What You Do, and How We Support It

You build, operate, and maintain safe drinking water infrastructure.

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.

Depositphotos_13260530_s-2019

Market Challenges and Opportunities

Navigating the Dynamic US Water Market

Water is critical. Access to safe drinking water is considered a basic human right. When it suffers, drinking water quality and availability problems bring huge political pressure on responsible organizations.

Water is also complex. Much like the hydrologic cycle itself, the water industry is ever-evolving and shifting. Nationally there is a patchwork of more than 50,000 community drinking water systems, most of which serve smaller populations on shoe-string budgets. Complex due to the combination of public, private, and investor-owned utilities responsible for drinking water supply and delivery.

Today's drinking water utilities face a myriad of challenges. Well-known challenges, such as protecting customers from exposure to lead in drinking water. Emerging contaminants, such as PFAS, that are of concern at the part-per-trillion level. Dynamic regulatory changes, such as the new lead and copper rule, and state-level mandates around PFAS sampling and exposure limits. Operational threat mitigation, whether it is from weather extremes or cyber attacks. Shifting federal, state, and ratepayer funding mechanisms and opportunities amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The industry itself may not always appear to be fast-moving, but the world is moving fast around it.

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.

The Business Intelligence You Need

You need drinking water market insight to enable the right sales conversations and marketing investments. With drinking water, 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. This keeps the taps flowing, and the quality high. 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 community water systems.

Real-Time Conversations: What are the hot topics being discussed in board meetings? For example, aging infrastructure, climate adaptation, lead service line replacement, non-revenue water loss, 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: Committment to overarching programs such as One Water.

Partnerships: Knowing the infuencers matters, including city leaders and their strategic partners for service delivery. Our data can help prime contractors find the best subs, and visa-versa.

Why Our Approach Works

We curate data, from 100s of sources, so that your team doesn't need to.

You access live, navigable data rather than static reports.

You find more white space in existing customer accounts that you can sell into, and new simliar customers that should be benefitting from your services.

Problems You Avoid

Our customers want to avoid the pain of being surprised.

Opportunities around the water industry 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 owner/operator 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.

Market Dynamics

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, as keeping clean drinking water flowing is the priority. 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 Water as a D, in their 2017 “Making the Grade” report. Fortunately, business leaders, like you, are part of the solution.

Links

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