There is a meme that captures something I have watched play out in boardrooms and jobsites for thirty years. A golden retriever sits at a restaurant table, ignored, looking miserable. The label on the dog: “Engineering team, knowing the solution is not technically possible.” At the table, happy and chatting: “Sales team presenting the solution in PowerPoint” and “Excited customer.”It is funny. It is also a slow-motion organizational disaster, and most water treatment companies treat it as an unavoidable feature of doing business rather than a correctable failure of management.In this episode of Drinkable, I go after the full picture: the handoffs nobody manages well, the compensation structures generating the problem, what Frank Blau, Jim Abrams, and Nexstar Network figured out the hard way, the private equity consolidation reshaping our channel, and what independent dealers can do that no PE-backed platform ever will.

Companion episode to this article:

About this episode

Every service call in the water treatment industry is a trust problem before it is a technical problem. In this episode, Greg draws on behavioral science research from a former FBI special agent to explain why homeowners resist the very professionals who can help them most, what that resistance actually signals, and what skilled technicians can do about it in the first five minutes of a service call.

The conversation covers the psychology of threat response, the difference between sympathy and empathy in a customer interaction, why water quality problems create a uniquely high vulnerability gap compared to other home service trades, and how WQA certification gives both technicians and homeowners a concrete bridge across that gap.

If you work in home service, manage technicians, or train water treatment professionals, this episode is for you.

Reference

Schafer, J. R., & Karlins, M. (2015). The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over. Touchstone / Simon & Schuster.

ISBN 978-1-4767-5448-2. Available wherever good books are sold.