Scaling UP! H2O

256 Transcript

The following transcript is provided by YouTube. Mistakes are present. To hear the podcast episode, click HERE.

[Music]

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[Music]

welcome to scaling up h2o though podcast where we scale up on knowledge so we don’t scale up our systems i’m trace

blackmore the host of scaling up h2o nation welcome to a brand new episode

episode 250 and just amazing that there’s

256 episodes out there in fact they’re actually more for those of you that have

stayed with us through the entire five years of producing this podcast you know

i tried to get creative in some of our numbering if it was on a particular topic i would have a episode 10.1 and .2

and i don’t know what the heck i was doing but anyway we try to keep it simple now and each new episode gets a

brand new number so if you were to count i’m willing to bet that we’re probably at least in the 280s probably even a

little bit higher than that and when i look at all the things that i have

learned on this podcast it’s just been amazing i mean just talk about how to create this podcast i

didn’t know anything about podcasting before i started doing this podcast

started learning a whole bunch about how to produce a podcast

learned a bunch about the technology and then there’s so many things that i

learned on how to interview people how to make sure that i was giving the scaling up nation what it needed how i

was making sure that i was staying relevant all of these things was to uncover the fact that i didn’t

know what i didn’t know and that was a question that somebody posed to me i

want to say at least 12 15 years ago his name is tim fulton

he’s a really big part of my life i call him my business coach and i met him at a conference

and then that became a class that i took from tim and then today

tim actually coaches me on a regular basis with trying to encourage me to learn things that i didn’t know

i didn’t know but he asked me that question well over a decade ago and i just love that question with the

podcast i didn’t know what i didn’t know so i started going on the internet trying to figure out what it is i needed

to know so i could give you a podcast that you wanted to listen to

in water treatment i do that all the time what don’t i know i don’t know

maybe i’m running a new test never run it before don’t have any experience with it i

don’t know what the different reagents are blended with i don’t know how they

react to a possible interference i don’t know what are some of the things

that they might do maybe they turn different colors if there’s different interferences out there whenever i’m

testing for something i’m not familiar with maybe a customer asked me to test something that we don’t normally test for

i asked myself what do i need to know about this test so i can expect some

things maybe i don’t plan on expecting so when’s the last time you’ve done that what are some things that could possibly

go wrong what are some ways that some interferences could happen when you run

a test the first time and i also apply that to pretty much anything that i do so here’s my question

for you do you ask yourself how do you know that

you don’t know something and then how do you find out what you need to

know it’s a question that just really energizes me because there’s so

much information out there so i would encourage you to ask yourself how do you know when you don’t know

something and how are you going to find that something out you know one of the

ways that we try to find things that we don’t know or maybe we just need to

expand what we do know a little bit further is with our friend james

mcdonald so here’s a brand new thinking on water with james

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 what alternative water sources can potentially be used for cooling tower

makeup city water and well water are often the first two makeup water sources that come

to mind for cooling tower but what are some others one person’s waste is another’s treasure they say

are there any waste streams going down the drain right now that could be recycled to the cooling tire for makeup

do they require any pre-treatment what challenges would these alternative makeup water sources pose once in the

tower would the current water treatment program need to be altered in any way to accommodate them

are these alternative sources reliable what volume of water can they provide

take this week to think about the possibility of using alternative water sources for cooling tower makeup be sure

to follow hashtag tow22 and hashtag scalinguph2o share your

thoughts on each week’s thinking on water i’m james mcdonald and i look forward to learning more from you

well thank you james you know james is one of those people that is always helping out our industry

and if you ever tune in to one of our hangs you are sure to see james mcdonald

james mcdonald is almost on every single hang and our next hang is going to be on

july 14th at 6 p.m eastern time

we have people all over the globe that join us and we get to meet new people on

the hang it’s only one hour of your time and you never know who you’re gonna meet

on the hang that can help you with a problem that maybe you don’t even know

you have yet go to scaling up h2o.com forward slash hang to reserve your spot

today and it will not cost you a dime just an hour of your time and you will

be so glad you spent that hour meeting some new people in the water

treatment industry nation in addition to the question what don’t i know i know

i also like to ask the question whenever i meet somebody new is who do i know

that you want to meet and i’ve introduced so many people that way well

if you were to rewind many years i want to say this was 1995

maybe i think i’m pretty close but that’s the first time i met our guest that’s coming on today

and i know you are going to enjoy this interview here it is

my lab partner today is bruce ketrick senior of guardian csc bruce i can’t

believe it’s been five years and you’re finally on the scaling up h2o podcast welcome well thank you i’m obviously on

top of the list so i really appreciate that we have been trying to do this forever i think and we finally got the

stars to align bruce i i don’t know if there’s anybody in the water treatment community that has not heard your name

but just in case there’s one person out there how would you describe bruce

ketrick to the audience bruce catrick is an individual that got into the water treatment industry in 1974

and turned around yesterday and said well now i know how to afford lake now know

how to sell i’ve built a company i’ve worked for a number of different majors and none of it was planned

it just happens you just take one step at a time and you end up there you wake up in a blink of an eye it all

went by it all went by bruce i’m curious how did you originally

get in to the water treatment industry while i was in college i was working summers in norfolk harbor industrially

cleaning villages fresh waters of navy vessels and one of the vendors worked for a company called gambling and we

were talking and he knew i was graduating and recommended i interview with gambling

chemical which i did and they hired me originally to be a trainee one of their

first sales trainees uh both industrial and marine and the idea was on road ships i did

cleaning underway i did rest cleaning i did product formulation and testing i

did everything they asked me to do with the idea when a sales opportunity opened up that’s where i’d be and it

happened in new jersey so i ended up being an industrial sales instead of marine and in 1973 when i got out of

college the vietnam war ended there was a flood of people coming back from vietnam

not a lot of jobs so you took the first of those offered so bruce did you did you always want to

own your own company was this something that you just said you know i got to do it

no not really i liked working for the companies i worked for i went from gambling to bats when gambling

got first got purchased and realigned i worked for beds for a few years

had the opportunity to go with a company called paralyn and within three years i went from a

salesman to the u.s operations manager and ran their u.s operations production

sales the entire gambit until 1987 when they got purchased again

and when they got purchased again the company that came in had a president that didn’t think

a 37 year old man that knew how to run a national company should be kept around so i got fired for producing too well

and at that point in time uh one of my distributors was looking to start his own water treatment company he was an

equipment supplier and we kind of worked out a deal which as i look back on it now i must have been extremely desperate

and started from nothing basically with two accounts harley-davidson and york

hospital were the first to add that was it and you still have those accounts don’t you yes i do

that is saying something we don’t lose a lot but we’ve yeah we’re like everybody else we try

bruce what do you think the biggest difference is from working with somebody to owning a company other than the

obvious worship for somebody means you do the best job you can and you hope you read what they want

owning your own company is taking a look at what do i need to survive and make the paychecks next week

it’s a totally different concept when you’re on your company you work for your employees people don’t

think of it that way they someone that has it on their own company will think well these employees work for you

you are for your employees because your employees are the reason you succeed those people are your family

if you don’t work for them and worry about them being taken care of every day you won’t have it and if you don’t have

them you don’t have a company knowing everything that you do now would you do it over again

probably i would probably do it a lot smarter i say to people all the time they say

how do you know these things i said well when you make a mistake you never forget

and i said i’ve made enough mistakes now that i even hear the two by four coming at me before they start to swing because

over time experience is what it is you learn and there’s a lot of things that i’ve done different from when it

first started but you’re younger you’re naive you think things are going to go the way you want them to go and they just tend

to go the way they go what’s one of the biggest changes that you’ve seen in our industry since you’ve

been in water treatment i don’t think we have four days

product development the way people sell we’ve gone from selling by the pound

to being energy engineers where we’re actually looking how to maximize the energy of a facility

uh we’ve gone from in the 70s we sold chemical boilers blew down to 10 cycles so

fuel was cheap after the oil embargo fuel wasn’t cheap so that’s when we started energy savings blow down savings

we still sold by the pound we chemical didn’t talk to equipment equipment didn’t talk to chemical in

today’s world it’s a marriage you have to condition the water as best as possible

with equipment pre-treatment equipment reverse osmosis the ionization whichever you use and

then polish it with chemistry to give the customer most economical program in the best

energy savings and it’s really all about energy it’s not about the product

is there something you say that we’ve lost over the years did we do something better back in the 80s than we do today

back in the 80s we were more of a fraternity than we are today there weren’t that many of us it wasn’t as big

as it is now and you know you had your competitors you liked the ones you didn’t like like

we do today there’s no question about that but on the whole we acted on a different

level it’s become much more commercialized today we’re seeing the change from we used to call it the

six-pack there were six major companies and they pretty much dominated the industry with a few independents they

purchased each other they spun off people they’ve been purchased back and forth and now they’ve churned

into very large entities and there’s not six of them anymore uh and independents have filled that gap

in doing so we lost a lot of humanity we had and there’s a very

definite separation between different groups and the way to look at things a lot of communications have been lost

even though we’re in the basic era of communication where everyone can talk to anyone at any

time like we’re doing now people in major companies we see this when you interview people have no idea

what awt is doing or what we do or the technical training but the only one that

uh seems to have any concept of that is chemtrail the rest of them it’s amazing the

difference uh there used to be very good training programs in the major companies

they trained their people very well technically but when they started purchasing each other and started getting people spin off they with major

competitors so they changed from technical training to sales training and moved the

technical inside so it’s controlled by a few people and we find we hire people from the majors and they are very well trained in

a specific area but they have no clue about general technology product application

what a phosphonate is they just know a product it’s changed dramatically

that personal touch is really gone and now it’s all about apps on your phone or

on your computer but as you have seen when you teach math

the basic concept of math and the formulas is almost like magic to people today

when it used to be that’s what we did well bruce you alluded to the association of water technologies uh i

believe you were one of the founding members is that correct not exactly i was one of the first

couple dozen 10 people started that company originally and the next year

after they started it they started recruiting people to bolster it and i was in that

shall we say the second phase one of the first two dozen if you want to say so you got a phone call

somebody i’m guessing it was chuck branvold he pitched you on this wait denny clayton danny clayton i was

handling a paper mill for danny clayton because he knew me from past experiences and called me up and

said we formed this company uh or this i’m sorry organization and we’d like you to join and of course i was pretty much

a two-man outfit at the time barely keeping my head above water it’s like hey i don’t have time to do this he says

you don’t have time not to do so we always went to the iwc in pittsburgh because that was the water conference

and the majors had their sweets and the rest of us were kind of at the table waiting for crumbs to fall off

and you went there anyway so we went there and after the meeting we meet in an auditorium

20 people and we’re forming this organization so that we can

offer insurance but we got to do more than just offer insurance we have to do everything else so danny said to

myself and rusty hill who was there at the time uh i’d like you guys to be in the technical

department because you both came out of technical i said okay what does that mean don’t worry about it we’re just starting

out just do it to which i was then introduced to everybody as the

chairman of the technical committee which didn’t exist so that’s kind of how it all started

well i met you because you were leading that technical committee and i did the math i want to say it was

in 97 when training was in atlanta and i sat down at an empty table it was my

first awt function ever didn’t know anybody and then you sat

down on the other side of me and j farmery sat down on the other side

and you talk about an intimidating lunch i was like how am i ever gonna hold my

own with these two water treatment jedi that was that was the first time we met

and you asked me i think i’d just take a bite of sandwich and you said so what do

you think and i had no idea how to respond i don’t know what i said hopefully it was halfway coherent do you remember that

conversation at all i remember that conversation i don’t remember what you said but it must not have been too

incoherent because we’re still talking [Laughter] so and then it was uh it was that

conference that i saw all of you guys speak of course uh jim lucanich i just thought he was just incredible with how

he’s able to entertain and teach and i remember thinking i really want to do

what these guys do i want to have a command of this information in a way

that i not only understand it for myself but i understand it in a way that i can explain it to other people so they could

understand it and it was that day that i decided that i was not worthy to do it but i wanted to become one of your

trainers well you’ve done really well at that so congratulations so i’m trying to

remember um i believe there was uh i i want to say

that i said i wanted to do this and you said well you need to get involved in the committee right and it was working

on the sidelines through the committee and i want to say you came to me one day colin was starting to do sales training

so he wasn’t able to do calculations anymore and you said well hey i’ve got an opening you’re not going to want it

but it’s math and i said yes and you said yes and i found out later you actually like matt so

i got lucky you couldn’t have asked me to teach anything uh more than than i think i i

would have wanted to do that allowed me to take the information really make it my own and and the

challenge was there the topic that nobody wanted to do that nobody wanted to sit through during training how can i

actually make that fun how could i make that entertaining how could i make it so people actually had handles that they

could bring home when they left the class so it was it was a great challenge i still aspire to

do that i get some good feedback uh after i do present i don’t think i’ve mastered it by any means but i really

want to thank you for the opportunity because it is something i look forward to each and every year well no i want to

thank you because you do an exceptional job colin and i did the math before that and i didn’t want it back and you do

exceptional at it so i appreciate that bruce that’s that’s fantastic uh thank you for that i

remember i only missed one technical training and that was when my father passed away

right and then i remember you were going through my slides and i of course when we talk about

boiler calculations i use the reference of dr evil where he’s he’s doing the one

million with his pv in his mouth just to remind people that that’s not the right answer if your boiler is not producing

one million pounds of steam you still have to do a percentage off of that and

we both know that there are cwt test question answers out there that if you

forget that step there’s still that answer available for you to pick so i put that up there as a result

and uh you click the next slide and this dr evil popped up you’re like what the heck is blackmore teaching you guys i

did think that yes but having not seen the script i looked at that and went i don’t know what to do with this

[Laughter] so several people reported back that you handled it very well i really wish that

i had a recording of that well the stuttering was probably the best part of the whole thing

so bruce you and rusty were charged with creating the original technical

committee obviously people know what it is today is what is it 30 years in the making now

oh more than that okay so so 30 plus years in the making it is the crown

jewel that awt does twice a year people go to the training uh they keep

coming back because there’s just so much valuable information it didn’t start there how did that start

well it started a couple of years in from what i joined and again was danny clayton he was president i think at the

time or just been president and he said one of the problems we have is

we have very talented people who know what i recognize is that we have a lot of people need training and training requires some ability and

some monetary capability to be able to put together well the independents most of our small companies individually

couldn’t do it but a handful of us had been trainers in the past had worked for major companies

so we put together a group in chicago to do the first one we all showed up with

our transparencies because this is well before powerpoint you might have to explain that technology to our audience

uh it was an overhead projector where the light showed through a transparency and put a picture

on a screen well the nice part about is you could write on with a magic marker if you wanted to and show people things without

using a whiteboard but there was no automation it was basically talking to a group with a lot

of transparent slides and to say that it was a complete

disaster was probably being kind many of the speakers that were in the first one actually the only speaker left

in the first one many of them were very intelligent uh spoken a monotone spoke at a level where everyone

sat there going i have no idea what we’re doing here and we gradually transitioned through there and got the

farmers the luck images and you know the people that are now a main part of this colin franklin and much later

but it started with a need to teach the industry and to close that gap

between the majors and the independents which i feel now with the cwt and the training we have we’ve closed that gap

and i don’t see the majors except for their size having anything

technically better than where we are right now bruce people have asked me how i’ve

decided you know what math equations we’re going to use and of course i teach the ones that are on the cwt examination

but how did i decide to go down certain routes how did i decide to use certain

analogies and basically how did i design my course so i’m curious with you

you’ve done so much of the awt architecture for the training course how

do you decide what you’re going to teach and how you’re going to teach it well

i was educated in the majors originally and also with a international marine company so i kind of when i went from

the international company to the major i looked at how differently they did things got the same answer

and we looked this the same way i look at it from the standpoint of i’m not teaching suez i’m not teaching

echolabs i’m not teaching country uh i want to look at the overall industry

in general generically which is why the trtm was built that way generically and

say how can i get this information across to people in a generic means which case you notice we don’t talk

about products we talk about raw materials we talk about different types of boilers and the problems they have

different types of cooling towers and the problems they have different types of water and what to expect

how you can calculate the proper level of corrosion not the guest that was the way the drew book did it or

whichever it’s really just sitting down with the people who come from a diverse background because if you look at their

trainers we come from every major company that was out there and saying okay this is how i present this how would you

present that and have them feedback and then eventually over time that feedback has developed the real framework of what

this program is well we’re talking about training let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about

the governance of the awt you and i were both presidents of that

great organization very humbled to to to be a past president when i look at all the people

that are on that list bruce why did you become president what was that journey like they tried to get

me to become president early on when it was just starting out and i refused to

because basically i couldn’t afford the time away from my company i wouldn’t have survived when i got to the point where i

could survive i got a phone call from mr maloyd and james said

it’s only an hour a month and i finally said well i’ll try and i was

voted in got on the board and that’s when we started the trtm and

a lot of the other things uh and at the end of your first year you decide if you want to move on to the

chairs as you know and the governance and i wasn’t asked to do that but i was given other projects and i found out

later on that mr mcnamara and mr malloy had decided since i was a uh how could i put

a mule and work very hard if they could stall me going into the chairs one year they get six full years of making me

work my backside off versus five once you get into the organization

especially when you get into those levels you learn more than you give and it

helped me tremendously with my own company with my own life

uh i met some fantastic people that again networking is what we really do in

our lives and the six years went by very quickly yeah thinking about it the awt board was

probably the first mastermind that i was ever a member of we would get together

afterwards and we would talk about each other’s issues and we would just lean into each other and and give each other

advice and then when you’re off the board that kind of went away

um i never thought about it before now but i think that was my first mastermind experience i just didn’t have that

language around it i would say so but when i joined the board it was very

cut and dry you showed up for the board meeting it was done by strict rules

and it lasted 10-12 hours and he went home and so when i became president

i looked at that and said this is not working for me once you start the official meeting it’s

got to be an official meeting why don’t we sit down before the meeting go through all our issues with dinner

couple beers whatever discuss it we’re going to relax so that we’re prepared for the next day and then

we get the work done which is again a mastermind concept what i proposed it our management group

which is not the one we have now uh looked at me like i had four heads and was out of my mind but evidently

that’s what they’re still doing and it worked out very well because we took the actual board meeting down to

about six hours get it done work on the real issues not two hours of

discussion or something we could talk about friday night and work out instead of doing it at the board meeting

well when i was on the board we still took that concept and we would get together i think we called it the pre-board meeting

and when i first started we had binders and then they would ship cds out and that had all the pdfs and

different documents on it and then we started using electronic where you could just go up in the cloud and get it but i

remember my very first board meeting i got a cellophane wrapped binder

and of course i’m reading that as diligently as i i could and then we go to this pre-board meeting

and the the president at the time who was chuck had just outlined all the

things that we really needed to make sure we understood before going into that meeting

and i can’t imagine us ever having anywhere near the same conversation had

we not prepared in that way it would have all been about talking about what we needed to talk about instead of

weighing in on what we already knew based on our findings that was all idea behind it

well thank you for doing that i am pretty sure they are still doing that today you know bruce what are what are some

big things that you’ve seen change with the the awt you know you’re one of the second round of members so you’re

probably member number what nine or something like that well not that that good probably like 18 or 20. okay when

we first started the only reason we started is bullfall india caused the

loss of liability insurance that prices were astronomical independents were

operating without a liability insurance and this was

a problem that we all feared so the original group got together to do offshore insurance

they brought us in for the same reason we were looking at getting liability insurance that we could afford

and other than that we knew we had to build a structure for an organization to

justify what we were doing a bunch of people just trying to figure it out day to day

we had nothing you have today we had no website we had no books we had there was no training there was nothing

and you look at it today today we have one of the best training programs in the industry and it’s not a training program

there’s six of them today we have a website that has more information than probably any place else in the world we

have the trtm which is constantly being updated and it is the first generic

training and technical manual in the industry not written with my point of view but everyone’s point of

view and the original four authors came from four separate majors which makes it even more cohesive

we have reference material assets people numerous people with talent and and

experience if you went for an uh to talk to an independent 34 years ago

they either had a couple years with a major company or just kind of fell into this

today you’ve got people with that are independents have been doing this for over 30 years and they’ve got

an established company established reputation it’s it’s very very very different

what does the future hold for bruce ketrick senior oh i’m running out of future i’m getting to the point where i

want to travel and i want to say you know what it’s your turn now i’m very quickly getting to that point

i’m 71 years old i’ve been doing this since i was 22. the future is

i’ve had a good transition with my company i’m i’m still here because i guess they feel the old guy should be

stuck in a room and just you know feed him and don’t don’t hurt him but uh i’m getting to the point where i’m i’d

like to just start backing off some and and go see what i can of the world now that covet has become a little less

toxic than it was before you mentioned transitioning your company

right now there is a lot of that going on a lot of people are passing the

company to either their children another employee maybe they’re selling it to somebody else

you’ve gone through this process very successfully i know it’s successful because bj your son says it went great

and he wouldn’t have said that if you guys didn’t figure it out how did you figure it out what what advice do you

have for people that are going through that process right now well

the first thing is you have to know that there’s someone coming in that is confident obviously

because for independents these are our babies these are our children we grew them from nothing so there’s a real

investment into this company and you don’t want to give your child to anybody

i was very fortunate to have two of my three children had an interest in this early i got

involved i made them start at the bottom they worked their way up they’re very talented uh thank god for their mother

that’s probably why they’re very talented and uh they had an interest in running the

company and i’d always told them you have to decide what you want to do

before i’m 60 because i’m eventually going to want to get out

and there’s only three options to get out one transfer to your joke two sell it to an employee three sell it

to somebody else and you need a few years to position your company for that

to get the most out of it so i said you have to make the decision if you don’t want to do it that’s fine i didn’t do

this for them to come in and have a second generation i did this because i needed a job

and started something so i had a job and then eventually ended up with 70 people

that worked for me now i have jobs that was the first step the second step you have to recognize

they are not going to do it the way you do it the biggest failures and transitions is

the person that starts the company feels i made it here because this is how i did it

and the reality is probably true but that doesn’t mean it’s the only way to do it and the most

difficult thing to do is to step back you have to when you transition to

somebody allow them to be the leader you can’t constantly step in and

reassert your power you can’t step in and say well i wouldn’t have done it that way in front

of employees kind of like raising kids you never argue in front of the kids

you are doing private and you work it out the kids see a solid front it has to be the same way

my son is not me he does a lot of things far better than i ever would dream to do

and some things that i consider important he does not okay so how do you do that you fill it in

with a competent person to do that part that he doesn’t want to do and again the hard part is to sit back and allow them

to do it and it’s been five years and he’s grown the company dramatically so we’ve been successful because we had

the right person and i was able to swallow enough ego to step back and let

him be that person and that’s very hard very very difficult at times and i think that’s where a lot of these

transitions fail if you have an employee that fits that and you want to sell it to your employee

it doesn’t have to be your child it has to be that person that fits and you still have to go through the same transition

the other option is you sell it you get cash you walk away that would have been my last resort

because my people are very important to me and i want them taken care of i’ve got people inventing me for 25

years 30 years and if i just sold it to someone i relinquish my

ability to protect them if i sell it to a good employee or i sell it to my children as we did

they see the culture they see how it worked they protect those same employees and those employees then who benefit for

a while just transfer the loyalties to that new president

and bring that experience with them to help that president go along and that’s worked very well for us but scott

stewart our sales manager has been with 31 years and he’s he’s got another five or six years

in him at least if not then and his transition to vijay because he knew him as a teenager

has been not only do i recognize you as my boss but i’m here to support you and protect

you and that all that experience he uses to make sure bj succeeds so

we’ve been very fortunate that’s great advice i know you’ve helped a lot of people just telling that story

so bruce thinking all the way back to the beginning of your career in 1974 to now what would you say your biggest

lesson learned is the biggest problem you have

is you feel you’re not adequate so you go out and you try too hard

people recognize you try too hard and people recognize you’re comfortable and confident

yourself if you come into a situation you don’t know be patient listen

tell that individual i don’t know that right now but i will the next time i see you and then bring it back

if you over commit because you don’t have patience you will fail so i i think that’s my

biggest lesson when i was younger i wasn’t as good at i got a lot better at after like i hit the head a couple times

with 2×4 well bruce you’ve done very well so far

in the interview but it’s anybody’s game because we are going to the lightning round where the point values are triple

so are you ready for the lightning round oh absolutely not but let’s do it all right you’re gonna do great so if

you had the ability to go back in time and talk to your former self on your

very first day in 1974 as a water treater what would you

tell yourself to listen a great deal more to look at the people that you were

surrounded by which i was fortunate to be with some very talented people and asked more questions

i was very fortunate to start the technical department with some experienced very talented people and

being young i just wanted to do things i really wish i’d asked more and listen

more bruce i know you’re an avid reader what are some of your favorite books to read

and then specifically what are some of your favorite water treatment reference books

well my water shooting reference books are probably what you don’t have i have uh the original formulation books that

we put together uh with berlin one of my favorite ones is pads of formulation by

bob cavano which i’ve been told is being updated but i’m not sure but it gives all the basics of all the raw materials

and i still use the trtm that is you know by far my favorite i’ll

go back i’ve got the bets book and then alco book and the true book and all i have the original permuted book on

permuted specs and bruner space oh wow which i’ll use because they have data in

them engineering data that isn’t printed anymore so those are a couple of my favorites

i asked jay farmery that question and he referenced the leo pinkus book which i

had never heard of before and i can’t tell you how many times i’ve referenced that since it’s become part of my

library that is a tremendous book i have that i’ve got a lot of the cooling water

books that were done by many of the legionella people today and one of my favorite books is the

corner dioxide by simpson well there you go nation a totally selfish question i want to know what

needs to become part of my library so thank you for helping me out with that bruce next question who plays bruce

ketrick senior in a movie i have no idea i really i looked at that

i said you got to find a tall fat bald guy but i don’t know who it would be

yeah i don’t know if i have one too um no i don’t know if i would say body body

status i don’t know that’s a tough one did you ask around the office oh no i wouldn’t ask that the response time to

get back since we have a very relaxed situation here i

i enjoy the fact that the people that work here in the office can express their opinion to me without

any fear because that’s the only way they can be accepted so i’m a little afraid to ask that question

because what i might get back because it would be free about explaining yeah i don’t know why but

john lithgow comes to mind okay i wouldn’t argue with that one so i’ve never done this before but we’re

going to do uh this on social media so we’re going to post something in our

social media channels we’re going to have a picture of you we’re going to reference this episode

and we are going to ask people what they think who should play

you so we’ll see how that plays out i have insulted you that badly have i [Laughter]

never done it before we will see how it works out all right my last question bruce if you could talk with anybody

throughout history who to be with and why someone you’ve probably never heard of paul maron senior

which is my wife’s grandfather he was a self-educated engineer that created the golden eye which was a bomb

site used in world war ii that made the u.s air force or army corps of air force

uh much more effective he was uh an inventor and creator and unfortunately died before i i had a

chance to meet pat and uh for all the stories i’ve heard about them and different things like that you know i’m a creator and it just

would fascinate me to have been able to meet him well bruce i’m fascinated that i was

able to meet you you’ve helped me more than i can tell you with my career

personally professionally you’ve always been there for me you’ve helped me with issues that i’ve had

throughout my in my career personal issues questions that that i’ve had you you’ve always been

there for me and i want to thank you not only for coming on this podcast but for always being there for me

well i i appreciate that but you deserve a lot more

learn how to take a compliment that’s hard it’s hard thanks for coming on the show bruce it

is absolutely my pleasure scoring up nation i cannot tell you how

much i owe that man he has just been an incredible mentor to me

when uh i started training with the association of water technologies bruce

definitely took me under his wing i really think he wanted to get rid of math and that’s why he jumped at that

chance to get me to start teaching math but it has just been incredible

to be working on the education committee with bruce of course bruce has taught me

so many things about organizing that about making sure that all the presentations stay relevant

something that bruce and i do is we review every single training presentation every single year we also

try to coach all the other trainers and make sure that they have everything that they need

we even try to give them some extra tools so they feel even more comfortable as a presenter as a trainer and then

when we’re on site we are working behind the scenes to make sure that the trainers have everything that they need

uh equipment’s working properly of course there’s an it team there but we’re kind of the intermediaries between

that and it’s just non-stop as soon as that technical training

starts that we’re working behind the scenes and i’ve just thoroughly enjoyed being in the trenches with bruce at

every single technical training and being involved like that it really allowed me to learn so

much i’ve been involved with technical training for well over a decade i have seen so many of the other

presentations by the other presenters and every time i see something

i learn something new i’ve seen these presentations dozens of times i have

reviewed these presentations dozens of times and every time i do that i learn

something new i might learn a different nuance of something i might learn that

there’s a different way to look at something there’s a different way to explain something

so if you are ever in a situation where you think you know everything there is to know about a topic i don’t think you

know the topic well enough and i can’t tell you how many people told me that they went to a technical training

that the association of water technologies put on once been there did that maybe they even owned the

t-shirt folks that is not something you can go to that is one

and done this is something that every single time you go you’re gonna find out something

more that you didn’t know and because of the extra experiences you had between the last time you went and

this current time that you went you’re going to be listening to the information in a totally

different way so my advice is is that you go as often

to any training that you can and continue to go

i know for myself i continue to learn every time i hear any of our presenters

speak so with that always check the awt website or if the awt is not the type of

water treatment that you do i’m sure there’s an association that has some sort of training

and i will say that if you really want to understand the industry that you are

in figure out a way that you can train others within the industry when you

become a teacher rather than just a student it

changes your whole mindset you’re now able to take the information that you’re responsible for

learning and turn it into being responsible for teaching and it just changes how you

look at everything that you are trying to learn and a tip that i can give you that

i learned a very long time ago is if i’m trying to learn something new i try to get an opportunity to teach that

something new as quickly as possible so for those of you out there that are

sending people to a training and you’re wondering is my money really going

towards something worthwhile are they actually sitting in class are the people actually getting something

out of it well don’t wonder assign them they’re going to train something when they come

back to the rest of the organization and i promise that that will change

their entire view of being at that training now if you’re trying to get somebody

to be convinced to pay for you to go to a particular type of training then throw

that out there say i want to train this item that i am going to learn and i

really want to find out more information on this item so when we come back i want to schedule the

entire company to get together and i’m going to train them on this i promise that would be a much easier conversation

to try to convince somebody to pay for you to go to whatever training it is

that we are considering nation take it from me that has worked and so many times when

people have come up to me and said my boss just won’t pay for something they don’t see the value when they approach it from that

standpoint that i want to teach what i learn more than often that person will come

around and says yes you can go to that training so figure out what training you want to go to and prepare yourself to

come back and train hey folks if you have something that you want to hear on this

podcast please let me know go to our show ideas page at scalinguph2o.com

and let me know what that is you can do that in one of two ways one you can go to our show ideas page and you can type

out what your idea is or you can select the send voicemail

function and you can record your voice asking your question to me

and i will get that answered on the air folks make sure you pull out

your calendars and mark down the first full week of october that’s going to be

october 3rd through 7th and that is industrial water

week this is year six of industrial water week it is really taking off we

have an entire week to celebrate how awesome industrial water treatment is

we’re going to celebrate with you by offering an episode each and every day

of the scaling up h2o podcast for you to enjoy of course we start out with

pre-treatment monday followed by boiler tuesdays cooling wednesdays

waste water thursdays and then careers on friday folks if there is something that is out

there that deserves celebration it is the industrial water treatment world and

i hope that you mark your calendars and we can all celebrate that together i

also hope that you mark your calendars for next friday when you’re going to get a brand new episode of scaling up h2o

have a great week folks [Music]

scouting up nation so many people that i talk to want to join the rising tide mastermind but they’re concerned about

being able to commit one hour a week for the mastermind calls folks i have to

tell you when you experience that hour you realize that that is the power hour

that changes every other hour that you will experience that week if we keep

doing the same things we will keep doing the same results and that one hour a week allows you to get out of the

day-to-day so you can work on your day-to-day do something different find out about

the rising tide mastermind by going to scalinguph2o.com forward slash

mastermind