- PNC is proud to support Business Forward, where community leaders discuss the issues confronting business in central Illinois.

(upbeat, cheery music) (gentle, dramatic music) (gentle, dramatic music continues) - Welcome to Business Forward, I'm your host, Matt George.

Joining me tonight, Shawn Sollberger.

Shawn is the fire chief here in Peoria, Illinois.

Welcome, Shawn.

- Thank you, thanks for having me.

- Well let's start off with you.

I always like to know about, one, how you got in the business, but did you grow up in central Illinois?

- I did, I'd like to say born and raised, but that would be false.

- Okay.

- My father was in the military and he was stationed in Omaha, Nebraska.

So I spent the first six months of my life there.

But my mom and dad are born and raised here, went to school at Manuel and when he got out of the service, then he came back here to Peoria.

- So you went to Manuel too?

- I did not.

- Okay.

- I married a Manuel alumni, ironically enough.

I graduated from Peoria High in 1992.

- '92, all right.

- Yeah.

- Well, I'm 1982, so I'm a little older.

So, as you're growin' up, dad was military, you just said, and so there is a little discipline tied to that position, but there's also discipline in what you're doing now.

So did you learn that from your dad?

- I did, I'm proud of the fact that I'm a third generation city of Peoria firefighter.

So my grandfather was fire chief in the '80s.

My father retired from the Peoria Fire Department 10 years ago and I'm third generation on that.

That being said, my father never really put that level of pressure on me.

He was a strong disciplinarian and I welcomed that.

I like structure.

I like the rules, knowing exactly where you stand with a person, I think is important, but, like, he never put that pressure on me, it was just like, "You're gonna be a fireman," anything like that.

He let me explore other things, other areas, but then I fell into this profession.

- I just find it, with people that had parents in military, but I do find it, whether they put pressure on you or not, there is that, you know, observation, as a kid, that you do certain things the right way.

You hold doors for people, you have manners, you stick to a schedule, you do all those certain things and so did you always wanna be a firefighter, knowing that your grandpa was a chief, or was that not even in your head?

- It really wasn't.

I grew up with a strong admiration for the profession, just being around it.

There were strong union firefighters, both on executive boards, just highly involved within the community, fund raisers and things like that.

So I had a strong admiration for firefighting.

I thought I was gonna be a professional baseball player and then at the mere age of 12 years old, when that came crashing down, so I kid, I just, I always loved being around sports, love always being around people, ingrained in the community I went to school at ICC and my first year there, my thoughts were was to get into athletic training.

That wasn't quite working out the way that I envisioned it, and at that point, I graduated high school early, at the age of 17, and so I'm sittin' there, 18 years old, I'm a freshman at ICC, really don't know what I'm gonna do with my life and my dad said, "Hey, just do one thing," he goes, "there's a ride-along program, "you can get one hour's credit at ICC."

So, in perfect honesty, I thought, "Well this is gonna be a really easy credit," you know, college credit, "I'll go ride along with Peoria Fire Department."

And I did and from the minute I walked through those doors and we went on our first call, I still will remember it to this day, and I'm a huge fan and friend of Tony Artist, and we went on a fire, I was there for two hours, and we go on a fire, and I watched the way these guys worked and the intensity, and I was hooked from that first day.

- Tony was a strong firefighter.

- Yes, yes, and he was definitely somebody to look up to.

- Well I was gonna ask you later on, mentor, but I guess that would be filling that mentor role, right?

- Yeah, absolutely.

I had a strong mentor within my own home, looking up to my father.

He was a great firefighter.

You can ask anybody, it sounds very biased coming from his son, but he was a very strong Peoria firefighter and Tony Artist was another strong example of somebody that I could look up to and try to emulate.

- So when you talk about being a strong firefighter, what does that mean, discipline, ethical, all of the above?

- Pretty much all of the above.

So when I look at that, it's just understanding that sense of community, understanding what it means to be a firefighter, and it's not to be cliche-ish, Peoria is thought of at such a high level within the state, if not the nation.

We're considered a medium-sized department and we've always had strong union activity.

We've always been ingrained within the community and I talk about fundraisers, homeowners associations, block parties, all these things, and that was by design.

It's not fake, it's just, it's the firefighters understanding that they're civil servants and that they need to have a strong sense of community.

So when I say that they were strong firefighters, they led by example, they were very disciplined, they welcomed how difficult this job can be.

So when I say the word strong, that's what I envision.

- That's nice stuff there.

So you're the chief.

That's pretty cool stuff.

20 years ago, were you thinking I was gonna be the chief?

- (laughs) I'd almost say 20 months ago.

(pair laughs) All I ever wanted to be, once I had made that decision, was just to be a good firefighter and I always enjoyed coming to work, always enjoyed the unpredictability of what you were getting ready to do for that day 'cause it truly is unpredictable.

So no, I never really had that vision for myself.

I just wanted to be a good firefighter.

We have a kind of a cliche-ish saying, a good firefighter makes a good engineer and the engineer who drives the apparatus and then a good engineer makes a good captain and so on down the line.

And so whatever rank I worked in, I just tried to fully embrace all the responsibilities of that and be the best in that capacity.

So I've told this story a couple times too and I think it bears repeating, Chief Artist came to me and Tony and I have been friends from the minute that I came on the job and he said, "Hey, Shawn," he goes, "you need to strongly consider "taking this next battalion chief's exam."

Well, I'm a captain down on station four, on the south side.

I'm like, I've worked my whole career to get right here.

I wanted to be a captain on engine four, and he was just like, "Hey, we need good, strong leadership.

"You've always displayed the qualities," you know, "that it takes to come up into administration "and the first step to that is the battalion chief," you know, being a supervisor on shift.

So I thought about it, and I took that leap of faith.

I was very unsure of myself.

I was unsure of whether this is what I wanted to do and from that point forward, I mean, it just has been on fast forward in a positive way.

- Yeah, it's important to have people like that because the theme of my show, for the last few years, has been this mentorship role that a lot of people have and people don't understand how important it is just the knowledge to be able to tell you something like that, you'll have no idea, you could just be just a regular, happy firefighter right now.

Now you're the CEO, without that advice.

- I know, I know.

- Pretty neat.

So, you know, Chief Zimmerman was on here, probably four or five months ago and I asked him the same question, and I just asked the police chief the same question, are you just on call your whole life, I mean, is that just part of the job?

Do you ever have downtime, especially being the chief.

I mean, you have to be in the know of everything major, right?

- Yes.

You can ask my wife this question too.

(laughs) It's 24, seven, 365, and it's just the way it is because if you're not, you alluded to these points already, if you're not in the know, if you're not accessible, you're behind, and it's just the way it is.

But I'd say this to my command staff and our firefighters all the time, I think it's important to have a work, life balance.

And so, I have active children within the community in sports and things like that.

So I try to miss less, and I know that I miss some things, but you have to be accessible.

When you're in this position, your command staff has to be able to get a hold of you, your firefighters have to be able to get ahold of you, constituents, city council, you have to be accessible.

- Yeah, I coach with Bobby Zimmerman and so Chief Zimmerman is on call, even during baseball games.

(laughs) - So I'm there.

- Right.

- But you're accessible, for sure.

- Well that's true.

- Yeah.

- All right, so important part of leadership, obviously, is communication.

With your job and lives on the line 24, seven, you have to be, probably, the best communicator, even better than when you took the job recently.

I mean, you have to think about that all the time, all of those different channels to communicate because every man and woman on your team needs you at times.

How do you handle all of those communications going back and forth, 24, seven?

- I've always enjoyed that and I don't know if it's just in relation to our job 'cause we do like to call our job, at times, as organized chaos, and (laughs) it's just the way it is.

If anybody's ever seen a fire scene, I think some people can sit back and be like, "I have zero idea what's going on here.

"It's just a bunch of people," you know, "going around, they seem like they know what they're doing."

And the reason why I bring that up as a point is you get hit from so many different directions whether that's text, phone, emails, social media, all these platforms, and leading back to the point of accessibility, you have to be engaged, you have to display a level of communication whether that's within your own department or outside of your walls.

And I've tried to display that, and at times, like everybody struggles with that.

You miss things, you're not as timely as you wanna be, but I've challenged myself since I came up to administration is to be as connected, communicated on the highest level possible and if you ask any of our firefighters, I think that that would probably be one of my stronger attributes is that I try to communicate very, very well.

- You know, if you look at our police chief, you look at you, you look at Jaime Harwood, the coroner, you all are accessible, and I think that's very important, especially in this time, in the United States, in general, coming off pandemic, goin' through everything that we go through, daily, but that media piece, you have to carve that out all the time, don't ya?

- You have to make it a priority, honestly, and I think that's what, (chuckles) and that's difficult to do, especially when you're working in the world of emergency services, so all the people that you just mentioned, knowing that this is a very, very high priority, you need to be in the public's eye.

They need to know who you are.

They need to know who the face of the department is.

I think that that's important and just listening to the community, they've relayed that same message.

How you do that, at times, can be extremely difficult because you're dealing with emergencies.

- Chief Echevarria talks about his, it's part of, really, his strategy, is he has to be that face, he wants to be that face.

He has to deflect things and take those hits and you're in the same boat, right?

- Yeah, absolutely, and I think I've looked up to Eric too from the standpoint that he came in to this, you know, from a leadership perspective a little bit sooner than me, but as I was sitting there as the assistant chief, I kinda watched the way he was moving and operating, to the point of, I kind of looked up to him.

He was in spaces that you need to be in, whether it's a platform like this or just basically being anywhere and accessible at all times is important to the community.

- So I always look at people in your position as CEOs.

And so people think of firefighters and they just think of fire.

- [Shawn Sollberger] Mmhmm.

- There's like 100 things that are under your purview of duties that you have, constantly and so not knowing when there's crisis, how do you, as a leader, know where to focus your time and energy in actually running the business because you still have to have a strategy, you still have to have processes put in place and you still have to have clean firehouses and accounting and everything.

- I think you have to rely on your staff heavily.

You have to surround yourself with good people and I'm fortunate enough to be, our command staff is small, it's five, and it stretches us very, very thin.

- Wow.

- Yeah, and so when talk about the worlds that we're in and regards to operations, that division chief is, he's the workhorse and Tony Cummings is a graduate of Peoria High as well, 1992, proud to say that, and we were classmates, but the chief of operations does just a crazy amount of work in regards to the stations, equipment and the personnel.

Nate Rice, who's in charge of prevention, he's in charge of all of our community risk reduction, all of our inspections, everything in that world, extremely difficult.

And then-- - That's hard.

- Yes, and so we could probably spend a good portion of a day just talking about prevention and our Prevention Bureau, getting back into the school systems, fire safety-- - Yeah.

- Smoke detector programs and all these things, but our last division is probably our most important and that's our training division.

And Rollin Tinley is just knocking it out of the park, so much so that we have outside agencies, outside fire departments that are wanting to send their firefighters to our training academy for them to train and that just goes to show you when you surround yourself with good people I think then, now, it gives me the ability to be able to get into these type of platforms and get into the areas where they need to be, as the CEO, as you stated.

I think sometimes you can get too caught up in the emergency services and responding to calls and that's a necessary thing.

You have to be seen by your firefighters as well, but there's other platforms in other areas that you have to be in.

So it's a constant tug-of-war, but if you spend too much time in one area as opposed to the other, you're kind of losing out.

- Yeah.

It's a constant juggle for ya-- - [Shawn Sollberger] Yeah, yep.

- How many firehouses are there in Peoria?

- We have 12 fire stations.

- And how are they located?

Like I know they're strategically located, but are they a certain mile apart, you know, how do you put them-- - That's kind of hard to quantify, yet you can answer that yes, in a real, easy, general sense, but the more complicated part is emergency response, you know, our response time.

And so that's from the time of receiving the 911 call, going through dispatch, hitting our tones in the fire stations, and then getting to the call.

We try, to the best of our ability, to do that within four minutes.

- So is the 911 call center, so I know it's based at AMT, then you have your, let's see, you have fire, police, ambulance, they're all coordinated, correct?

- Yes and no.

So we have our own ECC dispatch center.

- [Matt George] Oh, okay.

- Yeah, so which is-- - I didn't know that.

- So where the police station sits, the alley, kind of-- - Oh yeah.

- Sits between there, the old cop shop is what we call it, that's where ECC dispatch is at.

So we have a new ECC director and that's Brandon Blaney.

He'd probably be a great person to bring on the show-- - [Matt George] Bring 'em on.

- Yeah, he's new as well.

He's been with the city for some time, but he's new in that role.

And so all of those four entities, so AMT, police, fire, ECC, our own dispatch center all work together hundreds of times a day, you know, and how you coordinate that.

And we allude back to that original point of organized chaos.

- Yeah.

How many firefighters are there?

- Right now we have 178 firefighters, but when we hire these 11, through the Safer Grant, we'll be upwards to 187.

- Nice, and it's hard to hire people right now, just like any other business, correct?

- Yeah, it's extremely difficult.

A good example, our last recruiting class, our last testing cycle, we would generally have anywhere from 500 to 700 people apply.

We had 81.

(Matt Georget exhales) It's really a difficult time right now.

Now that being said, I try to think as positively as possible, we ended up with a hiring pool of 26.

So it started off as 81, got down to 26.

We've been able to fill all of our positions, so that's the positive side of that.

These 81 people that applied, they wanted to be firefighters.

- [Matt George] Okay.

- We do wanna see more people interested.

So we've increased our recruiting efforts.

We're working on a really good platform for a recruitment video and trying to get that out there.

So if anybody's ever had the pleasure of seeing what Boston, Philly, Atlanta, they put some really cool recruitment videos together, and so we were very fortunate.

We found a local videographer, new to the industry, very hungry, wanted to get his name out there.

So we're working with him on doing the same thing.

- Yeah.

So, you mentioned something earlier about getting back into schools, and I'm thinking that maybe, if you got back into the schools more, now it's post-COVID, you're doing some education that these kids can start dreaming again about being police officers and firemen and-- - Yeah, we're super excited about it.

I think a lot of people have seen Chief Echevarria's energy, my energy, and we're trying to, basically, bring those together.

We don't like being called The Wonder Twins even though that's been labeled a little bit, but bringing our energies together and getting into these spaces, whether that's the middle school, high school level, we're working with ICC, Bradley, so all the educational institutions getting in there.

So, I talked about Chief Nate Rice in regards to prevention.

Well, this is Fire Prevention Month, the month of October, and we, last year we had the ability to get into every single middle school, last year, and talk to every single student.

We were very excited about that.

We're gonna mirror that same thing this year and expand into the parochial system as well.

- And another guy, can't believe I forgot, Sheriff Watkins.

- Yes, yeah.

- Another new person, comin' in, same mentality as you guys, let's get out there, let's do good.

- Yep, and I think that they more that they see us and the more that they feel our energy and stuff like that, I think it's gonna lead towards recruitment.

So-- - I agree.

- I stole from Chief Echevarria and I know I bring his name up a lot, 'cause we're very like-minded.

You're always recruiting.

I could ask your camera guy if he's interested in being a firefighter.

So it's just, it's that important to us, getting the right people wanting to be involved in the community.

- You know what I hear a lot is why does the fire department go out on every wreck or 911 call, what's the answer to that?

- Yeah so, I love this talking point.

We've had this even at the highest levels, city council, like, "I don't understand," you know, "why does this big piece," you know, "red apparatus have to sit down on Ward Drive?"

A lot of these systems are by design.

We fall under Peoria area EMS, Dr. Matt Jackson, I'm sure you've had the pleasure of meeting him, and the system is set up the way it's set up.

We respond to certain calls, AMT responds to certain calls, and then sometimes, we respond together, and we review those on an annual basis on what calls we should be on, what calls we shouldn't be on, and so on down the line, whether that's police, fire and AMT.

So, sometimes people have asked a question too, you have a full arrest, someone's not breathing and they don't have a heartbeat.

Why does it take so many people?

We are so extremely proud of the fact that we are six times the national average in recovery rate on people who go into full arrest.

That's by design.

The reason why we have so many people there, we have what's called pit crews, CPR, and it is so highly effective and we have all these instruments and all these tools that we utilize to get a higher recovery rate than the rest of the nation, so, we love being in these platforms and talkin' about these type of things that everything that we do is by design.

- Yeah, if you think about it, you're saving lives and the argument on the other side is it costs money.

- Sure.

- It doesn't make sense.

- Mmhmm.

- So, you have lot of things that people don't really think about, you have hazardous materials and recently there's something here that a grain bin fell.

So, with the river, do you have, like, water rescue?

- We do.

We're pretty proud of the fact, I came on this job at a pretty unique time and we had had a hazard, or we do have a hazardous materials team, but when I first came on the job 24 years ago, our hazardous materials team was the only hazmat team south of I-80.

And so we've hung on to that for decades and continue to expand on that.

So we have a technical rescue team that deals with high-end goal trench rescue, structural collapse, confined space, and that technical rescue team is utilized on a weekly, monthly basis.

- [Matt George] Give an example of that.

- So (indiscernible) is a great example, so you have a structural collapse, you have an explosion and now you have leaning grain bins in all these confined spaces that were not there before.

Now they've been created by a blast.

You have to have specialized equipment, specialized training so that you can get into those voids and be able to search for hidden fires, the potential of occupants.

Technical rescue is such a highly sophisticated, highly trained group of people that we're very excited to talk about, but getting back to the Illinois River-- - [Matt George] That's kind of fun stuff.

- Yeah, so a lot of people don't realize the Illinois River is considered swift water because all they see is, you know, the top water, the undertoe, the undercurrent that's created, you know, by the lock and dams and things like that, it's a very strong current.

Zero visibility.

We've had an underwater rescue team in place since 1998 and very, highly skilled, highly trained.

We have three rescue boats and 30 underwater rescue divers.

- That is crazy.

- And so we call these specialty teams and one that we've just started getting into now is working with P.D.

They have what a lot of people would refer to as SWAT.

Here, locally, we refer to it as SRT, Special Response Team-- - Yeah, yeah.

- And we have tack medics that respond with P.D.

And so they look just like 'em.

They don't carry weapons, but if something would go sideways in a hot zone, we have paramedics that are on the scene with P.D.

So we're pretty excited about that as well.

- That's to my point, nobody knows what you really do.

They just think fires.

- Yep.

- Or they see you at a wreck.

- Yep.

And so I wanna change that.

And how I change that is this is a great platform to do that, but then, we even wanna get more intimate, we wanna be at the Homeowner's Association meetings, and just their-- - Yes, neighborhood association.

- Yeah.

- It's all those-- - Any platforms that we can get into and talking to the citizens and talking to the community so that they have a better understanding of what fire does.

'Cause this is generally what we hear, "I've never called 911, my house has never been on fire."

You know, "I've never been in a car wreck."

That's only the two things that they generally look at and we do so much more.

Our ALS program, we have 71 paramedics.

- Well, I wanna tell ya something that's just a personal story, just real quick, is when I was at Children's Home, there was a situation where your team came in and they were, not only the utmost professionals, but the empathy that was provided to my team was something special and I get to see it more than the average person in all the situations that I was in, but this situation was one of those moments that will never leave my head, and it was special, and it made my team feel at ease in a huge crisis moment, which they usually are in crisis anyway, but this was a level 10, which it's rarely a level 10, and I just wanted you to know, that empathy piece that your team has is special.

You're the chief for a reason.

I appreciate you comin' on.

This is a fun show.

I just wanna give credit to the men and women that are on your team and that support our community because you do a great job, Chief.

- I appreciate it and I do have to put a plug into our firefighters.

- Yep.

Well I appreciate it, thank you.

This is another episode of Business Forward.

(cheery, upbeat music) (cheery, upbeat music continues) (cheery, upbeat music continues) - Thank you for tuning into Business Forward, brought to you by PNC.

(upbeat, cheery music)