Yellow Tarp EMS
Fighting a wildfire demands exhausting, focused teamwork in a harsh, smoky landscape where heat, noise, and urgency press in from every direction. With risk everywhere, having dedicated emergency medical services on scene is essential for such dangerous situations. Yellow Tarp EMS—founded by Garrett and Kathleen “Katie” Cooper—exists to provide that critical support. They realized that, to keep their medics equipped, insured, and ready to deploy, the company required significant funding. To solve this, the Coopers turned to the Florida Small Business Development Center at the University of Central Florida (FSBDC at UCF) in Lake County, where they discovered the guidance and resources they needed.
Yellow Tarp EMS specializes in medical support for firefighters and personnel working on or near active wildfires. Their teams monitor crews for heat illness, smoke exposure, dehydration, and injuries, and respond immediately when someone needs treatment or evacuation. They also assist with medical planning, track crew health during long shifts, and help ensure that local EMS agencies—often unprepared for wildfire conditions—aren’t overwhelmed.
It’s a distinctive business model, and one that depends on collaboration. “We have a lot of allies in our space,” shares Garrett Cooper. “We don’t look at other companies as competitors. We’re on a team to provide medical care for our wildland firefighters and provide the service they need and they expect. What does differentiate us is that we are very consistent with the quality of the product and personnel we provide to the government agencies and their firefighters that we serve.” That consistency, however, requires substantial investment – one of the reasons that Yellow Tarp connected with the FSBDC.
“We originally sought out assistance from the FSBDC because it’s very expensive starting and running a business,” Cooper admits. “We had lots of insurance we needed to pay for, lots of equipment that needed to be bought, and it’s very hard as people working in the medical field as paramedics and EMSs to come up with the money that’s required. We needed funding and we reached out to Jose [Jose Molfino, FSBDC Consultant and Lake County Area Manager] and the FSBDC.”
Molfino worked closely with Katie Cooper to assemble financial documents, build a complete loan package, and identify lenders. “It’s mostly Katie who worked with Jose very heavily on coming up with the spreadsheets, coming up with the projections, putting them in the formats that were what we really needed to have,” Garrett recalls, “in order to apply successfully for some loans.”
Their efforts paid off. “Ultimately, by the time we were approved for a term loan that we’d been going through a long process to get, we no longer actually needed that loan,” Cooper explains. “But we did still need a line of credit, and, because of the FSBDC, we were able to get that line of credit which is very beneficial to help us to cover our payroll needs. In our industry, you need a big, fat stack of cash and then you spend it all and then get it all back a few months later. The better the payroll that we can have, the more successful this company is. In large part, because of the FSBDC, we were able to come up with what we needed.”
“If you care about your business,” Cooper concludes, “you should be willing to go in and see what the SBDC can offer. For us it was very valuable. Honestly, Katie and I, we couldn’t believe this was a free service. It’s kind of wild that so many people have access to this but they are not using it. Even if we hadn’t taken any money from it at all, it was still a very valuable process to have Jose line up our projections and a lot of grown‑up business types of things that we weren’t really ready to tackle on our own yet. It was all so very helpful.”
For information about Yellow Tarp EMT, please contact them at 480.695.6081.
