Jeremy Weisz 6:26
Have you had cases where they didn’t have their monetization strategy figured out like that, how they make money? Part?
Len Bland 6:35
Yeah, 95% of the time, when the entrepreneurs approach us, they don’t tell us how the investor is going to make money. They don’t know. A lot of times, they don’t know, sometimes they didn’t put it in their deck and didn’t tell us but most of the times, they don’t know, we have to coach them through that process. So they can get it across the employee to investors. We’re not trying to get into the details here. This is just like, Hey, am I gonna make money doing this? If it comes out the way you think it’s going to come out?
Jeremy Weisz 7:09
That’s an important question answer for the investor right?
Len Bland 7:13
There? Well, I would think so. I mean, when you go to the store, you kind of want to know how much things cost and what it’s going to do for you. And this is for investors, this is what it’s going to do for them.
Jeremy Weisz 7:25
So speaking of Nano Gas, and people could check this out at nanogasenvironmental.com. And, but I would love for you to talk about how it works. And I know one of those things, you go into existing wells, but in you have some visuals that can kind of, you know, I think it’s a good image, some good imagery with what you do. So if you want to share your screen and share, share that and go into what you actually do when you are going, you know, when you go into existing wells.
Len Bland 7:59
Yeah. So we we, we go after three huge markets. We proven all of these commercially, we deliver a lot of value for the customers, we gain a lot of value for ourselves and we have a competitive advantage like I was talking about, that’s cleaning up sewage lagoons, cleaning up oil industry wastewater, and getting more oil out of existing wells without having to do more drilling or fracking or using chemicals. On the on the sewage lagoon side. We we were working with do you want me to start with the wells or just
Jeremy Weisz 8:38
go ahead? Yeah, keep going in order. Yeah, we’ll get to the wells. But But yeah,
Len Bland 8:42
I’m the sewage of good inside. You know, we were out in new home Texas, they had a small community 300 homes. They were lagoons that treat their sewage sewer sludge laden, they were algae covered. There were bugs walking on top of the algae was probably harmful. And they were told that in order to fix your goons and clean them up, it’s going to cost you a million dollars to dredge out the lagoons. And so they’re wondering, well, you know, I wonder if there’s a different way and you know, they thought about things like bubbling gas through their water bubbling you know air through about the lagoons are so shallow that wasn’t going to work. So what we did is we put in our we provided our solution which included our nanobubbles Nano gas nanobubbles. What’s cool about nanobubbles is that we can create over 2 trillion bubbles per gallon. And they’re so small you can’t even see them with our light based microscope. But you can see them with a laser light you can actually shine it through the water when you shine a laser light through a regular water tap water. You don’t see anything. When you shine it through water with nanobubbles in it it it bounces off the nanobubbles, and you can see the laser line in the water. And so that’s that’s how you know there’s nanobubbles in there. And the cool thing about these bubbles is, you know, imagine opening up your coke. And all the carbon dioxide starts coming out, well, we could open up a Coke, if it held our nanobubbles, you wouldn’t see any bubbles coming out because the bubbles don’t rise there, buoyancy is less than the surface tension of the liquid. Which means we could put in a whole lot more gas into into a liquid. And that was that’s what makes it special.
Jeremy Weisz 10:35
Is there an application in in that market, like poppin, carbonated beverages?
Len Bland 10:42
Well, you know, a lot of people think it would be really cool to drink a beverage with more oxygen in it, for example. But our guts are anaerobic, they don’t use oxygen. And so we’re a little bit reluctant, even though there’d be nothing stopping us from going into that market. So we’d want to do research and testing before we did that. But it was consumed. Yeah, but on the lagoon side, we know that bacteria use that oxygen to survive. And the reason why you get these high buildups of algae and sludge is because there’s no oxygen left, and all the good bacteria have died off. And now you just have bad bacteria that produce methane. And you have, and you have algae buildup,
Jeremy Weisz 11:31
I just want to know really quickly in line, if someone’s listening to the audio, there is a video component of this. And you’re what we’re looking at right now are three images, kind of subsequent different days of kind of how it started. And then after the treatment, I guess you’d call it.
Len Bland 11:50
Yeah, you know, we’re within one day of adding nano bubble oxygen, the LG started to disappear within four days it was gone. Over time, we restored the entire lagoon because we got oxygen down at the bottom where the bacteria could get to the sludge that was on the bottom. So we reduced the bacteria ate up the organic sludge. They ate up 95% of it. And that restored the lagoon and gave them space to operate for years and save them over $900,000
Jeremy Weisz 12:27
When I’m looking at this, because one of the questions I’m thinking of how do you administer it, it looks like there’s a long tube going out to something in the middle. How do you go out and administer the the nanobubbles?
Len Bland 12:42
Yeah, we have hoses with nozzles on them that we can just, we can just put into the water. And those distribute water with Nanobubbles. The cool thing is that we can take dirty water. So we can pull in dirty water into our system. And the Nana balls put it out again and we don’t clog up. So that’s that makes us really different and makes us perfectly suited for these dirty water situations.
Jeremy Weisz 13:08
So who found you and who hired you in this situation? Because I’m sure there’s there’s places all over the United States and world that don’t know this exists?
Len Bland 13:19
Well, there are places all over the United States in the world. So beginning with we had a relationship with Alpha Omega resources, they’re a distributor to small, you know, communities and their wastewater treatment problems. We’re looking at a picture of the owner of Alpha Omega resources, testing how much organic sludge there is in the pond. So our plan is to go out through distributors. But when we go out for this market, there’s a group in every state, a not for profit called the rural wastewater Association. And they have people that are called that are circuit writers, they’re called, they go check on all the small communities and try and help them with their problems. And so that’s the perfect group to for us to connect with each state to start to get our solution out in the United States.
Jeremy Weisz 14:15
Yeah, so there’s a lot of partners that will, you know, realize they have this technology and it sounds like it’s really economical compared to other solutions to like you said, I guess they got a quote for a million dollars. And it ended up costing $100,000.
Len Bland 14:31
Right? Less than 100,000. Yeah. Now you’re asked about the oil industry. And there’s really two things we focus on in the oil industry. A lot of people don’t know this, but when they in the US when we pump oil out of the ground, we’re really pumping it out of underground water aquifers that contain you know, on average, the US comes out seven times more water than oil, oil worldwide, we pump out, the oil industry pumps out 12 point 6 billion gallons of polluted water out of the ground. That’s new water. And in the US is about a quarter that we have to do something with all this polluted water, the, in some places around the world where their country doesn’t have the same kind of rule of law, they just released that polluted water into the environment, which is really scary. In the US, what we do is we the cheapest thing to do is to shove it back down into the ground where it didn’t come from before. And the first thing we do is we go build a multimillion dollar saltwater disposal Well, in we allow the oil and water to separate, and we treat it with chemicals. And then we put it down into the ground. The problem is that even when we put it down into the ground and treat it with chemicals, it still can be you know, we might start with water with some oil in it. You can see picture that on the left if you’re looking at the pictures and end up with Blackwater that you think maybe has oil in it, but it’s really just got corrosive iron sulfide, it’s going to increase the maintenance for that saltwater disposal well, so they’re putting that back down into the ground. And the real problem is that can cause earthquakes. So in Oklahoma and Texas, they’re seeing more and more earthquakes as a result of the oil industry disposing all the water into the ground. Texas just had a 5.4 magnitude earthquake, there was a largest scene there in quite some time. And Oklahoma noticed this and they started cutting back on the water they were disposing and the number of earthquakes went down.
Jeremy Weisz 16:55
Yeah, so those lagoons in the oil industry. What’s next,
Len Bland 17:00
so when we treat, I’ll just skip this for now when we treat that water from the oil industry, instead of that water that requires maintenance and chemicals in a multimillion-dollar facility. We treat it so that it can be reused by the oil industry instead of freshwater. And so that’s our goal is to replace the need for using fresh water in the oil industry and then provide them water for our next step.
Jeremy Weisz 17:32
So the previous picture, let me just go back to the previous picture, the previous picture is really the I guess the old method, a different method from yours. It’s that’s currently being used. And you can see both are dark. And then your method actually, you can see is completely clear. Is that what we’re looking at? Yeah,
Len Bland 17:57
it’s clear. It’s just a lot of times in the oil industry, this water is coming from underground. And it’s usually salty like the oceans only it’s actually sometimes 10 times saltier than the oceans. So you can’t take this water, it’s very expensive to desalinate, it’s more expensive than a desalination plant, because those plants can handle water with this much salt. That’s why I dispose. That’s why they dispose of it now. But we think of better uses for the oil industry to reuse it, they can put it back into oil wells. As long as the grid in solids are removed, the oil is removed, and the iron sulfide is removed and we do all those things. It’s pretty remarkable. So then, you know we’ve got opportunities. We’ve got a oil company in South America and a distributor just like we have in the, in the lagoons. We have worked through distributors, we have a distributor in South America was lying to stop with an oil company to do a paid pilot and we’re waiting for that contract. And then we think that can lead to a 10 to $14 million contract for US per year. Because they have maintenance problems with their oil wells. Great Now, eventually, we can take that water and reuse it. And so we do we actually make the water better. For recovering oil that’s called Enhanced Oil Recovery. We’re renting out a couple units to a PCT which adds some just some saltwater and electricity to make it even better. But compared to just saltwater, we recover oil with natural gas that you wouldn’t normally recover. So you can so we went out in an oil well. And in the first five days we did 30 days worth of Production after adding our nanobubbles By the end of 60 days, we have doubled the production of the oil well. And right now, we just finished up for Wales in Kansas. And we’re really excited to see what those results are at Dixon operating company, because they’re excited to because we think we’re going to have the same kind of effect on their wells as well. So imagine being able to increase the oil production, potentially nearly every well in the world without having to do any new drilling or fracking or using chemicals. As you
Jeremy Weisz 20:40
expand. I don’t know if there’s any other other any other images? Yeah, keep going. Yeah, I haven’t been
Len Bland 20:46
growing. Yeah. But I thought I’d let you ask.
Jeremy Weisz 20:49
I had a question about, you know, as you grow, and expand, I imagine you need capital to do that and raising money. And when you’re talking to potential investors, what are some of the biggest questions they have besides how it works? And, you know, how are you addressing that? I mean, this is kind of your thing, in general, is helping people raise money, right. So
Len Bland 21:18
yeah, so they’re getting, there are six really important questions that we, when I work with entrepreneurs, we asked them to answer and I’m careful to include that in my presentation is well, what’s the product or service? Why will the customer buy it? What’s amazing about the management team? What kind of traction Does the company have? How does the company make money? And how does the investor make money? And so those are really a focus area for us, those investors want to know all that. They may want to know some other things like who’s the competition? Like? What’s, what’s the market size? But we think those six questions are core.
Jeremy Weisz 22:08
What type of companies are ideal to invest?
Len Bland 22:13
So what type of companies do we look for, for business for concept, equity group? Or what type of investors do we look for for natural gas or natural gas? So we’re looking for investors that care about sustainability, might know something about the oil industry, but that’s not important. But mostly for investors, they really want to make a difference, and see how they can make money and make a difference at the same time. One of the reasons why we love this, this technology is because you can make money while doing good. How did the team come
Jeremy Weisz 22:52
together? We’re looking at a spill image of you the Chief Scientist CEO.
Len Bland 22:59
Yeah. So you know, I started with people that I had been working with before. You know, Jeff Hardy, for example, is a successful serial entrepreneur. And he was helping companies, fund companies because he’d been successful with his companies. His most most notable one was he worked with the CDC, and Dr. Salk and Bank of America to help get AIDS patients who couldn’t afford their medicine, money by buying their life insurance policies so they could afford their medicine. And while Jeff ran that business, Jeff was in that business. They are in 67% annual rate of return. And so he was a founder with me on Nano gas. And he was he helped me understand all the benefits of the technology. And then de shimp, our Chief Operating Officer, was a senior manager responsible for the largest bankruptcy in the history of the US at one time wicks. He, he was a senior manager for McKinsey and advising them. And then he helped grow one of the early DSL, the communications companies called rhythms and he grew them from 200 employees to over 3000. So Dave’s a great operator, which builds a real need for us. And he came on board about a year, year and a half ago. How do you
Jeremy Weisz 24:27
do when you work through these distributors and partners? Are they helping implement, like you looked at you, we saw that lagoon, who’s actually going in to administer this technology.
Len Bland 24:39
So you know, in the early stages, like we are, we’re heavily involved and really, we believe that this technology is so new, the market doesn’t really understand it. And so you need to provide a solution, not a, a piece of hardware. We’ve seen people per by pieces of hardware and in the project fails, the algae isn’t cleaned up whatever it is. But we know if you do the right work if you understand what the wastewater is how much needs to be cleaned up, if you do the right scientific work that Jeff harden is really good at than you come up with the right pieces, not just ours, but other pieces made, we need to provide the bacteria, maybe we need to do DNA testing to determine what kind of bacteria is in the pond already. When you provide the right pieces, maybe you need to bring a generator on site because they don’t have electricity, then you provide a solution that works. And so that’s how we approach what we’re doing about as we move. And as we grow, we’re partnering with distributors that are going to be able to do that analysis for us, and monitor our equipment in the field. Now, once that we’re taking one step further, though, for automating our equipment, we’re reporting back on it there on all the data, we’re going to use that for predictive maintenance to know when we need to fix the equipment before it needs fixing, and then eventually add an artificial intelligence layer that helps us get better and better at what we do. From the partner standpoint,
Jeremy Weisz 26:22
talking about working with partners, because obviously, you’ve done this throughout your career, and this is an amazing way to get distribution through what you’re doing. How do you approach the partner is for as far as the value proposition for them.
Len Bland 26:42
I love working with partners. And you know, one of the really neat things is when we are we have such strong value propositions that if they’re an industry expert, they’re like, Wow, you can do that I need to take this to the market. So when we wanted to approach Dixon operating, we you know, our rep in for Oklahoma, Don, Paul said, wow, I’ve got 30 years plus in the oil industry. And I know what this can do, and I’m excited to take it out. And I’m going to tell everybody about it. And so, you know, this is just this one oil company took us two, we’re doing four wells now that they have 800 wells that they once we show them how well it works. They’ll turn it on for all 800. And then they’re so excited, they want to become a distributor. So that’s kind of how it works. The oil industry is word of mouth.
Jeremy Weisz 27:40
Yeah, I mean, even the value proposition is takes them less time does it help? Because it normally maybe the results wouldn’t be as good and it takes less time. What are they seeing in the technology that’s they’ve never seen before.
Len Bland 27:55
So you know, on that one? Well, that we were showing, let me talk about that. They were producing half a barrel a day, and we took them to over a barrel a day. All right, on the new ones, we’re doing wells that are bigger, and we’re getting the same kind of increase in results, we’re expecting 200 250 300% improvement. So they pay well, they spend a little bit of money with us as a service company, or with our distributor as the service company. And they get this big increase in oil production. And so they’re making more money out of their existing wells, without having to do you know, without having to, you know, again, do more drilling or use more chemicals, or whatever it might be.
Jeremy Weisz 28:43
Yeah, I mean, from the bottom line for them as it increases their output as so many other benefits, you know, to the environment and how it’s done. But they see an increase output in general.
Len Bland 28:55
You know, the oil industry kind of looks at things that way. We want to do things on a sustainable way. And we’re thrilled that we can be a green solution. But the oil industry says Just show me how to get more oil or how to clean up my my water so I could meet the regulations. Yep.
Jeremy Weisz 29:15
And a couple other questions, but anything else in here that you wanted to go over? Yeah,
Len Bland 29:21
sure. I could share a little bit about how we make money. And when you’re in three markets, each one has its own, its own. How you make money, but just for one example cleaning up that oil industry wastewater, a 5000 barrel per day saltwater disposal well. If we can rent our equipment for 700,000, that’s maybe 1/5 of the total in and out cost of water. So they’re saving money. But across us our cost of goods sold might be only 91,000, giving us a gross margin of 87 and have percent. And it’s that high because we own the equipment. It’s kind of like a software as a service companies that we have real equipment to build. But the cool thing is that we could have a payback of about five months on our equipment with what we’re making. So we make a lot of money, the customer makes a lot of money, everybody’s happy. And when we do that, we project that if we can get to just 338,000 barrel per day units in the field, by the end of five years, we can be generating 200 million in revenue, and over 100 million in EBITDA. And that’s where we’re headed. Now, the other question we ask our entrepreneurs is, how does the investor make money, a lot of they have a hard time with this, because they don’t know how all the investors work and how much how the project what the investors really going to make. I use here for natural gas, environmental, the same thing we recommend for entrepreneurs, which is the venture capital model. So if an investor invests three and a half million dollars, for 18% of our company, and we take in some more money later on, so after that, maybe they have 14%. If we had those earnings in five years of over 100 million a year, and we had in, we’re able to earn just 10 times, we’re able to sell the company for just 10 times earnings, you know, public companies sell for in the 20s, we would be worth over a billion dollars in five years. And so then the investor could earn something like $150 million on a three and a half million dollar investment, that would be 44 times their investment, or 113% internal rate of return. Unless you’re in real estate or your investor, you might not know what internal rate of return is, it’s really simple. It’s just the interest rate that I would have to earn every year in order to get the same kind of results. So you might think, okay, if I go have my passbook in my savings account, I might be earning one or two, or maybe 3%. Now, here, we’re saying that to get the same kind of return, not the same risk, mind you. But to get the same kind of return, you would have to earn 113% on your interest bearing account. So that’s, that’s why investors like investing in startups, because the return could be huge. They could also go out of business, we know we’re on track to be doing very well. And I’ve got everything in it, because I don’t think we’re going out of business. But investors have to take that into account. So then, you know, we would spend that on equipment operations, sales and marketing license, we’ve got patents behind this, and we’ve just been granted, you know, we’ve got 18, granted patents 30, more pending. And we’ve just got a Notice of Allowance on a piano and we’re really excited about it says we can stop anybody else from using the piano bubbles in an oil well to recover oil in the US. So we’re really excited about that. We think that’s really valuable. And then there’s other markets we can eventually get to. But when you’re starting up, you have to focus. So we’re focused on just those. So we think it’s great, because we have a world changing technology, a great management team. We’ve got great intellectual property, we already have revenue, and we’re making money. And each of these markets that we talked about are $200 million
Jeremy Weisz 33:42
costs. Lead, this is great. I love that this is so instructive. Because I mean, you walk through the six questions, and then you actually demonstrate it yourself. It’s great to see that and this can be used for for any company, even if you’re not trying to sell or raise money. It’s it’s I feel it’s important just to have these questions answered.
Len Bland 34:06
Yeah, we think so too. And we think especially company selling a lot of times, you know, entrepreneurs are cursed with knowledge, there’s a book called Make It Stick. The talks about that the more we get to know about our business, the more detail we get into and the less understandable it becomes. And and so we think you need to make it simple. And when I build my presentations, sometimes I need to go to my partner on the coaching side, Lauren, Mika’s from concept equity group and say, Lauren, can you work this over because I’m in my own business, I’m cursed with knowledge, and I need to, you know, bring it up a level so that it’s easier to understand on the first go around. You know, we can get to the PhD level with the investors on the next meeting, but we need to keep it really simple to start with. Love it.
Jeremy Weisz 34:58
Well, let’s have one last Question. Before I ask it, I just want to point people to check out nanogasenvironmental.com To learn more about what you’re doing over there amazing stuff. And I know, I love your focus on these specific industries. And I had a guest on Dave Colina, who runs a drink company. It’s a oh two is an oxygenated natural recovery drink. I was just at the CrossFit Games, and he was his company was everywhere, people are drinking it. And they add oxygen to help your body process toxins faster. And again, I’m not sure the science on that. But that’s just what they talk about. So I’ll have to tell him to watch this episode. So maybe they’re you know, there’s so many avenues you can take this technology, it’s pretty amazing.
Len Bland 35:48
Well, Dave, give us a call, because we’ve made the decision that it was not one of those core markets. We’re open to licensing. Yeah. And so what if he could put more oxygen in his beverage?
Jeremy Weisz 36:00
Exactly. So I’m gonna send this to him. My last question, Len, is really you provide a lot of mentorship and to entrepreneurs. And I’m wondering, who are some of the people that have been influential for you, in your entrepreneurial
Len Bland 36:17
career? Wow. So, you know, I’ve learned a lot from from everybody, but we’ve got, you know, for concept equity group, we’ve got a seminar, on some of the amazing things, some of the things you should do in a pitch. And these apply to whether you’re selling to a customer, or whether you’re selling to an investor, whatever it is. And so some of the things we like to revise a quote, Our Simon Sinek Simon Sinek, he has the one of the top TED talks on How Great Leaders Inspire Action. But really, his core question is, starting with why why did you do this? And I think it’s brilliant. I had to think about a lot about my personal why when I heard when I heard that talk, also really influenced by Steve Jobs, and Guy Kawasaki worked for Steve Jobs, doubt developing the user interface for the Macintosh, and how they approach presentations. And one of the things you can go out there and watch is Steve Jobs presentation, the iPhone, for example. And you’ll notice that there’s very little text on his pitches and all the letters are really big. And, and we think those are fabulous rules to go for in a pitch. And, and really, because in so another thing I pay attention to is, is Ink Magazine. So I sometimes see really interesting articles on in there. And I caught an article that said, science hates PowerPoint. And I say, Well, does it really say that? No, it doesn’t really say that. It really says, We can’t read and listen at the same time humans can’t read and listen at the same time. So why are we putting all this text on a presentation when the most important part of the pitch is the presenter? Great question. So those are some of the things we cover in our set in our seminar. Those were influential for me. And then one more person who passed away who was really inspirational for me, Jack Hayden, used to run an entrepreneurial think tank that I still participate in. And that meets every Saturday morning and we we meet with an entrepreneur who’s got challenges and we try to help provide insight and advice. And Jack was there as the leader and really created this group and I love that because I kept picking up new insights every Saturday morning. Love it.
Jeremy Weisz 39:15
Len, I want to be the first one to thank you. Thanks for sharing your story, your knowledge and really the company that you work on as inspiration. Check out nanogasenvironmental.com. Check out more episodes of inspiredinsider.com Len thanks so much.
Len Bland 39:30
Jeremy, Thank you. This was fabulous!
