IAM957- CEO Delivers Water Solutions for Industrial Customers

Transcription

The full transcription is only available to CBNation Library Members. Sign up today!

Please Note: Our team is using the AI CEO Hacks: Exemplary AI and Otter.ai to support our podcast transcription. While we know it's improving there may be some inaccuracies, we are updating and improving them. Please contact us if you notice any issues, you can also test out Exemplary AI here.

[00:00:22.19] – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

[00:00:49.79] – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I Am CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Riggs Ekelberry of Origin Clear. Riggs, it's awesome to have you on the show.

[00:00:57.89] – Riggs Eckelberry

Such a pleasure, Gresham. Thank you.

[00:00:59.70] – Gresham Harkless

Definitely. Pleasure's all ours. And before we jump in, we'll read a little bit more about Riggs so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. And Riggs is the founder and CEO of the innovative water technology company, OriginClear, which is delivering water solutions for industrial customers nay worldwide. With operations in Texas, Virginia, and China, OriginClear has developed and licensed an invention that treats industrial and agricultural wastewater with very little energy and no chemicals. And now industrial users can treat their water right where they use it using prepackaged point-of-use water treatment systems that have an amazing life cycle of up to one hundred years or more. Riggs, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

[restrict paid=”true”]

[00:01:39.00] – Riggs Eckelberry

Lets rock.

[00:01:39.70] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Let's rock and roll. So to kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit here a little bit more on how you got started. Could you take us through your CEO story? We'll let you get started with all the awesome work you're doing.

[00:01:48.50] – Riggs Eckelberry

Thank you, Gretchen. Well, I came came out of tech. I was in the dot com accustomed to these start a company. Four months later. Wow. You got sold. And which was good and bad because, you know, you're busy building something and all of a sudden, like, I guess I'm not. I am okay. I'll take some money, but what about this cool thing I was building? But, after two thousand things got a bit better, we were able to get a bit, you know, it reminds me a lot of what's happening with crypto now because, you know, the whole twenty eighteen now better. But back then in dot com, we had a similar thing where, for me, I got to do really exciting work, in the first decade of the 2000s.

And, I was key to taking a company onto the NASDAQ in a security space. And then, I made the thing that did the thing you should never do, which is I told a fund that I thought I could be a good CEO, and they agreed. And that was not brilliant. I've had ample cause to regret that. But seriously, in two thousand seven, we launched a company. Now, their thing was like, look, technology is great, but we wanna get going with green, and you know, save the world and so forth. And we realized that we had, an opportunity with this material called algae to create biofuel. And so, we created a company called Origin Oil because algae was the original oil. And we were on a mission to switch from fossil fuels to making petroleum in real-time. Right? Which is incredibly virtuous, and you wouldn't have to change cars really, and all that good stuff. So exciting. Unfortunately, the oil industry came up with fracking, which turned algae into a science experiment overnight.

And at that point, we had to either, a lot of companies shut down in the space that was real high flyers. We pivoted. We pivoted, by taking what we were using to harvest algae to then remove waste from water. Remove the microscopic particles from the water as opposed to, the good and bad stuff. We started in the oil industry, then it continued to have a hard time. I think the oil industry is just in this continuous, rolling downhill kind of mode where it's hard to put new technologies in because they're constantly shutting down wells or having some kind of disaster. Fine. We then widened out to water treatment in general, and then we learned a very important lesson which is the water industry does not like new technology. Takes twelve to fifteen years to get new technology adopted. Reasons like public health and they're trying to do the right thing, but they're hyper-conservative. So, it's like before Uber tried to convince the taxi industry to accept a credit card. Right. It's like, why? Cash is great. Right?

Exactly. So, we then started we started okay. Let's start trying to move the needle and change that about the water industry. Let's try to disrupt the water industry. We bought a company in Texas, it's we still have a fantastic company that builds amazing stuff. We brought in this this technology for modular water systems so that, you can just truck a system on-site, plug it in, and it goes to work. That's great. And all this leads to the big, big trend in water, which is like all other industries, decentralization. We have this amazing trend of because water infrastructure is falling apart, the cities are, you've heard about Flint. Well, there's a lot more nightmares you haven't heard about. South Bend, Indiana is far worse than Flint, but nobody talks about it. Because I guess they had refrigerator factories back in the day.

So all these super fun problems are creating water problems, and on top of it, the federal government's not paying for infrastructure, vicious cycle, and what's resulting is that industries are having to do their water treatment more and more, and that requires a whole new way because then at least you realize, wait a minute, these businesses, if you're a brewer and you have to do your water treatment now because you got stuck with it, well, that wasn't on your capital plan. You were not gonna spend two million dollars on a water treatment system. You were gonna spend it on better beer, and that's finally in the COVID year, what we tackled, but I'll get ahead of myself, that's my background.

[00:05:57.50] – Gresham Harkless

No. I appreciate you for drilling down on that because I think, and pivoting as well too because I think so many times there are different opportunities when you have that ability to see that and and see the technology and and marry those two things into that solution. But it sounds like almost and I don't wanna put words in your mouth. It sounds like you're partnering with these organizations, these businesses, breweries, for example, that maybe didn't have to solve a problem initially when they started, but now they have to do that, and not sure how exactly to make that happen.

[00:06:24.89] – Riggs Eckelberry

Right. So this is where in two thousand nineteen, we're like, hey, okay, we got the technology, and let's help you, and we just learned that we had had and still have the huge backlog of business that takes forever to turn into projects, and that's why the one industry is so slow to grow. It's because these are major capital projects, and so they take a long time. When COVID hit a year ago, it was just before my birthday, the first days of February, we watched the price of oil crash because Wuhan went down for a month. The first week of February. The rest of America was like, what? But the oil industry reacted to the sudden loss of demand, and we woke up here at OriginClear, and wait a minute, there's a problem.

And I like to say that COVID caused everything chronic to become acute. If you had a chronic problem before, it became like, Neiman Marcus was gonna close eventually. Dead men walking. Well, it closed. Barney's closed. All these things. Right? Anything that was in trouble broke down, and we realized that we had to solve the problem of funding self-treatment, localized treatment, which is replacing centralized treatment because America's not funding anything anymore, except throwing money around, I guess.

And, so we worked on this frantically for months, and the CEO of Airbnb said something very interesting last year. He said, that in ten weeks, we did ten years' worth of work. Mhmm. And they succeeded. They had a great IPO, and you would have thought they would have fallen apart, but they didn't. Amazing, amazing story. And I think there has to be a book about it. I think it's one of those cool stories. Well, we had a similar story in that we eventually realized, wait a minute, it's the funding stupid. If you can fund these systems, and just here, sign here mister brewery, and you'll just pay on the meter like you always do, and they go, okay.

Number one. Number two, because we have roll-in rollout systems, we don't we can always take them back if the guy stops paying. Mhmm. This means we don't have to demand a fifteen-year contract with stellar credit and your guarantee, and we want your mansion in Palm Beach. No. We'll just rent you this system the same way that someone might rent a TV, and that is the revolution. And the final piece of the puzzle came in place literally over the last month or two, which is we found a group of investors that is trying to reinvent itself and that's real estate investors.

[00:08:50.50] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah

[00:08:51.00] – Riggs Eckelberry

Real estate investors used to be that you could your entire life be a real estate portfolio and you were fine. That's not true anymore. You need to be diversified. There's good real estate and bad real estate, but there's no longer just great real estate. Right? And so, real estate investors are trying to diversify, and there's a new asset class called water, and we can bring them in, and they will help fund these systems for these service contracts that are called water as a service.

And it's turning into a beautiful thing. My team is going flat out to bring in these investors, convert their assets into money because that's what we need to build these systems, and then direct them. And very shortly, Gresham, the capability of my Texas company will be overloaded, and I'll have to start asking other water companies to please build stuff for us because we've solved this money problem.

[00:09:39.00] – Gresham Harkless

I want to ask you for what I call your secret sauce, and this could be for you your business, or a combination of both. Do you feel it's that ability to continue to innovate, that sets you apart and makes you or your organization unique?

[00:09:53.10] – Riggs Eckelberry

The key I think is, to be in a place where you have your own best resources is you at the end of the day. And you have to make sure that you're in a place where, you don't feel horrible about what's happening, or let's say somebody's taking advantage of you financially, whatever's going on, and you can't just go, Oh my God, and so the other world, and I'm to blame and I'm no good, right?

[00:10:21.10] – Gresham Harkless

sure.

[00:10:21.39] – Riggs Eckelberry

We all gotta improve ourselves, but at the end of the day, we are our own best resource. And so keeping that,  I did a lot of early studies, despite my advanced age, I spent a lot of time as a young man, learning at the feet of a philosopher named L. Ron Hubbard, and very few people around who had that personal experience. Well, what I what I came away from with that because I saw him deal with extraordinary challenges, is that you remain peaceful. You remain untroubled and go crazy. Deal with the problems. Solve them. Fix them. Do whatever you gotta do. But you remain an oasis of peace in a way that people can then go, oh, Riggs isn't too worried. I guess it's gonna be okay.

[00:11:11.10] – Gresham Harkless

Well, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

[00:11:20.60] – Riggs Eckelberry

Alright. Well, the number one thing I believe is that we have a very complex world today. Know what you don't know. Right? I can hack together an MOU, memorandum of understanding, and kinda throw it out there. But before I do something that's gonna commit the company, I better get some help. The key is, who do I select to help me? Right? I can select I've got an extremely conservative law firm, and they do wonderful things for me, they make sure that I don't get in trouble with the SEC. That's great.

But they're not gonna reinvent stuff for me. That's a different law firm. And who to choose to solve your problem because you're number one, I know my limits. I did not go to law school. I didn't even go to college. I got trained as a ship captain, a different set of skills, and so here I am dealing with a legal matter. Excuse me, I'd better get some good help, and that's where I'll go and recruit really, great people.

[00:12:13.60] – Gresham Harkless

I love that hack. And so I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. You might have already touched on this. It might be something if you were to hop into a time machine, you would tell your younger business self.

[00:12:25.60] – Riggs Eckelberry

Well, I used to tell myself, Riggs, it would have been nice if you'd apprenticed and paid some dues in the industry that you jumped into. But in fact, more recently I've realized that Our wealth of information is so good, that I, you know, I can And there's so much, so many people already specialized. Right? That I think, what I think is good is to yourself become a good generalist. Because those are rare. Lots of people are deep divers, and it's really good, and they'll call me up and they'll go, okay we got this thing going on, and they're like in their little silo, and I go, why don't we do this thing? They go, well that makes sense.

Well, that's because I try to be a generalist, and I try to keep that high-level view. It's a challenge because, at the same time, you and I have to do real work. We have to sit down and grind away at a stupid contract or whatever. But the more the more generalist viewpoint you can get, the more you can think, okay, my company can do well. Will this do a good thing for the industry I'm in? And will this have good long-term effects or will I just be ripping people off? Well, these are important concerns, and you can only have them by having that high-level view. Don't be too worried about not being a specialist. You can buy that if you're a good generalist.

[00:13:44.20] – Gresham Harkless

I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're open to different quote-unquote CEOs on the show, so Riggs, What does being a CEO mean to you?

[00:13:51.89] – Riggs Eckelberry

In one word, masochism. Because you can make money with money, I mean if you were smart enough to get Bitcoin ten years ago, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Right? So being an operator as we call it, is a tough and demanding job, and you're the center of attention, good or bad, and you could get in real trouble, no question about it. And a lot of people depend on you. But having said that it's a lot like when I was a ship captain, and I could have ended up at the bottom of the ocean many times. I think you gotta like it. So if some people are just, if I'm talking through you, Gresham, to people who may be CEOs one day, we need more CEOs.

At the peak of the .com, there was something like a hundred and eighty-five Silicon Valley companies that needed a CEO. It's tough, it's hard to find, and you gotta be cheerleader, fundraiser, ethicist. Right? Can't forget that. And also commercialized and all these wonderful things, and it's gonna be done relentlessly. You'll have zero time, and you'll be overloaded. So, try it out. And and at the same time, a CEO will die if he does not go ahead, and tap all of the specialists available to him, and not have it all just come ramming in on him. So that's the key to be willing to be that horrible masochistic thing that the world needs I think, but then also make it more occupiable by bringing in people to help.

[00:15:33.00] – Gresham Harkless

Appreciate that, and I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let us know and of course how best people can get a hold of you and find out all those things you and your team are working on.

[00:15:44.29] – Riggs Eckelberry

I like to say we're the most transparent public company in America because every week on a Thursday night, 5 PM, Pacific, 8 PM Eastern every Thursday night, We have a half hour where I brief everyone on what's happening in the company. Everything we're doing as much as possible, that I'm, that I'm permitted to say. And, and also I try and communicate directly to right now it's about thirty-one thousand people. Sign up on my website, for that newsletter. And when you receive my newsletter, if you hit reply, it's coming into my inbox. I love to hear from people, and I would love to hear from your listeners.

[00:16:19.00] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And to make it even easier, we'll have the links and information in the show notes just to get a hold of you, and they they find out about that newsletter as well too. So Riggs, truly appreciate you again my friend, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day

[00:16:29.70] – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.