A ll connections lead somewhere; you just don’t know where that might be initially. Case in point is how I ended up on the 8th floor of a historic building in downtown Raleigh sharing office space with a couple of very well-connected guys, one who happens to be my business mentor, and the other who I partnered with to launch a new company.
How It Started
These developments can be traced back to mid-November of 2011, when my spouse, Mariana Gallegos, attended the Internet Summit (I attended the previous year). Marshall Brain, the founder of HowStuffWorks.com, gave a presentation about how design doesn’t matter, that content is what matters (Craigslist is a classic example of this). Mariana was very impressed with Marshall, so she asked me to try to connect with him, especially since he was local to the Raleigh area. I was hesitant at first…”Why would he want to talk to me? I’m not successful like him,” I’d tell her. She kept pushing and insisting, and finally I, reluctantly, reached out.
I connected with Marshall on LinkedIn and asked him if he was interested in grabbing lunch some day. To my surprise, he actually was. In fact, one of his lunch appointments canceled on him when he got my message, so he sent me a quick message back and said “How about today, in 30 minutes? If interested, give me a call on my cell phone.”
And so started a casual business relationship where Marshall and I would meet over lunch, and where he would provide me with his advice and suggestions for improving my business. I even attended a few of his lectures at NC State University, where he taught a class on Entrepreneurship. I still remember the very first piece of advice he gave me on our first meeting. “I’m a big believer in never eating lunch alone…in meeting lots of different people from all walks of like during lunch.” At that very moment, that simple idea crystallized for me, and I too became a believer in this mantra.
The Other Connection
On a separate path, I met Jason Tan at a Triangle Interactive Marketing Association social event, and we shared some common interests, particularly an interest in the creation of cool smartphone apps. One of his developer friends, Matt Johnson, wanted to meet with me for lunch, and I thought it would be pretty cool if Matt, Marshall, and I all met for lunch, thus introducing Matt to Marshall. I decided on Tyler’s Taproom at the American Tobacco Campus in Durham, a startup-friendly area. After lunch, Marshall walked us downstairs, into what’s known as the Underground. This is where about 20 startups lease office space…a startup incubator. Marshall pointed out CED, the Center for Entrepreneurial Development, and thought that I should join that group. I had never heard of CED, even after 20 years of running my own gig. But that evening, at Marshall’s suggestion, I checked out their website and applied for membership in their Venture Mentoring Service, or VMS program.
Connecting the Dots and Building Relationships
The next day, I received a reply back from the Director of CED. She happened to be in the Raleigh area attending a life sciences convention, and we ended up meeting afterward. She brought along Bill Spruill, and after about an hour and a half of conversation, Bill volunteered to be one of my VMS mentors.
Over the next few months, Bill introduced me to Charles Gaddy and was also able to recruit two others as VMS mentors for me. Several meetings and deep discussions later, Charles and I decided to formalize a business relationship around our electronic chain of custody software product, ezCoC, and to create a separate company to fund it and move it out of beta / into prime time.
New Office Space
Bill and Charles, who are partners in Blackbook Solutions Group, were looking for new office space. Coincidentally, I was looking for new space myself, and our landlord had a tenant that was eyeing our current space. It so happens that we all have the same landlord, Empire Properties. Last week, we all started moving into shared space on the 8th floor of the historic OddFellows Building in downtown Raleigh. This space is, in a way, a miniaturized version of an incubator, with a few tenants that focus on software technology.
Note: If you happen to run a tech startup and need some space in the downtown Raleigh area, feel free to contact Bill. With Red Hat moving its headquarters this summer to the downtown area, and more and more startups opening offices on Hargett Street, the downtown Raleigh area is beginning to exhibit the characteristics of a small, growing, and vibrant startup community.
All Connections Lead to Your Future
It is virtually impossible to predict where the connections you make today will take you tomorrow. In my case, I am now partners with someone in a new venture and share tech office space with my new mentor because I happened to look someone up on LinkedIn and connected with him. I was at first intimidated, but I did it anyway. If I had not done that one simple thing, I would not be in business with Charles, I would not be a few doors away from my mentor Bill, I would not be exploring other industries where our electronic chain of custody product might address a need, and I would not be in a nice downtown corner office with a beautiful view of Salisbury Street and the State Capitol building. Our future is bright partly because of all of those very loosely connected events and relationships.
The point of my little story here is that you should get out there and make those connections, even if they don’t seem to have any immediate purpose for your business. Because in the long run, they do have a purpose, and they will inevitably lead you to your future.
Today’s post is courtesy of Karen Baer, who has over a decade of experience in the environmental industry. She has worked for Terraine for the past 9 years and is introducing our newly-released (from beta) SaaS chain of custody system: ezCoC.
For the last year, we have been mocking up, tweaking, adjusting, debugging, testing, you name it to prepare to bring ezCoC into the world. In many ways, the experience has reminded me of the stages of pregnancy. Initially, there was a bit of nausea regarding the significant changes in product direction. At times, there were complications that took time, testing, and troubleshooting to resolve. But eventually, the nausea subsided, the complications faded, and the excitement of invention took over. Excitement for the future, excitement for this evolution within the environmental industry, and excitement for being at the forefront of that change. Sure, there were times that (like during pregnancy) the ezCoC team felt like bonking each over the heads with, oh, I don’t know, a stick, frying pan, or perhaps an anvil. But we made it through, and the product is better for the experience.
Today, we are announcing the end of the beta-test program and the birth of post-beta ezCoC, the premier Software as a Service (SaaS) application for Chain of Custody and our first SaaS product as an environmental technology firm. With this announcement, I want to be clear that there will be changes and improvements down the road, and I’m sure there will be many sleepless nights as we continue to enhance the system and add features in upcoming releases. This is simply the beginning of more and better things to come.
So What Does This Mean?
What will happen to your current accounts? What changes can you expect?
For users – or field techs – nothing will change. ezCoC is, and will always be, free for you to use.
For labs, there will be three product options from which to choose: Free, Cloud, and Enterprise.
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Free
For a period of 90 days, laboratories can try ezCoC at no charge. Who doesn’t like free stuff? |
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Cloud
The ezCoC Cloud solution is a SaaS-based product that is priced per the requirements of your laboratory. It is “right-sized” for your organization’s need and budget. Support is included, and your laboratory will have featured advertising placements and posts on the ezCoC blog Lab Gab & Field Blab. |
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Enterprise
Your laboratory has the option to select an on-site or hosted version of ezCoC. Branding services for “white label” integration into your infrastructure are available. In plain English, this means that we can integrate the functionality of ezCoC right into your own website, with your own logo and unique color scheme. Just like the Cloud version, support is included, and you will also have featured advertising placements and posts on the ezCoC blog Lab Gab & Field Blab.
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Both Cloud and Enterprise have Early Adopter Discounts and User Adoption Discounts available!
So what are you waiting for? Sign up now!
 
This past week was a nostalgic one for me. Four big things happened, all in a single week.
- I hired Shred-it! to shred 20 years worth of final reports. That’s not a typo.
 Twenty years of final printed reports, some dating back to before company email, before PDF, back when I actually had hair, and back when fax machines and pagers were the bomb. I wrote a bunch of those reports and put them together myself. Some were even put together on a kitchen table in 1992. Phase I ESAs, Environmental Assessment Reports, Groundwater Monitoring Reports, UST Closure Reports, and the like. I remember most of them, particularly the early ones in my career, very clearly. Shredding them was tough emotionally.
- I chucked my college notebooks. Yes, I had actually kept almost all of the notebooks I used at Texas A&M, the University of South Carolina, and Duke University…until I threw them in the recycle bin over the weekend. That, too, was tough emotionally. Some of those notebooks dated back to before I bought my first Mac SE in 1987, some even before I had ever worked on a computer at all.
- I moved our Raleigh office to smaller digs two blocks away. No need for all that room anymore, no need for all of that environmental sampling equipment, either. We sold some of that gear to a friend, Eli Holland, who runs One Environmental, an environmental consulting firm in Raleigh and in four other cities.
- Kristen Oldham, our full-time controller, moved on to greener pastures. Friday was her last full day. In 2006, I hired her fresh out of college, when she was 16. Ok, she was actually 22 when I hired her. But she was still a kid. I threw her into an accounting role full-on, sink or swim, and she swam just fine. Led us through some good times and bad times and lately through our transition from traditional environmental consulting firm to a software company. And she learned a ton while at it. Like a little sister to me, I hate to see her go. But it’s the right move for her.
Nostalgia. From Merriam-Webster, it is defined as:
1: the state of being homesick
2: a wistful or excessively sentimental, sometimes abnormal, yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition
—nos·tal·gic adjective
—nos·tal·gi·cal·ly adverb
Looking Back at My Past
Looking through all of those reports my company created, the college notes that I wrote down while sitting through class 20 years ago, and reminiscing over some pictures I found of good ‘ol times, I wished I was there again. I remembered exactly what it was like to be there…it felt just like yesterday that I was at A&M in the fall of 1983 learning crystallography, or hanging out with my college buddies at South Padre Island drinking a ton of crappy beers during spring break, or busting through some asphalt with a breaker bar at a Q-Lube auto shop in Charlotte in the middle of a hot summer day in 1994. I remember the excitement of picking up our first bank client in 1992 — First Tennessee Bank — to conduct a Phase I ESA at Park-Med Walk-In Clinic. I remember very clearly overseeing the removal of a 20,000-gallon #4 fuel oil tank from the JPS Carpet factory near Statesville, North Carolina, in 1995. I even remember sitting through the ASBOG exam on a Saturday in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1998.
For quite a few hours this weekend, I wished I could go back to all of those times. I even posted some of those old photos and reminisced with old friends on Facebook about it.
Looking Forward to My Future
I’m ready for a new journey. A new beginning. And that new beginning is software. Web apps. Smartphone apps. Data collection apps. Databases. Data exchange with other software products. I’m taking Terraine there, and hopefully, it will pay off. Like I have mentioned before, I see an opportunity in our industry where others, for some reason, don’t. It will be a tough hill to climb, but I’ve been preparing for it now for awhile.
Our first product out the gate is ezCoC; it is currently exiting the beta stage. Our second product will be SF330Pro, coming out this summer. We are also working on a wetland delineation software product called SwampBase, which is a joint effort between myself and Marc Seelinger, founder of The Swamp School. And let’s not forget about Adesso, either. With Windows 8 just around the corner, I feel confident that Adesso will attract many new clients requiring custom database applications, especially as HP, Dell, Trimble, Panasonic, Nokia, HTC, and others start building Windows 8 phones and tablets this fall.
Will our software products succeed in the marketplace? Only time will tell. I feel confident that we are on the right side of history in that smartphones are here to stay, but whether or not we succeed financially at the software business is currently an unanswered question. Like most things, I suspect that some of our software products will do very well and others not as well.
We have a good team, are building relationships with many folks, are shedding unnecessary overhead, and are sharpening our focus on our new core. And at the end of the day — regardless of financial success or not — 20 years from now in the year 2032, if I am still alive, I will be able to look back with nostalgia on those good ‘ol times in 2012 when I dared to try something different, to buck the trends of the day, to ignore the critics, and to take a stab at making an impact on the environmental consulting industry through my crazy software ideas.
It Happens in the Present
It’s your experiences today that give you nostalgia tomorrow. Go make something happen. Don’t regret your past. Be bold and make an impact. Now. Not tomorrow. Not when everything is just right, because it will never be “just right”. Do it now!
I’m doing it in my own way, and so should you.
 Risk. It means different things to different people. From the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
1: possibility of loss or injury : peril
2: someone or something that creates or suggests a hazard
3a : the chance of loss or the perils to the subject matter of an insurance contract; also : the degree of probability of such loss; 3b : a person or thing that is a specified hazard to an insurer; 3c : an insurance hazard from a specified cause or source <war risk>
4: the chance that an investment (as a stock or commodity) will lose value
Starting and then running your own gig, big or small, inevitably carries risk. But so does doing virtually anything, even working for a large, established company, especially in today’s new world economy.
But that’s a topic for another article.
What I’d like to focus on right now is the question “Are you too risk-averse to be an entrepreneur?” Have you ever asked yourself that question? Put another way, do you think you have what it takes to go it alone and do your own thing? Here are five questions to ask yourself when thinking about that:
1. Do you need to know everything before you take action?
This is sometimes referred to as analysis paralysis, or over-analyzing or over-thinking a situation to the point that no action is taken or it is delayed for so long that circumstances change. If you have to understand every single scenario and possible outcome before you take action, you suffer from this malady. If you dream of someday doing your own thing, of being your own boss, you need to figure out how to overcome this problem; otherwise, you will never take action, because it is impossible to know everything in advance.
2. Are you willing to work long hours without being compensated?
 Another way to put this: do you have an hourly worker mentality? Launching your own business requires putting in the time. It’s not free. It doesn’t come without pain and sacrifice. No one gets to where they are because they were “lucky”. It requires you to be willing to do something because you are passionate about it, not because you want to get paid for doing it. That (hopefully) comes later, but it may never come at all. If you are unwilling to put in the time, regardless of the outcome, then don’t bother striking out on your own, because you suffer from hourly worker mentality and probably don’t have the passion and gumption to see it through.
3. Are you willing to fail?
When you have an idea for a business, the odds of it actually not failing are pretty low. That means that your chances of failure are pretty darn high. This is nothing new…most people already know this. But are you willing to accept those odds? If you aren’t, then stop right there and go work for someone else, because failing is part of the game. In fact, if you start your own thing, you will fail many, many times. Failing is not the problem. Not learning from those failures and giving up is the problem.
4. Are you willing to burn your bridges?
Starting your own thing might require you to quit your job; take out a home equity line of credit; provide personal guarantees; borrow money from your family; or other things that are uncomfortable, painful, and financially risky. There’s nothing wrong with starting your own thing on the side while maintaining your full-time job. Many people do this. But if you half-ass it, treat it like a hobby, and constantly look for immediate signs of success while maintaining your existing lifestyle, your odds of triumph will be low. Put another way, if you stick your toe in the water to test it out but are unwilling to jump in, then the likelihood of succeeding will not be very good. You have to be WILLING to burn your bridges. It doesn’t mean you have to actually burn your bridges…just that you have to be willing to burn them.
5. Do you have a supportive spouse, partner, family, or friends?
If you have to battle those closest to you every step of the way, it will be a very difficult journey. When you try things that are painful and difficult and fail at them, the last thing you need is to come home to fight yet another battle. Make certain that you have a solid support system before you strike out on your own, because you will need those people to inject confidence in you when you most need it. We all need a confidant and supporter that will be there regardless of what happens.
My Experience at Entrepreneurship
When I started Terraine 20 year ago, the word “entrepreneur” was not as common or sexy a term as it is today. Back then, someone who broke out on their own was more commonly referred to as “young, dumb, and full of …”. Basically, we were too dumb to think we wouldn’t fail. We didn’t think too much about knowing everything, about failing, about putting in super long hours, or about burning bridges. We just did it and understood that the journey would be tough but (hopefully) rewarding, and that we’d do some things right and some things wrong.
If you immediately know the answer to the five questions posed above, then you know what to do. You don’t need a set of questions to ask yourself to know that. But if you find yourself conflicted, constantly weighing your options, analyzing scenarios, and trying to decide how to answer those five simple questions, then you are probably not ready for the risks that inevitably accompany entrepreneurship. After all, one of the questions above is specifically about over-analyzing things.
That being said, you, like I, can do it, but only if you are willing to go down a path where you will never know all the answers and where you will spend gobs of time doing things that may ultimately fail without any return whatsoever…as long as you are willing to burn your bridges and have a support system in place.
 How much money do labs spend processing paper chain of custody (CoC) forms? This was a question that I asked myself some time ago, and until recently, I merely guessed at it being a big wad of cash. Definitely in the millions of dollars per year. But how many millions?
After conducting some research and asking a few labs about their annual volume of work, we came up with a ballpark guesstimate as to how much money this amounts to in the USA. Key word here: guesstimate.
To calculate this value, we first started by finding out how many environmental labs currently exist in the USA. Next, we asked a small lab, a medium-sized lab, and a large lab what their average annual volume of sample shipments/sample delivery groups is. Then we asked a few labs to tell us what they felt was their internal cost to process a paper CoC. By process, what I mean is to manually transcribe the data printed on a paper CoC into the laboratory information management system (LIMS), factoring in the time spent correcting errors, if any. Finally, we came up with an approximation of what percentage of all of the labs in the US are considered small, medium, and large.
Assumptions
- There are 800 environmental labs in the USA.
- A typical small lab processes about 750 sample delivery groups (SDGs) per month, or about 9,000 per year.
- A typical medium lab processes about 1,600-1,700 SDGs per month, or about 20,000 per year.
- A typical large lab processes about 4,000-5,000 SDGs per month, or about 50,000 per year.
- On average, it takes about 15-20 minutes to enter the data printed on a paper CoC into the LIMS (low volume CoCs take a couple of minutes to enter, but larger, multi-page CoCs take much longer to enter and cross-check for errors. We verified with several labs that 15-20 minutes is a good approximation).
- A typical lab tech in charge of sample login costs the lab about $40k/year in payroll, benefits, taxes, etc.
- Approximately 5% of all labs in the USA are large labs, 25% of labs are medium labs, and 70% are small labs (this was probably the biggest assumption we made that could result in inaccurate results, especially considering that some labs might be categorized as micro-labs with very low volumes).
- Less than 10% of all CoCs are delivered electronically by data management software such as EQuIS, ESDat, Enviro-Data, and others (some labs have told us that as little as 3% of their CoCs are delivered electronically, so 10% is a conservative estimate).
Calculations
Cost to enter a paper CoC = ($40,000/yr ÷ 2,088 hrs/yr) = $19.16/hr x 0.3 hrs = $5.75 = approximately $5
Total # of CoCs per year from small labs = 800 labs x 70% = 560 labs x 9,000 CoCs/yr = 5,040,000 CoCs
Total # of CoCs per year from medium labs = 800 labs x 25% = 200 labs x 20,000 CoCs/yr = 4,000,000 CoCs
Total # of CoCs per year from large labs = 800 labs x 5% = 40 labs x 50,000 CoCs/yr = 2,000,000 CoCs
Total # of CoCs per year from ALL labs = 5,040,000 + 4,000,000 + 2,000,000 = 11,040,000 CoCs
Total # of CoCs delivered by paper = 11,040,000 CoCs * 90% = 9,936,000 Paper CoCs
Total cost to enter all CoCs delivered by paper = 9,936,000 x $5/CoC = $49,680,000
Total cost to enter all CoCs delivered by paper, assuming $10/CoC and 95% delivered as paper CoCs = $104,880,000
Bottom Line: As an industry, we spend between $50 to $100 million per year to process paper CoCs
So there you have it. If we assume that each CoC costs $5 to enter manually into a LIMS, and we further assume that 90% of all CoCs are delivered via paper, then the cost to the environmental lab industry (and passed on to their clients) is about $50 million annually. If we instead assume that each CoC costs $10 to enter manually into a LIMS and 95% of all CoCs are delivered via paper, then the cost balloons to around $100 million annually. The latter is probably a more accurate estimate, considering the time involved for correcting data entry/transcription errors, not to mention the cost of running incorrect analytical methods because of a typo made during sample login.
What we could do with all of that money…
Fifty to one hundred million dollars to merely transpose information accurately from a sheet of paper into the lab’s LIMS is a lot of money for mindless data entry that could easily be done with computers. To me, this is a huge waste of money, talent, and time. There are 1,250 to 2,500 lab techs at $40K/lab tech/yr that could be doing something other than tedious transcription of information from paper to LIMS. Imagine a reduction in labor costs of that magnitude. Could the savings be passed on to environmental consultants in the form of reduced method rates? Could the savings be passed on to the lab’s shareholders?
With so much new technology available today, in 2012, when everyone is face down in their  phones checking email and their Facebook status, why aren’t we there yet? Why are we still predominantly using paper for this when almost everyone has a smartphone nowadays and databases can talk to each other via common data interchange formats like XML? Why not let smart database systems and software technology handle this tedious boring stuff and let chemists do what they were trained to do and do best, like data analysis and interpretation?
At Terraine, we feel that we have a solution for this huge waste of talent, money, and time, and it’s called ezCoC. There’s no software to download or install…it simply works over the web on any browser, even on your smartphone. It’s free for field techs and affordable for labs, definitely much more affordable than spending gobs of money and time manually transcribing information from paper to LIMS, with typos and all. And the best part? It’s the future, and it’s coming, like it or not.
The genie is out of the bottle. Smartphone technology and standardized data interchange formats are here to stay, and there’s no turning back. So why not embrace the future now and lead instead of follow? After all, most companies’ missions statements tout something along those lines…to provide the best value for its customers through innovation. ezCoC is one way to do just that.
This past Friday we had a big setback.  A major proposal that we prepared for providing a really cool database solution for a large energy utility’s massive construction project was not accepted, for various reasons. This would have been a huge win for us and added another large energy company as a client (in addition to Duke Energy and American Electric Power) to our corporate resume. But we didn’t win. And not winning this one has other ramifications. Less future cashflow that we were kind of counting on, resulting in a domino effect throughout the firm. So I sulked for a couple of days. But you know what? Life goes on, we have to live and eat and breathe. It’s the past. Time to move on and look at it from the positive.
In life and in business, you will go through dozens if not hundreds of wins and setbacks. I’ve seen my share of both while running Terraine over the last 20 years. And I seem to learn more with the setbacks than with the wins. It’s easy (and a lot more fun) to make decisions when things are rosy.
When things are good, everybody is (mostly) happy. Some want to become your closest advisors. Others get promoted. You have enough cash to burn to take on those pet projects. Banks line up to offer you lines of credit that you don’t need.
But its not so easy when things are not so rosy. Loyalty becomes strained, leadership is questioned, company direction is challenged. Priorities need to be made, despite opposition. Decisive actions need to be taken, even when painful, all of this without being distracted by the past.
So what’s the positive coming from this setback? While the guaranteed cashflow from that custom database project would have been nice, not having it will force us to make the tough decisions that we probably should have made some time ago. It will force us to focus on ensuring that our current product, ezCoC, quickly becomes a cash positive product that holds its own, that sustains us, instead of a cash negative product subsidized by our other work. It will force us to transition faster from being a provider of traditional environmental consulting services to a provider of software products for the environmental industry.
The bottom line is that you can’t lead by looking in the rear-view mirror. You need to focus on the road ahead. And in life as well as in business, sometimes what you think was something you really wanted or needed was exactly what you really didn’t need. Sometimes those things that you felt were setbacks are really silver linings in disguise, except in your mind, you don’t see them like that right away.
Make no mistake: I am NOT an expert at hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as it is commonly known. I am simply an environmental consultant who runs a small environmental technology firm that, over its 20 years of existence, has conducted hundreds of environmental assessments.
So why this topic? There are probably hundreds of people like me out there who work as environmental consultants and scientists on typical assessment and remediation projects involving petroleum hydrocarbon releases; Brownfields sites; dense, non-aqueous phase liquids (DNAPLs); underground storage tanks (USTs); and the like that know just a little bit about fracking but not enough to really know anything substantial about it, or how to get involved. Fracking is becoming more and more important every day, so it’s time to dive in and learn something new.
What Is Fracking?
From Wikipedia: Hydraulic fracturing is the propagation of fractures in a rock layer caused by the presence of a pressurized fluid. Hydraulic fractures form naturally, as in the case of veins or dikes, and is one means by which gas and petroleum from source rocks may migrate to reservoir rocks. This process is used to release petroleum; natural gas (including shale gas, tight gas and coal seam gas); or other substances for extraction via a technique called induced hydraulic fracturing, often shortened to fracking or hydrofracking.
In plain English, fracking is the process of drilling and injecting fluid into the ground at a high pressure in order to fracture shale rocks to release natural gas inside. 60 Minutes, the popular television show, had a pretty good segment about fracking in November 2010, which can be found here: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7054210n
The Bad Stuff
Earthquakes, fire from your water faucet, toxic chemical infiltration into important aquifers, and a massive use of water resources are just some of the more well-known issues with fracking. Since most exploration companies don’t even disclose the chemicals used in their fracking process, it’s difficult to know what short-term, and more importantly, what long-term effects fracking will have on our precious water resources. Also, regulatory frameworks governing fracking activities are still in their infancy and seem to be driven more by the oil & gas industry rather than by the environmental consulting industry.
The Good Stuff
True energy independence is a real possibility with shale gas exploration. Shale gas reserves in the US are larger than in any other country in the world. Reserves in the US have been estimated at a 100-year supply, and these estimates continue to grow as new discoveries are made; as new extraction technologies are further refined; and as our nation becomes more energy-efficient through the use of conservation efforts, more efficient vehicles, the use of smart-grid technology, and a larger mix of alternative green energies such as solar and wind. Today we are less dependent on imported oil than we have been since 1996. If shale gas extraction continues to grow as it has been, our nation has a real chance of becoming energy independent in 10 years.
Imagine True Energy Independence in 10 Years…
Fewer US lives and treasure spent on battles and wars in the Middle East. If our nation becomes completely energy independent, would we really be eager to go to war in the Middle East for what amounts to a war for oil stability? Probably not so much. Not having to police the world would equate to huge military savings. Currently, we spend about 20% of our annual budget on defense. In 2010, that was $690B. Imagine if we could shave this down to 15% of our budget, or even 10% of our budget. Less money spent on policing the world would mean less distraction, and more money to apply against our debt or other things that matter to us.
More cars and trucks on the road powered by electricity and compressed natural gas (CNG). Fred Smith, the founder and CEO of FedEx, said it himself a few days ago on NPR. FedEx is betting on electric and hybrid vehicles to deliver packages. According to him, his delivery trucks will operate on 75% less per-mile costs than internal combustion engines. That’s not a typo: 75% less. For FedEx, that alone is a game-changer. That will translate to less expensive package delivery to millions, more profit for FedEx, or both. Fred Smith believes that his company will achieve this because of improving battery technology and charging during off-peak hours. And when Fred speaks, people listen, because he can make things happen.
When I was a kid living in Venezuela in the 1970s, my dad had a Ford F100 company pickup truck that he would use every day to get to work and to take us on fun excursions exploring all sorts of cool places in the State of Anzoategui, Venezuela. In the bed of the truck, there was a large horizontal cylinder covering the entire front of the bed that contained liquified petroleum gas, or LPG. This extra tank was used for emergencies, whenever dad was driving in the middle of nowhere with no gasoline stations around. When the truck’s gasoline fuel tank was near empty, dad would flip a switch on the dashboard, and presto! We were now running on LPG. Note that this was something available in a 3rd world country in the 1970s. Surely our internal combustion engines and fuel tanks can be modified quickly and cheaply to run on CNG.
Fewer gasoline USTs and UST-related contamination. Imagine a world where USTs containing gasoline are a rarity. As environmental consultants, we all know that the best way to mitigate environmental contamination first is to remove the source of the contamination. If most vehicles are powered by electricity and CNG, this would result in substantially fewer petroleum hydrocarbon releases, thus eliminating the vast majority of future leaking UST (LUST) sites and a portion of the more than $200M that the EPA alone spends managing LUST sites today.
My Take On Fracking
In my opinion, fracking is here to stay. The stakes are too high for it to simply go away. So rather than fight it, I’m going to do my part by learning more about it and figuring out how to play a positive role in it. I happen to believe that environmental consultants and scientists are still relevant and should shape the fracking industry. So rather than categorically saying “no” to fracking or simply ignoring it, my take is that environmental consultants and scientists like me should use their vast knowledge and lessons learned over the last 30 years to create adequate, consistent, Federal and State regulatory programs and policies governing fracking and establish best practices for the industry. The industry needs to also do its part and disclose what chemicals they use in their fracking fluids, the quantities used, and their concentrations.
Fracking activities will no doubt cause environmental problems, just like gasoline USTs inevitably cause problems even today. But that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t do it. After all, every single energy source has its own set of issues. But the difference with shale gas is that this time, it’s ours, and in game-changing quantities.
More to read:
http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/
http://www.energyfromshale.org/
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/29/140872251/the-trouble-with-health-problems-near-gas-fracking
http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/04/20/more-problems-with-fracking%E2%80%94and-some-solutions/
http://www.cleanwateraction.org/page/fighting-fracking
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/industries/natural-gas-producers-are-being-forced-to-scale-back-as-prices-fall-storage-caverns-fill-up/2012/04/08/gIQAIofc3S_story.html
On March 6, 2008, Apple released its iOS SDK to developers.
And that changed everything.
Since that day — just a mere 4 years ago — over 600,000 apps have been created for the iOS store. 200 million iPhones sold, with about 75,000 sold every day. 60 million iPads sold in 1 year. 25 billion apps downloaded.
Stop for a second and think about that number. 25 billion apps downloaded since the launch of the iOS SDK 4 years ago. There are just under 7 billion humans on earth. That means that about 3.5 apps per person on the PLANET have been sold through the iOS store. No wonder Apple is now the most valuable technology company in the world. And they did this with an innovative product that is merely a 5-year-old toddler! In 1997, Apple was written off by nearly everyone. And now look at them. Pretty incredible.
Since the iPhone, Google followed suit, with its own Android OS, SDK, and similar app store. Can you imagine life today without these devices? I can’t. And the best is yet to come. Someday soon, sooner than you can even imagine, nearly everyone will have one of these incredible machines in their pocket. They will become as ubiquitous as your wallet. In fact, they will BE your wallet. It’s not a stretch. Its just around the corner. Maybe a year out.
Think about it: these machines are already your camera, your email and text messaging system, your phone, your video conferencing system, your entertainment device, your maps and navigation system, your restaurant reservation booking system, your yellow pages, your personal music streaming service, your bookstore, your travel agent…You name it, it does it (or will do it soon). Your smartphone will very soon also be your ATM and your credit cards too.
Don’t believe this? Take a look at the graphs below.
 
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-future-of-mobile-deck-2012-3
Now contrast this to the industry that I work in: the environmental consulting industry. It’s a relatively small, niche industry, which at one time in the early 90’s was an amazing place to be. Innovation was everywhere. New assessment and remediation technologies were popping up all the time. Nasty sites were being cleaned up quickly all over the country. News media outlets talked about the latest environmental trends and issues. It was a vibrant, exciting place to be, where you felt that you were truly making a lasting impact to society and the environment.
Not so much anymore. The environmental consulting industry has matured to become a staid place where innovation is extremely slow at best and almost frowned upon at worst. For most people in this industry today, it’s merely a job that pays the bills. It’s not a passion anymore. It’s just more of the same. And I believe that this is partly due to the increasing age of the environmental consultant.
Fewer young people with fresh ideas are entering this industry, and as such, the typical consultant today is older than the typical consultant from the 90’s. In fact, some of the same minds that started working in this industry in the 90’s (including yours truly) are still here. With a more mature workforce, mindsets are less open to innovation and change. Instead of thinking that bold actions are needed to shake things up, consultants today fear that those very same bold actions might indeed shake things up and put them out of a job. Thus, potentially disruptive innovations are ridiculed in an effort to maintain the status quo.
And that’s why, out of those 600,000 apps in the iOS store, only a mere handful are environmental consulting industry apps.
| It shouldn’t be that way. At Terraine, we are doing our part to disrupt the status quo, despite the naysayers. We are building apps that question practices that have been the same for decades. For example, we built a product called ezCoC, which is a bold attempt to connect Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) directly to field techs filling out those really silly paper chain-of-custody forms.In today’s world, with smartphones in 43% of the population’s pocket, why are we still filling out paper chain-of-custody forms, which then require labs to manually re-enter that same information again into the LIMS — typos and all — AFTER the samples arrive at the lab? Why not insert that data, in digital format, automatically into the LIMS via an API, the day BEFORE the shipment arrives? Wouldn’t this simple concept save the labs a ton of money, which could then be passed on to consultants in analytical method rate reductions? |
ezCoC iPhone App |
Another product we are building is a SaaS product called SF330Pro, which will be used for preparation of complex proposals in the Standard Form 330 format for Federal solicitations. Our industry STILL uses Word and Excel for this task. If you’ve ever had to stitch together individual resumes or project descriptions from multiple companies into a single Word document, you know that this task is mind-numbing and frustrating. Trying to align boxes, lines, columns, and proper page breaks using multiple Word files is enough to pull all your hair out. So why hasn’t anyone built something better for this time-intensive task? I’m not really sure, but we are going to try to change this by building a really cool and useful app for it. More to come on SF330Pro this summer.
Example of SF330Pro User Interface
If we as an industry are going to move forward with the times and with new technologies that are capable of improving our work lives in so many ways, we need to be more willing to disrupt the status quo and also be willing to be disrupted in the process. The unknown is a scary place, but what is even more scary to me is knowing that I know less than my replacements entering the workforce.
I don’t want to be on the wrong side of history, like that person who thought that the horse and buggy business was “doing just fine, thank you very much” because those horseless carriages were too unreliable, loud, and smelly.
What about you? What side of history will you be on?
Why do so many enterprises block popular websites like YouTube and Facebook from their corporate network? It’s among the dumbest ideas that corporate IT departments do at workplaces. Do you really think that employees will work harder if those “distracting” websites are blocked from their computers at the office? Can’t they just access them on their personal iPhones anyway? Duh.
Here are a few reasons that companies should just forget about blocking sites from corporate networks.
This Isn’t Syria
Blocking access to information is what Syria, North Korea, and other oppressive regimes do  to their citizens. We don’t do that in the USA…well, actually, we do. In your office. Access to popular websites deemed to be time-sucks on productivity are blocked. Content in your emails is scanned. Your browser history is checked. And if you don’t follow the rules, you get fired.
The funny thing is that we accept this practice – willingly! If America is supposed to be so free, then why do we treat employees the same way oppressive, socialist countries treat their citizens?
One word: fear. Fear that employees will waste valuable time on silly websites instead of on important work. Fear that employees will visit offensive sites that might land the employer into a lawsuit.
Productive Employees Need Distractions
No one can work 8 productive hours straight staring at a computer terminal. Key word here is “productive”. Sure, you can force people to sit in front of their computer monitor for 8 hours straight, but being productive in front of that monitor is another story. As an employer, when was the last time you worked 8 productive hours on something without taking a break, like checking your Facebook  status, looking at a Google News feed, watching a funny YouTube video, or simply acting like you were busy when you were really just staring at your monitor?
The point here is that people need a break every now and then. They just do. And if they aren’t going to be able to do it with the monitor on their desk, they will find another outlet — their personal smartphone, gossip in the office break room…It’s human nature, so just accept it. There are literally dozens and dozens of articles and books written on the subject of productive workers needing breaks and distractions, so I’ll leave it at that.
Monitoring Employee’s Internet  Access Is An Expensive Time-Suck
How many people in your IT department are dedicated to setting up and enforcing Internet access policies? How much money do you spend annually on software to manage this stuff? Do you really need to be allocating so many resources to this crazy 1984ish practice?
If You Treat Employees Like Adults, They Will Act Like Adults
Wow! What an enlightening thought! If you treat employees like adults, they will act like adults. It’s so obvious that it seems really silly to be writing this down, and yet many companies simply fail to do this. They treat their employees like second class citizens with no right to information that would be readily available anywhere else. In this day and age, where everyone is connected, all the time, it’s just plain dumb to block information from employees.
It’s time to rethink Internet access policies at enterprises. Employees will generally behave, and those that don’t, you get rid of. I am 100% certain that employees with full access to the Internet at work will be happier and thus more productive than those with limited access and with the Internet police watching their every move. Fear should not be driving these policies. Instead, common sense should be driving these policies. Like Ronald Reagan said in 1987, it’s time to tear down this (Internet access) wall.
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