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Is Your Fire Safety Consultant Actually Protecting You — Or Just Selling to You?
- Wayne Farquharson
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
In Jamaica and across the Caribbean, the demand for fire safety services is growing. New developments, tightening regulations, and increased public awareness have created a market — and like every market, it has attracted both professionals who genuinely know what they're doing and operators who are simply capitalizing on fear.
Knowing the difference could protect your building, your business, and the lives of everyone inside it.
The Core Distinction
Ethical fire safety consulting has one non-negotiable foundation: public safety and regulatory compliance come first, always. Everything else — the report, the recommendations, the equipment, the fee — flows from that foundation.
Unethical fire safety consulting has a different foundation: product sales and profit margins. The "consulting" is often a front — a mechanism to gain access to your building, manufacture urgency, and sell you equipment or services you may not need, cannot justify under the applicable fire code, and would never have purchased if you'd had independent advice.
The tragedy is that many property owners, contractors, and architects cannot tell the difference until it is too late.
How They Operate Differently
Risk Assessment
An ethical consultant conducts a comprehensive, site-specific evaluation — examining compartmentation, egress routes, suppression systems, detection equipment, structural fire protection, and occupancy classification. The findings are specific to your building.
An unethical operator performs a rushed walk-through and produces a generic, copy-and-paste report that could apply to any building on any street. The assessment exists not to identify risk, but to justify a product sale.
Equipment and Upgrades
An ethical consultant recommends solutions based purely on building needs, occupancy type, and the specific requirements of the applicable fire code. If your building does not require a suppression system under the code, you will not be told you need one.
An unethical operator uses scare tactics — exaggerating risk, invoking worst-case scenarios, and manufacturing urgency — to pressure clients into purchasing overpriced or unnecessary equipment. Their primary business model is product distribution, not professional advice. The "audit" is a sales call in disguise.
Transparency
An ethical consultant explains their findings in plain language. Technical terminology is translated, not hidden behind it. You leave every meeting understanding exactly what was found, why it matters, and what your options are.
An unethical operator withholds information, creates dependency, and keeps clients confused — because a confused client is easier to upsell. Manufactured urgency is their most profitable tool.
Integrity
An ethical consultant operates strictly within national and local fire codes. Their recommendations are defensible, documented, and designed to protect life and property — not to bypass the very standards that exist to ensure public safety.
An unethical operator writes reports without proper inspections, recommends non-compliant workarounds, and designs "customized solutions" engineered to sidestep strict building code provisions — exposing their clients to serious legal and safety liability in the process.
What to Ask Before You Hire Anyone
Before engaging a fire safety consultant, ask these questions directly:
Are you an independent consultant, or do you also sell and distribute fire safety products? A company whose revenue depends on product sales has a fundamental conflict of interest in advising you on what products you need.
Will your recommendations reference the specific fire code provisions that apply to my occupancy type? If they cannot cite chapter and verse, they do not know the code.
Can you provide a sample report? A professional report is detailed, site-specific, and readable. A template with blanks filled in is not.
The Standard You Deserve
Fire safety is not a product. It is a professional discipline built on science, code knowledge, field experience, and an unwavering commitment to one outcome: that the people inside your building go home safely.
Every building owner, architect, contractor, and facilities manager deserves a consultant whose only agenda is that outcome.
Ask the hard questions. Demand the right answers.
Your building — and everyone in it — depends on it.
Wayne Farquharson is the Chief Technical Officer and Managing Director of Farbo Fire Safety Consultants Limited and a former Senior Deputy Superintendent of the Jamaica Fire Brigade, with over 35 years in independent fire safety engineering, forensic investigation, and code compliance.
Farbo Fire Safety Consultants Limited operates as an independent advisory firm with no product distribution business. Our only product is professional advice.
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