Our History: Fifty Years of Fire Protection from Platteville

Fifty years ago this company was one man with one truck, and he was twenty years old.

1975: One Man, One Truck

The company dates to 1975. The owner was twenty when he was first introduced to the fire equipment business that year, and there was no shop, no crew and no route — just one truck and whatever work he could find and finish himself.

The photograph at the top of this page is Dick Sheer on the left and Rick Sertle on the right, standing in front of that early van with an extinguisher apiece. It is the oldest picture we have of the business, and it says most of what needs saying about how it began: a family, a vehicle with the name painted on the hood, and the equipment in hand. It has been a family business from the first photograph on.

Fire protection in 1975 was a different trade in the details and the same trade in the ways that count. Extinguishers still came due for inspection every year and had to be tagged by someone who knew what they were looking at. Units that had been discharged still had to be recharged, hydrostatic tests still came due, and commercial kitchens still needed their suppression systems serviced and their hoods cleaned. We have been doing all of it since that first year. Some of the equipment we met back then — inverting-type extinguishers, soldered and riveted shells — has long since been ruled out of service, and we still find the occasional one hanging in an older Wisconsin farm building or a church basement. They get replaced, not repaired.

Seven Years Out of a House

For nearly seven years the whole operation ran out of a home. One person did the selling, the servicing, the recharging, the paperwork and the driving, and learned the trade from the ground up because there was nobody else to learn it from. Resources were thin. The days were long, and every job had to be planned carefully, because a wasted trip was a wasted day and there was nobody to send in your place.

A route does not care that the shop is a house. Units come due on their own calendar whether or not the person servicing them has a building to work from, so the discipline of the business — show up on the date, do the work properly, write it down — was set in those years, before there was anything else to fall back on.

That is a long apprenticeship, and it set the tone for everything since. When you have personally serviced every unit that went out the door for seven years, you develop opinions about what fails and why — and very little patience for guessing. The business was built on honest work and on customers who trusted it enough to call back, and it still runs on both.

1985: The Furniture Building

By the mid-eighties the work had outgrown the house. In 1985 we bought the old furniture building at 5675 Southwest Rd in Platteville, Wisconsin. At the time it felt like a major achievement, and it was: a young business with its own address and its own front door. Forty years on, it is still the address, still the shop, and still where the trucks come back at night.

Owning a building changed what the business could do. It meant room for inventory, room for a proper service bench, and space to hold parts for systems other companies would tell you were orphaned. It expanded what we could take on, what we could keep on the shelf, and how far we could reach. A lot of what we can still fix today traces back to having somewhere to put it.

It also gave us room to build a real shop: the scales for filling CO₂ cylinders by weight, the recharge equipment, and the bench where six-year maintenance gets done. Six-year internal maintenance and twelve-year hydrostatic testing are requirements, not options, and we track both dates on every unit we tag. If a unit has to come off the wall for either, a tested swap unit goes up so you are never uncovered.

The Shop Today

Most of what a fire equipment company does happens on the customer’s wall or above the customer’s cooking line. The part that happens back at the shop is what separates a service company from a sales company, and it is the part that took longest to build.

Anything that cannot be finished on site comes off the wall: CO₂ cylinders, which have no gauge and can only be checked on a scale; clean agent units; cartridge-operated and wheeled units; and anything due for a hydrostatic test or a six-year internal teardown. It comes back certified, with the unit’s manufacture date, last internal maintenance and next hydro date on the report, so nobody is caught out by an inspector finding a twelve-year-old cylinder with no test collar.

We carry CO₂, ABC, BC, Class K, clean agent and wheeled units, so when a walk-through shows the wrong extinguisher in the wrong room — dry chemical next to a server rack, no Class K near the fryer — the fix is usually a same-visit swap rather than a return trip. And because we have been buying parts and holding them since 1985, we can often keep an older system running that a newer company would simply condemn.

Growth, One Customer at a Time

Today the company is 16 people including the owner, running 10 service vehicles across Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois. The growth was never sudden. It came a customer at a time, mostly from people who called back the following year and then told somebody else.

The trucks run regular routes through eastern Iowa, southwest Wisconsin and northern Illinois — Dubuque, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Davenport and the Quad Cities, Waterloo, Madison, La Crosse, Janesville, Beloit and Milwaukee, and the towns in between. On a route that has been run since 1975, we are frequently the only ones with a record of what was installed in a building and when. Businesses change hands, managers move on, files get lost. That record matters more than it sounds on the day an inspector asks for it.

The customers are the buildings of a working region: restaurants and taverns, factories and machine shops, body shops and powder coaters, warehouses, schools, farms, clinics and municipal buildings. Most of the multi-building accounts — schools, municipalities, larger manufacturers — go on one schedule and one report, because that saves them a great deal of chasing.

Fifty Years at a Glance

1. 1975The owner, twenty years old, is introduced to the fire equipment business. One man, one truck, working out of a home.
2. Early 1980sNearly seven years in, the work has outgrown the house. Every unit that has gone out the door has been serviced by the same pair of hands.
3. 1985The old furniture building at 5675 Southwest Rd in Platteville becomes the shop — inventory, a service bench, and parts for systems others call orphaned.
4. Today16 people including the owner, 10 service vehicles, and regular routes across Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois. Same address. Same method.

What Changed Around Us

The trade did not stand still for fifty years, and neither did we. Commercial kitchens changed the most. Vegetable oils replaced animal fats and burned hotter, which is why UL 300 exists, and the dry chemical kitchen systems that were perfectly adequate in 1990 are functionally obsolete now — in most jurisdictions a pre-UL 300 system will not pass inspection. We install and service the wet chemical systems that replaced them, and we still know the old ones well enough to tell you exactly why yours has to go.

Extinguisher standards tightened. The annual inspection got more specific about what a technician has to check and record. Six-year internal maintenance and twelve-year hydrostatic testing became the backbone of the schedule, with CO₂ and certain cartridge units on a five-year cycle of their own. Whole categories of equipment were ruled out of service. Recordkeeping went from a tag on the wall to a file an inspector expects to see.

Every one of those changes added work, and every one of them was worth it. The equipment on the wall today is better than what was there in 1975, and the buildings are safer for it. Our job was to learn each change as it came, keep the parts on the shelf, and make sure our customers were never the ones finding out about a new requirement from the inspector.

What We Built Along the Way

Fifty years is long enough to add a great deal to the truck. These are the pieces of the business that took the longest to build, and the ones we would not want to do without.

What Has Not Changed

What we owe the buildings we protect has not changed at all. Show up when we said we would. Replace the part rather than nursing it. Tell the customer the truth about what their equipment is and is not going to do. Leave documentation good enough that when an inspector asks for the file, the file exists.

It shows up in small ways. We build the schedule around yours, so kitchen work happens before service or after close rather than in the middle of the lunch rush. When a system has discharged or an inspection has failed, that call goes to the front of the queue, because until it is fixed the kitchen cannot legally cook. On an annual visit we will walk your manager through the monthly check once and leave them able to do it without us. And if you call from a town we are not sure about, we will tell you straight whether you are in range rather than string you along.

That is the whole method. It is not complicated, but doing it consistently for five decades is what the name is worth.

Working With Us

If you have a building in Wisconsin, Iowa or Illinois with extinguishers on the wall, a hood over the line, or a booth in the back, we can take it on. See what we service, read what customers say, or just call.

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