By Katelyn Polantz
The Roanoke Times
ROANOKE, Va. — The business of building firetrucks is a science and an art, a balance of marrying engineers’ blueprints with shiny red (or yellow, white, gold or green) paint.
M&W Fire Apparatus has mastered the techniques, and business is good. The Vinton fire and emergency truck manufacturer isn’t feeling the same penny pinch that’s pressing fire departments nationwide this year, said owner Raymond Plunkett, 42.
The company’s sales are up 41 percent this year compared with last, a trend almost completely counter to industrywide sales. Total apparatus orders in the United States are down 35 percent this year, said Dan Reese, president of Fire and Emergency Manufacturers and Services Association.
“Each year, we build a couple more trucks and hire a couple more people,” Plunkett said. He’s added six employees since January, pushing the total staff to 30. Five moonlight as volunteer firefighters.
In this business, hyper-competition between manufacturers makes up much of a day’s work, and M&W’s staff spend much of their energy winning bids.
Selling firetrucks requires long hours and time-consuming sales tactics, such as visiting the firehouse late at night and spending one-on-one time with chiefs and firefighters, Plunkett said.
The company, a small, niche player, hustles for deals with municipal fire departments and volunteer companies in Virginia and other Eastern states. It’s the only firetruck manufacturer in the region, besides a KME Fire Apparatus shop in Roanoke that builds trucks’ aerial ladders. A few national players — such as Pierce Manufacturing Inc., which holds about 40 percent market share in fire and emergency apparatus sales — sell to big-ticket firehouses such as New York City or Miami-Dade.
Nationally, fire departments are cutting equipment budgets this year, making them unable to buy new trucks. More than 88 percent of about 2,300 U.S. fire departments said their budgets have decreased because of the economy, according to a FEMSA survey.
But the small departments that buy from M&W have kept their orders on track, Plunkett said.
“Nationally there’s been a drop-off this year, although we haven’t seen it,” he said. “As bad as it sounds, fires still occur. Firetrucks still get used a lot.”
Pumpers are the majority of M&W firetrucks sold. Fully built, they weigh up to 52,000 pounds, reach 34 feet long and require three or four gallons of primary-color paint.
“They’re the ones you see screaming around city streets,” Plunkett said. M&W also builds rescues, the most expensive vehicle; these emergency trucks transport the Jaws of Life and other equipment used at accident scenes and act as a “toolbox on wheels,” he said.
A super-sized garage — “Garage? More like a zoo,” manufacturing manager Joseph “Junior” Wright said — had five of its seven bays filled with parts and trucks on Oct. 12, including a new rescue vehicle valued at $528,000 and a pumper at $404,000. Sixteen employees — all men — weld, paint and tweak the trucks. The company assembles five basic truck models, modifying them to accommodate each customer’s needs.
“Building a truck is analogous to building a house,” Plunkett said. “It’s easy to lay the foundation; the devil’s in the details.”
Owning M&W wasn’t the first time Plunkett played with fire. The electrical engineer and businessman had served as manufacturing manager at Kidde, a fire extinguisher manufacturer in Mebane, N.C.
Returns from investing in stocks and mutual funds — “just dumb luck,” he said — put him in the position to buy the company from its namesakes, Barry Mays and Doug Widner, and other partial owners seven years ago. To date, Plunkett has never suited up in firefighting gear. “But I know how to build them, and how the stuff works,” he said.
In his upstairs office, Plunkett has covered a dry-erase board in sketches of trucks, dimensions and equations.
The company takes about nine months to pull a truck together, from a customer signing on the dotted line to driving the truck away from M&W’s manufacturing floor, past a junk yard and out of Vinton.
Copyright 2009 The Roanoke Times