The following transcript is provided by YouTube. Mistakes are present. To hear the podcast episode, click HERE.
[Music] foreign [Music]
is proudly sponsored by the rising tide Mastermind Nation each and every year I
start out this podcast with talking about planning well this is something that we take very seriously in the
rising tide Mastermind in fact we have a very specific way that we go about it
and then we share those goals with the people within our Mastermind because
they are going to help us get those things accomplished you’ve heard me say
dozens of times life is too short and too hard to do it alone and there’s no
reason you need to try to find out if the rising tide Mastermind is right for
you go to scalinguph2o.com forward slash Mastermind
[Music] welcome to scaling up H2O the podcast
where we scale up on knowledge so we don’t scale up our systems my name is Trace Blackmore the host of the scaling
up H2O podcast episode 298 so close to
300 and if you’ve been a long time listener you know we are well over 300
shows for some reason I thought it would be genius to play around with the
numbering of our shows so we had 11.1 11.2 because they were all related
I don’t know why I did that there’s a lot of things that we start out and we think we are doing something because
we’re putting our own little spin on them and there’s just no reason to do that so our show numbering is evidence
of that I haven’t counted exactly how many shows we are I know we’re over 300
but we decided when we finally got our wits about us and I say we it was me and
decided to just count the shows one and at a time we decided that we were going
to keep all the points the way they were so we’re officially at 298 that means in
just two more episodes we will be at episode 300 and folks that is a
milestone to have a podcast that’s been on the air for five years to have a
podcast that is almost 300 episodes that’s pretty cool and again I just want
to use that for encouragement to everybody out there because we all start
something new and when we start something new it’s the first time we’ve done it and a lot of times we’re doing
it a lot out of faith and we don’t have a lot of experience if any to back that
up so let this podcast be inspiration to you that the first step is the hardest
you’re gonna make some mistakes you might number whatever you’re doing weird but you’re going to learn from those
mistakes and you will get better but it starts with that first step so here is
my ask to you what is that first step that you need to take on that one thing
that you want to do that you have not done yet
folks it all starts with one step and pretty soon you’ll be doing it 300 times
Nation another number that I want to shout out is the number 37.
we are ranked number 37 in Portugal of
all podcasts that are listened to there never thought that would happen when I
started 298 episodes ago when I had no idea what
I was doing so thank you Portugal I am just amazed that we are number 37 in
Portugal and we have so many listeners there so for everybody in Portugal thank
you for listening for everybody in the scaling up Nation thank you for listening thank you for letting
everybody you come in contact with that’s in this industry that we have a
podcast just for us and it allows us to know
that we’re not by ourselves we’re not just driving from account to account and
nobody else is doing that when you listen to the scaling up H2O podcast you know that there are other people
listening you know that there are other people out there that are doing the same thing that you are doing and that means
we are part of the community and that Community is called scaling up Nation
of course if you want to know what’s going on you can go straight to our show
page which is scaling up h2o.com and there you can go over to the
events section and you will learn everything that we know about that’s
going on in our industry so here are a few things the American Chemical Society
is having their Crossroads of chemistry show in Indianapolis Indiana that’s
going to be March 26th through 30th they also have a hybrid version of that so if
that is something that interests you I know we have a lot of people that are members of the American Chemical Society
within the scale and up Nation so that’s something you might want to check into
also the American Waterworks Association is having their sustainable Water Management conference April 16 through
19th in Minneapolis and Minnesota and this is a conference about managing Water Resources sustaining utilities and
infrastructure urban planning and design and efficiency and conservation all
around water if this is something you want to learn more about go to our show
page where we have everything listed under events also coming up March 22nd
is World water day just around the corner it is a celebration where the
entire world acknowledges that hey this water stuff is pretty important not
everybody has direct access to it and this is a day where we can bring
awareness to that we’re going to do some things on this show to bring awareness to it and one of the things we’re going
to encourage you to do is sign up for the global 6K we’re going to have
information on our web page we’re going to talk talk a lot more about that on
our special episode for World water day a lot of people have already gone to scalingup h2o.com and signed up to join
our team to run in the 6K we’re going to have so much more information about that
if you don’t want to wait you can go to our show page and you can look at all of
that we’ve already had one of these we are going to have this second one of these March 29th through April 1st in
Pittsburgh Pennsylvania what am I talking about I’m talking about the association of water Technologies
Technical Training seminars we do one on the west side now we’re doing one on the
east side it’s one of my favorite things to do and I sure hope that I see you
there because I’ll be there I am one of the presenters and it’s always good to
meet people within the scaling up Nation so please do not hesitate to come up and
introduce yourself to me and as always if you’ve got a show idea I want to know
about that because that’s how we have almost 300 shows Nation we’ve got so
much going on it’s hard to keep track I know it’s hard to take notes when you’re
driving from account to account so that is why the great staff here at scaling
up H2O has put together a great resource on our web page if you have not been
there in a while it is so easy to search the content if you’re looking for a
particular show a particular guest a particular topic you will be able to
find that by searching they’ve done a great job of making sure that keywords
are listed everything has a transcript so even if there is an obscure word there that you’re searching for it’ll
most likely find that transcript but also up there is an event section and
that has absolutely everything that we know about we know about that because you’ve told us so if there’s something
that’s not up there please tell us that and we will get it up there so you have a One-Stop place to go to see all the
things that are going on in our community now before we get to our guest
we are going to go to everybody’s favorite segment of course that’s
periodic water table with James hello and welcome to the periodic water
table with James where we think and learn about water chemistry drop by drop please use your week to search online
ask your colleagues or even pick up a book to learn more about each week’s
periodic water table topic if you do at the end of the year you’ll be 52 water
chemistry smarter so let’s raise the water table of knowledge together and get started
today’s topic is zinc not just a dietary supplement but
an industrial water treatment chemical too what is zinc used for in water treatment how does it function does zinc work
better alone or along with other water treatment chemicals how does pH impact zinc and what can be
done about it what’s a typical dosage level for zinc what could happen if it is overfed how
about under fed are there any restrictions that may prevent the use of zinc
do any of the products you currently use have zinc in them can you test for zinc in the field if so
how remember knowledge is power and taking the time to learn more about water
chemistry each week will help make you a force to be reckoned with be sure to post what you learned to
social media and tag it with hashtag watertable23 and hashtag scalingup H2O I
look forward to learning more from you
James thank you for that and just imagine at the end of the year how smart we are all going to be because of all of
the great ideas that James is giving us James thanks for all you do with that we
get smarter each and every week Nation a few years ago I went up to visit our
next guest and I learned so much during that visit I came back to my own place
of business and I immediately started putting the things that I learned into
place it was a game changer it was something that did not take a huge
investment to do and it allowed everybody to work better well I’m not
going to keep that to myself that’s why we’re inviting our next guest on the
show and here he is right now my lab partner today is Brian katarsky
of Aqua Phoenix scientific Brian how are you doing I’m doing wonderful Trace I’m just
living my best life every day I was trying to think how long have you and I known each other it’s got to be at least a decade uh it’s go it’s got to be
closer to 18 years that’s how long I’ve been with aqua Phoenix and I had to be really early on in my career the first year or two that we actually met so and
it’s very difficult for me during this interview to call you Brian I have known you as goose through that entire time so
if I slip up that’s his nickname scaling up Nation so I have to ask how did you get a nickname like that you know it’s
uh it’s like the Liberty Valance thing you know when the truth and the legend Collide you you print the legend so I
don’t know I’ve had that nickname since I was a young kid and just starting to walk and um certainly um if they were
going to put an obituary in for me back at home where I grew up they’d have to add Goose to the title otherwise nobody would show up so it’s followed me ever
since I was a kid all the way up until where I am today I remember there was a time when you said I’m trying to separate myself from
that nickname and I failed miserably I wanted to honor that request and I couldn’t do it and I kept on combining
goose and Brian every time I would say your name and finally you just said don’t worry about it it’s okay yeah
totally fine I it doesn’t bother me one bit um a lot of people in our in our industry still call me that it’s no no
problem at all I just as I started to mature I guess which is a strong word uh into my career and started managing
folks it just felt like a good time to start shedding a nickname and trying to be a little more professional which again isn’t all that easy for us yeah I
did not help with that so my apologies I’ve got Brian highlighted on all of my
notes so I’m hoping to call you Brian through this but it is going to be a struggle so bear with me no worries no
worries so tell us a little bit about Brian katarsky so I uh I am a recovering
redneck Andy inser I would call myself so I grew up in in Western Pennsylvania in a small town called Norvelt which is
uh close to Greensburg and Latrobe that area and Norvelt was actually named after Eleanor Roosevelt it was a new
deal town that they created right after the Depression so but my family had a dairy farm out there so I grew up and
spent a lot of my childhood on the farm raising uh cows I was part of the 4-H club it was actually a the president of
my 4-H club at one point so but you know I think growing up on the farm you kind of learn to be a little bit
good at a lot of different things so I’d say it was an inch deep and a mile wide always learning from the my family my
grandfather my uncles on how to be resourceful and and solve your own problems so from there I ended up
somehow randomly in central Pennsylvania for for college I went to Elizabethtown and while there I met a guy named Frank
lacrone and uh completely changed the trajectory of my life so I met him as a
junior and uh been working for him ever since that would have been gosh in 2003 so now I’m at Aqua Phoenix scientific
I’m working my way up through that organization and I uh I recently took over as our vice president of sales
there it’s an incredible story I love it when people find what they want to do early
and they stick with it and they just excel at it yeah no and I think it you know plays to what I enjoy right I I
don’t I had no idea what I wanted to do when I went to college I thought you could be a teacher or a farmer because that’s what
my parents did uh and fortunately like I said I kind of ran to Frank and in the early years of our company I got to do a
lot of different things wear a lot of different hats and spent a ton of time on our operations continuous Improvement
all those things and eventually led me against where I am today Aqua Phoenix has definitely changed
since its Inception can you take us through some of those changes absolutely
yeah so I want to say I was maybe the eighth or ninth employee there I don’t know if we had more than 10 when I first started uh in 2005 and since then we’ve
gone through three different buildings we’re now onto our third since I’ve been there we just expanded that one we now
have 300 employees because of a recent acquisition with chemetrics in Virginia
and our main facility in Hanover is 300 000 square feet now so when I see kind
of where we started and where we got I still shake my head sometimes and think how did we do this you know those early years it was like duct tape and
horsepower and let’s figure this thing out and somehow we uh we pulled it together into a I would say almost respectable business you know
now I’m going to say this and I hope you don’t get inundated with requests for it but one of my favorite things one of my
favorite stories about you and your company is I grew up in Virginia we had
Utz potato chips we moved down here to Georgia now we can get Utz potato chips
but we we used to not be able to do that and they were just such a childhood memory and my favorite thing of all time
are the crab Utz potato chips they have Old Bay seasoning on them you learned
about this and then for the longest time my packing material inside all the shipments you sent were Utz potato chips
it was just fantastic customer service I could not wait to order more stuff from you so I can potato chips
yeah you bet anybody uh hit me up send me a message give me a call and I’ll I’ll try to get some chips then out to
your next delivery maybe not with your chemicals I might send us a separate box these days but yeah no absolutely yeah when I came up to visit you you actually
took me to the plant and oh my gosh to live near there first off there are
potato chips and there are Utz potato chips and they are by far elevated from anything you think you have had but all
the locals there have these big tens and they just go in and fill these tins up they’re like oh that’s like 30 cents I
mean they’re hardly anything yeah no and there’s also a rumor and I haven’t proven it to be true yet but I’ve heard
that they have um some women that work on the production line that have been there forever and they pick out the
perfect chip off the production line and for special events or corporate Gatherings they actually have a tin of
perfect potato chips for it but again I don’t know if that’s legend or truth I still haven’t got to the bottom of that
one but I’ve heard anyway I love that who ate the perfect chips somebody I thought you had the tin I
don’t have the milk they never gave them to me so well let me ask you about
um what is it like now you’ve been in every position in aqua Phoenix uh now
you’re in the sales management position what is that like it’s different you
know every role that you you go into is going to be a little bit different but I I just feel so fortunate that I was able
to come up through our business and grow with it because you understand the various parts and pieces and you know
still get them wrong every now and again you know there’s things that I I think are a great idea in my mind and then we figure out later on it wasn’t but you
know pouring the chemicals on the floor being down there and working orders out the door doing customer service all
those different roles I think really helps you get ready for a role like this and so much of our success comes back to
that culture and that drive right to continuously improve to provide tremendous customer service and I think
that’s the biggest thing you know I still have that I feel that every day and so to be able to push that down into
the new folks we hire and the new folks we bring on board is just so big for us yeah I think you guys do a fantastic job
of that and random question when do you listen to the scaling up H2O podcast
what about my grass that’s the official podcast of mowing my lawn so I it for whatever reason it works out perfectly
that I like finish my lawn right as the podcast is kind of ending up so every Saturday I throw my earbuds and go mow
the grass so when I was trying to figure out when I was going to release the episodes and I and I changed around in
the beginning I was trying to get some Market data and trying to figure it out and I don’t think there’s any right day
to release a podcast but you said you always listened on Saturday so I said you know what we’re going to release it
on Friday so it’s ready for goose when he mows his lawn you bet and then
unfortunately in the winter I just have to listen to it on my driving to work but um can’t wait for the grass to start growing again so I can get back out
there and get in the groove a couple of years ago and I can’t remember exactly what year it was I came
up and I visited you all and this is when you were in your other facility and
you were showing me how you organized your warehouse and I was just fascinated
if you remember I I couldn’t stop asking questions I couldn’t stop taking notes and then we came back here and we
lovingly copied everything that you guys did at Aqua Phoenix and we’ve since
grown since then and I don’t think we’d be able to find anything if we did not
Institute that I got so much out of that visit I was hoping to bring that visit
into the podcast world give it as a gift to the scaling up Nation so they can
learn all of the Fantastic things that you guys do at aquafenix scientific around your Warehouse
yeah absolutely just like us to grow as quickly as we did we had to be disciplined we had to have good
processes in place and so fortunately when Frank first started the company he was so lean and strapped for resources
we had no choice but to do it that way and one of the things we love is sharing that information and and giving tours of
our facility and letting other people know what’s worked well for us because it has it’s made a huge difference in uh
in our success I remember when I got home you had sent me a book and the book really catalyzed
all the things that you were sharing with me one thank you for that and second do you mind sharing what that
book was and what you get out of it yeah it’s a book called the goal by Elijah
gold Rat and um you know it’s written kind of like a fable like a story which I know you you enjoy from your uh your
Pat lancioni books but uh it basically walks you through a story of a production manager who was trying to
save their facility and it takes you through different stories of their life to explain some of the theories of
constraints and essentially how lean manufacturing works and it was handed to
me very early on in my career by the gentleman who’s now our our chief operating officer a guy named Jeff
guyman and he suggested that I read that book and I still every couple of years go back and reread it just to kind of
get re-energized and remember what it was it sort of had me down that continuous Improvement lead manufacturing path
a lot of people have warehouses some people don’t I’m sure that there are
still going to get great information on this because we have to organize stuff and what we’re going to talk about today
is just about organizing stuff we’re just going to focus on the warehouse but let’s face it there’s some warehouses
that I think manage the people and then there are people that manage their warehouses so maybe maybe let’s start
with that somebody or maybe we haven’t used you as the example realize that
something needs to be done what do you do then oh so I think the first step is you
nailed it you have to recognize it and own it right like you have to actually appreciate that look this isn’t working we have to do something different and
that’s not easy Trace you know a lot of a lot of leaders and owners and key
people with organizations they have some of that you know not invented here mindset that if they didn’t come up with the idea it’s not good and I would say
that is one thing at Aqua Phoenix we don’t have and from the beginning we haven’t had that it’s been a everybody
has a voice let’s figure out the best way to get something done and if we find an issue let’s celebrate it we find a
problem let’s call it out right and then focus on how do we fix it how do we make it better
um and so that’s kind of like I said I think that is Step number one is identifying it and then beyond that it’s
okay how do we fix it let’s get creative let’s think through it as a group and and how do we solve that issue and one
of the other big things is is get help outside your org right find somebody with an outside set of eyes who maybe
has experience in this that can uh come in and help you organize what it is you’re doing so that you make it a
repeatable and sustainable type of a practice when I was visiting you I saw something
called a CSI board I asked you questions about it and you’re like oh they’re having a meeting right now come on in
tell the scaled up Nation what that is yeah so that that stands for concerns
suggestions and improvements and it was basically a board was an idea that Frank kind of had that it was an easel with a
pad of paper on it and employees could go up and write down any idea they had to fix something in our facility and
when I say anything I mean like the toilet paper’s you know not soft enough like if that’s something that is
annoying somebody at the office and we can fix it then let’s do it let’s take care of it what’s funny is since then
we’ve actually gotten away from those because they started getting a little bit stagnant a little bit stale and so
we uh we now have a continuous Improvement manager and he’s kind of changed things to where he has this up
theme from the movie up so he puts on like an aviator mask or aviator hat and
these aviator glasses or goggles or whatever and um our employees now have ideas they go to him with the ideas and
so we can Implement them quickly and more rapidly so instead of just writing ideas down on those CSI boards and then
once a month meeting and trying to figure out how we Implement them we’ve actually kind of scrapped him and taken them off the production floor we now
have people going directly to uh to Kyle on our team and we Implement these changes much more rapidly take photos of
them celebrate them share them around we actually have a big bulletin board on the production floor and I looked just
just yesterday we had 400 plus suggestions that came in last year and
we implemented um like 260 or something along those lines of those suggestions and some of them are big and some of
them are small but they all have a a growing effect and eventually improve everything that’s happening inside the
facility I can imagine if somebody’s just getting started to implement something like you
just described the team member feels like they are going to be singled out if they say something is wrong how do you
get past that you know again it kind of comes from the top and so you know good story on this
is Frank had the best idea ever we ship things as quickly as we possibly
can and if you place an order today we want it to go out today and so we call those orders that have to get out
shipshores right has to ship has to ship for sure today shipshores so Frank had
this idea let’s put a uh a light above our label room and so whenever that order comes in and it’s a shipshore
we’ll turn on this red light that’ll flash around everybody will see it and they’ll know there’s an order we have to take care of right now
so he brings in an electrician has the light installed all these things and about two days later one of our
employees goes uh and she actually I think used to babysit him back in the day so she called him Frankie she goes Frankie why don’t we just get on the
intercom and say shipshore and he started laughing and said this
was the dumbest idea I’ve ever had let’s tear that thing down let’s start back over and let’s go with your idea that’s going to work better and so again it’s
doing things like that to just show like Hey we’re gonna change things are going to improve we have to we have to do things differently every day and it
doesn’t matter if you’re the the president or if you know you’re the newest employee we have if you have a good idea or a bad idea we’re gonna
either implement it or we’re not right but either way we have to give those and have to try things so for somebody that says we want to
hear your ideas we’re going to consider them what if the idea of maybe isn’t the
best idea how do you report back to the person saying thank you for the idea but that’s not something we’re going to change it’s just that truly and it’s
also you know they may have an idea that gets you halfway to where you want to get implement it do it right get the
little win get halfway to the goal you’re trying to achieve celebrate it and then continue to improve beyond that
but it is the communication part you know even if the worst thing you can do is Ghost somebody right they give an idea you don’t implement it but you
never even tell them thanks or here’s why we didn’t do it so it is the communication part that’s that’s really important
I remember when you were showing me around your Warehouse everything had an address and I was just fascinated by
that because let’s face it in water treatment we have so many different parts not everybody can know what they
are they definitely can’t know where they are but now you’ve implemented a
system which we totally copied by the way and everything in here has an address so I can’t remember it was that
UPS or FedEx yeah so that’s what I was going to say is you know part of it is going outside your organization and
getting some help from other folks and we’ve used a number of of different organizations to help us over the years
but one of the I think big projects we did early on was we brought in ups and
they helped us with a process redesign where they went through and analyzed everything in our facility they brought
in industrial Engineers to help out with that and it was a big project and you
know part of it was hey you need to completely change the way your racks are set up you need to change all the numbers systems you have which was
substantial I mean you know talk about change management and being uncomfortable it really kind of pushed
our team to to do a lot of different things but it was good it almost ripped a Band-Aid off for us and got us more
comfortable with that kind of extreme change but it also taught and educated our internal teams a lot better too to
understand and how to identify those things so yeah through that we just did different things on how we label our
racking how we number the different slots and locations how we organize our inventory to make it more efficient to
pick it looking at ergonomics and things like that and it I think it it really helped kick off that lean Journey that
we started you know and and they called a journey because it never ends that was gosh probably 15 years ago we did that
the first time and we’re still trying to improve everything every day it’s amazing how much that helps somebody
that runs an office that needs to run out into the warehouse to check to see if we have the part they’ve never seen
that part before but they know where the address is it’s amazing how much that can help your facility
yeah and again it goes back to lean manufacturing right like lean principles and trying to eliminate those eight
deadly wastes um you know the the downtime acronym that they use to describe all the wastes and travel being one of them if you have
to walk out and look for things or you can’t find it and you’re you’re wandering around the warehouse that’s all non-value add time that’s time you
could have spent picking an order that was going to ship or working on an order or answering a phone taking care of a
customer or something like that I have to ask what’s the acronym oh gosh I know you’re gonna put me on
the spot all right so that the acronym is downtime and these are the what they call the eight wastes of uh any
production process and so what this means is in the lead time that you have to get something out the door so from
the time you get in order to get out the door customers want to pay for the value added time versus the non-value at a
time and typically of the lead time 95 of that is considered non-value added
time and you can identify these by using the acronym downtime so here we go the D
is a defects so that’s any sort of defect or error in what it is you’re pulling together manufacturing so um
crooked label loose cap something like that right so the O is over production
and this is probably the worst waste because it amplifies all of the other ones so if you have a defect and then
you make too much of it now you have that defect on even more product right so it’s over producing or putting too
much inventory in place all right d-o-w uh waiting W is waiting
so that’s where you know if you think about in a in a process within a warehouse if um the people who are going
to do the work on the production floor are waiting on inventory to be received in let’s say at the dock that time that
they’re spending waiting on that product is all wasted time it’s gone and non-utilized people skills I’m actually
coming up with these from memory too by the way I don’t have it written down um I utilize people’s skills so this is
like you know you have somebody that um has a specialty like a chemist right and instead of doing their chemistry work
they’re actually doing more like Inventory management or somebody even on the production floor has a great idea
and you don’t listen to it that you’re not utilizing their people’s skills very well right so those are all we’d call non-utilized people skills
T is travel and that’s like physically moving around how many times you have to walk back and forth a neat exercise we
do around this is what’s called a spaghetti diagram and that’s where you literally have an overview of your
warehouse and let’s say you have an order picker you follow that person with like a trundle will actually tracking
how many steps they take and you draw it out on a overview of the production floor and afterwards it looks like a
bowl of spaghetti because you have all these lines going all around the page but it is unbelievable how whenever you
go through that process people realize how far they really travel just to get something done and their minds they just
walk here and walk back but that’s usually not how it goes down so travel is is a big waste
CI inventory so inventory is again just having too much or even too little so if
you have too much inventory it eats up cash those are dollar bills on the Shelf if you have too little you are holding
up orders you’re not not servicing your customers not taking care of them so t-i-m motion so motion is similar to
travel and in this case it would be like the smaller motions you make so if you’re standing in one place and you
have to reach all over to grab the tape gun the screwdriver the utility knife
all these things we want to try to limit that motion as much as we can so we’re not reaching all over the place and
ergonomics kind of comes into some of that as well even with our racking you know like we look at how we stock things
on the Shelf we put the highest moving items right at Arms arms height as
opposed to the slower moving items we put up high or down low so you’re not going to this quite as often just eliminating some of those extra motions
and E is going to be extra processing and so this one is one of my favorites
and really all of them for that matter it comes back a lot of times to that that worst saying in the world which is
well that’s the way we’ve always done it right so extra processing is you know that extra label you put on something
that extra box you put on it the you know these these little tweaks and things you’re doing that don’t bring
value to the product or how it’s used but you do it just because you assume that’s what your customer wants or you
think that’s what they’re asking for and sometimes when you have those conversations you realize they don’t want it they actually they take it out
of that bag and throw that bag away so why are we even putting in the bag in the first place let’s you know shave out some cost and share those savings with
everybody so downtime there you go I remember them all all from memory very impressive that’s right a lot of years
of doing it as you were showing me your addressing system I remember you shared
a story that I don’t remember if you guys lived it or if it was a warning that you always put the lowest digit on
the bottom because it’s easier to add on you don’t have to redo if you add more racking yeah we’ve made a lot of
mistakes early on right so I had this genius idea that we have our our shelves be a b c and d and then you know
throughout we have like slot one two three four five six or whatever going uh left to right and that was one of those
obvious things that you know we thought was the greatest idea then UPS comes in and goes you idiots if you want to add a
shelf e that means you have to now like move everything around so they were like put a at the bottom and go upwards and
that way if you need to add e to store an extra Shelf at the top and it isn’t as hard so silly things like that that you you
think is such a great idea but again you have to be willing to accept that right when you make mistakes great celebrate
it win it you know let’s move on let’s make it better never gonna make that mistake again as I was touring your Warehouse in
addition to the dressing I also saw all these signs around if you break it you
make it and you had all these little phrases around but I remember that one specifically what was going on there
yeah this gets me to the point of doing the right thing for the right situation
and so that has to do with inventory management so we use a kanban system or a two bin system to handle some of our
inventory on our shelves and even though we have a very robust Erp that can manage inventory and put Min Maxes and
things like that for this specific set of inventory it was actually quicker and
simpler and easier to do it manually as opposed to doing it through our Erp so we basically um have a two bin system
set up and we have a little gate that’s across half of the inventory so you’re
grabbing all the inventory from one side and then as soon as you have to break that gate or you know break that little strip to get to the other inventory that
means you pull this this kanban card and you go get more of that product made and so part of it is to make it fun we uh
you know if you break it make it everywhere and we use different pictures and things like that like a broken arm
and a cast and then a cake next to it you know that says if you break it you got to make it uh just to kind of make
it fun and sort of make it our own kanban was something that I fell in love with when we saw it it solved so many
issues especially around the products we get from you because so many people are pulling from bulk to fill up their
smaller containers and the last person forgot to tell the person that orders it
that hey we’re getting low and now we’re out and now we got to figure out how do we not run an iron test on this on all
of our systems well now we use kanban so tell us exactly what that is
yeah there’s different ways to do it and I’m sure the the lean purists will probably tell me that you know I’m not
describing kanban the correct way but we really use a two bin system is how I kind of describe it and it’s it’s having
if you picture literally two bins one in the front one in the back that have you
know dropper bottles like to your point Trace so small 60 ml dropper bottles in there and you’re going to pull all the
inventory from the first bin and as soon as that bin is empty and you go to grab the second bin that’s the trigger that
you need to reorder a Bin’s worth of inventory and so essentially what you do is you factor in what your lead time is
going to be and what your usage is depending on the number of turns of inventory you want and you figure out
what those two bin sizes are going to be and they should equal each other so it should be 10 and 10 or 12 and 12 or 5
and 5. and so as soon as that bin is empty that’s sort of your trigger point to say hey we need to order more of this
and so again it could physically be a bin that you move and put someplace it could be a card that you pull and put in
a a collection location where once a day or twice a day or 10 times a day somebody comes through and grabs those
and then either places an order with a vendor or sends it into the manufacturing facility to get more
product made and replenish the stock that’s on the Shelf when I came back from Aqua Phoenix and
seeing your facility that was one of the first things that I did and it instantly solved the problem that I just mentioned
that we were running out of pillow packets we were running out of certain reagents and we we simplified it where
whenever say a liter or a gallon of reagent comes in will actually Mark that
bottle and once the level gets to that bottom it’s got a card tape to it the
procedure is you rip the card you put it in the location and now we know to order that and I want to say sometimes it
doesn’t work out as best as it could and then we got to retrain around that but nine times out of ten we aren’t running
out of things and it just fixed that communication step instantly
you make it Visual and you make it simple right because the other side of that is you have to train your people well you just have to remember that or
you just have to know that when we get down to five you should order more and so even doing things like rubber banding
half a I should use my insurism’s gum banding uh half of it right putting a gum band around uh half the inventory
with the card in there because again it’s just a visual physical barrier you have to break and if the person’s doing
that then that should be a trigger enough for them to go okay I need to do something different here I need to I
need to pull this card I need to alert somebody I need to give them a heads up and everything that I read that is the
key they physically have to do something and then that initiates oh yes I’ve got
to do something else I will say almost every time where this system has failed
with us it was the card was just attached to something and they had to remember that we had to have 10 of
something before they pulled the card well when we then bound it together or
in the case of uh pillow packets maybe we have them in a special container within a container that they have to
open then that almost always works yeah and it also helps with your um you
know making sure you have that fifo right uh and making sure you’re taking care of inventory and keeping fresh reagent on the shell for fresh chemistry
you know depending on if you’re blending or not but rotating your stock because then as the receiving folks come in and
they’re re resetting the kanban they’re going to make sure they put the newest stuff in the back and pull the oldest
stuff forward so you also don’t have that that case where somebody’s reaching to the back and grabbing the newer product right and then you have things
expiring on your shelf we were talking earlier even people that don’t have a warehouse can take
advantage of this we use this with our office supplies you know you talked about rubber bands well I don’t know why
we go through so many rubber bands but we do and then we are out of them and then you don’t have them for whatever
you’re using well we have them bound together so the last three packages now
have a card attached to them and then that goes to our office manager we don’t run out of rubber bands
yeah years ago I actually did a presentation awt about how to take lean manufacturing out of the manufacturing
and moving into your day-to-day and to that point Trace like you know think of your service Vans think of your your
physical test kit that you have um think about even on site at your customers you know if you have a test
station there and things you’re working on you can apply all of these lean principles to basically everything you
do I’ve even tried to do it at my house in the kitchen and I kind of got yelled at a little bit for that but I think
about downtime you know as I’m as I’m laying out my kitchen I make sure that my coffee mugs are above my coffee maker
my my actual physical coffee is there it’s next to the fridge so I grab my creamer easier and I’m not walking the
whole way around my kitchen just to get a cup of coffee in the morning so but it fell short when it came to like putting kanban systems in place for paper towels
and toilet paper and things like that I wasn’t allowed to implement that I had the exact same experience I I came home
and we were out of mustard or ketchup or something like why are we out of my mustard and ketchup so I think I bought
two and I put a kanbad card on the second one and my wife said have you
lost your mind we are not doing this it’s like it works so well at the office but some things just don’t transfer well
they don’t nope no doubt about it something that we also found was very
helpful we started putting the address where things are on the kanban card we
didn’t do that originally and then we had all these mismatched cards that weren’t where they were supposed to be
and now if something falls off because the tape you know we’re in the South it gets humid somebody immediately knows
where it goes it just made things so much easier and that was just something you don’t think about until you have to
solve why isn’t this where it needs to be yeah color coding we use that a lot too
so different color cards for things you’re going to purchase versus things you’re going to manufacture different
color cards for different vendors perhaps you know if you have like two or three vendors each one can have their own color even putting logos on it you
know like just anything you can think of that’ll simplify the process and make it more Visual and it sounds really
Elementary but man does it make a difference and you can train people faster get them up to speed with what
you’re doing and it just makes things so much easier I know we’ve all had this experience
we’re organizing the warehouse we’re doing kanban we’re putting all these
systems into place and then somebody forgets to do it and people get frustrated because they put so much work
in it so once the work is done what’s the proper way to make sure the team understands it so they want to do it
train it like crazy and then make it a daily thing that you reinforce so again
another lean principle that we use really well is 5S we call it 6s because
we add the extra s which is safety but that stands for and again your Palmetto spot here sort set in order shine
standardize and sustain so sort meaning you sort everything out you get rid of
things you don’t need set in order a place for everything everything in its place so as you saw in our warehouse we
have taped out spots for everything from the tape gun to the skid Jack right everything has its own location and it’s
called out and labeled sort set in order shine shine is cleaning keeping things clean eliminating sources of dirt
standardized is making it the same everywhere so again if we’re going to implement a compound system in one spot
we want to make sure it works seamlessly in another and we have them as similar thing so we’re going to standardize it
all and then sustain is that toughest part that’s always the one people struggle with and think about yourself
and your car for example right like once a once a week once a month you clean that thing it’s shiny it looks so good
and then for the next week you let it just get gross and dirty and you have like you know takeout bags in there or
whatever so it’s really that sustained part of it what we do is every day for the last 15 minutes of the day all of
our folks organize their their work areas they make sure they’re back in in the spot they need to be so that the
next day when they come in at the very stroke of eight they’re ready to hit the ground running they don’t have to look
for products they don’t have to find things and we have our team then go around and spot check as well so they’ll score themselves each day did I check
all those boxes are they green is everything set in order shine standardized sustain and safe and if not
then we make notes and say hey and red isn’t bad by the way and that’s one of the things that we call out all the time just because it’s not green it’s red
that’s okay that’s good it’s an opportunity to improve why why did that happen and we focus on the process not
the people with these things right what about the process broke down that didn’t allow you to be successful and now let’s
fix that Brian several times you’ve mentioned use your resources what are
some resources we should be using first as water treaters you’re always in manufacturing facilities or at least
oftentimes in manufacturing facilities so if you notice that they have a lean program in place steal the ideas you
know like I did yeah what does research and development stand for rip off and duplicate so um so yeah take those ideas
ask questions and and start to build out that network of people that can support you with that just having an outside set
of eyes walk into your facility and walk around with you and look at what you’re doing they can suggest things or give you ideas and one of the places we’ve
gotten a ton of help is through an organization called mantec and oddly enough the the ketrics mentioned this on
their podcast with you recently that they use them for some other family business services but we use mantec and
they’re part of the manufacturing extension partnership which is through nist and um they actually help find
funding to support some of the training that we do around lean manufacturing we
still send multiple people a year to their lean 101 course where they actually teach them these things that
I’ve talked about right like 6s and downtime and non-value AD time and things like that but they’ve been super
helpful for us and through them we’ve actually built out a great network of like-minded companies in our area
Hanover oddly enough is a just a hotbed of manufacturing it doesn’t make sense it’s in the middle of nowhere
Pennsylvania but so many different types of manufacturing there and so now we have this great network of like-minded
organizations we can reach out to and say hey can I come check out your facility and see how you’re handling kanban can I come see how you’ve
implemented your success program whatever it might be and so we kind of we work with them on that and through
that we actually have tours of our facility too so we’ll have 20 practitioners of lean come through our
facility and tell us things that they noticed that they liked and things that they think we can improve upon and so
can you imagine having 20 lean Consultants come through your facility it’s it’s awesome right you walk away with this huge list of things that we
can now go and improve upon based off their tour of the facility what’s been one of the silliest things
initially you thought you were implementing and it just had wild success in your organization
oof uh honestly this most recent thing that they’re doing with the uh the up
theme to drive or continue so it’s taken our continuous Improvement program to a
whole new level because these ideas have to come from the production floor they can’t come from you know the management
team or from you know the CEO or somebody like that it has come from the people that are doing the work the folks
are on the floor and so just having Kyle put on that silly aviator hat and running around our production floors had
such an impact on our business it’s been wild and then the other thing we do and and you’ll love this Trace to encourage
some of these things too we give out gas cards so as you know we like to use the acronym gas at Aqua Phoenix and because
this is a uh a rated show and I don’t want to get you blacklisted it stands for give a shoot right so gas and so we
give out gas cards to our employees whenever they show that they they have it that they’re that they’re given a crap and they’re out there working their
butts off so when they have these good ideas he puts on that silly aviator hat I’ll give you a photo of that and hands
them a gas card I love that that’s fantastic what would you say your top warehouse management
tips are so I guess number one is have an open mind right and and be willing to admit
that you’re wrong or that things aren’t working and I think that’s that’s one of the first places you have to start you
have to get comfortable with that change management is another thing you really have to get good at early on is making
sure that people are comfortable being uncomfortable because to do it and to do it well you
really have to be willing to change things move things and do it differently than you than you did the day before getting help from the outside is another
big one right if you don’t know what you’re doing that’s okay go find somebody that can help guide you through that and train your folks so that you
can start to take it over yourself think about information flow as much as
product flow that’s another big thing to consider so you know as you’re laying
out your facility you’re thinking about how material comes in what happens to it how it goes back out and trying to make
that as efficient as possible but the information part of that is almost as important as the actual material right
how does the work order get to where it gets or how does somebody know to order something or to ship something or
whatever it might be so think about those things cleanliness every day like it sounds crazy but just having a clean
organized space and you mention this all the time even in your your test station or in your mechanical rooms your
customer sites have it clean keep it clean it you’d be surprised how much happier everybody is how much safer it
is all those things that kind of go along with it and I guess the last one is try things don’t be afraid right and
fail fast so Implement quick if it doesn’t work great do something different try it but the worst thing you
can do is stay stagnant and stay right where you are you know you’re just never gonna move ahead if you stay in that comfort zone
Brian we’ve been talking about warehouse management I know you like to find the
next thing to elevate yourself personally any tips for the audience on that
the thing I say there is just go get it right like go look for that information don’t sit back and and say woe is me I
can’t you know I’m not improving or people aren’t giving me this information and there’s plenty of places that you can can accomplish that again find your
local MEP Network that can help you with the manufacturing side of things awt has been a great spot I volunteer there I’m
on a couple of different committees and I head up the young professionals group now so another great spot and then um I
also you know part of the The Mastermind that Trace put together and so building out those places like The Mastermind and
awt and building that network of folks that you can rely on and ask questions of I think it’s just so important
because it is tough these things aren’t easy you’re doing it for the first time and trying to learn it so don’t make the
silly mistakes we did over the years ask somebody for help so you kind of avoid some of those and can get to where you’re getting a little bit quicker
and if somebody wants to find out more about aquafenix scientific what should
they do check out our website uh www.aquafoenixside.com or call me I
you’ll put my cell phone number in there I’m sure I’d love to hear from people shoot me a text um send me a picture if you’re doing
some cool stuff in your facility you know some some neat ideas or things you have on on lean principles or lean
Concepts I’d love to see that and I will say the best hats in all of water
treatment thank you we appreciate that and I will say too our door is always open right so
if you’re in the Hanover area uh we’re about an hour north of BWI about 45 minutes south of Harrisburg really close
to Gettysburg so if you’re if you’re out there traveling I see the Gettysburg Battlefield or go to Hershey uh with the
kids or something like that please stop by and see us you could give me a five minute heads up and we’ll walk you
through the facility I mentioned the cleanliness part we have a joke at Aqua Phoenix called tour ready and so we keep
our facility tour ready at all times we have a person who does nothing but drive
around on a floor scrubber cleaning our floors all day every day picking up trash wiping down walls all those things
so that our facility any day you come into it looks like we are ready for our biggest you know most expensive best
possible customer in the whole wide world because our employees are that important right we want to make sure it’s clean and safe for them
I love that you know who else does that is Chick-fil-A you know you can go into any Chick-fil-A and ask for a tour and
they’re supposed to give it to you oh no kidding I didn’t know that interesting we’re learning all sorts of new things I
think we actually got the idea from Steve dumler back in the day oddly enough so I remember going to Texas into
his facility with Frank one time and this is years and years and years ago but I just remember seeing his floor
scrubber there and Frank and I were both like what do you have a floor scrubber for and he’s like every day we scrub the floor you know just because we have a
chemical facility doesn’t mean it can’t be clean and so we just kind of both looked each other like yeah that’d be cool so sure enough we got a floor
scrubber we’ve had one ever since it’s like one of those drivable ones like a floor Zamboni yeah yeah we started with
one of the Walk behinds and then now we have I think we’re honors I think we wore out our first one we’re on our second one already so it’s one of the
sit on tops that you just drive around yep well Brian mowing your grass you have heard these lightning round
questions so many times now you are in the hot seat are you ready to go I am
ready can’t wait all right question number one if you could go back in time
and talk to your former self on your very first day at Aqua Phoenix
scientific what advice would you give yourself I would say don’t wait for others to
teach you or or get you to where you want to get figure that out set some some goals that you want to achieve and
then put a plan in place to get there and and go seek that information and do that learning on your own I was
fortunate again to be surrounded by a guy like Frank and so many good folks but taking ownership for it myself I
think is something I wish I’d done a little better when I was younger so I’m going to change this question just slightly what are some of your
favorite lean books that we should be reading uh so the goal is by far the book to to
read if you have no idea what lean is I would definitely start by by reading the goal it’s just such a good book that
kind of gives you that easy guide into it until it’s just great stories about Herbie and uh who’s the fat kid who
they’re walking on a hike and Herbies the bottleneck of the hike with the kids so it’s just some good stories in there
and it’s a great book yeah so that’s on the lean side is is uh the goal but you know oddly enough I’ve I just this year
finally got into reading books which I have not been huge into doing and I want to clarify because my fiance will
probably listen to this at some point I don’t read books I listen to them and she points it out to me all the time whenever I say hey I just read this book
she’s like no no you listen to that book there’s nothing wrong with that I know so somehow I got on a Jocko willink kick
he also has a pretty decent podcast I like to listen to former Navy SEAL so the first book I read his was discipline
equals Freedom which was a great book and he does a great job I think of mixing in real world examples talking
about the concept and then also applying it to business sort of in that order so it’s just uh I don’t know it was a
really good read and that led me into the dichotomy of leadership which is another book he read which again I just
really enjoyed and so and now at this point I’m actually going through never split the difference by Chris Voss which
is a really cool book too so um I got about an hour left to listen on that one what’s been your favorite
Mastermind book that we’ve read together oh geez um I don’t I think Drew Dudley’s book
was a good one I really did I like that one quite a bit just kind of changed my perspective a bit on how I view my days
and and how I think about life so I think that was a good one I like that one Drew was the keynote speaker at the
awt convention in Vancouver and we read his book in the rising tide Mastermind
and I think his book was uh a lot of common sense put together
but he did it in a way that you didn’t really commonly practice and my biggest
takeaway from his book Is How We Do core values and we’ve always been really big
on core values just like you guys and he asked the question what did you do today
to fulfill that core value and I love that yeah I try to have that mindset when I
wake up in the morning too like you know again just sort of reinforce it but I wake up every morning and think it’s the best day ever you know like I just I
have to start my day thinking that that it’s going to be a great day and I’m gonna achieve great things and it just like I said this book kind of reinforced
that for me when Hollywood listens to this podcast they are immediately going to make a
movie about Brian goose katarsky who is playing goose
if we could go in the Wayback machine I don’t know if anybody’s done this before but if we could bring John Wayne back to
play me that would be like the ultimate for me if I could get uh get a classic John Wayne to play me that would be
great but if we have to go modern day gosh I don’t know maybe Vince Vaughn or something like that I think he’s funny
as can be so I think that would be a good one final question you now have the ability to talk to anybody throughout
time who would it be with and why this one I think about all the time Trace when you do the uh the lightning
round questions with people and it’s my grandfather my mom’s uh my mom’s dad so Gilbert James hutter I got a I have
photos of him actually on my wall here in my office that guy never got through eighth grade he was a Dairy Farmer and
what I didn’t know as a kid and didn’t appreciate was that I thought it just got dirty and drove tractors you know
like that’s what Pap did but that guy was running like a multi-million dollar business he was an entrepreneur he was
taking risks and doing things at other farmers and other dairies in our area weren’t doing we had our own bottling
plant all these things and so I never had a chance to have adult grown-up conversations with him uh once I
actually understood what business truly was and I just wish like heck I could sit down with him and talk through some
of those things that he did and show him where I am today and he would just be so proud of me I know it so it would be
great to talk to my pap oh Brian I want to thank you for coming on the scaling up H2O podcast without a
doubt I know so many people are motivated to organize and make things
easier for everybody and you gave us some steps to take towards that thank
you yeah absolutely and again it’s taking the first step right that’s what you got to start somewhere so just recognize the
problem and do something about it make tiny little improvements and you’d be surprised how quickly they add up so appreciate it Trace thank you so much
I can’t tell you Nation how difficult it was to call him Brian I’ve called him
Goose for probably 20 years now and old habits die hard so I probably switched
in and out when I was calling Brian Goose or Goose Brian so my apologies for
that I tell you he took the information that we talked about with how to
organize and get people to communicate around a Warehouse around a process and
just really ran with it and was just such a wealth of information I shared
with you during the interview and at the top of the show how when I came back from Aqua Phoenix I could not wait to
start putting some of those things into play and immediately I did so and you
have to have a training aspect with that because I was excited I had all this stuff and I shared with some people but
not everybody they shared with their team so here’s what I learned with that
you got to make sure you tell everybody what’s going on and you can’t just do
that once you got to do it again and then you got to do it again and then you got to do it again I heard once you have
to do something seven times on average for people to start getting it to stick
so just think the last time you worked on a project and something did not go
through all the different levels of your company the way it should how many times did you communicate it yes you did say
it but there’s so much going on and we’re so wrapped up in the day-to-day
if we don’t forcibly make new things heard it’s just going to become noise
and a lot of times we get frustrated over that don’t get frustrated it’s just the way that it is and just remember
leaders are repeaters so how many times did you repeat what it was that was new
until it wasn’t new anymore you know one of my favorite kanban stories is when I
introduce kanban to my household because it works so well at the office and my
wife did not appreciate kanban cards on the ketchup and the mustard I thought it
was great so once again a public service a word of warning what works great in
the office does not always translate well at home now I say that
tongue-in-cheek but I will say I’m a huge fan of EOS the entrepreneurial
operating system and we do a level 10 meeting and for those of you that aren’t familiar with that level 10 references
the rating that you give the meeting and the best meeting ever gets a rating of
10 the worst meeting ever gets a rating of one and if we look at most meetings
that we have they’re probably an average of three so the level 10 concept is how
do we make every meeting a 10 and there’s a whole series within the EOS
platform how to run a level 10 meeting and all the things that people need to
do to step up to make that a level 10. it’s not the facilitator’s job it’s everybody’s job to make that a level 10.
so I brought that at home now I will say the format that works in the office does
not work at home but if you are not get getting with your family and talking
about what their week looks like and what lessons were learned the previous
week and how can we make that better this upcoming week I think you’re missing an opportunity and it might seem
like a business meeting but in my family it’s really opened up a lot of dialogue and we’ve also realized that we’ve got a
lot going on and we can help each other through that if we didn’t know all the things that were going on now we’re
planning in the moment and that’s called an emergency and folks I just don’t like
those I don’t like having to switch my day around because I didn’t plan well I
want to plan well and have my day work as systematically as I can of course we
know our day is going to throw so much chaos within itself that it’s always hard to do that but the more we plan the
more we know the easier it is to try to do that so that’s one thing that I think you can do that will work at home but if
you want to try kanban and put cards on your ketchup and your mayonnaise and
your crackers let me know how that works for you again did not work well for me but it does work great at the office
here’s the great thing about our industry I have really never met anybody well
maybe a few but they are very few and far between that just doesn’t enjoy
talking about their successes and letting you know how you can copy them
hey we had this huge problem with our Logistics and this is what we did and if we had to do it over again this is how
we would do it it’s amazing how people will share what they were not good at
how they became better at it and now how they are experts and what you need to do
to get further faster than they did that’s one of the reasons that I started
the Mastermind the rising tide Mastermind that’s what we do each and every week we will get on a call it is a
zoom call we will share wins and then we get into what we call in the middle and
in the middle is where somebody has an issue and folks it can be anything
sometimes it’s technical sometimes it’s personal sometimes it’s relational it
can be pretty much anything that member is having an issue with and when was the
last time you had a sounding board where you could say hey everybody I’m having a
problem with this and everybody in that room is interested
and everybody in that room wants to learn more on how you’ve experienced
that so they can see the issue through your lens and then everybody wants to
offer you advice so you don’t have to start from step one you can start from
three four five or six and then you report back to everybody and they are
just as excited that you’ve solved this issue with you it’s just amazing so
teams is what everybody achieves more together everybody achieves more well I guess there’s some truth to that but I
will tell you what’s true is life is too short to do it alone and there’s so many things that we have in our lives that we
are doing alone and folks you don’t have to so I’m not saying the rising tide Mastermind is right for you it might be
there might be another master mind that’s right for you there might be another group that’s right for you but I
will say if you are going through problems and life alone you are doing
life wrong it’s too hard that way it’s not fun that way so find a group maybe
this is the right one maybe there’s another one out there but find a group that will help you process all the
difficult stuff that you’re going through in your life so you can go
through it a little bit easier you can go through it a little bit faster and you’re definitely going to have a
lot more fun in the process Nation thank you so much for listening to this
podcast again very close to episode 300. so much going on in the world and now we
have almost 300 episodes of scaling up H2O Nation you’re going to have another
brand new episode next Friday until then I hope you have a great week take care
everybody [Music] Skyline Nation you asked for it and it
is here so many of you are taking the certified water technologist examination
and you’re wanting to get better information on how to better answer the
mock exam now this is the exam that you get when you sign up for the cwt exam
well I have heard your request and I’ve done exactly that I have recorded a
class that has exactly what you’ve been asking for it is me answering each one
of the questions and letting you know why I chose certain answers and of
course everybody wants me to do math and I do all the math on the mock exam so
you can see how to get the right answer and I hope this is something that will help build your confidence so you can
get your certification you can go scalingup h2o.com forward slash cwt prep
once again that’s scalingup h2o.com forward slash cwt prep get out there and
get your certification today