on your own. We've got, you know, cable TV, you can watch some sports. We have meals every day, we have a lunch and a dinner every day. And so we've always got that time together to build that camaraderie. And I think it's the family aspect of what's unique to the fire service that helps us out. It's something police officers don't have because they're alone in a car by themselves for eight to 12 hours and still going to run. For us, when we come back from that call, we have each other to bounce ideas off of. We could train off of the scene we were just on. We could vent if the scene didn't go very well, we could laugh and joke, or if you need to, you got somebody to talk to. So the fire service is unique with that. We we try to make the station itself a comfortable home to be in.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

Actually, just absolutely my my mind is boggled. I'm looking at a picture over here that I'm going to share with everyone right here. This is you at the fire, and this is the book you wrote leading through the heat. And so I want to take a couple minutes and just first of all, can you describe that picture, that intense picture that someone took of you? What is going through your head there? Give us a minute or two of what that was like.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

Oh, yeah, absolutely. We had got called for uh house fire and just you know of of the the cover photo that is me. I'm on the right holding the axe. Interesting story. The publisher had told me, hey, you don't have to go buy photos from freelance photographers because you got to buy the rights and all that. I can get you some free AI-based rights-free photographs, and we could use them. I said, Absolutely not. I want the cover actually to be me because that's a portion of the book, is talking about the importance as a boss of being with your crew when things are are are getting dangerous or exciting. I'm not going to ask them to do anything I'm not willing to do myself. And so I wanted a photograph that summarized that. So I gave them maybe 10 from a freelance photographer that we we use in our fire department, and and this is the one he picked. The we we knew this upstairs of this bungalow house uh had fire in the walls. So we went up top to just cut a small little vent hole in the roof, and it really worked because the interior crews now were able to get up there because some of that heat is starting to escape and they were starting to extinguish the fire. And then as we're backing off the roof, I decided to just let's just make the hole a little bit bigger because it's now really producing a lot of vent point ignition, is what we would scientifically term it, and so now uh very effectively this ventilation opening is is pulling uh the all those hot gases away from the interior crews, and so I just from a safe spot on the the beam of the roof just decided to make the hole a little bit bigger because it was just working so effectively. My partner, a few minutes before that, was was to my other side with the chainsaw, and he's the one who made the bigger cuts, and then I just opened up the cuts with my act, and then we were just surprised at just how effective this ventilation technique was working for us in that day. And we had a great photographer right there in the street.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

It's it's it's like it's like out of a movie, it's like out of a movie.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

Yes, you get one of them every few years. We it they're so much more mundane than that, usually.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

So so now you're acting as a speaker and an author. Share with me, if you will, at what point did you decide that you wanted to actually be an author? And how did you come up with your topics?

SPEAKER_00 13:30

Early on in the career, I found myself talking with other colleagues, the peers I was coming up the ranks with, and found out that we were both interested in leadership. Uh, we always found ourselves talking about runs that went well, calls that did not go well, bosses we liked, the bosses we didn't like. And so when I got to about year 15 and I'm getting close on the lieutenant promotional exam, I realized, boy, I have this whole mental inventory of things I would like to be as a company officer. And so I realized, boy, I got I've really been compiling some talking points all these years. We fast forward about five, 10 years, and I got a GoPro helmet cam. And my helmet cam ended up coming at the perfect time because we ended up for the next year just with a streak of fires,

Coming Down After Chaos Together

SPEAKER_00 14:30

which we normally don't get in a in a suburb. And so I had a lot of good footage that I started putting on Instagram and some fire Instagram pages started sharing it, and a few of them invited me on their podcasts, and then that's when I realized the little bullet points I was writing to discuss on the podcasts. I said, Wow, these would make some really good magazine articles. Maybe I should try submitting again because I used to do that back in the day. And I said, You know what? Am I doing? Just why don't just knuckle down and just turn this into something? So I did. I took three of the talk points, expanded them into what I thought would be long form essays, and they just all of a sudden it looked like chapters of a book. So then I just said, All right, I I think I'm doing this, and then so over the next six months, I just knuckled down with all those pre-thought of nuggets and just expanded them. And before I knew it, I had a book. How do people find you on Instagram? Mark D B N F I R E, Mark Dearborn Fire, and then Mark Andrew on Facebook, and then I it's on hiatus because I've been selling the book, but uh a podcast called The Converse uh A Conversation with so The Conversat on Twitter or X, and it's it's been it's been fun just meeting people like yourself and talking leadership and management. And I'm learning a ton.

SPEAKER_01 15:57

On Instagram, it's MarkDBM N as in Dearborn.

SPEAKER_00 16:04

Okay, so it's Mark DB Delta Bravo November. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

Beautiful. And on Facebook, it's Mark Andrew. Yes. Excellent. I want to be able to add that so everyone will be able to see that here in the in the title right here. So I have for Instagram, you could find Mark there, and on Facebook, you could find Mark Andrew there to be able to see.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

Oh, I'm sorry, let's add and let's add fire after Mark DBN. I had forgotten that port. Mark DBN fire.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

So that everyone's able to find you there. Because at the end of the day, this is about fire and being able to persevere when things are hard. We dig in, we get we get inspired, motivated, our adrenaline is running, and we just have to be able to do more. At the end of the day, right? Would you say it's just about doing more? A lot of times, yes. Share with me if you will. Breathing. I was on with yesterday, Scott Schmerin was on the podcast, and we talked about during intensity and times of stress, breathing. Do they do you focus on that at all when you're out there when things are getting intense? What is it like for you when it comes to the breathing and being able to stay calm?

SPEAKER_00 17:20

It's definitely a skill that's taught for the interior firefighting, because you've got a mask and an air pack in a bottle that has a 20-minute time limit on it, where under stress it's likely to be 10 to 12 minutes. And so, yes, breathing does make a difference. The high stress of the medicals, whether it's a trauma or a CPR or a really bad trouble breathing, where we have to manage somebody's airway. I wouldn't say breathing is something we worry about there, but for the interior of firefighting, you absolutely have to watch your breath. But not only that, you got to just be in physical shape too. Because if you're just huffing through air, you're not going to be a good partner to your partner if your bottle runs out in five minutes and their bottle lasts 20 minutes. Now they have to come out with you because we always work in teams of two.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

It's just unbelievable. So, so the stress of knowing that you have 20 minutes, but if you breathe heavy, it goes down to 10 minutes, you're in a fire, you're trying to make a difference, and the fire isn't budging. How many tanks do you bring with you?

SPEAKER_00 18:34

Oh gosh, there's probably always five or six spare bottles on every fire truck with our ladder truck probably having about 10. So, yeah, if we we send three fire engines and a ladder truck and an ambulance to a fire, everybody's got their air pack, their singular air pack with masks already hooked up. And then in terms of spare bottles, yeah, it's not unheard of in a house fire that's stubborn and you're there for an hour and a half, it's not uncommon to go through 20 bottles throughout your whole crew. Just if you've got people on the outside working the rigs, and you got commander on the outside and you have a safety officer, you still got 10 people that are rotating in and out of the structure, and they're burning through a bottle every 15 minutes. So, yeah, it is not uncommon that we just empty out all the trucks of all their spares.

SPEAKER_01 19:28

Share with me, if you will, what is maybe one of your best success stories that that you remember, one of the stories you tell over dinner that you feel is like one of your favorite stories.

SPEAKER_00 19:40

I've always liked the fact that we came together as a team. For me, it was always the leadership around the fire station. So we've had 911 calls that went well. Uh, we've had some 911 calls that we learned from. But my I always thought the biggest success was because of the talent of the crew I was on. And if in any way I was able to help develop that or influence them in any way, then I suppose that's good. But credit to the crew that we always came together as a unit and built cohesive teams. I'd love the fact that when we would have rookies join the crew, that when their six months were up with us and it's time for them to rotate somewhere else, we as a crew took pride in knowing that that rookie is ready for their next assignment. And their good work going forward was going to be a reflection on us. And one of the things I probably took the most pride in was how many transfer

The Roof Vent Photo And Leading Up Front

SPEAKER_00 20:40

requests we had to come join the crew. We didn't always have a lot of transfer requests of people wanting to leave, and so those were the things that I was always proud of that myself and but more than anybody, the team itself was just always filled with talented people, and we developed an atmosphere where people people cared about the job.

SPEAKER_01 21:01

I love that. Who who in your life is one of your more inspirational people that you think about that you wanted you kind of like wanted to aspire to be like? Maybe it was your dad, maybe it was another person that you worked with. Who who is your most inspiring person and why?

SPEAKER_00 21:19

That's a little tougher because for sure my dad, I mean, just uh worked there for 30 years and always just a great provider. And so we you know had a had good childhood growing up, and that was always so appreciated. But when I came on the job, gosh, there were just so many bosses that really cared and were good, good talented firefighters and knew the job, and I always appreciated that. I gotta say, in the last couple of years, when I started coming to the idea of writing the book, I've really enjoyed watching the new generation. Generation of leadership thought people, the Jocko Wilnix, the Leaf Babbins, or you can go even as far as like a Mel Robbins or somebody like that. I'd love the fact that leadership talk, management talk, self-improvement talk is gotten past an Army four-star general. The only people that could write leadership books in the in the 80s, 90s, you had to be Jack Welsh, or you had to be an Army five four-star general. And they were the only people in the conversation. And now we have this network of business people and military people and first responders and and just thought leaders that care enough about workplaces to want to make them better. So I I take inspiration from all of those people.

SPEAKER_01 22:42

So so I picked up the one word that that matters the most to me from what you said, I think, is the fact that people are caring and that and that they could care about other people and and that even though you have good bosses or bad bosses, that at the end of the day, it's a caring environment and you carry that on your shoulder.

SPEAKER_00 23:02

I would agree completely with that. A common theme I've had in a lot of business podcasts and interviews I've been on with with people like yourself, are the the newer thought in management is caring and empathy is not a weakness. In fact, caring about your team is a strength. Yeah. When you when you care about your team, you care about their development, you it means that you're not letting them pass when they make a mistake. Most of the time, when you truly care about somebody, you're holding them to the standard because they're going to appreciate being held to a standard. And so it's not just wanting to sweep problems under the rug, it's about truly caring. And you can't care about people if you're not present. And so often, I don't know what it's like in financial services, but as in I know in the fire station, I could just walk around the building and just be present. And then I would start to notice personality stress start to click in. And then I could maybe tweak some job assignments or pull somebody aside and offer them some help. But I wouldn't notice those stressors, those issues of performance if I wasn't available and showing at least a little bit of empathy. And so you've just got to be present when you're managing a team.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

I think that's incredible. Your book is leading through the heat. It looks intense, it's awesome. I was able to read it and I appreciate you sharing that with me. What is one or two of your goals over the next, call it two to four, two to five years, now that you're a speaker and an author, a podcaster, and and out there in the public a little more? Share with us maybe what a couple of your goals might be.

SPEAKER_00 24:44

Well, at the top of the list, selling books and getting books for speaking gigs would be fun because I the more I get out there and speak and meet people, I'm truly learning from them as much as I think I'm teaching them. But I love the fact that in in business or in police or fire, we we can talk about management technique and find ways to bring these lessons alive and have it not to be as clinical textbook-ish from a lot of the ways I learned coming up. So getting involved in that, I think we can make leadership training and management training a little bit more realism-based. And I'm looking forward to those conversations with people.

SPEAKER_01 25:26

I love that. I do. I think that coming on this show and being able to share what you did around good leaders, bad leaders. I think there's something that we talk about, which was the micromanager leader, which I can't even imagine what that's

Writing The Book Empathy And Ending Micromanagement

SPEAKER_01 25:40

like, but maybe touch on that for a minute or two.

SPEAKER_00 25:43

Oh, absolutely. It is one of the more frustrating things being a first responder. And I I can only imagine what it's like if you're in financial services, you got a team of lawyers and accountants and just number crunchers, and then how hard their job would be if you had a middle manager looking over to their shoulder saying, re-add that column. You're doing it wrong. I want the decimal point over here. No, I want this column there. Re-categorize this inventory into this. I how you jumble numbers with a boss like that, I have no idea. And we run into that as a first responder. We would show up at a fire and somebody would just say, Hey, I need a ladder, but I want it to be the 24-foot ladder. I want it off the front of the building, but on the left side of that addition. I want you to go up, but only three feet, and then I want you to cut a hole there, and then I want you to go back to the top, and then I want you to use the saw to cut a vertical rectangular hole off the peak. Whereas I would just show them pictures of fires, show them construction styles at the station, weeks, months before. And then we would talk about fires. Hey, if we ever get this construction style, here's where the air gaps are going to be in the roof. Here's what we're gonna find some crossbeams. So when we go to the fire and I say, wow, a lot of smoke's coming from the roof, I need a hole up there. Do you got it? The crew would go, got it, boss, and they would just take off. And I would just go on with my job, and I would not have to think about what they're doing because I know they got it.

SPEAKER_01 27:18

You know, I love that. I I think for those that are micromanagers, I do believe that their brain doesn't stop. They want to control situations, they they can't get, they just can't stop themselves from being a micromanager. I am much more bigger and visionary. I hire people that are the right seats on the boss, in my opinion, and let them do what they know how to do and then grow with them. And and and even like with the podcast, I I bring people on. I don't actually want to know too much about someone ahead of time because I want to be inquisitive and get to know you as we're talking and with what we're doing and hear it for the first time and have honest expressions around the things that we're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 27:56

I'm gonna steal a line you just said. I want to grow with them. I that's that's really great. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 28:04

Feel free to write that down. And again, Mark, I do want to say thank you for being on the show. I am gonna go right here where we could find you on Instagram and on Facebook. You want to give us another one? Did you want to give us an email or a phone number? What did you want to do so people could contact you?

SPEAKER_00 28:21

Uh, you could just search my name, Mark Andrew, leading through the heat on Amazon and Barnes Noble or various other book platforms uh throughout the United States and the UK.

SPEAKER_01 28:33

Excellent. So, Chadco, co-financial group, we're here to help you get through your retirement, stay comfortably retired. We do that through planning. We do that through the abundant life blueprint experience. And again, we're just all here for you. It's really a pleasure to be able to bring another show to you with Mark Andrew, someone who's completely inspiring, fun, and knows what it's like to lead. Go out and buy his book, check out the website Co-Financial Group, have some fun, connect to us, and please share and subscribe to this podcast. Thank you again, Mark.

SPEAKER_00 29:07

This was so much fun. Thanks, Jen.

SPEAKER_01 29:10

Thank you. I appreciate you very much. Okay.