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 each and every year the
rising tide Mastermind gets together in Atlanta for a live event this is one of
the most anticipated events within the rising tide Mastermind normally we have
a zoom call each and every week but this is where we all come together and we
become better friends we learn more about each other and we help each other
with their issues it is my favorite thing and I’m sure it is going to be
your favorite thing to look forward to if you were a member of the rising tide
Mastermind that could be a possibility to find out if the rising tide Mastermind is right for you and you are
right for the rising tide Mastermind go to scalingup h2o.com forward slash
Mastermind and you can schedule a 15-minute call with me to find out more
yeah foreign to scaling up the podcast where we scale
up on knowledge so we don’t scale up our systems I’m Trace Blackmore the host of the scaling up H2O podcast and Nation it
is time for us to get ready for Legionella awareness month for the past
three four years we have been doing this and it’s been a wild success where each
and every August we talk about Legionella and we’re not celebrating
Legionella but we’re trying to get more information out about Legionella so in
just two short weeks we are going to be smack dab in the middle of Legionella
awareness month this is one of our highest listener participated months so
this is why we do it each and every year and we are going to kick off this
Legionella awareness month with top questions that I hear when I talk to
people or people ask me questions about Legionella so folks mark your calendars
for August 4th where we’re going to have our first episode for this year’s
Legionella Awareness Month something else we did a few weeks back I
thought was a huge success now what am I talking about I’m talking about the cwt
practice exam promotion that we did to celebrate the 4th of July and let me
tell you so many people signed up for this course and that makes me so happy
because I know that they now have Newfound confidence to sign up for the
certified water technologist examination several of you that I am speaking with
right now did that very thing a couple of you are on the fence about it and that’s okay you can actually look at a
totally free version of the cwt prep course by going to scalingup h2o.com
forward slash cwt prep and check out the first few chapters of what we are doing
in the prep course and what we do do in that free course is we let you know what
to expect with the certified water technologist process that whole process
on how do you take the exam how do you know you’re ready to take the exam all
of that stuff is in the first few chapters and you get a hundred percent free access to that so you know what to
do in order to get things started now on the paid course what we’ve done is we
have created 100 practice questions that we think are a sampling of what you’re
most likely to get on the certified water technologist exam now here’s the
fact we don’t know what you’re going to get because those are randomly selected each and every participant at their
terminal but we think knowing all the things that you need to know to be a
certified water technologist that these are a sampling of the questions so we’ll take you through a hundred of those you
will take that practice exam and then you will watch me explain each one of
the hundred questions explaining why I selected one answer over another and
then also giving you more resources so you can learn more about particular
topics that you might need more information on all of that is yours for the taking that is scalingup h2o.com
forward slash cwt prep Nation one of the things that people
think myself and my team for is keeping everybody in the know about what is
going on in our water treatment world and there are so many conferences and
different exhibits that you can attend how do you keep track of that well you don’t have to you just have to be a
listener of the scaling up H2O podcast or you can simply navigate over to our
show page which is scaling up h2o.com and click on events and you will have
everything at your fingertips for you to read up on and even register so here are
a few things that you might want to put on your calendar November 12th through
16th in San Antonio the International Water conference is having their
conference and here’s the cool thing about the IWC they have selected Yours
Truly that’s right Trace Blackmore is going to be the keynote speaker at the International Water conference right
there in San Antonio in the Marriott River Center I have the honor of being
the key note speaker I’m so excited about that can’t wait to tell you about
that entire experience right here on the podcast but even better you can be in
the audience and I sure hope that I see you there so be sure to mark your
calendars for that something else you might want to mark your calendars for is August 6th through 9th also in San
Antonio the American Society for healthcare engineering is having their annual conference we’ll have all of that
and more information on our events page and if you ever want to look into what
is going on it is so easy as I mentioned before go to scalinguph2o.com navigate
over to our events page and everything thing that you can think of will be
listed when it comes to deal with our type of water treatment now if there’s something that is not on there that you
know about well let us know that and we will get it up there my staff does such
an amazing job of keeping you in the know and we’re constantly looking for
what we should add to our events page well as you know I am the proud leader
of the rising tide Mastermind and I’m so amazed we have seven groups now with
over 70 members and I know we’re talking about the rising tide Mastermind quite a
bit on this podcast it is just amazing to see what these individuals have done
within the Mastermind and all those individuals have made The Mastermind so
much more than what I initially thought it could be with all of that said I am a
strong advocate of people getting involved in a mastermind now it would be
great if you get involved in the rising tide Mastermind but let’s face it there are a ton of masterminds out there and I
am a member of another Mastermind called iron sharpens iron and the leader of
that group has actually been on this podcast twice his name is Aaron Walker he’s been a guest on episode 184 and
then he came back on episode 248 and it was during these Mastermind calls
that I was introduced to our next guest and the whole topic was around why is it
so difficult to find people to work for our companies well that’s what our
interview is about today and I know you’re gonna love it here’s the interview
my lab partner today is Ron hetrick of light cast author of the demographic
drought welcome Ron thank you for having me Trace absolutely I want to tell you
that I am in a couple of business groups and one of my business groups one of the
partners in there they recommended that we watch your YouTube video the
demographic drought when we were talking about what the heck is going on with the job market right now so we all watched
it independently and I have to tell you the conversation that we were able to have after that was amazing not sure we
ever solved anything but we had a great conversation around it and I have recommended that to so many people so
thank you for coming on the show I would love to introduce your concept to the scaling up Nation
sure so demographic drought a number of years ago even going back to 2015 I started taking notes I was really kind
of watching the fact that it just seemed that we weren’t seeing the amount of people that we once saw applying for
jobs and I started thinking about what effect could aging an aging population have on the labor force so a lot of
people talk of demographics and they like to talk about baby boomers aging and what that’s going to do to maybe Social Security or what it’s going to do
for other things but I really started thinking about the fact that this is really could have a profound effect on
the labor force at the time really hadn’t thought through just how big that was going to be I think we knew there
was going to be something but really the essence of demographic drought or what we call a sansdemic meaning without
people is that when you look at this large population going through this baby boomer population there was a ton of
them that meant they had to work really really hard I mean these were the yuppies of the 80s you know working 80
hour work weeks they had a certain mentality about work I mean they’ve devoted to it sometimes to the expense
of their families because of the fact that there were just so many so you have that group highly motivated highly
skilled and now they’re all retiring and the groups behind them are not as plentiful or as motivated through really
no photo of their own but just really kind of looking at the demographics so demographic drought is this kind of a a
look inside of what this is going to do to the labor force for the next 10 to 15 years and what it’s going to do to
education as well so with that was covid the Catalyst that
sped it up this was always going to happen we just saw it all of a sudden when the pandemic hit yeah it’s pretty
much it it’s funny if you kind of look at the trend lines they were kind of Rolling Along we were definitely seeing
this I mean there’s no doubt about it you could watch this thing starting to happen in 09 as the first Boomers were
hitting that early retirement age and then it was really starting to play out and then if you get to the what happened
during covet you get this kind of we smashed an accelerator pedal down to the ground then we kind of eased up on it
but the the damage that was done by Smashing that thing down you know not only is it not undone I don’t think it
can ever be undone and I think that’s what’s affecting you know fed policy right now you know you hear it mentioned
all the time you know even at a presidential level of hey getting the labor force participation rate back up
again may not ever be realistic because what’s accounting for the drop of people
who are no no longer participating the labor force really is the population and over 55. and they were staying in the
workforce longer because they could and then covet hit and they were like I don’t need to do this you know it’s
funny what you find out is you know when we looked at or when I think it was the St Louis fed that studied it if you look
at the population that kind of went away you know kind of left the labor force these were people who were over 65 who
were just kind of like hey you know I mean I enjoy work I’m gonna I’ll work a couple more years and then covet
happened and for any number of reasons these people were like you know what I’m out of here and so a lot of people were
under this impression and this was a wrong impression that these were early retirements they really weren’t early retirements the 55 group you did see a
burst there but they kind of came back it really was that over 65 population that were like you know what I have the
money I was working because I liked it but this isn’t fun anymore so I’m gonna you know go ahead and take my earnings
and retire Ron what doesn’t make sense to me is we do a lot of work with colleges to try to promote people into
our firm and we’re just not getting people and we know people are there we know people are graduating what’s going
on there yeah you know it’s this is really interesting because you you mentioned college but there’s two Dynamics it’s
almost like two populations right now you know for years we talked about a stem labor shortage the war for talent I
mean that’s all we ever talked about for like a decade and a half you know we just don’t have enough I.T people there’s not enough engineering and of
course we’re getting these people from a lot of other countries through H-1B programs now this is kind of more systemic where you’re starting to hear
from everybody you know I I can’t get some you know skilled trades really decimated I can’t even get someone who
only has a high school diploma just to come in and take these jobs or at least someone of of equality that that seems
to be committed to what we’re trying to do here you know we just can’t retain these people and I think when it comes
down to it you know right now you’re looking at a country that is weakening right now just a little bit in the
economy and still has almost 10 million job openings now prior to the pandemic
you know we had seven million job openings and that was pretty Preposterous at that time so now you’ve
added a couple more million on top of it and think what you’re finding out is that first off there are a lot of
options through different professions so a person coming out of college has a lot of different career options and then I
you know there’s a second component of there are options for younger people that there weren’t you know for us so
whether you that’s an internet influencer or investing in Bitcoin and doing Bitcoin training like there’s just
a lot of things that are allowing them to not have to engage immediately or in
a way that we’re historically used to watching people engage with work especially straight out of school
where does birth rate fall into all of this yeah so birth rate is an astounding
thing to be watching across the globe and developed Nations you know we come out of the of World War II all the
developed nations are you know we really did a good job of repopulating ourselves and then in the early 1970s we see the
birth rate go below 2.1 uh and if you look back at that time it is at the
exact same time that you start seeing women in Earnest entering the labor force this is what we talk about in demographic drought you know we
sometimes when I’m speaking I say it’s hard to serve you know two masters you you can’t say I’m going to devote
everything to my career and I’m also going to devote everything to to you
know raising children women a lot of women have to make a choice between the two and not to say there’s a ton of
women who are doing both what I’m saying is it’s hard as a population in general to to say I want you here but I also
kind of want you doing this so around the world Japan of course this is to the 10th degree their birth rate is
incredibly low but you see this you know you need a 2.1 birth rate meaning replace the parents and then the point
one is is kind of the unfortunate thing of people pass away sometimes they don’t make it to adulthood you know so that
point one is to cover that that loss so that you can replace the parents now we have not been at a 2.1 in the U.S since
the early 1970s and in recent years we hit I think we got as low as 1.6 1.7 and
we’ve been hovering around that area 1.7 1.8 uh lately but this is persistent so
if you think of birth rates that is a compounding problem right so if you have so Boomers okay they have less children
but that’s going to be down a level so then you have so Generation X comes in there’s less Generation X and then the
Millennials which were the children of the Boomers there’s not as many of them that’s called an echo boom and then the
ex-children come next that’s gen Z for the most part that’s in because there weren’t as many X so the Millennials are
already not at that level so the next Group after that the Z’s will be lower
again and it just keeps going in and in and in less people having less children causes this whole thing to kind of go in
until eventually it inverts so what do we do I I I I don’t even know where where to begin with this so yeah oh
there’s a thousand directions but I’ll just say this it’s a lot easier in a podcast format than when I speak from a
stage because this is kind of a tricky subject but in the end of the day you know what you can’t do is you can’t go
back and you can’t have children so you know one of the things that I talk about is we have a service economy but there’s
no one here to serve us so you know what this ultimately means is if you don’t
have the people here then really what you’re doing is going out and getting other people now historically speaking
you know we are a land of immigration we kind of grew ourselves through that but it really does mean that the future and
I’m not saying anything here that every demographer and every you know estimator of population hasn’t already said but
our growth in the future will only come through immigration will not come any more domestically we just don’t have
that population that did not replenish itself so a lot of things you’re watching play out right now politically
speaking have very serious implications because this was our only path forward and now it’s just a matter of how do we
do it right and I think that’s what we all struggle to figure out something you just alluded to is uh you
know we we make a lot of things here in this country we don’t have a lot of people that are able to fix those things
we have people that are are leading trades we’re not replenishing that that’s going to create a tremendous
problem I don’t know where I’m going with how I’m going to form a question around this but uh but what do you think
about all of this yeah so last year I wrote I co-wrote uh who’s going to do the work so in that paper we interviewed
1500 high school students about their intentions after school now this was co-written with a company called tal
which works with students you know basically going into college so our sample would be biased because these are
people probably going to go but we did have 85 percent of our respondents who said I’m going to get a four-year degree if not right away eventually you can
look at a study that came out a couple years ago and it’s more like 55 60 people looked at that study and were like wow this is the dire state of the
US like only 55 percent of you know people graduating high school you know plan on going to college the actual
numbers around 63 that’s what we use that’s what we’re seeing right now now the point in who’s going to do the work
is if two-thirds of all graduating high school seniors intend to go to a
four-year college or are going to a four-year college but 60 to 70 percent of the jobs in the US don’t require or
need a four-year degree things like skilled trades retail restaurants manufacturing construction that can go
on and on and on those are the jobs that kind of keep your economy functional so that you actually can you know my trash
collection came today we need those people if you don’t think you need those people go a week or two without having
your trash picked up uh the industry that you all work in try going a week or two without water try going a week or
two with all these things and you start to look at it and you go oh my goodness I didn’t think about that like there’s
so many mouths to feed just to make the economy function and we can’t do that if
everybody’s going to college so it’s more it’s bigger than skilled trades but skilled trades in my mind is that kind
of Bullseye we’re really going to be in trouble if we can’t figure that part out
because I do laugh a lot at this concept of well it’s okay robots are going to
replace people that’s hilarious um who’s going to build them who’s going to install them who’s going to fix them
because we don’t have any of those people now so where are those people going to come from that are doing all of
this robot installation that you that you’re talking about and I think this is where we’re really we have a just a very
poor understanding of who we are as a nation uh how we’ve progressed and changed you know if we in the article I
think it was the second article we wrote we had three times as many lower skilled unemployed people for each job opening
in 2015 than we have now three times as many lower skilled unemployed people
looking for a job for each job than we have now so we are changing very very
rapidly into a very hyper-educated economy unfortunately you need all of these
things represented or you end up not functioning and that’s you know that’s certainly the warning that we were
trying to give people I’m a big fan of Mike Rowe he does a podcast he’s the host of Dirty Jobs one
of my favorite shows and he has a group called micro works and it’s all about
educating people that we need skilled trades people and I remember uh an
article he put out where it showed how much you could make as a skilled trades person on day one versus paying back
college loans and if you looked over the life of that it was tremendous I don’t
know if that’s made an impact but I think we need more of that to allow people to know that you know you don’t
have to go to college there are other options for that or if you do go to college there’s still other options for
it correct and who’s going to do the work that’s something we really try to to point out and that paper has done
incredibly well in the skilled trades world but the what we’re what we were saying in that was
stop telling everybody to do the same outcome you know we have guidance counselors in high school and where my
kids went to school here in Florida was just I mean it was insane the pressure on a middle school kit have you taken
this number of classes well you’re not positioned everybody oh you’re not positioned you’re going to have to get if you want to get into this college and
I’m like that was the wrong message we’ve got to stop telling everybody to
go for the same outcome or we’re all going to die under that outcome like who’s gonna how are we gonna eat you know who’s going to produce food who’s
going to distribute food all of these things they seem so basic but no one’s really thought about it because there
was always this belief well we have an endless supply of lower skilled people but that is an absolute lie you know if
we look at the current labor force of the U.S you have 155 million people on payrolls 160 million people working in
jobs a hundred million of those people have at least an associate’s degree or a bachelor’s degree and the largest
population in our labor force by far are people with a bachelor’s degree the smallest are these people who only have
a high school diploma or less and so when you look at the job openings that are out there you have about five to six
million job openings right now in our country right now that only need a high school diploma or less but we only have
about two million of those people now think about it these jobs can’t be done remote they have to be at the location
so it’s more than just saying you have a lot less of this population with the edu with the four-year degree people if you
really get desperate you could probably figure out a way of doing that job remote but you can’t have a remote fire
person or a remote you know utilities person who needs to go put up a line like those people have to be there so it
makes this all that more acute so to Circle back on your point and the deck that I have right now we talk about an
electrician okay I’m 18 years old I get out of high school and I’m an apprentice electrician after by the time after a
couple years I’ve gotten Along by the time I’m 25 I can be a master level electrician and our current the numbers
in our in Lancaster saying about 83 000 years what they make okay master electrician is making about 83 000 a
year now let’s say I’m an accountant and it took me four to five years to get out of school I’m now 22 I hit 25 I’m still
a staff accountant I’m making about 60 000 a year if I’m lucky just depends on
where I’m at if I’ve added another level skill to that I’m making more I can make up 70 75. you’re chasing this person but
that person never accumulated any debt to micros Point not only that but if you think about what Z say they
want which is I want to contribute I want to do something valuable I want a work-life balance well the mass
electricians probably running their own shop by the time they’re 30 determining their own hours doing everything
basically as they want versus the accountant for example who’s now in a company and is you know you got to be in
the office now you got to do this and and we expect this from you and that from you there’s no ownership about your
life this is the message that we’re not getting out I’m not demeaning accounts in any way shape or form what I’m saying
is what’s what’s an incredible thing is that we’ve somehow managed to stratify jobs as some jobs being good and others
being somehow bad or lower classes like that is completely wrong thinking they
are all critical to making things work and so we need parents we need Educators
we need everybody’s putting that same message out there of all of these jobs at Value we need people in every one of
them please what can I do to guide you down a path to get to those jobs jobs one of the other issues are people are
opting out of the workforce is there a way to get them to opt back in and
everybody’s curious how can you opt out of work how do I sign up for that yeah so an interesting thing around that so
recently the primage labor force participation rate did recover back to kind of where it was prior to the
pandemic but you got to understand we’re on a 20-year slide now that slide was mostly coming from men and we’re still
seeing problems in that regard now some of these people who are opting out you
know one of the things we talked about in that paper is you are dealing with a pretty extensive you know fentanyl
opioid problem so not only do you have people who are who have died of you know
as a result of addiction but you have people battling addiction and so you have all you know millions of men who
are doing that who are battling these things and if it’s not addiction it’s depression if it’s not you know depression it’s other kinds of these
things and so they just kind of drop out you know as we say in the paper and for anyone but who hasn’t seen the video or
seen the paper you know there were more men 25 to 34 years old in the last census who lived with their parents than
with a spouse for the first time since the Civil War okay so you do see a lot of what we call Failure to Launch but a
lot of uh men staying at home a lot longer and just not being encouraged or pushed a little farther what we
typically hear is well I’m in between things and I I hear that every time I’m speaking I’m in between things I’m like
there’s a lot of men who are in between things um I think that what happens is in in any individual circumstance somebody
would be able to defend well this is our situation we can’t do that but you have to understand as a collective as a
population it creates a systemic issue and I think that that’s what’s going to be really hard because what is really
astounding is the currently the bureau Labor Statistics is projecting that the labor
force participation rate will continue to go down until 2030. it’s going to continue going down wise three factors
one the Boomers retiring that’s that that was those were the ones who are really wanted to work two you’re about
to experience as we talked about in the paper an extraordinary transfer of wealth you know estimates have been all
over we’ve used 1.6 trillion from Boomers passing money on to their you know Millennial children which will make
Millennials the richest generation in history just from past on wealth along
with that passed on wealth is a third factor and that is elder care you know we’ve spent the past 15 years 20 years
talking about child care but a dynamic that’s going to take place over the next 10 years especially because the
hospitals will not be able to staff up even remotely close to what they’re going to need I mean I’ve spoken more to
the healthcare industry in the past two years I’ve spoken to anybody and they realize that you know nursing homes we
may not be able to staff nursing homes much longer you know it’s it’s going to be about a system it’s going to be about home care you know people are going to
have to be doing that and maybe this transference of wealth the expectation of Home Care this is going to knock a
lot more people out of the labor force because they’ll have the money of to live on but they also have a
responsibility that puts them a situation where they won’t be able to work and I think a lot of people haven’t really thought about that part either
so this podcast serves the industrial water treatment industry everybody is
listening trying to figure out one how do I retain who I have and how do I find
new Talent so we can do these critical services that we do what advice do you have for us
yeah and who’s going to do the work one thing that had really jumped out at me
as we were writing that paper it’s something I’ve been thinking about just in general but as we were writing the
paper and then as I started speaking on it really really hit me and we do talk about that a lot who’s going to do the
work and that is industries that are not universities or are not like the Googles
of the world have an enormous marketing problem you know they have let Society Market on their behalf and that
marketing has been very horrible you know like they have not only have a great brand but they have brochures of
you know we always joke about let’s say that you’re trying to employ people straight out of high school and like skilled trades well you’re competing
against college and universities who have massive marketing departments who you know put out these flyers of you
know multi-racial people sitting on the college Green throwing the football back and forth and it’s like you’re competing
against a machine that has a lot more you know invested in producing a
narrative that is really really attractive to young people so if you’re a young person and you see this you see
yourself in the and who’s going to do the work one of the questions we asked which was we had an unbelievable answer
to was do you see college to be as much about the experience of going to college
as getting the degree and the overwhelming I think was two-thirds of our respondents were like yes like it’s
as much about being there with your peers Coming of Age together as much as that as it is getting a degree and I
thought oh good lord skilled trades is really going to be fighting a really
hard battle because how do you create a situation where you can put people in
that kind of environment where they feel like well if I go this route I’m immediately going to be kind of like on
my own I’m just going to be surrounded by a bunch of old people and all this other stuff that’s a marketing problem once again it’s a coordination problem
so I think number one in the industry that you’re in one of the things you have to do is go to your websites go to your
messaging would you want to have worked there when you were coming out of school thinking about the options that people have what about it is exciting you do a
critical functions gen Z say over and over again I want to do something of
value you’re doing something of value so why aren’t they flocking to your doors and begging to come in it’s because the
messaging that they’ve received to this point is like oh well not that why not
let me bring you in let me show you what this is like so I think there’s a the marketing problem the messaging I think
making sure that these people get networked and then I would say a big thing as well is I I believe you’ve got
to get these people into your environment when they’re younger so I think a lot of people go well we go to the schools and we speak I’m like I’m
not talking about that I’m talking about get them into your environment get them under a mentor you know have them doing
an easier part of the job under a mentor who is investing in them so that they
can look at this and go you know what I think I could I think I want to make a career out of this like these people are pretty they’re pretty
awesome and they care about me and it looks like they want to see me grow I’ll do that you know I think that that’s a that’s a pretty big component as well
you know that’s very interesting if you go to a company’s website would you really want to work there and I think if
people start looking at that in that light uh maybe maybe there is some more interest and I never really thought
about the college marketing department and how they are selling fun as well as
you know come to our college to get the degree we need to start thinking like that it’s incredible you know the first point
that I was making I’d love to take credit for that but I watched a genius at work one time I was at a meeting with
a guy and this was when I was still in the Staffing industry and we came to talk to this company and they were a lot
like they made like large tractors and everything we’re sitting down with them and we’re talking about you know their
problem attracting talent and everything and this guy’s specialty was going in and looking at websites and what he was doing was he would go in and see first
off could I even find your career page could I even get a gauge for what these things were versus uses throwing job
postings up there like was there any connection to the cool things that you’re doing and then he would really
look at the imagery of you know is this a thing that if I clicked on it my eyes would be like oh my this is really cool
and what he said to these guys I just never forgot was you’re doing something really neat here you know all you have
to do is go walk around this building where you have these tractors and it’s phenomenal that message is gone from you
like there’s none of that on your website like if I went there looking for a job first off it’s not easy to even
find them it’s just text like you just threw them up there and there’s just no passionate image that I’m attaching
myself to and I really do challenge people to to think about that as you know if you’re trying to attract labor
are you putting forth the really the coolest parts of what you do I tell people like if you’re an HVAC you know
it’s that person who’s just helped a young mother your air conditioner died and you wouldn’t fix that it’s like
that’s an image that’s such a great thing for society that’s the kind of stuff that you want to stick out there
the service that you’re doing the value that you bring great points I’m curious are is it just
the United States that’s suffering the demographic drought oh no so it’s a
global it’s almost we are actually when you compare us with other countries
we are actually in a better spot than most so it’s interesting to watch us so
I’ll shoot through some really quickly so China’s inversion started last year they experienced their first population loss uh Russia’s been losing about a
million a year this is before the invasion of Ukraine they were already going to lose about a million a year over the next 10 years uh there’s
articles everywhere you can look them up right now uh about the flight of all those Russian men away is just going to
take this birth rate you know much much lower and it’s already a crisis Germany is is already in a lot of trouble Italy
is an enormous trouble birth rates have been extremely low I talked to somebody there who said we can’t get internet in
our part of the country because there’s no one to work in the industry that would put internet in your house so you can’t get it because there’s just no one
here to do those jobs uh Japan is notorious I think we’ve been watching this now for two decades their economy
will shrink somewhere between 25 to 50 percent over the next 25 years because their population is just going jet last
year I think I don’t know the number exactly was like Japan had I think 200 or 300 000 births and that number that
low number came eight years before their projections so their population decline model is tremendously off and it’s
actually going to it’s actually happening way faster than they thought it was going to and that’s what we’re seeing around the world right now so you
know the good news that we could talk about this as we continue this conversation is that there are countries that are ahead of us
but they’re not necessarily producing success stories just yet in Japan’s case
the people people are working till they’re 85 years old and their women can’t have children because they’re so
needed in the labor force because the labor force is so you know tapped out that like how do you fix a problem it’s
a compounding problem what’s the most common question you get asked when you speak
what can we do everywhere I go so I get it you know it’s funny is I literally
get asked to speak it’s almost non-stop I went to a Kentucky Derby party on
Saturday at a party of neighbors and came away with two people asking me to speak to their companies I’m like you
don’t understand like it’s just I’m not a it’s not really solutions that I offer it’s a full explanation of what the
problem looks like now what’s funny about that is we’ve we’ve often compared this to like going to a cancer doctor so
you’re you’re feeling pain you’re hearing these things and you get the news and the news is definitely not something you wanted to hear but at
least you have a sense of Peace of going okay Now what are my treatment options
because this is this sounds like it’s going to be here this is this is a condition what am I going to do it and
that’s kind of how we equate it and so I think I’ve worked really hard over the past years so to try to incorporate more
you know what can you do but really I the one takeaway that we you know we put
this in at the end of demographic drought I’ve also learned more to kind of emphasize this and that is
the level of service that you’ve been getting for the past 20 30 years because of that
glut of people in the labor force that’s going away uh we experienced it a lot right during the past year or so there
was a labor shortage you go into a restaurant the whole restaurant’s not open you go to get your car done and
they’re like we can get it to you in like three days but we just don’t I mean we have a huge amount of cars we don’t have a lot of you know our Workforce is
down that is the future now some people would look at that and go that is incredibly depressing and I would say
that was life before the Boomers so go back into the 1950s 40s 60s that
was what life was like we didn’t have 900 fast food restaurants in your hometown the town I grew up in Newark
Ohio had two you know and I think there will be less of those you’ll have less options you’ll
cook at home more and some people once again would just look at that and be that this is so horrible and I’m like
it just is different you’re you’re so accustomed to a standard Let It Go and
we say it’s a demographic drop just be really happy for the people who are working there please treat people better
don’t yell at anybody if your service was slow tell them you understand I’ve gotten a lot of free things that way
just saying um you know just that level of going I know what’s going on and I get it don’t
worry about it we will take our time here change your attitude and change your uh
expectations Ron if somebody wanted to find out more about you and your work what should they
do so go to lightcast.io that’s the company uh that I work for and you know I’m not
the only person they’re doing research there’s a lot of incredible things coming out there but you’ll find demographic drought there you’ll see the
second article which was called Bridging the Gap and then who’s going to do the work the first two presentations that I
gave on demographic drought and then to follow up are on YouTube you could watch those if you haven’t already uh what I
highly suggest to people and this doesn’t do me any good so I’m not like making money off of that but follow me
on LinkedIn if you see what I put up it’s all over the place like it’s whatever interests me at that particular
time so if it’s the housing market or if some headline that I saw that was just completely inaccurate I like to do a lot
of Correction of Click bait headlines and thoughts about Ai and what it can do for Industries you know it’s not the
same as what everybody else is saying I I tend to take an angle from what does this mean for labor like is this going
to help us at the end of the day a AI right now it’s the rage it’s going to erase all of these jobs
history tells us that’s absolutely not true and the reason why is when you look
into the future you look at a job that could be done by AI what you never consider is what new Industries will AI
create that you didn’t even know could exist right now in 2023 but three years
from now you’re going to be like wow this came out of nowhere and that industry is employing marketing and
sales and distrib Distributors and a Global Network of people this is what we
always miss is these things these Innovations we come up with the robots that I talked about
earlier you know there’s going to be a robot army oh that’s fascinating who’s installing this robot army you know
who’s who’s going to take care of this Army it’s like in um the current presentation I do there’s a quote from
the CEO of McDonald’s he said this in July of last year and he he said look it’s great at garnering
headlines but it’s not coming it is he goes it’s cost way too much to convert you know
what our place to like an AI or a robotic built thing that was a really telling statement because
fast food I’ve met with some fast food behemoths met with their corporate leadership and the thing that I told
them was develop a less worker intensive model so one of those companies now has
started doing drive through only models you know you don’t you’re not a restaurant you’re a fast food so why
have people employed cleaning and doing all these things on the inside of the place just devote it to getting people
food fast and I think that this is kind of what we’re kind of looking at going forward is taking these ideas and seeing
how can we change the delivery model which we we use yeah we’ve definitely started seeing that in the Atlanta area
where we see kiosks going up instead of waiting in line and somebody taking your order yeah and I think where we’re still
missing there and this always just cracked me up right now we talk about this in demographic drought the biggest
consumers of Robotics right now are the industries that have always been consuming robotics it’s still semiconductors it’s still auto
manufacturing or Electrical uh components Manufacturing now if that robot breaks you send
everybody home the tech comes over fixes it they will pick up production tomorrow off we go all right cool
I have a robot that I have doing surgery on somebody I have a robot that I have cooking all of my burgers in a fast food
place that machine breaks my revenue is gone or I’m risking
someone’s life when you start to put this in other environments the ability to handle the negative
aspect of automation that tolerance goes really down because the second this
machine isn’t cooking the food right or doing you know doing something wrong a Tech’s gonna have to fix it well we
don’t have text let’s say you have one Tech covering a region of 30 restaurants and eight machine spray some of those
recipes they may be down for a week that’s a ton of lost Revenue so what you
would prefer what you would do is say well let’s just say let’s just do what the robotics companies already tell us
they want you to do which is have a person the robot’s there to make your job easier it’s not there to replace you
that every robotics company out there says that because they mean it it’s too risky to let these things do
these things on their own you need somebody there as a fail safe that’s why in every manufacturing plant
we’ve invented machines to do the work of certain parts of a production line but there’s a person standing right
there on every part of that production line watching that and the section the the moment that that machine starts
doing something wrong somebody jumps in to correct it or shut that machine down you know throw the fail safe and take
this thing offline you know that’s kind of how we’re looking at this is look towards robotics as a way of making jobs
less awful and less as a means of the robot army’s coming to take your job and
you’ll be less threatened by it and then it’ll also encourage you to think more open-minded about the ways we could use
them Ron is there a book in the future so I have decided not to go down that
route I I am an incredibly 80d I I think the paper was a cathartic experience I
remember sitting at the front end of that going what you know what would a book require and then uh we had some
other brilliant writers in the company uh at this Hannah and Gwen and they were they were like hey we have these other
writers and just the thought of going oh wow that would be so great to just like share ideas and have other people write
uh turned out to be really great so what I’ve realized is I’m probably I’m actually pretty good at short form you
know it’s not a Blog it’s bigger than a Blog demographic droughts I think 55 pages but it’s just the idea of saying
let’s just make sure that you really understand this point so many times with books
they say a point and then just say it over and over and over again I think what we were trying to do is say we’ll show you the full breath if you want it
again start at the beginning and read it again and I’ve had people told me I’ve read it five times and I’m like that’s cool
that’s what I want you know that’s what I would want you to do so yeah look there will be more writing
there’s things deep down in the recesses of my mind I just haven’t figured out what I want to do yet
it’s a fantastic paper I have shared it with so many people it has allowed me to
at least get an understanding of what’s going on and through that understanding you’re now empowered to do something
differently so I really want to thank you for coming on the podcast and sharing that with all of us thank you I
appreciate it Ron thanks again for coming on scaling
up H2O and don’t worry we will have links to everything that we talked about
during the interview I promise you are going to want to go on YouTube and check
out Ron’s video of the demographic drought he’s got all sorts of evidence
and graphs proving his point and it is well worth the watch in fact you’re
probably going to want to share that with other people within your company and we’ll have all of that information
on our show notes page so keep your hands on 10 and 2 we will make it safe
for you to find the information when you are ready to find it now as Ron said his
job was to identify the problem it’s really up to us to figure out what we’re
going to do about the problem one of the things I think that we should double
down on is his Employee Engagement how well are our employees engaging in our
company and are we giving them opportunities to do that now there are
several tools out there that help us determine Employee Engagement in our
companies the one that I am the most familiar with is gallup’s q12 poll now
like I said there’s many more so there might be another one that you’re familiar with the goal is how do you
track how engaged your team is and do you know if you’re doing well or poorly
in a particular area now more than ever we need to correct any issues that we
have with Employee Engagement because it’s very likely we’re not going to be
able to replace anybody that leaves very easily now I’m going to talk a little
bit about q12 because that’s the one that I know so if you you know another one by all means you can fast forward
through this part but this is a really good tool that was introduced to me several years ago and we’ve been using
it here for quite some time it goes through four individual questions it
actually goes through 12 questions but there’s four categories it works through the first one is basic needs are your
employees basic needs being met there’s two questions with that there’s four
questions that deal with the individual actually contributing to the company
then there’s four other questions that deal with how they are part of the team
and the final two questions deal with is the employee feeling like they have an
opportunity for growth there is a whole concept around how to ask these
questions how to decipher the information and that’s probably a show
on on its own maybe I’ll put that in future show ideas list all around q12
because it really is a good tool but what I want to leave you with here today
is when was the last time that you’ve done that you know I know all the employers out there care about their
team members but how are you getting feedback to make sure what you’re doing
is connecting with each and every person and if people don’t know what’s expected
of them and they don’t understand how they are being rated on those
expectations where they fall within those expectations and then finally there are opportunities for growth
that’s going to create confusion and when people are confused they look for
reasons to find ways to be unconfused and that might be easier for them to
look for another job so the whole point here is we want to make sure that we we
keep right employees right where they are because they know how they fit in
the company you know what you need to work on to get them to fit even better
in the company and it is so much better to elevate people that you currently
have than to find people that you are looking for because if you’ve tried that
recently they are very difficult to find so with all of that I hope this show
today has helped you look at why we have this issue with an employee shortage but
more importantly what can you do about it how do you make sure that you create the best team you possibly can you know
figuring out how we do better is one of the things that we do here on this show
and whether we’re talking about how do we make our team better or how do we make ourselves better one week at time
of course we refer to our friend James McDonald here’s the next installment of
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 total dissolved solids now Trace
recently did a pinks and blues episode on total to soft solids and connectivity let’s see how much you remember
how do you define total dissolved solids or TDS are suspended solids included in this
definition what are examples of chemicals included are TDS and conductivity the same or
different how are they related is there one rule of thumb to convert
from one to the other or can the conversion differ for different Waters how has TDS measured
how is this different from how suspended solids are measured how does cycling up affect TDS in a
water system what might be the impact on TDS if a water system is over cycled or chemical
feed is interrupted 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 learn to social
media and tag it with hashtag watertable23 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 thank you
Skyline Nation have you signed up to take your certified water technologist designation exam if you have you’ve
received a mock exam copy and I have answered each one of the questions in
that mock exam letting you know which ones are the best answers I share tips
and tricks about the exam making sure that you sign up easily and confidently
and when you go in to take the examination you have got certain things working for you because you’re prepared
to find out more go to scalinguph2o.com forward slash cwt prep once again that’s
scaling up h2o.com forward slash cwt prep