The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Successful Transformational Change in a Fire and EMS Department: How a Focused Team Created a Revenue Recovery Program in Six Months–From Scratch by Robert Avsec

Episode Date: April 23, 2026

Successful Transformational Change in a Fire and EMS Department: How a Focused Team Created a Revenue Recovery Program in Six Months–From Scratch by Robert Avsec https://www.amazon.com/Successful-Transformational-Change-Department-Months/dp/1990717047 Change is hard. For any organization, successfully developing and implementing a transformational change can be an enormous challenge, one that’s fraught with ups and downs as members of the organization struggle to hold onto the past while the change agents struggle to inform, educate, and assuage the fears and apprehensions of their colleagues. But what about an organization that simultaneously tackled—and succeeded—at implementing TWO transformational changes? Told from the perspective of a change agent who was there, did that, and saw their efforts come to fruition, Successful Transformational Change in a Fire and EMS Department, will take you through the work done by a focused strategic project management team as they created a fee for emergency-ambulance transportation in a county Fire and EMS department and digitalized the department’s patient care reporting process in six months—from scratch. About the author Battalion Chief (Ret.) Robert Avsec served with the men and women of the Chesterfield County (Va.) Fire and EMS Department for 26 years. He’s now using his acquired knowledge, skills, and experiences as a freelance writer for FireRescue1.com and as the “blogger-in-chief” for his blog, Talking “Shop” 4 Fire and EMS. Chief Avsec makes his home outside of Charleston, West Virginia where he enjoys playing golf and alpine skiing when not pursuing his second career as a freelance writer.

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Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it's not endorsement or review of any kind. Today's featured author comes to us from books to lifemarketing.co.uk. With expert publishing to strategic marketing, they help authors reach their audience and maximize their book's success. We have an amazing young man on the show with us today. He's the author of the book called Successful Transform transform. Here he cut that. Successful transformational change in a fire and EMS department.

How a Focus Team created a Revenue Recovery Programme. program in six months from scratch. Robert Absech joins us in the show. We're going to get into with him and some of the details of some of his work and how he's doing it and how to probably build good teams and all that good stuff. He was a battalion chief paramedic, retired now. He served with the men and women of the Chesterfield County Virginia Fire Department and EMS Department for 26 years.

For a second act, he's used his acquired knowledge skills and experiences as a freelance writer for Fire and EMS online trade journals. And as a blogger in chief for his blog, Talking Shop for Fire and EMS. He's also an operations chief for the Fire Service Psychology Associations where fire service leaders, psychologists, and master's level clinicians are working to develop the field of fire psychology and bridge the gap between professional psychology and the fire service.

He makes his home outside of Charles and West Virginia, where he enjoys. playing golf and alpine skiing welcome the show how are you sir i'm doing christ and yourself i'm doing excellent and it's wonderful to have you give us any dot coms dot orgs where do you want people to find you on the interwebs i am at fire emspro dot org that's my that's my that's my talking shop for fire and ms website all right so give us a 30 000 over you what's inside your new book Inside my new book is how we put together a program to start billing insurance companies, Medicare, Medicaid, for emergency ambulance transportation. In our fire and EMS department, we were facing rising costs. I mean, ambulances and EMS equipment cost money. And at the local level, budgets, you know, you're working on budgets a year, two years in advance, and it's really,

really hard to get the money that you need to keep the rolling. Definitely, definitely. Take in, let's see, with this, you know, you gave me the org, correct for yourself? Yes. And it's pretty much a thing where, you know, you've worked in this field for a lot in time. You're trying to help other people get their stuff together. I guess this is a big issue on, you know, creating great team building and revenue recovery program in the field of this business.

Yeah, for sure. I think the far bigger thing that I got from writing the book and that a lot of people who have read the book have told me is that, you know, this is, this is bigger than just a fire an EMS department. I mean, every organization has to manage change, you know, big and small. In our case, it just happened to be a very big one in a very short period of time. And so give us a little bit of history on you. How did you come up?

What made you interested in getting into this industry? Was it like an aha moment. And where did you go from there? Oh, I'm like most of the firefighters and paramedics of my generation. You know, we grew up watching emergency on TV. Oh, yeah. And, you know, who didn't want to be like Johnny and Roy? Oh, yeah.

And, you know, that became my focus was, you know, how do you get into that business? I was a kid that grew up in southern New Jersey. Wasn't a lot of opportunities up there to get into the field. And so I moved to Richmond, Virginia and got into the EMS side of the business, working in the city of Richmond for a service that provided the emergency services for Richmond, started applying to every fire department in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Got my first job with James City County, which is outside. of Williamsburg, Virginia, where I was there for about eight months before I was able to get,

you know, a higher paying position with Chesterfield Fire and EMS. And I was there for, like you said, the next 26 years. And so you learned a lot. Tell us about how you rose to the organization and got to this position where you had to deal with some of these issues and how you dealt with them. You know, out of my 26 years, I spent about nine and a half years in what's known. owner staff positions in fire departments. You know, I was a, the EMS director for about three years. I co-managed our emergency communication center for about three years with a really good friend of mine, Sergeant Lieutenant now, Bob Pridemore from the police department. And then my final staff gig was in the running the training and safety division for the organization. So I had a lot of

A lot of staff work. And, you know, in between those, you go back into emergency operations for a couple of years, always in a different place than where you left. So I think that provided me an opportunity to, as they say, get a well-rounded education. Oh. No, I learned about budgets. I learned about, you know, how to make those working relationships that you have to have to get things accomplished, particularly. a public safety agency. Yeah, it's, you know, we just, I think we had someone on last week who was a firefighter and an EMS and he's haunted pretty badly by a lot of different experiences he had and things he saw, a little bit of, I guess, PTSD, actually.

And, you know, it's one of those things that it's really affected him. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's what, that's what motivated me to, to, to become a member of F-SPA was that, you know, I saw that as an opportunity to, you know, give back to a profession that had given me so much over the years. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's, it's a hell of a business with the stress that's under, you know, it's, I don't think it's normal you would have with, with, you know, a company, you know, you're dealing with life and death issues there, crisis moments, you know, everything's an emergency pretty much. You know, it, that's probably even. a harder environment to, you know, build good, healthy teams because, you know, everything's on fire all at once. That's, that is one of those things that you have to learn how to adapt to and make it so that it's not part of what you're doing is, you know, yes, about for the average fire and EMS department, about maybe five to eight percent of their work involves response to emergencies.

the rest of the time you're doing things like training, preparing, and, you know, making sure that when the alarm does come in, that you're ready, you're ready to go. And I think that's what really differentiates our stress from the stress of the average ordinary person, as you say, working for a company or working for their own business. you know, we, we recognize what the challenges are, and therefore you try to, you train so that when you get into those situations, you're not worried about, oh, how do I do this? You're worried about how do I apply this. Ah. It's all about the training. Sure, sure.

Muscle memory. Muscle memory. Yes, fun is fun. Now, do you counsel or coach or consult or speak on? some of these topics and help other agencies handle the issues they have? As I said, our mission with FSPA is to get more clinicians who know what firefighters do, how they do it, why they do it, what are the stressors, et cetera, because that's one of the, that's the number one identified barrier to firefighters and EMS personnel getting care

is they can't find a clinician who understands them. Okay. And then on the other side of the river is the fire service that looks across psychology with kind of a skeptical lot because they have trouble finding people who understand. You know, it's not a everyday nine to five job and those kinds of things. So what we do is that's where we do a lot of advocacy. Last month we were at the Congressional Fire Services Institute in Washington. you know, bringing that advocacy and awareness to the needs of fire and EMS personnel. We have an annual conference in October this year will be in Portland, Oregon,

and we bring together, you know, some of the best speakers that are working in the field. And, you know, it's the first and only conference where every presentation is focused on firefighter mental and behavioral health. You know, those are the things that we do to, as I say, build that bridge. Most people think about transformational change in government or public safety taking years. What made it possible for your team to build a revenue recovery program from absolutely zero in six months? Deadline. Deadline. So you said a deadline?

No, no, no. We had a deadline. We had a deadline. Our fire chief, Steve Ellswick, heck of a guy, heck of a guy, had been working for a couple of years with our board of supervisors to get them to approve this revenue recovery process, billing for emergency ambulance transportation. In fact, they had even done a study that showed us that, you know, 92% of the emergency transport that we were doing would be, covered by private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, and that we would only have to work with that other 8% to help them, you know, manage any bill that they got. You know, we worked out a sliding scale based on income that, you know, you could get a reduced rate for your emergency ambulance

transportation. And I emphasize emergency ambulance transportation, you know, because that's the only thing that insurance and Medicare, Medicaid, pay for is, you know, you absolutely, your medical condition required that you had to have ambulance transportation to get to the hospital. So it's not like we were able to bill for every call that we went on. Yeah. Again, he was kind of fighting an uphill battle here, and then September 11th came along. Uh-oh. And with that, you know, the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York City and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, people, you know, fire departments had to start preparing for, you know, this new threat of, especially bioterrorism.

You know, we had the powder scares happening all over the place in the post offices and in businesses. and, you know, that required us to obtain protective clothing and monitor equipment that we never had before. And the chief just saw that as, you know, that's just further taking away potential resources that we needed to keep ambulances in good condition, are people well trained, and give them the equipment they need to do their job. And so we went back to the board of supervisors and laid this out in that format. And they said in November of 2001, they said, go for it. But you got to get it done by July 1st. Because, because, and the reason was, the Chesterfield County's budget cycle runs July 1 to June 30.

Wow. So they wanted to have it in place before the new budget year began in July, July 1, 2020, 2002. And so that's where that's where the deadline came from. Wow. You got to get it done. You know, you need to be billing because that's how we're going to determine what your budget allocation is for that next fiscal year. Okay. And so that's where the deadline came from.

And it proved to be a, most people would probably look at that and go, oh, gosh, six months. But in retrospect, especially after we look, look back on the project, we said, you know, that was really a good thing. Hmm. Because, because it's, it's, it's what drove the creation of a focused team. Mm-hmm. You know, I, I had been, I had been attending classes at the National Fire Academy for many years, two-week residence programs up there.

And it always amazed me that I could sit down in a classroom on Monday morning with 25, people that I didn't know from Adam from all over the country. And we would be formed into, you know, four or five person teams and given a project and said, you have to have this ready to present out next Wednesday. And, and it always happened. And so I was having discussion one day with, with Chief Ellswick and, and we were talking about, you know, we got this revenue recovery thing, how are we going to get it done? And I told him that same story. And I said, I think if we could pull together five or six people and say, this is your job. Monday through Friday, 9 to 5 and weekends, this is your job to get this done.

That's how important this is to our organization. And don't you know what? I talked myself right into a job. That's a good thing. I was one of the six. And you described this as two transformational changes happening at once. why was tackling both simultaneously risky? Why is it the right decision?

It was risky, but we didn't know about it until we got, until we embarked on the original project of a revenue recovery system. And as we got working into the nuts and bolts, you know, one of the first things we had to do is we had to, we had to contract with a third party vendor to do the billing. Okay, because that wasn't something we wanted to be involved with. The other organizations that we had talked to, particularly when they were doing that, that feasibility study said, you don't want to do the billing. You want to contract that out to people that that's what they do. That's what they know. And when we did that, the first thing that our new vendor said to us was,

you guys use paper right now. If you can convert your people to using electronic patient care reports, you'll probably see a 20% better recovery than if you don't. Because paramedics handwriting is awful. Especially since we were going to be faxing those billable tickets to the vendor, you know how well even the best document comes out the other end. on the facts. Oh, totally. Yeah. So that's, that's, that's, that became the impetus for the, uh, the electronic billing. And that, that was the second part of the project that, you know, looking, look, again, when we, when we, when we did the, the, the, the, the post-mortem on what went well, what didn't go well,

et cetera. That was the one thing we said, you know, we should have recognized that up front. And probably, probably, you know, put that. farther up in the in the timetable and the timeline so that it was getting the necessary resources in terms of time from the get-go. Firefighters, we pivoted. Can you hear me? Okay. Yeah. Okay.

I think we're getting a little break-up on the line. So you did that. And then, you know, in a lot of the, you write about how resistance to change is almost guaranteed in fire and EMS organizations. What surprised you most where resistance came from and where it didn't and where was some of the ways you overcame it? Surprisingly, the issue, the big resistance wasn't so much with the frontline personnel, firefighters and paramedics that would be doing the billing, et cetera, okay? It's surprisingly it was middle management. The battalion chiefs that, you know, were suddenly going to, you know, we were telling them that,

You know, hey, it's going to be your responsibility to make sure that billing is not an issue. Okay. You know, the prime goal is a quality billable ticket on the first go. Okay, because if it goes to the, if it goes to the billing vendor and they can't, they can't submit, then that requires additional work on their part, et cetera, et cetera. You know, as middle managers, this is a new role. for you. You have to become the quality control and the quality improvement part of this. Okay? That, you know, if there are problems coming from one of the stations in your battalion,

you need to get in there and find out what's going on and get it fixed. Yep, definitely. And, you know, good management is hard to do and focusing on teams. You emphasize on a focus team rather than heroic leadership. What did you intentionally do differently in how the team was formed and empowered to make sure it was a focus team as opposed. Well, you know, it's, it's interesting because that team, our team leader was the deputy chief of operations, had three battalion chiefs, a captain, and two paramedics, firefighter paramedics on the team, right? So in any fire department, that's a hell of a rank structure right there, right? And fire departments are typically very hierarchical, right?

If deputy chief tells you to jump, you say how high on the way up. All right? Yeah. But, you know, he demonstrated some really great leadership by telling us from day one, he said, when we walk through that door every morning, we're six Joe's working on this project. and everybody's input matters. You're all here because Chief Ellswick and I believe that each of you brings something unique to this team. And, you know, we can't let how many bars you got on your collar or how many stripes on your sleeve get in the way of that.

And I think that just absolutely set the tone. But more importantly, that's how it really worked. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, team building, would you find that a lot of the lessons you learn in the spouse in your book about teams and team building and goals and achieving? Do you find that a lot of those are transposed over into corporate stuff as well? Oh, I think there, I think, you know, when you talk about managing change and when you talk about, you know, getting people to work together as team, particularly when you're talking cross-sectional, you know, people from different departments in an organization, et cetera, I, you know, you know, It's all fruit. You know, some of you may be apples.

Some of you may be oranges. But, you know, in the end, if everybody coming together is in agreement that, hey, we're here to do what's best for the organization, let's figure out, you know, the best thing we can do is figure out how quickly we can start working together. Yeah. You know, a lot of organizations, you know, like you say, we're all fruit. But, you know, I don't know. I have some people that work at our office that are vegetables, I'm pretty sure. I'm talking about their brains. Bob, that's you, Bob.

We're talking about you. No, anyways, Bob's the catch-all for everything we say bad about anything. It's always Bob's fault. So he's the catch-all for the thing. We don't have an employee by name Bob, by the way. We just, that's an effigy. We just throw stuff out. So, yeah, a lot of these lessons, they can be transposed to business and everything else.

Revenue recovery and emergency services can be emotionally and politically charged. You talk about the book. How did you address the fear that billing might conflict with the mission to serve everyone? I think the biggest thing that we did was we didn't focus on the recovery part, the money part. We focused on sustaining the mission. This is what we need to keep putting quality ambulances on the street that are, that are critical to the safety and welfare of our people as well as the people who were transporting to the hospital. It's critical to the training and education that we give to our entry-level employees as well as the continuing training for our incumbent employees so that we can continue to provide high-quality EMS care.

and then to make sure that they have the best equipment. You know, biomedical equipment is not cheap. You know, when you start talking about things like heart monitors and oxygen monitors and setups and all those kinds of things that paramedics need to do their job properly and provide good patient care, those things all cost money. And that's what we focused on. We focused on this is how we can sustain the good stuff that we're doing over time. And I think that's what, you know, that was the message that we promoted to the public

and the video that we presented, the brochures that we mailed out, the public appearances that we made was that was the message. You know, this isn't about money. This is about being able to provide you and your families with quality emergency medical care if and when you need it. Yeah. You know, it's life and death with quality care, but you know, you deal with lots of different things in the deal of in the deal of being in the business. You talk throughout the book about having a strong theme of communication, weekly updates, internal, external messaging. What specific communication messages should leaders most often make,

especially during major changes where they're trying to maybe turn the company around, et cetera, et cetera. I think the key to our communication was that it was early and often. Okay, early and often. It started off with our fire chief addressing all of our first, line supervisors over the course of three days, you know, and explain, you know, his vision, you know, why we need this, why we're doing it, all the things I just explained to you, that was his message to them, okay, because these are the people that had to lead that change.

You know, first line supervisors, we call them company officers in fire departments. they manage 90% of a fire department's resources, the people, the equipment, the fire stations. You know, so you have to get those people on your team right from the very beginning. And, you know, Chief Ellswood continued with that communication not only to our people, but also to the board of supervisors who would, you know, put their faith in him to get this thing done. It wasn't a case of you don't hear from me until we're done. It was a case of these, this is the progress that we're making. This is the progress.

You know, the internal communication was critical. Our project sponsor, Deputy Chief Shorter, Paul Shorter, you know, he had a standing appointment to meet with the fire chief every Friday at 1 o'clock to give him a status update of what we had gotten accomplished that week and what we were going to get done. the next week. So the fire chief was then just as informed as we were and was able to go back to the board of supervisors, go out to those meetings with those town hall meetings with the public, armed with the best and latest information about how this thing is going. And I think that's what people, that's what people want to hear. They want to hear action.

Yep. They want to know, they want to know, you know, is the glass half full? Is the glass three quarter full? How are things going? Yep. You know, communication is so important because it helps manage expectations when you agree. Absolutely. Absolutely.

I'll give you an example. You know, if you look at Disneyland, and I think everyone's probably been to Disneyland or Disney World in their life, maybe at least once by now. And when you go there, they have, you know, these. huge lines for every ride pretty much, but they tell you how long you expect to wait. So it'll say you current wait time is two hours. And they found that people, if they know what the wait times are or what the demands are or what the expectations are, management, et cetera, if they know what they are, they're more willing to comply with them and exercise them and not complain about it because they know. And if you're ambiguous, you're not communicating. You're not

communicating, you're, you're icing everyone out of understanding when anything's going on. Then you're going to have all sorts of chaos that grows out of the lack of information being delivering, the lack of expectations. But if you say to people, you know, especially if it's something hard or challenging that the company's going to have to do to come together, you know, you've got to get everybody on the same team and Kumbai on. And so, yeah, over-communication is really important. I think especially during change, you kind of have to over-communicate, hey, this is working, hey, this isn't working, we need to do this, you know, constantly, you know, feedback and information.

And as long as people are aware of what's going on, they're usually pretty on board with stuff. You know, I'm trying to think there was a situation I was in recently where I had to wait for something, but someone told me how long the wait was, and it wasn't too bad. I was like, oh, seven minutes or I can't remember the instance, but I was willing to do it because they told me how long it was going to take,

you know, and they were right, you know, on how long it would take. Just think how frustrated we get when we're in our car out on the highway and traffic's not moving. You know, if somebody could just tell you, you know, there's an accident two miles ahead of you, all right? And it's probably going to be 30 minutes before we can get traffic moving at its normal pace. Think what that would do to road rate. Yeah. You know, there is an app called The Ways. the Ways app, and I think it's owned by Google, so I think they incorporate some of the data.

And it will do that. It will say, you know, if I need to go across town and it's a half an hour drive and there's, you know, an accident or something in the way, it will show the backed up traffic where you can maybe exit off to go around it. Oh, I got to get me one of them. Yeah, it's called W-A-Z-E-W-A-Z-E-Ways. It's been around to 2011. Great technology.

And so anywhere you go, you can put in where you want to go. it will tell you the time it will take you to get there and it's they they got it down to a science of seconds and if there's something that comes up on your route there sometimes they'll reroute you to a much faster route or they'll show you you know there's a police car here there's a crash here and then you can see you can see like this red or an orange usually colors that will indicate there's a slowdown like especially on the freeway and then you kind of know you're like oh I should probably pull off the next exit and avoid that maybe go through the front of road. And, you know, that's a way of just communicating to people. Obviously, it's not government

run, but communicating people, how to do it. And even if you do get caught on the freeway in traffic, you can at least look at it and be like, okay, they're still moving about 40 miles an hour according to the Ways data. It can measure how fast everyone's moving either normally or in the slowdown situation. And, but yeah, communication is key. I mean, it really is. And what you tell people and how you work with people through those issues. And a lot of this transposes to corporations as well. The biggest thing that we did, that again, we were constantly treading on new, new soil was we conducted focus groups that hit every fire station and every shift in the department. At that time, we had probably about 250 uniform personnel. Okay. We did. We did. We

did these focus groups and we went out in teams of two and Chief Shorter told us, he said, listen, you got to really make sure that you don't talk. You want them to talk. Your job is to get as much of it down on easel paper as you can and bring those easel papers back here. And that's literally what we did. We would come back from a focus group and we would pepper the conference room that was our workplace with those easel paper and distill the issues down. You know, I mean, we ask questions like, what don't you like about what's coming? What are your fears? Do you got any suggestions on how we can, how we can make this work?

We just collected tons of data like that and we're able to streamline. it down to where that became the basis for a communication strategy. Because we realized this is not just who we need to talk to on a continual basis, but what are their hot buttons? What are the things we got to keep talking about? What are the things that we've got to keep giving them information about to keep to keep them keep them on the on the positive side of this thing. Yeah.

And listening, you know, like what you talk about. They're listening. Super important. Yeah, that's a real hard thing for firefighters to do because we're so used to response. So when somebody gives you a problem, I always said that my battalion chief business card should have said professional problem solver. Because that's what we do. Yeah.

That's what we do. We're the only 24-hour service in town. When people don't know who to call, they call the fire department. Yeah. It's a pretty wild world. And a lot of this, like I say, can transpose the corporations. You write from the perspective of someone who is in the arena and not an outside consultant, how did that insider role with you help?

And when did it make change harder, maybe? I think it helped in that, you know, one of the hardest things for any fire department people working in a fire department is having outsiders coming in, you know, because there's that, there's that, there's that distrust that's, you know, hey, they don't know how we do things. They don't understand what we do, et cetera, okay? So being inside the organization, that's, that's one barrier you didn't have to overcome. But then on the other side, you got that part about, you know, I know Chief Afzak when he was my battalion chief, so he's a good guy. Okay, that's cool.

Or somebody else says, you know, when I worked with him at this station, whatever, I thought he was a butt. You know, and that was true for everybody on the team because all of us had, you know, a lot of different experiences and different parts of the organizations. You know, when you're moving around that much and you're working with that many people, that you're going to pick up baggage. So that was one thing that we had to be cognizant of, you know, especially when we were doing focus groups, or once we got started with the training process of how this all gets done, we, you know, we just had to all be very cognizant of what is the potential baggage

that might be getting in my way in getting these things done with folks. Yeah. I mean, and if you're, you know, when people see you as an outsider, sometimes they, you know, they're like, you know, he's not, he doesn't really understand who we are or what we do. Yeah, you spend, you spend too much time overcoming that, you know, as opposed to being able to get going from day one because people know you. For firefighters and EMS leaders listening right now or just any CEO leaders, you can apply all this data to that of any company. Listening right now, who are overwhelmed by change, what's the first practical step that you would. advise them to take this week using your model in your books. Crank the problem.

What was that? Shrink the problem. Shrink the problem. Yeah. You know, it's, you know, I always, I always remember the old thing about you can't eat an elephant in one bite, but you've got to pick the most important part. And then, then focus your time, your energy, and your effort on, on getting that done so that you can get a good, solid win under your belt.

Because then whatever has to come after that becomes, oh, you're building upon that success. When we got into the training process of how to create billable tickets and how to use the software, You know, all of those things. Those were built upon the success of our early communication of why. Why is this important? Everybody wants to know the why before you get into any of the what. And especially any of the how. So I think that was a key.

That was a key. And then finally, if you had to instill the book down to one uncomfortable truth about leadership and change in public safety, what would it be? You have to be authentic. Authentic. You have to be authentic. Like I said, one of the, you know, the first thing that Chief Ellswick did was, you know, address the membership. You know, he spoke to the people who were going to have to get it done and let them know that, you know, this is what I am committed to doing to make this.

successful. Okay. And, you know, just the fact that he pulled six of us out of our normal jobs, that meant somebody else was going to have to do our job while we were gone. So that was, that was his, his big thing was, look, we, we're going to get this done. These are the, this is what I'm going to, this is what I am dedicated to giving to you to get it done. I'm asking you to come on this journey with me. And so I, I, I think that, I think, think that, you know, that being authentic, being honest with people, and, and, you know, going back to some of the things we first talked about, communicate, communicate, communicate. Not just, you're not just communicating expectations, but sooner or later, you've got to start

communicating progress. You've got to give people tangible things that are happening. And, you know, I mean, being authentic is really important because people know, when CEOs or leaders are faking it. They don't really care. They're just kind of going through the motions and stuff, you know. Give me your TPS reports for that office space show. So as we go out, give people a final pitch out to pick up your book.coms. Where can they find out more about you?

I'm a very, very large president on LinkedIn. So I'm on LinkedIn. I've got my website there that I write my blog, talking shop for firing EMS. and the book is available at Amazon.com. And the big thing I would say to anybody who says, do I want to look? I say, take a look and give it a read

because I'm pretty sure there's going to be at least three things that are going to go. I never thought of it that way. Yeah, yeah. This is wonderful and great leadership I think transposes even the emergency business. You know, we had somebody on last week who talked about emergency things and life, and it's a high-stress environment.

I had a friend who became an EMT right at the beginning of COVID, and the horrors and stories and PTSD he had to deal with from some of the things they would find. You know, they'd find people who'd died, you know, a couple weeks, and, you know, no one knew they were missing because, you know, everyone was in lockdown. Yeah. And, you know, they would find these bodies. and it was just not fun. Let's put it that way.

And it was a scary time. You know, it's a high pressure business. But I think a lot of your stuff in your book can be transposed to it. So thank you very much for coming in the show. We really appreciate it, sir. Man, I appreciate the opportunity to have this chat with you. Thank you. And thanks, John, us, for tuning in.

Order up his book wherever fine books are sold. It's called Successful Transformational Change in a Fire and EMS Department, how a focus team created a revenue recovery program in six months, from scratch by Robert Avseg. Thanks for tuning in the show. Go to Goodrease.com, Fortresschastchristch, Christfaz, LinkedIn.com, Fortresschus, Chris Foss, 1 on the TikTokot,

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