IAM971- Entrepreneur Enables Development of Patented Technologies

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[00:00:16.30] – 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.

[00:00:44.10] – 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 Rayne Guest of Our Water Rain. Rayne, It's awesome to have you have you on the show.

[00:00:52.20] – Rayne Guest

Thanks so much, Gresh. Good to be here.

[00:00:54.29] – Gresham Harkless

Yes. It's a beautiful time. Super excited to have you on. And, before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Rain so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing. Rain is the founder of Rwater, and Rain was home birth and raised in the mountains of Idaho. She attended five university universities while studying various fields, including business, marine biology, and nutrition. And over the last several years, Rain has spent time in Southeast Asia, Europe, Australia, Brazil, Israel, Africa, and many, many other places. She is driven to do good by doing good in the world and developing patented technologies for this cause. Rain, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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[00:01:32.40] – Rayne Guest

Oh, I'm ready. Let's talk.

[00:01:33.90] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Let's do it then. So to kick everything off, I want to wind the clock a little bit, and hear a little bit more on how you got started with your CEO story. We'll let you get started with all the awesome work you're doing.

[00:01:47.50] – Rayne Guest

Oh. Well, the Our Water story started back in the day in my Los Angeles years in around a thousand and six, during that time. I was doing recycling programs around the city of LA. So as you mentioned, I was born in a very home birth in a very small town up in the mountains of Idaho. So I was just raised in very pristine environments. So when I got out to LA in my twenties, I was like, what the heck is going on here? People would just throw their stuff on the street and be like, oh, it's a street cleaner's job to come and get it. And I mean, it was just a mess. We'd see trash overflowing everywhere. So anyway, it hurt my soul a little bit.

So I started doing recycling programs. I just started a business, going into hotels and larger buildings and teaching them how to source and separate their commodities, like plastic, cardboard, paper, and all that stuff. Saved people a bunch of money doing that. So one of the groups that I worked for was called the Core Hotel Group and they were doing a development in the Caribbean and they asked if I could develop a recycling program for the Island. So anyway, I got involved in talking with all the people there on the Island, the government officials, and all those people. And they let me know that a huge problem they've had on the Island is all the Islanders have got sick. Okay.

And they couldn't figure out what was causing it. And they finally traced it to the landfill. What was happening is because the island had had an influx of development with hotels and resorts in different places, all those chemical concentrate containers that they use for like window cleaner, floor cleaner, and disinfectant, and all that stuff. When that got discarded into the landfill, the toxic concentrate seeped into the groundwater and made its way to the aquifer which was the source of drinking water for all the people on the island. Okay? So before that, I hadn't given chemicals much mind, to be honest with you. I was one of these people. Like, I washed dishes growing up at a restaurant. It was like the more detergent, the better. Didn't think about wearing gloves. Oh, bleach. Oh, let me more bleach. Great. Right?

But anyway, quickly realized that that was not the case. Chemicals are pesticides and they're toxic and they're toxic to humans and they're toxic to the environment generally. So anyway, the core hotel group, I went on board with a company that had a technology where you could produce a disinfectant and all-purpose cleaner on-site by separating salt water. And this is back in like two thousand 2008. The hotel group implemented the technology in their properties to help eliminate the plastic waste problem, throwing all these chemicals out in landfills. So that's how I got introduced to this sort of technology. Now a large chemical company, Ecolab, came and bought that technology and shelved it.

[00:04:41.50] – Gresham Harkless

Oh, no.

[00:04:42.50] – Rayne Guest

That was in two thousand nine. So I was a little bit pissed at this. Yeah. I was like, what? Is that even legal? Right? Oh by that time I'd seen too, like hotel workers, how much they suffered from the chemicals they were exposed to. Right? And let's be real. The majority of janitorial people in large-scale hotels are not upper-class white kids.

[00:05:06.80] – Gresham Harkless

Right.

[00:05:07.30] – Rayne Guest

So people weren't paying any attention, nobody was giving them proper protective gear, right? They're minimum wage workers, nobody complains because they don't wanna lose their job with benefits. They need to feed their families, right? I mean, it was an issue. You could just people were hurting from the chemicals. So anyway, when I saw that company buy and shelve the technology, I went on a mission to find a new way to produce the solutions and found a new way to produce them and got a patent on it.

[00:05:35.19] – Gresham Harkless

Nice. Well, I appreciate you for doing that. And I almost sometimes use a phrase of voice for the voiceless, and so many times people feel like they don't have a voice and they don't have a say, especially if those things are happening. But I appreciate people like you who can build successful businesses and organizations, but at the same time, do good as you said so well in terms of doing it. Sometimes we feel like we have to do either or when, but I love when you have that opportunity to do both.

[00:05:58.50] – Rayne Guest

Oh, No. And it's been a difficult road because mind you, this was when I applied for the first patent in two thousand ten. So this has been what we were around way before COVID hit. Right? But trying to even raise money to get the business going in Los Angeles, you're dealing with venture capital firms that are like, oh, you got what? Well, okay. We'll put some money into you. We want fifty-one percent when we can go sell it for four times to the chemical companies. We're out.

[00:06:23.89] – Gresham Harkless

Right.

[00:06:24.19] – Rayne Guest

And I was like, no. You're missing the point. Like, hey. I'm a capitalist. I wanna make money. Okay. But I want a technology around that's gonna help people because I was seeing the tragic effects on human health, on the environment. I just don't feel it's you can't poison the population for profit. I mean, people do it every day. Don't get me wrong. But in my mind, that's just, like, the shit of the shit. Right?

[00:06:48.39] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. I have the same mindset as well too where I almost feel like, to me, like, the big, the best businesses and organizations are those that solve problems. The best entrepreneurs are people who solve problems, and I can't jive with, starting a problem solving a problem to create a bigger problem when we're talking about the human condition and and not, you know, having healthy people. It is to me, it doesn't make sense. So I appreciate you for doing that.

[00:07:14.50] -Rayne Guest

Yeah. Well, thanks. You may have a lot of potential investors who would disagree with you.

[00:07:19.00] – Gresham Harkless

Oh, sure. Oh, I know they would, but hopefully, that wave is starting to shift.

[00:07:23.80] – Rayne Guest

This way. I'm like, you're not the right investor for me because that's the wrong way to do it. So we're gonna go for optimal impact here. If we're gonna do it.

[00:07:32.10] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah.

[00:07:33.60] -Rayne Guest

Yeah. So anyway, that's how things started back in the day. I moved to know I couldn't get anywhere in Los Angeles because it was so expensive to live. Like I was barely getting by. I could barely pay my rent because I was paying all my money to buy parts to build prototypes my brother and, the inventor were building prototypes out of their shops. And, yeah, my girls would be like, you wore that dress last weekend. I was like, I bought electrodes.

[00:08:01.30] – Gresham Harkless

There you go.

[00:08:02.80] – Rayne Guest

And I dry-cleaned it. Sorry if I mess up your Facebook photo.

[00:08:09.50] – Gresham Harkless

No. That awesome. Because I mean, I think a lot of people don't realize sometimes the challenge of, like, truly disrupting, an industry and sometimes disrupting the norm, so to speak, when you have people that have especially a lot of money and probably influence as well too that wants to sometimes take those technologies and shelve them when you're trying to do something good and the sacrifices and the impact that you had to take to make sure that that happens. So I appreciate you for that.

[00:08:34.00] – Rayne Guest

Well, we're still not through it. Right? We're still dealing with it every day. We're going up against multibillion-dollar companies that do not want us around. Throughout the years, you'd be surprised at how many people got fired in positions that wanted to put us in, or how many facilities got free chemicals forever to kick us out. Right? Just very unethical stuff. But if you start, like, going and doing lawsuits everywhere, you don't have money to go and do it. Right? And then you take up all your time trying to fight them that way, and sometimes just gotta put one foot in front of the other and keep on pushing.

[00:09:13.10] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. And you don't sometimes have the resources to be able to do what you were created to do, that mission, you know, that you had. So, I wanted to drill down a little bit deeper because I know you taught Sean a little bit. I want to hear a little bit more about our water, the patent everything that you have, and how you serve the clients. Also what you feel maybe even sets you apart is what I like to call your secret sauce and make sure unique.

[00:09:32.00] – Rayne Guest

Oh, we got some secret sauce. There you go. Got that in my swag bag. No. So basically, the technology is a computer system that creates a healthcare-grade disinfectant and an all-purpose cleaner out of salt water. We do so by separating the salt, which is sodium chloride, and recombining sodium with water on one side of a cell and the chlorine with water on the other side of the cell. So when you separate salt, you get two products. One of them is hypochlorous acid and one of them is sodium hydroxide.

So the big differentiator here, right, is that we're enabling people to produce their chemicals on-site versus having them packaged and shipped to them. But efficacy is a huge deal. So sixty is our disinfectant. Hypochlorous acid is the active ingredient in that product. That product replaces all window cleaners, all disinfectants, and all sanitizers, right? I mean, it replaces tens of thousands of products that are currently out on the market. What sets us apart as far as efficacy is concerned is most products take ten minutes to work, Meaning you would have to spray a product on a surface and let it sit there for ten minutes before you wipe it up for it to kill the germs it claims to kill. Now you've probably been out to eat.

You've probably been to the gym. You've probably been have you ever seen someone wait ten minutes for a product to work? No. People weren't even doing it throughout the pandemic. It was so frustrating. So our product though, kills a hundred percent of the pathogens that they require you to test in one minute and it kills COVID in under twenty seconds.

[00:11:13.39] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah.

[00:11:14.20] – Rayne Guest

So super high efficacy and it's safe. You can spray the stuff in your eyes, your face, you can gargle with it and it doesn't hurt you. Whereas chemicals that people use now, I mean, they cause all sorts of issues, breathing issues, skin rashes. Right? And then the other product that comes out of our device is FC Plus for floor and carpet care plus more and that product replaces all of your like degreasers, all-purpose cleaners, grout cleaners, and granite cleaners. Right? So those two products replace the vast majority of chemicals that are out in the world today. And they work better.

[00:11:51.60] – Gresham Harkless

Work better and make the world a better place, it sounds like too.

[00:11:53.79] – Rayne Guest

And they're safe for humans. Right? And they're safe. They're clean release in the environment. And during COVID and stuff, everybody was running out of disinfectant. Right? It was a big deal.

[00:12:02.50] – Gresham Harkless

That makes sense. 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?

[00:12:13.60] – Rayne Guest

I go to bars and talk to people that sit next to me. No. I mean, truthfully though, I do read books and blogs on occasion and stuff, but probably the best insights, that I've gotten have just been from truly talking to people next to me on a flight or people at restaurants or whatnot, just open random conversations. If you're writing a book, you're taking time to put specific thought processes down in a certain way to affect most people. But if you have a conversation after a couple of cocktails with somebody at a bar and they're a successful business person, I mean, you can get so much of the real lowdown on how to handle situations and connections and everything. So yeah, my hack would be open, be out there, and just be yourself.

[00:13:01.60] – Gresham Harkless

And, I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something if you were to hop into a time machine you would tell your younger business self.

[00:13:10.89] – Rayne Guest

I would probably tell myself to enjoy the ride just a little bit more. Get a hobby, that is away from the business so that you have another way to unwind at the end of the day, and try to keep your mind off of it because I let myself get consumed the last decade. I mean, my thirties, I'm forty-one now, but, my thirties were consumed by the business. I mean, living it, dreaming it, grieving it every day. Wish we would have taken a dance class or just something.

[00:13:38.50] – Gresham Harkless

I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're We're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So, Rayne, what does being a CEO mean to you?

[00:13:47.60] – Rayne Guest

Yeah. Being a CEO just, I guess, means, hopefully, I can help lead my organization to make a better difference in the world and empower the people within my organization to improve their lives.

[00:14:00.60] – Gresham Harkless

Truly appreciate that perspective, Ryane, and I truly appreciate all the time you took today. 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 our readers and listeners know and, of course, how best they can get a hold of you and find out about all awesome things you and your team are working on.

[00:14:14.89] -Rayne Guest

One thing I would just really ask people is I feel like today we're getting in such a digital age that we have lost touch with each other, and we've lost touch with experience. We all are relying on our social media pages and what the news is feeding us to get our information. But the best way to get information is to go out there and live it and be a part of it and to get involved in your communities and to drive change and to know that the whole thing that one person, some people feel they cannot make a difference, but one person absolutely can make a difference and we all should.

So, I just would like to see people get out of that mindset of things happening to me versus the mindset of I'm gonna go make things happen. Right? Because we all have that ability. We all have obstacles that we have to get through, but we all can go and do things. So I don't care if it's helping a neighbor. I don't care if it's going and donating some time. I don't care if it's visiting a nursing home so you can gain some of the people's knowledge that is in there so that we can prevent history from repeating itself in certain areas. But just get out and get more involved. We don't need to be spending all of our time on screen time living vicariously through other people's lives. That would be my little end-of-the-day nugget.

[00:15:31.20] – Gresham Harkless

Nice.

[00:15:31.79] – Rayne Guest

If people want to get a hold of us, you can go to rwater.com, reach out, shoot us an email, or call our office, and we'd be happy to talk with you.

[00:15:41.89] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much again, Rain. We will have the link and information in the show notes as well too so that everybody can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things that you're working on. But I love that last nugget that you gave as well too. I think so many times we talked about the human aspect and how we forget about that. That happens in business, but it probably happens even more in life. So getting that opportunity to connect, have a relationship, talk, have, some margaritas or something, whatever it might be to lighten the mood. I think that's the preciousness of life, and I appreciate you for reminding us of that and how we could do that in our lives.

[00:16:25.39] – 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.

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