Pat Sullivan

I'm an odd mix on paper. NICET II fire alarm contractor. Navy IT before that. A pilot, with a bachelor's in aviation. And the kind of kid who wrote his first program in high school and never really stopped. FireDeck is what happened when all of that pointed at the same problem.

The trade came first. I have spent about 12 years in fire alarm, most of it at American Fire & Security. NICET II. I have pulled wire, sat for the panel programming, walked AHJ inspections, and spent more nights than I want to admit assembling submittal packages at the kitchen table after the actual install work was done.

That last part is what wore on me. The field work is the job. The paperwork is the tax. Battery calculations, voltage drop down the longest run, a device matrix that matches the panel, cut sheets for every part number, and a cover sheet formatted the way your local reviewer likes it. None of it is hard on its own. It is just slow, repetitive, and easy to get a number wrong on at 11pm when you are tired.

The difference is I could actually do something about it. Between the Navy IT years and a lifetime of writing code, building software is not a foreign language to me — it is just another system to take apart and understand. So I built FireDeck. The idea was simple: take the job inputs once and let software produce the AHJ-ready package, calcs and matrix and cut sheets included, in roughly one click. Not to replace the engineer's judgment, just to kill the busywork around it. You still review everything before it goes out the door. The tool does the assembly, you do the thinking.

Once the jobs lived in FireDeck, it made sense to run the rest of the shop from the same place. So it grew: a field app the techs use for inspections and work orders, invoicing and recurring monitoring contracts, receipts and reconciliation, an AI that answers the phones, and an assistant that drafts the email and preps the billing so I am not doing it at 11pm anymore. A lot of that is not fire-specific and works for any trade — but fire alarm is where it started, and it is who I build for first.

I want to be straight about what this is. FireDeck is a calculation and document tool, not a stamp and not a substitute for a qualified professional. Codes vary, and so do reviewers. Always check your AHJ for local amendments and submittal format before you rely on anything an automated tool spits out. I hedge on this for a reason: life safety is not a place to guess.

The blog is where I write down the things I had to learn the slow way. NFPA 72 battery calcs, voltage drop math, the small cover-sheet details that get a package kicked back. Real anonymized numbers from real jobs where I can. If it saves you one rejected submittal, it was worth writing.

If you want to reach me, I read [email protected] myself.