Brian Baker with Sentry Equipment

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Industrial Talk, Scott Mackenzie, Brian Baker, Sentry Equipment, manufacturing, power generation, employee ownership, ESOP, water sampling, technology access, skilled workforce, energy costs, market size, service capability, business transition.

00:00

Scott, welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots and let's go all

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right once again. Thank you very much for joining industrial talk. Thank you for your continued support of this platform. We are here to celebrate you industrial professionals all around the world. Yeah, because you're bold, you're brave, you dare greatly, it is an absolutely exciting time to be in industry, and AB in manufacturing could be in oil and gas, it could be, you know, power generation industry. It is an absolutely exciting time, and that's why industrial talk is here for you. All right, in the hot seat, we have Sentry equipment CEO. His name is Brian Baker. It was a barn burner of a conversation. The guy is really nice, as well as many in industry, but He's exceptional. And we were talking about all the stuff that's taking place within Sentry equipment. It's pretty impressive. They're there, they're good, they're good. All right, let's get cracking with the conversation. Yeah, I never tire, never tire of having conversations in industry, the people are absolutely spectacular, and you too. I'm pointing at you and the video, you're you're special too, and that's why you need to be celebrated. And that's why about this first segue. That's why you need to go out to industrial talk. You need to amplify your voice. You need to amplify your message. You have you have something to say. Industrial talk is here for you. You just go out and you click and you say, Scott, let's have a conversation on I'm having one on quantum computing, cybersecurity, quantum computing. How about that? That's a mind blower. But anything you need to just reach out info at industrial talk.com. You can do that. Reach out to me and have that conversation, because the reality is, is that we need to do a better job at communicating and expressing. You know what is happening in industry. Where do you fit? What problems are you solving? It's, it's all a part of the and it's, of course, it's happening fast, so it's important for you to be able to have that message out there quickly and and, hey, let's just, I'll make you feel warm and fuzzy. I'm not going to let you just sort of dangle out there. You know, you tell your story. It's important. It's important for the market, so that everybody understands what's taking place and what's in in your mind. So go out to industrial talk, or just email me at info, at industrial talk.com, it's all out. It's just there. All right, let's get on with the conversation. Okay, there's some real quotables in this particular conversation. The first one is one, he's a nice guy, and you and, and here they're doing some incredible things at Sentry equipment, and it's been around for a long time too. Been around for a long time, and, and they have an incredible history of success and and it's always, it's, it's a good conversation, just like anything else in industry. But there's some good, good quotes, one that I want to make sure that he said, Here's here is why it's so important, or why manufacturing here in the States is so important, and they're four, four, and I'm going to look down at my notes. One, low cost of energy. Apparently we have good low cost of energy. Yeah, low cost of rent, skilled workforce. Yes, we do. We have that, and it's going to get better. We have to, it has to get better technology access. We have access to technology. Yes, it's we do, and without a doubt, it's the biggest market. Yeah, it's huge. It's gigantic. It's enormous. That's, that's it. I'm going to create a little snippet on that one, because that was, that was just like, home run, home run. All right. Here's Brian Baker, Sentry equipment. Enjoy the conversation. Brian. Welcome to industrial talk. Thank you very much for joining me and be able to talk a little bit about Sentry equipment. This is going to be a great conversation. Listeners. They have 100 years of providing solutions and incredible services. That's what that's what Sentry equipment is. All about 100 years. That's a lot.

05:20

That's amazing, Scott. And thank you for having me. You know, Sentry equipment is my favorite topic to talk about, so I'm looking forward

05:27

before we get into that topic, before we get into and we also talked about manufacturing and what they do, as well as your unique approach to employee ownership. That's all good. It's all on the table for discussion. But before we get into that, Brian, give us a little background on who you are, where you come from.

05:46

06:34

I love it. I love it. Hey, yeah, you just been there forever. It seems like

06:38

it Yes. And when I started at Sentry A long time ago. I figured I'd want to be here six or seven years and then do something different. But it's such a great business, and the business continued to evolve over the whole time that I was there. And so there was always a challenge. And so it's been a great joy being part of Sentry for 30 years and and it's never been a dull moment. 30%

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of it exactly. Yes. See, I could do the math. So before let's, let's, let's, let's dive a little deep into what Sentry is all about. Give us a little 411, background on Sentry, the company, what? How it started? What was the focus?

07:17

Well, I will say, you know, just broad picture, stepping back sentry does great things for the world, because you think about all the processes that we count on to make our economy and our world go so think about power generation. Think about refining petroleum into gasoline and petrochemicals, and think about treating wastewater so our products and services help support our customers in managing those processes and making sure that their the processes are doing what they're supposed to do, and that all their people and equipment is operated safely, and all their people go into their plants every day, do their jobs and come out of their plants every day with everything that they came

07:56

into the plant with. So give us like a use case, specifically from a power generation perspective, where your solution is sort of deployed. I have a power generation and utility background, so I can, I can definitely relate. So I would like to know where that point of contact is. Yeah,

08:16

thank you for that. You know, if you think about a power station, fossil power station could be using coal, natural gas, nuclear, even that's heating up water. The water turns to steam, and the steam drives a turbine, and if you have bad chemistry in that water, say, for example, you know a bad pH level, if you remember from your high school chemistry class, a bad pH level can cause corrosion on the inside of the boiler, and that can create an inefficient boiler or a dangerous situation, potentially. Yep. And so our customers monitor the water chemistry, and they do it at really precise levels. They're really fine, ultra precise definitions of what they're monitoring for, and when they the chemistry goes out of whack, they can either go like it could be the result of a leak in the system, and then they can go find out where the leak is, or it could be some corrosion, or something's going on in the system that they can then go and address. But you say, think about, oh, excuse me, but

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go ahead. Go ahead. I was jumping on you because I'm galloping, I'm listening to you and I'm getting all giddy. Sorry about that. Oh no, that's

09:26

okay, but the circumstances in a power plant really hot, really high pressure, inconsistent flow of the sample from the boiler. So our equipment and services help our customers moderate heat, moderate flow and moderate pressure, and so the chemical analyzers can do their job, and then we package it together into a sampling system that the customer relies on to run their power station. And that's about 45 or 50% of our businesses water sampling in a power plant. And we also provide services. So we we're historically. Been a manufacturer, but we also provide services that help our customers tear out their old equipment, install their new equipment, start it up, train them on how to use it, and then we can also give them a maintenance contract to help them run the run the equipment going forward. So we like to think of ourselves as a manufacturer, but we're also a full service provider as

10:21

well. Yeah. So you know, you're, you're providing sampling services, testing services, as well as the ability to be able to provide the the deployment of these assets as well, you know, installment of them as well. So that's Has that always been sort of the the pedigree behind Sentry for how did Sentry get started? I mean, what was like? I think,

10:49

11:58

see, that's cool stuff. I isn't it funny when you start to research companies and and how they start out, and then, you know, fast forward and what they're doing today, how they just, I love the fact that you're nimble. You adapt, you look at what's taking place in the market, and you just, you provide the solution that is demanded at that particular time, that that's pretty good. I love it.

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14:13

Makes sense. Yeah, absolutely makes sense. Speaking of power, I digress. I go off on a tangent here, here, I'm, I'm weaving over here. Now you, how is your organization responding to the increase? You've got to see it, yeah, demand for power. I mean, it's, it's going through the roof. I went to a conference. They're talking about three, three times as much capacity that it is today. They're because of the demand.

14:47

17:17

The reality is, is that it's happening whether we like it or not, and we better be able to respond to it in an effective way. And that, to me, is the installation of capacity, not and please don't send me any emails. It has it's a it's a thermal generation model. You need it, you need that force. You need that predictability. You need that reliability, that clean power. And when I say clean power, not not the renewable stuff, but clean power is that that's 60 cycles that's being delivered. It's reliable period. Yeah,

17:54

our economy, you know, in our lives, you know that. You know, not just our economic well being, our lives depend on having a reliable power supply. And our customers that, you know, I, you know, I think green energy is still going to continue to evolve, but our customers thought it was going to evolve faster, and that transition to green energy was going to happen much sooner than it's really going to and so if you combine that, you know, the increased demand, the customers thinking that the industry was going to evolve in a different way, and you combine that with 12 years of deferred or no investment in the power infrastructure, the demand for the our power products is extremely high right now. And the good news is that we've managed to stay strong in this kind of bad industry for the last dozen years, and now we're well positioned to take advantage.

18:42

Not now, man, it's definitely, you know, when you start talking and thinking about the demand from these data centers, I just it's it's above my pay grade, it's happening. So it's nuclear. One of

19:00

19:39

just incredible time. All right, it's really exciting. And I You're absolutely right. It was sort of a dark period of time. Didn't really do much. And then when you have the utilities, utilities are not known for being nimble, and they're at the rate. Jason, you've got this and, yeah, there's just that structure we depended on. It for such a long time now it's the market is saying that's time. Exactly exciting for your

20:08

it really is exciting. And you know, like I say, we we never dismantle our ability to operate strongly in the power industry. In fact, we made it better by offering services, and so now we're so well positioned to take advantage of this boom period. Let's,

20:23

let's go into manufacturing. You mentioned manufacturing. You're saying we're not only, we don't only, we're not only in the utilities or in the power Gen space. We manufacture. Explain to us a little bit about that.

20:37

Well, you know, you know, at our core, we're manufacturers. You know, we have a, you know, a manufacturing facility in okanamo, Wisconsin, which is about 35 miles west of Milwaukee, and it's a world class manufacturing facility. If you took our manufacturing facility and put it in Germany, in Switzerland, in Japan and South Korea, any of those places, we would be top of the heat, because we have strong, really great technology that we're applying, and our manufacturing facility is world class. And I always like to talk about my dad worked in a factory. I you know, when I grew up, I got to visit my dad's factory a couple of times, and it was dark, dirty, dingy, I like to say all the D's of manufacturing that are no good. And it was, honestly, it was a place that you wouldn't want to spend eight hours a day, every day, you know, my dad did. And if you train, if you went to centuries factory, it's amazing. You walk into it, it's clean, it's well lit, it's orderly. The work people are doing is not repetitive work. It's, it's more troubleshooting, programming, highly skilled work. We have great automated equipment and robotics that we apply across the whole factory. And so it's, it's great manufacturing work, and it's just a really stark contrast. What are you manufacturing? What? What's the widget? Well, we're manufacturing the sampling equipment. So continue on with the power application. Yes, the physical equipment is a steam and water sampling system that would go into a power plant. And yeah. And then we make, of course, all the components and all the parts, you know, we do buy out from suppliers the chemical samplers that actually do the analysis. But we manufacture all the other parts of the system, and then all the components that go with it. And then we also make similar equipment for, you know, waste your wastewater application, chemical and petrochemical and oil refining applications. So we are, are making equipment that are, you know, our customers install, or our service people install. There's

22:47

this, this, you know, Buzz, this conversation that exact that exists in the world of manufacturing in general, yeah,

22:55

how?

22:59

How are you incentivized to expand your capabilities like you know, we have, we have stuff happening in DC. We're trying to stimulate more manufacturing. Do you find that your organization will be responding and expanding the capabilities and then leveraging all that data analytics to be able to produce more accurate it's just there's so much going on in the world of manufacturing. How do you find yourself residing in that?

23:29

And I think that the manufacturing in the United States was alive and well before the administration changed. I think that if you look at all the things that our country has going for it. We have this really strong manufacturing base. And no matter what happens, manufacturing is alive and well. Are going to keep expanding in United States. And if you think about it, you know, they're really like four, four factors that you want to cite. You know, first is that you think about all the low cost, abundant, reliable energy that we have available in the country. So anything that needs a lot of energy to run a process. So, you know, refining petroleum or creating chemicals or fertilizers, anything like that, the US is the best place to be, because we have this great source of reliable energy and inexpensive, reliable energy. That's good. And then you look at the our workforce, we have the most talented, skilled manufacturing people in the world, and they're highly educated, very skilled and and I think we're turning the corner on showing people that work with their hands, that manufacturing work is fantastic work. It's a great career. And so I think we're going to be keep drawing people that want to have a great job into the manufacturing world. Love it. And then you think about technology. You know, I talked about our factory. You walk into our factory and it's you see robotics. You see machines that run themselves. You see people that are really programming and making sure that the machine. Machines are running the way they should be, rather than doing pre predator manufacturing. So the US has the best technology. And very, you know, very, because it's right in the United States, it's access to technology. And I think, you know, lots of times when we think of tech companies, we always think of, you know, the people that run the internet, or, you know, think of Microsoft, or, or, and you think about Sentry, we are applying similar technology in a manufacturing setting. So, you know, so that's another thing that the US has going for it, that we have access to all this technology. And then finally, you know, you think about the United States as the biggest market in the world. And why wouldn't you? You know, tariffs are not there. You know it makes sense to locate manufacturing next to your biggest customer. So I think you know, if you if you look at all those factors, the future for manufacturing was bright five years ago, a year ago, and it's still bright right now in the United States. And regardless of what happens, tariffs are no tariffs, I think manufacturing is going to keep thriving for a really long time.

26:08

Yeah, I feel like it can conquer the world. Brian, that was a great summary, low cost energy workforce, skilled technology, assets, and we are the biggest market. No doubt about that. Yeah, and

26:20

if you just take a step back and think about that, why wouldn't you manufacture in the United States? You know, there's absolutely no reason why you wouldn't manufacture in the United States. All right.

26:31

One last topic, I like that a lot. One last topic, she talked about employee ownership. What does that mean? What is, how does that benefit me?

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27:48

Gosh, that's a bold move. That's bold thinking. I love it.

27:53

It was it. And there are a lot of different ways you can look at employee ownership, and the first one is what I just described. It's a way to transition a business from an individual or a family or a small group of people ownership over to its employees. And you know, Mary and Dick, the owners of the business at that time, they were very benevolent. They loved their employees. They treated them well, paid them well, but and the employees are also very loyal to Mary and Dick and the business. And so what better way to reward your employees than turning the business over to them so they can reap the benefits of employee ownership? And so if you think about really people that work in a business owning a part of the place or part of the business, they're going to be highly motivated. They're going to be invested, invested in making sure that the business serves its customers well, and so employee owned companies perform better. We serve our customers better. We serve you know, we have more efficient factories. We have more efficient customer service. Our customers love working with us. One of the reasons is because our employees care so much, and so employee ownership is a great way to tap into making a great business

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exceptional and

29:10

and for the employees, for the people that work in the business, they get an enhanced retirement plan, cuz the employee stock ownership plan is a Retirement Plan in addition to their 401 k plan, so when they retire, they can have extra assets to call on. So people that work at Sentry don't normally work until they're 65 they normally retire when they're in their upper 50s or their low 60s, because they have Social Security, they have their 401 k plan, but then they also have their employee stock ownership plan to help them in retirement.

29:47

How do you how do you strategically backfill that, for lack of a better silver tsunami that decides that I'm leaving, I'm retiring?

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30:59

Exceptional. I'm conquering the world because of you. Brian,

31:04

well, thank you. I You can see I plan on being at Sentry a short amount of time, couple six, seven years, and I've been at Sentry 30 years now, because it's such a great place to work. And you know, I love our customers. I love what the customers do for the world. And I love how, how we've made the world go for

31:21

100 years. I like it, huh? How does so if I'm, if I'm motivated by hearing what you have to say, if I'm listening to this podcast and I want to contact Brian, what is the best way to contact Brian and make you a part of my team?

31:37

You know, I have a LinkedIn profile, Sentry equipment. You know, Sentry equipment has a great website, and anybody can email me. Brian dot Baker at Sentry equip.com, and one of the things you know, I'm very passionate about, you can tell about sentry, but also about employee ownership. And one of the things that I've made kind of a passion over my career is lots of times business owners are thinking about transitioning their business, you know, retiring and you know, you know. And a lot of people sell to private equity, a lot of people sell to a big company. A lot of people turn it over to their kids. And I think selling to its the businesses employees sometimes isn't thought of. I think people in that situation think it's too administratively burdensome. I don't want the government in my business. I don't, you know, I don't know if the employees can handle running the business. Yeah. And so I think there are these misconceptions about employee ownership that, you know, that if anybody wants to reach out to me, I can, I can help clear up, because they're you know, employee ownership is a great way to transition your business. You're going to get a fairer dollar selling your business to your employees. And if you have any, most business owners are benevolent. They love their employees. They love the people that help make the business Great. What better way to reward your employees and make the business have a great legacy than turning it over to people to help make a business great.

33:03

There. That is a great note to end on, absolutely outstanding. Brian, this was a fabulous conversation. I really liked it a lot.

33:12

Yeah, thank you, Scott. I enjoyed

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it as well. It was cool. It was cool. Thank you for being on industrial talk. All right, listeners, we're going to have all the contact information for Brian out on industrial talk. As you can tell, he is a must connect. So make that a point. That's Brian Baker, sensory equipment. We're going to wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be right back.

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You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

33:46

Well, what did I tell you? Yeah, you're doing some great stuff at Sentry equipment. Brian. Brian Baker, you know what I do? That I shouldn't do I pull away from the mic. I shouldn't pull away from the mic. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it, you know, falls off after I pull away from the mic, so don't listen to me anyway. He was great. You know, you need to connect with him. Go out to industrial talk. He'll have that little LinkedIn link, and you reach out to him, you click on it, and you say, Yeah, let's connect, and let's have a conversation. Solve my problems. And they will, they'll do a great job doing that again. Your voice needs to be heard. You need to be out on industrial talk. You need to go to industrialtalk.com or email me at info@industrialtalk.com, and say, Scott, I want to be on the show. And I say, yeah, that's sort of cool. What's the story? Make it happen. All right, be bold, be brave. Dare greatly. Hang out with Brian and you will be changing the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned.