The Government Owed Them $500,000. The Bank Offered $250,000

Friday, peak fire season. Minuteman EMS owes its crews a quarter of a million dollars in payroll. The federal government owes Minuteman twice that for work already completed on fires across ten states. Both things are true at the same time.

That’s the business Tyler Olson and Brennan Holloway run. Ten ambulances, three rescue teams, and single paramedics scattered across the country. More than 40 people on payroll at peak. And a payment gap that shows up every single season like weather.

Here’s how the gap works. When a wildfire contractor finishes an assignment, the government issues a form called an OF-286. It’s an official acknowledgment of what the government owes you: these people, this equipment, these days, this amount. It is about as close to guaranteed money as a receivable gets. The only problem is when. Depending on which office is paying, it takes a few weeks to several months to arrive.

Payroll doesn’t wait a few weeks to several months. Wages go out every payday. Fuel, hotels, and flights go out while the crews are still on the fire. So contractors lock up huge amounts of their own capital just to float the gap. And most of them start the season with their backs already against the wall. Equipment, certifications, staffing, insurance, readiness: the spending starts months before the first dispatch. By the time an assignment comes in, much of their working capital is already committed.

The ones who can’t float it do something worse: they pay their crews late, or short. Some don’t pay at all until the government pays them first. Firefighters who spent fourteen days on a fire line working sixteen-hour days go home and wait on money they already earned, with their own bills stacking up. Delayed wages also put contractors on the wrong side of Department of Labor wage laws, which turns a cash-flow problem into a legal one. And plenty of companies simply turn down work they can’t afford to front.

Tyler hears these stories all the time. Firefighters from other companies tell him they’re owed $25,000, $30,000, sometimes $40,000 in unpaid wages because their contractor is still waiting on government reimbursement.

One conversation has stayed with him. A husband-and-wife team worked COVID vaccination deployments and wildfire seasons for the same contractor. When Tyler spoke with them, they had gone three to four months without being paid and were owed nearly $90,000 between them. The work was done. The government would eventually pay. Their paychecks simply hadn’t arrived.

Minuteman took the opposite path. Tyler’s rule is simple: do the work, get paid on time and in full, every time. Holding that line has taken disciplined cash management and, some seasons, finding money wherever it could be found. But employees notice. Firefighters tell each other which companies always pay and which ones don’t, and “go work for Minuteman, they’ll keep you paid” recruits better than any campaign. It’s also the problem Tyler and Brennan believe they can solve for the rest of the industry.

They lived this before they ever built software. A few years ago they applied for a bank line of credit to smooth the season. The bank looked at their balance sheet and offered $250,000.

One payroll run. In a slow year, a single peak-season payroll run at Minuteman hits $300,000 to $450,000. The bank’s answer covered less than two weeks of the problem.

The bank wasn’t being stupid. It was being a bank. Banks underwrite balance sheets and credit history, and a seasonal contractor with lumpy revenue and equipment in the field looks risky by every measure a bank knows how to read. The half-million dollars in government-guaranteed receivables sitting in Minuteman’s filing cabinet? Invisible. There’s no line on a loan application for “the U.S. Forest Service owes me this and always pays.”

Regular readers know Tyler and Brennan’s company, The Journeyman. Two former Marines from Rapid City who ran ambulances on fire lines, got tired of turning down contracts because they couldn’t find a Colorado-licensed paramedic in fifteen minutes, and built the system of record for wildland fire contractors. Every resource tracked, every assignment logged, every document filed. Over 4,200 firefighters across more than 150 companies on the platform.

Now watch what that position makes possible.

When Tyler first walked me through the idea, he called it payday loans for fire contractors, half joking. It’s a decent shorthand and a terrible description, because the mechanics are the opposite of a payday loan. A payday loan advances money you hope to earn, at rates designed around the chance you won’t. What The Journeyman is designing advances money you already earned, acknowledged in writing by the United States government. The only variable is timing.

The shape of it: a contractor finishes work and uploads the OF-286. From inside the platform, they request an advance. A lending partner funds roughly half the receivable’s value, enough to cover payroll and the overhead that keeps crews in the field, ideally within days. When the government pays the full amount, the advance clears first and the rest flows to the contractor, minus a modest fee. The half that was never advanced is the built-in cushion. Nobody’s betting on potential income. The bet is that the government pays its own paper, which it does.

The reason this works isn’t financial engineering. It’s that underwriting is mostly the cost of not knowing things, and the platform already knows them. The dispatch order arrives when a resource is ordered, before the work happens. The OF-286 arrives when it’s done. The two documents have to match: same agreement number, same incident, same dates. The platform holds both, plus the season-over-season work history behind them. A bank sees a balance sheet. The Journeyman sees 716 days on fire across ten states, documented as they happened.

That knowledge doesn’t stop being valuable at underwriting either. When you’re on the fire line, the guy sleeping in the tent next to yours might work for a company that shorts crews in October. Word travels. Tyler and Brennan know which operators run clean because they’ve shared dispatch calls with them for years. No credit bureau has that data.

The financing is an extension of that same trust. A contractor who can borrow against work already completed doesn’t have to choose between making payroll and taking the next assignment. Crews get paid on schedule. And the agencies fighting the fires get a workforce that shows up next season.

I keep watching the same movie at Wildfire Labs.

AgCents, another one of our companies, started as analytics for cattle producers. Then Brady and David realized their price models and herd data let them see lending risk that rural banks couldn’t, and they closed $795,000 in cattle loans last spring. First the workflow, then the record, then the capital.

The Journeyman is running the same play in a different vertical. Vertical software earns trust by solving the daily problem. Solving the daily problem generates verified operational data. And verified operational data is underwriting, which means the software company can eventually offer financial products that banks, with all their capital and none of the context, cannot.

Notice what’s required to pull this off. Not a fintech background. Not a banking license; a lending partner brings the capital and carries the credit risk. What’s required is knowing the customer so well that you understand their cash-flow problem better than their bank does, and holding the data that proves the money is real. Domain expertise gets you the first product. The first product gets you the data. The data gets you everything after that.

The honest caveat: this is a plan, not a product. The terms are still being worked out with the lending partner and the lawyers, and the first season will be a small proof run with Minuteman and a handful of companies. It may ship looking different than what I’ve described. Early-stage ideas usually do.

But the direction is the thing. Two paramedics from Rapid City are about to offer a financial product to an industry that Wall Street doesn’t know exists, because they’re the only ones who can verify the work behind the receivable. The moat was never the code.

And underneath the strategy there’s a simpler outcome, the one Tyler and Brennan actually care about: the people who did the dangerous work get paid on time.

That’s the product.

So here’s the question worth sitting with, whatever niche you’re building in.

Your software watches your customers work every day.

What does it know that their bank doesn’t?