What's the catch?

I was asked a “what’s the catch...” question the other day after sharing the success of our program with a potential client.

“…okay let me sum up what you are trying to tell/sell me; - - you say that we can discharge less than 2% of the total water used in our cooling towers, - - get extremely low corrosion rates, - - have zero heat robbing deposits, - - no biological growth, - - no need for any chemical once the protective WCTI chemistry has been achieved. You go on to say that we can actually use recycled waste water without using expensive pretreatment equipment like HERO, demineralizers and do not need to build evaporative ponds and also stop the need for post tower bleed treatment etc… How can that be??... Furthermore, you say we can do all this in most cases for less than a chemical program? OKAY, what’s the catch?”

Not being a fisherman myself, and seeing that the client was an avid fly fisherman (personally, I prefer seeing fish fly at Pike Place Market - its a Seattle thing), I thought hard for a good fish analogy to explain how it is we were able to provide all that we are seeing with WCTI chemistry – and all I could think at that very moment was - “give a man a fish and feed him for a day, or teach a man to fish and he will be fed for a life time”. Then I thought, let’s not go down that road but rather suggested that “there are lots of lures in our WCTI tackle-box” – and the biggest one is MOTHER NATURE!

Then I thought of answering his "What's the catch?"question by offering up my explanation as to why this sustainable natural green chemistry had not been used prior to WCTI’s offering. Maybe that would stimulate an answer for him without having to go into a lengthy and sometimes complex discussion on silica species, high TDS, pH chemistry etc…

Okay, “the catch” as I explained further, could in a way be summed up by what goes on in the board rooms & labs of many chemical marketing and manufacturing companies. For all intense and purposes, manufactured and blended chemicals are the life blood of the water treatment companies. There is nothing wrong with that - that is what they do well. Their business profits are tied, almost exclusively, to the delivery of a drum of chemical – pure and simple. You see, their managers and chemists now know that this patented silica based chemistry works and does what WCTI has claimed. However, it just does not meet their business model or in their standards of operation. Selling water and manufactured additives in a drum has met the industries needs for cooling tower water treatment for many years. You see there really has not been any “newly discovered” molecules for some time now to treat cooling towers for scale, corrosion and biological concerns; so...

QUESTION: What are we going to do as a chemical company to gain new cooling tower business?

ANSWER #1: Maybe... lets start selling new and improved chemical delivery and monitoring equipment - yeah that's it!

ANSWER #2: Or... let's go out and minimize, trash and create doubt about all chemical treatment alternatives, whether we believe it or not.....?

Don’t get me wrong, manufactured chemical additives do work and have been used for water treatment for nearly a hundred years now (i.e. boilers, closed loops, waste treatment and other specialty uses etc...). This sustainable natural green chemistry on the other hand has been around since the beginning of time and could very well have been used by Socrates (if he had a cooling system - maybe he did?) without one drop of the yet undiscovered, Alchemists formula’s.

SUMMARY: Keeping this short and sweet and sticking with the fish theme; ... you can broil and fry fish, but unfortunately, my friends are only selling you the cooking oil for the frying pans!

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