Proving your worth to customers and prospects

When I first started in water treatment, my trainer set a fairly high goal to assure we kept business and won accounts. His goal was for us to provide more cost savings ideas than our treatment contracts were worth. I agree that is a pretty tall order, but it does provide an interesting perspective.

So if you are treating an account for $10,000 per year, could you find improvement projects which could save that account $10,000 per year?

Our treatment programs protect equipment, reduce energy demand, and save water. So what could some ideas be for these projects?

Now if you start by saying, “Let’s reduce costs by lowering chemical dosage rates,” you may be stepping over dollars to pick up pennies.

In boiler houses, the major expenditure is in fuel. A 1 or 2% reduction in fuel could easily pay for your chemical program. Could you increase the cycles on a boiler through reverse osmosis makeup rather than softened water? Could you recover more valuable condensate and return it as feedwater? Could you add a blowdown heat recovery system to reduce the amount of heat going down the drain?

Cooling water systems remove heat from a process. For this to occur efficiently, the heat transfer surfaces need to be kept clean. A program that is being underfed and causing fouling of the heat exchanger tubes may be saving your customer money in chemical but costing them a lot in energy! In this case an increase in chemical usage could cause overall savings to the account.

It needs to be pointed out that additional automation may be a source of savings. I saw a competitor’s account who was replacing copper chiller tubes each year. The root cause was poor control and overfeed of the chlorine biocide. An investment in a simple ORP controller would save them thousands in repair costs each year!

So, my advice is, “Keep your eyes and ears open to improvement opportunities.” Be the consultant your customer will benefit from. There is great satisfaction to come from seeing your recommendations implemented and your customers being more satisfied with your services.