The following transcript is provided by YouTube. Mistakes are present. To hear the podcast episode, click HERE.
[Music]
welcome to scaling up the podcast for water treatise by water treaters where we’re scaling up on knowledge so we
don’t scale up our systems hi everybody tres Blackmore here the host of scaling up and I got to think
everybody out there in the scaling up nation because I have asked for it and several of you are making sure that I
receive it I am talking about your comments your questions all of that stuff please keep them coming in go to
scaling up h2o comm and let me know what questions you have because I love
answering those on the air one of the questions that I have received from many
or I guess it’s not a question I guess it’s more of a request but several people out there in the scaling up
nation say they really enjoy when we get somebody who’s been in the industry for
a good amount of time and they’ve got experiences and they can tell us about
them I know we have listeners in the scaling up nation that have just started in the water treatment industry two
listeners that have been in the industry for 60 years I think that’s incredible
and I want to make sure that we tap into some of that knowledge so we can share
that you know one of the goals of this show is to make sure we are making this
industry better one water treater at a time so I reached out to a friend of
mine Dick Horrigan and I asked dick because this has been in the industry
for for a couple more years than I have and he has had some very unique
experiences so dick said yeah I’d love to come on the show and tell you all about that and I think you guys are
really going to enjoy hearing my interview with dick Oregon well my lab
partner today is dick horrigan and dick I’m very excited to talk up to you and find out about your water treatment
career and just wanted to welcome you to scaling up and how are you dick doing great race thank you very much for
inviting me this looks like a fun for us I think it will be a lot of fun so I know a lot of people in the water
treatment community do know you but there may be a few out there that don’t know who dick Corrigan is so do you mind
taking a second and letting the audience know who dick Horrigan is certainly tres I kind of consider myself be a chemist a
soldier and an entrepreneur January of 2018 marked my 45th year in the water
treatment industry November 4th of 2000 I was discharged from the US Army at the
rank of lieutenant colonel after 35 years and December 4th of this year the
2017 will mark 25 years that I run my own corporation so that kind of you know
it explains why I think those three things are the the three cornerstones in my life well I think we’re going to
touch on each one of those three things during our conversation today so why don’t we go ahead and get started so how
did you become a water treaty well that that’s always interesting is I listen to the Jim Luke michone and tell you what
he’s right almost none of us intentionally got into this business I got off of active duty in the Army as
married had a two-year-old daughter and I couldn’t seem to find a job it was during a recession and my father knew
somebody it was the the president of the Rd Warner Ladder Company the guys that
make the aluminum ladders he’s probably seen the gorillas holding the ladder and he had asked Rd if there were any
openings at the factory where they made the ladders does his son needed a job
and he says well what does your son do and he says well my son’s a chemist he said well wouldn’t he rather be working
at a chemical company instead of a ladder Factory he said well I suppose and so he said he had a friend he went
to synagogue with and the friend’s name was dr. Merrill salute ski well doctor
solicitor you happen to be the vice president of Dearborn chemical up in Lake Zurich Illinois so just before
Christmas I’m in dr. solinsky’s office and he’s interviewing me for a research
position in in the chemistry section upstairs upstairs in the lab it’s kind
of touchy because the guy that was holding this job had prostate cancer and he was dying but
he needed somebody to replace him and so I was hired to to take this guy’s place
and my first day in the water treatment industry was the day after New Year’s but I couldn’t work in the lab I had to
work downstairs had to work on the experimental boilers and it had to be a complete secret what my reason for being
hired was and so in March this guy did in fact pass away and at that time I
moved upstairs and and took over the the research on the boiler water section working mostly with the new oxygen
scavengers doing formulations and I helped out in the in the analytical lab
I was one of two analytical chemists on the floor and whenever they whenever the lab got booked up I get called over
there and next thing you know I’m doing resin analysis and corrosion coupons studies and doing all the actual lab
work that generates these reports I mean it was a tremendous experience for me because Here I am I’ve worked on
experimental oiler now I’m doing I’m doing lab analysis for stuff that I’m gonna be using the rest of my life and
I’m learning all about formulations it was just unbelievable so that’s how I got into the water treatment part and
then a couple years went by and they needed a wastewater specialist and they were having trouble so they asked me to
come out in the field and see if I could help though sales force I made a couple sales the sales manager of that district
says to me you know dick you could make a whole lot more money in sales then you can’t work in on our laboratory and so
before too long I switched over to the sales department he was right I was doing a whole lot better than that and I
went through all the training and Here I are I’m a water treat [Laughter]
so and then when you were out in sales what was your job like then it was
exciting I mean I love people and it’s uh you know it I didn’t have any experience in sales and my boss said you
know what dick just just be yourself you don’t don’t have to be somebody else to be a Salesman just be who you are and he
was a hundred percent right you know you just it’s really as technical as I am the most important thing in sales is
building relationships with people you just don’t go for the technology you go for the relationship that’s what
starts the whole ball rolling so would that be your piece of advice for somebody starting out that you know be
yourself don’t worry about all the ten syllable words that you note on the biocides and all of that stuff just get
to know the person yeah I would say so the best salesman I have ever met are really good people persons they’re just
very good but that sort of thing and you know I understand that sometimes they do get themselves in over their
head they’re gonna need technical expertise from somebody like AWT or people like myself
you know things of that nature but until you get the sale you don’t have the problem sure so what what was your
process when you went out and you you saw hey that’s a custom it’s a potential
customer across the street I don’t have them and you went after them how did you do that well you know back in the day
you just went in and you kind of schmooze the receptionist and all that kind of stuff and you get names and
phone numbers and you never tried to really barge in you’d call back for an appointment and you you know it was all
a numbers game but you know you you know I think I figured out that that that one customer resulted from two proposals and
two proposals might have been four or five surveys and four or five surveys might have been a hundred cold balls or
something like that or 200 cold calls so it was all just like you know how long can I keep going and whatever so it was
a numbers game and you did that for a while and then a change happen tell us about that well there were a number of
changes I don’t know where we’re at right now but on this day when I was with Dearborn after being in the field
for about three or four years I ended up getting an opportunity become their technical director well this sort of put
me full circle I mean here I was I was like 25 years of age I am now I’m out
there with the Salesforce trying to solve problems that I’ve never seen
before luckily I had a good boss George Beck he was a great guy I had a good background
from the chemistry standpoint I had a few years behind me in sales I’d worked in the so technically what we would do is I
would go out there I’d get briefed on the problem I grab samples I’d bring them back to the lab I’d have the lab
guys doing either water or deposit analysis on we get all the results and
then I’d go back and talk with my boss who had had years of experience in the water treatment industry and we would
theorize as to what was going on and come up with a course of action which that I would go back out into the field
to present this course of action to the sales manager in the sales force what was great about this job is I would see
problems that most water treaters probably wouldn’t see in their lifetime or maybe take 20 or 30 years and I was
out and filled two or three times a week with different problems that were like once-in-a-lifetime problems she was just
incredible so you really learned on the job and and got the experience of some
of the best water treaters out there yeah it was great it was unbelievable it was really a education you couldn’t get
anywhere else all right so then what happened well after a while like I got
you know I needed the money so I wasn’t really making as much money as technical director as I was a Salesman so somebody
got me on the phone and they said you know we had this job for you in Cleveland well this this starts a string
of really really goofy employers I mean I had I had a string of three people
that I ended up working for the first one was I was a sales manager and we had
negotiated a salary and I got my first paycheck after the guy moved me out to Cleveland and the paycheck was really
for the amount of money that the guy had initially offered me which I had rejected so I went downstairs and he
wasn’t around so I walked into the vice president’s office and I questioned him about what my my salary was well he he
knew nothing about it and when the boss got back to the office he was livid apparently I even with my salary check I
was making more than the vice president and the vice-president was now angry that he was been there for 20 years I
was making more than him and I got called into my his office for the president’s office for a real tongue
lashing and hey I was told that yes you’re gonna get this money but that’s a yearly
salary and the rest of it was gonna be bonus and I hadn’t been there a year yet well that was kind of crazy well I ended
up working for them for a year anyway and I did learn a lot I learned a lot about being a Sales Manager I had to
manage Street Commission people and salary people and boy I tell you there’s a hell of a difference between the two I
was in charge of their laboratory and I was also their technical director finally I did get that check he gave it
to me at the end of the year made a big deal out of giving it to me and then my salary went back to the small salary
again so again another opportunity opened up and I went to a company called
chem clear which was a hazardous waste management company and they were a start-up operation forgotten getting
together because of the resource conservation and Recovery Act Ric row and I was to be their plant manager in
Cleveland and they had four plants and they were building like crazy and and I
was doing pretty well with that I had hired for chemists in the laboratory to work for me and but I found out one
thing about the chemists I had working they just were pretty much by the book they would follow all the instructions
all the company rules and all that kinda stuff but you know I it turns out a lot of chemists just aren’t imaginative you
know they would kept they kept rejecting the samples we wouldn’t do this we wouldn’t do that and Here I am thinking
man I need to get some business in here or we’re not gonna be able to meet our bottom line I can’t be taking money from
the corporate office every month to be able to keep this plant running so I go into the lab and so why are you
rejecting these samples and there’s this reason and that reason so I started playing around with them and I’m trying to teach these people to be creative
well we found ways to break these various waste they didn’t even think of and I mean no I’m trying to teach people
to look fresh look for things out of the box within about four or five months I was turning a profit and became the cash
cow of the company but it startups being what they are they’re always a little bit thin on money and so one day on the
electrical company came in they want to shut the power off and I thought okay I better call my corporate office so I did
yeah that’s never that’s never a good conversation no no and they said they wanted to know the check number so
how many times have I done this you know guy yeah okay you’re gonna pay me what’s the check number so I call the
Comptroller and he says tell him the check number is one three seven four I said that’s it one three seven four he
says oh man oh and i know dick when they get the check they’re not gonna care what the number is so that he’s my bass
that question they’d been convinced that something was gonna happen because I got a number and I suddenly realized that
that was a stupid question all along and and then also it was on credit references this cup this company had
three good credit references nobody else got paid well how many times did you
ever set up an account and you say you want three good credit references so now I don’t care about that anymore because
I know they’re gonna give me the three good credit references they have so it’s all a sham so darn if didn’t the
ultimate didn’t happen is that somebody out in the Chester Pennsylvania plan goes and screws up and next thing you
know the EPA is on this company’s butt well I was pretty much in line to be the
vice president of operations for this company at least that’s what the owner had told me because he thought I was
really on the ball he was going to have too much to do but all of a sudden I’m also now the highest-paid plant manager
in the company at a time when they need to find money to defend themselves on this lawsuit well next day I’m out of
the job so I’m back on the street again so that was kind of an interesting learning experience so then I got
another job offer in Chicago so ok I’m gonna move back to Chicago started
working for this company it was a water treatment company ran a tional company and the guy is an area manager and I’m
taking over his sales territory well I’m gone about four months down the road I’m finding out that he doesn’t know how to
be a manager he still thinks he’s a Salesman I go into my accounts and they said ah John was here yesterday
I said oh it’s interesting I didn’t know he was here and I said well how come you’re not using this product anymore he
says well John said that you know we don’t have to use a sludge conditioner and our boiler anymore because by now
our boiler should be clean well jeez I am making a straight Commission salary and John is finding ways to turn my
custom using the products that I’m trying to sell plus he’s probably gonna get their boilers dirty again
so I go back and I complain to my boss about it and he tells me what I need to do is I need to sell more so we end up
with a plan where I’m gonna go make sales calls with John he’s gonna show me how to sell so we go into this one
account and it’s an HOH account and he asked John ask the guy how much he’s paying for drum chemicals well he’s
paying 420 dollars she says dip go out and get your price book so I go out to the car come back with the price book he
says look up 101 tell him how much that cost of drum I said well the drum of 101
cost 125 dollars well like I said pressed so John sells him the drum of
101 and we’re walking around he says there you go that’s how it’s done see how fast we got a new account I said
John 101 is nothing but water and carboxymethyl cellulose how is that
gonna do anything for this guy his boiler he says don’t worry about that she got a new account when the drums
gone just selling something that will work well I thought god I I need to quit
this company I need to find some more house to work for so I went from them
about six months later I got a job with Mogul and I stayed with them for seven years and so those were some of the
crazy things and then after that there was a cleaver Brooks job cleaver Brooks
was getting into the water treatment business and they were praying thanking credible salaries so I went to cleaver
Brooks for about two and a half years and I was their best salesman I was doing a great job for them and I’m down
in southern Illinois and I call him on you know the old payphones she could up there in the line and you wait you wait
and I get through the office my boss says to me dick he says I need to have you come into the office I said you know
Pat come on I just got down here I’ve got a full week’s worth of work lined up I can’t be coming back to the office I
said to him I mean what’s so important what do you want to do fire me he says well Dickie I didn’t want to tell you
over the phone I said okay fine so I go
into the office the next day he says wow we’ve decided we’re getting out of the water business and you’re the most expensive
rep so you’re the first one to go he says but the other two guys are not gonna be here much longer either so he
drives me home and he’s really feeling bad you know tres I’m sure you fired people and I have to and you know it it
really is an emotional experience I hate hate to do it it’s it’s horrible so I
can see that pat was feeling out of mine so I said to him I said Pat what are you
what are you planning to do with all my test equipment he says well cheese dick hi I don’t know he says do you want it I
said well yeah I said I’m a water creature I’m gonna stay in this business I would sure like love to have this
equipment he says well it’s yours that so he got me to the house we opened up my garage door and he helped me unload
the stuff from the trunk of my car into the garage and so now I had the equipment I wanted and so okay well
they’re getting out of the water treatment business now what am I gonna do I gotta tell you I was at a very very low point in my life so you know is
measurement as anybody would when they just lost their job come to think of it but so I needed to decide where was I
going I worked for a number of companies that were just just crazy although they were all learning experiences I got
something of value out of every one of them it was just it was just nutty best
company’s I had worked for were Dearborn and Mogul they both seemed to have their acts together so I it’s time to do an
assessment you’ve probably done something like this yourself it’s kind of like the Ben Franklin clothes when you list all your liabilities on one
column and all your assets on the other and so I thought well okay here I am I
just got divorced about a month ago I’m now paying child support to two ex-wives
I’m living in a house with a mortgage and there’s a for sale sign in the front yard
I don’t have a job okay those and I still have to feed myself and pay my utility bills an unemployment
compensation probably isn’t gonna do this so then on the asset side let’s see
I have 700 bucks Wow you know I’ve got a
I got a seven check coming I’m in the army reserve the rank of lieutenant colonel some pick up
about six or seven hundred dollars a month off of my for my drill pay and then what else well would see I’m a
chemist I better research chemist I’ve been a Salesman I’ve been sales manager I’ve been a
technical director I’ve been a plant manager so I even ran a startup company
I thought you know what I can do this I could start my own business so Monday
morning I went 9:00 I saw my my divorce attorney who was a lousy divorce attorney but he really is
a very good corporate attorney I told him I wanted to form a corporation so he
sold me 800 bucks well I figured I could probably cover that with what I have coming in so then he says I mean what do
you want to call this company all of a sudden duh I don’t know I just know I
want to be in business so I only thing I knew was my name so I said okay let’s call it Richard Hagen incorporated to
dominate let me tell you a dumb name because it doesn’t really do anything about my company so we got that
incorporation started but I didn’t want to waste any time it’s gonna take a couple months so I started selling it
right away and the first thing I did of course was go after my Claver books accounts one I did not have a non-compete agreement two they were
getting out of the business so these people had nowhere else to go I had already met Gary Garcia so I started
working some products up with him got some prices and before you before you know it I had like 12 new accounts
it was back not October corporation wasn’t even up so I had to come up with
some name I made up some name that we used for about two months I didn’t have any insurance I didn’t have you know
it’s like it’s like this whole thing that’s really fly by the CB your pants and so corporation got up and I
converted all the account products over to that I had a few tax problems because now I had the self-employment tax and I
didn’t have a payroll account so I had to get an accountant and it was it was kind of crazy for a while and then I had
linked up with a friend of mine that the word for cleaver books and he told me about this company he was working us
and they had wanted to talk to me so I went up there to one of their meetings in Wisconsin and I talked to them for a
bit and this guy wanted to pay me $800 a month to sell products with his label on
it well you know that was sounding pretty good an $800 a month that I could count on so I had some money on the side
coming in from Richard Oregon incorporated and he didn’t mind if I had those and I worked for him to inputs now
on I think you think I sell is gonna have your label on it that’s fine well we went down the road I’m supposed to be
a three-year deal he’s gonna give me $100 well about a year and a half into it he calls me up and he says I can’t do
it I’m gonna have to stop paying ya just that some problems coming up here I need to divert that money elsewhere well we
only have a handshake that was our agreement there’s nothing in paper on that either so what I did is I said okay fine
discontinued to service these accounts but a new business I’m getting is now gonna have my label on it and I also met
through this company another company you know every one of his reps have their own corporations it was really kind of
weird and this one guy was handling all in Wisconsin he wanted nothing south of
Janesville so I worked out a deal where I’d buy those accounts from him so now
I’m handling all of Illinois and the southern half of Wisconsin that went you
know for a while and just making some decent money and then the guy that I at
the handshake agreement with dies well the new guy comes into a company and
he’s taken over one of the reps and we all get together and have a meeting up in Wisconsin someplace and he’s telling
us all the great things he’s planning to do with this company and what we’re gonna do and all that kind of stuff he
says by need to make sure that I got all you guys on board so we start and once you decide these things so he starts
passing out these pieces of paper well I look at it and it’s a non-compete agreement well I’m looking at all the
guys they’re all signing these things so I’m reading through the thing and I’m thinking I can’t believe this each of these guys spent their own money to form
their own corporations each of these guys has bought or lease their own car is paying all their own car expenses
they’re paying all their own food hotel bills they’re paying all their own all their own travel expenses health
insurance and they’re signing over the last 10 or 15 or 12 years worth of work
over to this to this guy so I took the paper that’s it sorry I’m not signing
this and so after the meeting broke up he came over to me so she got a dick there’s no problem we can just continue
the way we’ve been you know you know what I was born at night but I wasn’t born last night so I knew that he was
just trying to figure out how he was gonna you know take me down so right away I started converting all those
accounts to mine and within within a week I had done that and within about three months most all their dramas were
gone off the floor and my drums were there with my legs and it got better after that for sure when did you know
that you made it as a business owner Oh golly when I started I don’t know maybe
about three years in I mean there’s always been promised but you know I started paying people in less than 30
days you know today’s net 15 days net when earlier if I had trouble making my
bills you know I it was very very difficult so you just you know people in this 60 days 90 days you’re just trying to figure out
how you’re gonna hang on so it was makes mostly an economic realization that I derived all right did you ever regret
going into business for yourself oh god no absolutely not it’s the best thing I ever did you know the thing is
the peace of mind and young I gotta tell you trace the meetings are a whole lot shorter it’s just there’s always been
problems but you know you can call it both when someone else causes it to
happen when you create your own boat you know you know it’s like okay I gotta fix
this you know there’s something wrong but it’s always been great it’s there’s been difficulties but it’s it’s always a
problem they come one at a time and you handle it one at a time dick have you ever had employees with your company no
never so that’s why you love it so much my considered a trace I really did
and I thought hiring an employee was either going to be the best or worst thing I ever did and I
decided that you know I don’t have any children that that are interested in following this so this was just gonna be
a one person only business so that’s it you’re definitely right things do become
a lot more complicated with employees we’ve had some some good ones we’ve had some not-so-good ones and thankfully
right now I think we’ve had the the best group of employees at my company that we’ve ever had one but not about me more
about you what would you say your biggest accomplishment was well let’s
see certainly starting my own business was was number one I mean to see where we’re at here you you are bouncing all
over the place here with me just like you said you were gonna do let me see
keeping you on your toes yeah you sure are you sure aren’t I’m trying to think
there’s so many things you know cuz I’ve done well on a lot of different places but I did have one story I wanted to
share on that it is it goes back to my first start at Dearborn because I was so young was my first job I was like I was
out of out of the army out of graduate school and I was I was in the
experimental boiler situation at Dearborn and they had a situation where
their well water just went down they either lost well I don’t remember whether Dearborn had there don’t dedicate it well as whether they were
getting it from Lake Zurich so they had to keep the plant open so they started trucking water in well I took apart this
experimental boiler and what I was supposed to do was I was supposed to scrape the scale off of these basically
does heat exchangers electric heat exchangers that are stuck in this boiler and we measured that and determined how
much this program scaled on this water it was kind of a neat thing because we’d synthesize water from San Francisco or
Minneapolis or whatever and we then we treat it with a program and measure before and after or not kind of stuff
well I plug these things out and there the scale is jet-black looks like
popcorn and it smells so I called my boss over and he says what did you do
well it’s like you know I don’t know I said this is just following the direction cherry says I’ve never seen
this in my life you must have done something wrong well it’s it smells familiar to me it
smells like caramelized sugar well then I remembered women the trucks that are
delivering the water to Dearborn Chemical there are all Domino’s sugar trucks so I went over to the tap and I
got a beater now when I put half a beaker of water and in the beaker I put it down on the sink got my safety
glasses and grabbed for a gallon jug of concentrated sulfuric acid and proceeded
to pour it into the beaker and of course it comes to a rolling boil and I picked it up and the water is dark brown smells
like sugar uh-huh so okay I’m gonna go get my boss I’m vindicated you know you
tell me it’s my fault so I had to prove it wasn’t my fault so I call him over and I show him the
bumpy creases what sort I showed him demonstrated again I said those Domino’s sugar trucks they’re contaminated he
calls down the research director he comes down I do the demonstration again so next thing you know the research
director and I are walking across the parking lot to the corporate headquarters we get to the president’s
office there is Meryl Solinsky the guy who hired me vice-president there’s Jim
Shero the president of Dearborn first time I’ve ever met him in comes ideally the marketing manager I’ve never
met the marketing manager he’s the vice president marketing sales manager I forget can remember the name of the vice
president of sales and they call the other manager over from the from the plant the plant manager and darn I’m
meeting all these guys and I’m explaining so wait you know Cheryl wants to know how much product was made this week was it shipped – did we need to get
that stuff back from the customers and my new job is whenever a truck arrives
in Dearborn is somebody from the plant gets a water sample they take it in to me and I test it to make sure there’s no
sugar in the truck and if it’s okay then it’s a pass well here I am 26 years old
chemist been with the company six weeks and everybody knows who the hell I am excellent so you went from hey you’re
you did something wrong we’re going to blame this on you – the hero of the p’tee bingo it wouldn’t that’s a pretty
two hours period okay well let’s flip that question
around because I know I’ve got dozens of items that I thought were going to take off marvelously and they didn’t and I’m
sure you have some of those stories too so what what was something that you thought was just gonna be fantastic yeah
you did all the work for it you put it out into practice and it just fell flat on his face well I don’t know I was
thinking about those three crazy companies that I worked for because that that was when I kind of noted for this
I don’t really know it anything else other than that trace I’m not gonna just gotta make something up on the fly here
I don’t really I’m drink I’m empty on that okay fair enough so you’re saying some of the companies that you chose to
work with weren’t the weren’t the best and you made choices to leave okay yes right well I think you I think you
turned that into a good experience so as you said positives out of those well
what are some of the the changes that you’ve seen in in water treatment since you’re a chemist you’ve seen all sorts
of things come and go what were some of those well when I was first starting this is an old story but when I was
first starting chromates were on the on the market still and I had done I had
sold a few I mean the stock pet chemical which was a chromate boiler treatment I was still selling that when I first
started it was pretty nice because you could just grab a sample and you just hold this water up to a hello slide and
you could tell how much chromate was in the boiler without running the single test but chromates were pretty much
outlawed by that time and they were just just within a year or two of my starting they were going away the poly
chloroprene AIT’s where other ones you know you had these these types of bio signs that were really really toxic
incredible so you know what was interesting is that we were all struggling to come up with new
technologies that could compete with corrosion rates with you know chromate no let’s go with heavy sink products and
let’s go with phosphate and incredible number of problems I can remember a lot
of calcium phosphate scaled-up towers somehow we people forgot the solubility
of calcium phosphate is not very high as you know it wouldn’t be using it in the boiler I mean how the heck of it
they get so screwed up with that and it got so goofy that we we were told when I
was with sales in Dearborn don’t use corrosion coupons quit using corrosion coupons really but this may have might
not been company policy but that’s what I was told don’t do it because you know when you’re showing your customer that
you’ve got a corrosion rate on iron of like 7 or 8 mils per year and he’s used to getting like 0.5 with chromate this
this is not a good deal you know we don’t base it basically what it’s saying is we don’t have any good products yet
that we can sell you so the answer was let’s not let’s not show him the test for a while until we figure out what we
got together so a lot of this was driven by fear you know you kind of figured well my god competition may get a good
working product before weekend and because that’s what it is all of a sudden the known technology is thrown
into the area you can’t use it and everyone scrambling trying to come up with something that works eventually they did so dick were you actually
formulated when when chromates were banned um we had to figure out what – you know I was done with the
formulations and I was boiler side anyway so I probably wouldn’t have been involved in that but no I was out of the
formulations business and I was down on the sales force gotcha so you’ve listened to the show you know I do a
section called the boiling point and I do that because I see things other water traders do that they should not be doing
and I’m sure in your career maybe even yesterday you saw something Oh what
another water trader did that they shouldn’t be doing so the the mic is yours what do you see water treaters do that
you just want them to stop doing okay now here I’m going to throw your curve trees absolutely nothing now here’s why
you see this from your perspective you’re the manager and I listen to Luke
and itch and I listen to James omec Donald they’re technical directors they
train and they get upset when people do things I look at it from the standpoint of this competitor if you want to do
dumb things you go right ahead you’re just gonna make it that much easier for me to sell against you and so I actually
applaud when I see stupid things in the field cuz it just gives me something else I latch onto to get that account well that
is a different perspective on that but I tell you if that doesn’t motivate people to get better at what they do each and
every day because they know there’s people out there that do know what they’re doing I don’t know what else
will so I think even though it’s a different twist on what I was thinking you were gonna say I think it is a great
thing to say because you’re right yeah and it is it is another it’s a motivation from the negative you better
better know your stuff or someone else who does is gonna come in and take that account away from you
absolutely well speaking of knowing your stuff we’ve got a lot of new water treaties that listen to this show and
they’re learning but they don’t know everything quite yet and that being said I don’t think we ever know everything
but you know there’s that point when you start out your career and you just feel like you don’t know enough to go out and
talk to that customer explain what’s going on so for somebody like that what’s your biggest piece of advice you
could give them well I would say they should have some courage and I’ve got a
few notes on on that basically my thought is that anything that is worth doing is worth doing well and and so
it’s a learning process and you really need to you know get an education lean
on your manager of course and do things like that and even when you get to a level where you think you know what
you’re doing you don’t ever think I’ve got this you can always do anything
better than what you’re doing it now you just have to be more creative and think about it don’t get discouraged and don’t
give up and just certainly don’t listen to those people who said it can’t be done there probably quitters and they
probably hope you fail so just keep a positive attitude and keep on learning great advice now you said have courage
and I know you are a man of courage used to jump out of airplanes I believe is that a correct statement uh yeah I have
70 parachute jumps under my under my belt with US Army Special Forces and I
got a confession to make tres I’m afraid of heights and how does that work I’m terrified every time I did
absolutely but I take pride in the fact that I face that fear every time and in
landing on the ground safely so any jump you can walk away from is a good jump
how about that that is I’m a scuba diver so I go the other direction I can’t seem to get up
in that airplane that’s perfectly good and make the decision to jump out of it so I haven’t done that yet terrifies the
hell out of me well dick you’ve seen a lot in your career you’ve done a lot in
your career so when you want to learn new things in water treatment where do you go how do you do that okay well I
was gonna say that the best way I have ever learned things was to actually be the one teaching it and the reason that
is is because you know you’re gonna get hit with questions and you want to make sure you were ready for any question but
these days I’d say Google is one of the things that I do AWT members only
section definitely I have another confession to make I never read the analyst because I I would prefer to
actually learn things that I need to know so what I do is when I need to know
something I will go online and I will scan the analyst for the topics that I want to
learn about so I it’s kind of like not reading the dictionary but when you want
to look up a word you go to the dictionary you don’t just say I’m gonna read you know the first part of the dictionary there there is a couple there
was one there when there was the company I don’t know whether I should mention their name or not they were these
chemical non chemical companies they got their deal with cavitation that was one
of their deals they had a controlled cavitation and I try to understand how that would work and I wanted to learn
more about cavitation I realized I didn’t have a tremendous knowledge about cavitation everybody’s got like a
one-page oh here’s how cavitation will destroy your impeller and your pump so I
went online and I found a guy dr. Kenneth sus liqu University of Illinois
chemistry department who had written quite a lot about cavitation and so I
read two or three of his papers and I decided to strike up a conversation with him via email which was
very productive so I’m going right to the source now to the research people and I had learned that there was symmetric and asymmetric cavitation and
it’s only asymmetric cavitation that creates a problem there’s symmetric cavitation occurs in
sits you and the bubble just collapses and nothing happens and so I learned an awful lot about cavitation by going to a
researcher and actually communicating with him and then I also have a personal library of about 30 or 40 books that
I’ve been collecting over my lifetime you know I’ve got books on metallurgy and corrosion and all sorts of things so
whenever I’m needing to do something either it’s training people or whatever
I can go to these manuals and gather information and you know there’s a
number of times when I’ve had to do the dirty thing that you guys probably don’t like much and that’s the that I’ve been
an expert witness now three times twice defending representing the defendant and
once representing the plaintiff and these books are incredible because
they’ll take you from another perspective also I just I just think things I come up with stuff myself I
mean like that Domino’s sugar story I told you I mean I don’t know where I ever heard the idea of pouring sulfuric
acid into sugar water to see whether it’s bubbling or not maybe I read that maybe I just made that up on the fly I
just don’t remember anymore so I basically when you’re looking at learning things sometimes you you you
think you have a problem and you go and you just test it to see what what you could find to see whether or not your
theory on what their problem is is real or not so but yeah that’s basically it okay well what would you say your best
general water treatment knowledge book that you have in your library is
well I done two lean very heavily on this corrosion handbook book by yulik it
has it has data in there that you can’t find in other places now uhlig was the
as I recall the chairman of the metallurgy department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology he’s probably
deceased now but I have I have two of his books and it is really they’re
really informative when you’re working with things like aluminum and zinc and metals like that that they give you a
lot of interesting information that he’s this guy is studying everything it’s
unbelievable so and it’s it’s not like I’m taking it out of a an a WT manual
where somebody has digested it for you and they’ve made it apply to you or your
specific application this is a fairly technical journal overall discussion of
the human for example they take all these different metals it’s a book about I don’t know eight right ages thousand
pages so well great advice great advice I haven’t heard of that but great advice
we talked about troubleshooting you said you had a lot of experience early on in
your career so what are some of the tips and tricks that you’ve picked up when
you’re working out your test kit and you’re at that account and something isn’t going right what are some of the
first steps that you do to begin your troubleshooting process well yeah the first thing I do I don’t know what this
is typical or not let’s say I’m running a boiler test I normally like to work against the flow of the water so I’ll
start with the boiler and then I’ll go to the feed water and then I’ll go to them and then I’ll go to the make up and
maybe then the condensate so let’s say I seeing a problem and the boiler that I think maybe comes from the feed water
I’ll then check the feed water for that and maybe a test I hadn’t done then of course there are problems that come up
in plants that you see something stupid it doesn’t make any sense well maybe you
need to talk to the operators and try to find out what this is how long it’s been going on
what things happened when this started I had one situation many years ago were
Kahn estate was just going to hell every now and again and I had the guys
checking basically checking the conductivity of the kind of see and I said we need to know what is going on
when this happens and we it took me maybe Oh God might have been six months when
we figured out that it was coming from one particular building and it happened periodically and it turned out that it
was happening whenever a certain piece of equipment was coming online well this is a piece of equipment that was using
water and darned if some plumber didn’t figure out that that little sump pump over there in the corner that you and I
would refer to as a condensate receiver was an excellent place to discharge this water to and you know it was like it was
driving me crazy because that piece of equipment was only run once or twice a week and so sometimes you’d see it
sometimes you wouldn’t and the totally shouldn’t have been there so you know you what you really need to do in theory
I mean what I would say to use scientific method you have to find out when things are happening you just come
up with a theory as to what it is and then you say well how am I going to test this theory and maybe it’s a chemical
test maybe it’s a matter of looking at logs when people run equipment maybe it’s a matter of talking to people but
there’s something going on and it’s going on at certain times and you have to find out what they are and I don’t
know I can’t really be more specific than that I think that’s a great advice dick who would you say is the person
that’s helped you the most throughout your career well I I have a number I have a long career so it’s more than one
person but early on there was a gentleman named Fred Wilkes now John’s a
breeder knew Fred too and he would probably share my views with about Fred Fred was a great old water treater
and I knew him from Dearborn educational services when I first got my training he
was a very very positive very knowledgeable guy he would love to inspire young guys like me to go out
there and you know do whatever you could and then later as I became techni director George Beck George Beck was a
guy from Kansas did a lot of utility work and stuff like that and he was an incredible field sales guy but also sort
of technical as well he may not have known chemistry but he knew what worked and what didn’t work and a more recent
years now even though I’m fairly accomplished and I know a lot of stuff but we bouncing off other people and you
know quite frankly I used Jerry Garcia a lot as a guy that I bounce things off of
you know a masters company plug out for Gary there and you know if I ever want to know something about about silica
well Tim keister is gonna get a call for me because Tim knows more about silica than anybody I I know and if I need a
waste-treatment expert to tell me a few things I’m gonna call Rick Brust so there are there are people that you know
are subject matter experts in your life and you reach out to these people and there are the ones who can actually help
you and advise you on the great answer well dick this has been fun it’s not
quite over yet because we’ve done lightning round so are you ready to advance over to the lightning round
where the point values are double buckle up all right so we’ve got a time machine
you crawl in it you set the clock back to the first day of you starting as a
water treaty what advice would you give yourself well you know I’ve made a lot of mistakes and I’ve done a lot of
things but I would just tell myself to chill out don’t get so upset about making a mistake we all do and sometimes
that’s the best way we learn all right well there you go what are the last three books that you’ve read well that actually I have
read a number of them I’ve read two the Bill O’Reilly books killing Lincoln because I’ve always thought history
about Lincoln was fascinating killing Patton was another one as a soldier I really really enjoyed that
book and then I also read the was it called the narrative life or Frederick
Douglas he was asleep and ended up being liberated and you know went on to be
quite an author and got all kinds of stuff and you know you might think this is funny but I am currently reading a
book called general chemistry by Linus Pauling this guy won a Nobel Peace Prize twice so that’s the bonus for you and
that’s part of my return to Bay six you know I’ve got a good background in chemistry but you know the chemistry
you don’t you lose you forget and this guy who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1954 for chemistry and he won it again in
1962 for opposing the spread of nuclear weapons Wow well dick if they make a
movie about you who plays dick oh well now if they make a movie about me grace I am hoping it’s a comedy because we
said here’s why we should never take ourselves too seriously I guess Tom Hanks would be a great
choice great choice now final question lots of great answers on past scaling up
guests so no pressure here but just want to warn you so if you could talk to anyone throughout history who would it
be with and why trace I have actually been prepared to answer this question for at least 25 years and that is Sir
Winston Churchill never never never give up and this guy was an inspiration he he
was the first guy to call out Hitler when Neville Chamberlain was saying he could work with Hitler and we had we
have a deal we can live with peace in our time he led England to its darkest days and
that must have been horrible you know to be able to do that and after he was finally in secured a victory the Brits
threw him out and retained somebody else to be prime minister but but he he is an
unbelievable guy and I love that quote never never never give up you know it’s
funny I’ve never been interviewed on my own show but if anybody ever asked me I would have given an answer how about
that he’s one of my heroes as well dick this has been a lot of fun thanks for
coming on the show and sharing some of the history about how you got started in the trials and tribulation of being a
water treat your entire life and this has been a lot of fun I just want to
thank you for coming on and sharing with us in common I thought that it’s not
what happens to us in our lives that really defines us but it’s it’s how we respond to those things and I’ve always
tried to respond in a positive constructive manner so I would give that as a as a word of advice to everybody I
think it’s a great one and with that I think those are great closing words thanks so much for coming on the
show thanks folks I got to tell you if you know somebody who has been in this
industry for a good amount of time make friends with them you can read all day
long but there is so much value to hearing how they have experienced this
industry dick thanks so much for coming on the show I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation well a couple of things I
want to talk about I want to get into a couple of questions but before I do we have a technical training for the
association of Water Technologies coming up in the near future and folks this is my favorite thing that I do all year I
get to stand in front of an audience and teach and talk and ask questions about
water treatment so I hope you join me at these technical training seminars
because you’re gonna get a tremendous amount out of it so the first technical training seminar we have and they’re the
exact same thing they’re just in two different areas of the country we’ve got February 28th through March
4th we are going to be in Las Vegas and everybody loves to go to Vegas but now
there’s even a bigger reason to go to Vegas because you get to learn more about water treatment now if you can’t
make that one we’re gonna be doing it again March 21st through 25th in
Cleveland Ohio I urge you to go to
scaling up h2o dot-com technical training 2018 and read about all the
things that you were going to miss if you don’t go to this technical training
so I hope to see you there I always have a blast getting together with folks that know exactly what it is that I do day
after day and I hope to see you there let’s get into a couple of questions and
see what’s in the mailbag so the first question that I’ve drawn is how do I
know if I have glycol and a closed-loop system so I assume this person picked up
an account they didn’t know anything about it and neither did the customer and maybe it has some sort of coloring in it or
something and they want to know if that’s glycol let’s talk about the coloring first so if the coloring is a
pH sensitive dye and we’ve talked about phenolphthalein before so if you’re a scaling-up listener you know that term
phenolphthalein only knows how to be pink in a pH of 8.3 and above so the
first thing you can do is see if you put a couple of drops of acid in your sample
and that dye goes away it’s not died because of the glycol because that’s
just to die and that doesn’t change in different PHS now I guess a hundred
percent that doesn’t really tell you if it’s glycol or not but that’s something you can start at if it is a dye it’s not
going to do anything that still doesn’t tell you if it’s glycol or not so hopefully you have a refractometer in
your test kit they’re not very expensive if you have any sort of closed-loop system that has glycol in it you
definitely want to carry one of these so you put a drop of water on this refractometer and then you read it and
it will tell you at what temperature freezing will occur and if it’s anything
lower than 32 it’s got glycol in it and that’s really the only way you are going
to know now probably somebody out there is listening they’re saying yeah but is it ethylene glycol is a propylene glycol
and that you’re gonna have an issue with determining you’re gonna have to send that off to a lab and they’re going to
have to test for that now the only way that you can you can actually test for
that is if it’s not in the system if it’s in a barrel and you don’t know if it’s ethylene glycol or propylene glycol
Nino it’s a hundred percent you can look at the specific gravity and you can test it that way but really in a closed-loop
system that’s not going to do you any good at all so my answer to that
question is a refractometer and that’ll definitely tell you that if it’s below 32 that’s your answer
it’s got glycol in it if you have to know what type of glycol is in there you got to send that off to a lab next
question is I have a pH meter and the probe keeps going bad
they go in to say how expensive they are and they can’t keep replacing this or there any tips that I can give to make
the pH probe last longer well sure and I want to say that we talked about this on
a show previously but maybe I didn’t go into detail with it probes as the way
they’re made as soon as they get made they start to lose their life they they
only are good for so long and everything we do to them shortens their life and that includes
using them in a regular fashion so there are three things I think that you can do
to increase the life of a pH probe the number one thing is temperature make
sure the temperature of the probe and the temperature of the sample or as
close to each other as they can be before they see each other when we have
a superhot sample we take an out of a boiler and we take in our probe or meter
out of the trunk of our car and it’s wintertime when we put those things together that’s not a good combination
so try to get those temperatures as close to the same as possible whenever
you’re testing you want to get your tests down to about room temperature because it actually does change the
results of the test we’re not really talking about that in this instance we’re just talking about it with the pH
probe so try to get at the same temperature the next thing is to keep the probe clean the cleaner it is the
better result it is going to give and it’s also going to keep the the juice
that’s inside there and it’s it’s going to keep it in there longer so come up
with a regular regimen that you are cleaning your probe now I clean mine every week depending on how much I use
that meter or how dirty the system was that I just tested so minimum once a
week a lot of times I’m cleaning it every day sometimes I clean it after a test that I did because I know that
system was was just gnarly so how do I do that very easy I take some Windex I put it on
a soft microfiber cloth and I just simply wipe around the probe and then I
rinse that out really well if you haven’t done that in a while I think you will be amazed at what comes
off of that probe now the third thing is probably the number one reason that pH
probes go bad early again all pH probes are going to go bad but we need to be able to get an expected life out of them
and I know you’re saying well how long is that it’s really hard to say I’ve had meters for or I’ve had probes for a
couple of months I’ve also had them for a couple of years and I can’t really tell you that I’ve done anything different so the number one tip that I’m
going to give you is to keep it hydrated folks if you let these things dry out they are not going to work and I know
there’s some procedures out there that you can try to rehydrate them I have never had luck with getting a pH probe
to work very well after it’s lost its special juice so how do you do that well
you want to make sure that you keep it saturated with the right stuff and I’ve
seen people use DI water to keep it hydrated and actually you’re doing the
exact opposite of what you need to do there’s no ions in the DI water so
everything that’s inside that little glass probe is going to migrate out to
help that di water get some more stuff in it and that’s not the point of this so if you’re using DI water stop use the
I water to rinse it but do not use di water to store it what you need to do is
use electrode storage solution so go to your favorite test kit supplier and ask
them for electrode storage solution and a lot of you were saying well hey I just
use pH 4 buffer and that’s pretty much the same thing as electrode storage solution well it’s it is but it’s got
one difference and I think this is the part that we talked about on a show previously it’s got a pink dye in there
so you know it’s pH 4 buffer that pink dye will shorten the life of the probe
so make sure you’re using the right off which is electrode storage solution
I hope that helps hope that gives you a little bit more insight and gets you
spending a little less money on replacing those probes folks I have so
much fun bringing the show to you so I appreciate you listening and I look
forward to the next time we’re together on scaling
[Music]
you [Music]