Eric Johnson (00:00)
Welcome back to Boiler Wild. My name is Eric Johnson. On this podcast talk about boiler industry topics as well as personal development. We should all strive to get better and the listeners of Boiler Wild are striving to get better. I know you're listening. Thank you for that. I appreciate everybody who has rated this podcast five stars. If you haven't rated it yet, open up Apple Podcasts or Spotify and rate it five stars, please and thank you. It helps me. It helps the
Eric Johnson (00:29)
Podcast apps basically say that I'm alive, I'm posting stuff and I'm posting stuff that people do listen to. Even though I see all the other metrics and everything, the ratings really go a long way in showing up in in search 'cause boiler podcasting is not gonna get me rich and famous. So I am at the bottom of the search unless you put in boiler, but
Eric Johnson (00:59)
It's all right. I'm ready for it. Maybe I can get rich and famous off boiler podcasting. And then the boiler industry will have a influx of people because they'll think it's cool to work around steam boilers or make heat or work with burners or something like that. But yeah, that's never gonna happen because there's not enough money in it and there's not enough glamour, not enough
Eric Johnson (01:29)
Too much hard work I wanna say. The there's no there's nothing in the boiler industry that's get rich quick. Every example I can think of is hard work. If you're an engineer, if you get your PE in engineer stuff, that's hard work. That's a lot of math, a lot of science, a lot of specifications.
Eric Johnson (01:53)
Many years of schooling, lots of years after schooling, you gotta study for the PE. That takes work. That's hard work. If you're a service technician, gotta go to training classes, you gotta show up every day, gotta travel to customer sites, got to learn new things. And you also have to work be able to work by yourself. I think that's one of the hardest parts of being a service technician.
Eric Johnson (02:21)
A lot of the times you're working by yourself so you have to have a lot of integrity and that is hard work. That's hard work to hold yourself to a standard that it is so easy to just slip or wanna cut a corner and well I won't do that. Well who's gonna know? Well if I don't put that part on who's gonna know? If I don't check and pull that or flush that out, who's gonna know? And I struggled with that and I would get days when
Eric Johnson (02:49)
maybe it's little later in the day or something's not going right and maybe I haven't eaten well in the day and I'm tired and I'm hungry and I just wanna go home and it's like, I don't wanna do this thing and but then it's like, Well, if I don't do it, it's gonna bite me and come back to me and those were the hardest days of man, I gotta go do this thing. That's I remember
Eric Johnson (03:14)
random story. I don't know how I remember this is did a shutdown at a place and it was four four days, four days I believe. And I think there was a holiday somewhere in between the shutdown week. This was during the week and I ended up we were having this an issue with the DA and we had issues with the pump seals.
Eric Johnson (03:41)
grunfoss pumps, the shaft seals, it's pretty common thing to change, but it basically never got done and I was there till probably ten PM on a on I think Friday or something. And I was like I I I don't have time or the brain power to do this shaft seal and
Eric Johnson (04:10)
I just had I was like, I'm out, I gotta check out. So we all went home and I was like, I'll just come back the next day, even though I wasn't planning to come back the next day and it wasn't scheduled, but I'm like it has to get done because the next week they were starting up and I'm like, We have to get the shaft seal in. So I went back on a Saturday morning and put in a shaft seal on a Grundfos pump and I was
Eric Johnson (04:35)
a lot clearer in the head. I was thinking straight. I was eating breakfast or had eaten breakfast and it was a little bit more pleasant than ten PM on a Friday after working all week and being stressed out with the normal shutdown stuff of the list you gotta get done in the period of time that is never long enough. But got it done and the plant worked out from there. But
Eric Johnson (05:04)
let's see, sales, sales. I mean sales in the boiler industry, very long lead cycles. so if you don't know lead time, so if you're gonna sell a boiler, unless it's like something emergency wise, but if you get a project you do bin spec, or even if you have a custom project and you're specing something out for a boiler, takes months and months and months to usually from specing out the boiler, doing this, doing that, going back and forth, and then
Eric Johnson (05:31)
Get the order and then it takes probably it depends on how big the boiler is. If it's a small boiler, it may be in stock. If it's a larger boiler, it could be twenty weeks till the boiler ships or something like that. It all depends on the manufacturer and how big the boiler is and how custom the boiler is and how fast they can get all the parts in and assembled and everything. So th the lead time, long, long lead times.
Eric Johnson (06:01)
on the sales cycle and that makes things hard that for salespeople to be able to close customers to be able to keep relationships, just because you don't really you don't it's not the the fast transaction of like SaaS sales or something like product sales that are let me sell you a car right now and yes you can work with people but
Eric Johnson (06:29)
I don't know any car salesperson who has to spend eight months sending emails back and forth to a customer about a minivan that they're gonna sell. It's typically like, Do you want it? Do you not? Yeah, there's some relationship stuff, but boiler sales, not a drop in the bucket. Also, sales or you know, sales in general, you know, the customer goes, well, give us a quote on that. And a lot of people I found
Eric Johnson (06:56)
And I think I've talked about this before, but a lot of people, customers think you're doing they think you're doing you a favor when they ask for a quote. Like, they're they're they don't have enough to do, so let me ask for some quotes. And yeah, they're recommending you this stuff. Yeah, send me a quote. Yeah, send me a quote. And they have zero intention or budget of doing the thing you're quoting. And
Eric Johnson (07:26)
that's when you kinda have to feel things out and I'm sure there's different companies with different sales philosophies, but if you are actually looking at a project or you're looking at a messy boiler room that's it falling in disrepair and you're trying to quote something like, you know, what does it take to replace a feed water tank? Yeah, you can blow out a number like, sixty grand, that'll be what it's gonna be.
Eric Johnson (07:54)
But you gotta make sure you're not backing yourself into a corner. You gotta make sure, okay, here are the lines where we're gonna split and we gotta pipe from here to here. So I gotta make sure we're replacing all this. All right, how do we get the feed water tank in the boiler room? We do we have to split the tank from the base and make sure that we build the tank a certain way? Do we have to do this? Do we have to do that? Where are all the connections on the feed water tank? Okay, what is the new tank? Is it gonna have all these connections?
Eric Johnson (08:21)
Do we have any custom connections? How many pumps do we have? Are the pumps on off or are the pumps continuous run? Do we want to r redo pumps? Or the customer says, Hey, I want to convert from on off pumps to continuous run pumps. It's like, okay, well, that's a little bit more than just turning the pumps on all the time. You gotta change the the feed water control on the boilers and you gotta add the modulating valves on the side of the boiler.
Eric Johnson (08:49)
but there it it adds a lot of cost. Okay, what does that look like? How do we gonna how how are we gonna replace these water columns?
Eric Johnson (08:57)
And replace the bowls, replace the heads, put in the feed water piping and all that, yes, you can shoot a high number and just say, I feel comfortable with that. But if you're actually trying to get a good good quote number in there and try to get material cost in there where, you know, with the wild materials costs in twenty twenty six, you can't look back in twenty twenty three and say, Hey, we bought this valve for this and so I'm just gonna reuse that number.
Eric Johnson (09:26)
No, you gotta go you gotta ask all your suppliers. You gotta get quotes on everything and then your suppliers take forever to get quotes on it. And all of a sudden that quote for the brand new feed wire tank that's takes over a month of work. You send it and the customer doesn't even reply and they don't even they're just like, yeah, we were just curious about that. It's like what we just did all this work
Eric Johnson (09:54)
And you were just curious about it, I could have just told you it'd be sixty grand or eighty grand to, you know, do the feed water tank and do this conversion and th that's where I think you gotta develop a relationship with a customer. When I was a service technician, they would always say, Hey, this needs to be done, this should really be done, this should really be done. All right, give me a quote for that, give me quote for that, give me a quote for that It's like, Well, wait, your boiler's falling apart,
Eric Johnson (10:21)
you fight us on everything and you're fighting at me on this repair and all this stuff, yes, we could just send people out to quote it all but we don't have tons of extra people just to randomly quote all this stuff. And you have to kinda observe the customer and say, All right, like are they really gonna spend for this quote? Are what are we actually quoting here?
Eric Johnson (10:47)
What does this relationship look like? Because if they're just spending bare minimum and they're just wanting five to six quotes for projects of their boiler room, may they have the intention of doing things right and fixing the boiler room, but probably not. They're probably not gonna just find a hundred and fifty grand to dump into their boiler room. That's gonna be ridiculous to them if they're not already spending a lot of money and maintaining their boiler room. Boiler rooms are very expensive.
Eric Johnson (11:13)
And for a company to just not be dumping money into one and then start dumping money money into it unless there's a management change or something huge happens in the boiler room, it's probably not gonna happen. So then you spend a ton of time quoting work that you don't get. And that's I mean, that's part of being a contractor, part of being any any part of quoting is typically if if it if it's a service and you gotta go
Eric Johnson (11:43)
l look at it and put your eyes on it, it is very, very difficult to just estimate and just, it's gonna be sixty grand. There's a lot of nuance to it and that's what it takes. It takes a skilled and experienced person to do it. And there's degrees and levels to it, but it it's hard work. Every job is hard work. Even even the office people, you got dispatchers, admin, service department
Eric Johnson (12:13)
managers, all this stuff. The whole the whole you got customers calling and yelling at ya. You got customers calling dispatchers and I need a tech now. This is an emergency. Well, you know, only have so many techs and you don't have just techs standing around waiting to go to the emergency calls and
Eric Johnson (12:35)
Only certain texts can go work on certain pieces of equipment and not everybody knows the same amount of information and some people know boiler rooms better than other boiler rooms and it becomes this very complicated web where there's no right answer and you you can't please everybody and that's that's the boiler industry. There's there's a lot of hard days and
Eric Johnson (12:58)
I can't blame anybody for not seeing a career in it or not seeing a way out or a job that they that that they want to do. A lot of people get into it, myself including, get into it and just kinda make the best of it. Would I pick the boiler industry as a career if I had opportunity to be in any career that I wanted?
Eric Johnson (13:28)
Probably not, but I'm super happy with it. I love boilers. I love the industry. I love the people. but that's something that we kind of have to deal with ourselves as as an industry is how do we make it better for the people in the industry and how do we make it appealing for the people out of the industry? Because our competition is not the competitors down the road within the industry. The competition is the industry.
Eric Johnson (13:59)
that is around us. A a young person has and I know it's not true, but they have an endless opportunities of careers. They will have interests. They will have careers that they know about. So it won't seem like it's endless, but there's there's you don't hit eighteen, you're like, well you have to be a doctor or you have to be a machinist. Like there's there's no picking, but they'll be get steered. They may go to college, but they're gonna be steered into a career or
Eric Johnson (14:28)
steered into interests that they know about and if they see the boiler industry, maybe they have an internship, maybe they go work a summer or they know somebody about it. And maybe th their friend's dad works as a boilermaker and they ask him about it. Is he gonna say positive things about the industry or is he gonna say, stay away? I have worked with many pipe fitters who had daughters
Eric Johnson (14:58)
And we asked about careers and w you know, when we're talking and basically every single pipe fitter said, my daughter, yeah, she can do anything she wants as long as she's not a pipe fitter. I won't allow her to work in this career because like it or not, there's certain stereotypes and certain things that still happen in twenty twenty six and a woman being a pipe fitter, I'm sure there's some great great ones out there.
Eric Johnson (15:26)
I'm not saying that this is a skill issue, but there is a lot of culture things outside of skill that a woman or even a man can't control of the culture of the blue collar industry. And that's if you have endless opportunities, why is somebody gonna choose that when you may get yelled at or you may get treated differently or you may not have the opportunities that other people have just because
Eric Johnson (15:56)
you're a woman or a man of some certain kind, it it it doesn't matter, but people have endless opportunities. So would you recommend this career to somebody else when they have no ties to the career? And that's a very hard question that I I I've struggled with is, you know, would you recommend working somewhat in the boiler industry, whether it's a stationary engineer, service technician?
Eric Johnson (16:25)
We're on the office side, sales, I guess you could be an engineer, mechanical engineer, chemical engineer. there's hundreds of different jobs. You could be inspector, jur jurisdictional inspector, insurance inspector, you you could work for the state, you could go work for the national board. There's all kinds of things that you could do around the boiler and pressure vessel industry, but if somebody's
Eric Johnson (16:53)
talking about their career and some young person's overhearing it. Do they get excited about it or do they check it off in their mind is like, yeah, I do not want to do that. And that's a hard thing to wrestle with because the people in the industry, a lot of them are very proud of it, which nothing wrong with that. Absolutely. They should be proud of their jobs, proud of what they do and the essential work that we do. But in the boiler industry, there are so many problems that
Eric Johnson (17:21)
A lot of people just don't want to choose to have and be their problem, which I I can't blame Although there's problems with every industry. There's no easy industry, every industry's struggling. And I would take the boiler industry o which is a very essential career, very needed, over some soulless corporate job where companies are laying ten thousand people off in a quarter.
Eric Johnson (17:50)
That doesn't happen in the boiler industry. Yeah, you may get some small layoffs, but you don't get these mass tech layoffs where they hire a bunch of people and then three quarters later they need a good quarterly number. So then they lay off ten thousand people there's plenty of other industries where people struggle. Healthcare they're struggling, doctors are struggling. not not really pay wise, but they're struggling with the whole
Eric Johnson (18:14)
dealing with compliance and dealing with insurance and there's so many issues with that where the doctors are like, Hey, I just want to care for patients. I want to do this, but I spend most of my time dealing with insurance, dealing with this compliance stuff, and it's not really worth it at this point. I talk to people, I hear and read stories and there if you think there's a perfect industry, a perfect job
Eric Johnson (18:39)
That is absolutely incorrect. However, I think the line gets drawn of what people will tolerate is when you start not being able to afford life and basic life. And that's buying a house, buying cars, and having kids, going on some simple vacations. I don't think on average Americans ask a lot. Yes, everybody who says, I want to get rich and
Eric Johnson (19:07)
Whatever that means to everybody, that that means something different. But when somebody can just have a comfortable life, most of during I would say fifties, nineteen fifties on, we had great economic growth in the United States on average. I know there's ups and downs and recessions and everything, but on average great economic growth and people could afford a better life every generation and now
Eric Johnson (19:36)
young people, we can't afford a better life and things are more expensive than ever. So people are looking at jobs and while the boiler industry, while making steam is very, very essential, they they look at the job and go, Well, can I afford a basic life doing it? Or do they want me to work 10 years to just earn the opportunity to have more problems and then be able to get a career?
Eric Johnson (20:04)
where I now can make
Eric Johnson (20:08)
the amount of money that I should be making now. And that's a hard question. I go back and forth and look at job opportunities that I see online. And don't do this if you're a company or a hiring manager, but I the first paragraph of a lot of job opportunities or hiring ads are how amazing the company is
Eric Johnson (20:38)
And this isn't necessarily in the boiler industry, but a lot of manufacturing or larger jobs, typically larger companies, but how amazing the company is, how they're a global presence, global leader, market leader, all this stuff, yada yada yada. And then I go down to the bottom and if they list pay, pay is often not listed, but they just said all this.
Eric Johnson (21:04)
stuff and they spend the the whole top of the hiring ad talking about how amazing the company is and then they go competitive salary and the wage starts with a two and I'm not saying two hundred thousand I'm saying like twenty-four bucks an hour for this we want this experienced three to five year technician for our manufacturing plant and then they the the list of
Eric Johnson (21:34)
Things that they want you to be able to do or your knowledge is very, very long, like two columns of stuff long, and then they go, twenty four bucks an hour. W and then the pay range goes up to like twenty nine dollars an hour. In what world is twenty four dollars an hour for a three to five year experienced maintenance technician, how does that pan out? And people will say, well, cost of living cost no, no, no. The
Eric Johnson (22:03)
There's no cost of living. The the company they sell on a spl global supply chain. Just because they're selling to a lower cost of living state doesn't mean they lower the prices. Same thing with the labor. Just because you're in a lower cost of living market doesn't mean they can just underpay you. That does happen, but they underpay you and all these companies are just underpaying all these people, but and then they go, Well, we can't find anybody. Well, at a certain point in time, people just don't want to work.
Eric Johnson (22:33)
These jobs that are deemed essential, but they don't want to work them because they're like, Well, you want all this experience and you treat me poorly. You know what? I'm just not gonna do this. And then they don't. And then they go find a different job that pays the same, similar, and has fifty percent less responsibility. And then employers go, Well, why does anybody want to work this job? Well, at the end of the day, young people can choose anything they want.
Eric Johnson (23:03)
And if they find a job that pays the same or similar, even if the career, the fifteen, twenty year career, the supposed career aspect is better at one job versus the other, they have the the rent payments due at the first of the month. They can't look at their whole career. So when they find a job that pays similar and it's fifty percent of the responsibilities of the other way more stressful job.
Eric Johnson (23:30)
They go, well, why would I go work that stressful job when I can have this? And that's what I think about in the boiler industry. There are great career opportunities. There's great movement, but there's also a lot of stagnation. There's a lot of underpaid people, a lot of stagnated wages, and companies more and more and more, they want to pile on more responsibility and
Eric Johnson (23:55)
more knowledge and more this, more that, more that, and then Wages are barely bumping up. And if somebody can go find a job that pays similar and has half the responsibility, yes, it may not be as rewarding. It may be more of a machine in the cog versus a little bit more independent and another job. Like there
Eric Johnson (24:23)
There's pros and cons to every job, but if a young person looks at two jobs and they pay similar, yet one is fifty percent less of basically the hard factor, the suck factor, I don't blame the people for taking those jobs. And that's when you look at the boiler industry, look at boilermakers, service technicians, mechanics, anybody who's using tools, pipe welders,
Eric Johnson (24:52)
Anybody using tools, there are tons of people that want to do that, but then when companies don't pay a livable wage that somebody is happy with or can even live on, then and they find similar jobs that pay similar wages starting out, then they're like, Well, why would I go pursue that?
Eric Johnson (25:18)
This may seem wild, but it's it's something I've thought about because we as a boiler industry, we have to market to the general labor pool. We have to market to high schoolers, we have to market to college kids. Why should somebody want to work in the boiler industry? Why would somebody wanna work as an insurance inspector? Why would somebody wanna be a pipe welder? And a lot of people say, six figure this, six figure that, whatever.
Eric Johnson (25:45)
There's a lot of upside, but nobody wants to talk about the downside. But the downsides are very real. And it can be very, very easy to get stuck at the bottom or not receive any training or just be piled on with I don't know, just go figure it out. And you just pile on the responsibility on somebody young who has never been able and given the time to grow and mature around people who actually know what's going on.
Eric Johnson (26:11)
And they feel like they're just abandoned in the middle of the ocean and they're like, screw this. Like, I don't want to do this anymore. I'm gonna go find a job over here. And it's paying the same or similar or even less. And even if the job pays less, but it's so much less of responsibility. Maybe they don't have to travel and they're like, I'm good. I'm chill. I'm good. And
Eric Johnson (26:35)
We have to we have to deal with that. It's a uncomfortable conversation for the boiler industry or for any industry, but I'm dealing with the boiler industry and I love the industry. Once again, love the people, great people. I and it's it's I think there's a lot of room for improvement, but I I don't have the answers and I am just trying to figure out what we have to do.
Eric Johnson (27:02)
To pull people in and once again, if you overhear somebody talking about their job, does it sound interesting to somebody young? Or does it sound like, yeah, that I'm not gonna do that? Or do people say, Hey, this career has provided for me and it's paid well, or it has been worth the headache and the amount of time I've spent away from my family. I just wanna be around my kids and work forty hours a week and
Eric Johnson (27:32)
I wish I didn't do this. there's pros and cons to everything, and the employers of the boiler industry, you don't deserve any amount of labor. Nobody deserves labor. It is just no matter how essential an industry or job seems, nobody is actually required to do it until the government says, Hey, you young person, you have to go do that job. So until that happens in the United States
Eric Johnson (28:01)
Young people can choose to be wherever. And when the cool thing is, is hey, I want to work from home so I have more job autonomy and I can mow my lawn during the day and eat lunch in my house and send emails and do this and do that. People look at that and y there are a lot of downsides to it, don't get me wrong. But the younger people look at that and they're like, Well, that sounds great.
Eric Johnson (28:28)
Let me let me go into that and let me go into this SAS sales job or let me do that. I can work from home and do that. Versus I wanna be a service technician or I wanna be a pipe welder, do this, go work on the road and work eighty hours a week and travel away from home and be away from my wife and my newborn kid and all this stuff. Like there's there's so many pros and cons and the thing about the
Eric Johnson (28:56)
the boiler industry is supposed to be the career growth and the pay and you there's lots of opportunity for pay, but a lot of companies, once again, they they advertise, well, you can make six figures plus with overtime. Okay, great. Anybody who works three thousand plus hours a year should be making six figures plus. That that doesn't really count as a great job. Yes, we're gonna you're gonna spend the entire year
Eric Johnson (29:24)
working but LC made over six figures. That's that's not a flex. That's not competitive salary or benefits or anything. So but that that's that's the question I'm asking myself right now and I have been asking over the past years is how do we improve as an industry? How do we improve as employers? How do we improve in the messaging and marketing of the boiler industry? And when we talk to people, is it
Eric Johnson (29:52)
Is it a positive message? Hey, I would recommend this job, I would recommend this career to other people, or is it a negative message of don't do this, go to college, go do this, go do that, and don't get into this, don't follow my footsteps, and I do not recommend it to anybody? Let me know what you think. I would I would love to hear both sides, people who talk and work in any job, whether they
Eric Johnson (30:20)
They hate it and r they regret their career choice, but they're so far in that they can't pivot or people that that they they love it and they're in their twenties or thirties. I I love to talk to younger people and they they love their job choice, they love their career growth, they love the responsibility and they love being able to work around boilers and steam and fire and heating and all that stuff. So
Eric Johnson (30:48)
That that's what I have. I know it's nothing super exciting as a topic, but it it's something I've that's been on my mind a lot recently is how do we how do we just improve as an industry and what is the message like to people outside the industry? Does it attract them or does it repel So that's all I got. Thank you for listening. If you haven't already, please rate this podcast five stars. That helps me. It's free for you to do it.
Eric Johnson (31:15)
But it helps me greatly. I appreciate you all and stay wild.
