Company name: PSTrax
Email: marketing@pstrax.com
1. Where did your company name originate from?
PSTrax simply stands for “Public Safety Tracking System.”
2. What was the inspiration behind starting your company?
PSTrax was founded by Scott Bergeron and Cliff Long in 2009. The idea was born shortly after Scott was approached by his daughter, Nicole, a firefighter-paramedic in Colorado, with the idea to design a system for truck checks.
At the time, fire departments were still using paper to do their daily truck and equipment checks. Years later, most departments are still using paper, or worse, software that’s clunky and ineffective, and slows down the crews.
Scott and Cliff decided that software alone doesn’t cut it. Fire departments needed expert service combined with flexible software that could be spec’d to their unique requirements. Thus, PSTrax was born. The system was originally built for Blackhawk Fire Department in Colorado which is still a client partner today.
3. What is your signature product and how does it work?
What started as a system for truck checks has evolved into the leading system for operations checks – consolidating checks for vehicles, SCBA, PPE, critical assets, stations, inventory and narcotics – into a proven system that is easy to use and custom-configured for each department. Today, PSTrax’s cloud-based program is used by thousands of crews every day across the United States, Canada and Australia.
4. Why do you believe your products are essential to the FireRescue community?
If PSTrax can help make the small tasks an agency has to complete easier, so they can focus on more important things, we’ve achieved our goal. PSTrax takes the work out of checks. Our platform can manage inventories, handle maintenance tasks and create robust reports that assist in supply ordering, budgeting, lifecycle monitoring and more.
5. What has been the biggest challenge your company has faced?
As we worked through the various needs of the departments requiring our help, we quickly learned that there is no single checks solution to rule them all. Every agency we visited did things differently when it came to checks, and we found that an out-of-the-box solution wouldn’t cut it for our customers and what needed to be accomplished. That’s why, even to this day, PSTrax prides itself on being a truly unique platform, in that we craft a solution that works best for each department, rather than expecting agencies to work around ours. This shrinks the learning curve agencies would expect from a new operations system and offers immediate buy-in to the users, as they are as much a part of creating their own system as we are in making the platform for it.
6. What makes your company unique?
The most unique thing about PSTrax in this space is that we remain mission focused. We are and will remain a privately owned company offering a stand-alone, automated check system that works independently of other operations management software solutions. We do not answer shareholders; we answer our customers. Our focus has always been, and will continue to be, a company committed to superior customer service, providing continual enhancements based on our customers’ feedback and evolving industry reporting needs. Simply put, what is best for our customers is what is best for us, and we want to reassure you that PSTrax is not open to purchase or acquisition.
7. What do your customers like best about you and your products?
Time and again we hear our customers comment on how quickly we can on-board them to our platform. Once on our platform, customers say they now see accountability amongst the crews, aligned processes, a better communication system that does not require the use of sticky notes and, best of all, we provide a world-class experience, second to none, to our customers during their time with PSTrax.
8. What is the most rewarding part of serving the first responder community?
The best thing about providing solutions to first responders is knowing that we’ve made a small difference to a niche group of people who work tirelessly, putting their lives at risk, to help others. In a small way, it’s our way of saying “thank you for what you do,” to take something off their plates.
9.Do you support any charitable organizations within public safety/community?
PSTrax, through its charitable organization the PSTrax Foundation, recently announced that we are now a platinum sponsor for Revital Colorado. Revital Colorado is a non-profit organization that brings a proactive approach to serving those who serve us – first responders. They provide support and encouragement through a variety of services that revitalize mind, body, and spirit to the folks on the frontline, including firefighters, paramedics and police officers.
10. Is there any fun fact or trivia that you’d like to share about you or your company?
PSTrax strives to trade patches with the departments we sign on. Until this year, our team painstakingly pinned each these patches onto the backdrop of our booth at shows. To date, we have more than 300 patches from all over North America and Australia and continue to work to collect more for permanent display in our headquarters in Littleton, Colorado.
11. What’s next for your company? Any upcoming new projects or initiatives?
We’re always looking at ways we can improve our product and bring more functionality to the agencies who can benefit most from our offering. We’ve been seeing some pretty unique use-cases recently and they certainly have our development team’s gears working. You never know what PSTrax will bring to the table in the future.