The following transcript is provided by YouTube, mistakes are present. To hear the podcast episode click HERE.
[Music]
today’s episode is proudly sponsored by the rising tide Mastermind the term
Mastermind was originally written in Napoleon Hills book Think and Grow Rich
before that the earliest documentation that we have of a mastermind group was
Ben Franklin’s group that he used to meet every single week in a Tavern that he called huness Nation there’s no doubt
about it life is too short to do it alone and it’s not very much fun to do
it alone in nation I urge you to go to scaling up h2o.com and find out if the
rising tide Mastermind is right for you I’d love to have a 15minute call with
you to explain all things Rising tide Mastermind and see if this is a group
that’s right for you and you are right for the group go to scaling up h2o.com
slm
Mastermind hello scaling up Nation Trace Blackmore here your host for the scaling
up H2O podcast of course your favorite water treatment podcast the podcast that
every water treater is listening to where that’s our goal anyway and the only way that’s going to happen is if
you let others know that there is a water treatment podcast there for them
and they can simply subscribe and they have a treasure Trove of content that
they can listen to to help them enhance their daytoday as an industrial water
Trader well folks I am still excited that we just had our best industrial
water week yet of course we do what we do here on the scaling up h podcast we
bring you a brand new episode each and every day to celebrate industrial water
week and as you know we can’t just celebrate industrial water in a day it
takes an entire week and we like to theme each and every day to celebrate
all the things that make our job great now if you are planning for next year so
2024 industrial water week is going to be October 7th through 11th so make sure
you mark your calendars now and start getting all your party supplies before
the rush the week before you know that happened to you this this year so you don’t want that to happen next year I
enjoy so much seeing the scaling up Nation come together and everybody
posting their pictures and giving content to I guess it’s called
hashtagging content to iww 23 and if you want to check those
out you can go ahead and look at that hashtag and so many people participated
in that and that’s just so cool because that lets us know that when we are having a hard day as an industrial water
treater when we feel like we are alone when we talk to people that are close to
us and they have no idea what we’re talking about because they don’t have the same context about what our day
today is like we know that we are part of a community we know that there are
other people out there that understand and that are going through the exact
same thing that we are going through and I get comments all the time even from
myself that that helps make it better when we know that we are part of a
community we just feel better and Nation you are part of the the scaling up
nation and our favorite holiday is industrial water week and again that’s
going to be October 7th through 11th 2024 that’s going to be the 7th year
that we’ve celebrated this awesome holiday the person that was responsible
for bringing us industrial water week is also responsible for helping us get one
water treatment chemistry better each and every week so here is a brand new
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 today’s topic
is citric acid I’ll give you a couple of freebies today the chemical formula of
citric acid is C6 h87 its preferred IUPAC name is two
hydroxypropanone acid does it react with Metals if used to clean a system what
precautions or special measures should be taken can citric acid and a system interfere with any Water Analysis you
may be conducting remember knowledge is power and taking the time to learn more
about water chemistry each week will help make you a force to be reckoned with be sure to post what you learned to
social media and tag it with # watertable 23 and # scaling up H2O I
look forward to learning more from you thank you James we are learning all
new things and solidifying things we already knew and of course by the end of
the year we are going to be 52 times smarter about the things that we use
each and every day well something else you can do to bolster your information
is to figure out what conferences are available to you that you can go to and
not only learn more about the information you want to learn more about but meet people you have not met yet and
nation that is probably the best kept secret in water treatment it’s networking there is something special
about industrial water treaters I have been friends with industrial water treaters for years and nobody has ever
held out information for me if I’ve had an issue I would call somebody and they
would help me out with whatever I was going through people have even given me
formulations when I needed an extra formulation to help augment a water
treatment program it is just amazing when you network with people they become
your friends and then they become the community that helps you with your
problems because you’re helping them with theirs now this is what the rising
tide Mastermind is all about we built a mastermind group to help facilitate that
and we always say that it helps us all get further faster while we’re having more fun doing it but I can’t not talk
about the rising tide Mastermind it’s one of my favorite things so if you want more information about that you can go
to scaling up h2o.com for/ Mastermind and if you want more information about
the shows that I am getting ready to mention and all the ones that I haven’t mentioned cuz there are so many shows
and events on our events page while you’re at scaling up h2o.com you can
also go over to our events page and you will see everything that we know about you will see the 2023 water reuse
California annual conference is taking place November 5th through 7th in Indian
Wells California to learn more about this we’re going to have everything on our show notes page along with the
national groundwater Association is having their groundwater week show
December 5th through 7th in Las Vegas Nevada and then to start out the year in
January 20th through the 24th in 2024 ashray is having their winter conference
and Expo in Chicago Illinois so go ahead and mark your calendars for those and if
you’re driving don’t worry the fine staff here at scaling up H2O has taken care of that you can just
remember I need to go over to scaling up h2o.com and click on events and we will
have everything that you need to click over and register for these events and
learn more we will also have a button so you can put the event right in your
calendar we make it easy we make it safe so you can drive from account to account
and make sure you can always arrive home to your family 10 and two people that’s
where you want your hands on the wheel actually you know what I read an article that said that was not taught anymore
that’s how I was taught I think it’s now 9 and three so somewhere between 10 and
n and 2 and three is where you want your hands keep them there don’t try to take notes on this podcast we’ve got all the
notes for you on every single show notes page and then we even go further with our vents page and all the other things
things that we mentioned so scaling up h2o.com and you will be safe scaling up
Nation one of my favorite things about this podcast is all the things that we
get to learn together on the scaling up H2O podcast and that’s why I love to
have all sorts of different guests on this show a lot of these guests I have
met through you and you sharing by going to scaling up h2o.com
and letting us know on our show ideas page who you want us to interview well I
was introduced to our next guest at an association of water Technologies
Conference of course we were there just two short weeks ago and I have known
this individual for a couple of years and I know you are going to get so much
information out of this interview my last partner today is Dave
Fitzgerald of North metal and chemical company welcome Dave hey Trace good to
see you so good to have you on the scaling up H2O podcast it seems like
we’ve been talking about this forever we’re finally doing it yeah it’s crazy how busy things can get and uh trying to
put our schedules together but it’s here finally did it we are doing it and I am
so excited to introduce the scaling up Nation to you I’m going to ask ask you
in a second to tell the nation a little bit about yourself but one of the most
interesting things that I think I know about you is you were a middle school teacher how does that
happen well when I was going to college I started out as an accounting major and
I took three years of an accounting before I figured out that I like to talk with people I I wasn’t going to want to
um sit quiet and plow through hours and hours worth of um data and so I switched
directions set myself up to be a social studies teacher and after teaching for
one year realized that I loved kids and um I spent a lot of time coaching after
that but I really didn’t want to do it for my job and so just taught for one year and then oddly enough I had uncles
that were in the construction industry and a second cousin who was managing a
lumber yard and because it took me quite a while to get through college Switching gears um those were my part-time jobs in
construction so I I moved on to getting into the building material business and
was doing that all the way up until the building bubble burst in 2008 and that’s
when after managing lumber yards with you know a dozen people and being charge
of purchasing materials like Lumber which uh is is a commodity um for doing
that for quite a while I had this opportunity to uh switch over and really apply my small business management
skills and I had to start from scratch as far as chemistry goes but it ended up
being a great fit I love it here so speaking of here you’re speaking of North metal and chemical company tell us
that story how did you start working there well I actually like I said I talked for a year when my kids got old
enough to play soccer um I ended up finding myself coaching two soccer teams
and also my kids were on other soccer teams that I was paying for you know travel teams and I just got myself
really immersed in trying to do the best I could to make sure that their school
soccer team that group of people could be could stay together and I was really focused on having great culture great
camaraderie um with the kids luckily one of those kids ended up having a parent
who’s best friend of my boss Jeff and so when the building Bubble Burst and I needed a recommendation for a job
I got a glowing one from uh one of my soccer players uh parents and I ended up
having about a half an hour interview over lunch for the position and and got
the job Dave what does your day-to-day look like well we’re a pretty small
company and we manufacture sodium libate so we’re actually producing sodium
aldate from U Molly oxide when we have that product brought in it’s basically
reacting with CTIC there’s a lot of cleanup um of insolubles and managing the ph and and that jazz um to create a
sodium alate solution and then drying equipment and packaging so I have have a
group of people that are focused on the manufacturing of that product we also do some conversion of dry aols like uh T
triol and benzo triol into Solutions and we do a little bit of that with some phosphinates as as well but the majority
of uh the warehouse work is in shipping and receiving repackaging we usually
bring materials in in 275 gallon totes and we’ll repackage it in drums for um
people as as needed or 50 PB 5 gallon pales and there’s me and three other
people in the office um handling you know all the inside stuff the order
entry keeping inventory straight quality management system
everything and so we we operate really tight because we’re a 102 year old
company it’s been our Focus to make sure that we were getting the blocking and tackling you know just all of the basics
as correct as possible you know we’re lucky that we were handed a company that is debt-free and I think that’s that’s a
lot of times the case when you have a hundred-year old company that went through periods of time like the
depression and the world wars and everything there’s there’s the certain philosophy where you don’t have those
kind of financial obstacles and you can make those commitments to inventory and make those commitments to making sure
that you’re serving the customer better than anybody else and so that’s what we’ve been focusing on over the last few
years I’ve converted to a small extent to try to work on marketing because now I feel like we’ve got it right I’m
trying to get that word out I also do all of the um purchasing we have a lot of materials manufactured offshore and
so I keep track of the raw material cost for those things and I have them produced I take care of getting them
imported take care of the tariffs and everything and so between the international purchasing and taking care
of customers who might need something special and like I said I have a dozen people everybody we have a real flat
organization they they report to me and so I do a little bit of everything Dave I’ve never asked you what your company’s
mission statement is but just working with you it has to be something about
serving the customer and always being there for the customer and putting the customer first what is your mission
statement well actually that’s something we’re just in the process of getting ISO certified and um next week we’re doing
our very first management review and that was on the agenda to update and so our mission statement has been pretty
typical as far as um making sure that we are keeping in mind what’s best for all
the stakeholders but really you know at this point I’m trying to look at a way
to make sure that if you take care of the customers everything else gets taken care of and so in a mission statement
even though everybody does it it seems redundant that you go ahead and say and profitability and um taking care of the
vendors and everything I think when when you do a really nice job doing everything that you can for your
customer that it everything else takes care of itself and so I’m I’m trying to work at that uncomfortable point in the
mission statement that says uh and maintain profitability you know that kind of thing you send out a regular
newsletter and it’s one of my favorite emails that I get and it’s almost like you have a crystal ball that you know
what’s going to happen with all the raw materials how the heck do you do that
well I’d like people to think that I have a crystal ball however when you’re
purchas in dayto day when you’re purchasing multiple containers worth of material each day and you’re in touch
with the precursor materials for everything that you’re producing it’s
almost like looking in the rearview mirror I mean you actually know what’s going on the market you know when the
Market’s already headed up and when you typically have a lead time for these imported products to hit your warehouse
for three months it might seem like you know what’s going on in the future but because of the nature of where the
source of all these raw materials are it’s easy to go ahead and and be able to see what’s happening in your Market the
next couple of months just because of what’s happened with raw materials the previous couple of months some of the
raw materials that have just been on a roller coaster ride on availability and pricing are malate azol and fosfate can
we speak to those so malum is a crazy product and one of the reasons that it
is is because um most of the primary malum mines have closed down because
there is residual malum available in copper mines and so it’s a byproduct of
copper mines which ends up meaning that the copper market ends up driving how
much malum is uh dug out of the ground and when you have that um that byproduct
kind of situation it ends up sometimes not making sense and we’ve gone through
a couple crazy periods malum dioxide is generally used for stainless steel and
super structures like Bridges and skyscrapers however malum trioxide is
soluble and cost costic and so this is what would be a chemical grade malum and there’s a limited amount of that
available and so anybody that’s dealing in malib dates has to get chemical grade meibum and that means you need to be on
a contract and basically contracts are done annually late in the year for the following year and so what’s really
interesting is what people think is going to happen in 2024 right now as
they’re starting to get malum contracts together those kind of guests about what
kind of recession or you know what’s what’s happening are going to drive where the contracts are headed and what
kind of volume is going to be there and so the guesstimation now will have a lot to do with where the pricing goes next
year year because the contracts aren’t going to change the miners aren’t going to suddenly start extracting more
material if the Molly Market goes crazy because they’re really they’re copper miners they’re worried about that just
recently early in the year we reached a peak with Molly um oxide had gone up to
around $40 it’s down back in that 20 uh to $25 range which is much lower but we
have a history of that being closer to 15 in recent years and so a lot of people are going to say this is this is
a a pretty high price that that’s going on right now what about aols that’s
interesting because a lot it it’s always been a dynamic product but a lot of
where um the problem has been exacerbated is that there are tariffs on
those for um buyers in the United States and so there’s a large anti-dumping and
countervailing Duty tariff that equates to about 165% additional duty on these
products and so when um these volatile products go up not only do they go up but they go
up instead of by 100% it would be 100 or 265 per because you have to add add that
percentage to it and this volatility has been very difficult to manage um it
makes it really easy to get upside down as far as your costs go and it’s also just difficult for somebody on in the US
to import it because the the dollar value of each one of these tariffs is so
high you need um a customs bond to take care of it and they don’t close up these Customs bonds and so as soon as US
Customs says oh you’ve exceeded this Bond you need to get another one that’s larger that old Bond stays in place and
you have to buy another Bond when you go ahead and get a second Bond you can use a line of credit against it so that that
means that you would have less credit that you can work with with other things or you can go ahead and give them the cash and let them hold on to it but um
some of these azol bonds have been open for a few years already so the US um
Customs has been basically having the bond holders hang on to your money or
your credit for a long period of time and it’s been growing each year um how much has been held up so there’s not a
lot of people involved in importing the product anymore it’s it’s it’s almost impossible unless you have a lot of
extra cash that you can devote to it and then the last one you had mentioned was phosphinates the phosphinates
that market it goes through a cycle each year around this time since a lot of the
yellow Foss the the precursor materials are coming from China A lot of times um
during the course of the Year China converts basically from being able to
use coal to having to switch for their air pollution reasons switch to natural
gas and as that switch occurs there’s going to be this huge increase in cost and um and also a lot of times they’ll
go ahead and do some environmental cleanup at the same time so this this time of year we’re speaking in August is
often a time when phosphinite prices increase luckily we haven’t seen too much of an increase yet because demand
has been low it’s we’re still left over from previous year Overstock to a great extent reshoring is a term where we
bring products back into the country are we seeing that or the potential of that
with any of these raw materials there’s definitely attempts to do some reshoring
the difficulty is is when um the precursor items aren’t available you know if we do a great job at extracting
things out of the ground at with minimal pollution here compared to the rest of
the world however it’s so strict here a lot of times that extraction of
materials out of the ground whether it’s oil or some minerals a lot of times that’s been exported and when those
minerals are exported then it gets to a point where the production facilities
that are close to the raw materials they have a huge advantage and the resore the
companies that are in the US that are trying to do the manufacturing they’re the ones that are going to come up short when there’s any kind of shortages in
the market as far as product goes so the companies that are trying to resore
they’re just at a disadvantage until we realize that if we’re going to take care
of Environmental situations we need to do it on a global scale and stop exporting this pollution to other places
that aren’t going to do as good a job as we would do here domestically something else I wanted to unpack was you mentioned the Customs
tariffs and I don’t think a lot of people know about those and you with an accounting background how do you
possibly keep straight something that stays open indefinitely so it doesn’t stay open
indefinitely but the US government does take a while to process things and so
these bonds that are still open basically start from the beginning of 2020 it should be sometime around
October this year that they should start closing those and redefine what the Tariff is going to be for the for the
next year and right now um we’ve been operating at about 165% tariff that
looks like in October should be reposted at around 50% tariff that’s going to be
a huge swing that’s that’s going to lower our cost by you know 30% or so and
for that reason a lot of people are maybe because they know this is happening that US Customs has to do
something soon because th this is known there’s a huge reluctance to bring material in beforehand um because you
don’t want to get caught with overpriced material because the duty was higher Dave we all suffered coid together there
was no playbook for how to endure a pandemic we all lived through it we all
had different experiences many of us bonded together to figure out how we were going to get through it but looking
back from now to 2020 what did we take from coid and what
practices have we learned that are applicable now and maybe what are some that we need to
refocus well I think I’ve told you before I’m a small business Advocate and I believe there’s lots of things that
small businesses can do that are just really difficult for larger companies to do and I think we found found during the
course of Co that it was the small companies that could go ahead and dig in and find ways to take care of customers
when larger companies just because of the nature of their size because of the different silos and sometimes because
their key performance indicators would keep them from doing the right thing and making the purchases at maybe these
higher prices I think we found that um looking for a small company that knows
who you are that basically will always allocate what you need for you there’s a
huge value in that if you know so many times people thought cheapest is best in a flat Market but once you get into a
dynamic Market you figure out that reliability is far more important than saving a couple of pennies if you can
keep your manufacturing process going and keep your customers happy that’s invaluable if you can develop a partner
in your vendor to take care of you in some of these difficult situations you’ve got a friend for life many small
companies doubled tripled quadrupled maybe even more their amount of inventory on hand because there was
uncertainty there was higher cost in shipping as well as the raw material there was longer times in when it was
ordered to when it was actually delivered do we still need to be holding
higher amounts of inventory what data should we be looking at so we can make better decisions when it comes to
inventory on hand trace it really depends on who you’re purchasing from you know during
those years of coid and I’m sure a lot of people won’t believe me but there were a couple of periods where we didn’t
have a product for two weeks because all of the delays and shipping you know I I
calculated everything and there were still further delays than I thought there would be but even in the worst of
times we had material every single month every single item that’s on our price
sheet and on our website we had stock every single month and so during that
period of time we certainly tried to take on um some additional business especially if they were small businesses
um if we were getting calls from the uh the big guys you know know we don’t have anything for you you know if you would
have committed to you to us we would and you know this is the reason that you need to be uh a loyal customer you know
if you’re interested in that kind of service but we actually grew during
those years years because we did everything that we could to get material I had great relationships with our
vendors who were making sure that we got material when no one else was getting it you know when the cargo freight was
$24,000 or $25,000 just crazy prices that no one in their right mind would pay as a business
decision to bring inventory in with those um additional expenses we did it
because we were committed to making sure we had product for the customer I knew that they would appreciate and I knew
that they needed it and um and so we were able to do those kind of things we’re not the only ones and um so I
think you need to take a look at what materials some of your best vendors have
the vendors that’ll take care of you and those are ones that you can skinny up those are the ones that you want to
place orders with every single month because they’re going to know that they need to have that same amount of
material for you every single month and the ones that um your best supplier
might not be as reliable as you want those those are the products that you’re going to have to stock up
on so you just mentioned cargo containers cost uh $25,000 at one point to bring over where
are we now what what do we need to know about uh what’s going on currently and
in the near future with Freight and transportation so once again we’re talking in August the 23 at this point
it’s around um 600 bucks that I I’m getting um a container from Shanghai
China to New York or Baltimore and so that is a good historical number 2500
2300 those are the numbers that you will see going back a decade and um it was a
real anomaly when it went up to the $25,000 we’re at around 2600 right now
but that seems to be increasing on the East Coast partly because of what’s going on in the Panama Canal they have a
little bit of a water shortage they use fresh water to be able to run the ships through the locks and because there’s a
drought situation they’re limiting the the number of ships through they’re limiting the weight of the ships coming
through so they can carry fewer containers so right now um you can still
get a bargain and bring something in on the west coast for maybe $1,500 in that case um you have a
limited number of ports that you can deal with and the West Coast ports are pretty difficult and then also in Canada
they’ve had some some support strikes and so um they’ve ended up trying to divert some stuff into the United States
so there’s always some tricks as far as whether you want to bring stuff in on the West Coast or the East Coast but um
generally still after what we’ve gone through we’re at a great place as far as cargo freight where it’s looking and we
also are in that typical high point of the year because a lot of stores that
have materials for um Christmas and holidays they’re bringing material over
right now so this is sort of a peak season um I see the the price of cargo freight staying you know nice and
competitive the the main difficulty is they’ve cut routes there’s there’s fewer routes and so you might have a little
bit of a bigger lead time than um than you were used to there was a time that we could get we could depend on bringing
material from China in eight weeks now I would probably say guess that it’s going to be 10 or 11 because there’s just
there’s just fewer routes for a while we were dealing with things sitting at domestic docks because
they’re just worn enough trucks and drivers to get them to where they needed to go are we still seeing anything like
that we’re not seeing that kind of thing at least on the east coast and one of
the difficulties one of the reasons that we heard that is that was a problem not in Baltimore which is our closest port
but in New York and the reason was is the cargo ships they could load up
enough containers and drop them all off in New York and not have to make any
other stops it was easy to book it to New York and so they were refusing to make those additional stops and because
of that you had a lot of drage or those those kind of trucking carriers that were in a Baltimore area that didn’t
have enough work but those that were coming out of New York were overloaded and so it it wasn’t really an overall
shortage there were just specific spots that were overloaded at different periods of time
now we know the rest of the story Dave you are a Jedi master when it comes to
inventory management so for people listening today what are some kpis that
everybody needs to do when it comes to managing their inventory well actually you might know
that I don’t follow kpis as closely I
dig into the data and I know exactly who’s buying what and what kind of Trends I’m going after and so when I’m
watching cost of uh materials I really don’t have a budget I want to just make
sure that I’m doing the right thing and so I I take a deep dive into that product I think we have 65 products on
the books so it’s not like we’re trying to trying to sell a thousand different things you know I do have a limited
number of things that we’re going to be fantastic at providing and so I’m able
to go ahead and take a really deep look and see exactly you know what we’re looking for and to me doing measurements
on those derivative things is dangerous because all I’m looking forward to doing
is taking care of customers and you do whatever it takes even if it wouldn’t make sense with some kind of other
measurement um a good example of that is at the end of 2020 things had slowed down and everybody was trying to dump
inventory so that they could make their inventory turns I think everyone knew
that things were going to Boom in 2021 in the beginning of 2021 people were getting vaccinated and you know all of
that jazz plus there’s always a boom in January because people want to stock up
and and start filling their warehouse and it was crazy because I was able to um buy material from some folks locally
that were dumping it in December and resell it to them in in January at a great profit and I would say you know
I’m sorry I know you sold it to me at this but this is my replacement cost and so I can’t sell it to you below that so
when it comes down to any kind of rules I I’m a fan of I don’t know if you’re familiar with Eli Gold rat uh the goal
is his uh famous book and he really focuses just on throughput the theory of
constraints and that’s that’s what I’m always looking at is what kind of constraint I have and luckily because
you know we’re debt-free and and doing great I don’t have the constraint of any kind of budgeting I I’ll I’ll spend
whatever I need to spend to take care of customers let’s shift gear slightly I know you are an awt member and there are
lots of people that listen to this podcast that are members of the awt but we also have lots of listeners that have
never heard of the well they’re listening to the show let’s face it they’ve heard of the awt but they’re not
members what would you say to somebody that thinks no I don’t know if I should
really get involved with an organization like awt you know I I think a lot of people
don’t feel like they need any place to connect or get involved you know and
there is a certain amount of discomfort in initially doing such a thing and showing up and not knowing anyone it’s
uncomfortable but I think that there’s a growing awareness that connection and
having a place to be able to contribute can help turn a job into a mission that
you just love doing and awt is one of the places that you can do that you know
there’s a lot of small businesses and a lot of people who would put take the
shirt off their back uh for you a lot of great people and so um the difficulty is
just taking that first step working your way in starting to introduce yourself to people but I think it really you just
need to find one person and say hey I’m new can you help me out and everybody would love to be on the welcome
committee everybody who’s been part of awt for a while loves it and wants to share it and wants you wants to make
sure that you as a new person get all of the benefits of but there’s there’s great training the convention is a great
place to be able to see a lot of your vendors and meet them face to face you
know shake hands you know there’s there’s not not as much travel going on any any anymore you know to me it’s just
a wonderful opportunity to to get together and you just need to make the most of it you need to have the
confidence to know that these people are good people and they’re going to appreciate knowing you you mentioned the
training seminars that the awt put on and I’m highly involved in those and you
and I got to spend some time together this past year for somebody that’s never been to one of those trainings well what
did you get out of it what would you describe from it well every time that I do some kind of training I get something
out of it and I think that you need to go into it with a certain thought that
you’re going to be in over your head a little bit that’s really the only way that you can challenge yourself but there are some courses that are are sort
of beginner levels and there there’s a lot of stuff that you’re going to be familiar with when you first get there
but I would say that you just have to have the confidence to um to stick it out and ask questions um a lot of times
at the end of a session if there’s something you don’t know just ask the person next to you and that’s a great
way to meet somebody you know and and start learning more but I would highly recommend that you learn as much as you
can early because you’re going to love this industry you’re going to love awt and then 10 years later you’re going to
think man I should have really you know done that before it’s the that old adage the best time to plant a tree is 20
years ago but the second best time is today I I would recommend everybody get involved as heavily as possible as soon
as possible I love that Chinese proverb one of my favorites Dave you mentioned
this earlier that you really enjoyed coaching kids but more importantly
bringing culture to kids as a new dad and I started this Venture with a
16-year-old so I need all the help that I can get how do you C culture to kids
well probably what you need to do is just think to yourself that you’re going
to give them a head fake in this case I was coaching them in soccer and I make
them think that this is about getting better at soccer and really early on
during one of the practices you go to the parents and you have you let them know this is a head fake like I’m
talking about a basketball analogy actually but um this isn’t about soccer
this is about in the case of uh the boys team turning young boys into great young
men that have a bond together hopefully they’ll be able to carry all the way through high school and it helps having
that conversation with the parents early on because they they know that that is your Prime mission and that they don’t
start getting too yappy on the sideline and um during the course of coaching
these boys in soccer you have to really just look at what they need you know you want them to be successful you want them
to understand that hard work is necessary getting out of your comfort zone is necessary if you get knocked
down you got to get back up that there’s no use in having a bunch of emotions about it the sooner you get up the
better and that winning a game is not necessarily that important what what’s
important is in the long run that you’re doing the right things you have to make
sure that the other team doesn’t feel like they lost and so that was something
that was really interesting at a time that I had a team that had been winning
championships in the fall and then in the spring um I would get to the point where we were playing another team and
we might be up by a couple goals and I take one kid at a time off of the field and the refere would say coach you only
have eight players on the field and I’m just like I know and the parents would be yelling hey you only have eight players on the field I know I want this
to be a good G good game I want the other team to have chances to score and they would score so it’s you just you
need to make sure what the focus is and that uh you have kids that grow I was I’m lucky because this team that I’m
talking about the boys team they’re getting married now and every wedding I go to there are you know eight or so of
them together are showing up at these weddings they’re around 30 years old now they still are tight friends they you
know they often invite me and it’s a privilege to have been part of this
group of people that have such a strong bond I see a book in your future it’s not about winning the game no well you
know Simon cynic has that infinite game uh analogy that he talks about and
that’s definitely the case and if you approach work if you approach all relationships in that way it puts you at
a great mindset advantage to be able to be happy to be able to have joy in everything that you’re doing Dave if
somebody wants to find out more about you and North metal and chemical company what should they do well you can find uh
our website at North cm.com and there’s a way that you can go ahead
and plug in want a quote sheet that you just want to ask me a question or something like that if you’re not
actually interested in a product but if you go to an awt conference I usually do a commercial corter we always have a
booth I adore when people come up to me and uh and have something that they want to say you know I don’t need anybody to
necessarily want to buy anything it’s just really nice to be able to connect with other people who have tapped into
anything that you have in common well Dave I’ve got some lightning round questions if you are ready for those
sure all right my first one if you could go back in time and talk to your for for
self on your very first day as a business owner what advice would you give yourself it would have to be to
listen more you know it’s so easy to bring past experiences with you and feel
like you already know some things that you know some immediate changes to make that there’s lwh hanging fruit that you
want to get on top of right away and take care of but um you have to understand that you have a culture there
and they’ve been doing things that way for a while and there’s reason reasons that they have for doing things that way
and going through the process of listening and making sure that any changes are made or not because you said
so but because you have this shared Mission with those that have already been there that shared mission to take
care of customers better you know so there were a lot of times that I would you know come into a place and say oh I
can fix that for let let me get this list knocked out you know in the first month and it ends up you are surprised
that uh there’s a little bit of resentment and I think that that’s for somebody young it really just doesn’t
make sense but it’s the it’s the best way to skin the cat it’s the best way to get the most Improvement in the long run
you’ve already mentioned several books but I’m curious what books are on your reading list so my favorite author right
now is Benjamin Hardy and um he has I think three books with Daniel Dan
Sullivan yes that he’s written and it’s the map in the game is the first one
that they wrote together and then be your future self now and 10x is easier
than 2x which I think is brand new out this year I found them to be fantastic
books I love every one of them and he he does a bunch of great stuff on YouTube
as well tons of great content that support these books so I’d High highly recommend that another book that I love
this year is called unreasonable hospitality and it’s by Will
guaria guadara anyway he is basically a restaurant owner and he had been
involved in some Michelin re three star restaurants the thing that I got out of
that was the little things that you can do whether it be something that you feel
like is called Hospitality or if it’s just a simple uh providing great service it’s usually almost free all it takes is
a little bit of bandwidth a little bit of care and it makes a ton of difference difference and that book really showed
me how easy it is to make small differences by trying to create a level of hospitality that makes people feel
like this is where I want to be these are the people I want to deal with and then finally I had mentioned earlier Eli
Gold rat and I reread the goal recently and a couple of other his of his books
and there’s just some great material there I can’t believe that a lot of it was written um 40 years ago but it’s
still fantastic to know that productivity is completely wasted unless
it’s being focused at the bottleneck and so when you’re taking a look at how to do things you want to focus on safety
you want to focus on doing things the right way quality productivity only
becomes important at that bottleneck and so to to try to push productivity
through every facet of what you’re doing is a complete waste of energy and it puts those other things the quality and
the safety and everything everything else at risk when the writer strike is over they’re going to be looking for new
content they’re going to hear this podcast and they’re going to want to make a movie about Dave Fitzgerald’s
life who do you want playing Dave so if it’s a young Dave there’s an actor um
Joe Ki who plays Steve on Netflix’s stranger things it takes place in the
80s and you know it reminds me of who I was at that time in my life but if it was an older version I would love for it
to be Brad p and for him to do it in sort of that um Aldo reign of in glorious bastards the character he did
there I thought that that was priceless and uh even though that doesn’t always come out that’s sort of a character
going on in my head all the time my last question if you had the ability to talk
to anybody throughout history who would it be with and why so as far as
historical figures go I think that Thomas Jefferson would just be so interesting with everything that has to
do with his life his feeling about slavery what he had done to grow the country he basically helped create the
two-party system that would be so interesting but if honestly if I could talk with anybody from the past I’d
probably rather have one more conversation with my dad he passed away in 2019 and you know the feeling when you
have a conversation with somebody that you really love and who loves you you know I’d just love to have one more
conversation with him so I Thomas Jefferson would have to take a backseat
well this has been a great conversation I really want to thank you for coming on the scaling up H2O podcast it’s been a
pleasure I’ve been looking forward to it and I would love to help you out in any way possible so just let me know if
you’d like to do it again nation this interview was just
chocked full with all sorts of information if you missed anything by all means you can feel free to go back
and relisten and you can also go to our show notes page where we will have a lot
of material for you and things that were mentioned during the interview so you can die further into each one of those
items Nation like I said I’m still excited that we’re coming off industrial water week I’m so excited that so many
of you out there in the scaling up Nation celebrated that with me and I’m
so excited that each and every week I get to bring a brand new episode to you
the scaling up Nation so until next week take care [Music]
everybody scale up Nation are you getting ready to take your certified water technologist examination do you
wish you just had a little bit of extra help to build your confidence so you can
sign up for the exam well Nation I’ve heard you and I’ve got what you were
asking for I work each one of the seven 75 mock questions that you receive when
you sign up to take your certified water technologist designation I share with
you the logic behind how I get to certain answers and I show you how to set up each math equation go to scaling
up2.com cwt prep once again that’s scaling up2.com
cwt prep to get enrolled today