Understanding the Landscape of Industrial Water Sales
Ravi Kurani
"Trust, understanding, and quality are the cornerstones of successful sales in the world of water testing"
Exploring the intricacy of water treatment and customer engagement, this episode of Liquid Assets delves into the crucial role of technical expertise and relationship-building in navigating the complex waters of the water industry. Host Ravi Kurani engages with Chris Golden, Senior Director of Sales at Taylor Technologies, exploring his diverse experiences in the water industry. Golden recounts his journey from a chemical engineering graduate to a seasoned professional in industrial water treatment, sales, and marketing. His tenure at prominent companies like Ecolab, Nalco, and Taylor Technologies highlights his adeptness in aligning products and solutions with customer needs. Golden emphasizes the importance of customer understanding and trust in technical sales, advocating a consultative approach.
Delving deeper, the conversation shifts to the specifics of water testing and treatment. Golden shares his in-depth knowledge of balancing water chemistry in various environments, from swimming pools to industrial settings. He underscores the significance of precise water testing in maintaining equipment health, ensuring public safety, and enhancing the effectiveness of chemical treatments. Golden’s blend of professional anecdotes and practical advice offers invaluable insights for entrepreneurs and professionals in the water industry, making this episode a must-listen.
What you'll hear in this episode:
- Real-world Insights from Sales to Water Testing: Chris Golden recounts his career journey, reflecting on his evolution from a chemical engineering graduate to a leader in industrial water treatment and sales. He shares anecdotes from his experiences at various companies including Ecolab and Nalco.
- Deep Dive into Water Testing and Treatment: The conversation delves into the specifics of water testing and its critical role across different environments. Golden emphasizes the importance of precise water testing in maintaining equipment, ensuring safety, and optimizing chemical treatments.
- Golden's Approach to Technical Sales and Customer Engagement: Golden discusses the significance of understanding customers and building trust in technical sales, advocating for a consultative approach to aligning solutions with customer needs.
- Taylor Technologies' Impact and Quality: Golden highlights Taylor Technologies' reputation for quality in their products, explaining how this fosters customer trust and satisfaction.
Listen On:
Watch the interview:
Meet Chris
As a seasoned professional in the water industry, Chris Golden is the Senior Director of Sales at Taylor Technologies. With a background in chemical engineering, his career spans roles in industrial water treatment, sales, and marketing, notably at Ecolab and Nalco before joining Taylor Technologies.
Golden's expertise lies in matching technical solutions with customer needs, emphasizing a consultative approach in sales. His deep understanding of water chemistry and commitment to customer satisfaction have established him as a respected figure in the field.
The Book, Movie, or Show
In our quest to discover the literary influences shaping our guests' visions, one title stand out in Chris' repertoire is Working Genius
The Working Genius is a compelling exploration of personal and professional growth. The book introduces a unique model to understand and utilize individual gifts effectively in teamwork, enhancing productivity and reducing judgment. Lencioni weaves this model into a relatable fable about Bull Brooks, an entrepreneur who discovers a new perspective that revolutionizes his work, team dynamics, and even his marriage. It's strength lies in its simplicity, relevance to all work aspects, and quick applicability. Accompanied by a 10-minute assessment tool, it offers a transformative approach for individuals and teams to discover their 'Working Genius' and apply it in various life areas.
Contains affiliate Amazon links.
Transcript
00:00
Chris Golden
I don't want you to ask for the order until you have their trust. I don't sell anybody anything. What I do is I match our capabilities with our customers. What are you looking for? What do you need to have in order to do that? You need to know your customer. You really need to have walking issues, which is so fantastic, because otherwise it's just transactional. And we're looking for long term sustainable business. Now the game begins.
00:29
Ravi Kurani
Welcome to Liquid Assets. I'm your host, Ravi Kurani. We're going to talk about the intersection of policy, business and management, all as it relates to the world of water. Today we have an amazing guest for you, a good old friend, Chris Golden, that I've seen at multiple pool and spa shows, actually, which is kind of where our paths crossed.
00:48
Chris Golden
Hi, this is Chris Golden. I'm the senior director of sales at Taylor Technologies. Taylor Technologies is a test kit company, so anytime water is being tested, Taylor's a good fit for you.
00:58
Ravi Kurani
Chris, how are you doing today?
01:00
Chris Golden
Oh, I'm doing fantastic, Ravi, how are you doing?
01:03
Ravi Kurani
I'm doing good. Doing really good. Excited to actually join you on the east coast as I'm making this move from the west coast to the east coast.
01:11
Chris Golden
Well, we're going to be really happy to have you. East coast is an incredible area. Lots of stuff going on. Very vibrant. And as talked about, from Washington, DC to Boston, you've got nothing but solid amount of people, opportunity, culture, sports teams. It's a great place. I moved away from here for a little while and was fortunate enough to move back and really enjoy this area.
01:37
Ravi Kurani
Awesome.
01:37
Chris Golden
Yeah.
01:37
Ravi Kurani
Excited to see you there. Let's go ahead and jump right in. I know you have had an extremely wide spectrum of just experience in the water industry.
01:48
Chris Golden
Right.
01:48
Ravi Kurani
Right now you're at Taylor Technologies, which is a water testing company, but you've had a stint from Ecolab to Nalco. You've kind of run from everything from industrial water to swimming pools and spas. A ton to talk about in this episode, you said, you have a really good story. Before we hit the record button.
02:08
Chris Golden
Life is so much fun and just a few years away from retirement, so I just got a chance to look back and see how everything has fallen into place, and it's just amazing. Well, I got out of school in 1981, chemical engineering from Lehigh University. Wonderful year to graduate. If you graduated in 1982, your opportunities were like half of what they were in 1981. Everything was falling into place. And so we're all going on all these interviews, and I saw this notice for a job that was for industrial water treatment. And I was like, wow, that's really cool. Because I didn't want to be in a lab or sitting behind a desk. I want to be out there where things were happening. And it sounded like exactly the job for me. And it was with a company called Nalco. Who is this Nalco?
02:56
Chris Golden
Who's this Nalco group? Well, I did a little bit of research, went like, hey, these guys are pretty cool. Well, I applied for all the jobs. Well, my GPA wasn't the best in the world, so I didn't even get answer back from them. They didn't even know go to heck. They just left me hanging there. So I ended up, of all things, working for a steel mill. I went to go work for a steel mill. And if you know where Lehigh is in Bethel, Pennsylvania. Right there is Bethlehem Steel, by the way. Bethel and Steel also took some really top students from a university, which I wasn't included in. So I really wanted to go work industrial water treatment. Well, I go work for a steel mill, and it put me industrial sales, in technical sales. And where they sent me to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
03:42
Chris Golden
Tulsa, Oklahoma happens to be the heat exchanger capital of the world. There are a lot of chemical engineers in Tulsa. I fit right in. So I did that job for six years, and it was a small steel mill, and son of a gun up the steel mill. We ran out of money, so they ended up closing up shop. And I used that as an opportunity. Come back up to the northeast. Well, I went to go work for the ex president of that steel mill. He brought me back up to the northeast and worked in marketing, which is how I got into that New York area doing some construction products, of all things. And then I met this wonderful woman, who is my wife of 34 years at this point. And she said, what are you doing working construction products and buildings?
04:29
Chris Golden
Well, you have a chemical engineering degree. Why don't you go ahead and use that? Well, I was living at the time in Ben Salem, Pennsylvania, which is right next to a town called Trevos. Trevos is the home of Betts Industrial water treater. And who's their biggest competitor? Nalco. Well, I float my resume out there, and I'm going along with my interviews with Betts. And one of the headhunters says, well, you ought to put your resume over with Nalco. So I put my resume over with Nalco. I got hired in like, five weeks from the day of the first phone call with Nalco, because they were looking for a chemical engineer, sales and marketing background that knew steel mills. Wow. So, ravi, you want to guess what steel mill I ended up at? Which? Bethlehem Steel.
05:16
Ravi Kurani
Bethlehem Steel. Oh, my.
05:20
Chris Golden
That is that amazing. And so I'm down there, and it's the Baltimore plant that I'm at with them. And here you've got about three or four chemical engineers from Lehigh that are in that plant. So, it's funny the way life comes together. It's funny the way life comes together. And then the kind of the end of the story is that I found a little town that my wife and I got a house in Hunt Valley, Maryland. Cockiesville, Maryland, which is just south of Sparks, Maryland. And so we're hanging out there, and I'm doing my work at the steel mill and a paper mill, and I got a couple other steel mills. And I meet this person from Taylor Technologies. Well, Taylor Technologies, I use some of their stuff to test water. And so we exchanged cards.
06:07
Chris Golden
It was Pat Fitzgerald, who's the vice president of marketing, that she and I became pretty good friends. She calls me up and says, hey, we're looking for somebody to kind of help us out as a consultant on industrial water. Would you look at our marketing stuff and see if we're heading the right direction? And here it turns out that Taylor technology is just, like 2 miles up the road from you. Well, I do that for about seven years. And Paul woodden, the owner of Taylor, says, why don't you come join us? So I go, that's interesting. I've got a pretty good territory. I'm doing some really good stuff industrial water treatment and working on power plants at this point. So I had a lot of power plants, a lot of the Pennsylvania powered light business.
06:45
Chris Golden
Went home to my wife and said, hey, eileen, Paul just offered me a job. She goes, oh, I love those guys. They're fantastic. Would you wear better clothes? Because I was a circus guy with getting chemical stains up. I said, well, sure. Yeah, I guess so she goes, yeah, go ahead and do that. And so now, 16 years later, that I'm here with Taylor. It's just a wonderful company, wonderful ride, and I get a chance to meet with people like you. That's amazing.
07:12
Ravi Kurani
And Taylor just went through an acquisition as well just recently.
07:15
Chris Golden
So you've been through so many companies.
07:18
Ravi Kurani
That you've been at have kind of gotten sucked up by much larger companies as well, which has been.
07:23
Chris Golden
Well, yeah. Well, Nalco was the largest industrial water treatment company in the world. They were probably 4 billion at the time ecolab, with everything they were doing, they were probably around 7 billion or so when they bought NalPa. It was quite a surprise. It was quite stunning that Nalco got bought by ecolab. But there were great synergies with those two companies because Ecolab's more food side processing, side focused, and Nalco is more the boilers and cool where the peripheral stuff that keeps the plant running, keeps the plant cool, helps the process. So it was a great synergy, and I believe they have played that very well.
08:05
Ravi Kurani
One thing I want to kind of go back to is you started off as you studied chemical engineering, and then you kind of went into this technical sales position. A lot of the conversations I've had and the guests we've had in the past is around messaging, right? Messaging and storytelling, which I feel like is the number one job of somebody that's in sales. Right. You're trying to convince your customer that they should get this product that they need. That solves a particular problem. Our audience is a slew of entrepreneurs in technology from Silicon Valley, folks in the water industry as well. The question I kind of have is in this mirror that you look at, right in you, projecting a message to your customer for them to potentially buy the product that you have. What are some bullet points?
08:54
Ravi Kurani
Or let's explore the kind of narrative of what is a technical sales representative's job. And as you were kind of in the various parts in your life, be that at Bethlehem of Steel when you were with ecolab, Nalco or even Taylor, is there anything that you can kind of provide to the audience on what do you tell somebody from a technical sales perspective why water testing is important or whatever? Even in the past, what those jobs.
09:18
Chris Golden
Were, sure, you really have to look at the implications of not using your service. And I don't sell anybody anything. What I do is I match our capabilities with our customers. What are you looking for? What do you need to have in order to do that? You need to know your customer. You really need to have walked in the shoes, which is so fantastic because I was a customer of Taylor. My vice president, general manager of Taylor, was a customer of Taylor. Our brand manager at Taylor was a customer of Taylor. We all were customers. It was so cool. You got to understand your customer and you understand your customer. Then it makes it very easy to match your products or your solutions with what they're looking for. Now, just yesterday, I'm not excited. Just yesterday I sent an email.
10:18
Chris Golden
I got a chance to review an email from a purchasing manager from a company, and they have a group of retail stores. And these group of retail stores use our products to test people's water samples when they come in. So they have great trust in our products, and they're very good company. And he dispenses really good recommendations. And they've been very successful because people can trust them to give them the right answers, not just sell them products, but help them keep their pools looking nice so that people come over like, oh, my gosh, your pool is beautiful. What do you do? How do you do this? Well, we don't have their test kit business. We don't have the kits that they sell to their customers.
11:06
Chris Golden
We have the stuff they do in the labs, but we don't have the stuff that they send home to the customers. Well, this gentleman wrote an email, hey, sharpen your pencils because you want to be competitive. I want to give you this business, but you got to be competitive. I'm like, whoa, wait a second. You use our stuff for the lab and you send the customers home with a different company's product? Well, not all testing products match up, and not all testing products have that high quality. And that's the wonderful thing about Taylor's. We're known for our quality. And I can tell you, the guys in the back build it in building the quality, it's fantastic. I'd never have to worry about that. Anyway, so I said to the purchasing manager, actually wrote him an email.
11:49
Chris Golden
I said, well, let me ask you a question. If they go home, the customer goes home. You said, you need to have alkalinity up, you need to add this chemical into your water, and they go home and they have a different test kit from a different company. And they test the water and they go like, well, wait a second. It's not low. It's actually really good. But their test results are incorrect. With that other test kit, well, you lose the trust. And I always say that the cornerstone of every transaction, there's that degree of trust, right? The lower the dollar amount. Doesn't have to be a lot of trust, but you have to have some trust. I'm going to give you some money and you're going to give me something that's going to have that value. I got to trust you.
12:40
Chris Golden
The bigger the value, the more trust that you need. Well, you erode that trust. And especially, let's say, in the service that you're providing them, that you're going to be selling them a product, chemicals. In this instance, you're going to be selling chemicals. There's got to be that degree of trust, and you have to have a track record. Well, now, if they go home with another test kit product that may not be as good as mine or as good as the one you used in your store, and they get a different result, Ravi, they're not going to trust you. So I said, best chance you have of keeping that trust envelope. That trust is sending them home with a good test kitten. Who's better than mine? You're using mine in your store. You should have your customers using theirs at home.
13:23
Chris Golden
And he went back, he's like, you know, darn good argument. It's a darn good argument. So there's always that degree of trust. And I'll tell you, I don't make any money from that kind of stuff. But I went through some courses at Wilson learning. Wilson learning. If you don't know that group, they've got this wonderful course called counselor salesperson. I recommend that for anybody who's selling any product, or even if you're a manager of a company or an owner of a company, and you're trying to reach out to those people that could use your product, counselor salesperson is absolutely wonderful. Wonderful course. Awesome.
14:04
Ravi Kurani
Okay. And that kind of has this ethos, or the tenant is around basically building trust and making sure that you understand your customer in this interaction.
14:13
Chris Golden
Basically, no trust. No need, no want, no satisfaction. No trust. I had a young guy that just got out of college, and he came to work for us, and I did exactly what any sales manager would not do. I said, micah, I don't want you to ask for the order. I don't want you to ask for the order until you have their trust, because otherwise, it's just transaction. And we're looking for long term sustainable business. That's what we build our companies on, long term sustainable business. We're not going to hoodwink anybody. And of course, when I got out of college, all my chemical engineering friends went like, oh, you sold out? You went into sales. Well, guess what? Half of those guys ended up going into sales eventually when they found out, like, oh, wait a second. There's more to this. So no trust.
15:11
Chris Golden
You have no trust. I want you to gain their trust, Mike. I want you to become a friend. I want you to ask them about their business. I want you to ask them about what keeps them up at night, what challenges do they have, and is there any way that we might have something that fits their bill? Don't go in there and product sell. Hey, look at my test kits. Well, they may not want test kits. They may be looking for a software solution. We have a software solution. So gain their trust. And then once you get their trust, then you got to develop that need. What is their need? Ask the questions, what are their need? And then, no trust. No need. You find out that they have a need, then they say, well, no, I don't want your solution.
15:52
Chris Golden
And that's when the game begins. That's when the game begins. So, really, the whole thing is when I go back to understanding your customer. You really need to understand your customer and what his challenges are and do your homework. I don't mind sharing that. I got him very embarrassed at a sales call. I was out making some sales calls in Ohio, and I got a chance to meet with the owner of a company. It wasn't a very large company, but it was a good company. And after all the pleasantries, he looks at me and says, okay, chris, what's on the front page of my website? I don't know. I'm embarrassed to sit here and tell you that I don't know what's on the front page of your website.
16:38
Ravi Kurani
Sure.
16:40
Chris Golden
Now, here's where life and fate is. Very funny, Jim. Would you tell me what's on the front page of your goes? I just got into dust control. You got into dust control? I had the largest residual dust control application in the United States. It was at Bethlehem steel, at the sitter plant, where I was applying a residual dust control on this hot sitter that was going up into a stockhouse, and they didn't want it dusting the stockholse. So I fed it at a 10% solution at a rate of about 0.2 to 00:22 pounds per ton of product. And I used a spray header that was. And the guy sat there goes like, oh, my gosh.
17:25
Chris Golden
I said, now I'm really embarrassed that I did not look at your website, because I happen to have some really strange expertise in that area that I ran an application like that for six years. Wow, that's such an awesome story.
17:40
Ravi Kurani
Yeah.
17:44
Chris Golden
You keep your eyes open and you get around enough stuff happens. And it's great stuff. Yeah, it's great.
17:51
Ravi Kurani
Let's double click a little bit into the kind of applications of where Taylor is. You kind of started off, which was a great story, that you literally were the customer of Taylor technologies, and Taylor is a water testing company. Can you kind of walk the audience through? Some of them may not even know what kind of water testing is. If you can start from the layperson's term of, why do we even test water, what needs to be tested in a swimming pool, in a cooling water tower, in a steel plant? What exactly is the world of water? Testing? Is kind of the question.
18:27
Chris Golden
Yeah. Did you know rich Gottwald?
18:30
Ravi Kurani
No.
18:32
Chris Golden
He was the chairman, I guess, of APSP, american pool of spa professionals at the group. That was before the PHTA, and it was on manufacturers council. I was one of the last people he had a chance to talk to were at a show, and he said to me, can I get a half hour? Yeah. So we're there, and he says, where does Taylor fit in the world? And I was like, wow, I love that question. Okay, so we're in the pool and spa industry here. We're at a show. There are three people that love us. The first people that love us are the bathers. Why do the bathers love you? The bathers love us because we put sanitizer in the water to make sure that the bacteria is in check, that there's no disease in the water.
19:20
Chris Golden
And we do that by feeding chlorine and oxygen. We feed chlorine, and Taylor has tests for the chlorine. So the bathers love us because we help them stay healthy. Wow. Okay, great. Now, the second group of people that love us are the equipment people, like the heater people, the pump people, the filter people. Because if we don't keep the water balanced, if we don't keep the water from being not being scalant in nature or not being corrosive in nature, we keep it right there in the middle where it's nice and it's pleasant, it's not lumpy, it's wet, it's cold, it's not messing anything up. The equipment people love us because their equipment lives longer. They have less warranties.
20:02
Chris Golden
So if you do the water balance testing, the ph, the alkalinity, the hardness, which we can get into a little bit, as long as we keep those in line, the equipment's healthy and everybody's fine. The equipment people love us, and they go, well, okay, so people love us. The equipment people love us. The third people that love us are the chemical people. Why do the chemical people love Taylor? Because what I found, especially the last four or five years of my professional career industrial water treatment, was that the probability that a chemical gets added is directly proportional to the trust in the test result. So if you trust your test result, if you trust the information that's in front of you will act on it. If you don't trust the information that's in front of your chances are, do not act on it.
20:51
Chris Golden
So, with us, the action that occurs after you do a test is typically a chemical is added, right? So the probability a chemical that gets added is proportional to the trust in the test result. So the chemical people love us. So the bathers love us, the equipment people love us, and, boy, do the chemical guys love us, because the business that we're in, Ravi, is not test kits. We are the best tools for selling chemical. We're the best tools for selling chemical. You use us, you get a good test result, you're going to add that chemical sales will go up. That's kind of where we fit in. And fortunately for the Woodens, who had this company before, and when I joined, they built this wonderful manufacturing facility. Manufacturing people with just a quality mindset. We have our own plastic injection molding plant.
21:52
Chris Golden
They know what a good box looks like. They know what a good comparator looks like. We're not inspecting in quality. We're making quality. And working for a company like that is a dream. Is a dream. My first steel mill that I worked for, the pipe and two mil, they did not make good pipe. One third of the sales calls I went on involved defective material. 33% of the calls I went on, it started out with, come on back. Take a look at this garbage.
22:22
Ravi Kurani
Oh, my gosh.
22:25
Chris Golden
I go up, I wear tailor on my shirt. I go up to a retail store, Ravi. I've had gone to retail stores before. They open up, they see the tailor on my shirt, they unlock the door. They open up the door. Oh, my gosh. Are you from Taylor? Come on in. We got to show you the wall of Taylor or the shelves of Taylor. They're so proud of our product because it's quality and it helps them sell.
22:48
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, yeah. Makes a complete amount of sense. And I know Taylor's also in a lot of other industries, too. What other markets do you guys cater to? And back to your kind of three points around the bathers, the equipment companies, and then the chemical companies. Are there similar lists, or what does a kind of rest of water look like?
23:08
Chris Golden
So, the steel mill that I worked at, Bethel and Steel, we had about 15% to 20% of the business when I started there. And in about three years, we had 85% of the business. And of course, hey, I'm going in there to a steel mill. And I'd work for a steel mill. So I talked their language. I bid there. I walked in their shoes. I understood the implications. We had a couple of organizations that would support the people that were there. American iron and steel engineers. Aise was one of them. And then we had our own little club, Sparrows Point engineers club, and we get together monthly. We get Speakers to come in and they talk about everything in the world, just like your podcast, everything in the world. It's not about steel wells, it's about retirement.
23:55
Chris Golden
It's about 2000 was coming up, the year 2000 coming up, and we had a guy in from the power company, local power company. I got a chance to sit with them and talk, and I said, how do you feel about midnight, January the first, 2000? How do you feel when it clicks over? What's going to happen? And he goes, Chris, some of my plans are already there. I went, whoa, wait. You changed the clock on your plcs, you changed the clocks in your plants? He goes, yes. I said, brilliant. Some of them, they're not all chair. They're not all going to turn January the first at midnight. I was like, I am blown away. I am blown away. Well, they had these engineers clubs that got very involved in the engineers clubs.
24:52
Chris Golden
And at the beginning it's like, oh, you're just the water guy said, well, you know how much steel you can make without water? None. The blast furnace, they did that. It's not l as in mexican, spanish l, but it's l because they had ABCDEFG. Well, they finally got to l blast. El blast. Blast furnace was the largest blast furnace in North America, and billion dollar piece of equipment making, what's it, 10,000 tons, I think, of iron a day. And you put your iron ore in there, and you put coke in there, and you burn the coke and it heats up the iron and it melts the iron makes it liquid, and you send it down to the Bof to further process it. Well, you can imagine there's a lot of heat, so you don't want the system to melt. Right.
25:41
Chris Golden
So you got cooling water. Cooling water. I handled the cooling water and the gas scrubbing on that facility, and the cooling water was critical to making sure that the health of that blast furnace, because if you didn't properly cool it would melt. Yeah, you'd have a billion dollars worth of molten steel right there. So the cooling war is very important. The water was very important. And when I talked about the water in their terms, it made sense. Trinidad. Oh, that's what I'm doing. I'm keeping a friend of mine, Denny Dorham, used to say, and I was very young in the industrial water treatment business. What are your customers looking for? And I go into the engine well, they're looking for no bacteria. They want to make sure the bacteria is taken care of. They don't want it to be scaling.
26:32
Chris Golden
They don't want to be goes, no, I'm talking about your customer. What does your customer want? Your customer wants the water to be cold, wet and not lumpy. Cold to take away the heat. Wet, they can flow it, not lumpy, so it doesn't clog up anything. Cold, wet and not lumpy. They don't care about the specifics of the engineering or the chemistry that's in the work. That's all they want to do. They want to just keep making their iron. They want to keep making their steel. They want to keep processing their center very quickly through, gosh, just osmosis, I guess. Just adopted my customers viewpoint and everything went very smoothly. In fact, I got so involved with the Aise group that I was the first associate member of that AISC organization, become the local president of the chapter. They changed the bylaws.
27:32
Chris Golden
I could become the chapter president, which is so cool. Just so accepted. I was one of the gang. I was one of the gang. And it's because know truly understood my customers business. And I gotta say a side note on this is that my son has a degree in marketing from Towson state. Got his MBA in marketing. And you know what he does, Ravi, for a company, he does research on industries to find out what's critical for them and what opportunities his company has with those customers. He's jumping into his customers shoes. Yeah. Awesome. Amazing. Yeah.
28:16
Ravi Kurani
I want to tap into what you just said a second ago when you said cold, wet and not lumpy for the audience, and even for me, water is wet. And when you say not lumpy, I get the cold side of it.
28:29
Chris Golden
What is wet and lumpy? Not lumpy is there are times when you back up. Water wants to be balanced. Water wants to be balanced. And the two main things that make up that balance, I should say three. But in the pool and spa world, we kind of fix our ph. We want our ph at about 7.5. Why do we want our ph at about 7.5? It's ph of our eyes. You get far away from that and your eyes start to sting. And are you going to go into a pool and swim if your eyes sting? No. So it's around seven and a half. So you want your ph to be around seven and a half. That's kind of like, that's a stake in the ground. We need the ph to be there. But then we've got these two other things that are involved.
29:18
Chris Golden
One of them is calcium. Calcium is hardness. Why do we single out hardness? Why do we talk about hardness? Well, hardness is one of the few things in the world that has inverse solubility to temperature. Well, what the heck does that mean? Just about everything we can think of increases in solubility as the temperature goes up. Remember the science experiments where you get a pan of water and you put some sugar in there, and you put way more sugar than the water can dissolve, and you're like, okay, it's all said now, you put it on a stove and you heat it up. What happens to the sugar? It dissolves. Its solubility increases as the temperature goes up. Well, with calcium and magnesium, the other part of hardness. But with calcium, as the temperature goes up, its solubility goes down. Its solubility goes down.
30:07
Chris Golden
So it has inverse solubility. And then what happens when calcium comes out of solution, when calcium is going to deposit? That's the positive section. Well, you need a negative section over here to kind of combine and neutralize. Term. Well, it's a thing called carbonate alkalinity. Carbonate alkalinity. What is carbonate alkalinity? It's carbon dioxide dissolved in water. Alkalinity. Carbonate alkalinity is carbon dioxide dissolved in water. Right. So you got this calcium, and you got this carbonate alkalinity get together and form calcium carbonate. Well, if there's a lot of that, if there's a lot of it, you're going to get a lot of calcium Carbonate. You're going to get a lot of scale. You're going to get this white crusting stuff, and it's going to crust around the walls. It's going to crust in your sandfold. It's going to crust in your pipes.
30:57
Ravi Kurani
And I know.
30:58
Chris Golden
Go look up, do a Google search for an image of scale. Scale in a pipe. Scale a pipe. And you'll see some great images that come up. So that's scale. So that's when things get too much out of balance. When it's too hot. Well, what happens when it's too low? What happens with stuff like pure water? Like any of your bottled waters? The bottled waters, aquafino, all those are pretty much reverse osmosis water. So what they do is they take, usually a city water. I did some work at a Pepsi plant. You take some along with all the other stuff. You take city water and you run it through reverse osmosis and take all those dissolved solids out of it, 95% of the dissolved solids. So it's devoid of dissolved solids. It doesn't have that calcium and alkalinity in there.
31:44
Chris Golden
So what happens with that water? Well, it's very aggressive. It's very corrosive. It's corrosive. So over here we got deposits forming and over here we got deposits going away. We got retaken weight. And so that water wants to balance itself and it's looking for calcium and alkalinity and calcium. Well, calcium, that's in your plaster, your pool, that's in your grout between your tiles. And if you start seeing your plaster starting to fall apart or the grout start to disappear from in the tiles, that's because your water is too aggressive. It's not right there in the middle. And where is the middle? Two or 300 parts per million of calcium alkalinity and 100 parts per million of carbonate alkalinity. Boom, there you go. Seven and a half ph.
32:30
Chris Golden
I just solved all the problems in the pool, which is what you want to monitor for, and you want to add the chemicals when you need to keep them at those points. And this is the fun part. Now, in the pool world, we just go for that neutral lsi, we go for that balust work. What do we do in the industrial world? Well, I said cold, wet, not wealthy and cold. Well, we're taking heat away. A lot of times in cooling towers, we're taking heat away. In boiler systems, we're putting heat in. Well, in a pool system, pretty much, you have one temperature, or in a spa system you have one temperature. There is no difference. In an industrial system, you have hot water and cold water.
33:19
Chris Golden
In a cooling tower, we're going into that blast furnace and we're grabbing the heat away and my temperature is going up about 15 to 20 degrees fahrenheit. 15 to 20 degrees fahrenheit. And we're grabbing that water and we're taking back. We run it over a cooling tower, evaporate off and we're cooling it down, right? So we have these differences in temperatures. Well, that creates a different water balance. At the hut, if I balanced and made my neutral water for my cold water, well, temperature plays a part in that saturation index, in that stability, because calcium has an inverse solubility. So it's going to be really soluble at this point, no big, but you heat it up, it's going to want to come out of solution.
34:06
Chris Golden
So if you have this water is balanced and you're not worried about your hardware, you form scale in that system, it comes out and you're outbound. So what you do is, in the industrial world is you push it one way or the other. You either really lower the ph and feed acid and keep it down to its corrosive water, and then you feed a corrosion inhibitor, orthophosphate, zane, that kind of stuff, or you let it cycle up where it becomes positive. In LSI, up to about two. You create the scaling water, and you feed scale inhibitors.
34:37
Ravi Kurani
Scale inhibitors? Yeah.
34:38
Chris Golden
And that's the industrial world. So the industrial world where we can't do that in pools because people swim in them. Sure. We can't have those chemicals in, but in my industrial waters, nobody swim. Well, hopefully nobody's swimming in them. And we feed those chemicals to keep them cold, wet, and not lumpy, which.
34:57
Ravi Kurani
Kind of goes back full circle to your initial point you made of. You have to trust the test, right? If in both of these scenarios, you're having to either have a high ph or a low ph in your cooling water tower application or in your swimming pool, you're keeping people safe by making sure you have that ph fixed, and then you're working with the calcium one way or the other. If your input methodology, if your test is incorrect, if you can't trust the test, then your billion dollar asset, that is your cooling water tower, probably goes down the drain, or your pool is just nasty, right? You can't swim inside there. It's unsafe, and it probably ruins your equipment, probably ruining your plaster 100%, which goes back to that initial statement you made.
35:38
Chris Golden
So, a lot of times I talk about the industrial water treatment business as being, if all of your accounts, if you walk into this industry, all of your accounts are perfect, and they're all just running right down the rails, and you have no problems. You will know nothing about this industry. It's when something jumps off the tracks and something goes haywire, and you start getting scale in a system like that. Nestle play at the fifth tower, where they're taking their blowdown and feeding into anyway they were messing up. That's when you learn. It's like CSI. Our dead body is a scaled cooling tower, or it's a corroded heat exchanger. Now the game begins. And so you go in there and you want to learn about the system, and you learn about all the equipment that's in the system.
36:27
Chris Golden
You take a look at the water, and you start writing list of what could be the problem. You're making a list what could possibly be the problem. And the last thing you do not want on that list is that I didn't do my test correctly, that I don't know what my water chemistry is, because I'm not using a good test kit, or my reagents are bad, or the test results are bad. You don't want that to be on your list. And so that's just one more thing that's not on your list. And that's why we're the favorite of so many people, because they don't have to question. It's why I had no problem jumping over to Taylor when Paul offered me that job was because I never got a reagent from them that was bad.
37:15
Chris Golden
I never got a test kit from them that was bad. I could always test my trust, my test results. And so what a calming feeling. Now I know that, okay, it's something mechanical. By the way, anybody who's been in any of my service technician classes or my chemistry classes at international pool or western pool, I always make sure to tell them that anytime you talk about water maintenance is over 90% mechanical, less than 10% chemical. And we're all chemical guys. We're trying to sell the chemical. That's another key cornerstone to my consulting when I was doing water treatment was I would recognize the mechanical problems. I wouldn't just throw chemical at it all. My counterparts, they sell chemical. We got a chemical fix for that, when a lot of times it's mechanical. We were down at a section of the steel mill.
38:11
Chris Golden
They asked us to come in. This is before we took over a big part of plant. Probably a reason why we did take over a big part of plant. Was there having a problem at the rolling mill, at the hot strip, all. And they were scaling up a furnace, and it was really a big problem. And they invited all these different water treatment companies in. And my boss, Tim and I, were fortunate enough to go last, and went in there and we told them all the mechanical things they needed to do. You need some filtration. You need to do this, you need to do that. And guy finally stood up. So, would you tell us what the chemical answer is to this? We didn't go in selling our chemistry.
38:50
Chris Golden
We went in selling our consoling services and the mechanical fixes, which we didn't get paid for. Mechanical fixes. You got paid for the chemical. But the chemical is that last 10%.
39:01
Ravi Kurani
Yeah.
39:03
Chris Golden
When systems are really messed up, if your softener at your house or your boiler blows up and you're feeding hard water into, but there's no amount of chemical you can feed Ravi to solve that, it's over 90% less than 10% chemical, and it's truth you can set your watch by. Yeah.
39:25
Ravi Kurani
I ask everybody this question before we sign off, Chris, and it's, is there a book, a tv show, a movie that has had a profound kind of overview effect or impact on the way that either you look at the world or the way that you look at the world of water?
39:45
Chris Golden
Well, I hate to sound like a broken record, but I go back to that counselor salesperson of Wilson Lardy. I went through that course in about 1991. Wow. That's a long time ago, wasn't it? Holy. And it just showed me a path to, if you want to, say, be a consultant, to be a consultant to people, rather than a salesperson, find those pain points. Something's also very powerful in that is there are business motivations and there's personal motivations. If you can find a personal motivation, then you're doing really good. Like, if I go into a plant and I talk with an engineer, and he goes, yeah, that heat exchanger scales up all the time. We got to keep cleaning it. And what does that mean to you?
40:34
Chris Golden
Well, you know what it means to me is I got to do it after work because I can't do it while they're producing product. So I got to stay here late, and I miss my girls softball games. I love my daughter. I miss her softball games because I got to stay here and clean that heat exchanger. Well, hey, Joe, if I could show you a way that you don't have to clean that heat exchanger, you can make those softball games. Would that be good to you? You think he's going to hire? So that's a profound Armageddon. I love the movie Armageddon. Okay. I don't know what that's telling me, but just asteroids coming towards Earth, and I'm a fan of books.
41:16
Chris Golden
I got to think of the one that I just read, which basically talk about the different personalities and skills that people have at work and how to bring them together and how to make sure you hear about, hey, let's get the right people on the bus, and then we'll get them in the right chairs. Right? We'll get them in the right seats. I'm all about getting people in the right seats that don't have somebody that doesn't like numbers, doing numbers all the time. You don't have somebody that's extroverted working there in a computer. Get him in front of customers, in front of other people. Those books that I like to read. I wish I could remember the name. I just finished it up. I'd have to look at my Kindle, but it was good book.
42:00
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, no problem. Send it to me after and we'll actually throw them on your show notes. So we'll definitely put awesome. Chris well, thank you so much for the time. This was super insightful. I loved listening to your I always love listening to your stories of the world that kind of used to be with you joining from industry all the way to the pool and spa. Thanks again for coming on. Chris.
42:25
Chris Golden
Oh, I appreciate that. I appreciate your invitation. I appreciate your friendship and I look forward to seeing anymore become east coast. That's awesome. And we certainly will see each other.
42:33
Ravi Kurani
At the shows, definitely. And for all those of you out there, you can find liquid assets wherever you listen to your podcasts, be that on Google, Apple, or on Spotify. You can go to liquidassets CC and hit the subscribe button to never miss an episode.