We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Joseph Vulpis a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Joseph, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about growing your team – how did you recruit the first few people, what was the process like, how’d you go about training and if you were to start over today would you have done anything differently?
We’ve had employees since the beginning. Our goal at the National Rescue & Response Institute was to put together an Instructor Cadre that consisted of the best in the US. We accomplished that goal by hiring top tier Instructors in their instructing discipline. This will be our 17th year in business. It’s been quite a challenge, but an amazing ride. I may have made some minor adjustments if I was to do it again, but all around it worked and here we are today with 247 current Instructors and a Board of Directors with 12 people.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I’ve always dabbled in the outdoors since I was a little kid. It lead into a volunteer pathway with Search & Rescue, then Technical Rescue, then Mountain Rescue and Mountain Guiding and then Swiftwater Rescue. I’ve always wanted to be a better rescue professional so I surrounded myself with top tier responders and learned everything I could about the disciplines. It was a lengthy process, but by the age of 30 I was doing it full-time. I’m now 48 years old and myself and my colleagues have built a great company! We usually get hired for advanced, or efficiency type of training projects with Government entities. We do work with State, County, Municipal, Private Sector and Volunteer agencies, but our main customer/client base are US Government Agency units.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
What built my reputation, and the company’s, is providing training like no other. Myself and our Board of Directors members wanted to fix various aspects of the rescue and first responder industry. Physical and mental fitness and preparedness being the top priority. SO we put our minds together, hire professionals in that field and solve the problem. We meet regularly with an agenda and we don’t stop until the job is complete. We are on a pathway of making our upcoming first responder community the best in decades.
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
Being consistent with posting on social media. We used to mainly work with Government agencies and since joining social media, it’s starting to shift the other way around. Now, most of our clients aren’t participating in our trainings to “check a box”, they’re here because they want to be here. It’s great! BUT, they all find us on social media. We have a HUGE following and views on various social media platforms. We post multiple times a day. In the last 2-3 months our ig went from a few hundred followers to 105k, our Tiktok went from 300 to 31k with videos peaking at 1.3 million views and our facebook being the most popular went from 120 followers to 27k in that time frame with post views in the 6 to 8 million view range.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://nrrinstitute.org/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nrri_usa
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nrriusa/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nrri/
- Twitter: https://x.com/nrri_us
- Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nrrieducation
Image Credits
Our instructors took all of the attached pictures during trainings