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scalinguph2o.com forward slash special once again that’s scaling up h2o.com
forward slash special [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 the host of scaling up h2o and nation it
is just around the corner i am so excited because
next week we are going to awt we’re going to vancouver and i am so excited
one of my favorite conventions to go to definitely i see the most members in the
scaling up nation at an awt event and folks of course the convention and expo
that awt does every single year is where most everybody attends i know that
there’s some difficulties where it’s in canada this year but it sounds like everybody’s figuring that out and
everybody that i’ve talked to is going to come and we are just so excited to see
everybody so next week when you are in vancouver when you are at the awt
conference i hope that you go to find me i’m going
to be looking for you but it’s a lot easier for you to find me so let me know what you think about this podcast if
you’ve got some ideas i’d love it if you share it on our show notes page but if there’s absolutely no way i said show
notes page i meant the show ideas page if there’s absolutely no way that you will ever do that and the only way you
can get that information is to tell me in person let me know what that is if you have somebody you want me to
interview let me know who that is i’m always looking for the next on what
we’re doing with this show and you all and the scaling up nation help me with
that each and every time i make the request and i don’t think a show goes by
where i don’t make that request but i will underscore if you are at the awt
please come find me and let me know what you think about this show and i would just love to shake your hand and meet
you speaking of the awt if you have not registered there is still space
they’re probably going to pay a little bit extra for some airfare but trust me it is worth it so september 21st through
24th we have the awt convention now the day before that is
the business owners conference and if you are like me and you own an
industrial water treatment company you need to attend this there are still
spaces left and there are limited seats at that event because there is a venue
and they have to order meals and tables and chairs and all that stuff so once all that’s sold they are done but i’m
pretty sure they still have space for you so you can go to our show notes page it will have
all the information on the business owners meeting and the awt conference
and i have to say there’s so many rising tide mastermind members that are going
to be at the awt convention many of them are going to be at the business owners
conference so if you were thinking about joining the rising tide mastermind
i hope that you look for the ribbons that people have on their name badge and
when you see one that says rising tide mastermind you ask them the question
what does it mean to be a member of the rising tide mastermind what are you getting out of it why do you give the
time each and every week to join a call what has it meant for you what have you
been able to do because of it and i think you will really be impressed with
all of the answers that you get and then you can make the decision is this something you want to take the next
step in the rising tide mastermind there’s definitely a time commitment there’s definitely a financial commitment but with that it allows you
to get to where you want to go further than where you thought you can go and you’re going to get there faster
because you’re going to have the help of everybody else within the mastermind
if you want to find out more about that you can go to forward scalinguph2o.com
mastermind and you can read all about it and by all means if you’re at the awt please find
the members with the rising tide mastermind ribbon and ask them all the
questions that you can think of because i think you will not get a better answer than a member can give you
with that i hope to see you at the awt conference another conference you might
want to be acquainted with is weftec and that is their 95th annual conference
that’s going to be in new orleans and the conference is october 8th
through 12th and then their expo is october 10th through 12th
if you want to learn more about weftec go to our show notes page and we will have all of that information to you
another huge conference is green build that’s going to be in san francisco
california this year november 1st through 3rd if you are involved in the green space
this is the conference for you green build is where so many people come
together that touch the building exterior envelope interior decorating to
design all of that stuff if you have heard of lead this is all about lead
this is how we can make buildings more efficient this is how we can bring products in them that use less energy
that most likely are going to save people money they might be more comfortable they might be more ergonomic
they’re definitely a lot more technology that’s involved in them so all of these things it’s just amazing all the
different vendors that come to a conference like this this is one of the biggest conferences that i have ever
attended so if you want to check this out go to our show notes page and we will have all
of that information for you nation i love sharing these things with
you and by any means if you forgot anything that i said don’t worry it is
all on our website scalinguph2o.com and the wonderful staff here at scaling
up h2o they have added an events calendar so you can just simply go to the events calendar if you don’t
remember what show it was that i mentioned one of these organizations and
you can just see everything that’s coming up in the future you can click on it and right there all the information
you need including adding a calendar invite to your calendar is all right there
my staff is awesome they’re awesome because you guys are awesome they want to make sure that all the content that
we have is easily able for you to find and then when you
find that hopefully that sparks you to do something a little bit different it allows you to think a little bit
different and when you do that that’s how we are raising the bar in the industrial water treatment industry
speaking of raising the bar in the industrial water treatment industry here’s a new 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 reverse osmosis makeup for boilers
what are the advantages of using ro makeup for a boiler system what is the recommended maximum number
of cycles for a boiler on ro makeup how might ro make up impact condensate
corrosion and neutralizing immune usage how will a high percent condensate
return impact the economics of installing an ro what boiler savings may be the highest
when changing from soft water to auro makeup is it the water waste water fuel
chemical costs why would a chemical company want to recommend ro equipment for boiler makeup
take this week to think about using ro makeup for boilers be sure to follow hashtag tow22
and hashtag scalinguph2o to share your thoughts on each week’s thinking on water
i’m james mcdonald and i look forward to learning more from you james as always thank you for making us
think a little bit deeper about water treatment well nation i spent most
of the introduction talking about the association of water technologies annual conference and there’s no secret if you
listen to this show you know i’m a huge fan of the awt and one of the reasons is
because i’ve given a good part of my life to the awt i was on the board for
nine years and i was president of that fine organization and then today i’m
still involved in their education committee i believe in what they do and i want to make sure that i am part of
what they do but because of that i have met so many
incredible people many of those people you have heard here on the podcast and today is going to be no
different so i am going to introduce you to a good friend of mine i know you’re
going to enjoy this interview
my lab partner today is dave christopherson of dave christopherson consulting dave welcome to the scaling
up h2o podcast well thanks trace thanks for having me well i’m really excited to
talk to you about the presentation that you gave almost a year ago at the awt
wow it was good to actually have a convention to go to first of all and see people we got by through that virtual
thing but i think everybody was definitely happy to get back to uh face to face
and you took a concept that i think everybody finds challenging you put a
cool acronym to it and you really simplified it so i was hoping today we could talk
about what you spoke about at awt about a year ago and that was the woe factors
so before we do that do you mind letting the scaling up nation know a little bit
about dave christopherson sure so i’m a career water trader um go
back to 1977 when i first started working for olin working for bets
became part and owner of a water treatment company called crown solutions we did full service water treatment
boiler cooling waste water membranes provided you know operations contracts
built equipment you know did the full thing in 2006 violia approached us and so we became
part of violia viola water technologies i’ve always been in the water industry
largely on the technical side technical support side product development but i’ve had you know all this stuff all the
sales all the management and field operations and so forth so it’s just a huge intriguing
field and um i’m convinced it’s a it’s a great place to be i get a lot of
satisfaction from it so i decided hey i might as well just spend my time doing the the parts i like the best so i
started doing consulting to work for mostly other water treatment companies but i do work for end users and training
and problem solving product development whatever dave i was thinking back to when we
first met and that was my very first board meeting for the association of water technologies
and that was when we used to have a kid’s table and i wasn’t allowed to speak and so that was the very first time that we
met and by the way the awt has changed that no more kids table but i do remember the first time we really had a
conversation and we were at something at the awt headquarters and you and i and somebody else i can’t
remember who was with us we had walked across the street to get lunch at a burger king and i was i had my meter
because i had just received it and i was trying to get data so i was just taking samples of a bunch of stuff with my atp
meter i don’t know if you remember that and i started swabbing things in burger king and we were second guessing whether
we needed to eat there or not oh yeah that was something i would probably try to forget okay i remember
you were shocked when i took the lids that were for the cups out at the drink
fountain and i swabbed that and that was one of the higher atps that we saw on that
and and that ultimately came a paper i think that was the last time i ate a burger king actually yeah
so burger king i’m sure that was just that one yeah uh but that was that particular burger king on that
particular day and uh just trying to get some data on atp and um yeah we we got
some data we probably shouldn’t have gotten before we finished our sandwiches
yeah so and then that leads us to uh what you’re doing now and you alluded a little bit to it but you decided that
you wanted to help other people and start your own firm with consulting tell us a little bit about that
so i think there is a high demand still for people that
are willing to give their time on projects that are important that maybe other
people don’t have the time for because they’re running a business and they’re answering to other people and so forth
so i have uh you know a lot of experience i i’ve been there done that is my forte i
would say as that as your hair gets grayer or starts to fall out so i i think i have opportunities to
help people train to help solve problems to go places to product develop
especially to awt companies but also still to end users who are looking for
somebody that come in and say i’ve got this problem what’s what’s going on so for me that’s what gives me enjoyment
not filling out expense reports or you know doing some of the other things that’s necessary part about running a
business so i guess i’m i fill gaps i think there’s needs and and
that’s where i get my enjoyment particularly problem solving if there’s a a problem that needs to get fixed or
they don’t really know what’s causing the problem it’s a challenge and an opportunity and it’s fun when you come
up with a solution well let’s bookend your career so that’s what you’re doing right now let’s go
back to the very beginning how did you find water treatment well if you want to go way back when i
was 18 years old a day after i graduated from high school i got a job as a deckhand on an oar boat
so on an ore boat you have steam boilers i was a you know the utility guy did
everything well we went through the sioux locks we had a surprise water inspection
and we failed we had coliform bacteria in our drinking water in the tanks
so since i was 18 and planning to go to college for some reason i was
the smartest guy on the boat so they put me in charge of sterilizing the water so that was my first experience i was
destined then to be a water treater when i went to college i was a chemist it turns out my chemistry professor and
advisor was one of the top 10 water chemists in the nation had no idea that at the time then i was looking for a job after i got
out of undergraduate school interviewed with people and olin water services interviewed me
and i was like wow that sounds like something i could do so that’s how it all started
how long were you with olin four years four years um really enjoyed it great
company great people i didn’t think at the time that they were destined to stick around long and they they didn’t
you know they sold a drew so i just made a career move went to beds i did that for five years and with
some other people there we had an opportunity to um you know go out on our own and do it
the way we wanted to do it and you know so i i owe the water treatment industry for teaching me from the beginning but
you know i’ve continuously tried to learn every day since then when you decided to leave somebody else
and go into business with your partners what were some of the things that you were thinking about was that was that
more scary or was it more alluring because you could do the things you wanted to do the way you wanted to do
them are you glad you don’t know all the things you probably should have known when you were doing that tell us about
that experience yeah for sure it’s it’s scary and if you knew all the things that were going to happen or roadblocks you know you might
not have done it the allure was you know doing it your way making your
own decisions making your own products being a solution provider so that my my
water treatment career has always been about what’s the problem what’s the best way to solve it and that’s what we had the opportunity
to do whether it was chemical equipment operationals or whatever the scary part was you know you got no
money you got no backup your house is on collateral and everything else
so i asked my dad i said should i do this or not he goes hey you know it’s risky everywhere you’re working for
somebody else that’s more risky so you know if you say okay well it’s and
that’s kind of what we’re going to get to i guess the risk factor index you just you just compare the risks
but the rewards were much greater i thought and then i guess a time came where the
phone rang and somebody said hey we want to buy your company yeah it was we didn’t have an end game
we weren’t looking but we were working on pretty big projects um you know
more money than we could get from the bank violia came along and said we’d
like to be your bank you can do these bigger projects we’d like to use you to grow the business after selling us
filters so it seemed like okay we’ll we can do that we’ve we’ve been running you know crown
as a small business for a pretty long time got our kicks doing that let’s see what the next chapter brings
and for me it was really good because then they asked me to be one of their international directors for the chemical
business so i got to travel and work all over the world for quite a while tell us about that experience
uh well the olia you know now buying suez or in the integration processes who has they’re they’re global so
you know have you ever worked in india no a total different culture have you ever worked in china no have you ever
worked in well really europe so you you start finding the whole lot
of water treatment problems are the same but the approach is different the
resources are different the attitudes of the people are different you know how you’re going to go about getting it
it’s just a huge huge effort to get to places you know you’re always jet lagged when you’re
12 hours hours upside down in china or you know singapore or something
so you you got to do it kind of when you’re sleepy or not in your best but at the same time just the the differences
in the culture and learning all the it’s just a you know wonderful experience so i’m i’m really really glad that i was
able to to experience that dave if somebody’s listening to this and they’re thinking about getting into this
industry what advice do you have do it there you go yeah it’s a great industry
i mean if you think about um what we need we need water we need food we need
energy those are really good areas to get into water is such a broad category there’s
so many places whether you’re in a water plant a wastewater plant industrial all the technologies that go to it software
development i mean it’s just surprising how many opportunities there are if you
don’t like something move laterally in it you’re still in the industry it’s a secure industry it’s a necessary
and it’s a growing industry so and it’s fun and great people so i i can’t think of any reason why you
wouldn’t dave been in the industry for over 40 years you’ve seen financial corrections
recessions how does our industry fare through all those well again
we’re dependent it depends what segment you’re in so you try to be diversified
you know so you have you don’t put all your eggs in one basket you know if you’re an industrial water treater
they still need health care they still need food the automotive may slow down but there’s still
you know industrial applications so you just have to be flexible a little bit
and i’d say even within each one of those industries it’s valuable to have skills around
boiler cooling membranes wastewater you know water recycle you can pick any area you
want and without that big of an effort i think you can become a localized expert and really increase your value and
security at the same time well let’s get into the reason that you are on the show today
and we’re going to talk about risk factors and anytime we go into a new
client or existing client we’re always wondering what the risk factors are you came up with a great way
for us to assess and then also communicate those risks and ultimately
how do we correct some of those things so that’s what i was hoping to talk about now so tell us about that how did
you decide that you needed a better way to communicate risk well i think what you just said
water treaters especially as they get some years experience almost intuitively
assess risks when they’re going into the plant trying to get new clients or you
know their own clients i don’t think we do it formally enough and it was my thought process on it and i think we
miss a lot of things when we’re not intentional about it we make too many assumptions
one thing that i’ve learned and i talked to you a little bit about this earlier i think when you get into more complicated
treatment processes when you’re doing very complicated recycle projects it
forces you to be more critical in your thinking you know asking more questions than you
normally would well wait a minute what if this series of events happens then what do i do and how is that going to
impact the operation you know the operation of the wastewater recycle plant the operation of the production
plant whatever so you start asking yourself a lot more critical questions because you need to
because what i’ve discovered is water treatment is about the 95 percent of the time and
that’s easy you set that up you understand what’s normal you set up
all that program but that’s not where most of the problems occur and most of the problems occur
at that five percent time you know weird times when nobody’s there or when the pump failed or when some process
happened that shouldn’t have happened so what’s the risk well if if all of the problems occur and you know that 5 is
going to occur and you haven’t accounted for it you’ve got a failure you know you can’t be 95
successful in water treatment you need to be closer to 100 percent because we don’t you know our treatment chemistries
aren’t designed to remove the scale you know that that’s another process our our treatment chemistry doesn’t fill in
holes when we pit or corrode so you have to anticipate so
that means we need to be a lot more critical i believe in asking the questions so years ago i
started doing that as part of a training you know what’s what are we trying to accomplish here what’s risk risk is
um not having the outcomes that you want okay where do we start with that but what are the outcomes that you want i
want 100 production the plant manager said so i you know i don’t want any legionella in my cooling system i don’t
want anybody getting sick these heat exchangers the approach temperatures have to stay where they’re
at all those kinds of things okay so that’s what we do now what’s going to prevent that from
happening and i determined i guess we all have
that there’s three main areas water is one but i can take a really nasty water and
if it’s the same water every day have better success than i have a moderate water that has a lot of variability to
it so it’s more than just the water it’s the water and the variability of the water so that’s the woe part you
know i tried to come up with a way to remember what order of things so i call it the woe relative risk factor index
the second part is operations so if you have really um good water let’s say a
low risk water whatever you know your process is defines that in the water quality so let’s say it’s a
one for this particular application it’s a low risk water what about my operations if my
operations are no good if i have force you know control there at the site
nobody’s really looking after it i can have a really good water and still have really bad results because i have a
high risk operations so you got to look at that part too you have total failure even though you have
the right chemical the right water and then equipment equipment and equipment
design is extremely important sometimes outside of our control but if you need ro water to your boiler
and you only have one ro and you need to clean it what do you do some people say we won’t shut the ro
down well okay well if we do that maybe we won’t be able to make enough water or
maybe when we try to clean it when it does go down we won’t be able to get it clean so our equipment or our equipment
design is a problem so you really have to critically examine all of those and
then know where to go to try to in the future improve the situation
dave that all sounds great and i love the acronym i think woe is me is what everybody thinks of we’ve got these risk
factors so people are going to remember it but how do we use it yeah so
when i was was working on risk factors and under trying to understand risk factors i said this really needs to be formalized all
of a sudden i go ah this could be like the lsi you know i could come up with this index everybody would understand
you know oh that plant over there that’s a two two one plant you know uh moderate
water risk moderate operations risk and uh low because it has really good
equipment in there and so i started you know having this dream that i have
this new index that everybody’s going to use just like the lsi so i wrote this all up and i sent it to
our buddy mike standish and mike said now this isn’t even
fair he didn’t say whoa and that’s where i came up with water operation
equipment he didn’t say whoa on their partner but he did say hey wait a minute this is way too subjective to be you
know that analytical but i do think it makes sense for uh plants and companies to use it on a
relative basis so what may be high risk for one company because of the field or
their people it may be low risk for somebody else so that’s when with mike’s suggestion i
called it the relative risk factor index and i set my expectations a lot lower
so just as an exposure and a process i think internally
it helps you determine you know what kind of chemistry do i need is one example so if i have a high risk water
and it’s a very sensitive program i’m gonna go with a robust program i’m gonna go with something that has you
know high performance polymers maybe pbtc-hedp for the scale or if i have a
high corrosion problem a phosphate zinc problem anyways it can lead you to what
kind of chemistry i need here if it’s an lsi one you know maybe i’m over treating this
water you know too hot too high too robust or whatever so it can lead you to
the right chemical program but at the same time it can lead you and suggest who should be service in this
account you know this is a hard account there’s a lot of potential problems there’s some
high temperatures here there’s some you know really sensitive compliance issues here whatever is this
a rookie account or is this a 20 years senior account so a really good
consideration is if a plant is rated and you have it as a 333
internally by your company that means wait a minute do we have the right person service in this maybe we need
backup going in there more frequently compared to a one one one one one one can still
have a lot of problems but maybe that’s a better account to say hey we don’t need to have you know trace going into
that one so often dave just to clarify so one is extremely low risk two is a
moderate risk and three is as risky as you can get yeah i started originally on a one to
ten scale and i thought that’s way too complicated and this is relative and it’s just to give you an idea so i simplified it one
two and three so low moderate and high risk whatever that is for you is a great
starting point and like mike told me you know this is rather subjective but i think maybe
if you use it internally it can become a lot more objective than subjective especially if you assign the right
questions to each one of those risk factors and dave just so you know i have mike
look at my papers for awt as well and it’s because he he’s so good with
letting you know what you need to know and uh yeah he does a really good job of of maybe telling you you can do some
things a little bit better and then you do that you go and you rewrite some things and you make them better so i
have definitely been through the same mike standish experience that you just mentioned
yeah well just to be clear though leslie and chelsea are better people than mike so i don’t
i don’t want to give too much credit to mike uh nation those are his wife and
daughter and uh radical polymers they’re just incredible people and uh have given
so much to the organization that you and i volunteer with the association of water technology which is how we all met
right so but i’ve gotten us off topic i apologize yeah so i thank you too so so
a couple of the other things is service requirements you know how often do you need to go in there you know some some
accounts the whole problem is they need better service higher service more frequent service that’s their problem you would
know that if you you know critically evaluated and inside assign the right risk factors to it
for me another really really important successful outcome is having a good open
communications with the client certainly some clients are easier to do that with than others but for me an educated
client somebody that understands the situation is much preferred over somebody that
doesn’t want to take the time or doesn’t know and understand so if you have done this
you can explain to your customer why we need remote monitoring because this is
you know this is high risk i’m not in there enough you’re not there enough this is why we need to buy
another ro this is why we need you know a better control system and a better pump system
whatever so from a communication standpoint you have done the groundwork
so that when you go to your client you can explain the risk factors what you know here’s
what we need to get done you told me that this is the most important thing in the plant well for
that to be successful i’ve evaluated all the risks and this is what we need to do to get there and then
the last thing is if you know what’s risky or all the different things that are involved in
assessing and having a successful outcome then you can set goals for improvements and you can
time to time go back and reassess the the numbers that you’ve assigned this
three-digit number you know my goal is to take this from a three two two to a
three one one i can’t change the water let’s say but i can do the other things i can improve operations we can put in
the right equipment and overall then we have a lower risk factor and a greater chance of success dave i think this is
brilliant it’s brilliant in its simplicity but it allows us to communicate through all of the different
water treaters involved in our company but also to our customer so how do we set that up since it is
subjective if we were to start using this factor in our company
how should we get together and determine what a one is what a two is what a three is so we’re all speaking the same
language yeah and i think that’s a really good question and a great thing to do and i
think it starts which i tried to do in my paper and my presentation at awt is
a list of questions the critical things to know
is uh based on whatever process it is the questions are a little bit different
maybe some of the same questions and some of the questions maybe aren’t so obvious
and so create your own set of lists or your own set of questions your own list of the
questions you know unfortunately in water treatment i find a lot of high risk just because of
competition you know if if you tell me that you’re trading this plant this year another water treater treated it last
year another one treated it the year before that at another one the year before that i am very suspicious that the chemical
program is not what it should be or the service is not what it should be because it’s been bid out
you know that’s a high risk to me you know if a plant changes that often and they keep changing because of costs or
things me needing 15 or 50 or whatever ppm or whatever it is and i’m only at 10
because i’m at a very high risk now those are things you have to evaluate
how how responsive is the customer not just you know how much iron do we have in the water or how much you know
phosphate do we have in the water those are the water questions but a lot of the other questions are your interpersonal
situations the politics the history you know a dirty system is hard to keep
from getting dirtier than a clean system so you know what’s the condition of it has it deteriorated are they willing to
do the cleaning it’s too too long and too complicated i think to go through every system
but the ones start to become obvious um around and it’s relative again so
you know this water here in this location is relatively easy why is it what what makes it a low risk
water well i don’t have high scaling um it’s not particularly corrosive you know
and in the application that i’m using it in it’s easy to treat from a chemical treatment standpoint okay low risk water
what about this water this water is a you know calcium level from 100 to 250
alkalinity changes iron level changes that becomes you know much more risky is
it moderate or high you’ll have to determine that so the questions
and the processes and the applications i think when you start critically
creating the lists of questions the needs things that can go wrong what would happen why isn’t this working i i
just had a very simple case two days ago it’s a very
good water low risk water consistent water quality and it’s softened it’s
used in a cooling system shelling heat exchanger skin temperatures 120 to 140
shouldn’t have a problem the program that they have is a robust chemical with ptsa tracer and they have pictures of
severe scaling and they want to know what’s wrong to me it’s a low risk water that’s a one
they have good chemical treatment they have a relatively easy equipment design and system
what does that leave operations how often are you in there once a month does the plant do any testing no how do
you know the softeners are working um what’s going on so it’s those kinds of things you can
you know use it however you want but it’s to steer you in the right direction
to ask the right questions and then to monitor properly and make sure that you’re getting close to that hundred
percent and not missing on the five percent or even in this case it might have been a lot more than five percent
i think it’s brilliant because again in its simplicity and it allows people to communicate with
a common language i do want to ask if a company wanted to start using this say
in their survey process what recommendations would you have oh i think that’s a great place to start
again it creates a common language for your company and i think it
uses everybody’s talent and contribution so you you create this as part of your survey form
and it it you know survey form nice thing about a survey form is it’s a formal process and that’s what this is i
formalized this so you don’t just you know walk away going hmm this sounds like a pretty risky account well why
well it’s because of all these things you know it’s i’ve looked around the water and the variability i’ve looked at its operation and its controls and i’ve
looked at equipment and the design and i understand all of those now and you know
when we go back and assess it we can see how risky this is or what’s the chance that we’re not going to have the
outcomes that we wanted so in a survey you can do that too you you have as part
of your survey form the questions that you deliberately created for each process you know for
the ro or the demineralizer the boiler cooling or whatever you fill those out and then you fill it in
it what’s my number it’s a one what’s my number it’s a two and not just one person but three people do
it three or four people do it and you say well wait a minute why did you give that a three i didn’t see it
was that high risky and you go well duh did you ever consider this and you go no i didn’t no wonder you said it it was a
three so it i guess it kind of forces people to you know give and take and share their
experiences and grow and so at the end you have an idea of how much service this is going to be
what kind of chemistry you need and then how to how to propose it how to communicate it i have a project right
now it’s very complicated water i can’t get into too much of the details of it it absolutely
led me to develop a new product specifically for this because of the variability
the changes way above threshold inhibition capabilities sometimes so we had to address
that with dispersion chemistries and other things the risk assessment
then allowed us to say we we got a we got to do some modeling in french greek on this
one there’s too many variabilities and it directed us how to present this to
the potential client and why we said we had to do what we had to do why they had to make some investments because the
chance of success is is not good if you don’t do all of those things so you know to me it’s just
a tool that you can consider and based on how
your company operates the tools that you already have it may be something you’re already doing in another manner that’s
fine i made a spreadsheet and i’m happy to share that if anybody wants it or i put in all the questions and then you just
score it and it gives you the score based on the water the operations the equipment and then an overall score so
if it’s useful or not you know you might have a 1.5 plan versus a 3.0 plant but
yeah you can use it however you want well dave if you’re okay with it we’ll put the paper the presentation and the
spreadsheet on our show notes page oh sure no problem so if you and i were using this
we’re going to create a dialogue it’s going to allow us to communicate better but we speak a common language of
understanding water treatment how do we use this to better explain things to our customers
i think i have spent a lifetime trying to do both
i think internally you want to talk as technical as you can if people understand chemistry
saturation ratios then you do it if you talk to a client and they want to know it’s smooth as a baby’s behind
that’s what you use you know that kind of language so from a client’s standpoint i think
you you can demonstrate the process without getting into too much details
what are the major considerations in a successful water treatment program or potential failure so you can use use it
like that you don’t have to go into all the details that you
you will go into as a water treatment company all the specific questions unless they need to you have an ro
machine and an ro machine is on or off and you need 200 gallons a minute right so
you’re the customer that’s what you need you don’t need to know all the things that we need to know to keep that ro
going if you turn that responsibility over to us but i do want you to know
it’s dependent on a lot of things it’s dependent on having power we have to be able to post flush
we have to be able to feed chemistry 100 of the time we have to dechlorinate 100
of time or you’re not going to get the water quality you want you’re not going to get the water volume that you want so
you you can go complicated explain it in details or you can just say basically
you said you 100 production plant manager you’re not going to get it if we don’t do these things because i’ve done the
risk assessment dave when you put the woe formula together what did you consider success why did
you put it together when i do training i think and this ha this goes way back
to a guy that used to work for us a long time ago and then he went into a different field but he told me in
his field he just doesn’t find people that do
or have been trained in problem solving like he used to or when he was in water treatment he started with nalco long
long time ago and so i said you you know i i think so too um so i this was years ago i put
together a training on troubleshooting and one of the critical parts of that is
i don’t think very people know what they don’t know they don’t know how to write the ask the right questions but at the
same time they don’t even know that they don’t know so many things and as as you ask the
right questions you start learning and get more and more knowledge you know that the other thing that happens is you
learn more of what you don’t know so it’s like oh this is this is just never going to end but that’s that’s
right so i guess the whole point of doing this is to lead people direct people
into intentionally asking more questions considering critically
all the other things that could go wrong not just here this is this you know this is a pretty standard program we’ll use
the same chemistry we’ve used everywhere else no every place is different everything has variability different
people you have to ask more questions and then i guess the whole goal of this is just what can we do to be what better
water treaters what can we do to get more success that was my goal dave let me ask there are people out
there that are intrigued they definitely hear that you know what you are doing if
they wanted to contact you what are some of the things that you could help them with and then how can they contact you
yeah so when i started dave chris in consulting um i didn’t do a website so
i’m easy i have a phone i have email address um i have linkedin you know i’ve
uploaded some papers to linkedin so contact me just by you know
christophersondave gmail.com or my phone numbers you know it’s normal contact information i’m easy i’m i’m very
accessible generally if you want help if you want some training you know i give a lot of free
advice just because you know it doesn’t take very long and i have a lot of friends
uh but also i have a minimal charge i mean i’m a consulting so i’m in business so if you
want to hire me to do some professional training or problem solving or something like that it’s you know i’m open for
that well dave we will put all of that contact information on our show notes page so people don’t have to worry about
jotting down anything while they’re driving most people listen to us while we’re driving or while they’re driving
so uh by all means keep your hands on ten and two and we’ll have all of that for you on our show notes page for this
episode well dave i’m not quite done with you yet i’ve got some lightning round questions for you so are you ready for
those i think probably not but go ahead all right so you now have the ability to
go back to your very first day as an industrial water treater what advice
would you give yourself so that one is pretty easy because i give that advice to to everybody because
what i discovered in water treatment and then i i think i i assume this is true in most careers
is that people learn their jobs as quickly and as well enough as they can to be comfortable
and what i found is i was very uncomfortable in my early years i was scared
you know of competition so i wanted to learn as quickly as i could but then i found out
those people didn’t continue learning you know they plateaued pretty quickly so my advice is don’t do that because
you can grow and grow beyond everybody else without that much effort if you just learn
with intent and learn to learn it to know it to be able to use it in the future so that’s my advice
have a continuous growth plan and it’s so much more rewarding if you do that
what are the last few books that you’ve read that
um i’m almost afraid to say because i read a lot of books i started a book
club some years ago so i read a book club book a month and then another one and the last one i read
is john boehner’s book on the house when we try to avoid
political books but boehner lives in my neighborhood and he’s gonna be a guest speaker for our so we decided okay well
we’ll read that one but i have a i have a lot that i recommend and this is if you haven’t
seen this one i accidentally ran into it at the library a couple months ago and i said i can’t believe it it’s called
water a biography well that sounds really um interesting it is it’s uh it’s
like a history around water and and how civilization was totally dependent on water so it’s
like a history book around water um and it’s a brand new book so it’s called water a biography i read the new map
energy climate and the clash of nations which is it was almost exactly predicting what happened in
russia and ukraine but south china sees all of those things all the oil
problems and stuff like that it’s fascinating new book but the three books i’d really plug that
go on with my risk factor index and learning and so forth one is adam’s grant it’s new book
relatively new book and it’s called the um think again the power of knowing what you don’t know it’s a great book and
then there’s two neuron scientist phds from the boston area and
each one of them wrote a book i don’t even know if they know each other one’s called seven and a half lessons about the brain it’s a relatively small book
really fascinating new stuff things that you thought you knew about the brain that people thought they knew about the brain they’re just wrong it’s think
again you know they’ve learned a whole lot more how the brain works and then the other one is remember the science of
memory and the art of forgetting she’s an expert on alzheimer’s so she can tell you how to head off alzheimer’s but just
how your brain remembers things you learn things and how to remember them and how to get them to stick those are some really good books
when they make a movie about your life who do you want playing you
that that one’s easy because my kids all think i look like lieutenant dan
from forrest gump uh gary sinise so i would say him i don’t know that many
actors and stuff i don’t watch that many movies but i he seems like a pretty nice guy and my kids always say i look like
him so that would be it yeah he’s a fantastic guy he started something called the sinise foundation where he
helps veterans he is just amazing with all the things that he does great choice
last question you can now talk with anybody throughout history who to be with and why
yeah i’ve heard those before so i’m not very good at that but i i gave it a thought um and so
i thought well what are some characteristics that would be interesting to me somebody who’s adventurous i like
thinkers people that are thinking outside the box adventures and so forth so i i don’t
know why this name came up but it did aristotle um because the guy’s phenomenal he’s like the
father of everything i haven’t read a biography on him but he was like the father of natural science the father of
logic the father of everything and this is what 300 bc or something like that
so i guess it’s him i’d want to know why did he how did he think you know so many
thoughts and how did he come up with the things that he did the process that he used it’d be pretty cool i guess so
there might be a whole lot of other people but um that would be one for sure
well i’m sure there were a lot of people that were wondering how you came up with the thoughts you did and how you came up with the process that we talked about
today but we’re sure glad you did and thank you for coming on the podcast and sharing it with us
yeah it’s been fun thanks a lot
how cool was that dave had an idea it’s an idea that probably all of us have
thought about but he created something with it and as he mentioned if you want
to see any of the materials that he mentioned the paper he wrote the presentation that
he gave or the excel sheet that he’s sharing with us those will all be on our
show notes page for this episode for you to
go ahead and read through and hopefully start using in your day to day the thing
i love about his assessment is it creates a common language we’re in a
very specific industry and we all talk about it a little bit
different than other people and then you add customers to that and now that’s totally different
by us using a common language by us working with other people in our
companies and understanding what the risk assessment of a one two or three means
we can now communicate better across the company we can now make sure when we’re
doing annual reviews that we are all prepared with the things that we need to present
to that customer we can also now bring that customer into a different
conversation where they can have a different level of understanding because they can see how we’re putting risk
on their account and we might even compare them to another facility that they have us do
and why the risk might be different and we can say that if we change some of
this equipment if we change how things are operated if we put some of this
pre-treatment on we’re able to reduce the risk assessment
and that now allows us to make the program even better but it gives us
handles that we can all talk about it and move that account to a different
direction now nation there is no doubt about it it is hard to get chemical
these days it’s hard to get any supply it’s hard to get equipment so we want to
make sure that our customers truly understand what they need and with us having to do so much more
work because it’s so hard to get supplies if we can get better equipment
on the location that allows us to spend the time that we need to with that
customer doing things that only we can do if we can now convince the customer to
automate some of those processes it gives us more time for us to be
industrial water treaters and not compensating because somebody was too cheap to buy a piece of equipment that
could allow you to do your job better i think that this is a tool that allows
you to communicate what is so difficult to communicate to our customers and give
them a value so you can get better equipment better operations better
pre-treatment in your accounts so you can do your job better and when you’re
doing your job better you’re going to get noticed you’re also going to be a lot happier and that is another way that
we are raising the bar in the industrial water treatment world well nation as i
mentioned i hope to see you next week at the awt conference please come up to me
i want to meet you and if you’re traveling there please travel safely as always we will have a
brand new episode for you next week of scaling up h2o
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