#157 - Don't Be Like Steve Ballmer - LIVE from Landscape Ontario

[00:00:00] Name that tune my friends. Can you name that tune?

[00:00:09] This is a fantastic song. Brings me back to my childhood, but when I go to Canada, But I was in it for miles around Out at the speedway Some kind of evil thing I just wanted to find a way to release a little creative juice to the beginning of this episode because I'm going to sign off here in just a moment and play my recorded presentation to the group.

[00:03:02] And before I play that,

[00:03:04] I do want to recording of his presentation. The audio isn't great, but I'm working on ways to improve that so that I can play that for you as well. And he spoke about water savings as a service and his tenure starting water savers and working on some amazing projects all over the

[00:04:22] country and how what he's learned can actually be implemented by really any it is interesting to you. So that's why I kind of threw in that intro because that was fun for me to create something like that. And I really enjoy just creating things. So the rest of this episode is gonna be is prerecorded. However, that intro was just a little bit of my creation.

[00:05:42] And let's see, is there anything else you would like to share? Hmm. That's a great question, Andy. Let me think about that for just a moment. No, I don't think so. We're probably six or seven minutes into this intro already. So let's just go ahead and roll the presentation to the landscape Ontario

[00:07:00] irrigation conference on curiosity and irrigation innovation.

[00:07:06] So without further ado, here we go. have found a possible solution, it oftentimes isn't what it was supposed to be or it changes and it's kept me inspired, motivated to continue working in this industry and seeing how can the technology over time help us solve the

[00:08:21] answer to this problem. So what I would the question that has kept me interested in this industry for what seems like so long now, 20 years. So here's the question. How long should you water your lawn?

[00:09:43] Does anybody have any guesses? Anybody want to take a stab on how long

[00:09:45] you should water your lawn? So I started basically duplicating hand-drawn landscape architecture plans on the computer for the landscape architects that were on staff that were doing everything by hand. And on my, what's ironic is on my first day at that job, I was put into a workshop that

[00:11:02] was being held by Eagle Point, which at the time was a leading architectural engineering

[00:11:07] CAD software. all the sprinklers were going to go and have something really presentable. So he would draw them up by hand, give it to me. I would turn them into CAD, give it back to Paul. And I didn't know what I was doing. He would just have a sprinkler here and a sprinkler here and he'd say, label this pipe one and a half inch, label this pipe two inch, label this pipe one inch. And of course I could draw it, but I didn't know why I was doing it in that way.

[00:12:22] But I was interested.

[00:12:24] I think probably because Paul inspired me to morning or night but it was dark like this picture and it was raining like this picture and I saw that the sprinklers were on and then I got curious because I didn't know how ID irrigation controller worked I really I

[00:13:41] knew nothing I was just getting into the business, we had Google just recently, we had email, we had cell phones, we had Nextel push to talk, remember that was pretty awesome. But the sprinklers were just coming on based on a timer and I thought to myself, man, there is going to be some serious changes in the irrigation industry in the future because

[00:15:02] water is a resource but it's just coming on based on an alarm clock. But in 1665, Isaac Newton formulated the gravitational theory after watching an apple fall and asking why the apple fell straight down rather than sideways or even upwards. And to, I think, all of us in this room, it seems obvious. We know gravity.

[00:16:20] We grew up with gravity.

[00:16:22] Gravity is just a, it's one of the idea that was revolutionary. They had to be revolutionaries because they were fighting 2,000 years of power struggles that not only set strict limits on how each member of society could operate, but they

[00:17:41] also told you what you're in the same vicinity. It's not something that goes on a spaceship, it is an irrigation component. Rain sensor, yes.

[00:19:02] That is the patent drawing on a rain sensor.

[00:20:07] I do have, everybody knows these rain sensors, but I'll just pass the, what you might call the cork disks around just as a reminder.

[00:20:09] That is essentially the technology that is inside, even though it might be slightly different,

[00:20:15] it's the fundamental technology that's inside most rain sensors.

[00:20:20] Then I would like to ask you, what year do you think this patent was filed?

[00:20:24] Take a guess. So what if there was another way? I guess that's the type of questions I'd like to ask you. What if there was another way? What would that look like? And we can also make the comparison. I've heard this recently and I just wanted to share with you because it's relevant to a technology evolving.

[00:21:40] And that would be the carburetor.

[00:21:43] So I would say raise your that the current rain sensors are like a carburetor ready for change and anyone in this room could help influence that change. It's just taken a while. And so my curiosity led me to wonder, how could I get on Shark Tank?

[00:24:21] Could I pitch the sharks on my idea

[00:24:25] for building an environmentally friendly

[00:25:23] I brought with me a lawnmower. Now this lawnmower is just like the lawnmower that most Americans have in their garage.

[00:25:29] It's heavy, it's dirty, it's loud, and it's dangerous.

[00:25:34] Believe it or not, the blades on this lawnmower spin at over 150 miles per hour and they

[00:25:39] cause nearly 80,000 hospital injuries every year.

[00:25:43] But that's not the reason that this isn't your grandfather's old lawnmower is that it has a frictionless cutting system. When these blades spin,

[00:27:02] they're actually not touching.

[00:27:04] There's a very small gap that creates no friction, no contact.

[00:28:03] going to go, and I was literally walking into the Shark Tank. Did you get some money out of it?

[00:28:05] Didn't get any money.

[00:28:06] You can watch this on Hulu.

[00:28:08] I tried to screen capture it on Hulu,

[00:28:09] but you can't screen capture Hulu.

[00:28:11] So I actually set my phone up and recorded my computer screen

[00:28:14] to get that clip.

[00:28:16] But I mention this because it all

[00:28:19] started with me being curious, how do I get on Shark Tank?

[00:28:21] This was 2010.

[00:28:23] Or no, it was 2009, I think, when I, anyway,

[00:28:26] somewhere in there. and eco friendly. That much we know, but not everything that's designed to be good for the globe is actually good for business. That's why we got this guy with us. David John is known as the shark and the godfather of urban fashion. He's one of the most sought after branding experts in the country. We know your face from the shark tank as well. Good morning. Good morning. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. You know, we were talking about this as a

[00:29:40] branding expert. How can people, let's say people watching right now have a company that's

[00:29:44] green global. They want to do that sort of thing, but none of that from me so that's redemption for me. Okay let's let's jump back to the irrigation industry not the lawn industry. So I'd like to spark your curiosity with this picture. What are we So this actually saved him a ton of money. But if you look close at the controller, you might see something unique about it. Does anybody see anything different inside that controller that may not normally be there? If you look on the top right hand side,

[00:32:21] we'll see the laser pointer, there is a box.

[00:32:25] And that box has a basically a box it looked just like this and your two wire came out of that box but it was a computer that drove the system because the engineers were they had they knew how to they knew how to write software so they wrote software and then they built decoders and it ran on a computer

[00:33:40] but they didn't have a control box like this and Toro didn't have two wire so And the base line never really putting anything together. It was super formal. And now Baseline has their own controllers, and I spent 15 years helping them get to where they are now. Oh, I forgot, there's a closer look at the baseline interface. Okay, what field are we looking at here?

[00:35:00] Any guesses?

[00:36:05] the controller essentially bricked and this was not long. I don't remember if it was a day or two or three but they were a couple of days away from ripping up

[00:36:09] the field and laying new sod and now their watering system was out of

[00:36:12] commission. And I mentioned this again because sometimes you have to take a

[00:36:16] risk. I didn't think updating the firmware was a risk but anytime you're working

[00:36:20] with new technology doesn't always go the way that you wanted to go. And or irrigation design or sales, cost estimation. Let's see a show of hands. How many people would agree with that? It looks like irrigation, right? Some of you think that's too easy. It's got to be something else, or you wouldn't be asking.

[00:37:42] All right, well there it is.

[00:37:44] That's the job description.

[00:37:47] Plumber. What was different was it listed, and this was Chad GPT, soil and plant knowledge. Understanding how different soil types and plant species affect irrigation needs and system design. That seemed to be the differentiator from plumbing to

[00:39:01] irrigation. And to me what's interesting, and Well some plumbers might dig. Utility plumber system. And sometimes we kind of look like this. What is smart? What percent is this? It can get, Maybe, maybe not. It's just interesting. It makes me more curious, because you can still save water without switching the nozzles. There's multiple ways to do things, but the nozzle itself isn't necessarily the answer. If you switch a toilet from a high flush to a low flush, you get immediate savings, because

[00:43:01] every time you flush the toilet, it's less water.

[00:43:04] But it doesn't quite work sister question to this question. So when I say there's a problem, there's kind of two corresponding problems that work together, because the other question is when should you water your lawn for traditional controller programming? How long is the runtime? So that's where these two questions can kind of come together. So now let's overlay some data on here.

[00:45:42] Got some blue bars going up. that's that one's not. That's the missing the missing gap in the data. So then I'd like to ask you if the answer to the questions of how long the water and when the water were easy, what would that look like? And I tend to ask myself that

[00:47:01] question a lot, especially to hard questions. And the hydrometer has the valve actuation, and it has the water meter, and it has the digital output.

[00:48:21] So we also have the digital side.

[00:48:25] We can read the sweet spot. Do I need to know the start time and the run time? Maybe. You don't want your sprinklers, you know, watering the car dealership when all the people are walking in. So there's definitely some things you don't want, but if moisture is in the sweet spot, maybe the rest doesn't matter. So this is an

[00:49:40] example of, again, a moisture graph coming below a threshold. And this was just a zone of sprays, turf grass, full sun, kind of your basic turf zone. And again, here in the beginning, we see water, we see rain, and we see the moisture go up,

[00:51:04] and then it's not going to come on until it dips below the threshold.

[00:51:09] And at this point, we have it set whether it came from a grant or something else, we have money and we have a $10 million budget and we need you to advise us on all of our parks

[00:52:22] and where we can save the most water.

[00:53:26] think about this, maybe you only need a couple things at first to figure out your guidance. Maybe you just need some water bills, cubic liters, maybe you just

[00:53:33] need to know the irrigated area, square meters, this would be per site. And then

[00:53:38] you could run some calculations, how many liters per square foot are we using, and

[00:53:43] then you could find and look for some leak. I'm kind of thinking, is he joking? But, you know, that was nice. I say, big time. Can't wait to hear. Literally couldn't wait to hear. Paul thinks he found a million dollar leak. This happens to be the park that Paul found his million dollar leak.

[00:55:05] Looks kind of like shit, but they didn't see it. And Paul found it because of what I mentioned before, looking at the big picture, looking at the liters per cubic meter, or square meter, I have to remember my meters,

[00:56:21] that he was able to find it.

[00:56:22] So when you're looking at projects,

[00:56:24] and where do you start, sometimes there's bigger data. 2024. Bloomberg estimates his personal wealth at around $135 billion, making him the sixth richest person in the world. Sixth richest person in the world. So now I'm going to play

[00:57:40] a video. Pay close attention. Steve liked his strategy and he might have been right at the time. Who would have known the iPhone and Apple would become who they are? So he might have been right, but it's just a good example of it doesn't matter how smart you are, what company you work for, what your position is,

[00:59:00] or how wealthy you are. have the potential to save water. The controllers and the products

[01:00:23] don't save water. You guys here that know how to use them have the potential to