‘Punching way over our weight’

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This article was published 23/01/2025 (270 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s no toilet, sink, mirror or towels in the powder room at Bison Fire Protection, but there are a lot of fire extinguishers.

Dry chemical extinguishers are filled with powder that smothers fires by forming a barrier between burning materials and the source of oxygen. “The powder room” is where staff refill between 700 and 800 extinguishers each month.

There are fire extinguishers everywhere in the warehouse space of Bison’s office at the eastern edge of Winnipeg.

“Us running out of fire extinguishers is like McDonald’s running out of hamburgers,” says Rob Read, founder and CEO. “It just doesn’t happen.”

Headquartered at 35 Boys Rd. in the Rural Municipality of Springfield, Bison provides protection solutions across fire alarm and sprinkler systems, fire extinguishers, servicing and inspections.

The company employs more than 70 people who work out of offices in Winnipeg, Thompson, Brandon and Regina. There are additional Bison employees living and working in Saskatoon. Read sees a bricks-and-mortar location in that city on the horizon.

Today, Read is the head of a business that grosses more than $12 million annually, but the 59-year-old got his start in the powder room at a different fire protection company in 1991. He moved on from filling extinguishers to becoming a technician making service calls, eventually working his way up to management roles.

In 2001, he and a partner founded Bison with a handful of employees. The company got its start supplying, inspecting and servicing fire extinguishers in commercial kitchens. Bison began offering sprinkler systems when customers started asking for them.

Eventually, the company added fire suppression systems — which are designed to detect and extinguish flames, often before they can spread and cause significant damage or harm — to its offerings.

Bison competes against large businesses in major centres like Toronto and Vancouver, supplying and installing top-tier products from respected brands like Siemens and Ansul.

“We’re punching way over our weight,” Read says. “That’s something we’re pretty proud of.”

Bison spends a lot of money, he adds, training its employees. He references a proverb from the business world in which a leader at a company asks, “What if we train them and they leave?” and the leader’s colleague responds, “What if we don’t train them and they stay?”

“(If I were the customer) I’d rather have the guy that walks through the door and knows what he’s talking about,” Read says. “You can’t be an expert in everything and there’s always going to be that opportunity where we say, ‘I will have to get back to you,’ but I want that not to be the norm.”

Read and his employees take pride in doing excellent work. From a restaurant in downtown Winnipeg to a trapper’s shack near Churchill, Read has run into customers all over the province and he always wants the interactions to be pleasant.

“I’ve got to make it from the front door of the arena to my seats at the Jets game without an angry customer coming over and yelling at me in front of my daughter,” he says. “I’d rather they give me a high-five and a ‘How are you doing?’ than a ‘What the hell are you doing?’”

In the fire protection industry, lives are at stake — and Read is well-aware of that.

“It’s something that I talk to my staff about all the time: what we do here is we save people’s lives, we save their jobs, we save their businesses. We have a direct effect on someone’s life.”

From 2012 to 2019, Bison was named one of Canada’s top 500 fastest-growing companies by Canadian Business. Halfway through that run, in 2016, Read bought out his business partner.

He credits his employees for Bison’s success.

“I may be the face of it, but I’m not doing the work,” he says. “I’m the guy that takes the risk and they’re the guys that make it happen and make the magic.”

In 2023, Read sold Bison to Onyx Group for an undisclosed amount.

Founded in 1988 and based in Mississauga, Ont., Onyx employs more than 900 people who service more than 30,000 locations across Canada.

The deal allowed Onyx to have a presence in the fire protection industry in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, which it didn’t have previously, Read says.

Meanwhile, Bison received access to Onyx’s operating system, allowing the company to offer customers a higher level of support.

Read has done well for himself and feels a responsibility to help others. The experience he and his wife had in 2007 adopting two children from Ukraine further fuels his altruism.

He belongs to the Business Council of Manitoba and has served on the boards of the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce, Aboriginal Chamber of Commerce and Canadian Fire Alarm Association’s Manitoba chapter.

He’s been president of the Manitoba Fire Extinguisher Association and has supported charitable organizations and events that include Siloam Mission, the Teddy Bears’ Picnic and Winnipeg Folk Festival.

“The city’s been good to me and I think it’s my responsibility, or any business owner’s responsibility, to give back, whether it’s time, money, expertise (or) whatever that may be,” he says.

In the past, Read has shared the things he’s learned in business on Bison’s Facebook page and YouTube channel. One of the biggest pieces of advice he has for aspiring entrepreneurs is: “Hire your weakness.”

“There are three areas of business that matter: accounting, sales and operations,” he says. “You’re not going to be good at all three. You’re probably not going to be good at two of them. But you’re probably really, really good at one of them.

“So you figure out which one is the next most important (and) hire for that. And when you’ve built beyond that, hire the next one,” Read says. “There’s nothing wrong with having people in the business that know more about (their area of expertise) than you do.

“That’s not a weakness.”

aaron.epp@freepress.mb.ca