Xtreme Monster Sports | Volunteer Firefighter Recruiting Campaign

My name is Paul Breaud, I am the owner of Xtreme Monster Sports Inc (XMSI). XMSI is a Monster Truck entertainment company with five monster trucks currently entertaining around the world. One of our more popular trucks is BackDraft, which you might guess is a fire truck. There is also a BackDraft monster ride truck within our stables for which we entertain the masses by giving rides on an actual monster truck.

I’m excited to be able to offer my companies involvement in efforts of recruiting, awareness, prevention, and acknowledgement of our local fire departments and the heroes within our emergency services organizations.

With traveling all around the country I have been hearing recruiting advertisements for the volunteer fire companies. I contacted Senator Hill from Pennsylvania to do some research on the subject and was taken back a little of the alarming numbers. In 1970 Pennsylvania had 360,000 volunteer fire fighters, 2014 it dropped to 50,000, and in 2017 had dropped to 36,000. As these numbers decline so does the increase of financial burden on the governments and tax payers to provide emergency services.

Our program is directed toward getting young people engaged into the fire company at first. The monster truck industry continues to grow year after year with millions of fans. The beautiful thing is that our industry attracts fans of all ages, not just the young adults. What a great opportunity to reach a wide range of ages and large number of people with recruiting and awareness messages.

The idea is to attract people to the fire house and related events to educate and get them excited about getting involved in the volunteer emergency services. Our teams travel all over the country with the opportunity to display BackDraft at fire companies, by this, attracting the community to visit the fire house and provide the opportunity to meet and greet the fire fighters, as well as educate and recruit. The idea would be to coordinate the events far enough in advance to be able to advertise and prepare to deliver a positive message. Displays can be formatted specifically to help the local companies deliver the information and make the most of the event. Incentives could be offered, we always meet the public and offer picture and autograph opportunities to our fans, possibly a raffle for newly signed recruits to receive free tickets to a show we are preforming at, or honorary crew members at a show is possible. The object is to engage and excite as many people as possible to get involved with the fire company. My experience with recruiting has been the more people that a message can be delivered to the more recruits that are signed up, it’s a numbers exercise.

Involvement from the NVFC would be vital in making this a successful campaign. NVFC being the subject matter experts in this area, providing information and a structure for said event would take the burden off the local company to figure it out on their own. Although not necessary, coordinating or providing contact information for possible fire companies to hold an event would be helpful.

Additionally my goal is to contact the Fallen Fire Fighters Assoc. with a plan on dedicating one of the panels on BackDraft to honor fallen firefighters. This is a first step for us to do whatever we can to help all aspects of the emergency services industry.

I understand that the NVFC is a non-profit organization and there are expenses on your end as well as mine for such a campaign. With an agreement to work together on such a project I would like to approach fire service providers with our plan and your endorsement to obtain sponsorships. This task I would take on myself and would appreciate any information you could provide me that would help, such as companies, contacts, statistic, etc.

This is a start to a unique idea in hopes of building something really special. I have a lot of ideas for the monster truck, hauler, web site, and social media to attract a lot of attention for the cause. The more support from organizations such as NVFC, NFPA, NFFA, etc., the bigger the message becomes.