Ep: 105: FC Eric Saylors, BC Kyle Andersen, BC Marcus Regan - Succession Planning

And I'm just super honored to be around them again.

And if I can... go back into the Wayback Machine of when I was thinking about this problem and then how to practically make a change.

One of the things that I bounced back and forth with my collaborator on this project was one, what would you have told yourself if you could have gone back 10, 15 years? And what guidance would you have told yourself knowing what you know now, right? Seeing what you've seen now in the fire service, in your fire department, the challenges that you face, what advice could you go back in time? So when my collaborator and I, who was Chief Nico King, And he supported me through this process a lot.

We looked at, okay, let's go back and look at ourselves when we were new captains in our early 30s, thinking tactics, thinking about how we get through doors, how we pull lines, how do we survive on a roof? How do we supervise employees and employees? get through the day, well, what type of things would we give ourselves to think about in the future of how this is actually going to roll out? Because so many of us don't understand what attrition looks like and what the long term looks like of our careers.

We tend to think about where we are right now.

So that was the beginning of this process.

And as we described in the previous podcast, we sent out an open invite to roughly 30 captains who were fit this category that we were looking for as a voluntary basis.

They came into a first meeting and we gave them three post-it notes.

One asked, you know, who's your top leaders in the agency? What's their strengths and weaknesses? And then what problems should they be solving now? We put them all up on the wall and everyone saw that, oh, well, here's the leaders.

They're pretty consistent.

Most of them are gone in the next five years.

here's the strengths and weaknesses.

Well, if you see that in them, you'll probably have some of them yourself.

So figure out how to shore up your weaknesses and leverage your strengths.

And the biggest problem you're looking at facing right now is probably going to be the same problem you're going to be seeing in the next 10 to 15 years.

So it was a consistent process.

And then we brought them in and we started reviewing some outside doctrines and books to talk about how to do this.

And the two gentlemen that I have with us today, part of this process, The great thing was that I had a lot of people to pick from because there was so many people in this process in the beginning and so many people that went through it.

I can say with confidence just about every chief in the Sacramento Fire Department now, except for one or two exceptions that have been around, were part of this process.

You look back and you look at the battalion chiefs and the battalion chiefs on the current list and a lot of the assistant chiefs that came through this process.

So what I have, who I have with me today is I have Kyle Anderson, who's a battalion chief.

He was a captain of mine when I was a BC and then a captain when I came up as an executive chief.

And then I have Marcus Regan, who also was a captain of mine when I was a battalion chief.

And he's come up now as a battalion chief.

And he worked with me when I was an executive chief as well.