Fire Smarts

Fire Smarts, LLC is a nationally recognized provider of fire protection education and training services. The company’s team of internationally recognized instructors creates and delivers custom fire suppression and fire alarm training solutions for building and fire officials, contractors and business organizations internationally.  Fire Smarts is a Preferred Provider with the International Code Council (ICC) to deliver approved training programs for CEU’s toward ICC Certifications.

In 2017, Fire Smarts founder Ryan Smith identified the need to provide the classroom training course content in an online and on demand format.  The goal was to reach more people, provide an accessible and affordable option, and leverage Fire Smarts existing content to generate additional revenue.

Ryan hired a consulting firm that specializes in the evaluation of LMS systems.  The result was a detailed list of requirements.   As the team evaluated new platforms a few critical elements rose to the top of the list. 

• The need to effectively support CEU training.  Tracking participation, time spent on the course and issuance of completion certificates.
• Support for SCORM courses
• Flexibility in generation of certificates and controls as to when a certificate is generated
• Cloud based and easy to use
• A White Label solution that would provide customers with a seamless experience.

A reasonably priced solution was also a factor along with the reputation of the provider – experience, future plans, support and reputation among existing customers.  Ryan notes “If we were going to invest in a system we wanted to make sure it would be around for a while!”

Once LearningCart was selected the implementation process was quick.  “There was a learning curve as the platform is very feature rich.  The LearningCart team was fantastic about responding to our questions quickly and providing guidance as needed.  There are always details that you have to learn on the job and there were a few surprises but we always were able to work together and come up with a solution.” says Ryan.

“We’re now using LearningCart to track student participation and issue certification for classroom and online training.  It’s been very helpful to be able to manage all of that in a single system.  Everything is tracked on a single account so a student can login once and see all the courses they’ve completed and the associated certificates.  And we don’t have to print and mail out certificates which saves time and money!

We started with zero online training and each month has seen sales increase.  We feel like we are still in the infancy of our online training content, and that will only grow as we go.  We were hoping for and are now starting to see repeat customers – those that we touch in a classroom environment – log in to download their certificate of completion and then see the online courses that are available and make a purchase.  We are starting to see that play out more and that’s very encouraging.” 

Ryan Smith, Fire Smarts Founder
“ The support we’ve received has been essential to the success of the site – LearningCart has been very responsive and provide useful answers.  They know the system, they are talking from experience.  It’s not like calling a support center and getting an agent that provides canned responses.  The team really tries to understand our business need and provide a workable solution.  We are working on several new concepts to grow our business and LearningCart provides the flexibility we need to make that happen. ”