The following transcript is provided by YouTube. Mistakes are present. To hear the podcast episode, click HERE.
[Music]
as an industrial water treater you have to do so much you have to know about so many things
chemistry physics environmental electrical and the list goes on but did
you ever think that list should include cyber protection who’s got time for that
well hackers have plenty of time to find your vulnerabilities and hold your
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[Music] welcome to scaling up the podcast where
we scale up on knowledge so we don’t scale up our systems i’m trace blackmore your host for the scaling up h2o podcast
and nation how awesome was it so many of us participated in the global 6k
so many of us told the story that we are so lucky here in the united states where
water just comes out of the faucet we never have to worry about it not being there we hardly ever have to worry about
it not being clean and not everybody gets to enjoy that we ran
6ks or we walked 6ks or however you did it and we had so much fun we did some
hashtags we shared so many items and we came together as a community to bring
awareness to this cause folks we are industrial water traders and there are
so many people out there that just don’t have access to clean drinking water so i
hope you had a great time in the global 6k we’re going to make sure that we promote this next year as well so if you
didn’t do it don’t worry you’ll have an opportunity to participate next year but
if you didn’t do it or if you did do it and now you want to do more you do have
an opportunity each child has the ability to have a sponsorship
where you can work directly with team world vision they have a program where
you can sponsor a child each and every month to find out more information about
that go to our show notes page at scalinguph2o.com
we’ll send you a link right over to team world vision nation thank you for
participating in the global 6k here’s a couple of other things you
might want to mark on your calendar the american water works association is
having their ace conference two years after the last one they had they’re
finally back in person so june 12th through 15th that’s going to be in san
antonio texas if you want to learn more about that that will be on our show notes page ashrae is having their annual
conference in toronto canada and you can find out more about that on our show
notes page as well by the way that’s going to be june 25th through 29th
so you can stay up to date on what’s going on always check out our show notes
pages so you can find something that interests you and that’s a super easy
way for you to boost what you’re doing day to day get you in touch with other
people so you can expand your network and make sure that you can answer questions and grow
in your area of water treatment speaking of growing in water treatment here is
another installment of thinking on water with james [Music]
welcome to thinking on water with james the segment where we don’t give you the answers we give you the topics and
questions for you to think about drop by drop now let’s get to it
in this week’s episode we’re thinking about how oxygen is mechanically removed in a direator
what properties of water and oxygen are involved which law predicts the solubility of oxygen what does
temperature have to do with it what about pressure how does the deorator design facilitate
oxygen removal what can happen or change about a derivative to reduce oxygen removal
efficiency why is venting important why is mechanical removal of oxygen
recommended before the second step of chemically scavenging oxygen take this week to think about
deuterators and how they mechanically remove oxygen be sure to follow tow 22 and hashtag scaling up h2o share
your thoughts on each week’s thinking on water i’m james mcdonald and i look forward to learning more from you
scout up nation a lot of you know me through the association of water technologies and you know me because
i’ve taught you something in the technical training class or i’ve taught you something in the sales class or i’ve
taught you something in the fundamentals and applications class i do a lot of
teaching for the association of water technologies because i love teaching i love to give back to this
amazing industry and there you go right there the best of both worlds i’m doing something i love
to do and i have a great reason to do that well most likely
you have gotten something from me how i explain something
is from a tool that i received from somebody else somebody taught me
something that i shared with you somebody gave me an illustration
that painted a picture that allowed us to have a conversation to have a
discussion around something particular that just brought
it to life and most likely if that was around biofilm it came from montana
state university the center for biofilm engineering
my lab partner today is dr paul sturman of montana state university the center
for biofilm engineering welcome paul thank you very much good to be here
i can’t wait to talk about everybody’s favorite topic biofilm
all right well it’s my favorite topic but i’m not quite so sure it’s everyone’s favorite but uh thank you for
that before we get started do you mind introducing yourself to the scaling up nation
no absolutely my name’s paul sturman i have a phd in environmental engineering but you know
in my day-to-day work i’m much more of an industrial microbiologist i manage
the industrial interface here at the center for biofilm engineering and i’ve held this position for about two decades
now so quite a long time from a time when most of our industry support came from oil companies and
water treatment companies to the present time when we see support from a really wide variety of industry consumer
products manufacturers specialty chemical companies health care related companies testing laboratories even some
us government agencies so we’re very interdisciplinary in this regard and it turns out that i think our
center which has been in existence for quite a long time was kind of in the right place at the right time when
biofilms really exploded on the on the scene of industry as well as medicine
we’re going to talk a lot about what your center does but before we do if you were explaining biofilm to somebody that
has no idea what it is how would you explain them well biofilm is a community of
microorganisms and and this can be bacteria or algae or fungi and often
it’s all three mixed together and this community adheres to a surface
and it’s embedded within an extracellular polymer matrix which is produced by the microorganisms
themselves so biofilm forms on virtually every surface that is in contact with a
fluid that has a water phase and this water phase can be can be quite small as and not the main part of the fluid
but biofilm of course needs water to grow as all organisms do so biofilm is the reason that rocks in a
stream are slippery and slimy to the touch biofilm is the cause of dental plaque and biofilm forms even in
purified water systems including potable water mains and piping and a very
important aspect of biofilm is is its ability to protect microorganisms from
antimicrobials such as chlorine and drinking water or antibiotics in the human body
and this protection stems from the polymer matrix that the biofilm produces
so antimicrobials often can’t effectively penetrate this matrix even at
concentrations that are lethal to free-floating cells and this is really why biofilms are such a concern
here in the industrial water treatment industry we’re really concerned with biofilm for a
couple of reasons one it’s an insulator and now we can’t efficiently get heat
from where we don’t want it to where it needs to go and there’s also some pathogenic issues that happen
so i want to talk about those things but i want to introduce what montana state
university does and specifically the center for biofilm engineering what are
you guys doing and how are you giving us more information so we can do
our jobs better we’re a graduated national science foundation engineering research center
which means that we had an 11-year run of nsf funding and this was a huge grant
at the time and this ran from 1991 until 2001 and so quite a long time ago
was the largest grant that montana state university had ever received at the time
and after that 11-year run from the national science foundation you are officially a graduated center which
means that you’ve got to be self-sufficient at that point from that point forward and it’s my understanding that we are
one of the most successful uh post-graduation engineering research centers in the
united states and there there are many of these dozens and and so what we do and why we have
been so successful is that we understand the biofilm problems that exist in
industry and we seek to solve them we do both fundamental research as well as
very applied research in trying to solve those problems whether they are in an industrial water system or in a
healthcare related environment or even in bioremediation and biofilms growing
in soil and groundwater we are involved with that as well so this this
interdisciplinary aspect of what we do has been really important to our success because we involve faculty and graduate
students from about 10 different academic departments here all the engineering departments cell biology
microbiology chemistry organic chemistry mathematics all these people impact what we do and
and so we we’re able to perhaps solve problems from an engineering perspective that wouldn’t be solvable strictly from
a microbiology perspective or vice versa so if there was a student and they were
graduating let’s say they had a biology or a chemistry degree what would attract them to do higher
education in your department i think what would attract them to it is if they were
involved at all with industry and understood the importance of biofilms to industry
that would be a really compelling feature and it isn’t just industry i’d say probably about a little more than
half of our graduates go on to work in industry but the other probably 40 or so
go to work on in academia this is probably a little skewed from many
academic degrees because most i think most people graduate with a phd and and
say i’m going to go into academia but but our phd graduates are split much more in favor of industry than they are
academia and one of the reasons is that these students receive quite a bit of
exposure to industry and they see that working on industrial problems is maybe
a little different than they had expected and by that i mean that these problems can be really compelling and
interesting in their own right and and so i think that’s maybe a surprise to a lot of students
many of the listeners of this podcast work on cooling towers and making sure that they’re as efficient as they can
and also that they are as safe as they can be are cooling towers something that your
department is looking at yeah absolutely in many ways cooling systems were one of the original reasons
that biofilms were studied and this goes way back to the early 1980s and looking
at heat transfer resistance and the fact that as as biofilm builds up in a in a
heat exchanger or a cooling tower you get a loss of heat transfer efficiency and this in the case of a heat exchanger
can can reduce the flow within the heat exchanger obviously reduces the efficiency in the case of a cooling
tower it might actually collapse the packing media if it grows thick enough
within that media and so again this was one of the original areas of study that that we have worked on
here at the the biofilm center and in recently we’ve developed a reactor system which is just a laboratory
biofilm growth chamber that emulates a cooling tower it’s got the unsaturated
portion it’s got the media within it has a recirculation system involved with it
as well and so what we seek to do with that reactor system is to be able to
scale down an actual cooling tower to something that would be relevant to a laboratory bench situation
while keeping many of the important aspects of that actual field system and
so this is something that i think we’re really good at here as an engineering research center we think about things in
engineering terms flow dynamics how bacteria get their food how they
grow and we seek to quantify these things and that’s one of the things that i think
differentiates us from many just straight perhaps microbiology investigations of biofilms is that we
really do seek to quantify both the aspects of growth as well as the efficacies of treatment
how will industry see some of the benefits from the reactor that you’re studying well hopefully we can we can look at
developing ways to either effectively administer antimicrobials or perhaps
add antimicrobials together for synergistic effect i mean it’s really about how to control biofilm within a
system and and many people come to me and say i have a biofilm problem and i want to get rid of it i want it gone i
want to eradicate the biofilm and i have to say well eradication is probably not a realistic goal a more
realistic goal is is control that involves continuous or
periodic treatment and that periodic treatment is usually pretty darn frequent
because depending on the system biofilm grows back very rapidly and it’s important to maintain control of the
system if you’re going to maintain control of the biofilm that’s a conversation that we have to have with our customers quite frequently
specifically around legionella and people say i don’t want legionella in my system make sure it never grows there of
course we know it’s constantly coming into the system and people have the wrong goal where they think zero
legionella is what they’re trying to get to how do we apply what you just said to
legionella well i think it’s important to look at how legionella grows in these systems
and and it doesn’t grow by itself right it’s part of the biofilm and the more
complex the biofilm is generally speaking the easier it is for legionella to grow and particularly if you have the
presence of of higher organisms like the protozoan host that legionella likes to
multiply within if there are those organisms present then controlling
legionella becomes even more difficult and so as you said zero legionella it’s
fine to state that as a goal but i think we have to recognize that it’s perhaps not a realistic outcome minimizing
legionella certainly is a possibility and can be done i think it’s important to understand
that minimizing the biofilm that in general will tend to minimize legionella in in these open field
systems like a cooling tower and when i use the word field i just mean like a full-scale system
biofilm doesn’t grow in pure culture it it grows with a whole bunch of different
stuff all growing together i subscribe to what i call the theory of bacterial ubiquity meaning that everything is
everywhere and what can grow will grow and we see that legionella grows very
well in water systems and in in cooling towers and it grows better in systems that
aren’t well controlled let’s say is legionella something that you’re studying
we do study legionella i wouldn’t say that it’s something that we have studied a great deal there are probably other
researchers around the us and the world that have done more work with legionella and we have i think our piece of this is
is really looking at how legionella grows within biofilm systems and how the
presence of other microorganisms contributes to the recalcitrance of
legionella in these systems somebody in the type of water treatment
that i practice we’ll try to figure out what is the best microbicide to put in a
cooling system to keep the biofilm at bay as best we can
what does your center do to help with that issue yeah we we do a lot of work with looking
at different antimicrobials in different systems and this can be anything from the oxidizing biocides that go into many
industrial systems to the the non-oxidizers that are used in like the oil field in the subsurface places where
oxidizers just are inappropriate to use both biocides offer
some advantages and disadvantages and so the type of system that’s being used
really helps to determine the type of antimicrobial that might be used within it and our piece of this is to to look
at at how biofilms grow and the effect of these different antimicrobials on the biofilm and really to quantify that
either through looking at actual numbers of bacterial cells on a surface looking at how biofilms might be killed versus
biofilm removal which are two really separate phenomena you can kill all the
organisms in a biofilm but leave the biofilm intact some antimicrobials are better at removing than others some
combinations of antimicrobials are better at both killing and removal so it’s important to really target the
antimicrobial to the system that is being disinfected in an effort to try to clean up a poorly
fouled system somebody will put some sort of microbicide in there and then a lot of foaming will take place
is that a good thing is that a bad thing and then somebody might even put some d foamer in does that affect how the
microbicide interacts with the biofilm well in general the foamers are a good
thing especially in an unsaturated system like a cooling tower it’s important to
get the antimicrobial into contact with the biofilm and this can be a challenge
in in many systems not just cooling towers but in a variety of different systems so this this issue of of access
to the biofilm for the antimicrobial is really important to consider
and another thing to consider is the geometry of the system that’s being treated systems that have really complex
geometry that have a lot of dead legs and and other areas that biofilm can hide from the antimicrobial
they are much harder to disinfect than systems that are designed with biofilm
in mind and we’re doing our best to try to educate the mechanical engineers that are designing these systems with
bacteria in mind but up until you know maybe 10 years ago that just wasn’t a
consideration so a lot of legacy systems suffer from the fact that they’re not
easy to clean yeah how do you get flow to a dead leg you you don’t i think the way you handle
a dead leg is that you either make it not a dead leg by flowing or you close
it off if somebody fed a surfactant before they
fed a microbicide would that affect its effectiveness on the biofilm it
generally can yes this is something that is a very well established treatment strategy for
biofilms is to to try to open up the biofilm and make it a little more penetrable to the antimicrobial and a
surfactant does a good job of that in some cases even enzymes have been
used to try to break up the biofilm matrix that that sticks the bacteria to the surface so anything that might help
access the biofilm from the standpoint of the antimicrobial is generally going to make
that a more effective treatment there’s lots of mysticism and folklore
in our industry and i’ve heard people say that you feed microbicides in the morning or you feed them in the evening
and it all has different effects on the biofilm is that true that’s a new one to me i’ve never heard
of any diurnal kind of uh strategy to to to biofilm treating i suppose if you had
a photosynthetic organism that was you know had an activity difference in day versus night you might see some effect
there but there again uh yeah that one that would have to be proven to me thought i’d ask the professional we were
talking about cooling towers let’s shift over to potable water we’re going to more efficient systems in
all of our infrastructure and we’re slowing down the flow in all of our piping which is allowing more biofilm to
grow my question is you know around the laminar effects of water is that why
we’re having this issue and maybe we even need to explain what we’re talking about to our audience here
sure yeah so this is a huge issue right now with with water conservation efforts
and the mandating of low-flow fixtures the potential for biofilm growth is
really expanded within these systems there’s two reasons for this one is that the fluid shear that a flowing system
imparts will help to drive the disinfectant into the biofilm
to in some regard and that disinfectant in potable systems here in the us anyway is overwhelmingly either chlorine or
chloramine the other issue with low flow systems is also around this disinfectant
but it deals with the disappearance of the disinfectant in really low flow
systems the disinfectant is added typically at the water treatment plant and so it has a distance the water has a
distance to travel to the the point of use after that disinfectant is added and and
the entire time that disinfectant is in contact with that water it’s disappearing essentially it’s doing its
job by attacking the bacteria and other organics within that system a low flow
system what you’re going to do is extend that period of time so the water is is older by the time it gets to the place
of use therefore it may have significantly less disinfectant residual
in it which would lead to more biofilm accumulation so this is going to be an issue as we
move forward in in this industry because water scarcity is not going away and so
we’re going to have to figure out how to maintain water quality within these lower flow systems because they’re the
future and whether we like it or not it’s somewhat counter-intuitive or maybe
surprising to some that the answer to a biofilm that’s been in a low-flow system
that has grown up is to flush the system out which of course means you’re going to be wasting water in the process but
that’s that’s the way you get more disinfectant residual to a biofilm
i’ve seen hospitals where they used to put sinks in every location to make it
easy for people to wash that they’re minimizing that now because those things
weren’t getting any flow through them what are some design changes that you’ve
seen that people are trying to do to minimize this issue yeah so particularly the issue with
hospitals is really important because nosocomial infections are hugely important and the people who are in
hospitals are generally have let’s say more challenged immune systems than those outside of hospitals so a hospital
needs to be really careful about bacteria growing in their system and so they’ve got recirculating systems
oftentimes or or should and even the placement of fixtures is really important like not putting the sink
right next to the toilet is often a bad idea in a hospital or you know a toilet
needs to be away from at least in an enclosed room perhaps from where the
sink is located and there have been studies done where looking at tracing the movement of
particular strains of microorganisms from the waste system in a hospital to
the potable water system in a hospital and that happens through aerosolization from the toilet to places within the
sink which could then influence the when the water from the sink is turned on
so these are really issues that we haven’t thought about in the past very much but really need to think about now
for nosocomial infections speaking about low flow a lot of people
are putting variable frequency drives on their cooling system pumps what should we be doing with that should
we advise our clients that if we’re minimizing the amount of flow into that
system we’re not able to treat it as effectively how should that be taken into consideration
yeah i think it’s the same it’s really an analogous situation to what we’re talking about with potable water because
the disinfectant comes with the water right it’s it’s dissolved in the water
and the disinfectant kind of disappears from the water at a particular rate that
we need to take into consideration if there’s less water flowing to the biofilm there’s less disinfectant
flowing to the biofilm as well and shutting down a system for a period of time is is not a not an effective way to
maintain control over the biofilm so in a perfect world we’re trying to
reduce energy consumption we’re trying to reduce water consumption how do we do those things and make sure that biofilm
isn’t growing everywhere it’s a huge challenge and one that has i i don’t have an answer to that question
because i don’t believe there yet exists a good answer to how you pick a point
within these these kind of competing goals right i mean you want to save water you want to save energy
but you don’t want biofilm to grow there’s a set point there which you can control the biofilm and yet minimize
water use but it may not be as far down on the water minimization as people want it to
be i’m curious what are some of the things that you guys are looking at to try to solve that question
we are looking at the effects of water age on biofilm growth that’s one of the
areas that we’ve been investigating because water age really deals with the disappearance of this disinfectant
residual so that would be probably the area that i’d say is we’ve done the most with right now and i wouldn’t say that we
have have drawn a lot of conclusions yet that are going to really help the water treatment industry
immediately we’re looking more at the long game of how do we help the industry to minimize biofilm over the long term
and it’s a it’s a tough question well the great thing that i get from that question is that you’re looking at
it and you’re working with industry so we’re all coming at it together instead of just pointing fingers it’s your
problem it’s your problem yeah i mean absolutely we take a lot of our research cues from industry i’m not sure
if i mentioned it yet or not but we get about 40 of our support from industry either through the dues
annual dues of our industrial associate members or through sponsored projects that seek
to look at a specific issue around a particular product and that product might be plumbing fixture it might be an
antimicrobial that is being added into a system so we tend to maintain our relevance that
way by asking these questions of industry what are your biofilm concerns and how can we help
something i want to thank you for and i don’t know the title of the video but it shows how biofilm proliferates how it
sloughs off and i have trained so many water treaters by showing them that film
i know there’s a dozen probably even more than that resources that you offer the industry do you mind
talking a little around that yeah and these are all kind of available on our website so a lot of these videos
offer a great way to visualize what’s happening and we’ve got some really cool
microscopy capabilities here a lot of real time microscopy capabilities which
allow us to to look at particular clusters of biofilm growing on a surface
in real time while they’re being exposed to an antimicrobial for example and you
can see cell death you can see the removal of the biofilm if it happens
and you can watch why some antimicrobials are more effective than others again in real time and i think it
really helps people to understand that this biofilm is a it’s a pretty tough
adherent and tenacious colony of bacteria that is really difficult to
kill paul does your department do anything in developing methods for testing biofilm
absolutely we are probably the the foremost institution in the world for
developing biofilm methods and these are mainly laboratory methods for studying biofilm and it’s important to have
standard methods to study biofilms so that labs across the world can give the
same answers to the same questions and we have a standard methods laboratory
here at the center for biofilm engineering it’s run by a colleague of mine dr darla gores and darla is
probably the world’s foremost expert on developing biofilm methods right now we have
six astm standardized methods and this is a huge issue getting a method
standardized through astm is kind of the gold standard for biofilms and it’s a
very painstaking process to do this and darla and her her team have developed
these methods and standardized them and they’re in wide use around the world and in fact the epa has adopted one of the
methods that her team developed in their assessment of biofilm efficacy for
high level disinfectants so somebody out there were developing a new microbicide would they contact you
to find out these standards well a lot of them are available directly from astm if you just go to
their website and google biofilm methods you’d see many of these methods and
i think what we could help with is to choosing the right method for whatever they’re looking to study and we do these
methods routinely in our laboratory as well testing products for a variety of different companies and oftentimes what
we’ll do because we’re so familiar with biofilms and how they grow and the methods that we’ve developed we’ll take
different pieces of different methods and put them together to test something in a unique way depending on the field
application of that chemistry let’s say and so a lot of the work we do in our
labs is more customized work that that involves taking bits of
different methods and looking at them or trying to get an answer that is more relevant to the particular question
that’s being asked your department’s done so much to help our industry what’s something our
industry can do to help you well i think podcasts like this are
really important because it helps me to get the word out about biofilms to different companies that may not have
heard of us before and you know the first step is always to come to our website and have a look at what we can
offer and then the next step if more information is needed is to contact me and my email information is uh available
right on the website so it’s it’s really easy to get a hold of me try to answer every email that i get and i’m always
looking for more industrial contacts so we can both expand our influence and
help to fund the work that we do you know as well as just help u.s industry become more competitive
i would say we’re international for sure in our reach but primarily we work with
representatives here in the united states and canada as well so i asked this question of people that
i interview that are in our industry i’m kind of curious how you’re going to answer it what’s one of the oddest things that
you’ve experienced in working with biofilm boy let’s see uh
okay here’s here’s one for you let me rephrase and say what’s the strangest place you’ve seen a biofilm growing
one of the areas that biofilm can grow pretty well is in soap and we we did a project
that looked at the bacterial colonization in reusable soap dispensers
so these are soap dispensers in in a public restroom that are just refilled
with liquid soap whenever they get low on soap now depending on how they are
maintained that also influences the biofilm within it but the work that we did
actually took field samples of these refillable soap dispensers and found that there is a ton of biofilm growing
in in these soap dispensers so much so that you might be inoculating yourself with a
hundred thousand organisms and a single puff of soap coming out of that dispenser really remarkable and it
speaks to how biofilm grows it grows in a cluster the cluster tends to detach all at once
and then the biofilm continues to grow wherever it was but you know if you happen to to get a big cluster in that
dollop of soap that ended up on your hands you may be making your hands a little less safe than they were before
you used it the answer to this of course is that you you will see many soap
dispensers that are not refillable they have a little packet inside and that when the packet’s gone then you know you
put a new packet in and those are totally safe you know you wouldn’t find biofilm growing in those
paul if there are people out there listening and they want to find out more information what should they do
yeah again our website is a great place to go to to learn more about what we can
offer again i really do encourage people to to contact me directly very happy to
answer emails or if someone would like to call me i can i can certainly speak on the phone as well
and you’ve got a biofilm issue we look to help that is my job to interface with
industry and to try to help solve biofilm problems well we appreciate you doing that and we
all appreciate you sharing the message on scaling up h2o well thank you very much for having me
scala nation paul was not exaggerating he does return emails i was working on
one of my presentations and i went on their website just like he urged all of
you to do to get some information so i could better explain what i was trying
to explain to my audience and i thought i wanted to reach out and thank the
people that do all of this i wonder who’s involved i very easily found
paul’s information on their web page and i email paul and i let him know how much
i enjoyed what he delivers to our industry and i invited him on the
podcast i think it was 45 minutes and i got a reply email and he said i would
love to and then of course you heard the result of that we’re going to have all the information so you can link directly
to the center for biofilm engineering lots of great tools on there and i know
you can learn a lot more about something that we have just scratched the surface on an industrial water treatment which
is biofilm so that’s all going to be on our show notes page paul thanks again for
coming on the show thank you for leading the department that does so much for our industry
nation there’s no doubt about it our job is hard you heard me ask paul what do we
do when we’re trying to save energy we’re trying to save water and we’re also trying to keep biofilm at bay all
those things do not go together we’ve got to work as an industry we’ve got to work as a global team to figure
out how do we deal with all the things that we need to solve and by doing
something on one end we don’t harm it on the other and i think that happens a lot
when people don’t communicate and paul shared with me after the interview that he was very appreciative to come on this
podcast to let people know that there was a center for biofilm engineering and
that we all need to be working together so we’re all trying to solve the problem
together we all have little bits and pieces of information that the other one doesn’t have and when
we can collaborate with all that information we can come up with a better solution and we can get further on that
solution faster than we ever could by ourselves i think that’s a good way to
look at life anything that you’re trying to do you’re going to be able to do it better when
you do it with other people nation i absolutely love bringing
this podcast to you i really enjoy every time i go to an event
anything around water treatment people coming up to me and saying they enjoy the scaling up h2o podcast i think that
goes to prove the point this is a very lonely job we’re we’re driving a lot
we’re alone doing testing doing all the things that we do to make sure that our
customers get the best work and then of course we do get to speak with our customers but it’s very easy to become
an island and just like paul was talking about we can’t fix anything if we are an island
don’t be an island there’s no reason to be an island so maybe one of the things
i mentioned at the beginning of this episode is something that intrigues you and you can go to one of those
conferences maybe there’s somebody that you think you can help
that they’re struggling with a particular issue and you think you can help them wouldn’t that be a great phone
call if you receive so just imagine how they would receive it or maybe there’s somebody that you need help from
and you can call them and ask them for their help that’s a hard phone call to
make and trust me once you make it i think you’ll be glad that you did i have
never asked anybody in this industry well it’s happened very very rarely
where somebody has not reciprocated it and said how can i help you what do you need i want to say that because i do so
much for the industry that helps but people are just generous with their time
in this industry so don’t get in your head too deep that you are not valuable enough for somebody
to help you out people in this industry love to do that all you need to do
is ask scaled up nation we have hit the half time mark we are right smack dab in
the middle of the year so what have you accomplished this year what do you want to accomplish and make
sure that each day you’re learning from the last day you’re making yourself just a little bit better
take care folks i’ll have a brand new episode for you next week
[Music] it’s hard to improve the day to day when
we are stuck living in the day today and for one hour a week you can join the
group at the rising tide mastermind so you can work on the business without
being in the business that one hour will change every other hour of the week it’s
magic it’s not magic it’s how we get together it’s how we process issues it’s
how we encourage each other and it’s how we just form these common bonds around
each other and there’s a camaraderie that i promise you will not find anywhere else to find out more about the
rising tide mastermind go to scalinguph2o.com forward slash mastermind