Money in Numbers!!!! Brine by VSI 4K

so even if it doesn't snow if you pre-treat it still counts I want these guys to know it still has to count and it's not a freebie for for the customer as those granules of salt hit that snow and ice they create what's called an endothermic reaction right so you've got to actually take a ground temperature digital reader and actually read the ground because that's where your chemical reaction is actually occurring it's from the [Music] ground all right this is the numbers so let's give these guys every single number these guys need to help them dial this straight in Jordan yeah let's do it all right where do we start so let's start with the the most basic of Basics we've already talked about how important it is to mix our salt rine to 20 3.3% that's called the TIC point that gets you a freeze point point of -6° f um not only does it give you the lowest freeze point it also is the most stable in solution it's going to be the most stable to mix with your additives it's a very important number to hit and again we make it very easy with our technology you don't have to guess you don't have to weigh you don't have to measure it does it for you um with that 23.3% salt brine some guys might like to know that that contains 2.28 pound of salt per gallon so now now here's the thing I just want to be clear and I want to break this down that number never changes whether you're post-t treating or pre-treating that is a constant right but the post-t treating and and pre-treating application rate is what changed and we're going to cover that in a minute but just understand that this number is a constant this number is always a constant it is now one thing to keep in mind with that 2.28 lb per gallon is that's 2.28 lbs of actual sodium chloride if we're using bulk salt to make our brine we can't actually take a scale in weight 2.28 pounds because number one there's impurities in the salt those do not disolve into brine number two there's different moisture contents of salt so a handful of salt that's soaking wet is a lot heavier than a handful of salt that's dry so we don't want to actually we don't want to actually worry about weighing the salt I just wanted to give that number so people understand the context when we start talking about application rates of how many pounds of salt you're actually putting down breaker and it's way less than if you're applying dried salt okay so application rates pre-treat now this is before the storm let's just be very clear what that means yep my favorite analogy for pre-treating is it's like spraying a frying pan before you cook on it helps prevent the bond with the surface so it cleans off easier at the end scrapes right off so you go to cook an egg on a frying pan that's not treated or not seasoned that egg sticks to the pan you got a lot of scrubbing and clean up to do if you would have sprayed that pan it peels right up clean up is easy same thing with snow so pre-treat scrapes off easier cleans up easier L to clean up later and when you pre-treat you can call you can consider that half inch to an inch correct so depending on contracts so so pre-treat really there's two ways to look at it so the way I'm talking about is preventing bond with the surface that would be any amount of snow basically what that's going to do is it's going to make your lot straight more cleanly so you use less salt or less brine on the back end question you two hey when when they were talking about pre-treating and we're not going to name the name of the company but he considered that every time they went out whether it's snowed or not if were pre-treating he considered that 1 in every service event that they did they considered it 1 in one in so even if it doesn't snow if you pre-treat it still counts I want these guys to know it still has to count and it's not a freebie for for the customer no pre-treatment should be charged for um you know number one number one it's giving the customer the benefit of that cleaner scrape which means you're going to use less salt or brine on the back end which is better for their property okay uh number two if the snow happens to miss that pre-treat is good for a number of days I'd say even up to 5 to 7 days after so even if it misses and another event comes in 5 days later that pre-treatment is still good it's still effective as long as it doesn't rain correct as long as it doesn't rain okay so that pre-treatment we're looking at 40 I'm going to pay to say GPA that that's gallons per acre so the nice thing with the vssi Legacy Spray Systems is they have automatic rate control you go on the App you put in 40 gallons an acre it's putting down the right amount of product no matter what speed you're driving you're always using the right amount of product again looking at our math here you can equate that to see that it's about 90 lb of salt per acre so again we talk about how difficult it would be with granular product to evenly spread 90 lbs of salt over an acre that's like taking two water softener salt bags and spreading them evenly over an acre every granular salt will be like 10 in apart it' be almost impossible to do with liquids we get nice even coverage we're using a lot less salt and we're getting better more consistent results because of that the next way to use uh um uh liquid is as a post treatment so this is also known as direct liquid application so this is after the snow has fallen so after the snow has fallen so let's say we get a half inch dusting your post treatment would just be to go to burn off that half inch dusting right if you would have pre-treated maybe part of that half inch wouldn't have stuck in the first place whatever's left behind is what you're post- treating it's getting rid of any residual another way that post treatment happens is after you're done plowing when we're done plowing there's always something left behind there's a glaze on the parking lot or there's tire tracks or there's there's foot traffic that pack the snow down there's always going to be something left behind the post treatment is what's getting rid of that and instead of spreading granular salt we're using liquid and again that's where we're getting our huge savings on salt and I'll explain why in a second so that's going to be 80 gallons per acre and I will asterisk that that by saying if you have excessive snow pack or excessive uh uh ice left behind you might need to go as high as 120 gallons an acre either way we look at this 2.28 lb of salt per gallon we're still only talking about 160 to 200 lb of salt per acre which is numbers of this and let's let's equal let's put an equal sign right here 40 gallons * 2.28 gives you how many pounds are be putting down on an acre and then 80 gallons 91.2 on the three so equals 91.2 pound per AC okay 82.4 so you can see that that's a lot less salt the average contractors putting down 1,000 lb of granular salt per acre this is massive salt savings compared to applying granular salt and the reason here's the reason why you might be wondering how is this possible is this some kind of magic it's not it's actually really simple so when we spread salt on Stone and Ice Let's Pretend This is a patch of snow and ice granule of salt hits the snow and ice these are granules of salt sorry my art is poor as those granules of salt hit that snow and ice they create what's called an endothermic reaction an endothermic reaction is when the sodium chloride draws heat from the atmosphere of the environment to create melting as melting is created it creates a puddle of brine pretend that's a puddle of brine that's spread and as all these puddles of brine connect together now we have patches of bare pavement the problem is that takes a long time 48 Hours it can take 48 hours if the granules Sal are 10 in apart so what contractors do is they apply way more granules right so they're getting this many granules so that the puddles only have to spread a tiny little amount to get a bare patch of pavement and what's left at the end is a bare parking lot with a bunch of extra salt left behind on it what we're doing when we apply brine as a post treatment is we're skipping that phase change and we're applying the puddle so this is the puddle we're applying the puddle directly to the parking lot because we're skipping that phase change we're only putting down the scientifically necessary amount of salt and that's why we save so much salt by using Brian we are creating the chemical reaction during the mixing process that's where the efficiency comes from and then we're eliminating all of the excess waste got it so we talk about these numbers here so let's write this down too since I already said it average applying 1,000 pounds per acre post treat post treatment granular product okay so these are Big these are Big differences here 1,000 lbs per acre versus 182.5 and 91.2 it's a massive amount of salt savings good for you as the contractor in Saving cost on salt good for your customers saving salt damage to their properties good for your customers and not tracking into the buildings and good for your customers aesthetically because you don't have those stained white parking lots Left Behind after a snow event you have nice clean parking lots after a snow event okay what other numbers do do we need to know what other numbers do we need to know price let's talk about let talk about price let's talk about price so this is 2024 Yep this is Minnesota what is the price guys are getting right now and how do they calculate that and you you're going to have to figure out if you're in some other part of the country it's up to you to take the math from there we're giving you our price right now so that you can go out and undercut Jordan by 2 cents per whatever so let's let's look at the Baseline here too so we talk about a gallon of brine having 2.28 lb of salt per gallon so the cost to actually make our brine is you take your salt cost and you figure out your cost per pound and you know there's 2.28 lb of salt per gallon you can pretty easily figure out what your material material cost per gallon of salt is or of salt brine is I should say now there's a few other things that go into that there's some labor cuz you got to mix the brine there's possibly a loader like in the case of our Legacy Brian maker you need a loader to load it uh there's probably some electricity to run the pump not a lot but it's there and then if the cost of water if you're on City Water there may be a half cent a gallon cost there all in all what we see on a national aggregate average is that contractors are spending about 15 cents a gallon on finished rind so it's costing them 15 cents for salt water electricity labber overhead capex everything else about 15 cents per gallon now here's where the cool part is the margins in using liquids in Minnesota mhm for a pre-treatment the pricing that we're seeing is between $2 and $6 a gallon applied product cost you 15 cents a g a gallon correct and that's without an additive now if we add an additive to our brine there's additional cost there but even if that additional cost is 20 or 30 cents a gallon there's still a break spread there now let's talk about why this range is so big it's honestly pretty simple if you're doing a 5,000 foot property you're dispatching the same truck the same labor you have the same overhead uh uh the same equipment to do a tiny little lot you're going to get more per gallon for that tiny little lot to recover all those fixed costs right if you're on a giant uh 4 million ft site like a distribution center you're going to get a lower price per gallon because you're only dispatching once and you're doing the whole site while you're there and you probably even have on-site storage to store your BR so that's why the range is so large um it's just important to know what your fix costs are so one way to look at this could be that you have a fixed charge per visit and then your charge in on G per gallon on top of that but this is a pretty safe range in Minnesota um for parking lots now when we talk about sidewalks there's a lot more labor to applying liquid on sidewalks so when we talk about sidewalks you could look at probably doubling this cost or I'm seeing contractors actually doubling these rates to apply the same product on sidebox we talked about in the last video about how the return on investment with sidebox is so high that's because not only uh are we using a much cheaper product on the sidewalk we're replacing a much more expensive side sidewalk ice melt product with that cheaper product um that's also the biggest impact for the clients cuz they're going to have less tracking in their buildings when their sidewalks are treated with liquid then with rular product okay so for post treatment what we're seeing is between two shoot I did that wrong start that over so for post treatment what we're seeing is between 3 and $8 per gallon now you might be wondering why the rate is higher on post treat than pre-treat MH honestly it's it's it's a few things number one pre-treatment is not fully yet adopted or accepted by all clientele so when you go to sell them this service if it's a premium price service they may not be sold on paying for something that's premium price so that's part of its market conditions okay the other part of it is that pre-treatment happens before a snow event so there's a lot of flexibility like I said you you go out 2 3 4 days ahead of a snow event it's time that would normally be dead for your staff it's time that's not rushed it's time that doesn't have a big time crunch behind it it's more flexible time to add extra Revenue to your business thus there can be some more flexibility because the opportunity cost to provide the service is lower than doing it during the snow event now when we're post treating this is during the event we've just got done plowing the snow has just come down uh we're in the middle of a snow event we got to get to 30 different places at once clients are calling wondering where we are there's a higher opportunity cost to perform post treatment work and thus we can demand a higher price the other reason is because post treatment is universally accepted in the market so every client almost every client is having contractors already salting or post- treating their parking lots the way it is because that's what gets you down to Safe pavement after snow events occur so because it's universally accepted and because it has that higher opportunity cost we can charge a higher rate same concept as pre-treat um the lower end is going to be larger properties because we're covering more in one in one dispatch one visit the higher end is going to be smaller properties because we're covering less gallons in a in a single visit and you are selling each service separately to your client correct yes so the pre-treatment is sold as a proactive approach to keeping their property safe and to reducing the amount of choride used on their property again we can sell the value of reducing that chloride that $800 to $3,000 per ton of salt applied we're reducing that by 70% by doing the pre-treatment and the post- treatment with liquid so that's a selling point the other thing again is it's always better to be proactive than reactive in snow and putting down a pre-treatment is a proactive approach to snow to your snow operation okay one more question how many events per year are you basing your so cuz we've got monthly contracts yearly contracts and then per time price when you go out to do a contract for a customer how many events per year are you basing your salt events on here in Minnesota yeah so here in southern Minnesota I think this would apply to Greater southern Minnesota even up to Minneapolis St Paul metro uh we're typically looking at about 30 applications per year so when I say 30 applications I mean 30 pre-treat 30 post treats okay and that's going to be in a typical year there's certainly years that are higher there's certainly years that are lower but that's a good average to base your contracts on and then you just do the math from there correct okay you figure out how many square feet you do use these numbers and this is every number we need to be able to to at least get in business Jordan let's do one more thing okay so we talk about these application rates of 40 and 80 gallons per but let's quickly just talk about using Straight brine vers a brine blend with an additive okay so there's really there's really three main uh uh liquid Blends we can apply one of them one of them is going to be straight salt brine so straight Sal brine is literally just our 23.3% Sal brine it's going to be effective at preventing that bonding with the pavement for pre-treating it's going to be effective at melting snow and ice I would say a temperature is down to safely about 20° F will it work to less absolutely I know there's guys in Minnesota using Straight brine down to zero not something we typically advocate for because straight salt brine has the propensity to get diluted as snow and ice melts and when it dilutes you can have refreezing occur so what we recommend is anything under 20° using a salt brine additive at a rate of 9010 so when I say 9010 what I mean is 90% salt brine 10% brine additive so like on 1,000g spray unit we'll just write this out 1,000g sprayer it would be 900 gallons of brine 100 Gall additive okay all different kinds of additive out there there's tons of different brands most of them are magnesium or calcium chloride based um the reason that's important is because calcium and magnesium are exothermic chlorides meaning that they generate their own heat whereas sodium is an endothermic chloride which means it draws heat from the environment that's why endothermic chlorides don't work to low temperatures that's why you always hear guys talk about how salt stops working at 10° it's because there's no heat in the environment to create that melting process when we introduce an exothermic chloride like calcium or magnesium chloride now we can work to temperatures as low as NE -30° F in fact in our operation we've had standing water puddles at -30 and it has not refrozen so it's very powerful to use those additives in your buy operation at cold temperatures pre-treatment and post- treatment gallons per acre say the same same rates same rates it's just a different blend at those same rates and what about the price what are we looking at yep so so T typically speaking these prices are what what I like to say is that as the contractors we are the experts or or if we're not the experts yet we're going to become the experts we will always put down the right blend in our client's property based on the conditions so to keep things simple in our operation we do not adjust pricing whether we're using Straight brine or 9010 okay we are just always using the right product for the right situation because again in relation to these prices it's fairly immaterial whether your whether your brine costs 15 cents a gallon or 30 cents a gallon I know that's double but it's double on something that's massively lower than what we're charging so it's really over the course of a 30 event season it's not making a huge impact so in our operation we're always blending at the point of use so we are blending based on the conditions outside and we're using whatever is best in that uh it's not air temperature we're talking about when we're trying to figure out if we're going to use a blended or a straight salt brine solution it's actual ground temperature so you've got to actually take a ground temperature digital reader and actually read the ground because that's where your chemical reaction is actually occurring is from the ground so if you're going to depend upon the heat from the ground to activate that salt it has to be 20° or higher so you point a thermometer at the ground they have digital thermometers we carry one in each…