Manufacturer’s Spotlight Chris Mc Loone
Performance Advantage Company (PAC) was founded by Dick Young, seen by many as a visionary in the fire service. During his time leading a fire apparatus manufacturer, Young identified a need in the industry for equipment mounting components for fire apparatus. As he transitioned out of the fire truck business, he founded PAC to provide equipment mounting options for not only fire apparatus end users but other industries as well. I recently caught up with Tom Trzepacz, PAC’s vice president of sales and customer relations, to talk about how the company started, some of its products, and what makes PAC tool mounts unique.
CM: Provide a brief history of Performance Advantage Company.
TT: Performance Advantage Company, or PAC as it’s well known, is over 30 years old. We got our start with our founder Dick Young. It evolved out of Young Fire Apparatus when he was building fire trucks and selling tools and equipment through that. His biggest need was for tool mounting. There really wasn’t a lot out there. He was purchasing some and fabricating the other stuff. When he hung up his hat with that company, he made it his goal to come up with efficient tool mounting, which he did. Here we are, 30 years later, still doing what he envisioned and expanding on that and coming up with effective tool and equipment mounting for the fire apparatus and other industries.
CM: What makes PAC’s equipment mounting options unique?
TT: We have a vast array of brackets as well as our tool mounting solutions. When you use our extruded aluminum or tool boards, we use a channel insert that you can mount the brackets to so that you’re never drilling into your tool board. It goes in on the face of the board. You don’t have to put it in from either end, and it’s easily adjustable by end users, dealers, and distributors. When it comes to the end users, firefighters are always changing their tools and equipment, always buying something new. With our system, you can actually remove the bracket, change it, move it, put a new one in there, and you’re not damaging the tool board. However, you don’t have to use our tool boards to use the brackets. You can easily put the brackets on any tool board out there, or right through the side wall of a truck, or anything like that. Really, the whole system sets us apart from a lot of the other ones out there.
CM: Do you have any new products you’d like to highlight?
TT: We have a 6-inch Super Flex, which is going to be another mount for cylindrical objects that will go around SCBA bottles, SCUBA tanks, water cans, 10-pound extinguishers, etc. We also sell it as a kit with some aluminum to make it for an SCBA mount in a compartment or for fire extinguishers.
We have a PAC Strut mount using the same materials. It’s a hanging bracket that you can use for D-handle tools, hard suction, hose packs. We also have a Multi Mount HD kit: two L brackets and a strut with some reinforcement in it, allowing you to affix our brackets for long tools, or single tools. You can put up to three or four brackets on each of these Multi Mount kits to maximize compartment space.
CM: How do you see equipment mounting evolving for fire apparatus in the future?
TT: We have a very good product development team, and we meet every other week to try to enhance our current line, come up with new lines, and look to the future. One of the biggest struggles is the way tools and equipment are changing and evolving so frequently. For us to keep up with that is tough. So, we try to keep that generic approach and stay ahead of the industry standards as far as some testing and requirements.
It’s all about relationships. Sometimes we’ll go to a show and we’ll be surprised because we hadn’t heard about a new tool or an upgrade on a certain rescue tool. A lot of it is feedback from dealers, distributors, OEMs, and certainly end users.
We really try to look into the future. One of our jobs at FDIC is just walking the show floor, seeing what’s out there, seeing what’s new and different, and what we can do with some of those things that we know we’re going to get phone calls on for mounting.
CM: What keeps you awake at night?
TT: You know, with being a firefighter, it is really the uncertainty in the industry. Wearing both hats, you worry about where we’re going as a volunteer fire service, where our staffing comes from, and how we’re going to keep doing the jobs we’re doing. On the industry side, you see that there are going to be fewer and fewer fire departments out there. That will eventually affect us. We try to support volunteer fire departments and the career staffs. But, there are fewer people who want to do that on both sides of the fence.
