You build, operate, and maintain reliable and efficient wastewater infrastructure, from conveyances to treatment plants.
We help you know where the problems are so that you can proactively offer solutions to customers, rather than waiting for cold RFPs to arrive.
Navigating the Dynamic US Wastewater Market
The municipal and industrial wastewater industries continue to gradually evolve, and are helping your clients keep pace with regulatory and technological changes. The term 'wastewater' itself maybe falling out of fashion, since effluents are too precious to be 'wasted'. With increasing shortages in municipal drinking water supplies, influencial organizations such as the EPA and the AWWA are putting serious intellectual capital into water reuse.
Emerging issues and contaminants pose a challenge. Emerging contaminants, such as PFAS which can be concentrated in biosolids, are of concern at the part-per-trillion level. Changing regulatory defintions around 'Waters of the U.S.' create a moving target for wastewater treatment utilities. Industrial dischargers, including those dealing with discharged waters from coal ash impoundments, are being challenged with treatment requirements around difficult-to-treat trace metals such as selenium. Combined sewer overflows (CSOs) continue to be a challenge and regulatory burden in many jurisdictions. Even the COVID pandemic has relevance in the wastewater context, with municipalities tracking infections via sewer sampling.
Knowing the sources of project funding is becoming more important than ever. Municipal budgets, shared across multiple community services are stretched more than ever. Federal awards can be critical, and you can play a part in helping your clients secure needed funds.
As an industry leader in this critical market, your work matters. We empower you with business intelligence to see what lies ahead and make smarter decisions that benefit both you and your customers.
You need wastewater market insight to enable the right sales conversations and marketing investments. With wastewater, there is a constant push and pull between new and old ideas. The industry is, by necessity, risk-averse. Slow, measured change is the norm. But that doesn’t mean that the industry is standing still.
We provide dashboards containing current data, configured to your business, so you have fast accurate answers. This includes:
Operational Details: Nation-wide, operating parameters focusing on wastewater treatment permits, reports, and violations.
Real-Time Conversations: What are the hot topics being discussed in board meetings? For example, aging infrastructure, combined sewer overflows, and PFAS detection and treatment.
Capital Improvement Plans: CIPs are used by public organizations to forecast 3 - 8 year capital costs, funding, and timing for large projects. We carefully review 100,000s of pages of CIPs from large municipal governments and transit authorities, curating data on 10,000s of municipal projects.
Funding Mechanisms: Revolving funds, grants, and other sources of capital project funding.
Management Focus: Commitment to overarching programs such as One Water.
Partnerships: Knowing the influencers matters, including city leaders and their strategic partners for service delivery. Our data can help prime contractors find the best subs, and visa-versa.
We curate data, from 100s of sources, so that your team doesn't need to.
You access, live, navigable data rather than static reports.
Our customers want to avoid the pain of being surprised.
Decisions on wastewater treatment infrastructure don't happen overnight. There are months or years of capital planning involved. If you plan ahead, you can anticipate and engage future opportunities, long ahead of receiving that dreaded cold RFP.
Our customers don't hate RFPs, they hate cold RFPs. The ones that they could have influenced, where the potential client did not take the best strategic approach to the market.
The only way to avoid the pain of a surprise RFP, or even worse, being left out of consideration is to have good business intelligence on the market.
The market is large, with 1000s of medium and large systems and 10,000s of small ones.
First, know that the sales cycle can be lengthy. Making the first sale to a brand new customer can be difficult. Then after you are established, your footprint can be challenged by competitive re-bidding requirements. You may be the first into an account, but find yourself in a crowd as procurement sources multiple bids.
Next, if you are selling novel new approaches and technologies, know that water utility organizations aren’t always early adopters and are very conservative in selecting new technologies.
Change does happen but tends to happen slowly. Business leaders need to be both patient and future-oriented to anticipate the long-term trends and needs of utilities. It is a long-term investment in continually developing relationships, and as part of the educational process, you are providing useful solutions.
Finally, you’ll know from news headlines that budgetary needs are often not fully funded. Necessary capital investments seem to be continually delayed.
The ASCE published Amerca’s Infrastructure score for Wastwater as a D+, in their 2017 “Making the Grade” report. Fortunately, business leaders, like you, are part of the solution.
LET'S START TODAY
Contact us for mutual discovery of BI needs and solutions. We help you run the race just a bit faster, and sometimes, that is all you need.
dave@firmographs.com
510-671-0373
