As we ring in the new year (its already March!), the staff at Emergency Management Services International (EMSI) have an additional reason to celebrate…being in business for 25 years! Since its inception in 2000, EMSI has played a significant role in building capacity across all levels of government and within the private sector, enabling them to prepare for, plan, train, exercise, and respond to emergencies of any cause, size, or complexity. Meanwhile, the demand for these services has grown on a global scale as incidents such as 9/11 terror attacks (2001), Hurricane Katrina (2005), the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (2010), and the COVID 19 pandemic (2020) pushed response capabilities past their limits and to search for viable solutions. Today, EMSI employs a vast network of real-world tested, large-scale incident-experienced, subject matter experts to deliver a comprehensive all-hazards spectrum of incident management services. In fact, in 2024, EMSI delivered 107 Incident Command System (ICS) courses in nine different countries, supported 22 exercises, and sent response expertise to seven real world responses! Quite the global mission profile for a minority and service-disabled, veteran-owned small business from Culpeper, Virginia.
Recently, I was able to sit down with Ron Cantin, CEO of EMSI to get his perspective on what 25 years in business means, how the milestone was accomplished, and what is planned for celebrating the achievement in 2025.
Deptula: Ron, thanks for sitting down with me to get your thoughts on EMSI’s big milestone this year – being in business for 25 years. This is your 18th year as the CEO and while that is a milestone itself, can you describe what it means to you to lead EMSI to this great achievement?
Cantin: A few words come to mind right away, like gratitude, humility, hard work, relationships, professionalism, and…
Deptula: What about lagniappe?
Cantin: Ha Ha, yes of course lagniappe has its place, but let’s talk about that at the end, ok? So, yeah, being a part of how EMSI has evolved, thrived, and remained relevant over the past 25 years has been amazing to see. We are very particular about bringing the best response professionals across industry and government, with decades of experience, to our team at EMSI which helps us remain a leader among our peers in this business. What started out with a single contract with the U.S. Coast Guard to build their ICS training and qualification program expanded quickly across industries, government, and around the world. I certainly feel a responsibility to do this work the right way, which I learned from EMSI’s founder, Chuck Mills, when he told me to ask yourself, “why does EMSI need to exist?”. The answer is revealed from decades of response experiences, working with hundreds of clients, in the US and around the world, that continued to show great demand for professional incident response services. And that demand still exists today, if not more so. I can honestly say that ICS has become a standard global system today because of the work we’ve done.
Deptula: I want to touch on a point you brought up about the people that work for EMSI. With the successes you described, what does that say about the people that work for you at EMSI?
Cantin: Well, it starts with knowing the human capacities required to thrive and succeed in this dynamic work and realize that our teams continue to be quite amazing. I think we have about 300 years of combined complex incident response experience among our staff, which is an extraordinary resource for EMSI and our clients. I make sure of their ability to relate to our clients’ needs and have them step into a classroom or a chaotic situation and bring order to it. Again, many of our team members have attained recognized federal, state, local or industry ICS-position qualifications. And, with our ability to put the vest on with our clients and work side-by-side with them on incidents or exercises gives us the opportunity to coach and mentor, showing them insights that collateral-duty incident managers don’t typically see and that’s a big key, I think. We help them understand and execute the fundamentals, which is where it all starts there for most of our clients. We help them to become good at the fundamentals but then help them connect the dots by applying that knowledge with an incident management team. Our clients seem to like our approach as EMSI has never lost one. That’s a testament to our people. You know it all starts with our people and as I said, we have been so fortunate to have the best response professionals in the world.
Deptula: It seems that the organizations that have adopted and institutionalized ICS into their business practices have made contributions to its’ doctrine and application. EMSI has been one of those organizations to drive innovation within the Incident Management community. How has EMSI contributed to the principal of an “all-hazards” ICS?
Cantin: I got about a half a day’s worth of thoughts on that topic, but to go back to the beginning when EMSI found itself right off the bat with our first contract (U.S. Coast Guard) there really wasn’t an all-hazard model out there. My first ICS training courses were held at the National Wildland Fire Coordination Group (NWCG) in Missoula, Montana. They saw this Coast Guard guy in the class amongst all these wildland firefighters and they’re looking at us like what in the world are you doing here! We had to learn somewhere, right? And so if you go all the way back to the 1990’s, NWCG had the only model ICS training program. EMSI, with many Type 1 Wildland Fire Incident Commanders, then took that foundation and created the first real all-hazard model, long before FEMA was involved in ICS. We had begun to build all the ICS courses with this all-hazard concept before we built all of the same for the Coast Guard. Eventually, some watershed events such as 9/11 and Deepwater Horizon pushed the all-hazard approach to DHS and FEMA. Sort of amazing really, but the ICS all-hazard model is so effective for managing incidents and planned events, its proliferation was inevitable. So EMSI has been there from the very beginning and there’s nobody better on the planet to be right smack in the middle of this than us, in my opinion. I do feel that we (EMSI) maintain a deep responsibility to the system itself and want to maintain the integrity of the system while we help it evolve in the right way.
Deptula: So lastly, I wanted to know what we have planned in celebration of this milestone.
Cantin: We are letting our clients, and the public know about the achievement though various social media channels. We want to continue to share our insights on incident response through our online newsletter and blog. We may have some branding changes to showcase the milestone on our website, clothing, coins, etc. We may also come up with a few more special ways to share the achievement with friends and family. Mostly, we are using the milestone to refresh our communication with all those that have been a part of this success, such as our enduring clients and supporting organizations.
To learn more about us, visit EMSI History – EMSI
