Fire Rover was named one of Crain’s Best Places to Work in 2026. We are especially proud of this recognition because it comes directly from our employees, who answered a confidential survey about what it is actually like to work at Fire Rover.
Fire protection is an industry where trust is built slowly, through installations that run for years and are monitored by real people dedicated to providing around-the-clock surveillance for the businesses we serve. A recognition that starts with employee feedback says something about whether that same standard holds inside the building and in the relationships we build with our team each day.
Here is what the list measures, why the honor matters to a company like ours, and what it reflects about the team behind the technology.
Inside the Fire Rover Best Places to Work Honor
Crain’s produces its Best Places to Work program in partnership with Best Companies Group, an independent research firm that has specialized in workplace assessment since 2004. Companies can’t buy a spot on the list or make their own case for why they belong.
The evaluation runs in two parts. The first is an employer questionnaire covering practices, policies, and benefits including paid time off, health coverage, how internal communication works, and how advancement is structured. The second, and the more heavily weighted of the two parts, is a confidential survey completed by employees themselves, asking about leadership, culture, working relationships, and whether people feel their contributions actually make a difference.
This result matters to us because it comes directly from our employees. Benefits can be listed on paper, but a sincere endorsement from the team is something a company cannot create without putting in the work.
Recognizing the People Behind the Technology
Industrial fire protection is usually described in terms of equipment, and Fire Rover’s systems have to hold up in genuinely unfriendly conditions like heat, dust, vibration, weather, and more. What sets us apart is the live human verification behind every system that we install.
Our in-house engineers configure each system to meet the specific needs of our customers. Our field teams handle service and support, while trained operators monitor live thermal feeds 24/7, distinguishing actual hotspots from harmless reflections, rising steam, and other false alarms.
That combination of technology and human expertise is central to how Fire Rover works. Our systems are built by technicians in Farmington Hills, Michigan, and supported by a team of people who know how to recognize a real threat and act on it. That confirmation is what our team is built around, and a recognition based on employee feedback is a direct reflection of the work we do every day.
The Values That Define the Fire Rover Culture
Our values are worth noting as it is not the words themselves, but how they show up in the work here, both on ordinary days and on the ones where everything happens at once.
- We Are Crisp in Everything We Do: We bring clarity, precision and excellence to everything we do – from the products and services we deliver to the way we communicate and work together.
- Act With Integrity: We describe what a system does and what it does not do. In this industry, overstating capability is how people get hurt.
- Treat Everyone With Respect: Titles carry less weight here than whether someone’s read of a situation is worth hearing, and that holds for colleagues, customers, and partners alike.
- Encourage Individual Initiative and Growth: The sharpest ideas about how a system should behave in the field tend to come from the people who are in the field. Internal movement between roles is common as the company expands, and people are encouraged to take it.
- Give Juice to Get Juice: We invest energy, ideas, and effort into our work and relationships – and trust that strong results and support are earned in return.
At Fire Rover, our strength has always been our people. It shows up in the everyday interactions with colleagues stepping in to help, sharing what they know, and making sure new team members have what they need to succeed. This recognition matters because it reflects those experiences as told by our employees, not by us.
What the Team Says About Working at Fire Rover
The survey responses behind this honor are confidential, but the sentiment is not new. Public reviews from Fire Rover employees describe an open-door management style, a real willingness to hear ideas from any level, and benefits that compare well against previous employers. Weekly team lunches and regular all-hands meetings, where company performance gets shared openly, are mentioned more than once.
CEO
What makes this recognition especially meaningful is that it comes directly from our employees. The confidential survey gives current team members an opportunity to share their honest perspective on what it’s like to work at Fire Rover.
What Fire Rover’s Best Places to Work Recognition Means for Customers
There is a practical argument here as well as a sentimental one. Fire protection installations are long-lived. A system commissioned this year may be monitored, serviced, and modified for the better part of a decade. How much that relationship is worth depends heavily on whether the same people are still around to remember why a particular site was configured the way it was.
Retention protects institutional knowledge. An operator who has watched a waste and recycling facility’s feeds through two seasons knows what normal looks like there. A service technician who has been to a site three times knows which access door sticks. That accumulated familiarity represents a deep understanding of our clients’ operations, earned simply because our team chooses to stay.
It also explains how the company has been able to grow. Fire Rover has appeared on the Inc. 5000 for five consecutive years, and the product line has widened from Early Detection into Continuous Suppression and mobile systems built for sites where the risk moves. CEO Will Schmidt was profiled by Inc. in 2025 for scaling the business tenfold, a result of leadership and the team working together to achieve the same goals.
Join the Team Behind Fire Rover
Recognition like this belongs to the people who generated it. Thank you to every employee who took the time to answer the survey honestly, and to the customers and partners who have trusted this team to protect the facilities and operations that keep their business running. We are grateful to have a team that takes that responsibility seriously.
We are continuing to grow and are always interested in hearing from people who want to be part of the team. Please contact us or call (844) 417-6837 to learn more about current openings.
