The Sprinkler Nerd Show

Welcome back to another episode of the Sprinkler Nerd Show. I'm your host, Andy Humphrey, coming to you from the 45th parallel, the 45th parallel. That might make you wonder what parallel you are on. What is your parallel? It's not typically something that we think about unless we're talking about the seasons or the amount of sunlight.

We kind of just take for granted where we live, but not necessarily in reference to a parallel. I think we all know what the equator is. Right? Zero. So 45 would be halfway to the North Pole. I'm on, I should say 45th parallel north. I didn't clear, I need to clarify that. 45th parallel north, which runs directly across West Grand Traverse Bay in Traverse City, Michigan.

And today I'm taking my sailboat, which is a 35 foot sloop. It's 1961 Allberg 35 hull number two that was gifted to me by some friends in the. Awesome story that I almost want to tell you right now because I'm on her, but let's save that maybe for another time because it's not super relevant. But what is relevant is I'm on right now, I think the second largest body of freshwater.

I should fact check that because this is Lake Michigan. And I believe Lake Superior is the largest of the Great Lakes in terms of total volume and then Lake Michigan. So this must be the second largest body of water. And there's all kinds. Here's a fun facts about the Great Lakes, most of which we should probably know because of the industry that we're in and actually we should just likely know as American citizens because this water is in the United States, uh, although it touches Canada, no, that's not true.

Lake Michigan does not touch Canada. It touches the upper peninsula of Michigan. Lake Superior touches Canada and then the other Eastern Great Lakes touch Canada. Anyway, I'm on Lake Michigan. I'm returning my boat to dry dock, which is about a four and a half hour power and this week got a little ahead of, got a little ahead of me and I didn't record an episode and I'm hoping that when I get to port here in another hour, I can sit down and see if any of this recording actually came out.

I'm, I've got this newer microphone, it's handheld cause the last time I recorded an episode with the wireless lavaliers, it didn't come out so well. I'm looking here at my iPhone and at the, you know, sort of. The, I don't have the words for it, but the, the sound waves, yeah, the sound waves. And I can clearly see my voice and I don't know how much of it's being filtered out with the noise.

You can maybe hear the sound of my atomic four engine purring away original engine, which is freaking crazy that an engine from 1961 still works from what I understand. Atomic fours are, you can't kill them as long as you maintain them, you can't kill them. And they're heavily used in tractors. Some of you guys listening are familiar with engines and mechanics.

I'm not and owning this boat, I've become more and more familiar, particularly this year on how carburetors work because I don't ever, most of us don't have to mess with carburetors on our vehicles unless you have an antique vehicle and such. So I had a couple issues this year with float sticking and fuel filling the basin, the bottom of the carburetor and it's spilling out.

And then there's a vacuum tube that on this model sucks it out, returns it to the top of the engine. So, yeah, became a little bit of a, I guess a novice expert, even though those words are opposites. I'm a beginner at engine repair. So anyway, there's a lot to think about when I'm out here for a couple hours on Lake Michigan because the water is fresh and there are places, many places in the United States and the world where there's no water, yet I look out here and it's hundreds of feet deep fresh water.

And here in Traverse City, we have two bays, West Bay. East Bay. And there's a 20 mile long peninsula. That's a couple of miles wide and on East Bay, not far from my house, it gets almost 600 feet deep, which is pretty incredible of fresh water. And, uh, you know, it's just fascinating that living around here, people take water for granted because it's right here and there's so much of it.

Yet the population is in very dense around here. So I wonder what, I wonder what the world might look like in 50 years. And in 500. 100 years, will we continue to build where there's no water, or will these areas become more populated and what kind of conversations will we be having as a society as it as it relates to that?

Will we allow development to take place, such as here in northern Michigan, where there's a lot of water? What, what kind of conversations will we have, and will this land become extremely valuable because of its water resource, and will the arid deserts be devalued over time? Will water play into the future value of property?

Not because of the mineral, the water rights on the property, but because of access to it and people wanting to build, uh, build here and grow these communities. So, anyway, as I sit here on Lake Michigan, solo, on my boat, I have the auto pilot running. And you guys would laugh if you saw my autopilot because this boat has a tiller, which is super fun when you're sailing.

because you get a really good feel. But when you let go of the tiller, the boat literally turns immediately. It does not drive straight because of the prop wash that comes off the prop uh, against the rudder. It just turns immediately. So I've got the tiller tied off to a cleat on the port side with some tension and it steers a straight line and if I need to deviate a little bit, all I have to do is slide the line tied to the tiller up a couple...

Millimeters or down a couple millimeters to get back on track or change course. Uh huh What else am I gonna share with you here? Solo on the mic. I think, uh, I was talking too much. I let my cigar go out. Yes, I have a cigar. 'cause smoke it if smoke one if you have one. And I, because I had engine trouble earlier this year, I wasn't sure if I was even gonna make it up to Northport, but now I North port's in sight, so I'm going to make it

so I figured I would. Light up a cigar and relax and celebrate making it to Northport as well as celebrate cleaning some data. We put some sensor devices on a new client's property and all of the data that came back, we were able to match it up and we have a clean, a clean set of, of water use data that we're providing for a client and that feels really good also.

And I hope that wherever you are on this, this weekend in September that you're happy, you're healthy. You can celebrate life. You can celebrate the industry that we are in and the position that we have having a hand in our water resource and perhaps maybe think about it that way. You have a hand in the water resource.

It's not just, you know, growing plants, although that's what we are doing. It's using the right amount of water and water is a precious resource and there are many individuals in the world that don't have any water to even drink. So remember, you're in the water. You're technically in the water resource business and feel proud of it.

Learn as much as you can about it. Keep an open mind about it. Lots of ways to accomplish all kinds of things. And you know, all sprinklers are created equal, right? It's the, it's the user of the device that holds the power, not this sprinkler or that sprinkler or this controller or that controller. It's you, you, the installer, you, the maintainer, you, the designer, you guys are the ones.

So yeah. What else, what else is going on in the world? Of water. Let's see, I did learn this week that there are two states that do not, that all the water in the state runs off. And I don't think I'm going to give you the answer. I'm just going to leave that there. If you're curious, you could probably Google it.

There are two United States that any, that all the water that lands from the sky leaves the state. Think about that. Literally leaves the state. And of course I'm not counting, you know, there are ponds and, and um, you know, bodies of water. But generally speaking, any water that lands in the state exits the state.

That was just an interesting, I guess an interesting fact I learned this week that you can, you can do some bar trivia next time you're alone and you tell somebody what you do, ask them that question. I won't give you the answer. You can go figure it out. Yeah, so, appreciate you guys listening. And, um, yeah, this is, I gotta get this podcast in because I'm sticking to my everyday fri I it really doesn't matter.

I guess it doesn't really matter what I'm doing, or what I have time for. It's up to me to make the time, and up to me to make some content. And, God, I would just love to host a, some kind of an event up here on Lake Michigan. Because it's just such a great place to, it's just such a great lens to look at what we do through.

And maybe that's the way to describe, all of us have different lenses. If you live in Miami, you have a lens on what we do, and what this industry is. Through the lens of Miami, if you live in Seattle, you are going to have a lens on this industry and what we do through the lens of Seattle. Same thing goes for San Diego, San Antonio, Boston, New Orleans, St.

Louis, Minneapolis. We all have a lens on what we do from the position at which we sit and where we're located and what we've learned. And I can tell you that sitting on one of the largest bodies of freshwater in the world is such an Perspective really, really makes you think, uh, let's see. Are there any exciting announcements out there that I can share?

Um, Hmm. Hmm. I don't think there is this time. Yeah. I would just say, try something new next week, install a new product you've never used before. See what happens and make that a, make that a general practice in what you do. Always try new things, experiment what you think works, embrace. And what doesn't work, leave to be and maybe try it another time later.

So that's all I got guys. I can see North Port Marina in sight. I'm not too far away. I appreciate you guys listening to the mind of Andy today. Thank you so much. We'll catch you on the next episode. I'm out. Bye bye.

500 Million Gallons at Hickam AFB

In this episode, Andy has a discussion with Paul Bassett, in the car, driving to the Hickam AFB in Honolulu Hawaii.

Learn more about ENVOCORE

===

Andy: Welcome back to a very special edition of the Sprinkler Nerd Show. I'm your host, Andy Humphrey, joined by the one and only the magnificent Paul Bassett live, well not live, as close to live as we can get from the island of Oahu, Honolulu, on the way to, where are we going today, Paul?

Paul: We're going to the Hickam Air Force Base, where we're saving a bunch of water by retrofitting out some old, antiquated irrigation systems.

Andy: And I think we should, you should give a little background on the Hickam project and why. Why you're here and then we can see if we have enough time to discuss why why I'm here with you But give us some background on the Hickam

Paul: project Well, we were lucky to be fortunate to be selected to help the Air Force Base and our client Amoresco save energy and water They're using based on our analysis initially in this particular project over half a billion gallons of water

If you are an irrigation professional, old or new, who designs, installs, or maintains high end residential, commercial, or municipal properties, and you want to use technology to improve your business, to get a leg up on your competition, even if you're an old school irrigator from the days of hydraulic

Andy: systems, this show is for you.

Paul: Um, specifically on the irrigation system, we analyzed them consuming about 300, 350 million gallons annually to virtually apply water to the grass around the common areas and the housing

Andy: units. Is that just outdoor water use or is that indoor and

Paul: outdoor? Well, the half a billion would have been total.

So 350 million approximately annually on the landscape and 150 million. Uh, on the interior homes and

Andy: businesses and facilities. Wow. So Envacore though is headquarters in Maryland. How does a company headquarters in Maryland end up securing a project here in Honolulu?

Paul: Well, fortunately for us, we do work all over the country, uh, with regards to the Department of Defense.

And we've been working with this particular client as long as we've been in business, 15, 20 years. So they trust, we're a trusted partner with them. So we're able to secure projects virtually all over the world with this client. And the client's Amoresco? Client on this one is Amoresco, yes, and they're, they're an energy service company.

So what we do is we help them, when they secure projects, develop and build energy and water conservation projects for them that, that pay for themselves and the reduction of the utility bills.

Andy: So people oftentimes hear about these projects and hear about opportunities to conserve water and do performance contracting and generate an ROI that has a payback return on the savings, but I don't think a lot of, let's say, industry, Companies and professionals have an opportunity to get involved with them.

So maybe you could tell us a little bit more about, you know, about this side of the, of the industry that only a few get to participate in right now.

Paul: Well, I think luckily for us, we've found a way. to really parlay irrigation savings into performance contracting. So it's really water savings as a service.

And the key to the success that we've had over the years is we deploy and integrate the newest and latest technology to be able to almost in real time watch the water consumption move through the water meters and then report on that information directly to our client. So one of the benefits that we have is that You know, we, we calculate savings based on evapotranspiration and the amount of water being applied to the landscape.

But in the real world, you really need the data to prove out the savings that you promised. So in order for our company and my company to be successful, we have to prove year after year that what we calculated in the water savings is real and tangible.

Andy: Awesome. So let's go back to, in order to... potential is.

Let's, let's go back to when this project first started. When was that? What year were you first involved and how do you actually start looking at a project like this for the first time?

Paul: Well, this project has been going on since 2015. Initially there's been a lot of back and forth and up and down and contract negotiations and challenges.

But what we typically do is we'll get the water bill and the utility bill and we'll analyze, you know, how much either energy or water. Water is being consumed and we determine from there what either gallons per square foot or gallons per person is being consumed and we'll do a weather analysis and we'll calculate how much water should be consumed by this particular plant in this particular climate and then we look at the utility bill and we say, huh, we think this site should be using 20 gallons per square foot annually and we see it's using 30 gallons per square foot annually.

And then right away at that point, we know that we have an opportunity for savings.

Andy: Okay. So you do the analysis and then at what point do you actually come on site to do some verification and to look and see if that's actually poor performance with controls, if there's leaks, if it's distribution, when do you come in and do your first analysis?

Paul: Well, when we do the utility analysis initially, and then we determine the viability of the opportunity, meaning we deem that there is potential for savings by looking at all of it. Okay. data. And if the data says yes, we think there's an opportunity. Then at that point, we all agree that we're going to engage into a contract and then we're going to deploy folks to be able to come out and actually physically do the audits, run through the irrigation systems, count all the sprinklers, try to determine the flow rates, extract the schedules and controls, and then establish from that point what the actual irrigation system or plumbing system or lighting system is consuming energy and value.

I'm going to the

Andy: utility bills. Okay. So your team put eyes on every sprinkler on this project several times. Yes. Wow. Okay. So let's talk about the scale of this project so that the listeners can visualize what, what this is. So maybe let's talk about, let's go top down. If you can recall some of the data in terms of how many water sources, how many controllers, how many zones and potentially how many sprinklers.

Paul: Well, as I mentioned prior to the, um, Initial conversation, Andy, we initially analyzed that they were using, consuming about half a billion gallons of water through all of the piping network and infrastructure. We then got all the housing unit counts and the peoples and bodies per potties. And we had meter data for all the irrigation.

And then once we deemed that, then it was time to get really boots on the ground. And then from that point, we, we really go in and identify all the controllers, all the water supplies, all the valves. We put it all on a map, um, inventory, everything at that point. And, and then we know exactly what we're going to be getting involved with at that point.

Okay.

Andy: So how many is that? You know, it's one thing to hear a half a billion gallons, but let's flip that over and turn and turn that into number of controllers, number of water sources, sprinkler count. What are those numbers look like?

Paul: We were just over 200 controllers on the site that were not battery operated controllers, just standard plugin controllers.

We have 135, 140, I believe water connections where the feeding those 200 and some controllers. And then it was over 30, 000 sprinklers that were within the scope

Andy: of services. Okay. And those sprinklers include pop up spray heads, three quarter inch rotors, and one inch rotors. And

Paul: some drip. Some drip. You know, not much, but some drip.

We're phasing the drip out of the scopes. Okay. Well,

Andy: there's not a lot of projects opportunity. Well, maybe there are, but they 200 controller retrofit opportunity and 135 water sources. That's a massive scale. And, what I didn't realize about this base before visiting is that it's like a village. People live here.

You come through the gate, we're about to, right now, show them our DBID cards. To get access to the base, but this is like kind of Entering a private HOA community that's run by the government you live here you work here Everything happens on the base and maybe because I didn't grow up in the military.

This is all new to me There's probably a lot of listeners that are like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we know this but to me I guess I thought at first that the base was just military operations I didn't realize that people lived on the base and that all of this housing and infrastructure is managed

Paul: Yeah, I mean, again, I think for us on this particular military base, I mean, there's a bunch of soldiers that live and work on the base and they consume water.

They have consume energy. They want their grass to look good. I'm just like the rest of us who live in the regular population. Sorry Andy,

we were going through the gates. So

Andy: I got distracted. Yeah, we going through real time, getting our security checked out right now.

Awesome. Thank you. Thank you too. And, uh, I also I should have done my homework, but I didn't realize this is a. a joint base or what a joint base even Really meant and so this is and you can tell me paul. This is the air force and the navy. Is that correct?

Paul: Yeah, the official name of the site is joint base pearl harbor hickam okay, and we're we're working on the hickam side, which is the Air Force side of the military privatized housing

Andy: because this is a very strategic location for the United States and it's security for the world here in the Pacific.

So they have air and sea operations, not really land operations because there's no land here. This is all this is in the middle of the. Pacific Ocean. So we have the air, right? And the sea joint on this base.

Paul: Yeah. And ideally if, if you think about how we're working here, it's primarily to reduce the amount of energy and water that the federal government spends on this utility.

So we are helping the taxpayers reduce our debt or demand on the utility spent on this base.

Andy: And at this point, uh, let's start back. What, when did you start the actual renovations?

Paul: Well, once we got the approval to move forward with the construction, we started October of 2022. So we're just about a year and 11 months in into construction, um, which we're about halfway through the project.

Um, it was a two year. Construction period. So we're about halfway in and, and we're right on, right on schedule with, with the construction timeframe.

Andy: Okay. And I think, you know, let's, let's talk a little bit about, I would love to hear from you. Where, where are you, where do you start? So you did the analysis, you know what you need to change.

You've got your, you know, marching orders. Where do you start

Paul: first? Well, we were dictated here by the military and the housing folks on where we wanted to start. And there's some specifics that they wanted us to focus on certain areas of the base. And as you know now, Andy, there's multiple... neighborhoods that we work in.

There's five distinct neighborhoods that we worked in, so we're, we're focusing on a neighborhood at a time. We're going in and completing that specific neighborhood, getting that fully functioning, getting that up a hundred percent, and then we can start managing the water and the data. And then once we complete a given neighborhood, then we move on to the next

Andy: neighborhood.

Okay, and do you start with controls and get control of the system and work down to the sprinkler, or do you start with the sprinkler and work back

Paul: up to the controls? Well, we have a couple of different crews that we have, uh, deployed on the base. We have one crew that is focused on controls, number one, then we have another crew that we have come in as going to do the flow sensor master valves install.

And then the, the final crew, which is the largest of the crews are the ones that are replacing all the sprinkler heads. So ideally we, we just, depending on how the. Workflow is the first crew goes in and starts retrofitting all the controls. That way we reduce or remove all of the standard control systems and then get control with the web based remote opportunity.

And that way it's easier for the managers to control the control system remotely while the guys and gals on the ground are really doing the, doing the dirty work. And

Andy: what type of controls do you have here? Did you go?

Paul: We, we, um, went with weather track, which is, you know, the. System that's been proven beneficial for our company and our clients long term.

We've been deploying WeatherTrack for over 20 years.

Andy: And, uh, which model

Paul: weather track? The ET Pro 3. Okay. Um, and then because there's some complexity of the water supplies, we have multiple controllers on a single supply. We have multiple supplies on multiple controllers. So using their OptiFlow system really helps integrate and manage the water on some of these

Andy: complex systems.

Okay. At this point, as of today, September 15th. How many controllers have you retrofitted and installed?

Paul: Last I looked, we're about 125. So just over halfway, the halfway point of the controls.

Andy: Okay, and are of all those 125, do they all have flow sensors and master valves?

Paul: Today they don't because we're With the complexity of the digging permits and some of the other things.

I think we have about 30 to 35 of the flow sensors installed at this point. Um, and then now we just got approval recently to go ahead and start excavating and some of the other areas to start putting in the flow sensors and master valves. It's just a little more complex with digging and excavating here on a military base.

There's a complexity with regards to the, the permits that are required to dig on the site. Okay, so

Andy: you've got, uh, I think you said maybe 35 flow sensors. How, who watches those or looks at those and do you have to report on those or what do you do with that

Paul: data? Yeah, we have team members that their responsibility is to go ahead and analyze the data every day, take a look at all the reporting, take a look at all of the flow.

Um, and then if there's a, there's an anomaly or an alert condition and then we dispatch the folks on the ground to go ahead and analyze and determine what the problem is. Okay.

Andy: And as of today, 11 months in, what, what's been the most difficult part of the project so far?

Paul: What we've seen is the transition between our services and the existing maintenance services.

Like who's responsible for what? A lot of times they just wanted to go ahead and. Push everything on to us and the communication between our team and the existing facilities maintenance team Has been the biggest challenge trying to let them understand that they're still responsible For the neighborhoods that they have been working in and we're responsible for the neighborhoods We're working in so trying to get all of the parties together to make sure we're all working as one has been the biggest challenge Okay,

Andy: so let's uh I think let's maybe not bring this to a total close, but let's move to, you know, what we've been working on this week without, you know, exact details.

Uh, you know, but maybe we should just talk a little bit about the concept of these very difficult, hard to manage areas that were part of this project that fall outside the standard scope of replacing a controller. And, you know, requiring some, some different type of technology that, you know, we look forward to sharing with the listeners at some point here in the future.

And this is not a, a testing ground, but this is a unique application that we're able to deploy some very innovative technology to solve particular problems that traditional industry isn't able to solve.

Paul: Yeah. Well, good, good insight, Andy. One of the things that we found on this particular facility is that there's a lot of.

Medians that are going through the neighborhoods. Um, and they're running and operating on a battery timer controller. So there's no remote activation or remote monitoring. So what we're doing is we're, we're in the midst of deploying some smart valves. What is a smart valve? A smart valve has more than just one activation.

So it has flow sensing and master control and pressure and soil moisture. So what we're able to do is take away that old school just running whatever that time battery controller was and being able to provide remote access into that insight and be able to actuate that valve and monitor that flow remotely.

Right

Andy: valve to the cloud where there is no infrastructure. There's no wires. There's no control. We just have one valve in a median We can now take that information put it right to the cloud manage it remotely and have all

Paul: of the data And that's really what has been extremely fun and rewarding to be able to deploy Some of this new technology into a place where they're just been using traditional controls.

Andy: and when it is just a single battery operated controller that is not connected to anything it runs a schedule, right? It does that schedule every Monday, Wednesday, Friday at a particular time and that's part of the water waste issue is there was no Smarter automation just ran like a

Paul: Like a clock and that the problem with that is is because of the site so big and it's hard to manage That these things that batteries die and now that area is brown and nobody understands Why or the they never adjust the clock from the summer rotation?

So it was running seven days a week and then in the winter time It's still running seven days a week because nobody really sees it So there was really a lack of insight and management of those particular devices Yeah,

Andy: and there is outside of this project, there is a really big market opportunity for this technology.

And I cannot wait to, uh, share this with the world when we're ready, perhaps at the IA show. For those of you listening, if you would like to join us at the IA show, we may be ready to share a little bit more about what we've been, what we've been working on and what Paul's deployed here at Hickam. Super exciting.

Paul: Well, Andy, I know we are going to wrap this up because we got another. Half a day here to finish up this project.

Andy: So, and you're going to get dirty, right? I'm going to sit here in the car and edit up this podcast, right? You're going to, you're going to get, get dirty today.

Paul: I suppose not much editing luckily for this one today, Andy.

Andy: Yeah. This might be one of the podcasts that is totally in the raw, not much editing. So I hope our mics work. Paul's got a mic on, I've got a mic on again, technology, dual wireless mics, just piped into my iPhone right here. So we got to the site. We're ready to finish up our last day. Thank you guys for listening.

Keep your eyes open. There are projects like this that are out there. And large or small, there's plenty of projects like this. If you keep your eyes open, you will find them. Any, uh, last words of advice, Paul, for someone looking to maybe, you know, not get out of just installing sprinklers, but expand their business into more of this conservation performance contracting?

I mean,

Paul: my... Thoughts to that is just keep your eyes wide open, be willing and open to change and test and fail and then succeed after you fail. That's what I've learned. And there's a lot of times with when you're dealing with technology that it doesn't work right out of the box. It's new. It's innovative.

It's testing. It's trying. So that's really what we're doing. And what I've done over my career is, um, you test and you fail and you proceed on. And eventually. You're going to get to a point where you're going to find success because

Andy: if it were easy, anyone would do it. This is the truth. Awesome.

Appreciate your time. Paul. Good week with you. I thank you so much and appreciate everybody listening. Mahalo. Mahalo.

In this episode, you will learn how to START an irrigation system based on a 3rd party device.

Example: Start irrigation when the soil temperature is 82 degrees.

In this episode, Andy shares a live recorded Demo of the IRRISketch design software and the potential that it may have to disrupt the industry.

Learn more here: IRRISketch

===

Andy: When I see something new, I like to check it out. I like to learn about it. And I, I'm a strong believer that every irrigation system proposal should have a drawing. I just, that's what I believe. And using a lot of the design software, it's not that particularly great. Now there's some software like LandFX that is really actually fantastic, but it offers sort of a level that is a lot more, I would say, than the average irrigation or the average landscape contractor needs.

It's really, in my opinion, designed more for that architect engineer because it can provide you with some really, really It's just above and beyond what the average design build contractor needs. So I had a web meeting, sort of training overview, actually not training demonstration, let's call it a demo of the Erisketch software and I'm playing, I'm going to play that for you today.

We, we probably spoke for about an hour and a half and this episode's only. Maybe 35 minutes. So I did my best to cut it down, not to bore you since you can't see the screen. So you can't really see the demo, but I wanted you to hear the conversation and some of the things that we were talking about and what's really fascinating or what, what.

What makes me inspired and excited about this company is where we started when we started the conversation was about iris sketch irrigation design, but when we ended this conversation, it was actually more about building a stack of software that could help you. If you're the contractor, from beginning to end, and what I mean by that is, it can help you from the design of the system, to the materialist, to the pricing, to the proposal, to the ordering of supplies.

And this is something that I have been, I have been waiting for. I feel like we play in separate buckets right now, we play in the buckets of irrigation design software, we play in the [00:02:00] buckets of um, Business management software like ServiceTitan, then we play in the buckets of, of distribution. And there really isn't anything as of today that can tie things end to end.

And Errorsketch does not do that today, but I, I just have this hunch that what they're building and what you'll hear in this episode is the first attempt to try to tie a lot of this together. And it really does start with you. You're the one out there meeting with the client, residential or commercial.

You're the one out there designing the system, determining what the materials are going to be. And then you're the one that has to place the order, install the material, and then deliver that customer with the final project. And so what, what you'll hear today is Iris sketch sort of combining all of these things together in a potentially very disruptive way, which is why I played that clip in the beginning, because I think our industry needs more disruption.

If you look at the consumer goods industry, like Instacart. Instacart is filing for their IPO right now at the time of this recording, and it's disrupting the, the grocery business. There is a good chance that era, uh, not era sketch. Instacart is driving down the price of the goods and they're going to roll an advertising platform on top and offer upsells, offer brand manufacturers, a direct channel to the consumer through their software layered.

Uh, layered on top of the grocery store. And I think that that could happen right here in our industry. So a couple of pointers, a couple of quick, um, want to see this a little bit so that you do listen. And if it, if it by any means starts to bore you, just hit that 30 second skip ahead because there is a lot of good, interesting meat in here.

And this was not recorded as a podcast. So I should preface that this was recorded. I just recorded my demo. And then I asked for their permission to use some of it on today's episode. So I [00:04:00] want to have these guys back to have a real sort of more legitimate actual podcast discussion because this was just sort of a behind the scenes look at the demonstration.

So a couple, a couple things you're going to learn today. You're going to learn how Erisketch, their main goal is quick and easy. They want to provide design software that is quick, easy. Of course it has to be accurate. But what I noticed the most, it was actually a beautiful presentation and a lot of irrigation design software that's out there.

The goal of the software isn't to be beautiful. And the goal of the software is not, not necessarily to be quick or easy. It's mostly to be accurate. But I'm a strong believer that you got to sell the project. You can kind of figure out some of the details later. So I really liked the idea of having to be quick, easy, and a beautiful presentation so that you can use it to sell.

Then they have an integration with Mosher. So I went ahead just this morning, ordered myself a Mosher. On the stick, because I want to start playing with this. I want to use Mosier to do a full site, take off, load it into the era sketch software and learn how to design with it. And then you're going to learn how you can.

Potentially use it to build your bill of materials. So you can load in your own pricing libraries, your own parts lists, and you can make changes on the fly. So let's say you design it one way, the customer wants some changes. When you change it live in Erisketch, it is going to automatically update that bill of material and potentially that proposal.

In real time, you don't have to do all those, those three steps separately. You can add five heads. You can move material right on the drawing with the customer if you would like to, and it will update the rest of it for you. So I just think that there's, man, there's just so much good [00:06:00] opportunity with this, with this software.

I can't wait to try it out. I haven't used it myself. So please don't necessarily consider this to be any kind of an endorsement. I'm just excited about. The possibility. I'm excited about what these guys, how these guys think, how they are thinking longterm and what it could bring to what it could bring to the industry as far as efficiency value innovation.

And when those three things come in, there's going to be some people that their cheese gets moved. And if that's you, that's okay. You got it. Everybody's cheese is often always moving and you got to be looking in new places for new opportunities. So I guess, I guess that's all I have for this intro. Let's, uh, let's just jump right in and roll the episode with my conversation with the founders of Eerie Sketch and Eerie Cellar.

Theo: Uh, as you mentioned that I introduce, invite also my colleague, my partner, Philip, he's the, uh, inventor of Erie sketch, the design software. And I think, uh, the right conversation should only. With both

Andy: of us sure together. Yeah. Thank

Philiph: you. Yeah. Okay, how to proceed? I want

Theo: I want Philip maybe to explain what's the idea?

For Iris sketch for our program. So he's the inventor. I only came up with him two years after the first launch of every sketch and Yes,

Philiph: Philip. Let's go. Yeah, so let's start with the proper pronunciation. It's Erie sketch. I am I think that it's not properly, uh, trans, uh, transposed to English. Yes,

Andy: it's. Oh, no, it's good.

Yeah. You're a sketch. I get it. Absolutely.

Philiph: Okay. So it's about irrigation and sketch. It means that, uh, you make a sketch of irrigation design without any effort and, uh, you can start, [00:08:00] uh, as fast as you can with, uh, Making a proposal to the customer that started when I started doing irrigation. Actually, I'm from the ground.

Uh, I was mounting the systems and I understood that there is a big problem with the projects and making them is takes a lot of time from my life and from my personal life. And, uh, I Couldn't find any, uh, good, uh, software for this. So I, uh, searched the rain card, tested it, but it was too complicated for me.

And, uh, I thought that, uh, with my knowledge of basics of web development and, um, so on, I can, uh, make for me, for myself, the proper. tool that will be fast and easy and, you know, in the cloud. So that was my, uh, um, I wanted it very much, so it will be available through all devices and, uh, everything will be stored there.

So, uh, that's why I started with this. It was three or four years ago already. Uh, and the idea is to make it fast so, uh, I can show you, I can show my screen and what it can do. So, yeah. That would be

Andy: great. Yeah. Everything. Wow. So what were you doing? You said you were doing irrigation before you started this.

Um, I

Philiph: was working from 2012 at irrigation and, uh, it's like six or five or six years. I, I was in the field, um, and in the winter we had no occupation, so I tested out my skills and the development. So, yeah, no, I

Andy: think it's really important because I shouldn't say, I don't know the number, but I would say most contractors don't deliver the homeowner a, or the client, commercial or residential, a drawing.

You know, some places they have to because it's mandatory. Other places they may add another fee or maybe it was done by a designer, but just for like the average home. You know, they might sketch [00:10:00] something on a piece of paper perhaps and leave it with the client, but there's nothing that's a true kind of record drawing.

And, um, you know, a brand new system doesn't really matter. But then as time goes on and somebody wants to make some modifications or something's not working, that's when having a drawing. Really helps

Philiph: the maintenance and support for the project. Yeah, it's crucial to have something where our pipes laid at least.

So, uh, that was also my idea because I'm, uh, was making, yeah, 50% on my knee with the paper and, uh, I said, I tried to deliver the customer, uh, belief that I can do it, uh, in a good way. So, and, uh, I thought that. So this will be really professional if I can do it fast and with some present, uh, presentation that is good looking, uh, like an output from the ear sketch now.

So, uh, then you start, uh, the basic drawing when you create new projects. So you can, uh, measure the field or you can use the new tool, the Mosher, uh, that is used, um, Oh,

Andy: in U. S. I know. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen that. You can actually tell me, tell me how that works.

Philiph: Uh, that works very simple. You have your Mosher measurements, and when you start drawing a new polygon, you can import, I don't know where I have, uh, some Mosher.

Yeah.

Andy: Okay. So you use your Mosher, and you get your exported file, and then you can import it into here? Yeah, definitely. Ah,

Philiph: exactly. So, uh, for example, this is a measurement from the Mosher. Uh, ported to the Iriscage, uh, drawing with a one to one scale. So, uh, when you measure, uh, measure this, you can export as CSV file and there is all data and you just need to start drawing a polygon and

Andy: say, yeah.

So now you just gave me a reason to go buy the Mosier. I'm going to buy the Mosier. I'm going to test this out and make it work because I think that combining those together. That is, what a great

Philiph: [00:12:00] idea. Yes, that's really, uh, making, improving the speed, uh, of the delivery. Oh, maybe it's

Theo: always, uh, possibility, possible to, to add some underlayers.

So we can add

Philiph: photos of

Andy: drawings. Okay, cool. I was going to ask you that. Could I screen capture something out of Google Earth, maybe? And then just put it in here and then take the Mosier and put it on there.

Philiph: Yeah, actually, I don't know some, uh, I don't have some, uh, images here on the computer, but, uh, you can, uh, input anything that is in raster or in PDF file.

So it will be, uh, in the Erie sketch. Also you can, uh, for example, export from, uh, AutoCAD or more, uh, sustainable software, more,

Andy: more big. And I love the trees because typically an irrigation drawing is very flat. It is, you know, an engineered file. There's no pizzazz, there's no like sexiness to it. It doesn't sell, but this is giving you the ability to, you know, add some sales appeal to the drawing.

Yes.

Philiph: Yes. That was made especially for Iris Cage by the, uh, the artist. So he will, he's drawing, uh, actually the nature and I asked him to make some stuff like this so you can then make some, for example, the flowers. I'm not so big

Andy: designer. Hey, it's all good. Even just dropping a couple specimen trees around the property could make it, could enhance the drawing, you know?

Yeah,

Philiph: definitely. Yeah. So it can be curved as you want. So you can, um. Use it as a simple sketch tool for a landscape also to deliver the concept of the garden, for example, uh, it's why not when you switch to irrigation tab, everything is more, uh, a pack. Yeah. And, uh, uh, so you can now, uh, focus on your irrigation.

You set up your, uh, water source, you set up your. Uh, manifolds or [00:14:00] you don't start with the manifolds, of course, you now, uh, need to understand which nozzle you need to draw. Yeah. There is a wide range of the nozzles. If

Andy: you could, maybe we just, um, remove those layers, you know, start with that polygon and then let's just, you know, let me just give you, could I just give you some parameters?

Like here's how many gallons a minute we have, uh, here's what our pressure is. And then we can kind of go from there. Uh,

Philiph: no, actually, there is the, uh, the other, uh, way of thinking for us. So you'd first you need to cover this area at any, uh, you know, with your, uh, with your, uh, sprinklers. So you need to cover to deliver the precipitation.

And, uh, by knowing the precipitation, uh, by knowing the amount of flow, uh, then you make zoning, uh, uh, based on your, um, pump, you know, your pump, or for example, the wood designer, uh, knows every time what is the water source, uh, so he can calculate it in, uh, in mind how much of the water flow he. He will have for one, uh, zone, yes, for one, uh, great zone.

So when he starts to make in the, uh, drawing the nozzles, we, uh, we focus mostly on the covering area with the nozzles. It's very handy tool here that automatically fits, uh, your, uh,

Andy: Now, the nozzle though is subject to the pressure. So how are you getting a coverage if you don't necessarily know your pressure?

Philiph: Uh, the, uh, currently when you start drawing the standard pressure is applied. So it's, uh, for example, for MP rotator, it's 45 PCI. Yeah. So, uh, and then of course, uh, when you realize that, um, we have. Flow, for example, uh, 87, uh, gallons per hour, and it's not enough for [00:16:00] us. Uh, our pump won't, uh,

Andy: Can we switch that?

Cause in the U S we don't think in gallons per hour, it's gallons per minute, gallons

Philiph: per minute. Okay. Just a second. Because we also don't think even in gallons, that's just my attempt

Andy: here. Like an emitter is gallons per hour on micro, but otherwise it's yeah. Gallons per

Philiph: minute. So, yeah, we have the, for example, 1.

5 gallons per minute. Let's

Andy: go ahead and put the other ones in there. You know, let's fill that in.

Philiph: Let's do it. So you select the type of nozzle, not actually the, you can select the proper nozzle that you know, but I have also auto drawing system that you can choose. Uh, in, uh, in a whole range of that class of nozzles.

So for example, MP Rotator provides you with MP3 5000, uh, so it's very easy to draw the nozzles with this tool. You can, you

Andy: need to try it on your own. And it's, um, how is it determining the distance? And the spacing, or you?

Philiph: First, you start with placing the nozzle, then you set the needed radius that you can see on the drawing.

And when you click, Then, uh, by the, uh, based on the angle you said, and based on availability of nozzles, you can see that, uh, the proper nozzle is chosen. Okay. So that's how it works. Okay. Okay. Now you can see the whole, uh, consumption and it's five gallon per minute. So it's a tool that is meant for designers.

For advanced designers, not for like customers who want to design their garden irrigation or something. So they should know how it will behave on which pressure it will work with this, with this consumption. And, uh, When you start to make zoning for, uh, for example, [00:18:00] if our pump can do, uh, needed pressure only for two gallons per minute, we need, we know that we need at least three zones here.

Uh, yeah, two zones. Yeah,

Andy: let's just say we want to do two zones for this instance. For example,

Philiph: yeah, we, we're making two zones and we see how to properly cut, uh, uh, the, into two pieces of this. So for example, we have. Almost five, uh, gallon per minute. Uh, no, I didn't select 5. 15. And when you start to take off one side, you can see it's decreasing up to three.

And if we remove also this, it will have a 2. 5. So this will be definitely one zone, this line and the center. So, and then you just, uh, can draw the pipe. And then if we know the, uh, the source of water will be here, the next pipe would of course go. Something from here. Maybe in this direction and to offload that one side, maybe it will go like this.

So, uh, when you have your, uh, piping, you set up the manifold, the better place, I think near the source or somewhere near, so now you're attached to the manifold. You can do it in many ways, but I think the schematic way is better because you don't care. You understand where you will dig also.

Andy: Yeah. And it sounds like the idea for this is a quick sketch.

That's a great presentation. That also shows the crew, which sprinklers are going together on the same zone, where approximately the pipes are going, but it's not meant to give you. Like all the exact materials and the exact pipe and the friction loss from this point to that point and all of that. It's a, it's a quick sketch, which is actually really helpful because most of the like engineered software out there, although it can be easy to use, there's a lot [00:20:00] more involved, so it doesn't become quick and easy.

You may get potentially better engineering results. But it's not quick and easy for this purpose.

Philiph: Definitely. Yes. It, uh, will automate something, but not everything that, uh, that we want, but we are moving into this direction. Maybe the one day we have more, uh, You know, past and more precise, uh, system, but, uh, currently it works like this

Andy: and you should But this is actually okay.

I mean, really you could take this and generate a pretty accurate, um, not full materialist, but bid based on some other input. So somebody wanted to take this and then generate a price quote. You know, this would be enough, I think, to get that started.

Theo: Yes, we are able, we are able to create a complete, uh, material list out of these, and we are now in a, uh, an area for private people, for private lawn, for private yards.

Philiph: Residential, yeah,

Theo: residential area. And the friction losses during the pipe, it's not so necessary in the smaller cases of gardens. If you are going on golf courses, friction losses are definitely important, but on small private yards, it's not so not so important.

Andy: And it just depends because it can be if somebody uses the wrong size pipe, right?

If they use three quarter inch pipe everywhere and they don't realize what the friction loss is. And because a lot of homes in the U S don't all. could have low pressure to start. So somebody has low pressure to start and they don't want to purchase a pump, then they need to carefully consider pipe size because they're trying to, you know, conserve pressure, I guess.

Philiph: I will show you this a little bit later, but what I want to show you now is the, how we calculate the pipe diameter. So, uh, here is now Get some information about the diameter the direction of the flow and velocity of the of your flow so for [00:22:00] example It calculated that we need These diameters of pipe and this will be the speed inside and this will be the flow.

Andy: Okay. So it says four inch, then we need to go to two inch, three inch, two inch, an inch and a half. Yeah. If you want. Yes. Or, or you could just stay at two inch cause a bigger pipe is fine. You don't have to go down, but sometimes, sometimes contractors don't downsize cause then they need a whole bunch of other fittings.

So they'll just use whatever the largest pipe is all the way to the end, even though it costs more money, it's just easier.

Philiph: Now we have, uh, the basic system set up here. So let's continue with, uh, the basic, uh, controller with the wiring. You of course, making the wiring, uh, here in the Erisk Edge. So it, Yeah,

Andy: wiring is not something that's typically included on an irrigation drawing.

Yeah.

Philiph: Um, on a drawing, you can, uh, save everything you need because this is like design, uh, step. And when, uh, then you finish with this. For example, we've made a basic design, then we switch to layouts. Layouts will hold as many, uh,

Andy: Oh, layout is like your, your, uh, planned, uh, page.

Philiph: Yes, like, uh, viewports of your, uh, draw.

So you can... Uh, choose what you want to show on viewport, uh, Will that put a scale

Andy: in there? Um, yes.

Philiph: Okay. Yeah. The scale, of course, we can set, uh, for example, uh, one inch or it's one foot or, uh, Yeah, like one inch in 10, five. Let it be five for our scale. It will be good. Okay. And then you choose your, uh, sizes of everything of texts.

And, uh, you say,

Andy: Gosh, I'm really thinking that, um, if you could, first of all, this is fantastic for the purpose of quick and easy presentation, you know, a drawing, it's good enough for the guys to know what they're going to [00:24:00] do and for the client to know what they're going to get. Uh, if there was a way to layer this on top of Google Earth or bring it in where you could just type in the address of the client.

Do this remotely. You don't even need to visit the site. You could have a couple conditions and you could probably sell the system without visiting the site. At, at the end

Theo: you could, yes. Um, depends on the quality of the mapping service, of course, uh, Google, Google maps. It's in Germany. It's not so nice. So we have, it depends on

Andy: the tree cover and stuff.

And again, this is like, you could say, Hey, here's what it could. Here's what it looks like it's going to be. Here's a couple unknowns, you know, Hey, we don't know if you have an extra flower bed. So you could ask a few questions to help clarify at least get it in the ballpark. And you could probably double the amount of quotes that a contractor could put out there if they don't have to travel to each site to wow the customer, get them to buy in.

And then you have a. kickoff meeting with the client, go over it, see how close it is, then find out if there's anything that might be missing and how that might change the scope, if at all.

Theo: Definitely. You can work in this way. Yeah. For a first quote, you can do it in exactly this way. At the end, we also implement a service that the homeowner can prepare the planning for yourself.

So you have the, we have the ErieSketch design studio. That's a smaller version of the ErieSketch professional tool that homeowners can upload their own satellite photo or their own sketch or their own drawing. And Uh, send it to you to, uh, asking for, for, for, or for, for

Philiph: irrigation. Yeah. You create the design, uh, link that anyone can access even without having some, uh, Eurosketch account.

And, uh, this link. We'll open the Erisk edge, uh, with another tabs. It [00:26:00] will only be the drawer where you place your loan, your irrigated zone, not irrigated zone, whereas your controller will be located sensor, location of water source. And then you. Uh, make a quick survey with a project name, with your bucket test, for example, or with your climate conditions, or you cannot.

And you can

Andy: even say like, upload a picture of your water source. I want to see the pipe where it comes in, in your basement. You need to upload that picture, right? I want so that it's like you're being there and people with their phone can just snap a picture.

Philiph: That's fair. Yeah. Well, but it's in development

Andy: now.

Yeah. Well, I'm just saying I can make my own form, you know, that I could get the project information from clients. That's great.

Philiph: Yes. That's, uh, you, you inspiring us to speed up the development of this feature. Yeah.

Andy: So yeah. Now, uh, would this be, so it's interesting too, is because it's web based, it means there's a lot you can do with it or cloud with, is this something that, um, like, could I embed this?

I guess I could just do like, um, A window, like a frame, iframe. Could I embed this in my website? So customers coming to sprinkler supply store could design their own system and not even necessarily, well, maybe they would know it's Errorsketch, but just beyond all on my domain.

Philiph: No, we, we are not restricting from this.

So you can embed these in, uh, iframe of course on your website. So that's not a problem. You just provide this link and it's, uh, embeddable. You don't need to do anything but just type a code that's iframe and it will open.

Andy: So anyone could come to Sprinkler Supply Store and design their own system. Why

Philiph: not?

That's great. And, uh, you create as many links as you want and, uh, for example, track there, uh, from the other, uh, places of your website or from other platforms, uh, that you need. So, for example, you place it on Instagram, this link, or in your, on your website within, within an iframe and, uh, you [00:28:00] can, uh, Uh, you, then you get the requests that's on up to you, up to the contractor who's using this design.

Yeah.

Andy: So you've got rotors and sprays and different nozzles. How does this software handle drip irrigation?

Philiph: Uh, drip irrigation is all, uh, also handed, handled, and, uh, you can choose between the 16 and 17 millimeter drip. Uh, you have, uh, every, uh, drip line we had on the market, but not maybe everything, but from main, uh, uh.

Andy: And sometimes it really, you know, it doesn't even need the brand because if somebody knows they're going to use a 0. 6 by 18 inch spacing. You know, it doesn't matter what the brand is because it's 0. 6 by 18. The math is the same regardless of the brand.

Philiph: So, uh, we, we also have the feature with, uh, to cover some drip area dripped.

Uh, for example, you check the, your preferred, uh, drip line here, and then you draw up something, some area, some perimeter. And before you finish, you can, uh, set the step of the, of your, uh, future, future. Lines. And the angle? And then when you finish, uh, your drip line will be, uh, created and you can see the water flow.

So it's 3. 5 GPM, the length, total length of the pipes. Uh, and then you connect it to the water source with the same type, but with a special drip start, uh, drip start, uh, node. It's it can contain anything you want, like the tap, the,

Andy: yeah, I just think, uh, for And for contractors that are. Involved in the sales process, this is a fantastic tool.

I mean, talk about a differentiator. No, no one's using it yet. Clients, they may not expect this, but they want a higher level of [00:30:00] technology to be used in the sales process. They don't want a back of the napkin sketch on a carbon copy quote form. You know, this is, this is amazing. And you could produce this in, you know, less than one hour.

Philiph: Yes, we are. We produce in this online. So, uh, also you can. Create some sprinkler, uh, coloring and To show the zones where the zones are belonging, the drip line, everything, some information about this, so length and flow, precipitation, what is on the zone, so, uh, the covered area and so on. So you, you have your, even you can calculate the timing of the controller.

Uh, because you have all the information needed,

Andy: uh, Oh, I see like a runtime to produce one inch of

Philiph: water. Yeah. Based on the water demand, based on the infiltration rate of the soil, you can set it up in the special windows.

Andy: So you also have a scheduling engine then it sounds like,

Philiph: yes, that's a calculated.

Yeah. By, uh, so it gives out your time per run and daily consumption for the, for all your cycles

Andy: and runs. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. This is really what, um, This is really what our industry needs because we're still doing it more or less the way it's been done for the last 20 or 30 years, basically.

Philiph: Same, same in Europe and

Theo: the same in Europe.

So most of the, uh, contractors don't plan by itself. They leave planning for big companies, which also provide parts and

Andy: they go to their distributor. And then they say, I need this. And then, and then not only does the contractor have to make multiple visits to the site, right? One visit to make the measurements, the second visit to produce, you know, to sell the proposal, if you will, then they have to go to their distributor and the distributor draws it with no guaranteeing that the contractor is even going to get the sale.

So all this work is being done for no. no purpose. Um, and I've always been under the belief that a contractor should do their [00:32:00] own work, not use a supplier for anything other than purchasing parts because it's their drawing. They should be responsible for it. And this really does put the power into the hands of the contractor

Theo: and quality of drawing.

It's much better if contractor is on the same location. Because when you, uh, discussing with your disproducer is also over email, over phone. So he's sitting maybe a hundred kilometers or a hundred miles away from you and he never sees the garden at itself. And it's always a better design if somebody was really there.

Philiph: I don't

Andy: know. This is so great. My mind is, my mind has so many other things here because I'm looking at you take this list down. So let's say we're done. Boom. Now my question would be, how could I feed my pricing in here to generate a quote? Because I could give you a feed, you know, with all the exact pricing or, or different libraries.

And then the user could say, no, no, no, show me, is there another option that would automatically change these parts to, to be 10% less?

Philiph: That's what we deliver. Of course, the, we were thinking on this and we are, uh, created the, another piece of software that is named Iris Seller. And, uh. IrisCache is drawing, and IrisSeller is for selling.

So, uh, when you have your setup in IrisCache, you can, uh, easily, uh, create it into your outlay with only your, uh, real life, uh, goods and, uh, stock. So that's, uh, I will show you how it work. I, I see that you are interested in this, so that's why I will, uh, take time. Yeah,

Andy: no, and I'm, uh, and it's interesting because I think people are afraid This so they're not, no one's doing it, but this is what needs to be done.

And it basically becomes a marketplace, right? Where a, if a contractor uses your tool, number one, they can get a price for a Rainbird or Hunter or whatever dynamically they want right at [00:34:00] that moment. And then they could say. So, show me the price from site one, show me the price from Ewing, show me the price from Horizon, show me the price from sprinklersupplystore.

com. Let me get a real live marketplace, you know, pricing on this material. Yeah.

Philiph: To compare and choose the best options.

Andy: Yeah. And again, if it's just showing up in your doorstep and it's delivered, the supplier becomes less relevant because you're doing the work. You're doing the value, you know, and they're just buying it and it ships in a box.

Philiph: Of course. You are free to

Theo: choose what you want, where you

Andy: get it from. Yeah, and then the, and then the client, you know, if they say, Hey, is there any way, you know, we could, or how could we take like 10% off this price? You know, I had a budget of 4, 500, but this came in at 5, 000. Then the contractor can say, you know what, let me go through and see if there's any parts we could swap out that wouldn't affect the integrity of the system.

And then rerun the quote, like in real time, not have to go back to the supplier, make five phone calls, right?

Philiph: Welcome to E Risk Etch. Yeah, that's cool that we are trying to do the same that you're saying. And, uh, yeah, I'm really proud now of it.

Andy: Because yeah, because somebody's got to poke the bear. There's too many big bears in this industry controlling the entire supply chain.

From a couple of big distributors and a couple of big manufacturers. And it's time that somebody, you know, shook up the snow globe

Philiph: should come into the deal. Yeah. So, uh, for a manifold, uh, you can set up the valves there.

Andy: Yeah, and I mean really, sorry to interrupt you, really if you had, um, one way of, um, providing labor is to do a like per sprinkler, let's say it's 15 minutes per sprinkler and it, you know, how long is it per foot of one inch pipe, inch and a half, two inch pipe.

If you could get your labor factors, which is, which are known. You can get your labor factors per [00:36:00] piece. Then you just put it on that quote and you can calculate out the installed price that like, and I have some of this data, you know, and then you got the installed price.

Theo: We have,

Philiph: we have. Well, why do, uh, why he knows how Eriskitch works?

Yeah. Did you

Andy: tell him? Interesting. No, I've just been, it's what, what happens when you. I mean, basically 20 years ago, my buddy and I had an Excel sheet that did all this and every part had a price. And at the end you get your costs and then you can figure out what kind of margin you want to cover your overhead, but it's just.

Database info. Super.

Philiph: That's what we really created. And this irrigation equipment configuration is just the beginning. Uh, here you set the, uh, most, uh, crucial parts of your system. It's like nozzles, uh, the drip pipe connections and valve manifolds, automation. Uh, you also have here the main pipe, a lateral pipe with, uh, they are fittings, uh, elbows, tees, crosses, whatever you need, uh, that, uh, end caps, if they are, they are here.

Also the wiring, wiring calculation is, uh, another thing that, uh, you need to understand how you calculate, uh, your wiring because someone used cables, uh, multi cord cables. Someone used wires. And,

Andy: uh, the reason we used to do, but it was like half the number of zones times the length of the main line or something like that.

It was

Philiph: just like, uh, yeah, multiplicative outlay, but here you, whether you can calculate it, uh, on your own or you can, uh, give every sketch opportunity to do this. So, uh, if you get used to it, you will be, uh, more, uh, more free to make any kind of assumptions. So. Yeah. Thank you. Uh, this step is finished. So here you have two options, whether you want to give a list to someone to calculate you the stock, uh, and [00:38:00] to give the, um, proposal for the materials list and, uh, to pay for, or you can go a way that we call iris seller.

And when you have your stock or when you have, um, Your distributor that you are bound to and he has his stock in the Erie sketch system You can easily turn this everything out in the in your outlay. That is very configured with your own elements and Okay, let's switch to it and I will

Andy: show you how yeah.

Yeah. I mean again, I think if even just If it didn't, you don't even have to put the price of the labor, just having labor hours in here would be helpful so that a contractor that's using it could look and say, okay, I see here that's 30 labor hours, you know, so if I bring a four man crew, I can do that in one day.

Right? Or, or they can just break it down by, by labor hours and then if they know what they pay their laborers and they know what kind of margin they need on the labor, they can calculate their own, you know, labor price, but the labor time would be really valuable.

Philiph: I think, um, that labor, uh, times can be calculated based on amount of work, yes.

Amount of sprinklers. Yeah.

Andy: And then you could have to say, okay, are we pulling this pipe? Are we trenching? Is this sand? Is this clay? There are things that affect. that, but, but it's nothing that you can't, you know, uh, build around. So,

Philiph: uh, here we, uh, uh, went this way. We provide this, um, feature is adding the price list and you can create your personal price list, or you can share your prices, price list, and, uh, become a like kind of distributor in terms of Erisk Edge, for example, we have on the.

Hold on,

Andy: let me stop you. So I could take a price list, put it on Eurosketch and make it public? Yes. Oh,

Philiph: badass. That's what I'm talking about. Okay. So you can create your own price and share it. Yes. And ideally,

Andy: I could tie [00:40:00] you in on API and it could generate the order on my website. Why not? And then you can make a commission, you know, like Instacart 10% commission.

Philiph: Things are increasing. Yeah. This speed. And yeah, we will think on this, everything step by step. I would just want you to show that, um, what we've developed by the moment and, um, how it, how it give you the ability to, um, output your data and how it's connected with the

Andy: project. That's why I'm just happy that you're thinking bigger.

You know, you, you've, obviously as an entrepreneur, sometimes you just keep thinking, right? You're like, Oh, and if we did this, then we could do that. And if we did that, then we could do this other thing. And it just keeps going. And that's important because the schedule by itself that has some value, but if you can tie it all the way through the supply chain and the market and the end user and get them all together, now you've really.

Got something.

Philiph: So, yes, I agree with you totally. So that's, that's our idea. And so, uh, it's, uh, I showed you how fast and how easy the changes are made to the outlay. So you just change something in the project and when you set up everything, you have a freedom to make fast recalculation of this stuff. And when you have everything, everything prepared for this, like pricelist from your beloved distributor, who are you working with and your calculations of labors, you are very fast with this outlay.

So it takes how money, how much time till it takes for you to make this kind of cycle. The standard small one

Theo: 30 minutes. Yeah.

Andy: Once it's all, once you do the work and you enter it all in it, it's all gonna be done at the time you do the drawing ? Yes. Yeah,

Philiph: that's fair. But you will take time to attach proper prices, uh, select them from your list, and that's all.

I think it's like five minutes for the outlay. Yeah. [00:42:00] So, yeah. That's what we showed in short story.

Andy: Very cool. Well, uh, this is great. I think I want to, I want to experiment with it, run, you know, do some, do some real live drawing with it and then, uh, see how to embed it on, on the website. So if we have any customers at sprinkler supply store that want to design their own system, then we can direct them there.

Maybe I could like, um, make a little video that shows them how to use it and, um, see how we can use it to support our customers. Yeah. I

Philiph: think the first thing is what we need to make all internals work, internal work, preparing the price list from your stock, uh, creating them in Erisk Edge. Uh, and then when you have a request, we have to be very fast by, uh, processing it with your price list and your labor's work, but, uh, we, of course we don't show to the customer, everything that is internal and we can show just, uh, Amount of, uh, the price for the, uh, equipment and one price for the labors, for example, how much it will be cost.

But you know that this price is very precise because you took time to calculate, to prepare all these prices and you can rely on it. That's the case when you risk it. Yeah.

Andy: Yeah. Fantastic. Cool. All right. Well, I will, uh, you know, right now we just got some other things happening, but I want, I'm very excited by this.

And like I said, I, I mostly excited because you guys thought you thought further than just the design and, and I don't know why, uh, other existing companies aren't, aren't Doing this because it's something that, um, I, I, in a weird way predicted like many years ago that why doesn't the irrigation design software, they know all the parts and pieces, they're just missing the pricing and then they're just missing the labor and they could take more of a bite out of the service that they're the value that they're adding and [00:44:00] therefore charge additional fees.

Okay. Do you want to include pricing that has another plan? Do you want to include labor that has another plan? ?

Philiph: Yes. That's what we are working, uh, with because, uh, we are in one person, the developer, and uh, the user. Uh, that's,

Andy: uh, the main thing. That's amazing. You guys have built all this. It's a lot. I, I know how much work this is and it you, this is a lot of work.

Philiph: Yes. And we are making this, uh, very live and. We are continuing with this work, improving the Erie sketch almost every day. We are adding some equipment and we have also the future plans for the second version and so many, uh, so many things. And I'm

Andy: going to buy the Mosier. Um, and I also have, uh, I can't remember the name of it.

It's the, it's the wheel that you can put your iPhone on and you can, so it's got a GPS file. Oh, that was my question. What file are you looking for to import? What type of a file?

Philiph: Uh, for Mosher, it's CSV file. It's a standard export of the Mosher, uh, layered export. It's, uh, previously it named CSV plus plus.

So it's

Andy: not a GPX or a GPS file.

Philiph: No, uh, actually it's just a set of coordinates, it's like X, Y, Z coordinates, columns, and the points of that, uh, as a rows, you just, uh, input, uh, uh, you can see that, uh, you can generate. From any type of software, uh,

Andy: yeah, I'm going to, um, get a Mosier and to do a real life demo, like, uh, measure out a house, put it in here and, and use the software.

I think that'd be fantastic. Um, it also would be some good content. If I can figure out how to turn that into a YouTube video, you know, how to design, you know, an irrigation system in less than 30 minutes.

Philiph: Yes, that's the point. We also have this, uh, like promo or maybe you saw this on the website. [00:46:00] It's, uh, do you see this?

Do you hear the sound or not? No, it's okay though. Oh, then I will share you in the chat and you can see it when you have time. So it's like a small explanation of what we have here. I don't know. I don't see the chat actually.

Andy: That's okay. I can look, I can look at it on your website.

Philiph: Yeah. Okay. Okay. It's on the main page.

So, uh, that's what, what I was talking about is, uh, I don't remember what I was talking about. I don't know,

Theo: but I have some other question, maybe directly to Andy for us. It's interesting. I think so. As you know, as you recognize the set, uh, Philip come from Russia. At the moment, he's located in Germany. He's, uh, come, uh, one year ago to Germany.

Now we are both at the same place in Germany and, uh, we develop Irisketch and, uh, wanted to start, of course, uh, to spread Irisketch over the whole world. So we are now at the moment strong in Russia, of course, and we are strong in Germany. With distribution of our software. And of course, US market is the main goal of us to reach, um, all, uh, contractors from your market.

But what we are missing is a partner at the US market at the moment. And especially somebody which really knows how the market works in the US.

Philiph: So, um,

Theo: we think we know, but it's better if you can explain what to say. U. S. irrigation market on who is contractor, what did contractor actually do? You just told us that mostly nobody tried to design their own.

Uh, when we look on websites of contractors, we only see something like renovation and retrofit systems, but

Philiph: nobody offers

Andy: new systems. Oh, [00:48:00] no, no, no, no. New is, um. Yeah. So let's see. Uh, I'd be happy to tell you everything I know about the U S market. Um, we would need, we need a little bit more time, but, um, there are generally two types of contractors install and service some do.

And then each of those do a little crossover. So some contractors do only new install. and a little bit of service, and that's commercial. And some contractors do a lot of residential service and some install. And it's different on the West, the Western United States versus, let me take you off spotlight here, versus the Eastern United States.

So the Western United States, most irrigation systems are drawn by a professional engineer. Or a

Theo: garden architect.

Andy: Uh huh. Uh, commercial, anyway. Commercial. Okay, yeah. And, uh, on the eastern United States, it's mostly contractor design build. And so contractors go to the distributor, the distributor draws it, uh, and maybe 20% of the time it's an engineer.

So there's a difference between the East Coast and the West Coast. And then you have your distributors where there's like four or five really, really big distributors. And then there's a handful of smaller, you know, family owned businesses and the family owned businesses are now selling to larger businesses and the market is consolidating.

Um, because it's maturing and, uh, from the contractor's perspective, there really aren't any national franchises. There's one growing called Conserva and they're probably, they're really like the only franchise. And this could be a good tool for a franchise, you know, because it would differentiate the franchise.

So that is the thought that I have is, hey, that's a great opportunity because you sell it to a [00:50:00] franchise and then the franchise owner requires all of the franchisees to use the software and then they have access to it. Then they see all the like it's all It's all tied in. Um, and after that you

Philiph: have a small franchise.

Yeah. Yeah.

Andy: You have small contractors all over the United States. Um, and that's part of the, the problem and the opportunity with irrigation. You don't need any education. You don't need any formal licenses other than whatever is required in your town or your state. Yet at the same time, that just means any old guy can throw some stuff in his truck and now he's an irrigation contractor and he comes in at a lower price.

And a lot of the times, these contractors don't know how to compete against somebody who has a low price because they're not any, any, any value themselves. And so I try to really educate contractors to don't worry about price. Make sure you're the most professional. You show up on time. You, Like do everything right.

And then you should be able to have a higher price system, right? It's obvious if it's one guy in a truck, his price should be less. So you don't have to compete against that. Um, and then you've got some landscapers that do irrigation. Right. So you have some landscape companies that also do irrigation and some landscape companies have landscape architects that could use this software and include it in their drawing.

And in the U. S. we only have one company called Land FX. Land FX. Yes. They own the market now outside of people just using AutoCAD and

Philiph: some templates and what about Pro Contractor, uh, isn't used it in the terms of irrigation, uh, Pro Contractor Or you mean Land FX is a, uh, uh, uh,

Andy: complete. That's the largest irrigation software provider of, of, uh, irrigation drawing Land FX.

Philiph: Land FX and Kamatsu Studio Pro Contractor is, uh,

Andy: [00:52:00] And their software is used by the largest engineers in the world. Great company. Very nice guys. I know Jeremiah, the owner pretty well. Um, but it's not something that you can just, uh, design in 30 minutes. It's not quick and easy.

Philiph: It's complicated and very precise.

Andy: And it, yeah, it's very precise. And it sounds expensive. And it is expensive. Yep. Yes. But if you are working with engineers and architects and drawing big CAD drawings, that is the software to use. Yeah, so it's just land fx. com. Yeah,

Philiph: I've been there. I also Investigated about all the software

Andy: and they don't do anything that you're doing.

There's no seller They really just stick in their wheelhouse because I think business is pretty good for them And they don't have the need necessarily to upset the applecart like to chase something new but in my opinion what you're building is really the direction that they They should be going. Um, you know, and then you have, you have some contenders like, uh, that are coming in from the business software, the business management software side of things like service Titan and aspire where contractors are using their software to run their business schedule, service calls, um, prepare quotes, you know, do invoicing and this stuff doesn't.

Like land effects doesn't integrate but it could like yours is built for that because it's all it's all tied together So there's no reason that once the customer signs that Agreement that that design should flow right in to the business management software. They have all the parts and pieces and material Um,

Philiph: yeah.

Really that's what we are thinking about is integration of the, uh, of the whole process of, uh, irrigation contractor, uh, starting from the [00:54:00] design and, uh, up to the main tenants. And, uh, also we are thinking on the how, uh, we can, uh, the, for the whole lifetime of the project, Uh, be helpful, be handy for the contractor because sometime you need to go to the site and check what's happening and you should know where it's all located.

So it's like the working documentation on the project and the risk edge.

Andy: Yeah, yeah. And then my business, um, sprinkler supply store is, um, also I have a, uh, partnership with site one landscape supply. So they're an investor in Sprinkler Supply Store and I, let me see how to describe this. I think of Sprinkler Supply Store as a digital layer on top of wholesale distribution, really on top of site one.

So they're sending me, um. Data every 15 minutes from 10 of their stores all over the United States. So when somebody places an order, if they're in Texas, I will have that fulfilled from the location in Texas. If they're in Florida, I'll have that filled from Florida. And then what we can do is also split orders in group order.

So if not one single location has all the parts, we'll split it up to get it to the customer fast. But I could, I could drop ship out of like 50 of their locations. And so there's this real opportunity for like, for me to vend you the product data. And if somebody wants it, we can get it to them quickly because we built the stack, you know, the integration stack where site one directly.

They're not set up for this yet. And

Philiph: interested, uh, how do you, uh, proceed the prices because you are providing the prices for a special, your customers and, uh, who should know these prices? Because if you put some price in the E Risk Edge, it becomes, uh, public. The

Andy: whole world. I'm, I'm kind of a believer in pricing transparency, right?

We're kind of moving past the [00:56:00] days of this guy's price and this guy's price and this guy's price. I mean, maybe you could say like, Hey, here's a 10% discount or something, but I think that it really just needs to be. And right now the prices are somebody out there on the Internet is already selling that part for less.

Of course. Somebody wants to take the time and search. They'll find it for less.

Philiph: Don't fancy it. But the question is how he delivers it, which services he provide and so on.

Andy: Yeah, and the bigger distributors, they still believe in pricing tiers. They don't want. That pricing transparency, because what it really means is everything has to drop a bit.

Um, but that also means their overhead might have to drop a bit, but that's where the efficiency of what you're providing comes into play. Because if that contractor no longer knocks on their door for a design every week, then they don't need to provide that. So they should lower their price because they're not doing as much work.

Philiph: Yeah,

Andy: so that's kind of why I think some of this could be done, not grassroots, but going to the biggest players, they're not going to be interested because it's too, it's a bit too disruptive for them yet. They don't even know how to like sell their own parts on the internet. Yeah. That's why we But because I ship through SiteOne, SiteOne just wants business, right?

They, they know that orders land in their system automatically. There's no effort on them. So I get, I have really, really good pricing. So we have a doorway basically into, you know, I would love to figure out how I could sell 50 million of parts and, you know, just flows through the system, right? It's like, that's why you could take a transaction fee.

Added on there service value added transaction fee or commission from me and I could do the same It's like we can be really competitive if if the system works and the user comes in and then it just flows through with little Input [00:58:00] then everything can be, you know streamlined

Philiph: Mm hmm without any intentions

Andy: Super

Philiph: anyway.

Yeah, I just will Impressed how progressive your vision and uh, yeah, I think we met the wrong, the right guy we need.

Andy: Well, there's, you know, I'm only doing this cause no one else is cause there's not very many other people like you, there's really only, uh, you know, a handful of people I come across once in a while that, um, have any type of a vision other than like what's Just right in front of them.

That's cool.

Philiph: Yeah. But we are at the start, we

Theo: all was with the same problem that we need a proper way to make design for irrigation. So, uh, we also do many time, many years irrigation. And, uh, from the start, I thought that we have to do design by ourself, not by this polluters. And, uh, in this case, I met Philip three years ago and start with.

together with him to develop a resketch. And here we are. So our main goal is to bring irrigation design to contractors, not to the big players. Uh, we also had some discussions with the big players in Europe, also with big manufacturers like Hunter and Rainbird. And all what they're asking for was, okay, make a ErieSketch version of our products.

So they want an ErieSketch version only with Hunter products. They want

Andy: exclusive, only put Rainbird on your stuff. I know. Exactly. That's part of the problem is that those guys want to control everything end to end. And they're not wrong, they used to be able to do that, but that's not what the future looks like.

The future might not even look like making any money on their parts. It's like, it's a, the value is, is always, you know, moving and if guys want to use Rainbird, they should pick [01:00:00] Rainbird because not because they have to, not because it's the only one in this software. But

Philiph: because it's working the best way and the proper way.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The best way.

Theo: And we don't agree with them and we kick them out. Uh, we had many offers or we had offers of these big players and we, no, we don't want this. We want to bring irrigation design. To people to constructors,

Andy: especially if you're building a marketplace, which I think at the end of the day, you're kind of building, you know, that marketplace and the marketplace needs lots of suppliers, you know, and you need, of course, it's

Philiph: not every time that's that's centralized sources.

Yeah, yeah,

Andy: yeah, um, on the supply. Yeah. And we're working on some, uh, since you guys are in Europe, there's, there's, you guys might know about the Laura technology,

Philiph: Laura. We have a solar solution from France. It uses Laura, uh, communication from in the field.

Andy: Yeah. So we're building, I've got a couple other partners on a startup that, um, basically building a Laura, uh, analytics, uh, platform so that contractors can add wireless sensors out into the landscape or the building and then control the irrigation system, you know, with, with that.

And we've got some wireless valve equipment, but I think

Philiph: that. Valves. Do you have output relays for, to connect this

Andy: valves? Yeah. So wireless adapters, it can go right in the valve and you can go a mile or more. So I, we kind of see the future is actually, the future of irrigation is here. It's just not built and distributed yet, but there's no need for wires and there's no need for a controller.

Yeah.

Philiph: Future will be no,

Theo: no need for water.

Philiph: Yeah. The water. Yeah.

Andy: Can you tell me about your pricing fees? How do you guys charge for the system? Uh,

Philiph: for the [01:02:00] EuroSketch, it's a subscription type. Uh, we charge for the period of subscription. Uh, in Europe, it's 450, uh, in net, uh, Euros. So, and

Andy: that Euro is kind of one to one now for the U. S., almost, right?

Almost.

Philiph: Yeah, it's almost the same, yeah. Four, 450 for the year? For 50s for the year and a bit more if you purchase by the monthly subscription.

Andy: Okay, and is that per company per user? How does

Philiph: that work? Uh, it now working for a user, so if this is a company and it has Uh, two or more, three seats, they can use it, uh, in, uh, but they will have the same workshop where, uh, the place where the projects are stored.

So if they, uh, open one project simultaneously make changes, there will be an, uh, conflict in the saving. So, uh, I'm not, uh, restricting by the number of seats. Currently, but, uh, in future versions, I plan to do the licensing per seat, but now it's not needed because we need to grow now and to catch the market, uh, with our,

Andy: Yeah.

You need people coming in. Right. And it's like, you know, I could even see there being like, um, yeah, it's 4. 50 a year, but maybe your first five sketches are free. So it's like you have a trial, but it never ends. You just can make five. Like if it takes you a month, or a year, or whatever the number is, two, one, ten, you know.

Philiph: Our system is, works like this. We have a trial period of two weeks. It's almost full featured trial period. So you can every time renew your account or, uh, remove and create new one. So the guys are, uh, someone using this feature because they are creating and for 12, uh, two weeks, they have almost full functionality.

But, uh, then they see that it was very handy tool and they are just buying it most of the time. So, uh, we have a very good conversion out of our old [01:04:00] registration. It's like, uh, 10 to 15% of. Purchases. So, uh, it's, it's normal conversion rate. So we have in Russia, we have now it's like 6, 000 accounts of contractors.

So it's very big amount in Europe. It's, we are starting now to grow. It's almost thousand. We caught, I think I need to see the statistics. Yeah. I'm just

Andy: thinking too. It's like if, um, It's one thing if a contractor uses it and likes it. It's another thing if it helps them sell a project. So it's like, all right, how can we.

And I'm thinking of what would it be like if I was trying to sell this? You're like, here it is. Go use this. And once you sell your first system, you'll be like, Oh shit, I got to pay for that. And add 10% to your price when you use this software and see what happens. So

Philiph: our, our,

Theo: um, way to market ErieSketch is that we are searching for represent each country in the world, or maybe each language area in the world.

So at the moment in Europe, we have the, the German speaking. Uh, area, what I cover, we have some guys from Croatia, we have some guys for the Netherland, we have some guys from Lithuania and these guys helping us to develop EruSketch in case of languages, especially. So do translation, do, uh, tutorial videos and do the support after.

Um, and for this work, they get a discount on the annual subscription for customers. So they sell it one time to the customer, so to the contractor, and they get discount on the, uh, subscription price and they get it each year, year by year by year.

Philiph: Yeah. So that's how we market. You're risking our, uh,

Andy: country.

Yeah. How difficult is it to control the features that people have? Buy like, you know what they've paid for like is there is there [01:06:00] some super light version you could give to somebody that's great And it's just always free to just keep people coming in um

Philiph: We have the free version fully free version and it's perpetual.

So you have you will have every time you're um, features like drawing, like drawing landscape, like drawing irrigation on top of it and even layouts. You will have one list of layout, but you don't have access to the outlay to the iris seller. That's the case of the easy version of free version, but every time you can.

It's for a short period of time, switch on the paid version for a month, make everything needed with your project that you created on a free version. And then, uh, stop with the subscription. For example, when the season comes to the, some countries, they have a season for like three or four months. Yeah.

That's what

Andy: it's like here too. And that's why I like the annual plan because the first question someone's going to say is, do I still have to pay in the winter? But when it's yearly, it's like, this is what it is.

Philiph: It's yearly. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. It's cheaper than if you purchase it by month or by, uh, so contractor will think, okay, well, maybe I will have some projects in the winter to work on and to create some designs or requests or,

Andy: uh, you know, do some marketing, you know, and kick out some designs and some proposals all winter

Philiph: long.

Maybe you can provide to your customer and customer and say in the winter, your project will be cheaper and less.

Andy: And there's nothing wrong with it. I'm good. I'm thinking out loud with, um, The contractor doesn't have to give this away for free, right? To me, the drawing's worth a minimum 100. So either they charge, either using it to maintain the highest price in the market or, you know, they're being competitive, but then right away they say, would you like a drawing like this upon completion?

And they're, Oh, I absolutely want that. Okay, cool. It's just a hundred bucks for that drawing that they make their money, you know, easily. [01:08:00]

Philiph: Yes. And it depends on what kind of information they share with in this project, because they can, uh, for example, uh, hide every pipe and just show the sprinklers or hide, uh, I don't know, uh, the, how the wiring manifolds and say, this is the free.

project, just see, uh, and decide if you want more, uh, detailed project, pay for it. And that's how it works in Russia because, uh, we have a bunch of contractors that provide free, uh, designs and that's, uh, the very big sheet in this case, because they are first, they dumped the price to the almost the lowest price for the project.

And now they are providing them for free. And, um, that's the big case when the big players now. Also have to lower the prices for the design. So it's like a chain reaction. I don't know how it's, how it's named. So now we are thinking in Russia about association and they are created some, uh, two associations of irrigators that are now.

We'll take it into control or something. I don't know. I heard that in the U. S. there's an irrigation association that is licensing everyone.

Andy: Well, they don't have any licensing, right? I mean, they have certifications, but it doesn't mean anything to anyone. Uh

Philiph: huh. So it's not really a licensing, so you

Andy: can work without it.

doesn't, they might care, they might not. It's just a way, it's important, don't get me wrong, and it's the education and the training, but It's not required by any state. Uh, I shouldn't say that there might be a couple jurisdictions where they use that, but, but not, not really. And that's part of the problem is it's more like just saying, well, I'm smarter than you because I'm certified in this and you're not.

And that guy's like, well, my business is twice as big as yours and I don't have that certification. So

Philiph: yeah, I thought it's more strict there [01:10:00] than, than we

Andy: have, but no, it's more strict on a backflow. Some places where the plumbing union is, uh, strong, you know, the irrigation contractors can't put in backflows.

Or the contractor has to have a certified plumber at their company. So we fall under the plumbing code. But not, they're not our own

Philiph: code, but that's good for community. Yes. Not to make the pipes, uh, contaminated the main pipe. And

Andy: actually the state of Texas has their own licensing. So in Texas you do have to be a licensed irrigator, but

Philiph: that's if you work without it, you will have problem.

Yep. Okay. Nice. It's really nice to speak with you to know everything about this.

Theo: Very nice. Okay. Andy, do you visit the irrigation show in San Antonio? I

Andy: will be. Yeah. In December? Mm hmm. Are you guys going to come?

Philiph: We are heading to them. Uh, only problem for me is to get a visa because I'm, uh, of Russian nationality.

And, uh, I,

Andy: I've attempt, what do you need? Do you wanna put down that you're coming to visit my business and I'll write you a letter? ,

Philiph: maybe this will be great. I al

Andy: I already, I know places like China, sometimes you need a letter from the business, right? And

Philiph: so, yeah, that's how I get into Germany. Tale made this.

It's a kind of invitation for me and, uh, uh, he also hired me as a, uh, employer, irrigation designer. So that's the only way

Andy: I can go. So let me know. Happy to help you out. If you need something like that. Oh, thank you. So, and I'm, I'm, I might be, um, trying to organize like, uh, you know, a little meet up kind of event, like at a bar or something like that.

So, um, which would not be for like Rainboer, Toro, and Hunter, I really believe in trying to help the incumbent companies that are trying to do something of real value, you know, like yourself. But a lot of times contractors [01:12:00] don't know about what you're building. Because the industry only talks about the same thing over and over again, and they're very protective of the market.

Yeah.

Philiph: They don't, uh, new things to come fast. Yeah, they don't make it. Yeah. It needs time to everyone understand how it's, how it's perfect. Yeah. To work with the cycle.

Andy: Okay. Cool. All right. Well, let's keep in touch. We'd love to meet you both. And, um,

Philiph: Yeah, every time you feel free to contact us and, uh, we can, uh, discuss, uh, more detailed, uh, on how it works and how to improve all this.

Andy: Hey guys, Andy here for, for an ask. I should ask in the beginning instead of the end. And I love to sell, but it's hard to sell yourself. So I don't always sell myself, but here I go. Please, if you like The Sprinkler Nerd Show, like, subscribe, and share with a friend. I actually probably prefer if you share with a friend.

So that way, more people can join the Sprinkler Nerd movement. And, let's just say, disrupt the industry. Sprinkler Nerds, we're here. Revenge of the nerds. Revenge of the nerds!

Andy records live from Highway I-15 in Salt Lake City, Utah.

In this Episode, Andy talks with OptConnect CEO Chris Baird, and National Sales Justin Nichols.

Learn more about OptConnect Here: OptConnect

==========

Andy: For those of you listening that this might be the first time you've heard about OptConnect, I encourage you to go listen to Episode #73 that Justin and I recorded probably a year and a half ago.

Something like that year and a half ago, two years ago, and that'll be kind of like level one cellular connectivity intro, how it works, the benefits, all those sorts of things. What I want to do today is kind of hear from both Justin and Chris on where things, where their business has evolved since kind of.

Entering the irrigation market.

Justin: Yeah, that's awesome. Uh, you know, we entered the irrigation market about three years ago and we knew that we had a very good value prop based on, you know, other markets that were very active in, in our market leaders. And, and over the last two and a half, three years, you know, we've really started to scale in the irrigation market.

I think today we have about. Four out of five of the large, you know, national distributors set up to be able to supply OpConnect hardware and services and about a dozen, uh, regional distributors as well. So if you haven't heard of us, chances are it is locally available at your, you know, landscape irrigation supply house.

Uh, also just recently during smart irrigation month. We launched our brand new Ascend Dura device. And what's really cool about the Ascend Dura is it basically functions like a wifi hotspot on your phone. And so for the last couple of years, you know, we've really, uh, tried to penetrate the central control market.

Uh, and now we have a new tool in our tool belt that allows us to connect to wifi only type of controllers. So you're. Your Hydra wise, your beehives, your ratios and any other type of wifi only type of gateway, uh, to be able to provide the same type of high level managed service to be able to troubleshoot.

Now, not only the cellular side of that, but also the wifi side of that. So you can now bring your own wifi solution, plug and play and let us. Hit the easy button for you.

Andy: Okay. Wow. So there's a whole bunch happening there and some of this I wasn't quite aware of. So why don't we step back? Because I had always thought of OpConnect as, as cellular, but you just said a bunch of wifi.

So how does cellular and wifi come together?

Justin: Yeah. So basically the wifi allows you to connect locally to a piece of equipment, just like you would in your house. Uh, and so we're able to make a local network connection via wifi. to that wifi only irrigation controller that allows the user to connect with a cellular device when otherwise they would have no means or way of connecting that external device.

So we collect connect locally via the wifi network. But then all the communication is done on the cellular side. So when you're trying to do remote management, uh, Monitoring of a site like this, that's using a wifi only controller, whether it's light commercial, your own personal property, a vacation rental.

We're able to manage that now remotely over the cellular network. And because of our managed service value prop, we can actually troubleshoot. Both types of those connections with the wifi.

Andy: So can we like get a tangible example? Let's name a controller just to give this some context. Could we say like a Hunter Hydrawise controller?

Would that make sense to talk about that? And just to try to, you know, have it more tangible.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. So you have a Hunter Hydrawise controller. Uh, you know, has 48 plus zones. If I remember correctly, they can go on a lot of light commercial properties. The cost is a little bit less expensive than that commercial unit, but you're relying on that property owner or that site's wifi connection.

Perhaps they won't let you on their network. Perhaps the wifi signal isn't strong enough. We're able to put a cellular device that acts as a Wi-Fi hotspot inside that controller or right next to it and allow any type of Hydrawise user to manage that system remotely over an OpConnect cellular network.

Andy: Okay. So you bring another device, your brand new device, and let's talk about that device. Is it one device? Is it two devices? How do you get from the cellular cloud down to the Wi-Fi LAN or local Wi-Fi?

Justin: Yeah, it's all it's just one device. So basically, we have the, the Wi-Fi technology and the cellular technology baked into a single device.

It's fully plug and play, we can provide a NEMA 4x enclosure. So if it's You know, an outdoor install and you don't want to mount it inside that Hydrawise controller cabinet. We can just install it right next to it. There's no wiring that you would have to run between the two. And it's, it's very simple.

It's, it's activated, ready to go out of the box. The Wi-Fi is turned on. We give you, you know, the SSID and password to manage that. We can change that on your behalf. Uh, you really don't have to worry about anything when it comes to setting up that local Wi-Fi network or managing it over the cellular network.

Hmm.

Andy: Wow. Wow. Okay. A couple of things I'm thinking, is this a single controller device or can you connect multiple controllers or even other devices to it?

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. So just like you would with your iPhone, if you're traveling and you and your work colleague are trying to get on a Zoom call or check your email.

We can connect multiple wifi devices to this single device. Uh, it also has four ethernet ports. So if we wanted to, we could actually hardwire four controllers into it as well. Uh, but yes, any type of wifi equipment that the landscape property manager or whoever it is. Uh, is, is utilizing at that site. We can connect everything that they have at that site, uh, within a, within a reasonable distance, obviously, uh, to the wifi, to the Ascendera device.

Hmm.

Andy: Does that change, you know, so thinking historically irrigation controllers don't really use a lot of bandwidth, right? There's just not a lot of bandwidth. What is the bandwidth of this device? And I ask because I'm just curious. Because somebody may want to, you know, get on their phone and watch YouTube, and from an irrigation perspective, that's a lot of data that historically hasn't been required.

But how does that translate to the new device? Yeah, so the new

Justin: device is called a LTE Cat 4. So that is kind of your baseline fast type of device, uh, similar speed to, you know, web browsing or, or app browsing on an iPhone. And so it's going to have the speed and bandwidth to connect multiple controllers or pieces of, you know, equipment that, that communicate via wifi.

Simultaneously, so you're not going to have any lag, any delay, uh, any timeouts in your communication probably wouldn't, uh, advocate for them to use it as a hotspot to, to stream, you know, YouTube on just because there are data plans on the cellular side associated with that. Uh, and you don't want to, uh, get dinged for, for using a couple of gigs of data when your irrigation controllers are maybe set up for, you know.

250, 500 megabytes of data

Andy: online. And I was kind of asking, not because I think someone's gonna get out their phone and start watching YouTube, but maybe there's an opportunity for a contractor to mention this to maybe, um, a municipality or a school district, something like that, so that they, the, you know, the client can get extra usage out of the device.

Absolutely. And use it to operate other equipment that happens to be on the site. Yeah,

Justin: absolutely. And so when you get into some of these commercial installs, you know, outside of just the wifi-only type controllers, you may have four or five, six controllers in a utility room, and we could connect all of those with a single device

Andy: now.

Wow. Cool. So I'm, I'm wondering if this would be a good time to discuss if a, if a contractor or a client, you know, is thinking of a control system, you know, XYZ, let's not name any names, controller XYZ, and that. The brand manufacturer offers on their own, both wifi and cellular, you know, how, what type of decision would they make or how would they make the decision to use OptConnect and choose, you know, this device that you're talking about the wifi hotspot or just your, you know, standard cellular device.

Justin: Yeah, it would probably be a decision based on what their current infrastructure, you know, is in that area. Um, the device can support five Ethernet-based connections. No, I would probably still advocate for hardwiring it in. Um, but otherwise, yeah, uh, they would have the ability now with multiple tools in the tool belt to make an even more informed decision as to how they're going to connect their equipment or other equipment.

Uh, in their room that they want to be able to remotely manage.

Andy: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. As well as I'm just thinking, uh, you know, my brain's just turning here. I'm thinking that there's a benefit to knowing that OptConnect is, you know, supporting the brand manufacturer with the installation so that the client doesn't have to worry about how reliable is the brand manufacturer's cellular.

This takes that question away because now they can look at Your company OptConnect and see that this is what you do. So it almost like may reduce the risk of using, you know, an irrigation brand manufacturer. Cellular service.

Chris: You, you bring up a really good point, Andy. And, and in our world, you know, we think of connectivity as more than just connecting it to a, uh, to a cellular tower and then allowing that to, to roam.

If you were to use OptConnect over a different solution, say one of the brand manufacturers, there's an entire team at OptConnect that's dedicated to watching for certain events like overages and outages. We're watching to make sure that that device has a healthy connection. We're taking autonomous action.

If it doesn't, uh, we're on the back end providing support in the event that, uh, the, the installer or the end user has additional questions or needs support. You know, anybody can pick up our phone and be talking to an agent in 30 seconds or less, get live technical support, single call resolution. There's the, uh, a layer that OpConnect brings, uh, professionalism.

and satisfaction, if you will, to an operator that they might not get anywhere else so that they don't have to think about it. We know that in the world of IOT internet of things. If there is not a reliable eye, there is not a reliable tee. And we try to bring that stability so that an operator can go do what they're best.

They're not best at sitting behind a computer screen watching for connectivity to drop. We are. They love to be out moving on to the next deal, making sure the grass is green, the client's happy and that everybody is, uh, is satisfied at knowing. That, that controller's connected reliably to the internet.

Mm hmm, mm

Andy: hmm. And I think as soon as, um, a contractor or client experiences an outage, uh, or when I say outage, I mean the controller's offline, let's, let's say it that way. The device is offline. A lot of the time, brand manufacturers can't tell the user why. It's just offline. You know, you got to roll a truck out there.

It could be, uh, the power's out. It could be it lost, uh, uh, the connection and it timed out. You got to roll your truck out there. And from what I've experienced using OpConnect, one of the greatest benefits is to be able to explain, help explain why the controller is offline. Because just because the controller is offline doesn't mean it lost its cellular connection.

Your device could be still connected and it's a great way to troubleshoot that remotely.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. We're able to eliminate a lot of variables without having to roll that truck roll, which is very costly.

Andy: Well, Chris, since we have you joining us today, I would love for you to share, you know, I guess as much as you are willing to share in terms of how OpConnect kind of, um, got started or sort of the foundation of OpConnect, you know, before you guys entered this industry, could you share a little bit about that?

Chris: Sure. It's a, it's a good story. I'll see if I condense it, can condense it here for us. Uh, there's a really interesting part of this story, which is, uh, I think there was some timing involved here and being a little bit lucky and having some, uh, some insights that were coming. We really cut our teeth. In another industry, uh, not in, uh, in agriculture, if you will, or in irrigation, we actually cut our teeth over in the retail industry, which, uh, specifically we were serving locations that were unattended, such as kiosks, ATMs, and signage.

And what we learned in that space is that connectivity was becoming increasingly important, more and more difficult to procure and less and less reliable for people that were doing it themselves. So we set out to Perfect. A solution that ultimately became OptConnect. And over the course of a few years, we refined that and product ties that in a way that allowed us to take that same solution to dozens of industries, which we do today, we take each of these industries serious.

We try to serve those industries in meaningful capacities. We try to be good stewards and participants of trade shows and organizations. We try to be thought leaders or partner with thought leaders to help enable them. But really what we learned through it all is that we had an opportunity to become an expert at something everybody else took for granted or thought as an afterthought.

Thanks to the advent of the iPhone, everybody thinks that IOT connectivity can be as simple as an out of the box, powered on, uh, walk away solution. And we know the reality is, we've worked very, very hard to make that experience true. But otherwise, it generally doesn't happen, or it certainly doesn't scale to that, that capacity.

So, when we started, uh, serving these various industries, our goal was simple. We want to make a out of the box experience, make it as easy as possible for anybody in any industry. to open a device, plug it into power, hook up the antenna, plug in the Ethernet cable and walk away. 30 second install. Uh, or we're not doing it right.

And I'll tell you, it's taken a team pretty significant team. Uh, you know, a long time to perfect that to make that a reality. And that's what we've done today. Uh, the company really has evolved over, over the last couple of years, but we've really hit a stride as well. And we know where we provide value.

We know where we sit in the supply chain, if you will, of our customers and how critical internet connectivity is. And, uh, you know, we just come to work every day loving what we do.

Andy: That's great. I love how you mentioned, I think you use the word unmanned devices, something to that effect, and I couldn't agree more because there's a difference between something working all the time, or let me step back, there's a difference between when something fails, but there's a dude one door down that can just go, you know, restart it versus something that's unmanned.

When it's unmanned, it really needs to work all the time because there's nobody around to fix it. And I think that's a, that's a great differentiator. And if you can achieve, uh, you know, close to a hundred percent success and an unmanned environment, that's,

Chris: that's amazing. Yeah. You know, that's, that's just the reality of, uh, of where we're headed today.

And especially if you fast forward in the history of the company through the pandemic. We learned that a lot of businesses turned to technology when the workforce sort of dried up, if you will. They turned to connectivity as a means by which they could be in multiple places at once. Uh, we learned through the pandemic as a nation and as a world, the importance of connection.

And we certainly learned in the business world the importance of connectivity and OpConnect serves that and sits directly in that value proposition of being able to allow our customers to magnify their efforts and to be in multiple places at once, if you will, by essentially replacing the man on the edge with a device that allows our customers to see what's going on.

And, uh, to, to trust and know that somebody's behind the scenes making sure everything's working how it needs to all the time. That's fantastic.

Andy: I'd like to ask if you're willing to share how you came to the company,

Chris: Chris. Yeah, I, that's a great story. I've actually been here since the beginning, since day one.

And, uh, I was in a, an adjacent market, if you will, uh, working. Happily in that market, when the opportunity came about to take this, what we call our proverbial duct tape solution of a router, this is in 2006 when IOT wasn't even a word, right? Yeah. If you will, or even M to M it was all. what we would call telemetry, uh, and pull that together.

And over the course of a couple of months, what we found is that there was a solution out there for the oil and gas industry that allowed for that remote telemetry to be collected. via a cellular gateway and transmitted to the cloud, if you will. Uh, and I, I think even then calling in a cloud was a big stretch.

Uh, like I think about today, right? Very, very expensive solution. So I set out to, to, to find a way to get the cost down and to productize that, to standardize on what we did. And, and about two years later, after having some. Pretty phenomenal success, just word of mouth. We made the strategic decision that, that this could not only be a product, but it could actually be a business.

And not only could it be a business, it could serve dozens of industries. And not only could it serve dozens of industries, but we saw the writing on the wall years and years ago that we were going to be moving towards an ever connected world that relied on the ability to connect ubiquitously anywhere, almost anywhere that you are.

There's, we call them cellular deserts. There's very few of those that exist in the country these days. Uh, you know, connectivity is essentially everywhere. And, uh, we set out to. Find a way to to meaningfully connect our customers to the Internet, uh, and it's just it's been a lot of fun. We have had so many extreme use cases and different examples of things that have come to us over the years.

And, uh, you know, irrigation is just one of dozens, but a perfect example of where we can add value to something that may have had a legacy solution that's either old, decaying or going away. You know, radio controllers and, and, uh, you know, traditional, uh, boring of, uh, and laying cable and, and copper underground, you know, those are days of past and, uh, with everything moved to connectivity wirelessly or cellularly, you were, we're in a perfect position to help.

Andy: So over the last 15 years, has it just been smooth sailing, easy peasy, lemon squeezy, the business just grew, or were there times when. It was tough going and you questioned whether you were making the right decisions with the company. I love to hear kind of how the progression went.

Chris: Yeah, you know, as we look back, it's really clear to see that we've always been under some meaningful growth tension.

Whether we recognized it in the moment or not, uh, there were always things that we were learning and adjusting. And I've always been fond of a business that can, can look back in retrospect and make a statement, uh, something that's happened in the past. And for us, I, it's very clear to see that there were a few pivotal, what I call DNA altering moments that were make or break, lay it all on the line, uh, opportunities for the company to go after.

Uh, I remember. Uh, particularly a number of years ago, a situation that occurred globally on on the Internet. There was a a vulnerability introduced to the Internet called Heartbleed in 2014. OpConnect was not personally, uh, you know, affected by Heartbleed directly. We didn't have any vulnerabilities in our system and there was no data exfiltrations.

We never got hacked like was happening everywhere. to major companies. Uh, you know, if you had a online log in with the whether it was to an email account or social media account, almost everything was vulnerable. But what we saw as a result were a number of inbound inquiries, uh, testing our systems to see if they were vulnerable.

And it was breaking the system. It was causing things to not be able to get out. And that was a make or break moment for us where we had to make a couple of decisions to move forward. 40, 000 customers to a new platform that was protected behind a firewall. We had to do that in the course of a couple of hours, which was unprecedented.

That was like a six or a nine month effort that we, we got done in about a little over 24 hours. It's amazing what you can actually

Andy: do when you constrain time. Isn't it?

Chris: Oh yeah,

Andy: absolutely. You tell your team to do something and they're going to tell you, Oh, six months. And you say, no, can you do it in 24 hours?

Like, it's just amazing when you layer time onto something.

Chris: Yeah. We, we learned that we're best when our backs against the wall. That's when, when the best in us comes out. Uh, you know, and then fast forward a number of years, I think every organization went through this reflective moment as. The reality of the pandemic was setting in quickly and, uh, you know, as businesses were getting shut down and people were getting sent home, you know, we, we look at that very, uh, very fortuitously.

We had months earlier made the decision to enable a remote workforce. Everybody had a laptop. We had already fully adopted technology that allowed us to stay connected. Through, uh, back office systems and, and, uh, zoom and teams and, uh, and think chats, uh, chat tools. So it was a seamless transition for us that allowed us to get to a position where we could be not reactive to the situation, but actually helpful to our customers that they were trying to navigate, you know, sending remote employees home and figuring out how to keep them connected.

You know, we quickly developed a solution that allowed our customers to send their. cut their employees home using our connectivity so that they could stay connected, get their job done. Every day. So there's there. It certainly has not been smooth sailing, Andy, but as we look back, we are also grateful for those experiences because they're where we stretched and learned the most.

We have a saying on our wall that alludes to the fact that stretching is while it might be painful, it's where we learn the most. We believe that learning happens on the edge. And if we can keep our company on that edge of learning and catastrophe, but always stay to this side of it, we're always going to be in a helpful growth position.

Andy: Fantastic words of wisdom. Love that. Thank you for, thank you for sharing that. Thank you for giving us a little bit of a history of the company. And I think maybe since we have Five minutes or so left. You could tell us, uh, what's on the horizon. Let's assume you guys got great market share and irrigation.

Everybody's using your product. What's

Chris: next? You know, I love this question and I love to put it into perspective too. If we kind of zoom out of the business world and just look at what's happening globally, the electrification of everything, uh, connectivity, you know, I knew that we were onto something at OpConnect in the business world.

When I got a phone call from my parents saying they have a washer and dryer that needs to connect to the internet and needed help, I thought, okay, there's, there's the rest of the world kind of catching up and making it here. But if we look at fast forward, there's a couple of macro trends that we look at that I think are really important.

Number one is the importance of scarce resources. Uh, as a country, for example, uh, it happens to be raining outside for us today, yesterday, we got an entire summer's worth of rain and about four hours, uh, people tend to think of water as free cause it falls from the sky. We know better if we look and step back.

It's a scarce resource. We need to manage it appropriately. Where else does that happen? Well, it happens with energy. It happens, uh, in, in a number of, of different, uh, industries. It's going to happen with electricity. So if we can identify these macro trends. That are likely to either get regulated or just out of necessity be managed differently, and we can position ourselves to help facilitate the collection of data to help customers make actionable real time decisions that can be our guiding star on where we take the company next, um, as Thank you The world connects EVs.

We're going to have to do that really smartly. There's just not enough electricity to supply. If you were to replace every, every internal combustion engine with electric vehicles today, we would be kind of crippled, if you will, as a nation. So we, that has to be built out as that's built out. It needs to be managed differently.

It needs to be monitored. Uh, there may be times where it may need to be routed, certainly needs to be secure. So we know that's a macro trend that we can look at, uh, that will help, uh, drive, you know, not only growth, but meaningful adoption of connectivity and technology that allows us to use our resources better.

We look at things like security, all types of applications of security, you know, regrettably, we live in a world where Where that is more important than it's perhaps ever been. There are more and more assets being deployed to more and more unattended locations that are vulnerable to various types of nefarious activity.

Those need to be protected. They need to be monitored and, uh, and managed accordingly. So those, those are some of the ways that we try to think about. You know, macro tailwinds that could help guide us long term as an organization. Now, by no means does that mean we're willing to turn our back on some of the industries that we serve today.

In fact, our plan is to continue to land and serve those industries long term, be experts, become a trusted household name, if you will. Um, the the OptConnected and the Kleenex of the of the world, if you will. And, uh, and that's our goal to just provide meaningful connectivity anywhere possible. It's great,

Andy: uh, great plan and I think you guys are well on the way.

I know I certainly trust your devices because I've used them and have experienced with them and the people that I've suggested to use them feel exactly the same way. It's kind of like once somebody tries one, they go, all right, I'm just using this. For all my stuff. I don't, I don't want to have to worry about brand manufacturer, ABCD ease devices.

I just want one portfolio with all my devices. So I appreciate what you guys are doing and I appreciate how it is also kind of raising the bar in our industry and providing, you know, more contractors with more access to technology so that they can learn faster and maybe to use your words, you know, run their business on the edge a little bit as well.

Absolutely. Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much. Uh, we are running out of time and Justin, maybe on another, maybe we can do a, a sequel to the second episode and talk a little bit more about some particular, some other industries that, um, that you're involved with that are also, you know, water related, looking

Justin: forward to it.

Andy, thanks for having us

Andy: back. Thank you very

Chris: much.

In this episode, Andy chats with Kevin Williams an expert in ChatGPT and A.I.

==========

References:

www.SprinklerNerd.com/inkworks

www.InkWorks.ai

==========

Kevin: You know, it's not going to be AI that replaces you as the employee or, or supplants you, your company. It's going to be a company that knows how to use AI or a person who knows how to use AI that's going to disrupt things.

Andy: Hello my friends. This is Andy. Welcome to episode 129. Of the Sprinkler Nerd Show, where it's my job to speak with world-class water and technology innovators from all walks of life so that it may inspire you and your business. My guest today is Kevin Williams.

Who is Kevin Williams?

Kevin has been featured in Inc.Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and even as a Shark Tank business. Before starting his current company, www.inkworks.ai, Kevin was the former operating partner and CEO of www.balls.co. And before that, Kevin was the founder and CEO of Brush Hero, which is the product you may have seen on shark tank.

Our conversation today will be focused on AI tools like Chat GPT, and how you can implement these tools in your business. So with that, Kevin, welcome to the show.

Kevin: Thanks so much for having me, Andy.

Andy: I cannot wait to talk about AI and how service businesses, contractors, irrigators, and landscapers can learn a little bit from you, who has spent a lot of time, uh, really becoming an expert in this field. And I think that before we jump into that, I'd like to ask how you got your start in business and as an entrepreneur.

Kevin: It's, it's funny. I actually come from a family of entrepreneurs ever since I was about 10 or 12. My family was traveling all over the country with various business ideas and it was just part of the fabric of my life.

Kevin: Sadly, that story doesn't actually end particularly well. So sometimes I, I, I glib about it that I come from a family of failed entrepreneurs because in a period in my adolescence, my parents lost their business, they lost their house. They lost their marriage, like all of this horrible stuff. So young Kevin decides that a good idea is to not be an entrepreneur and instead go be a chemist.

Kevin: Well, fates have a way of, uh, of messing with plans like that. Um, I went on the straight and narrow path. I did a bunch of interesting stuff and I ended up at pretty good business school. And in business school, I entered a business plan competition just as a part of a, like an elective entrepreneurship class.

Kevin: And I won. And I won a bunch of money that came along with it for seed funding. Um, so I ended up starting my first business having done everything in my power not to be an entrepreneur. I was like, oh heck, here's an opportunity. I'm just going to take a left turn in my life and chase this now. Um, that business didn't necessarily go anywhere, but it introduced me to the angel and venture community in my town in Washington DC and uh I ended up operating businesses for a high net worth, uh, individuals for a bunch of years and my own entrepreneurial journey kicked in again, where I saw that there was just so much waste in a lot of startup companies that people really didn't know how to demonstrate.

Kevin: What we marketers would call product market fit, and instead they just dump bucket loads of money into things trying to prove a concept. Uh, and when I saw the rise of social media, I saw an opportunity to rapidly test concepts, um, without necessarily spending a lot of money. And that pivoted into a whole series of businesses where I would either license or buy intellectual property.

Kevin: And my dirty little secret was that when a patent was pitched to me, I could go out onto social media and test some concept around that product. I could throw a bunch of traffic at it, see if anybody cared. If people cared about the idea, then I would license the patent and then I would already know that I could get on to first base with the product.

Kevin: Was it going to be a home run? Who knows, but I could get on to first base. So that led to the Brush Hero product, which I had licensed. I'd licensed the underlying IP from a gentleman in the UK, um, and several other patents in homewares and kitchenwares. Uh, I sold, um, or I, yeah, I exited Brush Hero in about 2019.

Kevin: And, um, then I ended up running, uh, a large international brand. Usually I don't say, but yes, it was Balls. co.

Andy: Fuck it, you can say it on this channel, on this show.

Kevin: Yes, I was a manscaper. Um, so Balls was the largest, uh, manscaping company in Europe. Uh, you can probably already tell I'm not the guy who tells Balls jokes all day.

Kevin: So it was, it was pretty fun to dive into a brand like that. British sensibility, really cheeky humor. And, um, our goal was to drive it into, uh, the U S with that sort of humor. Um, the realities of running a UK European based business from the West coast of the U S not so great. A lot of early mornings, a lot of late nights.

Kevin: So, mm-hmm. , in part when I saw just the I I, I, I like to think that I immediately saw the opportunities that generative AI would represent when G P T launched in November of last year, and I left and dove feet first into generative AI and practical applications of it. Um, And I've been rooting around for business models in my M.

Kevin: O. You know, test some ideas, test a lot of different things, um, to see what might take root. And from there, ink works is one of several different products, projects that I'm working on, um, as well as doing executive coaching and executive coaching oriented around a I capacity development within organizations.

Kevin: Because one challenge of all of this Is that coming up with a one size fits all solution just isn't practical. So business leaders need to develop a framework around the way that they think about AI and how they're going to safely lever it in their business. Um, as opposed to just looking for a magic bullet type.

Kevin: Platform that they can just buy. That's going to solve all of their problems. Um, that's going to be very interesting to, to, to see how that develops. And it's been fun to, to, to work with other business leaders to try and identify how their particular business, be it, you know, in landscaping or direct consumer or.

Kevin: Business to business SAS type stuff. Well, how can they actually deploy this stuff right away to make changes in their business? Because, you know, the, the adage has become. You know, it's not going to be AI that, that replaces you as the employee or, or supplants you, your company. It's going to be a company that knows how to use AI or a person who knows how to use AI that's going to disrupt things.

Andy: I love that. So there's a couple takeaways. I'm going to start with the last thing you said, because it reminds me of a great expression that I can't remember who the author is, but I use it all the time. And that is the company that kills you will look nothing like you. So when you said AI may not replace the person, it's going to be a company that knows how to use AI that becomes your competitor.

Andy: That's a great example of another company that It looks nothing like you, but could end up killing your business and you were running balls. co and this is not the right time to talk about balls. co, but we don't actually talk about a lot of balls in this industry. We do talk about a lot of nipples though.

Andy: There are many different types of nipples in the irrigation industry, believe it or not. So I'm just going to, I'm just going to put that out there inside joke for those that are listening. We don't talk about balls, but we like to talk about nipples, talk about

Kevin: turf.

Andy: And turf. Yep. Totally. You can talk about turf.

Andy: There's a lot to, a lot to play with there. Not last week. It's been probably three weeks now. Kevin and I both went to a conference. I would say that's just for shark tank companies, just for those who have. been on Shark Tank, whether it aired or whether it was just taped, because we know that most of the businesses that tape don't actually go to air.

Andy: So we were both at the conference, and that's when I was learning about what you were doing in the AI space, because Kevin was actually presenting at the conference. And I thought this would be great, Kevin, to have you come and share some of your Uh, real practical world experience with AI, you know, and how you are coaching people to use it, some of the value that it has, and maybe even some of the best practices or things you should do first, second, third, or even how do you optimize the responses of, let's say, chat GPT versus a beginner that just goes in and asks it a basic question.

Andy: So very, very excited, and especially because this industry is tends to lag behind.

Kevin: So first, just to back up, I we were sort of operating on the assumption that everybody knows what this is, and I'm pretty sure everybody has at least heard of it at this point. That is this magic machine that can that you can talk to, and it can it can come up with responses.

Kevin: Um, but it is actually a success story. That's it's one of those overnight successes. That's eight years in the making that billions and billions of dollars has been poured into what are called neural networks that allow So Uh, highly abstract patterns to to interact with each other such that the magic machine can output based on a predictive model.

Kevin: What might come next from a thought? So that's essentially what it's doing. It's predicting from the sum of the human Internet knowledge. What? The next likely thought can be, and it is absolutely amazing what it can do, but the underlying fundamentals of neural networks have been around for a long time.

Kevin: The novelty and what was just completely mind blowing for most of us was the Interaction, the interactive effect. Like if you leave a bunch of wonky people together who are studying neural networks, they know how neural networks work. They don't need this chat functionality. What the chat functionality did is it made it much more accessible for we mere mortals to be able to lever these tools, um, on on even on a basic level, as opposed to going through a whole machine learning type process.

Kevin: So These are predictive models. They're taking the sum of human knowledge and they are outputting the next likely. So the first thing to understand about them is that They don't necessarily know or care if anything is particularly accurate. So, this is what you hear about in terms of hallucinations. And hallucinations are just wrong facts.

Kevin: Like, the AI is not particularly good with facts. It's very good at expressing A dubious fact in a very convincing way, which should be a giant red flag for most of us who produce any sort of content that particularly in a subject matter that's relatively technical like what you guys are talking about, um, it could easily.

Kevin: It could easily just lie to you. So the first thing that I tell people from a, from a mindset perspective is that you need to calibrate what you're doing with the AI based on who you are and what you know, so picture like a Venn diagram, you've got this. One circle, that's the size of my house, that is the sum total of human knowledge.

Kevin: And then you have this intersecting circle that's much smaller, which is the sum total of who you are and what you know and what you know about irrigation and, uh, and lawn care and everything else. Right? And the intersection of those two circles is where the power really lies. So If you, the farther you drift away from that, the more likely you are to get into dangerous territory.

Kevin: So, I know a lot about digital marketing. I know a lot about business operations and such. That is a core of who I am. But, if I drift away and I start talking with the AI about neuropsychology, I might get interesting results, but I have no way of calibrating whether or not those results are actually useful or, or practical or not.

Kevin: I'm just leaving it to the AI. So when you say

Andy: calibrate, what does, what does that mean? What does calibrate mean? So

Kevin: it's you know what you know. So imagine, you know, most of us have have businesses that are large enough that you have developing staff like there. There are other people that are involved in the business and you you take, let's just say a new sales guy and You, The way If you're the senior sales guy or you're the business owner, you might tell the sales guy to go off and do X, Y, and Z.

Kevin: And then you're going to look at the output and you're going to, you're going to coach them, you're going to push them towards an output that you know is going to work in because you have this expertise in the knowledge. It's the same as true for the AI. The AI doesn't necessarily know what it's talking about, but if you were to look at the output.

Kevin: Your art as a business person and just as an individual is being able to identify the value in that output. And if it's something you don't know anything about, that's going to be really hard to do. So if you're, if you're looking at, at creating something that's entirely new that you don't know anything about, there are ways to use AI that you can do that.

Kevin: But it's not as effective as Amplifying things that you already do know. So in a lot of organizations, let's just take a lawyer, for example, like you could you could call a lawyer and say, Hey, I need to set up a trust document and whatever. And right now the M. O. would be that lawyer would probably record the call or take notes on the call.

Kevin: They would go to their associate. Their associate would look through their templates about it. Trust. They'd adapt it to Wyoming. They put it back to the senior attorney who would then approve it, edit it, give it red lines, hand it back to the guy or gal and then process it and then finalize it and then send it out because that senior attorney really knows their stuff or you hope they really know their stuff.

Kevin: They can do that. That is their art. That is their job. That is their profession. But now you can bypass all of that, that associates job. Not so good for the associate, right? But you could output that document and be able to read it and have it done in 15 seconds, but you can't abdicate your professionalism and your art.

Kevin: You can't just trust it. You're going to get 80% of the way there in 15 seconds, but that last 20% of editing and clarifying and redlining, um, you still own that at least at the moment. So. The lawyer knows a lot about law. The business guy has actually read a ton of contracts, right? Like, I've probably read a thousand contracts in my career.

Kevin: I'm not a lawyer. I happen to be married to one. But, I... Not a lawyer, but if I need to create a new contract I can actually get 90% of the way there So let's just say 70% of the way there Because I know how contracts are written right and I can read it and I can interpret Okay, this indemnification clause makes sense to me The smart move is to then send it on to the lawyer, but I didn't have to spend the 500 for him to draft the first version.

Kevin: I just need to spend the 250 for him to take a pass at it at the other side, because I know enough to be dangerous. Now, if it were to get into case law, statutes, regulations, things like that, it could easily lie to you, and that's out of my realm. Like the lawyer might recognize that that case isn't a real case or that that statute isn't accurate, but dang, if the AI isn't going to be very, very compelling in its, it's sort of its defense of its own facts that it's putting forward, but that's the.

Andy: So, so would it be. Would it be safe to say that an attorney who uses Chet GPT, if Chet GPT or the AI can do the 70% as you describe, but because they're the expert in that field, they can review that 30% and get it right. So that if it's lying, they can correct it because they have the expert knowledge in that core business.

Kevin: Exactly, exactly. And this is where I like to focus when I'm talking to people about it. There's a lot of water is wet out there. Oh, you can just. Have it write a giant blog post for you. Okay. That's cool. You know, it's cool to watch it do its output. It's like, it's sort of mind blowing if you haven't seen it by all means, totally go sign up and see that because it's really cool, but that doesn't allow you to abdicate from your art and your expertise.

Kevin: So, you know, your audience knows a lot about lawn care and it like, like you can have it create a blog post about certain patterns of irrigation and you're going to be able to decide whether or not those are accurate or not. But if you want to reach into topics that you don't know much about, even if they're close to you, you can.

Kevin: But you have to have either some sort of validation mechanism such that you can determine whether it's accurate or not, um, or not care, so. Because

Andy: then if somebody who is an expert in that category reads it, they may think, Oh my gosh, what is Kevin talking about here? He doesn't know what he's talking about.

Andy: This is not accurate.

Kevin: Exactly. Like imagine, you know, I, as I understand it, that, uh, you know, grass varietals change by different continents and there's expertise in South America and they're, you know, sprinkler nerds in South America and like you pontificating about, you know, Argentine varieties of.

Kevin: Bermuda grass, like that person is going to be able to smell a rat because that's their, their expertise. And worse, this is sort of meta as there's an industrial scale opportunity for content production. If all of us. I'm not going to get noble about this, but like if all of us are out there producing bad content, the AIs will be trained on the bad content.

Kevin: So there is going to be value. Is that the

Andy: garbage in garbage out analogy? Yes.

Kevin: Garbage in garbage out. And at some point it all reverts to the mean. So from the segment of your audience that is out there and doing direct to consumer type marketing, don't be, don't be tempted to do just. Industrial scale output.

Kevin: Your art has to be producing new information from somewhere. But what AI can do is it can make some of that new information really accessible. Like there's a lot of geeky in this sort of field, right? And there's scholarly articles about soil density and all this other stuff. One really cool use of AI is to be able to contextualize something like a scholarly document and make it accessible to people who have expertise that can do something interesting to it.

Kevin: So, you know, somebody comes out with a paper from the university of Florida, as far as water absorption rates, whatever it is, and you can then use the AI to simplify that overly complicated document to a way that it falls into that zone of expertise and art. And then you can actually. Add to the corpus of information that's out there on the web in an additive way because that paper was never really going to get found.

Kevin: It was somebody's PhD thesis or whatever. But now you Andy can like actually make that accessible in a way that increases the store of human knowledge and from a Strategic perspective, I do suspect that, that, that brands, particularly in the internet who can truly add novel value are going to be rewarded by search engines, by advertising platforms, et cetera, and that those who simply put it out like high volume garbage are going to get severely punished.

Kevin: And, and I'm

Andy: thinking that likely the level one knowledge. Which may address the most frequently asked questions about lawn care on the internet will probably be garbage in garbage out and stuff that everybody talks about. I love what you said about finding a scholarly article and what came to my mind is that there actually are scholarly articles from, I believe, University of Florida on, you know, lawn care and let's say soil moisture sensor technology.

Andy: And my question would be, number one, Perhaps this would be a great training example for us to do live like, Hey, let's grab a couple articles and use that to produce some really awesome content using AI. And could we do that? You know, could we take an article of a research on soil moisture sensor, not right now about soil moisture sensor technology, real case studies and recreate it in a, in a, in a way that everybody could understand it simplified, but on a deep topic

Kevin: like that.

Kevin: So this is, let's walk through the practical example. The example is yes, that would be really cool, right? So first you're going to find the article and then let's just be practical. First, if you're not paying for GPT, pay for it. It's 20 bucks a month and it gives you access to GPT 4, but more importantly, it gives you advanced access to advanced processing.

Kevin: So the, the 3. 5 was the first model 4. 0 is where it is now. 4. 0 is roughly 10 times. It's more powerful as far as the level of connections. It's also slower, um, which can be a little bit agonizing in a demo because it writes really slowly. Um, but it allows you to contextualize. These are, these are all terms that are going to be so common in the next few years, but right now we're all kind of bending our heads around it that you have to set context.

Kevin: Like, uh, I like this particular example, like you go, you stand at the top of a, of a building at, uh, you know, Times Square, you stand in the middle of Times Square and you say, what should I read? And people are going to have all kinds of opinions. They're going to have like, Oh, you should read the Bible.

Kevin: You should read, you know, Tom Clancy. You should read, you know, the, the sprinkler digest of 2022. The Idiot's Guide to Landscaping. But that's because, yes, of course, you know, scintillating reading, right? But that's because nobody knows anything about you. So one of the first keys here is you have to set the context of the conversation such that you're narrowing, you're narrowing what you're after.

Kevin: So from a practical perspective in GPT 4, you can start out a conversation by saying, I'm a landscaping expert. Um, I'm interested in expanding my knowledge of lawn care practices using scholarly articles. And it's going to say something like, yay. Next you set the context for the conversation because you could just.

Kevin: Continue. And this is where it gets dangerous. Like, let's just chat about lawn care. And you're going to come up with all kinds of interesting stuff. In the back and forth that it's, it's, as you're, you're expanding. It knows who you are. It kind of knows what you're looking for. But now, you want to refine that context further.

Kevin: And the way that you do that is by contextualizing something like a scholarly article. And there are tools, they're called plug ins within GPT 4, that allow you to do that. And that's simply by Letting it ingest the PDF, and now this is what we're talking about. We're not talking about the body of the knowledge, of world knowledge about lawn care.

Kevin: We now have established minimal context that you have expertise in lawn care, and now specifically what we're going to talk about is this scholarly article. Like, use, oh mighty GPT, use your chat based functionality to make this easy, but this is what we're talking about. So now you've set the context for it.

Kevin: And you're going to do something like, let's ask for a summary, um, that would be applicable and interesting information for an audience that is focused in on lawn care science. And it's going to come up with a bunch of ideas. Okay, cool. Now. Let's say, oh, okay, I like idea number three, that, um, you know, I don't know, relative humidity and the impact of, uh, water absorption rates on whatever it is.

Kevin: Now let's dive into that, and let's put a marketing hat on. Okay, let's produce content, a blog post about this that, that, that incorporates interesting facts from the scholarly, the scholarly doc, document, and dresses it up with a little bit of marketing speak. Okay, cool. Now, because we're a marketer, we need to put headlines on it.

Kevin: So let's come up with 10 possible headlines for this. So now you have 10 possible headlines for the article. Now let's get a little bit wonky because this is a scholarly article. Scholarly articles often come along with data sets. Okay. So you could actually ingest a dataset using the, the, the code interpreter function within GPT and say something completely simple, like some giant dataset, and just say, help me visualize the data in this dataset in a few different ways that would be interesting to my audience, my audience.

Kevin: Like you've already defined who your audience is, right? It's another cool part. Like it has permanence. Um, So it's remembering

Andy: what you gave it earlier when you said, you know, my audience is homeowners, you know, interested in black, it, it,

Kevin: it, it stores that. So we've, we all, we all, I'm not going to say the name because it'll trigger, but the S device on a, on an Apple, if I were to say the name and I would say, Hey, what's, what's the weather in park city tomorrow?

Kevin: It's going to have an answer. And if I simply said, what's the weather on Saturday? It's going to say, what are you talking about? Because it has no permanence to it at all. You have to start over in that conversation. Permanence in GPT is so cool. So just a practical tip. You have chats. that maintain that context.

Kevin: And some of my chats are now hundreds of pages along because I'm chatting through specific business models and it knows that that's what we're talking about. It doesn't need to like remind itself. I can go back months later and bring something up and all that context is set and you get much better results once the context is set.

Kevin: So what you've done with that. So if you, if you have a

Andy: thought. Or you have another question, but it's really related to some other things you've already asked that you'll instead of starting a new conversation, if that's what it's called, you'll go back to your other one and add it into the dialogue.

Andy: Yep,

Kevin: exactly. Just write, don't even need to be like, do you remember what we're talking about? No, of course it remembers what it's talking about. It's a machine, right? Um, but imagine you've put out that blog post and, um, somebody now in the community has some insightful question and you're like, I don't know what the answer is.

Kevin: Dump the question in and say, this was a community conversation. Can you, can, can you come up with some sort of, can you help me answer this question? And it's going to use the context of your chat. The conversation you have, it's going to use the document that's been set as context. And it's going to try and answer that question within that much narrower context, um, than just the wild west of the internet.

Kevin: So taking it like just taking it to the logical conclusion again, as a marketer, you need visuals. So now we haven't talked about the visual tools at all. I've been very GPT focused and GPT is not the only language model out there. I just, it currently is the strongest, but. In my opinion, but there will be many, there's no real barriers to this except gazillions of dollars, which people like Mark Zuckerberg have.

Kevin: So you're gonna see a lot of different models and this is just, it's going, they're all gonna be out there. So people will choose their poison. Do you know,

top

Andy: of mind what a couple other models are that we could share list in the,

Kevin: so Google Bard is quite powerful, and it's not like Google wasn't working on this.

Kevin: They missed a tick. They have business model problems with this that are pretty obvious. You know, they make 160 billion a year off of advertising. And what does advertising mean if. Like you get the answer, it's not so great. So they

Andy: also not perusing the internet and clicking lots of times and visiting lots of pages and getting served.

Andy: Lots of visuals. We're

Kevin: in that space, right? Yeah. So it's, it's, it's going to be an interesting existential crisis for them. They seem confident about it. So I think they have a plan, but they're constrained. My, my worry is big brands like that get more constrained by reputational impact. We all have heard the stories of the New York times, I think.

Kevin: Kevin Roos, um, who like the AI tried to convince him to leave his wife and stuff. Um, like open AI, which is GPT can kind of get away with that with its. I'm a 10 billion startup thing, but Google has to worry about that. So naturally they've limited their model more. So there are all these instructions and there's a term that's, that's, that's.

Kevin: It may be permanent, but at the moment, I'm not quite sure it's called a constitution. And it's this idea that there's, there's an operating, we call the, the, the, the, anytime you type something into a LLM, it's a prompt, but there are all these hidden prompts that are behind the scenes. And those hidden prompts are, let

Andy: me catch you right there.

Andy: You, you, you mentioned a buzzword that I want to make sure everybody knows you said.

Kevin: Large language model. So a GPT is one of the large language models. Um, Lama from Meta and Facebook is another one. Um, Google has its own that, that underpins BARD. Um, these are all, they've all done the similar thing where they've subsumed.

Kevin: The Internet and are making these connections. Um, and then, yeah, that's a GPT is not the generalized term term. It's that it has that has to do with technical language transformation. So GPT is actually a technical term. Yeah. So anytime you put a prompt into these things, that's a set of instructions that the AI is then trying to follow.

Kevin: But there's a whole set of hidden prompts behind the scenes that are basically don't be psychotic, like Try not to say like racist stuff. Try not to like incite violence. Like, don't try, don't answer legal questions in a way that could be misleading. Like, it's, it's, it's like this whole giant set of things and, you know, building that constitution into the model, um, the, the, sort of the strength of that constitution ties into, this is slightly wonky, but it ties into the, the, the, how crazy the outputs can be.

Kevin: And there's another term in there that's called temperature. So the higher the temperature, the more likely it is to go batshit. That it's going to start making And what does a high

Andy: temperature mean? What,

Kevin: what is that? So it's a, it's like a continuum, like low temperature is cold. Just the facts, man. And stick to the fact Right.

Kevin: This is what Okay, I see. High temperature is, we're going to loosen up. That loose that that that neural network and you know, I'm being I'm trying to paraphrase a little bit But like it's gonna loosen up the neural network and allow the network to make kind of wilder connections between things

Andy: Okay, so it's called something that's extremely factual like one plus one is two would that be very very cold

Kevin: not factual So that you got to be super careful like it's pretty okay.

Kevin: All right high level of probability that 1 plus 1 is 2, but, but some of these models are very bad at math. Um, because they don't, that's not what they do. They're, they're predicting that one thought follows the golden rule. Okay, we have a lot of information about the golden rule. We, we are really, really comfortable that the golden rule is due unto others, right?

Kevin: So that low temperature, it's going to connect this extremely high temperature. It may come up with something like Hmm. Maybe that means something different. Hmm. Let's just like connect things. So it gets creative on its own? It's creative. Don't anthropomorphize, but it's, it's easy to do, but it is, um, it just gets looser in its neural connections and it can be very powerful in terms of being extremely creative.

Kevin: There's an example that's, uh, I like that. So a high

Andy: temperature means more creative.

Kevin: Yes. And most of the models by default operate at a relatively low temperature because, That's where the you should leave your life wife and marry me stuff comes in where it starts like It's crazy. Like, don't get me wrong.

Kevin: Like, researchers in this space, they anthropomorphize it because it's doing stuff that they don't understand.

Andy: Well, I'm just wondering, um, number one, I'll ask you, and you could answer it now or later, is this, is this regulated? Because if it's high temp and it's super creative, which means it may not be accurate, should there be a disclaimer in the response that must be included if you use the tool?

Andy: Because the answer may or may not be correct because it's high temp and where, where do we draw the line? Or is there a line being drawn on telling someone disclosing the use of the tool?

Kevin: So this is where Europe is heading. Europe is heading to a disclosure of AI, and I think we may see something similar.

Kevin: To this in the U S at some point, but it's a commons issue. Like that sort of disclosure is only as good as the compliance of the community and the enforcement mechanisms that make that happen. And I have doubts having lived in the digital marketing trends as long as I have that. If there's an edge to be had, people don't have to use these models.

Kevin: So that's, we haven't really talked

Andy: about that. And right now I can write a blog post about whatever I want, factual or not. It's up to someone else to actually decide if it's right or not. I don't have to, there's no disclosure I have to put on it currently.

Kevin: And you bury it in your terms anyway, in the bottom of the fine print somewhere.

Kevin: Yeah. It's like an affiliate disclosure that, um, it is possible that artificial intelligence was in some way used to construct this particular note, this particular route. Right. So maybe by

Andy: default, someone would have to trust the author, i. e. trust Kevin, trust Andy, trust the author. Then you'll trust the words, but don't trust the words.

Andy: All by themselves, unless you trust the source, which is essentially where we're at today anyway.

Kevin: Yep, exactly. Do you trust the source? So authority, you have a lot of authority in this space, because you have such a great community, and you know, there's a lot of energy and output and such. That is why search engines reward you, or I assume reward you for that output.

Kevin: Mm hmm. The same will be true in these models that, that, and that's the winners will be those who have a lot of authority and a lot of credibility and that will make it very hard for new entrants to, to batter through. In my opinion, there will always be shenanigans or tactics that are designed to like break through the model and try and get something that to get attention.

Kevin: Um, but I think it's going to be a lot harder than it has been with a search engine optimization SEO over the years.

Andy: Let me ask you a quick question. Do you think a service business? Landscape contractor, landscape maintenance, service business, irrigation, you know, they could write an article about, let's say, turf grass management, and they could write that article with the audience being the world, yet that, with the audience being the world, that pool is extremely competitive, which makes me think that they should use That's AI to write something more hyperlocal so that they're found with somebody in their service area, and that's what matters.

Andy: It's like lawn care maintenance in Peoria, Illinois, and being the expert there, but not Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Kevin: So I think, would that be the right way to think of it? I think it would. And you and I chatted briefly about Sunday. I mean, that might be a polarizing company in your world, but they do from a sales mechanism.

Kevin: They're very, very good about using satellite imagery and sort of loose connections about soil density and soil construction in order to get you into their marketing funnel. And they can do that because they were extremely well funded. And, you know, they, they spent a lot of money trying to figure this out.

Kevin: And the fact is there's really nothing right now preventing a Peoria, Illinois provider who knows about soil to be able to output like sort of micro geo content. Based on the information that they have to, to educate the Peoria, Illinois population about the very specific aspects of their soil on a level that someday can never touch because it's just microform.

Kevin: They're too

Andy: big, right? Exactly. They're the authority in this particular area based on their experience just in this area, which someone who lives in that area, they would want to hire someone. That knows a thing or two about that specific location.

Kevin: So imagine you have your scholarly article, let's put a few of them in there that are about like how to manage, you know, pH, whatever it is, and then you can put a data set or even even sort of qualitative information.

Kevin: Well, I happen to know that Be embarrassed to show you guys my lawn, but the, uh, like I happen to know I'm in a high clay area and like, I don't really know what that means, but like, you, if you feed all of this in, you could come up with a very practical micro guide that's very effective without necessarily having to do the whole lift of, of, of doing the brain dump.

Kevin: Of everything, you know, about high clay environments. Um, you could use the AI as your assistant to relatively rapidly output that information. So, I mean, honestly, that's, that's very practical. Like anybody listening to this. If you're that hypothetical Peoria, Illinois, like provider, you should totally do this.

Kevin: There's SEO value to that, like as far as having content that, that a local, like long care tips in Peoria, you know, right now you might actually find, if you were to type that in, there are all of the dynamically generated, like SEO articles about there that do that. But that's kind of crap content on the inside.

Kevin: If you have authority as somebody who's in that community. Plus, you know, being a professional organization there, plus offering this micro content that's useful to people. You wouldn't have bothered before this. Now you can do it. You can do it this in like a half an hour. Like this is, it's, it's way easier than it, than it would have been.

Kevin: And. Is it going to change your business, but is it going to, on the edges, allow you to build out just this, this corpus of credibility that, that in a very SEO sort of way can follow you over the years? Yeah, that's very plausible. Wow, this

Andy: is really hands on. I mean, I think we could, there could be a ton of value in actually doing a live workshop that could be recorded for people to see later, but take similar businesses, i.

Andy: e. irrigation, contracting companies that number one, all have to have a website. I'll know exactly the type of work that they do and all know exactly their, who their best customer ideally is create some content, you know, copy pasted onto their blog, you know, know what the traffic is now. And then over.

Andy: let's say three, six months, what happens after the end of six months? Could we get a cohort together that becomes like number one ranked in all of their local areas through a quick training demo seminar?

Kevin: There's value in that. I think that'd be

Andy: fun. Wow. Okay. Well, we can't show people actually how to use chat GPT today, but I love how you talked about some of the context because I feel like that's what I've had to learn the most about is not just asking it a simple question, but creating that frame.

Andy: Um, and believe it or not, I learned it from my son, who was apparently was taught how to use this in college, and he's a computer science major, and you know, he uses it actually to correct some of his code when it doesn't work, uh, among other things, but he was the one that taught me you got to basically, you know, tell it who it is, what its job is, all those sorts of things to frame it.

Andy: Which I had no idea about and I think that a lot of people may use again Just chat GPT and then say, you know, I tried it, but it didn't give me the results. So yeah,

Kevin: I'm done And so let's let's wrap a little bit of truth practical other practical ways that I think that everybody should be using it and cool, it's you know ranging from just dead simple to much more complicated but the Most simple bit is none of us have any excuse to have blank page syndrome again Like, some people are talented content creators.

Kevin: A lot of people aren't. I am not. I, I actually can write, but it is an agonizing process for me. I'm not that guy who just can hammer something. And I have blank page syndrome. I sit there, I look at the page, and I kind of play with some words, and I'm like, eh. We

Andy: don't have that. Then your mind starts to hurt, and you'll go, eh, I'll, I'll try it again tomorrow.

Andy: And then it's just repeat, repeat, repeat, and you never frickin do it.

Kevin: So now it's like I need to write a letter to X, Y, and Z client, and this is the sort of stuff that it can't contain, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and bam, you've got a draft. And then my art and my effort is spent on revising that draft and personalizing it and putting the me into that draft.

Kevin: But I'm already, I've gone from zero to eight, like in 15 seconds or, you know, it's spending a little bit of time. Going back and forth with it working on tone, you know, bringing that down a little bit. So that's one It's just you you don't need blank page syndrome again Like you just start with something and then work them in related is a brainstorming partner is like Trying to isolate good ideas.

Kevin: What's a bad omnipotent Personal assistant, um, next to you who knows everything about everything and occasionally lies to you, but they're very enthusiastic about it. So pretty cool to have like this brilliant thing that you can like bounce ideas off of and none of it's perfect, but boy, does it come up with some just interesting things, particularly if you, if it's like come 10 actionable headlines for this topic, like, oh, that's kind of interesting.

Kevin: Like, Oh, that's neat. Let's explore this a little bit more. Um, also related. Um, you know, I think a lot of small companies struggle with creative design and creative development and are frankly beholden to a lot of creative like people and agencies out there that charge a lot of money for it. Being able to use this as sort of a creative designer assistant, again, you're not going to get to eight or nine in this case, if you're not already creative, but being able to use it to get to, you know, six, seven, eight, and like maybe script out a video or a piece of content and have an idea of what that's going to take to get it done.

Kevin: Oh, you know, what sort of camera angles might I use? And then you walk into the conversation. with that creative partner, and you're way more equipped. You have a good idea of what the storyboard looks like and what it feels like. And then their art is layered on top of that because they don't know your business.

Kevin: Like as much as we all love the idea of having a creative agency that knows everything about us, they're busy and they might know something about your business, but you will always know your business better than they will. So if you can kind of skip that phase and get to the, the, the creative production part.

Kevin: That can be super, super useful, um, correcting documents, um, or assessing documents rapidly. Just, just being able to absorb information like in your guy's world, like every time a new regulation comes out or if, uh, you know, scholarly articles, if you're a real geek, you know, whatever it is, being able to rapidly ingest that information in a way that, that you just, you have it in your to do list.

Kevin: Okay. Like I have family members who love to send me Atlantic articles. Like they're always like. 15 pages long and like, I just can't, I like don't have the bandwidth to read it. So I'll put the article in GPT. I'll summarize it. I'll frame who I am, uh, and like be able to come up with a summary that, uh, that, that, that is appropriate for who I am, that, and then I can decide if I'm going to engage in whatever, wow.

Kevin: The first thing

Andy: I think of when you say that is, could we take, let's say the national plumbing code and use it to help understand what the requirements are for irrigators as it relates to the national plumbing code on what you can and can't do and what the laws and regulations are.

Kevin: Theoretically. Yeah, you could.

Kevin: Wow. Your art. Don't forget your art. Like, you know, there's a code inspectors, like even you guys probably don't totally know, like, Where that line is, and it would make me a little nervous, um, to do that, but I bet you'd get some pretty meaningful output from it. Um, it would be an interesting test actually.

Kevin: And just maybe

Andy: a summary format, like, Hey, can you summarize the national plumbing code and what irrigation companies should know are responsible for, you know, in a

Kevin: summary. So I literally did something like this. It was an OSHA regulation for scissor lift safety. And, um, I put in the OSHA reg and I asked it questions about like, this is not something I was doing as a hobby.

Kevin: There's, I have a client who is in this world, just to be clear that I, yeah. You

Andy: weren't just going to rent a, yeah,

Kevin: a lift and go out there. But I was, I was, I was. Clean your windows. About like, you know, I have this situation, like there's a two 20, um, junction right here. Like how far away does the scissor lift need to be?

Kevin: And it did an ad, it did a very good job. And I think let's think ahead a little bit. Well, what, like this is all cool. Right. But. Man, this is going to be powerful. Like you imagine that you're an onsite contractor and you've run into X, Y, and Z scenario, like right on your phone, like, Hey, I've run into this.

Kevin: You know, there's a T junction of whatever flow rate. And how does this apply to, um, you know, the code of. Peoria, Illinois and flow rates that will yeah, no doubt about it. Right.

Andy: Exactly. So today, uh, we've got something called friction loss, uh, friction loss charts. So those listening likely know what a friction loss chart is.

Andy: It'll tell you what the PSI loss is per hundred feet based on a specific flow rate and a specific pipe. And if somebody were out in the field today, it's very hard to have all of those things memorized. It's actually. probably impossible to have them all recalled in your head, but just to be able to ask, ask it, Hey, what's the PSI loss on 2.

Andy: 5 inch PVC pipe or a hundred feet. Cause you want to make a change to your design. You need some quick engineering facts.

Kevin: Sounds interesting. That's going to be a thing. It will, it may already be like, that's, this is changing. So, so fast. I mean, I literally was in the middle of the presentation and when Andy and I were in Vegas and a new feature was released in GPT.

Kevin: As I refreshed my screen, and I was like, Oh, that's new. Yeah, it's, it's very hard to keep up with. Um, and the possibilities are virtually endless. So, yeah. So what other things? So business businesses, you all have a bunch of customers. You could dump your customer data into it and ask it to visualize it and visualize where the clusters, you know, you have sales staff that are out and they're, they're covering things.

Kevin: Um, It's a bit of a lift to do some sort of geographic sales analysis of how effective you're being. But if you dump the data in and you can tell it to visualize, um, where all your customers are, like almost do like word cloud type type. Deals, it'll do that. You can see that, you know, 85022, like you're doing really well in that zip code.

Kevin: So kudos to that salesperson. But these other zip codes, you know, they're not, or maybe they have a lot of customers, but revenue is lower. Identify

Andy: opportunities. That was my next thought is I think that. Contractors probably have revenue per customer because that's the account. They may not have profitability per customer because they may not job cost down to that level of detail.

Andy: But could you, you know, do what you just said? Say, show me geographically where, you know, a majority of our revenue comes from or where our profit comes from.

Kevin: You absolutely could, and easily, easily you could. Major caveat. You're putting your data out there, and you've got to decide if you care. Um, I have a very practical, uh, attitude about this.

Kevin: That... There. The, the LLMs are not in the business of yielding your data, but there is evidence that they are porous at the moment. So if you put highly sensitive data in there that you know, the formula for Coke or something like that, it is possible that the MO model. maybe training itself on that. So if somebody somewhere then asks for the formula for Coke, um, since you've put it in there, it can connect the dots, but we're not talking about,

Andy: so you might not want to disclose the name or the address, but maybe just the zip code.

Andy: And that might be good enough. The first column was a zip code.

Kevin: So, but I'm, I'm not too stressed about it. You can turn some of these tracking features off and the training features off. But somebody would have to. Like the data would have to be meaningful, right? That, that, that somebody would be interested in it and like be able to put it together and whatnot.

Kevin: So know that and you're going to start to see micro LLMs develop. Um, I don't think in this scale of business so much, but in medium sized businesses, you're going to start to see captive this is just Kevin pontificating, but you're going to start to see captive LLMs such that they are walled. Such that the organization can play with the LLM, but it's not necessarily getting out into the corpus of the world.

Andy: I mean, I think it, uh, you're right, is we don't know how the data could be used now, but if, if the engine, if that's what you call it, the, the machine ends up with, if everybody uploads all of their sales data by zip code, then potentially the machine knows where people are spending money on outdoor, you know, services.

Andy: So if we had a new, business we wanted to sell into a brand new greenfield market. It's a startup and we could ask it, show me the areas that spend the most on irrigation systems and it could provide that to us. Then we would have a target on how to go sell holiday lights or ponds or landscape lighting or something else, patios.

Kevin: Yeah, we could. And it's pulling from all kinds of different data sources as well. So, um, so other practical things. So let's talk about images.

Andy: I was gonna say, um, that's what I wanted to get into next, just briefly, because we are kind of running out of time. But could we talk a little bit about images?

Andy: Sure,

Kevin: uh, so In much the same way that the language models can predict what word comes next, image models do the same thing on a pixel level. So they're predicting, based on their neural network, what could actually come out next. And this can allow you to enter prompts, in a similar way as GPT, into a model like MidJourney.

Kevin: is, uh, the one that I prefer, but there's also Dolly, uh, stable diffusion. There's a few, a few others that are out there that allow you to visualize things. So here you've done your blog. Um, now you need, uh, an image to go along with the blog. You could go to Getty or one of the other image provider things and find a dude squatting next to a sprinkler.

Kevin: Or you could ask the The image generator to come up with, you know, middle aged guy working on a sprinkler in their yard mountains in the background and come up with a plausible image that you can use very, very quickly. That's adapted to what you need on a professional and you and I did

Andy: this. Briefly, like with a five, a five minute, you know, demo.

Andy: And I'm, I'm curious, do you still have the copy of that image that we created with

Kevin: AI? Which one that does the discord image? Yeah, I do.

Andy: Yeah. Cause maybe what we could do is if you could email that to me, I will, you know what, I may use it as the cover of this article. I'm not article, but of this podcast, uh, on sprinkler nerds so that you guys can see an example of an AI generated image that Kevin made with me with a couple prompts.

Andy: So if we still have it, let's, let's

Kevin: pull it up on my screen. So it's, uh, yeah, cool. Um, so it's, it's like a guy, I think, what's the, what's the prompt? Let me read the prompt. It was, uh, If you're

Andy: listening to this on Apple podcast or Spotify or something to see the cover art, I think you will need to go to this episode on sprinklernerd.

Andy: com. That's where you'll see the actual graphic that Kevin's talking about.

Kevin: So the prompt is 30 year old energetic man checking a sprinkler in a deep green lawn. Nikon photorealistic and the trigger there is I'm trying to get it. It knows what a Nikon photorealistic image should look like, so it's not going to be some wild cartoon like, you know, psychedelic type thing.

Kevin: It's trying to get it to be as real as possible. And sure enough, there's a guy squatting next to a sprinkler that is pretty well unusable. Now, from a processing perspective, you know, just let's just talk more work a day like you don't know what's going on. I, I've always advised, so I guest lecture on the stuff, um, entrepreneurship in general.

Kevin: And I've always told my classes that, you know, you need to know basic Photoshop if you want to be a, a group by base level entrepreneur, because if you're not a creative person, you're going to be beholden to those agencies and it takes a long time, even if you're outsourced. So you're waiting for the student.

Kevin: So things like practical things, like I need to remove a background. So, you know, I see Andy's logo behind him. I need, I need a transparency of this logo. Like there's an app for that, that, you know, for basically nothing. You can go to remove BG and it's going to pull out the background or image correction or image resizing.

Kevin: And what you're going to see is a lot of these tools are going to be baked into the image processing software, like. Photoshop and Illustrator. Uh, I highly recommend if you're graphically oriented that you check out Adobe Firefly, uh, because it is magic. Like. I want a picture of a deer. Okay, now let's put the deer in an alley.

Kevin: Oh, let's make the alley dark and add a sign over this door. And it's just on the fly creating all of this stuff. Which should make any graphic design oriented person tremble in their boots because... The most graphic designers make their, most of their income off of the stupid little stuff. The image correction and things.

Kevin: It's not the big creative projects. And you're going to see that's going to be an industry that's going to be highly disrupted as a result of this. But yeah, even

Andy: Canva today is really disruptive, but not nearly what you're talking about. But Canva

Kevin: will implement this stuff too. So you can also do video voiceover.

Kevin: I mean, be very afraid about voiceover and deep fake potential. Like we're not going to get political, but the next few years in this country should be very, very interesting. That way it's an election cycle and we're going to see all kinds of crazy stuff. And just to get, you know, philosophical for a second, we're going to end up in a place where you can't trust things and that's not a good place to be at all.

Kevin: But just know that you can replicate your own voice in 15 minutes. Like I do a lot of podcasts, my voice is out there. So I had this bit of an epiphany and I called my, you know, 83 year old mother and I said, look, it is entirely possible that somebody could call you with my voice and try and get access to your bank accounts.

Kevin: Like. That is actually possible right now and I gave her a safe word, like, you know, if you ever feel weirded out, whether or not it's actually me, um, just ask and, um, you know, we can verify, right? Don't say your safe

Andy: word. Don't say it.

Andy: That's a great tip, actually. I think I'll, I'll, uh, with my family, come up with a safe word for all of us in the event that somebody does this. I think that's a really good

Kevin: tip. And it's awful, but people, it's already happening where people will get calls from their kids. I've been kidnapped. You need to send, you know, 10 grand right now.

Kevin: Like that is happening. Now the positive side is like you're very soon you're going to have the ability to have these virtual customer service agents that can actually talk to people. Um, it's also terrifying, but. Like that's, let's just stay on the positive, right? That these are, these are, these, we are going to be able to offer such a personalized experience to our customers that we are going to just be able to blow them away.

Kevin: Like when you, right now you're busy, you're running around, you got all your crews, you maybe have one person answering your phone, maybe you have nobody answering your phone. The phone can be answered. Chats can be responded to like, this is an whole aspect of practical applications that you, you all should be thinking about that.

Kevin: How can I, how can I create a better experience on a creepy experience, but a better experience for my customer using some of these tools to get them to what they need instead of the endless frustrating, like back and forth. So, so

Andy: this might be a good point. Two are a good time for me to mention. I would like to run an experiment.

Andy: So if you've made it to the end of the episode here, I would like to run an experiment based on what Kevin just said about personalization. And I think I would like to I'm kind of just spitballing this as as I go. I'd like to put a form on my website. So let's just say I'm going to go with sprinkler.

Andy: com forward slash Ink Works, I N K W O R K S. Ink Works. I'm gonna put a form there with a few questions, including your address and when you fill out the form, I'm gonna use one of Kevin's projects, ink works.ai to send you a personalized letter handwritten from me based on the input, personalized based on the inputs that you enter in the form.

Andy: How's that

Kevin: sound? That sounds awesome. So, and that's, that's my, and

Andy: I'm going to pay for it. It comes with a fee and that's Kevin's project right now, inkworks. ai. So I'd like to actually test it in real time with you guys listening and, um, you know, give you, give you a taste of what Kevin's

Kevin: working on. So we do, we're using, uh, LLM technology to interpret messages.

Kevin: And then we're using pen wielding robots to handwrite notes. So, let's imagine you did a big landscaping project for a customer. Like, you know you should send them a thank you note. Or a Christmas card, or whatever it is. But you never get around to it, because it's, it's, it's time consuming. Um, using Inkworks, you can produce that letter.

Kevin: And it comes out handwritten, absolutely unique. Um, I of course have them piled around here. They look like they're written by... And, um, it's remarkable efficacy and very ironic that I'm using multiple layers of AI to create something that's so highly personalized specifically because people are craving that personalization that we're all bombarded by all of this information constantly with emails and SMS and all this stuff and people just ignore it and it's just going to get worse as AI continues to advance.

Kevin: Um, so. Ironically that my, one of the first toeholds I have is doing something analog with something amazingly complex.

Andy: So great. So great. Can't wait to run this experiment. Uh, on that note, you know, Kevin does, uh, coach businesses in this field. If you would like to, uh, hire Kevin to, you know, help you with your business, coach your employees, give you tips.

Andy: How can somebody reach out to you, Kevin?

Kevin: Yeah, the easiest is, uh, Kevin at www. inkworks. ai. Um. Or I'm relatively easy to find on, on LinkedIn. Um, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm out there.

Andy: Very cool. Very cool. And hopefully we can maybe find a time to do a little online training as well. And again, visit sprinkler. com forward slash inkworks and let's test out Kevin's software.

Andy: I'm really excited to do that. And. You know, Kevin, I think that from all the people who I have met that are into AI and use the tool, I don't think I've met someone as knowledgeable as yourself, and I really appreciate you sharing

Kevin: this with us today. Thank you. I'm clearly passionate about it. This is the future, guys.

Kevin: Okay,

Andy: well, until our next AI conversation. Thanks so much, Kevin. Have a great one.

In this episode, Andy calls Paul Bassett, and together they have a short conversation about the opportunity to turn water into dollars.

===

Paul: Hey Drew.

Andy: Paul. Good morning.

Paul: Good morning to you buddy.

Andy: How's your day going?

Paul: It's going great today. Thanks. It's Friday.

Andy: Heck yeah. I was thinking about you this morning because of the concept of turning water into dollars that I was thinking about and thought we could just brain share about that concept.

Paul: I like that.

Andy: So yesterday I moderated a webinar with Ben Coffey at WeatherTrack and Max Moreno, who's the VP of sales for Harvest Landscape, and Max uses water budgets as a part of his daily business practice. And the more I started thinking about water budgets, it's really a concept of a budget and a budget entails finances and money.

Andy: And what I think is so fascinating is that we all, you know, in this industry, when I say we, I'm generalizing here. Most people talk about run time, number one, you know, how long should I run my sprinklers in the form of time? And then. Kind of at the next level, people talk about how much water am I going to use?

Andy: What's the gallons? What's the volume? Either gallons per minute, gallons per day, per cycle, per year, per month. But then what we really don't talk much about is what does the dollars mean? How can we convert that to dollars and cents and why do we not use that as a discussion point more often?

Paul: You're right.

Paul: I mean, it's something that I think should be discussed with the end user client because in In almost any other utility consumption, it is discussed in dollars and cost. I don't know why the water is slower to transition to that. So I think it's a good place to be for us, Andy, because it will allow us to kind of be a differentiator, or what we teach others to allow them to be a differentiator.

Andy: I think that if we're only now starting to talk about the dollars, I feel like what we need to do is put the dollars out there. So with the, let's say the irrigation design, the proposal, you know, the estimate when contractor X goes out to a client site, whether it's residential or commercial, and they put together their estimate for construction and installation.

Andy: I don't know that I've ever seen a proposal that includes estimated. Cost per year on the system, and I think if we led with that, then that would spark the kind of curiosity and question and we could go backwards into the different parts of the system, the design, the distribution uniformity that actually affects the cost of the system, but lead with the dollars and then explain it through the use of technology, proper installation, proper design, et cetera.

Andy: I mean, it's, it's so good because if you think about it in, in other appliances that you buy, for instance, you know, if you see nowadays, if you buy a hot water heater, or if you buy a refrigerator, what do they have stamped on it, they have stamped on what the anticipated energy cost is to operate that piece of equipment for a given year based upon a unit of measurement of that particular particular.

Andy: Energy or, uh, utility. So they say, okay, if you're gonna buy this refrigerator, average energy costs in the United States is 12 cents a kilowatt hour. On average, this particular refrigerator is going to cost you a hundred bucks a year to run an energy. Why can't we do the same in irrigation? It should be that way.

Andy: Right. Instead we say this sprinkler uses, uh, 2. 5 gallons per minute, let's just say. But what does that really mean? The user, the end user, doesn't, doesn't really know what that means, and they don't necessarily... But what if we said something different? Yeah, change the metric. I don't know if we could necessarily turn it into dollars, because it depends on, you know, how long it needs to run, but maybe it could be like, here's how many, you know, dollars per hour of operation or something like that.

Andy: Yeah, or, you know, just like you, when you create a gallons per minute, we know what that... Flow rate is and you determine what that zone should run for and then calculate what it should cost to run that many gallons through the system. I mean, it's really not as challenging as one would think it's just we don't use that metric at this point,

Andy: right?

Andy: And and all of these, uh, let's say modern control systems Let's just say modern because I I personally don't think most systems are really all that awesome So we'll just call them modern if we're already tracking gpm And we, you know, we can find breaks in the pipe and we can, we can have all those kinds of alarms and we have a GPM.

Andy: All we have to do is add another box to the controller interface that says, what's your water cost? And now we can run basically like a cash register of, of water, of a dollar totals. You know, how awesome would that be? That's a

great

Paul: idea. Yeah, that's a great idea.

Andy: The screen of the controller should say.

Andy: You know, you spent 264 yesterday to

Paul: operate this piece of equipment. Yeah. That's a good idea. And it's

Andy: not anything that requires any kind of like sophisticated engineering. It's just another variable calculated. Like it's easy.

Paul: Pretty much. You're right. I mean, I don't see that. And well, then there's, there's another idea to put to the idealist.

Andy: We got it. Yeah. And you know, we're looking at from the sort of, that's the technology side of it, but even as a contractor putting together a proposal, I think it would be an amazing differentiator to separate someone's business if they included that in their proposal, because it would be a great.

Andy: conversation piece to have with the client that would allow the contractor to showcase their knowledge, expertise, and build trust. And the client may say, you know what, you're the only one who, who gave me a proposal with the estimated water costs. And then the contractor might say something like, you know what, you should go ask the other contractors how much their system is going to cost you.

Andy: And if they did that, the other contractors may say, I don't, I don't know, I don't, I don't think about that and basically talk themselves out of the sale. Yeah,

Paul: that is a very good point to make if you're a sophisticated contractor and you want to differentiate yourself from the rest of the pack, that is a good ploy to put in your proposal.

Paul: Yeah, and that

Andy: would be one way to win the project by and be the highest price is because you're adding value And I don't know anyone who's really doing that. So there you go guys. That's one little nugget Maybe you can experiment with and then reply back and let us know how it went Did it help you close the sale when you included water costs

Paul: and if folks need assistance with it Andy Certainly they can reach out to both you and I we can we can help them prepare that document because you know We've been doing this for more than 20 years.

Paul: Ideally, I know I've or that 30. So that that's really what has helped me and my business succeed is being able to tell the end user what they're using and spending in water and what a 10% or 15% reduction of water is going to show in savings and then where they can use. Savings by increasing the efficiency in the system or by investing in technology,

Andy: it would help explain.

Andy: So if, if instead of selling a quote unquote, more expensive sprinkler, because it has pressure regulation built in, let's say for those areas where it's not necessarily required, that helps tell the story of why, well, because you're going to save that amount of money right away in the first year. Because of the reduced water usage.

Paul: Yeah, and or even as we do, Andy, add some additional data points, i. e. some soil moisture sensors to be able to stop watering in a given period because we now know what the moisture level is in the soil. Whereas other irrigation systems will just water their regular Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule and we can delay or even stop those schedules and we can, or you can prove to the homeowner, here's what it costs every time your schedule runs.

Paul: And then here's how many times we feel we can delay the schedule and what that savings are going to be. Yeah,

Andy: because the, the volume of water doesn't really mean much to people because they don't know what a thousand gallons looks like or 50, 000 gallons looks like. 50, 000 seems like maybe it's a lot of water, but if, if we had the, if we changed the narrative.

Andy: and switched it to dollars, then the amount of water doesn't really even matter as much. It's more like, how do I go from spending 750 a month to spending 500 a month? It's much more tangible, I think.

Paul: Definitely. Definitely. And then people hope, you know, some of the more sophisticated homeowners and business owners have a budget that they prepare, and then they go from their budget.

Paul: So you can, you can assist them with establishing their. Their annual budget costs of what they're going to spend in water.

Andy: So I think when we're thinking about water budgets, and then again, this is where my thought came from because this is what our conversation was with WeatherTrack and using the tools of that controller for water budgeting and you can enter the gallons so that you can put, you know, you can track and trend how many gallons you're using.

Andy: I think we really need to switch the conversation to just be about Dollars and cents because everybody understands dollars and cents, but I don't think a lot of people Understand what their water costs or what a certain volume of water, you know, it's it's not tangible to them Yeah, and

Paul: it's really strange that that's been the case with water and again dealing with it for this past 30 years I'd like to see the narrative shifting I like the fact that people are really caring more about the insights and digitization of water And, and now that there's more and more tools to be able to deploy for people to see the insights in their water usage and their patterns.

Paul: Mm hmm.

Andy: Mm hmm. Yeah. And again, we kind of talked here about using homeowners, but really, you know, the bigger, the bigger opportunity is for these light commercial, commercial municipal sites that did use a lot of water, you know, say 20, 000 or more a year. I think that's the real hot opportunity.

Paul: And Andy, as you know, there's other sites that use hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Paul: You know, or more a year, um, and just a slight decrease of 10% can can really be dramatic when you're spending 100 grand. I mean, think about it. If they're spending 100 grand in water a year, and you, you say 10%. 10, 000. I mean, that is a big number to be able to use to invest into the newer technology.

Andy: And then depending on perhaps what type of, uh, uh, ROI, you know, there could be, uh, a client could say, you know what, anything that can give us a five year ROI, we're going to invest in.

Andy: So 10, 000 over five years is 50 grand. There's the budget for the controls retrofit or whatever the retrofit might be.

Paul: And then two, it's not even just about the technology to achieve the savings that they, they could use that money to invest in personnel that can monitor and manage this equipment. And so that's really where I think this particular strategy really takes places where you can sell the end user, the upgraded management.

Paul: of the system by showing them the savings by just having someone have eyes and ears looking at the data.

Andy: Yeah, good stuff, man. Well, appreciate the little brain share this morning. Always good to vision future vision with you. And I think that turning water into dollars, we might be on the on the edge of that next revolution.

Andy: There's

Paul: no doubt and it's always good to talk with you to the thoughts and brain shares are

Andy: Always great. So there you have it guys. Paul and I are making a prediction that one of the next revolutions, or let's not say revolution evolution is going to be totalizing water in the control systems by dollars, not just gallons and displaying it and talking about it.

Andy: Cool. Thanks.

Paul: Good to hear from you. Thank you. Have a good day. Bye bye.