Photo by Valeriia Radchenko
Ben Collier followed in his father’s and his paternal grandfather’s footsteps. Both men had been volunteer firefighters and inspired Collier to choose fire service work as a career.
After completing fire school at Chipola College in Marianna, Florida, Collier went to work for the Bay County Fire Service and climbed the ladder there, exiting the service as a captain after 18 years. He specialties had come to include emergency management and hazardous materials response.
Among the emergencies he dealt with, none was bigger than 2018’s Hurricane Michael, a Category 5 storm that came ashore at Mexico Beach and wreaked havoc along a path that extended to North Carolina.
Collier was a key member of an incident management team that addressed the aftermath of the storm. His role coordinating logistics came as a sudden baptismal.
“Michael was my first foray into incident management on such a big scale,” Collier said. Like the CEO of a conglomerate made up of a number of entities, Collier coordinated the work of several agencies and units of local government.
Michael walloped Gulf Coast State College, which the incident management team treated as a municipality. Collier’s role brought him into close contact with Dr. John Holdnak, who was GCSC president at the time, and they eventually became friends.
Holdnak recalls a post-storm assist that Collier made at GCSC, one that made a big difference in the life of the community at large.
Immediately after the storm’s landfall, Holdnak checked in with staff from the college’s radio station (WKGC) who he had placed at the county’s Emergency Operations Center and learned that the station had been knocked off the air.
Holdnak determined that the station’s 400-foot FM radio tower was still standing and then went looking for anyone who might be able to identify the cause of the outage. That’s when he met Collier.
“Maybe I can help,” Collier volunteered. “I know a little bit about that kind of stuff.”
Collier and Holdnak trudged through knee-deep water to the transmitter building. There, Collier almost immediately determined that a Thermos-sized fuse had blown in a power transfer switch; that kept the emergency generator from powering up WKGC’s 100,000-watt transmitter. Looking around, Collier fortunately spotted a spare fuse, which he installed.
“For the next three days, WKGC was the only broadcast entity, radio or television, that was on the air and passing along vital information from emergency operations personnel,” Holdnak said. “I received a lot of accolades for the job that WKGC staff did in keeping people aware of developments. The truth is, had it not been for Ben Collier’s knowledge, skill and can-do attitude, the storm’s aftermath would have been a lot scarier and lonelier for thousands of people who had been impacted by Michael.”
When Holdnak, currently the vice president of operations and innovation at TechFarms, learned that Collier was planning to leave the fire service, he asked him for a copy of his resumé, which Holdnak reviewed and forwarded to TechFarms founder Steve Millaway with an endorsement.
Collier hired on at TechFarms in September 2024.
Since that time, he has been kept busy with diverse projects including improvements to the Atlantis Innovation Center, a sprawling commercial office space located in Lynn Haven and owned by Millaway. He is also working to build out and ramp up a prototyping facility as part of the TechFarms campus.
Collier spent his wee years in Gulf County. He was 4 when his family moved to Calhoun County, where he resides on a farm and apiary. He grows peanuts there and cuts about 60 acres of two types of Bermuda hay each year while also tending to a menagerie that includes horses, chickens, ducks, rabbits, dogs, quail and pheasants.
Collier and his wife, Michelle, have two daughters — Amelia, 8, and Danielle, 3.
He continues to teach classes related to fire service for Chipola and the University of Florida.
At TechFarms, he wants to help the business grow and expand its capabilities in part by making the prototyping/fabrication shop a profit center. He intends that the shop do work for TechFarms business incubator tenants and additional clients not tied to TechFarms.
Too, he hopes to find and develop truly groundbreaking products.
