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[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 that he called hunus 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 you are right for the group go to scaling up h2o.com slm
Mastermind happy Earth scaling up Nation Trace Blackmore here the host of the
scaling up H2O podcast and hey April 22nd is Earth Day each and every year we
celebrate Earth Day and I think a lot of people may not know what Earth Day is
and really it’s just a day for us to think how is what we’re doing impacting
this planet now we’ve had talks about all sorts of things water on this
podcast and how that acts in the planet and how if we take something out of the ground here it’s not necessarily going
to go back there and that creates an issue so I think there’s a whole host of
things we can do as industrial water treaters to help educate people about
things that they do every day habits that they have habits they may not even be aware of and how that affects the
planet so April 22nd is a day for us to do that and of course it’s held every
single year and if you want to know more about earthday you can go to earthday.org to find out anything and
all things Earth Day and it’s my hope in just a few days you celebrate Earth Day
by letting people know what you do on a daily basis Nation we are a green
industry we are the greenest of Industries and we were green before there was even a definition of green we
are making sure that water is used properly and for as long as it can be in
each and every one of our accounts I think we need to celebrate that I think
we need to talk about that and great day to do that is April 22nd Earth Day
another date I want you to put on your calendar is May 18th and that is the
global 6K Nation I love the global 6K I think it empowers everything that we are
trying to do in industrial water treatment when it comes to how we treat
water when it comes to how we think if we don’t have water nothing else really
matters and there’s so many people out there on this planet that do not have
the availability to just open a faucet and nice clean drinking water comes out
in fact the average person that does not have available clean drinking water to
them has to walk 6 kilomet 6 kilomet how far is our kitchen
sink so that changes everything when you put that into perspective and there’s so
many things that these individuals can’t do because they are walking to get and bring back water so the global 6K not
only represents the distance that these people have to walk to get water it also
allows us a forum to talk about what we do and educate people that not everybody
has the privilege of just walking to a neighboring room and opening a fost it
Nation I love the global 6K for $50 you can sponsor a person you can sponsor a
child and you now get a t-shirt a ribbon
with a badge on it with a metal you also get a race placard that you will pin on
your T-shirt to show the child that you are sponsoring Nation I’ve done this for
several years and you’re not going to have great times because what happens not you’re not going to have a good time
but you’re not going to have a good running time because people are going to stop you and ask you what what are you
doing what’s what’s the cause we had so many people stop and talk to us at our
local park and that’s where we do it we get the whole team involved we all put on our t-shirts we all put on our race
placard and then we walk run jog however we do it and we talk with people
throughout the park and letting them know what it is that we are doing and the goal is to end the global Water
Crisis so everybody has access to clean drinking water and just think when you
have access to clean drinking water it changes everything people go back to
school people are not walking on dangerous roads all sorts of things that
they weren’t able to do they are able to do now and World Vision who sponsor
spors the global 6K they are wonderful at educating the people of the
infrastructure that they’re bringing into their community so they take ownership it’s not somebody coming in
installing something and then leaving and when it breaks nobody knows what to do they are owners of this all along the
way it’s a great organization and you can find out more by going to scaling
up2.com 6K once again scaling up H2O
/ 6K and you’ll find out everything you need to know and there’s a couple of
options you have one you might want to do this 6K by yourself and you can go to
your favorite Park you don’t have to go to any one place and you can join team scaling up we would love to have you and
that way we can share all our results as a team and I hope you hashtag all of your race photos to the global 6K
hashtag that they have now maybe you want to do something for your company like we do you can create your own team
Nation it is a great way to bring your team together over a great cause we love
to support this each and every year and you will be glad that you did too so
once again that’s scaling up2.com 6K scaling up Nation after you sign up
for the 6K it’s my hope that you go over to our events page and see what conference es you might want to attend
we’re always keeping that list up to date for you so you know exactly what is
coming up so you can arrange your schedule so you can be there so many
wonderful things happen when you go to conferences of course you’re going to learn but you’re also going to network
and by networking with other people that do the same thing that you are doing you are now creating valuable resources that
you can reach out and ask questions to I know people that met each other at a awt
conference and they decided they were going to get their certified water technologist designations that year they
formed a study group well if they didn’t go to that conference they wouldn’t have been able to form that study group and
every single one of those people is now a cwt nation when we get together as
industrial water treaters great things happen and a great place to get together
is is at a conference so go to scaling up h2o.com events and find your next conference
Nation as I mentioned today is our Earth Day celebration Earth day is just a few
days away and that’s where we’re going to focus our next
interview my lab partner today is Andy rying of HOH water technology welcome
Andy hey Trace great to be here we are excited to have you here we’re going to cover a lot of territory today and today
is our Earth Day episode so happy Earth yes back at you we’re going to be
talking about sustainability but before we get there do you mind telling the
scaling up Nation a bit about yourself yeah sure so I live in the greater Chicagoland area um married and I have
three beautiful kids Olivia is 10 river is seven and Kate is five I lived here
since 2018 originally grew up in the West Michigan area and that’s where I actually got into water treatment and
about me I like about anything active especially if it’s outdoors so I’m an avid golfer um enjoy hiking any sport
you could probably think of especially if there’s competition involved I’m gonna be game for it so yeah that kind
of sums up kind of who I am Andy you’re a member of the rising tide Mastermind and because you brought it up a couple
of years ago we do every live we have a live event every year where everybody
comes into Atlanta and then we just enjoy each other’s company and we have some things that we do but one of the things we do is an activity and one of
the activities we did was WhirlyBall and Nation if you haven’t
experienced whirly ball I think I would describe it that lacrosse and bumper
cars had a lovech child would that be a good definition that’s a very good picture of it yes Andy you dominated you
were the VIP everybody wanted you on your team I I think I think you had
played whirly ball professionally before as you were playing it was just amazing
he shot he scored he wiped the court with everybody I can attest that you are
very competitive and you are very good at sports yeah I mean wh ball is actually fairly popular in Chicagoland
so you might have thought like oh he plays a lot of wh Ball but not true I’ve probably played it twice before in my
life but uh I don’t know God blessed me with hand eye coordination and uh a competitive spirit so that’s all I can
really say you were fantastic at that and then of course another year we did Top Golf and of course you were the VIP
on that as well so at this year’s live event everybody’s going to want you on their team unless we do a spelling event
because we do spelling event Scrabble I will take last place 100 per. as the
person that puts together the live event I can guarantee there will not be a spelling challenge makes me feel better
I think if I speak I always have those little Wiggly lines under it because I speak misspelled so yeah we’re not doing
that Andy one of the things that I love about HOH is that you have been around
for a very long time and you are a familyowned business and not only a
familyowned business but your family likes each other how do you do that yeah
I mean that’s uh that can be a rare thing in family businesses I say a lot lot of times when family business come
together if you can figure out how to make it work it’s one of the best things possible but when it doesn’t work it is
just terrible and I’ve gone through um lyola here in Chicago does a uh a family
business course and there’s like an 18month program that they take Next Generation leaders of family businesses
and put them through and I went through that course and man I heard some horror stories of what’s going on in family
businesses and uh luckily we’ve you know we’ve had a share of dust ups but uh
overall we’ve done really well and you know I credit uh my father-in-law for kind of setting that foundation and
expectation of how we get along and work inside the business together and I credit Reed my business partner a lot
and uh creating an environment for us to both Thrive and have our individual roles but uh also work really well
together I would say and I don’t have this statistic but I would say the majority of the awt membership the
association of water Technologies are family run businesses yeah absolutely it’s
important to get that right yeah the big what do we have big three big five six companies out there and then there’s you
know five or six hundred other ones most of them are family businesses that either are either gen one and you know
thinking about potentially transitioning to a second generation or they’re in their second generation and kind of thinking about are we going to try to
you know carry this Legacy on or uh or exit out we’ve done several shows about
that in fact your father-in-law and brother-in-law that you mentioned earlier they were on that show talking
about how they were trying to make sure that the transition went well and I can’t remember that show number but I’ll
be sure to have that in the show notes if anybody wants to listen to that Andy a question for you you guys do get it
right as a family so you’ve heard stories you’ve probably experienced things so how do you make sure that
everybody shows up and they want to show up for Thanksgiving dinner what are some tips that you have for a successfully
run family in a family own business I mean I think the first thing is to just
be vulnerable and honest with each other about what expectations are you know we all have stories in our heads and if
we’re just letting those stories sit there they can grow and grow and grow once you have what you might think be a
really hard conversation with say a cousin or a sibling or an in-law it puts
that story out in the open where now it’s not this scary thing that just keeps building in someone’s head and you can actually talk about maybe some
disagreements or differences Reed and I had that uh we’ve had that a couple times in our relationship and got what
needed to get out on the table early and then it allowed us to actually work on it I would also recommend that you know
it’s hard sometimes but to not let family business dominate the conversation at the Thanksgiving table
my wife is really good at shutting us down if we’re together in a family and she’ll let it go for a little while
because it’s you know very easy to get caught up in whatever is happening but at some point my wife will just look at
all of us be like all right no more HOH talk we’re done we’re just going to be a family here and so I think you got to
draw some boundaries too any horror stories that you remember from that session you were talking about that you
can share and how you guys make sure that that doesn’t happen to you horror stories from the the class that I did
yes I mean I prefer to protect confidence of the people that in are in there but I can tell you a story that
you know re probably doesn’t want to me share but early on when uh when we were working together I joined HOH a couple
years before Reed and then he joined and I was living up in Michigan at the time and uh we were hanging out at my house
he came up for the weekend and we probably had you know a couple pops and some liquid courage in us but we were
sitting down pretty late at night talking and I said to him I go you know what I didn’t really love when you came
into the business and he looked at me and goes you know I didn’t like when you join the business and that really opened
up our dialogue we’re like hey we can say what’s actually on our mind and understand that this is a safe place and
I think that put us on a trajectory to have the relationship that we have today but it took us being vulnerable and kind
of letting us know like hey this is you know this is could get awkward now that there’s two family members you know in the business how are we gon to handle
that and uh yeah that set the tone for you know how we’ve managed our relationship ever since I’ve had the
pleasure of working with both of you and I can generally say that you all like each other it’s not just a business
relationship you all enjoy being with each other yeah that’s true I mean Reed
has you know over the years he’s become one of my best friends and we spent a lot of time together obviously at work
but we spent a fair amount of time together outside of work as well and um I would have never thought that when I
met his sister all those years ago and he was in high school um that you know this relationship would be what it is
today but uh it’s been a real blessing for me now you mentioned something
that’s a great debate most people don’t know it’s a great debate I’m saying it’s a great debate you said pop I say soda
and somewhere between the two of us I think there’s a section of the country that says soda pop really I think so
where is that dividing line because I lived in Florida for a little bit and that was all soda down there right and I
know I think in California everything’s a Coke it doesn’t matter if you’re ordering a Sprite you’d order a Coke and
then they’d say what kind Sprite yes that that is how it is here in atanta
that’s that’s at they might do that in California but I guarantee they do that here in Atlanta because that’s where
Coke is headquartered yeah what kind of Coke do you want Pepsi you would never say that no all us Northerners drink pop
which I don’t know you know the more I’ve lived other places I feel like pop sounds weird and so now I probably say
soda more often but when I’m up here especially in Michigan everyone’s pop they look at you crazy if you say soda
well and if you go to a grocery store in Chicago it’s actually six or wherever it is it says pop if you do that down here
in Florida or or Georgia it says soda so there you go Nation you’re going to start noticing these things and we’re
going to find out where that dividing line is cuz I have heard people say soda pop that’s just too long who’s got time
for that but I if you say that let me know where you live because because we we want to solve this argument yeah my
bet is that somewhere around Louisville once you go south of Louisville that’s where it starts changing and that’s another one how do you say Louisville
Lewisville Louisville lville there’s like 15 different ways to say that we of course have to learn that for the next
awt convention because that’s where it’s going to be so that’s another debate we have how do you say that City there’s so
many debates we’re opening up today yeah sounds like a good presentation for awt in Louisville well speaking of awt
presentations you were at the awt convention in Grand Rapids last year and you spoke on sustainability well hey
it’s our birthday show so why not talk about sustainability and I want to start
off with something that I thought was very interesting you had a service that you had set up that everybody could text
into to answer questions and then right on stage we could see the responses to
all of those questions and you asked some pretty fun questions up there to get us started and after you got
everybody into actually answering the question you asked the question question
what is one word that you think of when you say the word sustainability or when
you hear the word sustainability and I have to say some words I expected but a
lot of words I didn’t expect can you tell us a little bit about that yeah I mean that uh that was very intentional
Chase I expected to get the response that I got and I set the talk up by
talking about how I went to Google when I first started looking into sustainability and typed in the word
sustain ability and got 2.5 billion search results in less than a second and
then I was like this is not going to help me and so then I went to Wikipedia and uh as a fairly trusted source and in
Wikipedia in the first like two paragraphs on the site it called out that sustainability is a word that’s
just naturally misunderstood or the definition is disagreed on and so I was like all right no one actually knows
what this word means because it’s so big and so then I said let’s ask the crowd and see what we get which will reinforce
the idea that we don’t even know what we’re talking about when we hear the word sustainability and so yeah I had everyone type in what they heard and
some of the main ones were what you would think environment green conservative liberal um but there was a
lot of other ones that were kind of out there you know some like uh pain overregulation
reuse a buzzword trendy and um yeah it was kind of fun I think for the whole
group to see uh what their peers around them think of when they hear the word sustainability I thought it was a great
setup for your talk it allowed the audience to know that they were asked to
be involved and I also think it disarmed everybody because it wasn’t just I’m
going to shove down your throat what I think this is you put out on the table hey we don’t agree with this we’re all
in the same industry let’s figure this out together I thought it was set up great yeah my goal was to make sure that
people were not thinking that I was trying to preach at them about you know lowering their carbon footprint or
global warming or all these buzzwords that you know we hear and tense up depending on what side of spectrum you
sit um it was more trying to be educational and kind of give my story of
the journey that uh that I went on looking at sustainability and especially looking at it in terms of you know what
HOH is doing or could do one of the aems you did right after that was you said hey this is the definition that we’re
going to use and I think you used AI to help with that what would the definition you went with so I used chat GPT mostly
because I was curious and you know it was just kind of starting to get some legs and uh and I asked chat GPT what is
sustainability and it came up with and I quote sustainability is the ability to meet the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs it involves balancing economic social and
environmental factors in order to create a long-term Equitable and resilient system that can endure over time it’s
hard to argue with Skynet Andy I know like what I don’t even know why we’re even thinking anymore like we could just
walk around with our phones and answer anyone with just a you know let me ask hold on all right now I will answer it
was good I mean I was really impressed with it and uh it hit all the main components in sustainability they talk
about their pillars which are the economic social and environmental and it touched on that and uh and what I told
what I said in the talk was I loved how it talked about our existing needs because we have existing needs and we
cannot forget about those but also the future generation needs and finding that balance of not just like pretending like
we don’t have a civilization to maintain and only focus on the Next Generation
but realizing that hey we can’t just think about ourselves and we do have to think somewhat about the Next Generation
so for me it balanced those two opposites pretty well you talked about
your journey what you did with sustainability but then also you told
the audience why they should care so why should the scaling up Nation care when
we’re talking about sustainability yeah I mean the first thing I this is probably the part where
I tried to pull their heartstrings a little bit and I gave an analogy about backpacking in you know a real remote
area or territory and there’s a rule in backpacking that says whatever you pack in you pack out and the idea is that uh
you know the next person that comes behind you gets to experience the same thing that you got to experience and
have that that feeling that you might be the first person that’s ever stepped foot in this you know section in the history of mankind because you can have
that when if you’re in a pristine area that’s this obscure trail that you wander off and you can be like man has
anyone ever sat here before this is kind of a cool experience if you look around and you saw water bottles or you know
old shirts and you know garbage uh you would immediately know that all right I’ve not been the first person here and
it would taint your experience and so backpacks have this just innate idea of
hey what I take in I have to take out with me everything’s got to come that I brought in and I thought we could apply
some of that mentality to what we’re doing in our lives about our businesses we’re producing you know these emissions
like what are we doing to try to take this out with us when we go and so I think it’s the right thing to do and so
that was my first point is you know I think we should care about sustainability because it’s the right thing to do caring about our environment
leaving in in better shape than in than what we found it and then next I went to really about our businesses which you
know probably most people in that room would care about in talking about how it’s actually good for your business
because our clients whether we know it or not care about our sustainability
because it affects either their reputation and what they’re trying to do or it affects their bottom line because
a lot of our customers and especially you think of like these big food customers that some of us might have
they have public pressure to lower their carbon Footprints and sustainability is
measured in Scopes and so scope one scope two and scope three and scope three is what their vendor
sustainability looks like so if I have a customer that’s let’s say a big food
plant if they’re measuring their scope three which a lot of them are being pressured to do they’re going to look at
well how sustainable is HOH because now my sustainability is AFF affecting their
score and if their score is high they’re uh they’re going to go find another vendor that’s going to help them lower
it because of the public pressure that they’re under Andy when vendors ask you to help them lower their scope three
what kind of questions are they asking you part of why I went on this journey to begin with was that a couple years
ago we kept going through these RFP processes and there would be a page on
there and usually it would be like a couple questions and asking about our sustainability and initially I was so
annoyed by it I was just like why do they care it doesn’t make any sense like who cares what we’re doing like this is
our business and uh I just didn’t understand and then noticed that the question started getting longer and
longer and in the talk I showed people a RFP that we participated in recently and
it had 17 questions all about sustainability and so they wanted to know what our scope one was and if we
were tracking it our scope two scope three they wanted to know if we were um obtaining any of our electric or other
resources from renewable sources they wanted to know all these things and so the questions that we get usually is are
you guys doing anything about it is it even on your radar they’re if it’s not an RFP if it’s just a customer it’s more
of a general like hey do you guys track it do you measure your carbon footprint do you have a sustainability team what
projects are you putting in place to try to lower it some of those bigger things on the RFS they’re getting more granular
about uh what they want to know about us let’s dig a little deeper into scope one two and three and what exactly those are
yeah so scope one is all your direct emissions for your building so for you trace um down there in Atlanta for your
business bus you could think of scope one as if you guys have a a furnace there that’s you know burning propane or
burning gas and the emissions that are going up that’s going to be your scope one for some of our customers if they
have boilers they’re burning you know that gas right on site that that’s going to be part of their scope one emissions
for any of us that had Drive company cars those are all scope one emissions for our companies that we work with
scope two is called indirect and so that’s going to be mostly electricity we’re using so one way that I found it
helpful to remember is thinking about where the burn takes place and so if the burn takes place on our property then
that’s direct emissions and part of our scope one if it’s taking place somewhere else but we’re using the result of that
burn like electricity then that’s going to be scope two then scope three is
everything else outside of that and so think of your travel think of you know
you got pens in your office what did it take to make this single pen what were
the you know emissions to make this one pen it’s a huge scope and uh people say
that your total carbon footprint probably 70 to 80% of it actually comes from scope three but it’s also the
hardest to measure because it can be so granular most companies start with scope one and scope two because we can
calculate those pretty quickly and easily and work on lowering those and then once you’ve really graduated scope
one and scope two people will move to scope three and maybe not try to tackle whole elephant but take little bites out
of it and say like all right we’re just going to start tracking our travel and how much paper we’re using in our
printers or something like that there’s a little red soda company I’m sorry Pop company here in Atlanta so to protect
everybody I won’t say what the name is but they are so into this and they want
to know they want to broadcast that they are putting the
least stress on the environment the people that they’re doing business with are doing the same thing and they want
all of that documented so I think maybe the larger companies are probably the ones that are doing that right now and
eventually I really think that that’s going to be how business is done do you
agree that if somebody listening today hasn’t been asked one of these questions just wait it’s coming 100% yeah and it
makes sense why it starts with the big companies too especially the public ones publicly traded companies they have public pressure to you know be engaged
in this and you know there’s a lot of the population that wants to be purchasing things from companies that
are sustainable or sustainable forward you know operating and if they find out
that they’re not then it’s not like there’s not a plethora of options for someone to get a soda or a piece of
clothing you know or whatever it might be so I only expect it to grow in intensity and uh even the smaller
outfits I think will start looking at it as well that aside Andy you went from
annoyed to these questions to hey this is something I think we could do tell us about that
process yeah so I went to a a networking event for actually data centers data
centers are very big into sustainability lots of pressure when they’re competing for storage and customers they have lots
of pressure on them to be as sustainable as possible and there was a company there that was working with this one
data center that had the software that they created that was monitoring their uh CO2 emission in real time it was kind
of what they were really selling and I got into a conversation with the rep about it and and I knew very little
about sustainability at time but I was just peaked my interest was peaked and so I talked to him about it and then I
started wonder wonder what that would look like with a small company like HOH so I started having conversations and
started figuring out like what are the steps to even dip your toe into these Waters and what I realized is that you
don’t have to go from where you’re at today which might be not doing anything to doing something like like a big soda
company that has a red company brand and we could take baby steps to get there
and one of the first things you can do is just set up a sustainability team in your company and so that was the first
thing I did is I sent out a survey to our group and uh I said hey we’re gonna start a sustainability team and who’s
interested and we’ll do this from time to time we’ll you know create a group for engagement or we’re going to throw a
a party or something like that we need people to help organize it and we’ll send out a survey and usually if I can get you know five or eight people I’m
pretty excited about it and so I sent this survey out and I’m thinking in my head like sustainability like nobody is
gonna want to join this committee and I got 38 responses back saying they’re
interested in being part of the team a lot of questions about like well what is this what are we G to do but that showed
me that there’s a whole lot more people in our company that are thinking about these kind of things and are excited
that they’re part of a company that’s Forward Thinking in matters that pertain to sustainability so we started a team
and uh started talking about hey what things are you guys passionate about what things could we be working on to uh
lower hoh’s carbon footprint but to lower it you need to have a Baseline and
so then we engaged with a company to help us establish our uh footprint and
so we did scope one scope two and we got a footprint for HOH and then we could start looking at small projects that we
could do to lower the footprint and and uh we’re still in that process and so we did a lighting project this year we
looked at solar uh we’ve actually brought in five EVS into the company for people to drive just to test out to see
how it works compared to say a gas car for doing service and uh we’ve just been
pulling that thread slowly and seeing where we can go what was the process like when you brought somebody in and
they started measuring what you were using what did they do yeah mostly grab
bills for gas and for electric um they wanted to know totals of gas consumption
for our vehicles in the field and uh I mean it wasn’t that expensive it uh if
anyone wants to reach out to me feel free and I’m I’m happy to connect them to who we worked with but he’s just a
guy that does this uh it’s kind of his business that he helps companies basically get started in sustainability
he calls himself a fractional sustainability individual I said I don’t know what to do you tell me and uh he
said I need this this and this and probably in four weeks we had a carbon
footprint and uh our plan is to wait till we have a full year and then to do it again after we’ve made some changes
to see like all right it was here now where’s it at based on these changes and can we get a trajectory where we have a
plan to uh keep lowering it and that’s what our sustainability team is going to be focusing on what I love about that is
you didn’t have to purchase all this equipment you didn’t have to do all this outrageous stuff and go find stuff it
was information you already had in your accounting software and they were able to give you a baseline there so
hopefully that paints a positive picture for people that they don’t have to go out and buy a bunch of equipment that
maybe they don’t want to do or maybe they think it’s too difficult yeah and now when we you know we fill out these
rfps and they ask do you measure scope one we can say yes we do do you have a sustainability team yes we do and I
don’t know if any of these companies are actually looking at this data and kicking someone out of a bit or not but
as we’ve all been there like you whenever you have to write no when you feel like they want you to write yes
you’re like o I don’t know like am I going to get you know excluded from this bid and yeah we just took that hurdle
away Inc magazine I think it came out last year was doing an article on why
people leave organizations and actually what people would think was they left to get more
money that was like way down on the bottom of the list but number one was they worked somewhere where they felt
what they did daytoday was making a difference and I I love the story that
you just shared that is speaking directly to that article are there any
examples of where employees have come to you and said oh my gosh this just really
makes me feel like I’m working for a company that cares and it’s actually motivating me to to stay here and to do
more yeah I don’t know if anyone said it that directly but we’ve definitely had um a handful of individuals and they’re
in the younger demographic it seems you know the younger generation cares more and thinks more about um the environment
and also just the meaning of work to them I feel like you know us over 40 got
sucked into this trap that money is the only thing that matters and this newer generation coming out is is more about
is this meaningful work am I making a difference am I making an impact and uh we’ve had a bunch of people raise their
hands and say that you know they’re very interested in the environment and they really appreciate that we’re looking at
it and thinking about it and they want to be part of you know any other beta test that we do whether it be EVS or
something else that we’re trying that is you know a little outside the norm maybe a decade ago maybe not quite that long I
used to teach a course for the association of water Technologies so people had the prerequisite to go take
their lead GA exam and with that that was uh what a lot of people were doing
for companies to show that they spoke the language that uh they knew how
buildings got lead certified and could actually get business a little bit easier if that’s what somebody wanted to
do and and I’ve taught dozens of people it wasn’t a wasn’t a very well accepted course but in each and every time that I
started talking about being green or what lead is people were thinking green
is such hogwash and your wordcloud maybe prove that a little bit and I always
started started out by saying that water treatment and what we do is green no matter how you slice up green because
water treatment is going to allow us to use less natural resources so we’re
putting less carbon footprint less all of those items in the atmosphere so
we’re green that way we also have to pay for all those items so if we’re not using all those items we’re spending
less green so I’ve always been of the mindset that regardless of how you look
at green water treatment has it covered if we take that same mindset and we
start looking at what we can do in our businesses what are some things that come to your mind that we cover each
side of the green I mean one of the first things Trace I think you got to do is is start by measuring the outputs
that we’re doing and uh and they look at greenhouse gases and there’s a lot of greenhouse gases like methane and
nitrous oxide but far in way the one that’s most prevalent is carbon dioxide
and they measure it in metric tons of CO2 and what I did at the the convention
in my presentation is I wanted people to experience like what is a metric ton of carbon dioxide because it’s hard to know
like well how much is that like you know you get your your carbon footprint and it you know ours was
928 metric tons of carbon and I’m like cool is that high is that low I have no
idea I have no understanding of the uh size of that and so what I did at the
convention is if you picture a cube of air up in the sky that’s 27 feet wide by
27 feet tall by 27 feet deep that is a metric ton and that’s a pretty big cube of air in the in the atmosphere but we
also have to remember that a metric ton is not a volume it’s a weight and so it’s about 2200 pounds that’s how heavy
that cube of air is we often time think of air as being weightless but it does have a weight and so that 2200 pounds
you could think of it as like a Mazda Miata that’s how heavy that that cube of air is and if you were to drive a pretty
standard car from San Francisco to Atlanta that would emit about one metric
ton so that’s an idea of all right this is how fast we’re emitting metric tons
and one of the most fascinating things that I’ve learned when I was reading this and I I’m not here to get into a
debate over you know Glo climate change or global warming but the whole idea
behind that is carbon dioxide in air holds more heat than oxygen and so the
more of it we have in the air it heats up and that’s it like that is the whole
basis of global warming climate change whatever it is is the more carbon we’re putting into the air it just holds more
heat than oxygen so if we put in less then we’ll slow that process down and maybe I’m a little thick but that was a
that was a light bulb moment for me I was like oh that makes sense whereas before I didn’t really get what was
going on Andy on the other side of the green you’ve done some things has it
saved you some green yeah I mean we’re still we’re still measuring that and so like I said we did we changed all of our
lights in our uh office here in Chicago over to LED this last year and we’ve
definitely seen a drop in our cost there and so we’ll uh we’re waiting more time to to see like how big of an impact that
was that and same thing with the uh EV you know they they cost a little bit
more than the traditional vehicle that we would uh normally have our reps drive around in um but I I have one and you
know I don’t go to gas stations anymore and I charge it mostly for my home and the average charge that I put on it at
night and I charge I probably charge it two to three times a week but it cost me like two to three dollars to charge it
at my house and the real test is going to be how long does it last which is what I’m most curious about and I plan
to drive this thing until the batteries wear out because I want to see like how long are these batteries going to last and we would typically put uh our reps
in a car close to 100,000 miles that depending on the driver could be between you know two and four years but with
these you know if I can have someone Drive the same car for five six seven years well then it’s going to start to
really paying off and that cost analysis could uh be favorable in terms of the EV
so I’m excited to see where that shakes out I’ve been an early adopter to electric vehicles I took a 2007 Prius
and made it into a totally electric vehicle and that was in uh an Earth Day
fair with georia tech and it was just fun I I never did anything like that and I got to work with a friend of mine and
we did it and uh it also had this super hybrid mode so I got about 110 m per
gallon so and it had like a 50 horsepower motor in it so it didn’t go up any any Hills very very fast but I’ve
been an early adopter I really like the idea that one you don’t have to go to
gas stations two you don’t have to do all the maintenance I mean just controlling a fleet and keeping up with
oh this person needs an oil change this person needs this renewable redone you
don’t have to do any of that but now come the cars of today and Andy you know
this but for those in the nation that don’t this is the real reason that I
have a modern electric car so I have a Tesla Model S it goes from 0 to 6 in 2.3
seconds that is pretty darn cool yeah that is one of my favorite parts of
electric vehicle and a lot I mean almost all of them are Zippy like that like they feel like little go-karts driving
around changing lanes is one of the more enjoyable things that you do in a uh car
if you got to get in front of someone you see your spot where you want to go it’s like go and you’re there H there’s no wind up and it’s a lot of fun but
Trace you’ve been I mean you’ve been an early adapter not only on electric cars but on solar and other things I mean I
would be curious from your perspective I believe you have solar on your home and your business have you seen good savings
going through that endeavor especially with The Upfront cost of solar when I
originally looked into solar and I saw how much it cost I stopped looking into it and one of my good friends Charlie
chetti he’s been on this podcast a couple times he that’s what he does he helps buildings get certified with lead
and he works with companies to make sure their scope three down that’s the business that he’s in and we went out to
lunch and he started telling me about all these different incentives that were there but were going away that I could
take advantage of so I started getting my mental calculator out and I was like wait a second I could buy this asset and
I could write the entire thing off in one year and then take 30% off at the
time that’s that’s reduced now but 30% off on my taxes as a write off okay this
is now real money and then I we started looking at what our payback was okay how
many years will it take for us to actually start making money on our
electric bill and it was about 7 years at that point and then later there was
another incentive that came out that we took advantage of batteries and something that was going on here with
our Electric Co-op was we could not net our meter production so uh with another
Power Company they might say we’re going to look at your entire bill over a month and whatever you consume versus what you
put on the grid we’re just going to net that out and and if you have that solar
is for you because you can now get back your Roi in a much shorter distance with
us here at the office we had to sell it as soon as we made it and I was paying
about 15 cents per kilowatt and I think I was selling it back at Less Than 3 cents so now we put these batteries on
it and now instead of a 3 cent value per kilowatt it was now a 15% value and we
have far surpassed our Roi on that and we we are making money on it we went
without power for8 hours we got struck by lightning a couple of weeks ago and
because of that it it didn’t come in through the solar it didn’t come in through the batteries in fact that all got conditions it came in through the
HVAC so it back channeled there they had to replace the Transformer outside so
the entire office Park was without power for about 8 hours and the team out there
that disconnected the power could not figure out why we still had power and that they did not know where the
disconnect was and they came knocking on the door and we’re like oh no no we’re on batteries and they wanted to make sure that it wouldn’t back feed into
what they were working on so they wouldn’t get electrocuted and of course that’s what they’re going to install when you get that done so I can think of
a couple times that just having our own power available has allowed us to get work done but we are actually making
money every time we are now making electricity and and that’s pretty darn
cool what we just recently started doing was letting our customers know about it it was cool for us I did it for the tax
right off I did it because it was cool I’m a I’m an early adopter in technology cuz I think it’s cool but our customers
said hey you need to tell us about that because now little red soda company they
can now do something with that and that now hopefully as you said puts us at a higher Notch when
people are looking at who’s going to do their water treatment Service uh another thing we did Andy is uh there’s a device
called a sense and there’s some other things out there but the sense is super easy I’ll put an affiliate link on our
show notes page because we have them here at the house but also at the office and it pretty much monitors your ingoing
and outgoing electricity if if you have solar it’s just your user electricity if you don’t but it starts learning
everything that’s on the grid so if you have a toaster it’ll learn that hey the toaster came on for 3 minutes at 8:00
and you’ll see the power output at that and it will it will begin to Benchmark
what you’re always on electricity is versus all the other appliances that are
there and it creates a game out of it so we have an iPad up front in our conference room and all these bubbles
pop up when things come on and our goal was can we get our always on power
reduced and because we started looking at it we started doing something about
it and what we found is all those little Chargers that came with everybody’s cell phones like 10 years ago no one ever
unplugged them and we were converting AC to DC for no reason and we had about 3
kilowatts all the time that was going through uh as are always on well now
we’re down to 1.1 and that was just because we were unplugging things we were not using and that directly
affected the green on how much money we had to pay for power wow so can you get
one of those even if you don’t have solar you can just install one in your business absolutely so if you had solar
you would buy uh they’re called CTS and I can’t remember what CTS stand for but they’re just little Loops that go around
your power if you’re familiar with electricity and I’m not condoning people open up their panels at but if you’re
familiar with that it’s a really easy install and it starts learning all of
your appliances and once it learns an appliance it shoots it up to a database
so maybe Andy you have a toaster oven that I have and because you’ve shared
that information it knows how much power it draws when it comes on it knows the tangent line pattern that it absorbs
when it’s on the grid so now I know I have a toaster OV and because you uploaded did that so it’s it’s just
really cool yeah so I have two questions I’m thinking of one is have you tested a
portable space heater because I’ve always heard those draw crazy amounts of power and were you able to see like wow
this thing is pulling a ton so if the Fire Marshall is listening to this we
have no space heaters in the office that being said oh yeah those things will
just drain your electricity I mentioned that lightning strike that we had earlier the way that we had heat until
we got the new HVAC was we were using strip heat and all that does is just short out electricity to create heat and
we had this huge bubble we couldn’t see any of the other bubbles whenever our heat would come on because of that and
the space heaters are just a smaller version of that all right and then at your home was there anything that Drew
way more electricity than you would have thought our hot tub I was I was amazed
at how much our hot tub was drawing and we had the hot tub forever and it’s something our family really enjoys but
what we did is I ordered a new head that went on the controls and at the time
when we ordered it there was no Bluetooth there was none of that well now you can upgrade all of that so I did all of that myself and now it’s
programmed there’s no sense to keep it at 10 and something degrees during the day we’re not using it so we programmed
it to go to a standby mode and now it heats up when we’re normally going to get into it and that was a tremendous
safe yeah that is very cool you’ll have to send me that link I would like to install those here at work and make a
game out of it like like you guys did like how low can we get our like standing electricity to be because I can
I probably have four or five things plugged in right now that don’t need to be plugged in I think that’s the key
though make it fun when people feel like they’re forced to do something like I
want to buy incandescent light bulbs and now I’m being told I can’t do it well for those of you that know temperaments
I’m a red I didn’t even like incandescent light bulbs but if you tell me I can’t do it I’m going to go find
them now that being said we have all LEDs throughout here but when people are told that they they have to do something
it’s not fun how do you make a game out of it and by us making a game out of
this it saved us money on our electric bill yeah we uh about three years ago at
HOH we moved to open book management and so we share all the financials with everyone in the company and doing games
like that where it’s lowering you know what we’re paying which you know our cost and our and our overhead that can
be a really fun game to show how it affects the profit and any little bit we can do affects the profit and you know
affects bonuses for everyone so I could see that being a great game for us Peter Ducker said and I’m G to mess the quote
up what gets measured gets better Trace Blackmore says if you want to make people care make it a game yeah I agree
with that Andy you shared a video that I think will help everybody in the scaling
up Nation just put less waste into the environment how should we be washing our
hands well Trace I got to give you credit because I actually saw this video for the first time at uh the Mastermind
live event and uh and I thought it was tremendous it’s a TED Talk you actually might know the title of it better than I
do but it’s uh um how to wash your hands or how to dry your hands I’m sure you could you could Google that or type that
into YouTube and find it on the Ted talk but the proper way to wash your hands is obviously wash your hands with soap
rinse them off with water and then to shake them into the sink 12 times just
shake all that water off it looks kind of like you’re having a little bit of a of a nervous breakdown and someone might
look at you funny if you’re in a bathroom with someone but you shake it all off to get all of it off and then you go and take a smaller than normal
slice of paper at the dispenser you don’t need the long one some of those dispensers kick out you know a three
foot long piece of paper you only need one that’s probably about uh six or 10 inches and then you fold it and the fold
is important and I’ve practiced this a lot and I agree with him the fold is important and uh and then you rinse or
you dry your hands and you’re good to go and uh this Probably sounds ridiculous but if you go watch the Youtube video
it’s pretty funny and uh it’s impactful and that was my hope in the the talk at awt was to leave the uh audience with a
very tangible thing that they could do starting today that will in fact make a
difference in sustainability long term just in something simple as how much paper are we using I’ll make sure to put
that link on our show notes page I think it’s like three minutes long I originally found that because we did Ted
Talks as our assignment for the live event and I wanted to lighten the room that hey a TED Talk can be about
anything and the funniest thing was when we did a bathroom break everybody was in
there shaking 12 times it really does work yeah the hard part is convincing your kids to do it kids are the worst
like I watched my son he pulls out like seven of you know the the paper towels and I’m like what are
river what are you doing like you just need one and uh more is better you know
yeah I believe folding it creates capillary action but there is a huge difference I mean my hands have never
been so dry I’m using less and people are thinking weird things of me as I’m shaking 12 times so you get all those
fun things yeah but I have had people come up to me afterwards like months later and be like hey you know I still
dry my hands like that and uh they comment about it so it’s working yes and
I know that there are people out there that are thinking that’s just ridiculous but your hands actually come out dry
when was the last time you left a restroom and didn’t use this technique and your hands were dry you really have
dry hands after this yeah I would like to see a comparison between you know like the uh the hand dryers Dyson makes
the you know the really powerful ones now I’d like to see a comparison between the carbon footprint of a dryer with the
electricity and if you just use one small paper towel you know what is better worse for
the environment didn’t you say something like 259 million pounds of paper towels
would be saved in just this country alone if we did that I don’t remember the number exactly it’s in the video but
it’s a massive amount of trees and it works better Andy I hope that you’ve
given everybody that’s listening today the hope that however you define green
that there’s a benefit to doing that you don’t have to invest a lot when you measure something it just gets better
and you’ve given them some tools to do that and I’m sure people will reach out to you if they have some questions
specifically about what you did but before I let you go I would like to ask you some lightning round questions if
you are ready for those I’m ready so I ask these of all of my guests and it
just gets us to know our guest a little bit better so the first question is if you had the ability to go back in time
and speak with your former self on your very first day as an industrial water treater what advice would you give the
advice I would give would uh center around patience I remember the first
year even two years of my uh my water treatment experience career I always
felt behind I always felt like I didn’t know enough I wasn’t learning fast enough and where I sit today like just
patience it’s going to come to you you’re not expected to know everything and this industry has such a deep well
to it like you can keep learning for a 40-year career so to put all that pressure on yourself that I need to know
everything you know in a matter of a year is not healthy and uh yeah I would have told myself to just slow down and
it’ll come to you and it it’ll it’ll be exactly how it’s meant to be what are the last few books that you’ve read oh
the last few never split the difference as one we’re reading right now um I’ve actually read it before in the past uh
reading that through the Mastermind group uh a lot of people seem to really like that book it is a fun one and I’d
recommend it I also read the dream manager which is kind of an interesting one it’s a program that we’ve rolled out
uh here at HOH starting this year but uh that’s a very short it’s kind of a fable book um about this company that
implements a dream manager program definitely worth a read and the one that had probably the most impact on me
recently was the psychology of money by Morgan howel I think his name is so I don’t know if you’ve read that Trace but
very fascinating just about how we think of money and how we’ve gotten to where we have today he talks a lot about the
honic treadmill and just never you know being satisfied and there’s some really great quotes in there and uh yeah caused
me to think a lot about how I view money and and how I’ve thought about it growing up my grandfather taught me at a
very early age money is a tool and if you ever look at it differently you’re
giving money too much power yeah one of the quotes in there the the ideas that
he said was that uh the hardest Financial skill is getting the goalpost
to stop moving when it comes to money and when he said that I was like gosh that is so true right like you put the
goalpost and then you get there and then you just keep moving that goalpost and it becomes a honic treadle where you’re
just never satisfied he does a really cool job of comparing being rich to being wealthy and he talks about how
rich is what we all think about you know like the watches and the cars and you know the planes and all these celebrities or whatever like they’re
rich wealthy is having the ability to buy all that but not buying all that
because if you do buy all that you don’t become wealthy anymore you just end up poor yeah you just you just spent it all
right you spent it all and so like I was like you know what I would like to one day be wealthy where I could but I choose not to because I don’t need all
that stuff my next question I always set up when Hollywood makes a movie about
your life who do you want playing you however living here in Georgia Georgia I
think makes more movies than Hollywood does now and I had lunch with a friend of mine and he said that’s the bad setup
so I’m going to set it up differently when Georgia makes a movie about your life who do you want playing Andy uh you
know what I’m gonna say Matthew MCC mostly because I just really like his accent my wife and I are rewatching the
first season of True Detective and there’s parts of it that was like wow his hair kind of look looks like my hair so I think that would work have you read
green light I have not I heard that’s really good though oh my gosh Andy it is fantastic and I know you’re an audible
person like I am I am he reads it it is fantastic I could not it’s got some
language in it to be worn but it is just I was I was dying laughing as I was
driving to different accounts highly recommend it yeah I think that’ll be my next book I I was in the audible store
the other day looking at it I don’t know why I didn’t pull the trigger but I got so many books that are in QE but I’ll
get there last question Andy you now have the ability to talk to anybody throughout history who would it be with
and why that’s a really easy question for me trace it would be my dad my dad died when I was 10 so I haven’t had a
chance to talk to him in a long time and I’m now older than he was when he died which is kind of a weird thing and yeah
I would just love to talk to him about you know his life going up and how it felt to be close to my age knowing that
you know you have a terminal illness and you’re leaving a family behind and it would just be so fascinating so um I
would definitely connect with my dad Andy I want to thank you for maybe changing some Minds today about how we
Define sustainability we at least had fun around the topic yeah so thanks for
coming on the scaling up H2O podcast thanks for having me Trace I really appreciate
it Nation I hope that you can see that being green whether the green is
spending less money and saving green or green is putting less resources in use
for whatever it is that we are doing however you define green I hope you see
it fun and I hope you see that the things that Andy has done in his company
they’ve had fun around that I know for a fact the things we’ve done here at my
company we’ve had fun with that and it’s so much fun we’ve made games out of it
folks when you gamify things it just makes things more fun and people want to
win at games so figure out what you want to do and you can have fun with your
team but you’re also going to save green whether that’s paying for the resources
or using less resources it is good all around and I challenge you to look for
ways that you can save on these things because after all it is fun one of the
things that I mentioned that we had fun with was a device called the sense and I’ve got an affiliate link for you to go
and look at the sense it’s scaling up h2o.com sense that’s sen
n and the sense is this little device that you put into your electrical panel
you can get an electrician to install that if you’re not comfortable with it and then you hook it up to your internet
and we have an iPad in our conference room and it shows us every single device
that is on and like I said we made a game out of it and we found all these
things that were plugged in that we were not using well nation that cost us
hundreds of dollars a year to just have something plugged in it was huge money
and now we use that hundreds of dollars when we go out and celebrate the 6K and we now have a budget to do something
else so anyway you can find something fun to do and celebrate Earth Day at the
same time speaking of fun and speaking of someone who loves games that’s James
McDonald and here is a brand new drop by [Music]
drop what welcome to drop by drop with James the podcast segment where we
wonder explore think about imagine and learn and duster water treatment you
guessed it drop by drop together in today’s episode we’re asking
ourself what if H what if the acid feed stops working
on a cooling tower what happens if suddenly there is no acid being fed to a cooling tower on
an acid control program does something happen immediately does
something happen gradually where within the system could this something happen
how long could this lack of acid feed occur before anyone would find out how could you determine remotely that the
acid feed had stopped working what alarms could be set up once the problem has been determined should the acid be
turned back on immediately could turning the acid feed back on immediately cause any problems with the system what should
be communicated to the end user about this occurrence what could be done to prevent it from happening again should
blowdown be adjusted during the response to the lack of acid feed how might the other water treatment chemicals be
impacted due to the lack of acid feed a cooling towers water treatment program is an expertly balanced chemistry if one
part is negatively impacted it may very well impact the other parts of the chemistry as well there’s a lot to think
about when just one part goes wrong knowing the root CS will help prevent you from chasing your tail when trying
to get the program back under control I’m James McDonald and I want to
encourage you to be like water by forming bonds with those around you dissolving new knowledge and making
worthy ripples drop by drop thank you James Nation I hope you
have a great Earth Day in just a few days on the 22nd one of my favorite
Earth days was when I got to drive my converted Toyota Prius I mentioned that
in the interview in an earthday parade and what I did I converted that so it
was an all El electric vehicle as I mentioned in the interview it was not very fast I think it had a 50 horsepower
electric motor in it so I try not to go over too many Hills but so many people were interested in that and at that time
electric cars were something that people just really couldn’t have a concept of how do you do this how do you get from
point A to point B and there wasn’t a lot of infrastructure at the time so I was able to start the conversation there
today Tesla has 30 something thousand charging stations there’s another one
called Electrify America there’s so many charging stations out there there’s not an issue with where you’re going to stop
to charge and maybe you might think well I don’t have time to stop to charge well as Andy mentioned normally we charge at
the office or we charge at home so it’s not a Time issue actually it’s a time saving issue cuz I don’t have to go and
pump anything my car is going to be home for8 hours at least at night anyway so why not plug it in I don’t have to worry
about anything else and it’s ready to go so Nation if you have a range anxiety or
you’re thinking I can never do an electric car 0 to 60 in 2.3 seconds
that’s pretty impressive that changed my mind about Electric cars so I just encourage you to maybe look into that
I’m very fond of that technology it’s like I’m driving a spaceship every time
that I’m in my Tesla I do a lot less maintenance on it and I know there’s a lot of people there that says I will
never drive an electric vehicle I think you have an impression of electric
vehicles that probably doesn’t bring into light all of the features all of
the things that are available us today when we go buy a new electric vehicle
Nation just food for thought happy Earth Day I hope that you enjoyed this episode
I hope you decide to do something that will save you some money I hope that you
have a great week and we’ll have a brand new episode for you next week take care
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