Leadership isn't theory when the clock is running.
Derek spent years in the South Hill Volunteer Fire Department, working up to lieutenant and later serving as an instructor, teaching leadership inside the department. He also pursued EMS education, attending EMT training, out of the same pull toward being useful on accident and fire scenes. He does not sell any of this. It is simply where he learned to make decisions with incomplete information, under pressure, with real consequences.
What fire taught me about business.
People assume firefighting is about training your body to run into danger. That’s part of it. But the part that actually changed how I think, the part that shows up every single day in how I build businesses now, has nothing to do with courage. It’s this.
No two scenes are ever the same, even when they look identical.
Take a car wreck with someone trapped inside. From the road, every one of those calls looks like the same problem. It isn’t. One time the safest move is cutting the roof straight off. Another time the roof is the only thing holding the structure of the car together, so you go through the A pillar and B post instead and leave the roof alone. Another time the car is resting in a way that if you cut anything before you stabilize it, it shifts and crushes the person you’re trying to save, so first you’re lifting with airbags and cribbing it in place before a single tool touches metal. Same call type. Three completely different right answers. You don’t get to run yesterday’s solution. You have to read this scene, right now, in the first sixty seconds, or the outcome changes.
Structure fires taught me the same lesson from a different angle. A house fire and a commercial fire are not variations on the same event, they’re different animals entirely, because what’s actually burning changes everything about how it behaves. Wood frame construction burns predictably for a while and then, once trusses and engineered lumber are involved, it can fail fast and with almost no warning, which is why so much of modern fire training is built around recognizing collapse indicators before they happen, not after. Commercial and industrial fires change the equation again depending on what’s stored inside. A fire fed by ordinary combustibles behaves nothing like a fire fed by flammable liquids, and both behave nothing like a fire feeding on an oxidizer, which doesn’t need outside oxygen to keep burning at all, it carries its own. I found that out directly. The fertilizer warehouse fire I fought in July of 2024 wasn’t a fire we were ever going to slow down with water and manpower the way you can on a typical structure fire, because the fuel itself was generating its own reaction. Every assumption you’d bring from a normal house fire was wrong the moment you applied it there.
That’s the actual lesson, and it’s the one I didn’t fully appreciate until I was years into building businesses. Most consultants show up with a playbook and try to make the business fit the playbook. I show up assuming I don’t yet know what I’m looking at, because I learned that lesson the hard way, more than once, with real consequences if I got it wrong. The business that looks like the last one rarely is. What’s actually fueling the problem, the real load bearing issue underneath the visible one, changes everything about the right move. Cookie cutter thinking gets people hurt on a fire scene. It just quietly kills results in a business.
You don’t get credit for knowing last year’s answer. You get results for correctly reading what’s actually in front of you, fast, and being willing to throw out the standard approach the second the situation tells you to.
Years on the line.
Firefighter to lieutenant
Served for years with the South Hill Volunteer Fire Department, working up to the rank of lieutenant.
Fire service instructor
Taught leadership and decision making inside the department, training others to hold a scene.
EMS training
Pursued EMS education alongside the fire service work, attending EMT training driven by wanting to be more use on accident and fire scenes.
Move Over Law advocate
Proposed keeping the totaled truck as a public awareness centerpiece, and donated the trailer through Hazelwood Insurance Group so it could travel.
The crash that started a campaign.
A vehicle traveling northbound on Interstate 85 failed to move over for emergency vehicles already working a scene. It struck the chief's truck, causing significant damage, and ended up lodged underneath one of South Hill's fire trucks. Derek and other members of the department had to extricate the driver from the vehicle. Had that driver moved over, none of it happens.
Days later he was still thinking about it. What stayed with him was how exposed people are while they work on America's roadways, and how routinely drivers pass them without slowing. So he took an idea to Chief Michael Vaughan: don't scrap the totaled pickup. Keep it. Make it the centerpiece of a campaign about distracted driving.
The chief agreed. Derek donated a trailer through Hazelwood Insurance Group so the truck could travel and the story could be told in more than one place. Since then it has been shown at local fairs, area fire department events, and the Virginia Fire and Rescue Conference. In October 2023 it stood alongside AAA Mid-Atlantic, Drive Smart Virginia and VDOT as Virginia unveiled new Move Over Law signage.
Interstate 85, the morning of May 15, 2022. Click any photo to open it.
Two jobs, one blind spot.
Derek has spent most of his adult life making sure people carry the coverage to protect what they have. He has also spent years running into scenes as a volunteer firefighter. Both jobs put him in front of the same tragedies from opposite ends, and both made the same gap obvious: the Move Over Law is promoted by law enforcement, by emergency responders, even by insurance carriers, and drivers still do not follow it.
The trailer
Donated by Hazelwood Insurance Group so the wrecked truck could be hauled from event to event rather than sitting in a yard.
Where it has been shown
Local fairs, area fire department events, and the Virginia Fire and Rescue Conference.
December 8, 2023
Eighteen months later, a Jeep crossed into a closed lane at speed on the same interstate and struck the engines working a tractor trailer fire. Derek pulled Chief Vaughan into the gap between them and the tanker as it came through. Damage to that engine alone ran fifty to sixty thousand dollars.
On scene.
Sixty one photographs from the department, shuffled fresh on every visit. Click any one to open it full size.
The 9/11 stair climb.
