Telgian Holdings, Inc., is all about risk – anticipating it, assessing it, then preventing or at least reducing it.
From the relatively humble beginnings of a fire code development and fire-testing company started in San Diego by retired firefighter and Fire Marshal Bill Tomes in 1985, Telgian has grown into a safety Goliath headquartered near the I-10 and Elliot Road in Ahwatukee with earnings over $75 million.
Its 350 employees – roughly half in Arizona and the rest spread across 31 other states – provide services that protect some 50,000 schools, hotels, big stores, government buildings and other facilities across the U.S.
Those workers conduct 150,000 inspections annually, design sprinkler and other prevention systems, interpret building and fire codes, evaluate and analyze potential risks to facilities and provide fire safety, training and security services such as consulting on responding to active-shooter or other unlawful entry.
In other words, Telgian’s history pretty much reflects the Old English origins of the name it adopted in 2007: “spread out and grow.”
“’Telgian’ talks about who we are as a company,” said CEO James Tomes, the founder’s son. “Every service is a response to a customer’s request and we branched out and grew and added services to meet the customers’ needs.”
The grandson of a Detroit firefighter, Tomes has been a party to that growth ever since he joined his father in 1988 as an account executive when “we had five employees,” though in a few years he became chief financial officer.
As Bill Tomes continued growing the company with the help of now board Chairman Russ Leavitt, Telgian relocated in 2001 to Arizona, first settling in Chandler and eventually landing in 2015 in Ahwatukee, a convenient location for a workforce dominated by residents of Phoenix and East Valley communities.
Its Ahwatukee headquarters is home to the holding company and one of its two operating companies, Telgian Fire Safety; Its other operating company, Telgian Engineering and Consulting, is based in Atlanta.
Though Telgian “grew up with retail,” serving a wide variety of big-box and other stores, Tomes said, “Now we do everything – we do schools, heavy industry, power plants, airports. Right now, we do everything.”
Purely a service company, Telgian Fire Safety inspects, tests and manages the repairs to an array of fire protection equipment such as sprinklers, alarms and other prevention system components.
“We’re not trying to push a certain product on our client because we’re ‘manufacturing agnostic,’” Tomes explained, adding that the Atlanta operation does “all the high-level engineering and consulting and designing of all those systems.”
And it is pretty high-level stuff.
“It’s designing retinal scanners, controlled access into facilities,” Tomes said. “It’s also camera design – those types of things. So, one, you’re trying to control people that are coming into the building with normal course of business with internal scanner-controlled access into facilities. So, we’re trying to control people that are coming into the building during the normal course of business with internal scanners, fingerprint or facial recognition technology.”
Second, the company designs camera-fence systems and other “types of things that prevent unintended intrusion of the building.”
Telgian also helps companies and other institutions prepare for the possibility that someone might get past all that technology.
Its cadre of “security professionals, corporate security, former law enforcement” train clients in how to deal with intruders, particularly armed ones.
“Basically, what we specialize in is mitigating physical risk to people and facilities – fire security, terrorism, natural disasters – all those types of things. We don’t do cyber. We don’t do political risk. We don’t manage hazardous materials. It’s mostly directed towards physical risk to both the occupants of the building and infrastructure.”
Clients come to Telgian out of a desire for economic as well as physical survival, along with a desire to be compliant with any safety regulations, particularly fire codes.
“There’s an increased awareness of risk management” especially among corporations, Tomes explained, though he said the U.S., western European countries and Japan have had a particularly long tradition in risk prevention.
“Nobody wants their brand associated with a mass-casualty or catastrophic event,” he said. “I remember educating a CEO of a company in Mexico City. Mexico City does not require fixed fire protection and (the client was) building a million-square-foot distribution center and a giant industrial park.”
He said he explained the possible risks if the client relied solely on the fact that Mexico City has a fire department.
“I don’t really care as long as everyone’s safe, okay? Because we care about human life – that’s our thing. I was explaining to educate because we never try and scare people into making the right decision. I never come to a client and say ‘you should do this because it’s the code.’ We don’t operate that way.”
So, as he walked the client through the potential dangers of not having a sprinkler system and other safety equipment installed, Tomes said he asked, “Do you want your brand associated with a fire that 17 million people in the valley of Mexico City are going to see?”
The client replied, “no” and then ordered a full sprinkler system throughout the industrial park whether tenants wanted it or not.
Staying nimble in the world of risk protection means Telgian also in the last 20 years has developed services to meet the new and burgeoning threats of the 21st – like active shooters.
But the company also keeps a focus on the risks that natural disasters pose.
He noted how some global countries might centralize the manufacturing of a critical part or piece of their business in one plant.
“When you’re dealing with this intricate network of global supply chains, you’ve got to remember you’ve got to keep that plant functioning – whether you’re worried about a tidal wave, or an earthquake, fire, civil unrest, somebody doing damage to that plant. So, companies think in terms of protecting their assets. …But they also think about protecting their associates and ultimately their brand and market position.
But, Tomes added, despite the array of risks it tries to protect clients from, “our core services are in the area of fire-protection services. That was our initial offering when my father started the company.”
What about, then, wildfires as they become increasingly frequent and more menacing to suburban and urban communities and facilities?
Tomes suggested that trying to protect neighborhoods or businesses or even equipment like power lines from that threat is doable, but costly.
Calling the wildfire threat “an emerging area,” he noted that in some areas, particularly California, “you have communities built off all these canyonlands and stuff like that with dense fuel nearby. So, one of their strategies is to mitigate once a fire starts and it comes into it. But there’s also kind of an emerging technology around protecting major sources of ignition.”
Such protection involves technology that is so expensive “you really have to have state or federal funding,” he said, though he allows that HOAs comprising expensive seven-figure homes may one day consider investing in that kind of tech.
Moreover, he continued, the cost not only would involve the equipment and its installation but its maintenance as well. Hence, an HOA of high-dollar homes have to raise dues or a high-income community might have to raise taxes to pay that heavy cost.
But while studying such threats, Telgian keeps its eye on the ball that Tomes’ father got rolling.
“What we do on a core basis is we deal with companies and their infrastructure,” Tomes said, citing examples like “a company (that) has one plant that produces ball bearings for all its facilities or maybe they need to invest in a life-safety system to protect their employees.”
Besides, there are other dangers Telgian helps clients address.
“Think of a pharmaceutical storage facility,” Tomes said. “It could be a small building but have billions of dollars in inventory there. So not only do you worry about a fire happening there. What if an earthquake happens? Maybe there’s no danger to your facility but what if you lose power for an extended period of time? Do you have back-up power generation?
“It’s those types of things we look at. We look at clients even in the construction of a new facility. Where do you place that facility? You look at places to make sure that building is out of the floodplain or not near an active earthquake fault.”
Tomes isn’t all about dangers and preventing them, though.
Given that the Ahwatukee building has a large classroom as well as large lab space where devices are tested and customers are trained in their use, he’s lately been considering ways Telgian can give back to the community by partnering with schools.
As a member of the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, Tomes is exploring partnerships with both high schools and higher education institutions to train interested students in job skills.
“We’ve got an outstanding lab here,” he said. “And we are looking at ways to use that lab to give back to the community. We’re working through that in both a classroom setting and kind of hands-on settings.”
Information: telgian.com.
