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is proudly sponsored by the rising tide Mastermind the term Mastermind was
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earliest documentation that we have of a mastermind group was Ben Franklin’s
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welcome to scaling up H2O the podcast where we scale up on knowledge so we
don’t scale up our systems Trace Blackmore here your host and I want to
talk about scaling up you know you can obviously hear how that’s a play on
words of course if we scale up a system nobody likes that that reduces capacity
that increases the energy demand of whatever equipment we are treating and
customers normally don’t like that and that means we don’t like that our job is
to make sure that things are as efficient as possible and if you have
heard me Teach what this job is we are heat transfer efficiency managers
everything we do is about heat transfer
everything that we do is about making that equipment as energy efficient and
water efficient as possible and that translates into two things the first
thing is we make that equipment as cheap to operate as possible so we are a green
industry we’re the original Green industry we are saving our customers
green now I know we have listeners and 90 plus countries and not everybody’s
currency is green here in the United States our currency our dollars are
green so I would ask all the people listening in other countries and I am
amazed at how that number grows each and every episode and that’s because of
everybody out there in the scaling up Nation telling people about this podcast
so thank you for everybody that continues to do that so even if your
money is not green think of the United States money you can borrow that image
we are saving our customers green but
what is that green going to buy well it’s going to buy water it’s going to
buy energy it’s going to buy all of the things we might need to use to clean the
system to write whatever we wronged or whatever has wronged in the system so we
can get back efficiency so we are saving
that customer and that building and that facility all of the resources that have
to go into running that plant now we call that a lot the carbon footprint
when we talk about how much energy we’re using we know we have a global Water
Crisis so we are saving water and of course all the downtime and all the
things that cost the customer even more money we are saving them with that so if
you’ve never thought about what your job is now I don’t care what’s on your business card and I hope you have an
amazing title on your business card because you deserve it but really behind
whatever that title is what it really should say and what you need to know
that you do is you manage the efficiency of heat transfer and we are saving our
customers green no matter how they or you define that to even further or split
that down that means your program is
costing them far less than all of the savings that you provide your program is
probably the most scrutinized bill that whatever department is paying that bill
is looking at because they don’t understand it they don’t understand all
of the things that come from you providing the excellent water treatment
service that you provide for that customer they don’t know the things that
we just spoke about in this podcast and it is your challenge this is my call to
action for you that you let that customer know your value and if you
don’t know what your value is the call to action for you is for you to
determine how you are valuable to each and every customer that you come in
contact with and here’s a little spoiler alert you are a heat transfer efficiency
manager so look at your job look at everything that you do through that lens
and it will instantly become clear on how you explain your value to your
customer and I want everybody to think when was the last time that they did
that and try to make today’s interaction the day that you start doing that make
sure the customer appreciates everything that you do to make it more efficient
for everything that they do in that plant and if you don’t tell them I
promise they will never know and when you shift your relationship to your
customer so they view you as a heat transfer efficiency manager I promise
every communication you have with them from that day forward will be different
because you change the lens in which they look at you Nation one of the
things that I hope you do is always talk
about your value when you are thinking about your day always do it in the value
that you bring I promise that thought will change every other thought
as we do each and every episode we bring you some of the events that you might
want to look into to increase your knowledge about this industry and Nation
I want to give a shout out to all the scaling up Nation listeners because this
is an idea that came from the nation there is so much going on out there how
do we keep track maybe we’re just looking at one independent industry
maybe we’re just looking at one Association well now we’ve got blinders
to all the other things that are going on out there so the awesome staff here
at scaling up H2O they are on a mission to find out as much water related
conferences and activities and bring them to you and of course we do that
each and every week and if you miss any of those weeks or you want to get more
information because let’s face it we’re driving from account to account be safe while you’re listening to this podcast
and always know you can go to scaling up h2o.com and go to our events page to
learn everything you want to know about what we mentioned here today and everything that is coming up in our
industry so the 2023 Bulma International Conference and Expo is taking place June
24th through 27th in Kansas City Missouri from groundbreaking building
Technologies to new occupant expectations the new phase of hybrid work environments to promising
decarbonizing efforts is all about the Boma International Conference and Expo
so if this is something that interests you you know where to go we are going to
have this on our show events page also coming up is the 10th International
Water Association membrane technology conference and exhibition for water and
waste water treatment this is taking place July 23rd through 26 in Saint
Louis Missouri this is hosted by the International Water Association and this
conference brings scientists and professionals together around membrane technology in the water sector so to
find out more about this of course we’ll have that on our show notes page and then finally one of my favorite
organizations to promote is the association of water Technologies and
the awt annual convention is taking place October 4th through 7th in the
Amway Grand Hotel in Grand Rapids Michigan folks this is one that I am
attending and I hope to see you there always great presentations of course a
lot of the presentation things that turn into podcast interviews come from this
conference so I’m always walking around I’m always having a microphone in my
hand maybe I will have a chance to interview you so I hope you have that on your calendar
for all these events and more again scaling up h2o.com and you can go to our
events page you know speaking of walking around the awt and just finding out
what’s going on and sharing that with the scaling up Nation we have had so
many other Industries reach out to us for us to help bring awareness around
their events and I just think that’s amazing I think that shows how the
scaling up nation is growing and how when we all learn more the entire
industry gets better and there’s so many people out there that want to make the
industry better and those people are joining the scaling up Nation so thank
you for all those other organizations out there that are reaching out to us and giving us more information so we can
can share with the scaling up nation and Nation thank you for listening to this
podcast not many shows go by without me asking you the scaling up Nation to
reach out to me and give me your ideas so we can have thousands of scaling up
H2O episodes in our future well I don’t know if you know this but I also ask my
guests that very question and one of our guests introduced us with our upcoming
guests that you are getting ready to meet and that takes a village so please
Nation if you have a topic or a guest that you want us to reach out to go to
scalinguph2o.com navigate over to our show ideas page and we will continue to
produce this content so you can get better one episode at a time when Nation
Army next guest is in the irrigation industry and I know we are dedicated to
the industrial water treatment industry but I can’t tell you how many of our
customers have asked us to help them out on the irrigation side or they don’t
understand things that they can do on the irrigation side to save water like
we know how to do on the industrial side and there is no reason why we can’t
cross streams so Nation here’s our interview
my lab partner today is Andy Humphrey of the sprinkler supply store and
self-proclaimed sprinkler nerd Andy welcome to the scaling up H2O podcast Trace thank you so much for having me
today and I love how you called me your lab partner that’s fantastic I started doing that when we first started the
show and it just stuck yeah I actually think life is just an experiment so in terms of like how I approach every day
and what I do this is just one big experiment so I’m right I’m right on board with that awesome awesome well we
have a lot to talk about today and uh I’m trying to think where to start but I want to talk to our audience and make
sure that we’re all on the same page that regardless of how we’re using water
it’s everybody’s charge to make sure we’re using the smallest amount as
possible and I looked up online of course Google never lies to us so we know this is a right answer nine to ten
billion gallons of water a day are used in irrigation and I just find that an
incredible number and I’m willing to bet that most of that irrigation is probably
not optimized and there’s a lot of runoff and it’s not being used properly in the equipment’s outdated and all of
that stuff and you’re going to tell me no I’m wrong there’s rainbows and birds are singing everything’s fine no you’re
totally right we undervalue water and so I think that is an enabler for poor
quality irrigation systems and poor operating irrigation systems and what I
find really interesting is that as you drive around your city your small town your neighborhood you likely as a
majority see poorly operating systems then you do correctly operating systems
and here I live in Traverse City Michigan it’s right on Lake Michigan and
I see sprinklers running into you know late into November always running in the
rain like really low hanging opportunities to reduce water usage that
doesn’t take a lot of Technology yet we still let it happen coming to the office this morning I saw
that very thing matter of fact a sprinkler head had popped off and it has been running for at least two days yeah
so if we were to fast forward let’s say some period of time I can’t say it’s two years five years ten years probably more
like five minimum that won’t happen anymore meaning there’ll be technology in that system that immediately shuts it
down when that happens and that technology is available today it just happens to be very expensive and and
that’s part of you know undervaluing water if water goes up in price then all of a sudden these Technologies become a
lot more realistic but right now there’s still a bit more expensive for your
average you know residential site I interviewed somebody on this podcast from Israel and water is very expensive
over there and a lot of the new ways of thinking on how we can we can better use
water comes from there for that reason I think yeah I mean and something as
simple as right now the water flows to your building your house your building your Park water is in a strange way
unlimited right you can turn the water on and it will flow for the most part
and so I think maybe what we need to do is flip that upside down and say you
know Trace here’s how much water you get do what you want with it
because then you can start to make decisions like you know what maybe the back part of this property it can go a
little bit that grass can go dormant I want to keep the front green but right now we really don’t make any
prioritization decisions because the water just flows and then it becomes just a you know Financial dollar
decision but water flows all the time if you want it it’s there
yeah we get asked all the time of course the listeners of this podcast normally cooling towers boilers closed hydronic
systems so we’re in buildings and Facilities working on that and people will come and ask us hey you do water
well help us with this irrigation system so I know sometimes we do get involved
with that so I’m hoping around Today’s Show we can give people some better
information so they can help guide their customers and ultimately the goal is
we’re all using water more effectively absolutely that’s the idea is you know
especially when it regards to Growing something right growing an agricultural crop or growing a landscape crop I.E
turf grass trees and shrubs is that there’s something called the plant water requirement and so the goal is really to
give that plant exactly what that plant needs to grow optimally
well before we get into all of that would you mind letting the scaling up Nation know a bit about Andy Humphrey
sure let’s do the uh 60 second version which is I was okay in school not an a
student but didn’t really like it and so I focused on things that I could be successful at which is really creative
things building things so I went to architecture school switched to landscape architecture school got into my first job in 2002 as a cad you know
CAD jockey for a landscape company teaching other Landscape Architects at the company how to use CAD I met an
irrigation professional who still you know my best friend today and sprinkler nerd 2 my partner in crime his name is
Paul Bassett and that’s when I learned about this irrigation industry and one
of the first things I asked Paul is how does the irrigation controller know when
it’s time to water and of course 2002 this was 20 years ago I learned that it
operates on an alarm clock because it’s Monday at 7 A.M and so I started to ask
more questions I was very curious about this and that’s that’s really what led me
down the path of irrigation as soon as I learned how irrigation systems worked I
immediately saw an opportunity and stopped doing landscape architecture and went headfirst into irrigation and you
know specifically the technology side which at that time it even today is revolves around the control systems and
so I’ve worked with many different manufacturers Control Systems implementing them in cities and
commercial facilities and bringing this type of control systems to Market it was really because I saw what was
going to happen in the industry and how we were using water and how there really was not any technology in the irrigation
industry okay and then and then you layer on me realizing that I’m an entrepreneur learning how to sell things
online in the early 2000s building e-commerce stores launching Sprinkler Supply store in 2010 which I’m now a
joint venture with a large company called site one landscape supply and we have a fully integrated e-commerce stack
into their EIP system and into their brick and mortar stores where we can
fulfill from the shelves and so I’ve kind of you know went head first into the irrigation industry technology and
mixed that in with both the hardware side of the industry and the software
side so with all of that I’m thinking of the sprinkler system that we have here at
the office and it is probably from the early 2000s and when we bought the
building I think it’s a hunter system and it had nothing on it but as you said
an alarm clock and I went online and I found that we could add just a rain
detector to it and just by doing that we were using a lot less water to irrigate
and with that I can only imagine what they can do today so here’s the interesting thing is they
can do more but basically they’re the same they haven’t changed that much and
I you know applaud you for using a rain sensor because they are a fantastic tool if installed correctly and maintained
correctly they’re very inexpensive less than a hundred dollars they’re Wireless they take you 15 minutes to install and
that’s really the way that we should look at rain is money falling from the sky because when it’s raining you should
not be irrigating and then there’s a period after it rains you know kind of like a
delay where depending on your soil type and how much volume it rained you can
not water for an extended period of time after that and that’s really sort of the
next evolution of the rain sensor is it actually dries out pretty quick you know the tech in the rain sensor is
just simply a contact switch a little disc swells up it trips the switch it turns off but the rain sensor being in
the sky doesn’t know how much of that rain landed into the
soil and how long it’s going to take for that soil to dry out and so that being
said the next sort of evolution if you will that’s coming is better and easier
to deploy soil moisture sensors so instead of just detecting what’s falling from the sky it’s actually
measuring how much water’s in the soil correct yeah because the rain sensor is
the right tool for turning this system off because to turn it off you need something in the sky that can measure
rain in the sky but if you want to know when it’s time to turn the sprinklers back on you need a sensor in the soil
profile that says all right we’re dry enough now now it’s time to come back on
I’m assuming my cheap little 2004 circuit system is probably not able to
take that on so does that mean I need to upgrade the system it means that there
is not really the technology available today on the what you might call Residential and Light commercial this
technology is available for your higher end larger scale properties and I’ve been fortunate enough to have helped
build a company called Baseline Control Systems which is now owned by hydropoint Data Systems and Baseline has patented
soil moisture sensors that we’ve deployed on all kinds of large-scale commercial and Municipal properties but
again that price point it’s you know in the thousands of dollars not the hundreds of dollars and so as we fast
forward five years we’re going to see this Tech move down into the residential
scale or perhaps for 200 or less you could add you know maybe some Wireless
sensors to your system at your office or your house yeah that seems like that is definitely
an improvement so I look forward to that so we are not wasting water here or at our home a lot of our customers will
come up to us and they’ll ask us how we can be more efficient with water and one of the first things that we do and I’m
assuming most municipalities have this but they’ll give a sewer credit for the water that is not being returned back to
the sewer and we always ask them to apply for that for their cooling tower
and also their irrigation is that a thing all over the United States or is
that just in certain municipalities I believe it’s all over however there
are likely municipalities that don’t honor that but that is true a sewer deduct meter is definitely an advantage
and from what I understand and you might know more because you’re you’re more in that in the municipal side but I believe
that something like two-thirds of the water bill is sewer right one-third is water so you can have immediate
deduction by by doing that what is the equipment that needs to be in place in
order for the municipality to Grant a credit like that I believe you just have to apply for the meter and then have a
you know licensed plumber install the meter that the city needs and then they read that meter so if you have a home or
commercial building you would have two meters your water meter and then your water deduct meter or your sewer deduct
meter I’m assuming that there are electronics that will help monitor those meters and
probably also report when you’ve hit the ROI and how much money you’re saving yes
I’m laughing because that’s what a normal person thinks and and I say that
lightly because that’s the way it should work but that’s not the way that it actually works today and that you’re
talking about some technology and hardware and analytics that’s coming but it’s not really readily available today
and so with that in mind my first suggestion would be to put a meter on
the irrigation system or a flow sensor so that you know how much water you’re using and get your water bills and track
and Trend that data and if you know how much water you’re using and you use
something simple like the square foot of irrigated area you can kind of know with
a couple calculations how well you’re doing whether you’re using 2x the water
you should be per square foot or whether you’re right on or whether you’re not using enough but most I shouldn’t say
most almost all irrigation equipment today doesn’t do any of this the human has to come in the trained human who
knows what it is I’m talking about here has to come visit a site set all this up and help that property owner property
manager but it’s not readily available in the irrigation industry that is really surprising to me yeah so
it’s coming this you’re talking about the next evolution is that data and
analytics infrastructure that needs to be added to the irrigation system because most irrigation systems are
still alarm clocks a little bit better than that that turn solenoid valves on
and off at a specific time for a specific amount of time I remember I was so excited when we when
we had a sprinkler system I had never had one before and I got on YouTube I
tried to learn everything I could about how to make it use the least amount of water possible so we didn’t get runoff
it was just going where it needed to and I remember I had pie plates that I was using I’m sure I wasn’t doing that
correctly so from the sprinkler nerd what does everybody need to know in
order to properly set up just their system at home so the first thing they should think
about we’re in April right now okay so in a lot of the country sprinkler systems are coming on for the first time
right now however the water demand from the plants right now is not heavy because it’s cooler they’re just coming
out of dormancy and what happens with sprinkler systems right now is they get turned on in April and they run the same
all season and then get shut off in October okay so the same amount of water is applied Monday Wednesday Friday from
April all the way through till October when it’s turned off but that’s not how the weather works the weather starts to
get warmer and peaks in let’s say July as the highest water demand time period
and then it curves off again and so if you were going to be applying the right
amount of water you would use a lot less in the spring let’s say 50 percent less right now then in the summer you would
use more and then the fall you would taper it off so it kind of looks like a bell curve the actual water usage is
like a bell curve not a flat line so that is if you’re going to do it by hand that’s what you can do right right now
either go to one day a week or turn your time down by 50 and then as you go
towards Summer start increasing the frequency or increasing the run time and then as we go towards fall start
decreasing it and there are controllers that do that today so that’s called an ET curve evapotranspiration and that’s
the word that describes the water loss through the soil and the water loss through the print the plant
transpiration and essentially the plant water demand and you can automate that with something called an ET controller
and that is something that is readily available and I would say for no more
than two hundred dollars you can have a residential controller that does that commercial properties again you’re going
to look for something that is more industrial and it’s going to cost more than a couple hundred dollars but you
can automate the watering based on the weather yeah that’s fantastic I want to look
into that as soon as I get off of our interview here do you think that we’re
going to start seeing more public policy where they’re saying you cannot use
water you can’t have so much runoff and now we’re going to be responsible for
doing some of the things we talked about in the very beginning of this interview are there municipalities that are thinking about doing that and what are
your thoughts yeah they’re absolutely already doing it by either telling you
you can only water on odd days of the week or even days of the week things like that I think it’ll become a
question of what’s the right approach to that and I don’t know what the right approach is I think that limiting
somebody’s time that they can water isn’t necessarily the right approach
because if you can water on Thursday you could water all day long if you want to and some people do they don’t realize
that there’s only so much water that the soil can hold after that it’s wasted water I think an interesting approach
might be instead to just allocate the amount of water here’s how many gallons you get based on your square footage of
landscaped area do what you want with it you know give give the owner the user a
choice on what they do with the water instead and then you can start to make some decisions just like everybody has a
budget family budget business budget travel budget whatever that is and then you make choices based on what’s going
to fit in your budget and when you start to look at it that way you start to ask some really interesting questions like I
mentioned in the beginning of of our talk questions like what are what are my priorities can I prioritize my landscape
are there high priority areas of the building that I absolutely want to be
green and Lush all the time and are there areas of the property that can go dormant so that if I only have X number
of gallons to use I’ll apply that where I think it matters most and maybe that
area behind the warehouse that grass can go dormant it’s not going to die it goes dormant it’ll come back nobody sees it
but right now we don’t prioritize any of the landscape we just water all of it there are companies out there that are
catching their runoff and then using that in their irrigation systems what
does somebody need to know in order to do something like that what are the pros and the cons of doing that
I think that what a lot of people don’t realize is just how many gallons of water a landscape needs and so you could
say the same thing about catching rain now what’s interesting about catching rain is sometimes when you catch the
rain the landscape doesn’t need it because it just rained and when you’re in a drought and you need the water
there’s no rain so it can be a catch-22 and I think just understanding the pure
volume of water that it requires that the landscape requires and just understanding how much that is because
if you could have a secondary source so we like to call those secondary sources whatever that secondary source might be
then you may apply that to certain areas of the landscape but you might not use
it for the entire landscape because it might not be enough for the whole landscape I remember seeing a sign where
somebody did that very thing and then they put out saying that we’re irrigating from a natural spring so not
really but I think it made everybody feel good with runoff with all the things that are collected as the waters
running to wherever that Reservoir is do we need to be concerned that it’s collecting something that’s going to be
hazardous to put back on the landscape yeah I believe that every local municipality has their own code of how
well that water needs to be treated and it does need to be treated to some specification and again I don’t know
what those are it’s different for every every area and that does add to the cost
to treat that water a lot of times it’s treated through the the pump station or through the pumping infrastructure if
you’re at your house and you’re collecting rain off the gutter then you’re on your own you can do what you want with that I believe again it’s not
a lot of volume but it might be enough if you’re catching it on your house to just water your flower beds perhaps what
are some of the things that you want everybody to know that’s listening about sprinkler systems
I would say number one is realize that the volume of water okay so if you were to look at one acre and the general rule
of thumb is that cool season turf grass requires one inch okay one inch of water
and this is also interesting because when you think of a sprinkler system we all think about time okay how long is
this particular Zone going to water for well I set my timer for about 30 minutes every other day but most people don’t
have any idea how much water that is they just know that it’s 30 minutes but they don’t know how much they applied
because they don’t know the precipitation rate of the sprinkler and
so the general rule of thumb is one inch of water you know per week
and over one acre that’s 28 000 gallons of water right one acre inch is 28 000
gallons of water and most people don’t have any idea that it is that much and
that would be per week over one acre that’s a huge number so knowing that
information what do we do to make sure that everybody can just go home today and they can impact that number what do
they need to know to do that well if they want to go home today and impact the number let’s let’s define
impact the number I’ll just assume that means use less water yes okay so what I
would do right now since it’s April if you’ve had a professional come turn on your sprinklers or if you turned them on
I would just leave the controller in off okay and this is assuming you don’t have a ET based controller or a you know call
it smart controller I would just leave it in the off position and wait until you start to see a little bit of plant
stress then turn it on and start automating with it but in the spring a
lot of service companies go around turn on all the irrigation systems and they don’t need to be on it just fit into the
schedule of the service company to go turn them on and they leave them in Auto but they’re still on a schedule so I
would just leave it in off and we all kind of know when late spring and summer is here where stuff starts to dry out we
we know when that happens and then I’d flip it to Auto let it run so obviously using less water the only
amount that you need is the key how does xeroscaping come into this
well I think that xeroscaping is an interesting word because it can mean different things to different people I
like to think of xeriscaping as simply drip irrigation whether that’s inline
tubing drip irrigation or whether that’s micro emitters irrigation and what we find with landscape is is that they’re
different from the east coast to the West Coast okay so on the East Coast we plant high density Landscapes you know
we have Foundation plantings right down to the bed Edge then we have turf grass
very dense plantings in on the west coast you have less dense plantings
where you have one plant 10 feet away you have another plant 10 feet away you have another plant and so on the west
coast you have a lot more what we might call xeriscaping because of that so
you’re not going to water that entire landscape bed because the plants don’t
occupy the entire landscape bed and so you water the specific plant so you
might run some low density polyethylene you plunge into it you put an emitter or two on each plant and that’s kind of the
difference between the west coast and the east coast and we do see this on the East Coast drip irrigation and
xeroscaping meaning micro irrigation but the biggest differences in the west were
the density of plantings is much further apart you really that is the best way to
water it because if you water the entire landscape bed 50 of that is not occupied by a plant
and therefore it doesn’t need to be watered to shift gears just slightly you are a
master at marketing I look at your website it doesn’t look like the typical website of course you’ve got the podcast
how did you start all that and uh what did you use to know what you needed to
do it’s uh it’s an evolution so I would say practice
and with that so in 2004 when I built my first website some of the Easy Web
building tools of today didn’t exist then and it’s a heck of a lot easier to
do it today I would say that I I’m just curious and when I want to know how to do something
I dig right in and figure it out meaning do the research read watch YouTube try
it get stuck do some more research figure it out implement it get stuck again and just repeat and if you do that
long enough over time you get better and better and better and things build over time and that’s essentially what
happened I’ve just been practicing for 20 years what have you seen as that Evolution was
taking place as far as your customer base what was the feedback that you were getting what did your sales look like as
you were experimenting and doing more to educate them so I think that what’s interesting is
that the market actually changes so if we were to think about 2004 and if
somebody wanted to buy something online they went to either Google or Yahoo for
the most part and they ran a search and that is how all eyeballs came to a
website 20 years ago basically from Google from Yahoo or maybe they typed it
in directly now we have a lot more places where people are you know you
might call it hanging out online people might discover you through YouTube they
might discover somebody through Instagram they might discover somebody through Reddit they might discover somebody through all these different
platforms that didn’t exist back then and so that to me is the basically the
fundamental change is it’s a it’s a much more diverse Marketplace than it used to be and what’s interesting about these
marketplaces that is that if you were to price your items and I guess I’m saying
this for anybody listening that might work for a supplier or have a direct-to-consumer product if you price
your product for Google to be let’s say the lowest price on Google assuming you
sell something that other people sell then you’re kind of giving up Margin potentially through all these other
marketplaces and it’s a slippery slope and an easy trap to think you need to be
the lowest price item whatever that might be and it’s very easy to run a
Google search and find a few competitors and see oh gosh I’ve got to be priced
here in order to be competitive but that’s not necessarily true and we’ve
kind of built our business and the combination to have competitive pricing
not the lowest pricing because we also need to make money and we need to be
able to have some margin in order to make customers happy it’s been an
interesting landscape to watch to watch the econ Commerce landscape change and I think that in today in 2023
Distributors are poised to they’re in the power position okay so I I might
have opposite thinking of most Distributors they might think they’re getting squeezed out Amazon’s taking
over but the the person who has access to the product and the product on the Shelf is
the one that holds you know all the cards if you will one who has the product is the one who’s in the power
position they can’t be cut out they’re just not doing anything about it right now some are some aren’t but as a
distributor there’s unlimited e-commerce opportunities right now you do a great job of educating your
clients on YouTube how did you start to do that and you were very polished now
I’m assuming it didn’t start out that way in the beginning God YouTube is
okay just like anything you get better the more you do it okay and and we we all get in our own way in
terms of doing something for the first time because we have a picture in our head of what we want to do and typically
the first time we try something could be riding a bike first time we ride a bike we might fall off we can’t expect to go
win the bike race the first time we get on the bike you just have to start and try something new and different each
time you do it like a lab like an experiment to see what happens to see if you liked it to see if the audience
liked it and I’m kind of a believer in trying to make little improvements every
single time because if you did a hundred YouTube videos and you improved one thing each
time then that Compound Effect of a hundred little changes becomes really
big at the end and what’s interesting about YouTube is that there are a million questions that
somebody could have and some videos that I’ve made are answering a specific question but my
primary goal with YouTube is actually to try to bring the human element to the
digital world so that when someone is buying from Sprinkler Supply Store more
than ever now I want them to feel like they’re buying from people like who are these people do I like these people do I
believe in these people do I trust these these people and I feel like that’s missing from from the Internet is on the
internet you’re either a picture or a name on a screen but the actual human part of it isn’t there and I don’t see
why the digital world has to be any different than the regular world it’s just one world and part of my YouTube
strategy is to try to kind of come out from behind the curtain and say hey I’m right here I’m just a dude and you have
a question here schedule a call with me to just try to be as human as possible
to try to build that sort of authenticity with what we’re doing if someone wants to find out more about
what we’re talking about what I’ve seen where should they go there’s two places they can go if they go to
sprinklersupplystore.com on the home page you’ll see a few videos and those are all embedded YouTube videos so if
they want to watch more videos then go to YouTube and our Channel Sprinkler Supply store so search sprinkler supply
store on YouTube if you want to hear my what I might call my podcast experiment
that’s the sprinkler nerd show and you can find that on all the podcast channels as well as sprinklernerd.com
you can listen to all the episodes right on sprinklennerd.com excellent we’ll
have all of that information on our show notes page as well normally I transition to the lightning round questions with my
guests same questions I asked of all my guests but I thought we might do something a little different with you
because you were a participant on one of my all-time favorite shows and I thought
if you were okay with it we could talk a little bit about your Shark Tank experience absolutely love talking about Shark Tank
all right so I gotta know how do you get on Shark Tank what did you do so I don’t know how you get on it today
but I was crazy enough to think I could just Google how to get on Shark Tank this was in 2010 and I googled how to
get on Shark Tank I found some email address I mean it was literally like a woman’s name at gmail.com and I just
emailed and totally forgot about it six months later it was about 11 p.m I was
traveling on the East Coast a phone call came in from an unrecognized number and I didn’t answer it and then I listened
to the message and sure enough it was a producer from Shark Tank so that’s what I did I don’t know how you do it today
and I would say the rule probably applies for anything if you want to do something just look it up and pick up
the phone and call somebody or email somebody what did that call go like with the producer so what’s interesting about
Shark Tank is and again this was season two I felt like they wanted to keep me on the edge of my seat every moment the
whole time from the first phone call all the way to walking on the stage it was
almost like there’s a chance you might not go on the show
sort of like nothing is guaranteed if you do well on this next phone call Andy then you might get an opportunity to
talk to the next producer so there was this progression of kind of keeping me
on the edge of my seat and then interestingly I feel like they wrote the pitch because for about five weeks
leading up to the taping I would have a call with a producer they’d say all
right Andy let me hear the pitch right here the pitch and then they’d say something like you know the Sharks would
really probably like to hear you talk more about you know X and if you could be more passionate about why so rewrite
that and then we’ll catch up with you in a couple days and hear it again and so they gave me sort of revisions each time
and by the end what I had was this is all in hindsight in the end what I had was their pitch interesting it wasn’t my
original pitch it was the producer secretly crafted pitch that I wrote with
their suggestions all right I’m going to ask you about that a little bit later in in my
question so now they say this is your taping date I’m assuming they paid for
your traveling expenses and you went out to where do they even tape it it was taped in Culver City at uh NBC Studios I
believe so what was that like what was going there like okay so the fun part
was was meeting all these other you know inventors if you will entrepreneurs and
most of them never got on Shark Tank that’s the other thing that people don’t realize is that if 30 people pitch they
might pick three to actually go to Air and again if you think about what are they selling they’re selling
entertainment again this is my own perception so please don’t think this is actually real it’s just how I view it is
that shark tank isn’t about the deals it’s only about the deals to entertain the viewers but the sharks they have the
whole world of deals coming at them they don’t need the Shark Tank Deals they only need the Shark Tank deals to make
the Shark Tank show a show to entertain people and so what they’re really selling is amazing entertainment which
is why you like this show because it is entertaining it creates emotion and they
do a great job at that I have never pitched an investor in real life but from other people that I have met that
are either Angels or other startup Founders it’s nothing like Shark Tank it can just be a you know a cup of coffee
with an angel telling your story it’s not you know a high pressure pitch
situation and a lot of the high pressure pitch situations which we tend to see in
every small town or a lot of small towns even Traverse City might have a pitch night it is usually to you know build
and Market the organization running the pitches but it’s not really for funding
deals at that moment It’s Entertainment so you’re back off stage there are 30
entrepreneurs back there how do they choose who goes on yeah I wish it was
kind of like that so they also try very hard not to have the entrepreneurs talk to each other oh we could talk to each
other at the hotel so we did all stay the same hotel and they gave everybody the same amount of money okay so that
there’s no unfair advantage to one person or another and if I remember correctly the gal that you know when she
was giving out the money she explained why and she said that Shark Tank was considered a game show so like legally
it’s a game show and because it’s a game show there can’t be any advantage for one player if you will or one
participant over another and so I think they gave us like 500 or something like that and we could hang out with each
other at the hotel but then we each had sort of a dressing room I think that’s
what you call it it was just a a room with one couch all white walls and I had
to hang out in there all day I could go down this go down the hall and like have a snack then I’d have to come back to
like my sort of holding cell before it was Pitch time and then they kind of
told us all right Andy You’re Gonna you’re gonna pitch at one o’clock let’s say and then you do the pitch and they
guide you you know stand here then they’d say walk around right here and kind of make it look like you’re really
nervous and you’re thinking and you’re contemplating to kind of guide you so they could take you know sort of some of
that b-roll and then you do your pitch then you go back to your dressing room
then they brought in I don’t know if a therapist psychologist they brought in somebody to talk to me to make sure I
was in the right frame of mind I don’t know if this is sort of their legal all right he’s cool and if he jumps off a
bridge we had somebody talk to him so we’re off the hook like cut almost like that and then immediately I got in a van
and went to the airport okay this is fascinating I’m so happy I brought this up I know I’ve seen your
episode but it’s it’s difficult to go back because I don’t have a great streaming service and I wanted to watch
that but if I recall you did not get a deal I did not correct can you tell us
the experience that you had you know the doors open you walk out on stage and you
pitch to The Starks what was that like yep and you’re giving your lines right so you’ve memorized this pitch that the
producers say is going to be great investors are going to love it and you’ve memorized this
and what I felt like and what I observed while I was giving the pitch was that I felt like
there wasn’t a lot of active listening hmm like I can we’re here on this video
call I can tell you’re actively listening to me but I felt like the Sharks were not actively listening it
was more like they were thinking of something they could say or maybe they
knew maybe they didn’t know my exact pitch but they were looking for something they could say to kind of cause some drama you know that emotion
make it entertaining versus actually trying to understand what was being said
in the deal again it’s it’s Television right it’s reality but it’s orchestrated
highly orchestrated reality and so I felt like there wasn’t a lot of active listening and it was sort of uh
me just being I guess naive if I if I wasn’t so naive I would have realized I
was walking into a television show that is there for entertainment purposes and
they were a little harsh on you oh absolutely it’s interesting because I wasn’t
I was into the idea of the business which what they showed on television
wasn’t exactly what I was pitching you know they for me I had a eco-friendly
lawnmower they trademarked the Eco Mower and I wanted to build an environmentally friendly lawnmower company that’s really
what I had the budget for was to build an Eco mower to get into the to the market and they focused on the mower
right why would anybody want to buy a push real mower blah blah blah I was sort of there saying well look this
entire industry is going to be run by electric equipment in the future this is
how I’ve started but they focused on the mower part of it you know so that’s the other thing to remember is I may have
been pitching for 30 minutes and they show five and they can do what they want with the footage it’s for entertainment
purposes and they do a really good job with the entertainment would you do it again I would totally do it again
absolutely yeah and it’s a very fun conversation to have not that I go out to bars by myself unless I’m traveling
but it’s you can have a fun conversation with anyone because of it what would you do differently now that
it would be your second experience if it was the same product I would probably do nothing different and I
again I would focus on making it to television because most of the people
who pitch and again I say most I don’t know if it’s most not everyone goes to air
and I know someone who had a fantastic product we still keep in touch he got a deal three hundred thousand
dollar deal on tape but never actually like followed through never got the money never made it on television but on
taping he got you know he had a 300 000 deal and so the the goal is to be on
television whether you are the pawn whether you’re the winner you just want
to make it to television any way possible and people ask me did you get a
lot of hints to your website did that generate a lot of sales and that was the other thing that I learned was that I
would have thought yes that that would have been an amazing opportunity to sell tons of units but if
I recall there may have only been 15 or 20 000 visitors to my website over that weekend
you know Shark Tank airs on a Friday then you have Saturday and Sunday let’s say it was 20 000 visits it’s not a lot
of traffic at the end of the day and that was sort of my aha moment that
media isn’t about a one-time opportunity there’s a reason we see commercials over
and over and over and over and over again because you’d rather be in front of somebody many times than just here
today gone tomorrow I saw that once I never saw it again you need you need the repetition you need to be in front of
somebody often well it seems like you took what you learned from that and you started
applying that to your own firm with all the marketing that you’re doing yeah yeah absolutely and I had already
started Sprinkler Supply store that same year yeah I started sprinkles apply store June of 2010 and we taped for the
show in November 2010 and then it aired in 2011.
but that you’re exactly right so I took what I learned about e-commerce and the
Eco mower was my third e-commerce business and then I said all right how can I do this for my industry I know
Distributors I know the products how can I take my e-commerce knowledge and apply
it to my industry and that’s when I started sprinkler’s supply store thank you so much for sharing that story
that was fascinating yeah my pleasure it’s a great show highly entertaining Andy once again if someone wants to find
out more about you where should they go I would say go to sprinklersupplystore.com and then visit
sprinklernerd.com sprinkler nerd is my podcast and sprinkler supply store is my
e-commerce store and you can reach out to me directly anytime would be happy to talk to you about B2B e-commerce and
direct to Consumer e-commerce and how you might be able to layer that on top of a wholesale distribution company as
well as irrigation technology and how you might be able to provide some better
sensors and data analytics right at your commercial building to try to reduce your water usage
Andy thank you so much for coming on the scaling up H2O podcast thank you trace
really appreciate it [Music] scaling up Nation my favorite thing
hands down is meeting new people and I met somebody brand new right here on the
podcast and of course we learned a lot about Andy and we learned a lot that we
can do to help our customers understand that water savings is not just what we
do with their chillers and boilers it’s also everywhere that they use water and
I hope now you’re thinking outside of the regular box that we are trying to
save water wherever we can and of course everything we do is to help our clients
succeed and now we have even more information to do just that
Nation have you ever heard the expression if you’re a carpenter everything looks like a nail it’s my
hope that that little saying is not how we’re living Our Lives it’s not how we
are performing our incredible Services we’re looking at the base knowledge that
we know and we are trying to help our customers apply that knowledge to
everything within their facility so don’t just stop at the equipment that
you treat our job is to be the biggest Ally that we can for our customer and we
know more about water than probably anybody else that will ever walk through
their door so don’t let it stop just in the mechanical room make it be a
catalyst to make our customers wildly successful to help them with all of
their water decision making now that being said I’m not saying you have to be
the ones to do everything and I think the more you do outside of what you are
good at and your company’s Core Business is is probably the worst you get at your
core business so I’m not saying that I’m saying you’re the Catalyst of that information and you can drive them
towards other resources whether it’s information or maybe it’s other
contractors that you are working with so you might be saying Trace I am a boiler
expert and I know boiler water where am I ever going to use what I just learned
about irrigation well just think of how many irrigation companies are out there
and how many of those companies have potential customers for you so so maybe
an idea from this episode is you reach out to one of these companies and you
let them know what it is that you do and this podcast that you just listened to
and how can you collaborate with them and now maybe you guys can help each
other just an idea and that’s what I hope this podcast does for you it allows
you to think about your job differently it gives you an idea but I hope it
doesn’t stop there I hope that that idea now allows you to go further with the
idea and if you can imagine the idea being a DOT on a map and then spider
webs from ideas just coming out of that one dot is what I think this podcast
allows to happen I think everybody does something a little bit different with
that information and you’ve heard me say on past podcast it’s my hope that this
podcast unlocks your ability your desire to find
out why and everybody’s going to take that Journey a little bit differently so
I’m curious how are you going to take this information how are you going to make it your own how are you going to be
successful and as always our friend James McDonald is trying to make us more
successful and more knowledgeable each and every week here is a brand new 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
Fenton’s reagent some of you may be thinking I made this one up but no I haven’t
Fenton’s reagent what is it what chemicals are involved in the Fenton
reaction what are the chemical reactions happening when and where would one use
Fenton’s reagent what dosage ratios between components are recommended
do low and high pH have an impact upon their reaction conversely will Fenton’s reagent have an
impact upon water pH what is a hydroxyl radical and how is that different from the hydroxide ion
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
water table23 and hashtag scalingup H2O I look forward to learning more from you
thank you James Nation once again my call to action is for you to take this
knowledge and do something with it maybe think a little bit differently maybe
meet somebody new maybe educate a customer about how you can help them
Nation it is always my pleasure to bring you this podcast each and every week and
I’ll have a brand new one for you next week on scaling up H2O
foreign 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