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Welcome to Scaling Up H2O the podcast for the Industrial Water Treater. Scaling Up Nation my name is Trace Blackmore and today is Friday the 13th September 13, 2019. Now, what does that mean? Well, Friday the 13th is always a day where we think of being scared and it’s the other Halloween I guess we celebrate. Well, we are going to talk today about things that people are scared of in the water treatment community. And I have a top 10 list. So, here we go.
We are going to go through the top 10 list. Well, here we go with our list.
Number ten, the tenth reason that us water treaters are so scared is Cold Calling. Cold calling’s when we go up to somebody we never met before and we try to tell them our story about water treatment and how we can solve a particular issue that we don’t even know that they are having yet. So talking with somebody we don’t know is our number ten fear. So, rather than just listening out what the fears are, I’m gonna tell you how I deal with these fears and maybe you can take something from that. So, I don’t like talking with new people either. It is very disconcerning, you haven’t built that trust up with them, they have not built it up with you.
There was a show that was done just recently on being introvert. Well, folks this isn’t an introvert issue, this is an everybody issue, it is nerve-racking when we have to talk to somebody we have never met before. But consider this, If you treat the water treatment industry the way I treat the water treatment industry and you’re always trying to be better. You always trying to educate people, you always trying to raise the bar within the industry. Why wouldn’t you wanna tell that story? Why wouldn’t you want to let people know that you are in water treatment and you will do the best job possible and that’s a fun story to tell. And people will pick up on that enthusiasm and hopefully doing something like that will make that a bit easier of a task.
Number nine is Heights. Tall buildings, folks they put cooling towers really high off the ground. We have some towers that are fifty plus storeys off the ground. Have you ever looked over and see how far the ground is. I have to tell you, this isn’t one of my personal fears, several people have written in and let me know what the top fears are. I love high buildings, I think that’s one of the coolest things in our job that we get to have a view that no one else is privilege to see and how cool is it that they put the equipment that we service on those roofs. Now, that can create a problem because the of the mechanical rooms down at the bottom and the tower is all the way up on the roof that’s probably a lot of pressure that we got on that system and that something that make me nervous when you have three hundred pounds of pressure on the equipment that you’re servicing but that didn’t make the list so we can’t talk about that but heights did. So, by all means don’t get too close to the edge of the building, normally they have some sort of safety structure around there but when you are up there, appreciate where you are and realize that not everybody gets that advantage point.
Number eight, getting a CALL right after you’ve completed some kind of service. So, here’s the scenario you have just finished servicing or installing a piece of equipment and now you get a phone call, you are maybe an hour away from that account somebody calls and says “hey did you know this?” “did you know you left this open?” “did you know you didn’t close that?” something were to happen and now you get that phone call. So with that, you can probably mitigate that by being prepared. How prepared are you to leave the account. A lot of times we think were being prepared, as being prepared to go and service that account. But if you listen to show for any month of time you know I absolutely love checklist. And checklist are the way that I ensure I don’t forget the stupid stuff. Now my brain is working on the advance stuff how do I make this account better, how do I do all these cool things with water treatment but it’s that stupid thing that you forget to do that’s going to get that call back. So what you can do is you can do a “what I need to do checklist and order to leave the account” maybe it includes that all the valves you turned are now in the correct operating positions. Maybe it means that whatever pumps you’d prime you’d make sure that all the bleed valves are closed on those. Whatever it is you can create a checklist and eventually maybe it’s just a mentor checklist. I always wanna make sure that the room that we’re servicing in looks better when we left and when we found it. And might that even mean that we sweep the floor. We wanna make sure that people are proud with what we do because we are proud that they are letting us do it. So, that might be able to make you create a checklist so you know you haven’t forgotten the stupid things that could get you into trouble.
Number seven, hitting your sales numbers. Now, we’re all out there most of us work for a company and some of us even own a company. But let’s face it even if you own a company you are still working for that company and you have to produce otherwise the company is not gonna do well. So, we are all employees of a company. And all of us have to produce revenue for that company. Now when we spoke to Colin Frayne on episodes 101 and 102, Colin told us that everybody that works with any company is a revenue producing body. We have to make more money for the company than we cost the company. And that means that in addition to just simply servicing, a lot of us have sales responsibilities and that means we have quotas in order for us to be productive for the company. We have to sell so much business or we are a drain on the company.
And unfortunately, it’s not that people don’t like you, it’s not that people don’t think that you are a good water treater but if you can’t produce revenue for the company. The company just can’t afford to keep you. So a lot of people have sale quotas and the fear is Oh my gosh! What if I don’t hit them? I’m going to suggest that you don’t worry about hitting your numbers. You pro-actively do something to hit your numbers. Now, I’m going to bet that if you ever be in the situation it didn’t happen all of a sudden. There were certain activities that were or weren’t done in the beginning and then repeat it and that’s what led you to not hitting those numbers. Work backwards, I’m such a fan of working backwards habit two of the Seven Habits of highly effective people begin with the end and mind. What’s the end? Maybe the end is getting your CWT or Certified Water Technologist designation. Now, what do you have to do? How do you work backwards from where you are today in order to achieve that in? Well, do same thing with your sales numbers, if I have to produce X using the data that I have now and I keep doing the same things. What do I need to do to achieve that X? And it might be you have to talk to fifty people a week in order to close one a week. I don’t know what that is, but if you’re not looking at that data, and you don’t know what it takes for you to close a particular account. That’s one of the issues. So, don’t be worried about hitting your numbers. Be worried that you don’t know what numbers you’re actually doing that’s going to produce those numbers. What’s life telling you, then use those numbers how many opportunities do I need in order to be able to actually sit down with someone that’s interested in what I do. And then how many of those people do I need to talk to in order for me to be able to come up with a solution and they buy it. Work backwards from there then figure out how many of each of those you need to do each and every week and you will not have a problem hitting your sales numbers. The problem is you’re not keeping track of it and it just hits you in the face when the end of that quarter comes.
Number six is forgetting how to run a test or running out of reagent when you need to run a test. Now I ask people to write in and let me know what their fears were and I gotta tell you I don’t understand this one because I think this is another checklist item. Folks when you go out to service your accounts, you should never be guessing how much you should have in your test kit. Prepare your test kit each and every day. Make sure it’s stocked up. Your test kit is a tool that works for you. You do not work for it. So, if you are out there at a job and your test kit does not have what it needs to have any and you can’t do your job, that test kit is now the master of that service. The only reason you got to that point is because you did not take the time to make sure it was stocked and ready to go so it was the tool when you needed it to be there. So, if this is your fear, don’t have fear, do something about it. Make sure you stock your kit on a regular basis. Make sure your reagents are in date. And then as far per getting how to run a test, I didn’t quite understand that one either because you know what folks we’ve lot of procedures out there.
No, I’m gonna be the first to say if you have to read a procedure everytime you run a test, there is no way that you’re gonna be efficient running your service list. So, you do need to memorize these items and after you memorize them you need to figure out how they work because all test know how to do is change color or indicate something if there are other things in there that could be interfering or you might have made a mistake in your procedure but you don’t understand how the test works it’s just garbage information. So my advice is keep some procedures with you especially for those tests that you don’t run on a regular basis and it really easy even if you don’t have something with your company or if you don’t have something printed out. Folks, you can go to hack the water analysis handbook online if you search that on Google just about every test you can imagine is on there. Now, it might be a little different in what you’re used to running but it’s not that much different using specific hack reagents.
And in depending on how you get your reagents from most likely they have a website to where you can look at their procedures. So, if this truly is a fear of yours don’t let it be a fear. I think this is a fear of not being prepared, not being ready for something that could happen and we can do so much on the front end by preparing, so when the unknown does happen we have the tool to be able to fix it.
Alright, the number five fear that people have written in with is losing an account. So, customers calls you up and say “hey! You’re doing a great job or for whatever reason you’ve lost this account or maybe a customer calls you up and say “hey! You’ve done not so great of a job and we’re getting somebody else in here that knows what they’re doing. So, I’m not sure when people wrote it which one they are referring to but losing an account is number five. So, let’s talk a little about losing an account. I always like to investigate why I lost an account when that happens and if there was something that I could have done and that would have made it so I wouldn’t have lost that account. I wanna learn from that and I want to apply that to each one of my accounts so I don’t have to endure that again.
I learn something and then I use it and then I make everything else better. But if there was something like price. I gotta tell you folks, I don’t lose sleep when I lose an account over price. I do a very good job and my team does a very good job of what we do when we prove water treatment services to our customer. Now that means the customer has to pay for that. All of our guys are CWTs, if they’re not CWTs they are on their path to be coming CWTs. We do a tremendous amount of training here. We’re doing test that most other companies don’t run. And I don’t understand why that is because without those test we can’t tell what’s going on in the system. So, if someone’s gonna compare our quality of work to somebody else coming in running ten percent of the test that we run, not knowing what the volumes of the waters or how they’re dosing the product.
There is always somebody out there that is going to be cheaper. So, if somebody says “we think you’re doing a fantastic job.” But somebody else came in and they have a lower price, you can keep this business if you can lower it to their price my answer is always NO. We do a fantastic job and we are not the same price as somebody else that does it last. Now, if we have made a mistake, and that’s why we lost the business you better believe that we are going to learn from that mistake. But all that’s being said but if you get one message from today’s fear factor episode is don’t compete on price. Folks, when we beat each other up on price nobody wins. Not even the customer wins on that because you can’t service the account correctly for some of the prices out there that some people are charging for water treatment. What happens is the customer thinks that’s the price for real water treatment and there’s no way you can do a complete water treatment program for what some people are charging for water treatment.
So, make sure you know what it takes to do the job correctly. And then whatever that price is, that is your price. And if you lost an account for another reason, learn from that, make it better, and it’s not so scary.
The number four, top ten reason people are scared in water treatment is getting that call at three a.m. from a customer. Folks, nothing happens good after midnight I’m sure you have heard that before. Well, if your phone is ringing at three a.m. and your caller ID says it’s a customer you better believe something is going on there. That’s probably my top one that something has happened. There’s some sort of catastrophic event. Hopefully, it’s not something that the water treater did. Hopefully their calling to get some advice. But if something like that would happen, take a deep breath, deal with it, call whoever you need to call within your company and then go out and help your customer deal with that. If it was something that you had a direct affect on and that’s why they are calling you.
Do an analysis, figure out what happened, how it happened, and then what you could have done differently so you could never get that phone call again. It’s my hope that your phone never rings at three a.m. in the morning with an issue but if it does do what you need to do. Do it smart and learn from it.
Number three. Seeing equipment that you are not familiar with so you walk in, maybe you’re trying to make sure you’re getting your sales numbers and you’re doing some phone calling, you’re getting some referrals. Somebody refers you over to some sort of facility. You get the survey, you’re all excited. You walk in and you see something that you have never seen before. And now you’re probably thinking OK now what do I do? Well, here’s a thing folks, don’t be scared of that. There is so much stuff out there that there is no way you’re gonna be able to see everything. So, don’t fake it. Ask the question. You know what, I’m not familiar with this. Tell me about what this does. I promise you people love talking about their facilities. And when you can show them that you care and you’re willing to learn they will teach you everything that you have ever possibly wanted to know about that particular piece of equipment. So, you’re never gonna know everything, but if you use the water treatment field as your perpetual training ground and you’re curious to the people that you’re talking with and ask them to help you understand something, you don’t need to know everything about everything.
Number two on our top ten list. Getting bored with your job. I shared on our 100th episode that one of my favorite emails that I received was from a gentleman who was ready to quit the water treatment industry. And he asked me not to share his name or company on the air, so I’m going to respect that but it was one of my favorite emails that I received because he said after listening to the show it just gave him a little nudge differently. What he was bored with was doing the same thing, the same way each and every day. Folks, that would make me bored. If I had to do the exact same task each and every day. I would not like that one bit. So, I choose that even if I’m doing the same job every day, I do it a little differently. I always try to work on the very outside of what I am comfortable with. So if I’m right there on the bore, I know that I am stretching my limits. Now I’m still on that comfort level mind you but I am as far out of it I can get still being in it knowing that I’m trying to expand that. And how I do that? I ask a lot of questions.
I try a lot of new things. I read about new ideas. I ask people what they are doing and I see how I do things differently. Now, different is not always better but different makes you consider how you are doing things. Let’s take testing for example, if I’m running the test the exact same order and the exact same way I’m always done it. Maybe I’m extremely fast at it but maybe it’s boring. Or maybe I could be a lot faster at it if I change up the order. Maybe I can learn some of the results early on, and that means I don’t have to run some of the ladder results because that tells me what I need to know in the system. If I don’t ever think about that, if somebody showed me how to run my test one way, one time and I’ve just repeated that for the next five years I’m not getting better. I’m just repeating the task that they have showed me. So that was an example with task but we can use that with anything. So, how are you stretching your limits of what you’re comfortable with, how are you learning more, how are you getting better and how is somebody holding you accountable to do that.
Do you have an accountability partner? Do you have somebody or you can say you know it takes me an hour and a half to run a test. How long has it take you? It takes me half an hour and I’m running the same test. Or what are you doing that can shave an hour off of that time and have that conversation. If you don’t have anybody what you can do and this is just talking on the test way I don’t know how I got off on test, but you can actually start timing yourself. Now time is never to sacrifice quality. If you’re getting bogus result, but you’re really quick at getting them, it doesn’t matter. So, you have to make sure that you get correct results and figure out how you can shave a little bit of time off. Because here’s the thing. If you have so much time at an account and all you’re doing as working out of your test kit. And by the way that’s one of my pet peeves that’s how some people think water treatment is they go in, they run couple of tests, they run out report, they leave. Folks, that is not why they hired you to do.
They have hired you to use your brain to make the account better and one of the tools you have is your test kit. It is not how you service. Your test kit is not your servicing device, it’s one of the tools that you use in service to help you to make better decisions. So, if you have more time freed up, you can do other things. One of the things that Bruce Ketrick taught me many years ago, was to do extra things for every service. And they might be something like you check some steam traps at one account and maybe you might run of dissolve oxygen test on a dike tank. So, those are two extra things that you don’t normally do and then next visit you gonna do two other things. Well, at the end of the year, you’ve done twenty-four extra items for that account and you gonna let the customer know about that. “hey! These are the things I’ve done.” Well, Trace I don’t have time to do two. Ok just do one. What that’s doing. That’s allowing you to think outside of the box. That’s proving to the customer what your worth is and I promise you if you do something like that you will learn something up and above what you would have learned had you not done that.
The number one on our top ten list. The number one reason that people are scared in water treatment. Are you ready for it? Here it is Not knowing the right answer. So here it is, the customer has asked you a question and you don’t know the answer to it. And I think that this is an issue more for people that have just started in the industry. I’m speaking for myself. I remember one, I just started in the industry and you’re younger. Well, you can’t really sure that you have all the experience cause you look like yo don’t have a lot of experience. So, when somebody ask you a question you wanna come off being knowledgeable when you say “hey! That’s very easy.” Here’s the answer to that, and now you are not able to do that and you think oh no! They see me I look young or I just got into this industry recently and now I can’t answer this question that they’re giving me. They must think that I’m a moron. Here’s what I want you to realize, they don’t think that, depend on what you say afterwards they might come to that conclusion. But I don’t think anybody expects you to know everything. Now, this is a pressure that you are putting on yourself so my advice is don’t put that pressure on yourself, make a commitment. I promise you there is so much stuff out there that I have no idea about what is going on. And I tell the customer that.
But here is what I will do. I will commit to them that I will use some of the resources that I have and I will find the answer, and I will get back to them on a particular date what the answer is. And then I do it and then we have a conversation about it. I’ve said on an earlier show I think people will remember you’re following through the commitment better than the fact that if you would have known the answer right when they asked the question. They’re thinking OK well, this person they did not know the answer but they care enough to take my question, figure it out and bring me answer back to me. Well, take it that just with this question, what would they do if I actually gave them the business. So, my advice for you is to ease up for yourself. If you have the expectation that you’re gonna know everything in this industry, you should get our if this industry cause you’re gonna drive yourself crazy because that is an impossible task, but you can learn what you need to learn when you need to learn it. Make sure you have a system for that, make sure you have a network of people you can ask. And then get back to the people that asked the question. I think that means more than anything in this business. It’s keeping commitments and making sure that the people that are asking you to do things can trust that you’re gonna do them.
I wanna thank everybody in the scaling up nation that helped me come up with this top ten list of what fears water treaters most. And I thought it might be interesting. I’ve never told this story on the air. You’ve heard the story, I think if you’ve heard me train in certain venues but when I first started out and this is something that I was scared of but it was something that was just so unusual. And when I think of Friday the 13th there was a movie out there called Freaky Friday so I wanna tell you a freaky story. So, I was working with my dad and this I back when we were in Virginia and we work for another company that’s not longer around now and it was a school system they have forty something school systems and we were serving all of the accounts. By we, I mean me, cause I was doing all the work my father was back in the office and I was writing with the engineer that they had assigned two water treatment and we were going from school to school to school. Took us about a week to go all the schools and when we were going from one school to another I don’t remember school we were coming from but the school we were going to was an elementary school.
We were writing there and a gentleman got a call on the radio. And he said that he had to go get that call but he was going to introduce me to the janitor and drop me off and the janitor would show me everything that I need to see and let me in to where I needed to get into. So, he introduced me to the janitor and right when I introduced myself the janitor said “don’t you hurt my babies.” I was like wow! What’s pretty interesting I didn’t really know how to answer that. So, I can’t remember what I said to kinda side step that but he then show me to the mechanical room, I started taking notes and doing all the things that I needed to do so I could figure out what we needed to do to properly take over this account. And then I asked him to see the cooling tower. He said it was on the roof and it was on a the roof where you have one of those ladders that’s attached to the wall and you have to go up a hatch. That’s probably on my top ten fear thing. I hate those build the facilities that there’s an actual ladder there. How the heck do you get stuff on the roof. And if you got a mechanical room or if you had a cooling tower on the roof and that’s all you have. Well, engineer, architect that was bad planning.
You are not planning for us to actually service it. And that was just rude. I think you need to do better job with that. OK that’s off my chest. Anyway, we are walking up the ladder and we went on a hatch and we’re walking across the roof to the cooling tower and the gentleman as you know you could tell he just did not like me. And I was asking him some question about you know the how the water treatment work or what his expectations were. How I can work better with him and I don’t remember the exact question but he replied back “don’t hurt my babies.” And I said sir this is the second time that you’ve told me this I don’t understand what you mean. Are you worried that I’m gonna spray some water treatment product on the kids as they’re playing on the playground? And he said No, and then right then he had his hand on the cooling tower door and he was open it he said NO I mean my babies. And he opened the door and folks there were about 12 inch koi fish in this cooling tower. He was keeping koi fish in the cooling tower basin. Well, unfortunately his babies has to go because that is not the correct place for them to be. They relocated those not really sure where but I got the most evil stares every time I run into that genetor from that point on. I was always checking my tires, I was checking behind me. That guy did not like me because I made him relocate his babies. If you’re listening out there I apologize.
I can’t remember your name. This was twenty plus years ago. I hope that your gold fish, no they’re not gold fish I just insulted you. Now you’re not gonna like me anymore. That your koi fish were so much happier in a habitat that was more appropriate for them than the cooling tower. So, I don’t know if you enjoy that story. That’s one of the freakiest stories that I can remember so I wanted to share this on this fear factor freaky Friday the 13th episode. And folks, again thank you for giving me some of the items on my top ten list. If you have an idea for a show. Don’t keep it to yourself. By all means, that’s my fear that you’re gonna keep all these ideas for yourself and I’m gonna run out. Well, help me with my fear just as I have helped you with these top ten fears and let me know what I should be talking about.
Give me some show ideas. Give me some guest recommendations and then I will be a lot happier. And I’ll be happier next week when I am talking to you on this show and you tune in and you told me that you’ve told another water treater about scaling up h20. So, with all of that, talk to you next week folks.