Meet the Experts with Steve Johnson

foreign and this is brought to you by the carpet and fabric care Institute commonly known as CFI I've been a member of CFI for over 40 years I've been a director Regional director and let me tell you why you should join CFI CFI is the the training ground for moving on in this industry it'll give you all the information you need and you get to hang out with other carpet cleaners and ask the silly questions that you're afraid to ask of everybody else and they'll have the answers for you I've been at this a very long time I've owned a business for almost 40 years now and CFI is where I got my start in this industry moved up to the IICRC board and some other things but I will tell you um this is a valuable opportunity for you and your employees to learn more about this industry and how to be better at it thanks Doug if um if any of you don't know Doug he's been around the industry a long time he started King's Carpet Service in 1983. um he's been active in his community with the CFI the IICRC in business with Kiwanis um he's always been involved so helping with committees board positions um and he got involved with this community and was elected to the city council and later became the mayor of Lodi um that's getting pretty involved um and he's he's filling in for Steve because uh Steve's got some other things that he's going to be doing and he knew Doug had nothing else going on so Doug's uh Doug's stepping in and and uh Phil Doug was the right guy because uh Doug has done this before back in the go-to meeting days he and Steve did exactly this so um it would be a good fit and uh glad to have you Doug and and as my wife would uh would say I've left out the important stuff like he managed to raise a bunch of responsible kids which I think is the highest calling um but uh anyway if you don't know Doug and it takes about five years for any of us to be forgotten uh that's that's Doug oh I did want to ask you Doug is that guy that's saying about trying to get out of Lodi is he still there Creighton's Clearwater Revival yeah yeah I'm sorry that that's a that dates me quite a bit doesn't it thanks Brian that's lodi's theme song okay so who do we got coming up here with us Doug we have got Steve and Steve's going to tell us a whole bunch of information about encapsulation and quite honestly um I've seen encapsulation uh perform um I don't personally do encapsulation in my company but I might after today and so might you so Steve from Amber amaresco um or ramsgo a ramsco you know it was easy when you were with these other companies because I know them yeah Aramsco though and uh I'm looking forward to this and and cleaning some information for my company so that I can use I've got some questions for you down the line you can post questions as well if you'd like online uh we have a list of them that have been submitted already but let's Jump Right In Steve Dallas oh wait Brian you're going to introduce Steve with some really cool Steve Johnson with some really cool information about him yeah I'm sorry Steve I I took your three pages of bio and cut it down quite a bit I deleted it from six down to three before I sent it to you so well he's done a lot he's basically he's been in the cleaning industry for over 35 years he started out running a high-end cleaning business uh before he was absorbed by the Borg and became part of Interlink um now a ramsco he sailed multiple positions with the company classes I've done a lot of work with industry groups like like ours and uh you may have met him at a past event or convention um he reminded me that I've met him before and didn't remember so he gave me a hard time about it but he does help he does love to help people be successful and that's why he's here tonight and thank you for coming Steve and my pleasure thanks for having me I think I think we're going to learn a lot yeah good so so how do you want to get started do you want to tell us a little bit about uh um you're the expert tell us a little bit about uh just a an overview of of what we're going to do tonight so we can do this a couple different ways I can certainly uh get on the list of all the benefits of encapsulation and talk about it and kind of do lecture style but sometimes that's not as entertaining and people probably have specific questions I think uh the largest percentage of your CFI members are are probably pretty educated and experienced so they might have more specific or exacting questions so maybe just real quick the first question a lot of people ask is what exactly is encapsulation cleaning and I think it's important to clear up a couple of things when it comes to encapsulation cleaning and what it's defined as is it's a low moisture system designed for interim or Maintenance Cleaning basically on Commercial carpet now doesn't mean you can't do it on residential doesn't mean you can't do it on upholstery but it was designed as an interim or a maintenance system for uh for commercial carpet all the fundamentals of cleaning are still present we're not changing the laws of physics we're not changing the rules of cleaning you still got to have your dry soil removal your soil suspension your extraction your finishing and drying and we could talk about those a little bit more in detail if you like but it differs from hot water extraction a little bit in that we know it's hot water extraction we lay down a pre-spray we agitate it we suspend or emulsify the soils in a new solution and those are made to be rinsed or extracted away and if we don't rinse or extract those away they can reattach the fibers the carpet can get soiled quickly and so forth well the way encapsulation works is a little bit different you lay down your pre-spray or encapsulating pre-spray there's a couple different methods to do that it's agitated and often aggressively into the fibers where it attaches to the soils oils and greases and it and it dries into what we call a crystal lattice structure or a brittle film and there's probably questions about that there's there's concerns there's debates what is it really doing we Define it as the the form of the polymer what structure is the polymer in but what happens is as that encapsulating chemical attaches to those soils oils and greases and encapsulates in that dries into this crystals uh crystal lattice structure which may be better defined as a brittle film and then that film basically cracks and and dissipates uh or dissipated is the right word but falls to the base of the Yarns and then it's vacuumed out with a post vacuuming treatment now there's also a polymer typically depending on Whose chemistry you're using and that polymer will coat that fiber and render it resistant to soils for ongoing and so what it does it really helps the carpet stay cleaner last longer it's easier to clean next time you uh you clean uh the and so it's a very simple very fast very safe system that's widely recognized by The Mills the carpet Mills love this as an enormous maintenance years ago we used to do a lot of things with Shaw and some of the other Mills and we did training for all their Direct Buy customers and people that got through Shaw Shaw Direct flooring pack craft and those organizations and Shaw the rightfully so got tired of paying millions of dollars in unjustified claims for carpet that was poorly maintained and so they spent a lot of money and a lot of research and a lot of development to train their people that were buying those Carpets Direct how to do proper interim or Maintenance Cleaning instead of your traditional methods but we all grew up with the bonneting and things like that so jumping forward encapsulation is really the premier low moisture way to clean and maintain commercial glued on carpet it's not new it's been around for decades but the chemistry and the equipment today is far greater than what was than what was available out there for a long time I do remember being introduced to an encapsulation system uh back in the DuPont maintenance days and they had a tool that looked like a lawnmower right and the guy who was demoing it actually ran down the hallway with it and and to prove how fast you could you know clean with it right um and and we asked him you know where's the dirt go and he said who cares looks great and he was right the carpet looked great um but you know we were concerned that at some point you have to pay the piper and at some point you have to get the you know whatever it is out um so uh it it was it was interesting because in that case Dupont had had built a I guess an unviable non-viable maintenance program and then had to come up with a way to make it work for the people who were and there was a whole movement with that and it's it was extensive and they put a lot of money into it and I I don't think we're supposed to throw out any brand names we're certainly not throwing anybody out of the bus and they have definitely improved their uh their system and their chemistry over the years so but they flooded the market they probably didn't have proper vetting uh you know some of the some of the raw materials weren't maybe the same quality then as they are today uh and so forth and then maybe uh maybe similar situation like we have today right there's two camps there's probably people that undervalue this service which I think value is discussing today and there's probably people that overvalue it or maybe overstate what the capabilities are and you know you mentioned you asked a question to somebody where does the dirt go the dirt certainly goes away and it certainly has moved away if done correctly like all systems encapsulation needs to be done correctly and if the process is not done correctly or you cut corners or you try to you know get that extra thousand square feet per hour I think you want five instead of four or six instead of five you might be cutting a corner and we all know what happens when you do that so the hot water extraction is no different or any other method is no different when you try to deviate from the the plan that's when things go go awry yeah it's it's okay for me to to uh uh throw somebody under the bus because I don't I I can I can be the flippant guy because nobody's gonna come after me right right well in today's world what we do is we associate that with the quality of the product the application and uh and you know the person himself and and here's what we really believe and here's what we've talked for the last 20 plus years at Bridge Point when it comes to encapsulation and and most of our Communications with Carpet Mills which we communicate with regularly especially Shaw is that if somebody's had a bad experience with encapsulation or didn't like it or felt like it was not given as advertised there's probably one of three reasons number one is they probably used a a lesser quality product they probably had poor chemistry it is not easy to make a quality encapsulation chemistry everybody is in that space everybody has a product every chemical manufacturer has an encapsulating chemistry but they're not all created equal I think we can all admit that when you use one of the top manufacturers in your hot water extraction your pre-sprays your rinses you fall all the proper fundamentals of cleaning you're going to do a pretty good job you know when you're using your Bridge points your probe cams your ctis whoever your favorite guys out there are when you use a quality product you're going to do a pretty good job that's not the case of encapsulation not all encapsulates are created equal it's very difficult to make a quality product that cleans well suspends soils removes those soils through the vacuuming after the crystal out of structure dries the post vacuuming is is important and then of course how good is that polymer what does that polymer doing long term so poor chemistry is usually number one the second one is poor application there's you mentioned the guy running behind the machine to show you how fast it is you know was he going at the proper speed based on the soiling condition or or the type of the carpet was the machine or the equipment and he was using really the right kind of equipment to do encapsulation with and then the last one and and probably the most common honestly I don't know that these are really in any specific order but unreasonable expectations there you know you don't typically go in and try to clean up an Exon spill with encapsulation now the good news is is it's so fast and so efficient I can hit an area multiple times and maybe get the equivalent of a restorative cleaning with my encapsulation especially some of the guys that do some of the more aggressive methods you know the cymax the Trinity some pretty aggressive equipment that's out there you can do some pretty amazing jobs on uh on uh on cleaning there's other orbital oscillating equipment that's very effective but the carpet Mills prefer the crbs or the counter rotating brush machines they like the vertical agitation they like the deep down agitation they like standing the fibers up they don't like causing any undue harm uh to the fibers and so forth so that's one of the three reasons I and I would challenge that if somebody's had a bad experience with encapsulation cleaning I would look to one of those three things what chemistry were they using they might have had a poor quality product what uh what application were they doing and did they have an unreasonable expectations on the soiling condition because it it really is not the blend all of cleaning it's an interim or maintenance system most of the Mills tell you they really don't want you to encapsulate more than three or four times between hot water extractions that's not a hard and fast carved in stone rule but it's a guideline that they like to follow and again that all depends on sorting conditions fiber type traffic type of soil and so forth we have many customers that will go two years and 10 12 times never have a problem so you know the condition of the carpet the soiling is going to dictate that well you do I got to tell you the first time I saw this um was at a trade show in Las Vegas and they were uh demoing it where forklifts were driving in and I gotta tell you I was pretty impressed low pile carpet uh crb machine and it did a really good job in a very short amount of time so um but there's also other all types of equipment that are available for people to use one I just saw a comment pop up they went from one machine to an orbital machine and you're talking about CRV tell me which one in your opinion is more effective if you were to recommend a uh type of machine what would it be yes so so let's start with I'm a big fan of crb the counter rotating brush machines right for several reasons the vertical let me get clarity on you from that first so it's a cylindrical round cylindrical device that rotates counterclockwise not not a or not a rotating circular flip that on its side so the crbs are the counter rotating brushes they're actually a vertical agitation it's not necessary too horizontal like a rotary with two heads or three heads a crb is a counter rotating brush they'll typically have two brushes on a machine uh potentially a third uh depending on the machine there's a couple out there I've seen there's one I think it's called a trio that's popular for for guys to do a lot of commercial the Mills really like that one uh and it's uh it's fast it's efficient it's lightweight anybody can carry it around and it meets all the mill guidelines and it meets all the mil specs so I'm a big fan of that but I also love other machine scenes like the cymax I'm a big fan of the cymax now some of the Mills really denounce rotary and and I if you're familiar with the cymax it doesn't necessarily fall into the standard rotary action right well you look at 175 RPM one and a half horse machine uh you know spinning on a carpet that's pretty aggressive heavy weight on those fibers uh and when it's done incorrectly or doesn't have good lubrication or or maybe done extensively in an area there's some potential issues with that long term on those fibers and the carpet Mills don't like that can you use a rotary machine yes you can should you I think there's probably better methods than than a standard 175 rotary machine but the cymax is a little bit different in that yeah so it's planning to interrupt you for just a second so the concern then from the Mills would be blossoming of the tips of the Tufts yeah and they they all kind of have their own they've all done their own tests they've all done their own you know studies and things like that some might call Halo or blooming or blossoming or you know untwisting any Yarns those kinds of things right when you get into the filtering on a wool carpet yeah you might get fraying you're fuzzing absolutely and it looks like your carpet has split ends you know so those are things that are not popular with Carpet Mills the the cymax is a little bit different and it's a planetary gear system so you have a large disc with three other discs underneath and the large disc spins One Direction and the other disc down below spin the opposite direction so I don't think it really uh equates to the same potential untwisting or unblooming of the Yarns the Mills don't necessarily denounce the cymax but they don't heavily endorse it either uh and then there's the orbital or oscillating machines and they're all over the scale some of them are more aggressive than others some of them are more uh expensive than others that's usually do the quality of the build they do a very good job in encapsulation cleaning I like the result that you get but you typically don't see male endorsements with somebody oscillating or orbital type equipment then there's a machine out there that I really like called the Trinity the Trinity Phoenix is uh is a tri-directional agitation and so what it does is it has a rotary action but it also has an oscillating or orbital action where it vibrates back and forth and then the third action is a tamping motion you know picture a truck going down the road and you're following a real bumpy road and all the tires are bouncing up and down bouncing up and down uh and so forth so those are the types of machines that uh they do a great job they get the carpet very clean there's a lot of violence on that car but and there's many other things you hear different names and and different uh and different uh categories of those types of things but they all kind of fall into that you have a crb or the counter rotating you know whether it be uh made in this part of the world or that part of the world yeah the rotary machines you have the oscillating orbital the Trinity is uh is kind of a new Direction in agitation with that tri-direction you have the planetary gear system in the in the cymax so basically that was a very long-winded answer to your question Doug but I I like all the equipment I like it if it's a quality built machine and it does the work it's supposed to do I can get soil out I can clean heavily soiled carpet I can make it look nice I can get my three four five thousand square feet an hour depending on on the soil and I'm not doing unharmed to the fiber but but having said that we got to kind of curtail that if you're doing a lot of commercial properties that are that you know there's warranty in place and there's uh you know Mill concerns and stuff like that they're going to default to that CRI you know the carpet and rug Institute Silver approval program and they're going to default to the to the crb because that's the type of action they like the best so when it comes to all these machines that you have mentioned one uh low pile commercial setting like an airport or a church versus a plush piled residential carpet uh different types of equipment different machines for preferences what do you got so what I the way I look at it I always look at what's my target market right who's my demographic if I do a lot of commercial glue down carpet and it's that tight low pile carpet you know a loophole something like that and they're big wide open areas I'm gonna probably use something that goes fast and that's going to be like a cymax or Trinity or a or orbital or something like that that I can hit those high production rates because honestly in commercial cleaning it's all about production rates you got to do the best job you can uh in in the least amount of time with the least amount of expense and that's one of the Beauties in encapsulation cleaning is very low cost uh you you know you have the electricity of the property you have your machine that you paid for that you probably paid for the first few times you used it do you have chemistry that is pennies per square foot to use so it all boils down to labor Which is far and away your most expensive commodity the highest the absolute highest expense you have in your business is your labor and so if you uh you know if you're stepping over to ours to pick up dimes you're that's where you're getting hurt and that's what happens a lot of times in commercial where guys can't compete they're trying to do 30 40 Cent a square foot work for 10 12 cents a square foot and they just can't do it sure and and I would say this anybody who does any commercial work of or any volume if they're not also offering encapsulation they're simply working too hard that's the case so if I do a lot of commercial and I have big wide open areas um I'm gonna have both I'm gonna have a crb and one of those other machines I talked about and that's really personal preference that would that would be like me telling you what do you like what you should have a chocolate or vanilla ice cream right you you can try the the Trinity you can try the grumpy you can try an orbital you can try the cymax you can decide which one you like the best if I was to maybe downplay one not a real popular action in the industry uh is uh is the 175 RPM rotary machine the Mills just don't like that I've done 100 presentations with Shaw and every one of them have a picture of a rotary and a big circle and a red you know a red line through it so can you encapsulate with a rotary machine yes should you probably not I I would like to see you uh invest more in a crb machine or or an orbital or oscillating like the Trinity or one of the others or the cymax and I think you'd probably like that after you after you try them now is that because of the moisture it doesn't get it's creating too much friction because it's a low moisture product It's usually the action it's usually the action yeah the action itself and and if you're going to use one I prefer uh even though it switches gears a little bit we love the pads on the cymax we love the the pads on the Trinity because of what they do on a rotary machine I would probably use a well broken in Brush versus a drive Block in a in a pad and it's just it's just going to be aggressive and the Mills don't like it I don't ever want to see a cleaner set himself up to get you know in a situation where it becomes awkward between him and customer so uh that that's the camp that I sit in certainly there'll be people that debate that but uh there there's great equipment out there there's great units and and there's no way I could mention all the brands but get a quality unit get the right action and then make sure they match the the job the soiling condition the carpet type uh match it to that equipment but make sure you have good chemistry carpet cleaners so we have to make things more complex so yeah you get a crb machine but there's several different bristles there's several different brushes for different purposes exactly not going to want to use the aggressive brush on a wool carpet yeah the beauty of the crbs and and the better ones like the ones we sell the brush Pro that we sell um there's three brushes for it and actually a fourth now the the real hard hard surface one but the standard that comes with it you're going to use 75 of the time that actually is soft brushes that if you're going to use it in a residential like a plush or velvet style residential carpet you'd want to use that or if you're going to do wool carpet you want the very soft brushes there's a lot of people that do uh the Dual rugs and Oriental Rugs or they might do dirty rugs or some of those uh seagrass or uh things like that the jute rugs that are really sensitive to moisture uh they'll use the really soft brush I uh I've done several trips over to Maui not only for vacation but we had a distributor there and I've toured many of those properties with him and he sells equipment to them you know you you go up on the you know a high-end floor of the quanapoli alihi and Maui and and do a really expensive wool inlay there you better have the right brush and we did I think they ended up buying 12 machines or something from us so they uh they loved it and then the other beauty of the of the crbs you have that pie lifting capability if they have the uh collection plates on them or The Renovators you can actually do a dry soil removal with that and you can go over the carpet and pull out a lot of sand and debris that a vacuum might not pick up so it's kind of a dual purpose and just about every single person that has one of those uses it during hot water traction for agitation and uh and so they lay down their pre-spray agitate that into the carpet and then do their extraction a very good form of agitation and a very good form of cleaning we do yeah it's it's it's great we sell the 10 inch one a lot and uh hundreds and hundreds of those every year that we sell and uh and they love it just for that and you you can tell listening to Steve that he's not trying to sell you a product he's just excited well I can but that's another meeting so no I am excited but you know I'm a carpet cleaner at heart I've been in it 35 years at a high-end residential business uh I went to work for Bridge Point started traveling the country teaching icrc classes but what I also am as a businessman and I know how to help carpet cleaners make money and I want to see him improve their profitability and a lot of that comes with the right equipment and the right chemistry to reduce your labor and increase those profits and and sometimes we as cleaners we get a little opinionated and we get in our own way and we tend to think the only good piece of equipment happens to be the one we own or the one that's in our van and and I would encourage us to kind of get out of our only a little bit do your due diligence get demos on other pieces of equipment because you don't have a piece of equipment in your truck or in your shop that doesn't pay for itself while you're using it we're very fortunate in our industry you know we're making 100 200 300 bucks an hour any piece of equipment we could advertise it as a short period of time or long period of times we want a lot of the pieces of equipment I'm talking about put on a credit card write a check or or uh or something you're going to get an Roi on that piece of equipment very very quickly so when you try to weigh out hey this is only 1500 bucks but this one's 2500 do I really need the extra thousand really find out the differences between those two pieces of equipment see if that thousand bucks is worth it because that's like six hours worth of cleaning so in six hours you've covered that difference Brian if I may uh you threw out there that you use it and I know this will meet the experts and you're an expert so you threw it out there that you use it tells the application you're using on um we have a couple of restaurants we do that are like a lot of people that do restaurants they should be done more often than they are and some of our guys have just finally figured out that a little extra time up front working with a pre-spray in a crb just makes the rest of the cleaning job so much easier it's it's worth doing um so we'll also use it sometimes on the wash floor when we're cleaning rugs and uh and we'll occasionally use it to do encapsulation in fact we do have a couple of high-end restaurants that um they just sort of have a lot of Grease impact both from coming in off of a dock or a paid parking lot that will extraction clean that carpet and then we'll use an end cap at the end very good great soil Hider so it's there to help the carpet stay looking better longer and plus those typically on those commercial jobs they're not going to pay for the added uh you know a floor chemical protector for example but you know for you for a couple pennies a square foot and 15 minutes out of your day you lay down a an encapsulate and agitated in there every time you clean that carpet in the future it's going to be easier but when they vacuum while they are subsequent vacuumings uh are going to vacuum much easier with that polymer in place so that's a great application now you you've talked about chemistry a little bit and I would guess that in the time you've been at Interlink and remsco your own chemistry has changed a little bit so so what you used to provide back when someone may have used something in the past and kind of I didn't like that but things have changed so what's changed so there's several things and and you really have to to try to drill down to the manufacturer themselves you know what what's their MO what's their target we at Bridgeport I can't speak for everybody even though I I probably know more about the average manufacturing industry that I probably should know uh you know it just gives the relationships and people in the industry and the testing that we do but here's what I can say we do at Bridge Point with our chemist Tom foresight and way back you know from Gordon Hanks when we really started to you know in the early to mid 90s start to bring all our chemistry in-house and manufacture our stuff instead of having it made for us we made a policy in the very beginning we're never going to make a product based on price we're going to make it as good as we can make it and then we'll worry about what it costs after that and when you look at a certain chemical we are very discriminatory on the sourcing of our raw materials uh there's many parts of the world that we just simply won't buy materials from and and we never will at least why a few of us are still employed here that's not going to be the case so that's a big deal because just because you have a an stpp or tkpp or a glycol E3 ebdb or phosphates or whatever you can go down the list all the stuff that goes in to chemistry to make it what it is we are very discriminatory on the sourcing of that raw material because that is the basis of everything you do that we have a very sophisticated blending process and we could give a lot of people our formulas and they still would have a hard time making them because they wouldn't be able to figure out the the space the temperature the time the percentages and things like that so it's a very sophisticated blending system but what that does on the back end is it gives you a product that is very consistent we want the first scoop and the last scoop or the first ounce and the last ounce to work exactly the same and I think you and everybody on this comp can say over the years you've probably used many products where you can't say that one time it worked great you loved it another time you're like what happened what changed and and so we try very hard to make that bit consistent the other thing is the coverage rate I'm not talking about dilution I'm talking about coverage rate when you look at a ready-to-use gallon of product you know a lot of the industry standards on the pre-spray side might be 200 to even you know 300 square feet we're quite often three to four hundred square feet per gallon coverage rate on a ready to use gallon and that's because of the quality of the raw material it allows you to go farther do faster be more efficient uh like a gallon of our main our number one encapsulant it's a 1 to 32 dilution so it makes 33 ready to use gallons you're getting four to five hundred square feet on average soiling on average gallon that one gallon covers 16 500 square feet of carpet and and so forth and so when you see things out there where people advertise a a 2X or a 3X or the concentrate it's it's really the percentage of solids that's in that polymer and the quality of the raw materials we could have advertised at ours is a 6X concentration uh but you know if you can get 400 square feet out of a gallon so the 300 that's a considerable savings on your chemical cost and and that along with an answer to your question but chemistry is very very important when you when you start to analyze the products you're using you start to test them out test them out test them on different Carpets on different soiling conditions uh ask the right questions uh if the person you're buying it from doesn't know the answer to those questions hopefully he can get with somebody that can't answer those questions for you well we're we're fortunate in that we learned a long time ago that the costume chemical is not really pertinent it's the lowest cost of doing business yeah so why why sacrifice that it's it's your lowest cost of doing business but to give you a for instance here's it sounds like a lot hey this drum or this pail is 192 dollars and this one's 140 it's 50 difference how can I afford that well when you look at it dilutes this many ounces per gallon or this many ounces per what five gallons and I'm getting two three four hundred square feet a gallon coverage that pale by the time it's gone you've made so much money with that pill and it's gone that cost does become irrelevant now we at Bridge Point we look at it a little bit differently if we save two three cents a pound on manufacturing that would equate to hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings just on that item but we're not going to do that figure out how to make it the best we can make it and then and we'll worry about what it costs after that yeah if a better product saves you time it saves you time it's time without question without question I uh I'm certain there's guys on this call and and we've all been you know it's the world we live in today there's message boards and there's blogs and there's there's people that live on these boards and that's fine and and some of them have more traction than others and some of them have more activity than others uh and sometimes the people are listening to a lot of that because they that's the only one talking to them and I understand that that's the world we live in but unfortunately in our industry one of our biggest competitors is misinformation get the right information from the right place and the right people uh I have very good friends all over this industry that work for other manufacturers and we're great friends we share rental cars we we travel together we stay in the same hotels we and we've done that for decades and and we we co-teach we co-present at trade shows and and things like that and and uh but most of those guys will get along and and whatnot so if you have a question you know maybe uh and maybe go direct to the source and go direct to the manufacturer talk to other people that have used it and and those types of things and and then Remember The Facts of Life you can't argue with the laws of physics and and chemistry is your lowest cost of doing business and and your labor is your highest cost of doing business so what makes your product safer than other products on the market very good question so Tom is is absolutely um laser focused on that and he's uh he was probably the I would say the number one reason we really started to go down that direction and because back in the day you know hey this works so much faster and we can buy it for this and nobody cares well I don't want my guys mixing it all day every day you know the the what really changed for us at Bridge Point is when we had to get an explosion room the explosion room changed our focus on things but uh so there's a number of things that play into that and you know regulatory unfortunately our labels today you know labels anymore aren't marketing tools they're regulatory labels and you have to put this on it and that on it but what makes our product safer and you got to say ER you know say for greener those types of things is the sourcing of the raw materials the products we use to manufacture them uh the percentages and the concentrations that we use to put in those most of your better materials especially in their ready to use formula are are green or Greener and uh it's some of the other aftermarket or lesser market products that are not I can tell you right now Point blanks I would certainly never go down this road I can tell you the names of a whole bunch of chemicals that aren't aren't approved for use in California they shouldn't be selling that they don't have prop 65 that we can sit and go down the list but that's not that's not where we live that's not what we do and and so forth so when you're using better quality raw materials and you're uh you're following the guidelines set forth by this organization that organization typically those products are better now I will also be very upfront and honest and tell you we're not going to certify all those uh you know when you talk about green seal gs37 or EPA DFE which is now safer's Choice Eco logo you know those types of things while while I uh applaud those organizations and I I like what they're doing they're trying to make it better safer healthier environment they're trying to encourage products uh you know better for the user and better for the environment and probably all the science and all the testing hasn't been done yet on a lot of that and you know some of the people that have certain criteria to get a product approved don't even have a testing category for that product and and so I'll just leave it at that and I I don't want to you know go down a negative road but but some of that hasn't really been thought through the other thing that happens in our industry is now some of these organizations if you were to certify those uh those products and get them approved it's uh it's very expensive but you also have to divulge out your formulas and in today's world it's very difficult to put out a very good very high quality formula that meets all these guidelines it meets all this criteria uh and uh and make it usable and and practical and you divulge all that to your competitors which I I would argue that Bridgepoint has far away the most imitated product line in the industry this isn't a Bridge Point seminar that's not why we're on here but that's that's just one of those facts that the quality of that product line everybody knows how much Citrus salt we sell they know how much is Viper Venom we sell they know how much so they've all tried to come out with products and there's some very very good products out there uh but what are the raw materials that they're putting in those products and and so forth again another long-winded answer but better materials equals better ingredients and better ingredients equals better results and a better product for the user uh and the environment that he uses them in well it's gonna I was just gonna say that since I'm the politically incorrect one I can say that some of the um requirements for some of those certifications are just silly they're just silly and they're they're directed towards if you take this product and pour it in the pond behind your house will the fish live yeah don't do that right this is not what this is designed for yeah um some of those are just a little bit silly I I you said it very nicely Um well hey listen after you know after curfew at the bar over a cocktail you know during happy hour I have no problem letting it fly this this probably isn't the right format for that yeah well since you you mentioned it you mentioned polymers the end caps work with with the polymer technology and polymers today seem to be getting the same kind of connotation as chemical did a few years ago um all polymers are bad um what's different about the polymers it's a training issue right that's a that's a training issue and again I meant I think I probably said in the first couple minutes we started talking that the chemistry today is so much greater and so much better than it was when we started this uh but polymer is is widely used in all parts of our industry and all Industries many different Industries you know they use it in the electronics cleaning there's polymers and abatement cleaning there's encapsulants and polymers and people that do stuff like that and and uh the the member I talked about the sourcing around materials what type of polymer is that is that manufacturer putting in that product so uh I I'm probably comfortable in saying that there's some products out there that the polymer flakes off maybe in a larger size or a larger you know structure or it doesn't even bond to the fibroid you don't get any long-term effect or it only works on one type of soil a dry silicate soil and so forth and that might be why it's you know 12 bucks a gallon or something like that uh the quality of that polymer uh we would say in most cases is not injurious in any way and it's a very safe product we have a product our number one product that we actually certified through the the CRA crisoa program and through the EPA safer Choice program so it's a very green product and it has a polymer in it and stuff like that so uh it's you can't lump them all into the same category and and polymer could be used as a very positive word it could be used as a very bad word uh but just like anything else you could say chemical instead of chemistry or solution you could say solvent or you know people start to wig out over over solvents not understanding what the true definition of a solid is so that's part of the dialogue we're talking to people in California in California has some pretty strict regulations um whether they're yeah earlier you mentioned the word silly so I will whether whether they're silly or not I know it's the world you live in in California so there are polymers that that are in encapsulation products to um to make them make the carpet stay cleaner longer which is really similar to the goal of a Teflon or Scotchgard polymer product so if California is outlawing polymers are they outlying a typed polymer one polymer some polymers are you going to get in trouble if you use an end cap that has a polymer in it that acts sort of like a Teflon no we're going to go to Nevada and purchase that stuff yeah so the answer is no and let's not confuse polymer technology with fluorocarbon technology and and that's the direction what's happening now you know fluorochemicals were our Our Savior for you know we invented the aftermarket fluorochemical protection industry I mean 3M you know way back with Scotchgard and then Bridgepoint got behind that and started marketing and we made tens of millions hundreds of millions of dollars on protectors um and now with uh with the restrictions or the bands on pfos and pfoa you know the fluorocarbon technology going away uh that is definitely a rule that I don't think all the proper testing and criteria has been done that's definitely something that I disagree with uh and and you know that you just throw it all away and then let's work backwards from there but it is what it is that's where it is it's California right now it's Maine there will be other states that go down this road uh and so forth so the next up is polymer technology polymer is a very good protector in certain circumstances it's not as good a protector as fluorocarbon I can tell you that because it doesn't give you the real aggressive resistance to oils uh and uh in today's world you know there's a lot of oil-based soils that get tracked in on a carpet uh secondly is look at all the fibers that are coming out now what's the number one fiber that sold nowadays it's polyester and polyester has an affinity for oil so what's going to happen What you're going to see is you're probably going to see more frequent cleanings are needed uh then you know we went a long time where we could go a little bit longer between cleanings we could protect the carpet and stay cleaner longer well uh you know we're getting a little bit off on capsulation here but but the likelihood that people are going to have to start cleaning a little bit more frequently to keep these polyester fibers and pet fibers and corn oil fibers cleaner longer uh they're gonna have to clean more frequently and uh but the next best step is is polymer technology some of the rinse agents or extraction agents have polymers in them not only do they uh do they uh help clean and do that but they also have that anti-wicking capability they give that invisible barrier well an encapsulation chemistry a good polymer a high quality polymer not only uh do you leave the plumber behind it doesn't change the hand it doesn't change engine feel doesn't make the carpet dry stiff but it definitely repels soils and so each subsequent vacuuming you're continuing to pull out soil so that carpet looks nice for a much longer period of time in between your store of cleanings that's the direction that it's going and and we'll see what happens uh you know California and Maine or right now we think Vermont soon to follow on the fluorocarbon thing uh and uh but you guys are uh ear protectors that you can use now are are polymer based not fluorocarbon based and uh and whatnot there's one there's one left we actually had a product Advanced protector with Teflon that we we saw this coming we made a very large batch we just had to beat April 1st to deadline uh and we I think we had it last count maybe 1300 gallons left but if that's something that some of you guys want to jump on get into an aransco branch and grab that advanced protector with default I'll take 500 gallons because once it's gone it's gone in California so wow yeah it's it's really unfortunate um uh you know the carpet meals have pulled fluorocarbons out of there you know the fork out of their manufacturing years ago because they saw this coming of course you know we do hundreds of millions they do hundreds of billions so they can stay ahead of that game a little fast in the weekend uh but uh that's where we are today that's what's happening and uh and so we got to play by the rules that are on the field and that's what we do uh we have a very good uh uh polymer based protector and in Kathy guard uh we have another one Maxim SOS is polymer base with acid dye resistors so there are options but I would never sit here in this chair and tell you it's as good as our regular Maxim or or some of the other good fluorochemical technology that you guys have used in the past by other quality manufacturers it just isn't and uh until we can invent something or come up with something we have some things in the works we have some exciting testing but nowhere near ready to to lay it out there um we got to deal with those oils and that's likely going to come through more frequent cleaning or um another step towards people getting rid of carpet yeah so one thing I think we need to we need to do too I want to make sure because there's probably people on the call that I started earlier and then we kind of got off track a little bit there's there's kind of two camps right there's people that maybe undervalue the service of encapsulation cleaning but at the same time there's people that overvalue uh the service of encapsulation cleaning and so the encapsulation absolutely works and it does very well when when does when applied properly and we talked about quality chemistry we talked about realistic expectation we talked about proper application but when you're talking about you know the the 1500 to 3 000 square feet per hour on the low end and higher in many cases dry times in less than an hour many times in less than 30 minutes uh you know it's very easy to learn very easy to train technicians uh you don't have to be six foot two two twenty and bench 300 sounds to do it uh I mean the you know most of those machines the crbs are under 50 pounds and uh and so forth so anybody could do it and you could train it very quickly uh and I think those things are important but what it also does there's two other things that I think people forget it allows you to competitively bid against any other cleaning system out there uh and do a very good job in a very satisfactory job and hit those high production rates and stay very profitable at competitive pricing uh but at the same time it also helps you compete against not cleaning a lot of the commercial accounts that we target we know they don't clean frequent enough and we know they don't clean often enough and quite often that's a budget issue and so if we could encourage them and hey we don't have to clean this at 25 or 35 cents a square foot we could clean it at X and uh and so forth and you guys have to determine that I you know it when you look at chemicals that are pennies per square foot and you look at the machine you bought and how long you want to amortize it over the course of a year or six months or whatever and then you look at your labor rates you know what your cost of cleaning is uh and then you base your you base your profitability on that but I have a lot of customers a lot of customers that do commercial cleaning at six seven eight cents a square foot and they're very profitable because they do it correctly so if you're if you're really down on encapsulation you might want to you might want to rethink that a little bit let's make sure we get educated on the on the right way to do it you know we're just close to uh wrapping up is there anything else Steve that you wanted to throw out yeah I would say maybe one more thing is is Let's Be sure that uh we we make sure we research properly and question what we think or hear somebody that might be overstating it there's manufacturers of certain pieces of equipment there might be manufacturers of certain chemistry that claim it's to be all end-all we've never caught that we never will teach that uh with the carpet Mills don't promote that uh they they typically like X number of times of encapsulation between hot water extractions they like that restorative um people ask about residential law can you do it in residential absolutely you certainly can't and a lot of people that do it I wouldn't rely on it solely great for interim great for touch-ups before or after parties or on the holidays but typically our customers are paying for that once a year truck mount restorative cleaning they want that full truck mount experience or that hot water extraction experience I mean I love Portables too so uh that that's something I think we need to remember and consider but when you look look at the delicates the rugs you know sensitive carpets but also the world we live in today the price of gas and and the the cost of fuel and the cost of the van and the cost of a machine when you look at the cost of encapsulation cleaning and what it takes to drive out and do a job doing that versus the cost of hot water traction you can save a lot of money and maybe hit some of that environmentally friendly situation that some of those customers you know especially in some parts of California more than others might be uh might be conscious of and so those are points that I think people really need to be conscious of and maybe uh and maybe weigh in and then you know other than that it really boils down to things that I know we jumped around a little bit but you know why would I maybe be down on capsulation is probably a training or an education issue it usually boils down to chemistry application or unrealistic expectations uh what type of equipment uh we know there's equipment out there does a very very good job but are we also maybe uh aligning ourselves with the Mill's like and what the Mills represent uh and and so forth and then profitability uh you know what uh what do we need to price this at what do we need to do it at because I'll never clean it x amount per square foot that's just too low well when you're walking away for millions of dollars this is you know in millions of square feet because uh I mean I said millions of dollars that was a mistake when you're walking away for millions of square feet because you won't clean at a certain price maybe clean it differently and and you put that Revenue right back in your right back in your company and and it opens up a lot of avenues so don't be down on it uh it is a viable system It's very effective it's very efficient it's very profitable when done correctly and uh and so forth and at the same time be honest with yourself and don't overstate it uh you know let's not get into a situation where we can cause issues down the road that we shouldn't have right Brian did you have any questions any from uh people that sent in anything that we didn't cover yet well the only the only thing that um that I had was a question about uh people that are concerned about polymers and if you're going to do an in-cap cleaning in somebody's home you're leaving a residue that's supposed to flake off and be vacuumed up um is there a health concern for kids or pets if there's a residue that's going to flake and it's a polymer residue so here's my answer to that and it's not a perfect science but here's what I would say in a residential environment I would like to clean or be the one to do the post acne and uh and so forth so at the end of an encapsulation job you are supposed to do Post vacuuming most times in a commercial setting we don't do it we just educate the property to do it that night or the next day or their next regular scheduled vacuuming but you don't have people Walling around on the floor right so they're walking they're upright and and so it's typically a non-issue if I were in a residential uh situation and I was encapsulating in a residential environment I'd like to see the cleaner use air movers and dry a little bit quicker and do the post vacuuming themselves and uh and that can eliminate that issue but even outside that even if they don't they just tell the homeowner to ask you I've never heard in 20 plus years now 25 years of being around encapsulation cleaning even with all the relationships we have a Shaw uh and other males that we work with over the years I've never heard of an issue or a situation where somebody uh uh maybe have an adverse effect that doesn't mean it hadn't happened but I've I've never heard of one so I I think that we can claim It's very effective it's very safe uh you know you drive vacuum uh you pre-spray you agitate it in it dries quickly they vacuum it most people vacuum since their carpets dry anyway we all know that they go right behind us and vacuum it even though we just left with our 80 000 truck mount so uh and uh and they're going to be in good shape but and then the last part of that long-winded answer we tell them not to walk all over it and be right on top of it anyway even when we do hot water extraction you know I mean when we apply to protector or something like that so well I like the the idea what you mentioned doing the whole routine um partially because there's a marketing aspect to showing up with the truck mount and showing up with a little Jiggly machine and running a towel over their carpet and by the end of the day they're not impressed at all with um and I can get one of those down at the grocery store um and that that might be the equipment because there is there's equipment looks like they can rent it the grocery store but there's a lot of equipment they can't right but as impressive as a truck mount is or a big powerful portable and and you give them that restorative and that powerful and that aggressive and that uh uh that uh real dog and pony show of hot water extraction what do they really pay us for at the end of the day they pay us to clean your carpet they pay us to clean their carpet they want a good job they want a fair price they want to be able to refer you to others with confidence and call you back and uh and so forth so if I'm able to go into a job and and meet all that criteria and being and out of there in less time and have it dry in less than an hour and and and so forth and check all those boxes what's the problem do you see what I mean so and where labor is our highest cost to do business you know if I have a big ten thousand square foot property but only two or three thousand square feet of it really needs restorative cleaning with hot water extraction but the other seven I can do with encapsulation I'll do that all day long absolutely yeah all day long so it's uh it's just one of those things that maybe let's try to get out of our own way and and look at the big picture I'm a truck mount guy I'm a heat freak I'm a hot water freak I'm gonna get in and get aggressive and sweat and get the dirt out of there and scare those grease monsters out of the carpet I live in that world too but I'm a businessman at the end of the day and it's another tool in the toolbox and there's a place for this well I think uh we've gotten a great amount of information from you thank you for being here Steve my pleasure hi Steve I learned a lot tonight so I appreciate it thank you yeah I appreciate you guys having me on hopefully uh I didn't cross any lines or anything but uh you you'd use terms like Politically Incorrect and offending people and silly this that Hey listen there's nobody that can play that game better than I can but I've learned over the last 35 years you pick your battles all right exactly well this has been recorded CFI members can see it at any time so if you want in your text to see it you certainly can go to the CFI website and look it up did we get all the questions answered I know there was quite a few pop-ups there was some it looked like there were some pop-ups on equipment uh there was pop-ups on did we get all those questions answered well there were two that came in at the end um can you add deodorizer to your end cap and can incap be made in a powder concentrated form so um we've not really experimented with the powder because of the type of the raw material we put in there and the polymer I've heard that there's other people experimenting I haven't seen one that I could that I could uh say is ready to go or ready to go to market so and I don't see us coming out anything like that anytime soon so no on the powder it is a liquid uh and then the other what was the other question I'm sorry it was adding a deodorant most of the better other ingredients are going to have a mild fragrance in them already and you know if it was a water base and there was uh there was you know kind of a mile what's the makeup no alcohols or something like it you probably could but what I'd rather them do is they feel like they need to deodorize do a mist of something after I don't really like them mixing any other chemistry in with the ingredients that are in there already and change Solutions or change yeah I don't want to affect the polymer I don't want to affect the encapsulation process so probably not the other thing is I mentioned percentage of solids earlier uh and like we have a product that could be a much higher pH product but by lowering the pH of it it takes some of the nasty smell out of it sometimes pH will affect the fragrance of the odor of a product or the odor profile and so just by lowering the pH we can put far less uh far less deodorizer in it or fragrance in it when we manage Factor it which if you if you use less fragrance you get a bit more good stuff in it right something that actually adds to the cleaning of it and and so forth and one of our key products one of the key ingredients we've really back down that fragrance profile so we could put more a better percentage of solids with polymer in there and it made a huge impact perfect right so good so are we are we over our our time limit here Chauncey are we uh are we good to go I'm gonna ask an hour if you guys are good to go I can go until everybody passes out you're free to keep going as long as you want all right well how are you how are you doing Steve I think we covered everything I I'm good I just uh I didn't really have anything like I say sometimes a lecture or uh you know going down a specific agenda it can get a little bit boring I maybe if there's people still on that do you have other questions are there questions we haven't answered do you do you want to fire away any other types of questions that we could uh that we could cover for you Steve uh when's the next training on this particular method and we do them all over the place uh you know we'll do them on our branches and things like that um something I started doing during covid all the years of traveling and teaching I kind of got this little loyal following I was doing independent training for like companies they'd get three or four companies together guys together and you know we'd log in and do a quick training we can do that but now that everything's opening back up most all of our branches are very educated on this not all of them a lot of them are restoration and stuff like that but we can schedule classes and we can schedule seminars and and we can even set up webinars uh I could uh I have a workshop that's literally only about 90 minutes uh on encapsulation cleaning and if if you guys wanted to set up a a 90-minute workshop it'd be a little bit of a review what we did here and obviously it would be a little bit more uh you know manufacturer friendly meaning we'd focus on our products but but I'm very open as you heard I mean I'll talk about others I know there's very good products out there and and stuff but that's an option but you have a Hands-On Fortune of the class yeah usually at the end of that class we do a demo we absolutely we do a demo of various pieces of equipment if that location has it on hand and and if we're traveling around teaching and stuff like that we'll try to make sure that's the case I when I used to travel and hit all the Distributors that I worked with all the years we might pick three or four Topics in a day uh or a day and then the next morning that we do you know protector and encapsulation and tile and grout and a business class and then you know we do a 90-minute two-hour workshop and do a half hour demo at the end and they get to play with all the equipment and then the next morning I told them how to make money with all that stuff we talked about the day before so we do things like that we do them all over we have many instructors that travel around a lot of times our customer appreciation days or or open houses they'll have equipment there that can be demo and run and tested uh we have our Nexus show coming up in Las Vegas and at the end of March which is real attractive it's becoming one of the largest industry trade shows uh and it's our show we have a lot of our vendors there and they'll be uh equipment and stuff there not a lot of Hands-On opportunities obviously there in the ballrooms and things like that but certainly information is uh is Flowing like crazy at that place and and it's a good place to rub elbows with other people that are doing it you bet right would you let Doug use the crb and Chase down the forklifts I would yeah yeah I'll get the forklift in there early and have them mess up the floor yeah I've used uh I can't tell you how many gems I've used our crbs to clean up our booze you know because there's paper and trash and front all over and you run that over and our our booth is off in the shiniest booth in the show wow there's some marketing picks up the lint here's here's an idea you asked this Brian earlier and and for the other guys that might think and why would I want to go out and pay that much money for a machine like this what is it really going to do for me I mentioned the quanapoli alihi in Maui and and if I could just for two minutes explain this let me talk about the versatility of this machine not only can you do the encapsulation like we talked about which is vital but they uh they've spent I don't know how many tens of thousands of dollars on vacuums all these years and uh you know they're right on the beach right on Maui so the amount of sand and stuff that you can imagine gets trucked in that place is insane so we went on there to do a demo we went up to the fourth floor not the first floor we went to the fourth floor and right off the elevator inlaid with between all this travertine all this beautiful travertine is this very high-end woven wool inlay it's this wool carpet and they had very nice vacuums I think they were the uh the Windsor what is it the Model 12 very nice vacuum commercial grade high-end and they did the full on north south east west they went over that and they vacuum it twice a day every day and uh and so for north south east west the four-way vacuum just like they were taught just following the rules there you know all the people around the streets follow the rules they're two of them so anyway so what I did is I went right behind him I put The Renovators on the brush Pro uh crb and I went over the exact same area with the soft brushes I went over the wool and when I was done I took off The Renovators and they were full of sand just I mean full of sand they probably weighed a pound and a half each and keep in mind that gets vacuumed every day twice a day and uh and then we were on the fourth floor and I did that demo so when you go and you can do pile lifting and dry soil removal now it doesn't have a vacuum Source on it it's all mechanical but pile lifting and removing dog hair and pet hair and embedded soils and standing fibers up pre-spray and then agitate priority or hot water extraction encapsulation a very versatile tool so don't think you're spending whatever they cost now just on us the crb look at the other tools that it can do for you I could look it up but I think it was about 3 500 bucks I I yeah the 17's probably like 3 700 and the the 20 inch is probably 3 900 something like that and then a 10 inch uh the 10 inch is is around 2300 now for those of you that know this or may not ever heard the the tenants basically has been almost out of the industry for about two years there was a severe supply chain issue over in Austria the pump or the motor manufacturer had an issue they moved it uh then they still couldn't keep up they went to a new one it just it was a nightmare of issues so we were getting very few uh that's been corrected they're getting back uh in uh in uh they're on the water right now I'm doing to get about 140 of them next week they're already sold but I have like another 150 coming right behind it so the Austrian built 10 inch uh crb the the brush Pro is uh is within the next 30 to 60 days should be back and available for some of you may have some you're waiting for or have to have someone order for a year and can't get it and of course we'll we'll edit this commercial offer I'm sorry kind of not really all today don't delay yeah that's right so perfect um yeah you are definitely right with the the price of the chemical and the price of the equipment if it's good equipment um you know we've we've purchased equipment that was um inexpensive um and had it last for six months yeah and and be unfixable and unfortunately getting parts for that lesser cost machine can be a nightmare yeah there's many other there's other components and there's other machines in that category we simply won't so I've been approached by everybody hey sell this sell that I'm not gonna do it I won't do it we sell these that's what we sell that's where it's going to stay and uh we owe it to our customers to do that and perfect and uh and so that's where trust me I've had enough bad experiences with a piece of automated customer man I don't need to throw any gasoline on that fire [Music] all right but I think it it seems like we're winding down so we might as well uh call it a night it looks like we've answered the questions that have come up in the chat so um if you can think of anything else you'd like to ask Steve just give them a call work home we'll uh absolutely we'll post his cell phone number there's a good there's a very good chance I saw Wild Bill Corrigan's name on there in a few others there's a very good chance those guys have my sale number and they know it's on 24 7. all right unless I'm on a plane or teaching uh that my phone's on and I'll return your call as quickly as I can I don't care what time it is so well Steve I've got your number I'll be calling you you bet you're welcome to one of those machines coming in from right and feel free to email I mean I mean obviously I'm in a lot of meetings and sitting in a lot of that stuff like that and email or if I'm traveling stuff like that that you're more than welcome to reach out I say if I had one party message you know if if you hear something from somebody whether it be a over a chemical or a piece of equipment or something like that in our industry and you feel like you're questioning a little bit there's probably a reason you should question it and and get the answer get the right you know talk to other people talk people used it maybe do a little research and uh and uh make sure you get the right answer so you can make the best decisions for your business Perfect all right well we'll be back in two months right Brian do this again that's right thank you very much thanks Steve all right guys take care have a have a great evening and thank you for the opportunity you bet thank you