You’re in your service van, stopped at a traffic light. In your periphery, you spot another work van. You instinctively glance at the signage to see who owns the vehicle—and maybe try to guess what those guys are doing here, if they are qualified and what kind of competition you are up against.

If you pulled up alongside a truck displaying the FTBA logo, you might mistake it for a fleet vehicle from some imposing federal entity. But FTBA is much more enlivening than that, as a visit with Brenda Henwood quickly reminded us.

Brenda Henwood is the president and CEO of FTBA. We dropped by for coffee with her because we knew she would be an excellent source of original thinking about the proposition in this article’s headline: service and maintenance will never be safe.

FTBA has mastered three overlapping core disciplines: electrical testing, maintenance services and safety training.

These three follow a natural progression. Electrical contractors on a new building project routinely need independent testing of what they have just installed. We’re there for them. That new installation will require electrical equipment maintenance, now mandated by NFPA 70B. That is one of our fortes. Through it all, everyone engaged in the upkeep of electrical systems—in both our customers’ organizations and our company’s staff—must remain on top of their game with respect to safety training.

Having the capacity to offer electrical safety training to your customers makes logical sense, but we have not ordinarily seen companies that bundle all these offerings.

Today, we cannot imagine operating any other way, especially when it comes to electrical safety training for everyone involved. I cannot emphasize this enough. Facility owners often do not know or fully appreciate the maintenance requirements for their electrical equipment or the training requirements for their in-house staff. So, we have taken it upon ourselves to be absolutely certain that all of our people are prepared for whatever they might encounter in testing and maintenance.

Our opening salvo about service and maintenance never being safe was not as a suggestion that workplace accidents are unavoidable, but rather as an attention-grabber that unsafe conditions are lying in wait for those in electrical field service.

I get that. It’s all about awareness, making sure that safety is top of mind for everyone involved. Recently, I made a generic presentation to an organization of facility owners to review at a high level the kinds of services FTBA provides. It wasn’t a technical talk. It wasn’t a sales pitch. I was merely trying to stir up their awareness of safe work practices.

To my amazement, someone in the audience admitted that, because he had not had the proper training, he had unknowingly been doing something with their electrical equipment the wrong way, time after time. It was a reminder of how important awareness is as a starting point in the conversation about testing, maintenance and safety.

These days, when we discuss all three issues, folks might quickly refer to NFPA 70B and how it has been elevated to a “standard,” not just a recommendation, for electrical equipment maintenance.

Yes. But I prefer to point out that—beyond talking about “what” it is—we should be talking about “why” we need it! That’s what is important.

Oops! We have neglected to elaborate on the meaning of “FTBA”—and how it came to be!

Funny you should ask! Very early in my career, there were people who questioned my education and certification, to ensure that I was properly credentialed to play in their league. So, I added the abbreviation “FTBA” to my signature block. When they asked what it meant, I simply recited, “fun to be around!” That’s all it took.