#127 - Retro Regulator™ with Praxxis CEO Kevin Miller

The Sprinkler Nerd Show

In this episode, Andy interviews Kevin Miller, CEO, Praxxis Manufacturing.

Company Website: https://www.h2owize.com/

YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/CZfaKbiE-Tg

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Joining me today is Kevin Miller, the CEO and co founder of Praxis. The manufacturers of the retro pressure regulator and other water conservation products earlier in his career. Kevin co founded, built and led three companies that generated substantial revenue in the hundreds of millions. Alongside this, he made strategic investments and joined Goldstur.

A pioneering bootstrap startup that developed an automated retail kiosk for the analysis and appraisal of precious metal jewelry. Currently, Kevin serves as the co founder and CEO of Praxis, a company renowned for its creation of H2O Wise water conservation products specifically designed for the landscape industry.

Kevin, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me this morning.

I am really excited to talk to you because I think you've got some hidden gems of products that I'm sure a lot of listeners aren't familiar with yet, but I think they will become familiar with your products over time. And sometimes it's harder to be an incumbent in this industry when there's a couple big brands that tend to own a lot of the shelf space.

So really look forward to learning about your innovations and perhaps some of your go to market strategy and such.

Absolutely. Let me just get started by giving you a little more background on the company and myself. I've always been involved in the manufacturing space and right out of college, I went to work for a Pentair, a big manufacturer of pumps, filters, and heaters, and got involved in product development.

And if there's one thing that I truly love is just that, developing products. Working on hard, complicated solutions to everyday problems. It may not be a super sexy thing, like irrigation or pool equipment. But with Praxis, we've been able to develop a couple of unique patented products that save water, save money, and also divert plastic waste from our landfills.

And the Retro Regulator is one such product. And this came about at the height of the pandemic. We had just launched the H2OWISE brand in 2019 at the Las Vegas IA show and the world shut down. It was a unique experience going through that. And we continued working, we had a a product that had been we tested the concept, worked great.

And California was just going to mandated PRS. And when you look at the amount of sprinklers that are in the ground, just in the state of California, there are over 450 million that have zero pressure regulation in them for the most part. And when you extrapolate that through the entire United States, that number quickly rose as you can imagine.

We wanted to offer a solution that was easy for the pro contractor and also for a homeowner to be able to retrofit a product. Into an existing sprinkler already in the ground. There was born retro regulator. Several iterations. What was can I ask you, was this the first product that Praxis developed?

No. Which was first? So our water irrigation ring was the first product that we developed. And Praxis started as a OEM manufacturing company. So we do custom injection molding and custom design work for other large OEMs. Not just in the irrigation space, but also in the pool and spa industry.

So WaterWell was the first H2O wise branded product that we launched into the market in 2019. Okay. And when you say OEM, does that also like contract work? Let's say I've got a new widget that I want to make. Could I contact you to manufacture it? Exactly. Yes. You never know, I might be contacting you someday.

Yeah, give us a call. Okay, so you started with the water well, and from what I understand, that's like a drip ring? Yeah, it's an irrigation ring. It's designed to go around new and relatively new trees that are planted either on slopes, on parkways, and it includes a five GPH drip emitters and a non eroding well that goes around the tree.

We make them in a couple different sizes. And what it does is it allows for 100% water absorption right to that root ball, which is critical, as in the first year or two of growth to get that tree established and get those roots established. But also collects rainwater prevents erosion and runoff.

And like I said, 100% water absorption, no waste. Wow. Versus what would be the alternate? A dirt well. A dirt well with a bubbler. That's common practice that the landscape architects use. And dirt wells erode within six to 12 months. And as bubblers get clogged. They're not obviously sometimes not you can get 10 GPH and get five GPH out of them so they can be variable.

So ours is a fixed GPH and flow. Okay. And approximately what year did you come out with that product? That was 2019 at the IA show in Vegas. So right before the world shut down. And was that kind of the kickoff to the company was with that product? That was the kickoff to brand H2OI. Praxis has been around since 2017 doing that.

Okay. OEM injection molding and design work. And then you said during the pandemic is when you came out with the retro regulator. Exactly. Yeah, obviously we had a lot of free time and we were in the midst of the worst drought in Western States history. And we came up with the solution, literally in my garage, tinkering with things with sprinklers and made a few prototypes, put them in my yard, watched them run for about three to six months and we knew we had something.

Do you remember where you were or how you first had the idea for this? Yeah, I think I was actually cleaning out my garage the first couple of months of the pandemic because there was nothing else to do. And I came across some old sprinkler heads. We weren't allowed to water more than a couple of days a week.

And I found a few OEM heads that had this pressure regulation device in them. This is before the PRS mandate hit California. And I thought, wow, what a, what an idea. What a great idea to be able to regulate flow in each and every head and have even distribution. Now, what if I don't want to go spend eight or 9 for a new head?

I've got all these perfectly good heads. in the ground in my yard that worked great. What if we came up with a device that allowed you to retrofit your existing head? So you didn't have to throw away all that plastic and go buy a new one. And literally that's how it was born.

What type of sprinklers were you first experimenting with? Rain Bird 1800s. That's what I predominantly have in my yard. And I've got a few Hunter Pro Sprays that were put in as repairs. And what I'll do for those that are listening is I'll drop... Some links on the episode so you can click through and learn more about the retro regulator, but let's maybe you could just describe it the best that you can, for people listening since they can't see it and if they're not familiar with it, let's just describe it.

Yeah, absolutely. The regulator is about an inch and a quarter tall and it is designed to go in the flow tube or the riser of the sprinkler. What you do is you unscrew the cap, take out the guts. And literally with your thumb, press one of these into the riser of the sprinkler and it will radially seal on the inside diameter of the riser.

And there are certain engineering design criteria inside this device that allow you to set it at either 30 or 40 PSI. So it's going to reduce pressure and also restrict flow to give you that optimum rate that you need for these sprinklers, because really with a spray head, you don't need more than 30 PSI for your standard nozzle.

Your rotators, they like a little more 40, 45 PSI. And that was really the sweet spot we were trying to hit. And at the same time, it has a gasket with a secondary spring on the bottom of it that acts as a check valve. So for all those low head sprinklers that like to leak. This was another design feature that we put into the retro regulator and that actually complicated the design quite a bit.

Cause we've got a couple of independent things going on inside there and it made it very hard. To get the engineering and the flow just right. I can't wait to ask more questions about that. But what's so funny about, let's just say this industry is, doesn't matter which manufacturer, they're all essentially strange in the same way.

And that is that you take your base sprinkler and you have, four inch, six inch, 12 inch side inlet, right? But then if you take all those models and make it a 30 PSI. And then you take all those models and you make it a 40 PSI. Then you take all those models again, and you make a 30 PSI with check valve.

And then you make, and then you do a 40 PSI with check valve. You've just taken four skews and you've made it, I don't know the math, 36 different skews. When you have one skew that you can put into all of those sprinklers. And it just seems like a lot of the manufacturers today just have so many different skews that it's a waste of shelf space.

Yeah, and skew proliferation is one of the things that we looked at when we were designing this. All the different models from all the different OEMs. We have one device that will go in 85 to 90 percent of the sprinklers that are in the ground today with almost no digging. You really don't need a tool to do this.

As long as the head's clear, you just unscrew the cap, push one of these in the stem and reinstall it. Which brands of spray heads does it fit? We like to say everything except Toro, but it will go in your Rainbirds, your Hunters, your Weathermatics, your Erytrols, K Rain. It'll go in most of the orbits that you find in the mass merchants.

And there's some international ones that we sell to, overseas in Spain and Italy, it'll go into those as well. And so essentially what I'm guessing then is the interior diameter of all of those risers must be basically the same. Yeah, they're very close. No one is exactly the same, which is very interesting.

But they're close enough where we can make up the difference with our dual O rings. And our dual diameter at the top and the bottom of the retro regulator. Yeah, that's fascinating. So Toro, is Toro too big or too small? They're too narrow. Too narrow. And we have a design already in place for that. We have not pulled the trigger on tooling, but if there is a demand for it, we could have a market ready product in about three months.

Yeah. It's just fantastic. I don't know why other than people just not knowing that you exist, which is probably a part of it is that a lot of contractors don't know that you exist because I think if they did know that you existed, they would keep boxes of these on their service trucks and the service technicians should say to their client, would you like me to retrofit your sprinklers?

It's only X per sprinkler and it could be an easy like order bump. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And. When it comes to price at the contractor level, it's about 50% less than buying a brand new four inch with a check valve and a flow control device inside when you step up to the six and the 12 inches, the price difference is considerable or considerably less than a six or a 12 inch.

Yeah. And you can use the same head. You don't have to throw it out. Yep. And your nozzles already on there. It's it's just easy. Exactly. It would be great to know, maybe some of the barriers to entry that you've had to, or the hurdles you've had to jump through to get to where you are.

I would say the chief marketing hurdle that we have is just consumer awareness and education, making the contractor, making the homeowner aware that a product like this does exist. Because there's nothing like this for many of the big OEMs and not being a behemoth like some of these other guys, that's been our greatest challenge is to just to get the awareness of this product out to the market.

And while we're in all the major distributors you can't walk into every branch and see these on the counter. They need to be requested in a lot of places. We do have some stocking areas. We are doing some things with a couple mass merchants right now which is bearing some fruit. But I'd say marketing and just consumer awareness.

And I'm just sitting here thinking about some things while you're talking. And I'm wondering, there's probably some averages, let's say, contractor XYZ has said number of clients. Let's just say it's a thousand customers, residential customers or commercial. It actually, it doesn't matter.

And then of those clients, how many zones are typically sprays, and how many sprinklers is that? So if a contractor has a thousand customers, how many pop up sprinklers are under management, let's say for them. And if they retrofitted half of those with these, what kind of extra revenue could that bring to their business?

It's probably tens of thousands of dollars. It's huge. It's exponential. And the water savings you get with this as well. And the consumer is saving money. The payoff, the ROI is a lot quicker than replacing all the heads in a zone. So your typical residential zone has about what 10 heads on it. Three quarter inch pipe.

So you can literally retrofit a zone in about 30 minutes. So very quick, very efficient, no digging. And you've got a product that the contractor can make a lot of margin on and also offer a environmentally conscious friendly solution to saving water. Totally agree. Would you be willing to share a little bit about your patent process?

Yeah, absolutely. And I asked because something like this, I would imagine, and I'm just making an assumption here that the patent is probably important because. If it wasn't protected, then the big names that we all know would just all have it, and then you would just be basically squashed, potentially.

Yeah, absolutely. I've been involved in patent processes dating back to my pentair days when I was in my twenties. It's a very cumbersome a very expensive process. You usually need to elicit an attorney to help you with the filing, especially on things of this nature, where we have a, Huge addressable market potential.

So always when you're designing something new and unique like this, you're looking for features, you're looking for utility and design patents that you can file. And it's not just one, it's multiple things that are involved in this retro regulators. So when you file a patent, it's not just one thing could be 18 things.

With this one product our water irrigation ring has 22 different unique features to it. That makes it harder to engineer around and knock off. And the patent process itself takes years average, about two years from the time you file and your patent pending to the time you get.

That patent because the patent office will come back and say, Oh, we're going to deny this claim. You need to make this change. And those iterations cost thousands and thousands of dollars every time the patent office comes back to you. So the pandemic is lengthened that it's about three years now to get a patent.

And tens of thousands of dollars. Have you had to protect your patent yet? On the retro regulator? Yeah. Yeah. We have. Okay. How often do you a couple of things. How did you know you needed to protect it? Did you see a real product or do you monitor filings? How does that work? No. We, there, there are certain ways and certain methods you can that an attorney can monitor certain things.

I'm not going to go into those details, but yes, we obviously will heavily defend it. Thank you.

Any patent that we have. So let's talk. I want to keep talking about the, spray heads and pressure regulation, and I don't know a lot about the state mandates other than some of the states, let's just say in California, as you mentioned it, where you cannot buy a non pressure regulated sprinkler any longer.

Does this qualify for that? So great question. We are working with a lot of water districts right now to have this added on their rebate program. Thank you. We've made substantial headway in certain states where this is a rebate type item. However, when it comes to the WaterSense label and identification, since we do not make the entire sprinkler body we cannot file for that WaterSense label.

We can meet all of the... qualifications for it as far as a testing and performance goes, but we can't use that WaterSense label on this product. We make a PRS ShrubRiser that we just launched, and that ShrubRiser has a built in regulation device that is WaterSense certified because it is a complete unit with a housing and a regulator and you can put a nozzle on top.

Okay. We're actually actively working to change that legislation in the state. If, let's say there was a manufacturer of a sprinkler that didn't have a pressure regulated version, if they combined it with your this device, would that meet the requirement? Yes, and that's a great question. That would meet the requirement if they went through the CIT or WaterSense testing.

Okay. And let's say, again, I'm asking questions because I don't know the answers to these things. If we just take a box of 1800 sprinklers, today, and you're in California, you can't go in and buy a case of traditional 1800s. You can only get the PRS option. Would it be possible for Rainbird to sell a box of traditional sprinklers, but include You're welcome.

These retro regulators in a bag, in the box, where the user has to put it in, or must it be pre installed? Typically it needs to be pre installed. And that, again, just comes back to the WaterSense wording that they have in those regulations. But, yes, absolutely, you could install this in an existing separate.

Oh, FlowTube. Absolutely. I'll have to remember that. FlowTube. Is that the technical name for the bottom of the sprinkler? Yeah. They like to use that. Okay. I like to say riser. But some people... Yeah, riser. Yeah. I like to say FlowTube's the technical engineering lingo for that. Fascinating. There's not a lot of components in here, but there are a lot of them are small.

So I'm imagining that the manufacturing process has to be pretty darn precise because of the size of the different individual pieces. Yeah, we're dealing with some incredibly tight tolerances in this part, as you can imagine. And that was probably the most challenging thing from a manufacturing perspective is how could we build something like this, manufacture it, sell it, market it at a very competitive price.

Because we couldn't sell something like this for 9 a piece. It just wasn't going to sell. We had to make it, we had to incentivize it such that we were well below the cost of a new replacement head with all these items. I'm guessing it has to be hand assembled. There's probably not a machine that can put this thing together.

There are a few machine processes that we use. But it's a combination of human interaction and machine. Yeah. Cool. All right. What I wanted to ask you if there's any, again, as it relates to pressure regulation, are there any sort of common myths that you see out there that people, things that people think are true that aren't true?

A lot of people will just put a pressure regulation device back at their valve to solve the problem of. over spray and misting. And while that works, it's really not the best way to accomplish pressure reduction because you're going to have uneven spray at that first head versus your last head.

So really the most efficient way to do this, to get good coverage, to get equal distribution throughout your entire zone is to have in head pressure regulation. And every OEM will tell you the same thing. What the states are doing with the PRS mandates it's a really good thing. Because you're getting even uniform distribution, you're saving water, and you're preventing, misting and runoff and overspray.

A lot of people like to push back because the heads are more expensive. But, at the end of the day, it's a very good solution. I put this up on a test stand and I used, a pressure gauge on the riser under the nozzle to test the pressure and it locked right in on the pressure that you specified, which tells me that there isn't a pressure differential required and what a lot of people, contractors don't realize is that oftentimes when you regulate a valve, there is a pressure differential required.

So if you're shooting for 50 PSI and the incoming is 59, it won't regulate unless there's a 15 or other pressure differential to make it work. Yeah, that's correct. And yours is just fixes right in at the correct pressure. It took us about 18 months to get there, but we like to think we have a pretty good product.

Yeah. So if you had a crystal ball and you're like, okay, in the next two years, what would that look like for your business? We have a lot of other products in the pipeline right now. Some of which I can discuss others, which I can't discuss cause everything that we try to make for the most part is.

patentable. We do have other products that are just what I call me twos, but are all based around water conservation, like our sprayed a drip adapter, our PRS shrub risers. We've got some nozzle caps and some other plastic parts high volume. But we are working on a flow control device right now.

I can't go into great detail about it, but we see this really is the next A big requirement that states and will be implemented in building codes for outdoor irrigation. And it will be able to tie into all the controllers that are out there in the marketplace. But that's that one we've been working on now for about 12 months and we're getting close to having a product that we can show and talk about.

Very cool. I can't wait. That sounds like some technology. There is going to be technology. I can tell you there's going to be a bit of organic AI in it. And that's a new term that I've learned in the last year of it will be a learning type of cool. And it will be something that can retrofit into an existing system.

And that's something we try to look at when we set out to design new products. We're not going to be the guy that designs a new sprinkler or designs a new valve. We want stuff that can be readily accepted into existing irrigation systems with. Existing controllers and existing components from all the big manufacturers.

You can innovate faster, likely, than some of the bigger companies because you're set up to do that. Yeah, absolutely. I worked for a big company for seven years for Pentair and I was in the product development space for five of those seven years. So I'm well attuned to how long it takes and what kind of bureaucracy to deal with when you get to those large corporations and we've got a couple of secret weapons.

At Praxis, I like to call them and we like to move at speed and make decisions informed decisions, but rapidly with measured risk. Do you ever have any, let's say, user group feedback, get some contractors together, ask them what their pain points are, things like that.

Absolutely. And that's where some of this idea generation comes from. I have a very close friend that owns a very large. Commercial landscape maintenance company here in Southern California. And we use his projects and his guys is really a test bed and a product validation before we take something to the market and mass produce it.

That's absolutely critical. By the way, my yard just doesn't cut it, but when I get to a commercial property where there's hundreds or thousands of these things and we have scale, we can really see how it works and how it gets used and abused. Yeah, what's your go to market right now? Do you have reps? Do you direct sale?

How does that, how does your sales process work? Yeah, great question. So it's a hybrid model. We have independent sales reps in certain areas of the country, mainly West of the Rockies because that's where the greatest Need for water conservation is out right now. We're obviously open to expanding that eastward.

But we're, the low hanging fruit has been pretty much everything west of the Rockies. We do some stuff with with mass merchants, directly through Praxis. I've got a couple of account managers here that handle that. We're in a lot of the major distributors at this time which is a great a great place to be because we're able to reach those big, bright views and landscape developments of the world.

And then we do a little bit of online marketing, not a whole lot. A lot of this has been word of mouth once people start to use it, figure out that it works. But again that's expanding as we expand our product line. And I like how you said people start using it once they've realized it works.

Is there speculation when someone tries it for the first time that it might not work? Yeah, absolutely. Because they wonder why a Rainbird or a Hunter or a Toro hasn't come out with something like this. Who are you guys? Yeah. And, why do you think that is? I think it's just goes back to the old fallback position of everybody's comfortable with what is already being done in the industry.

As far as innovative and disruptive products go, there haven't been a whole lot in irrigation in the last 20 or 30 years. I agree. And we try to look at things from a very disruptive because we are not embedded with any special interests or, we really not beholden to any shareholders, so to speak.

So we can look at things differently than some of these other big companies can. And we like to look at it from a very innovative and disruptive position. Do you think that some of these bigger companies Have to operate from a bit of a defensive place like essentially not yeah They could do it this way, but then that might cannibalize another part of their business So they don't because they don't want like one new innovation to suck profit out of an existing business channel Absolutely 100% and I think that's why that you haven't seen anybody else try to create a product like this But again all these big guys they make great products I'm not here to knock anybody.

I want our retro regulator going to everybody's sprinkler, right? Regardless of what your name is. And I've got 20 year old 1800 series heads and pro sprays in my yard that are still working. I've replaced the nozzle a few times and maybe this spring, but they all have retro regulators and they perform.

So that goes to show you that. Yeah. They're good products. Fascinating. I was going to just give you the floor again to if there's anything that you would like to share or that you think people should know or new parts of someone's business that this could unlock, do you have any sort of words of wisdom?

Oh, geez. I've been at this a long time. I don't want to get philosophical on everybody here, but this is the fifth company that I've owned. This was started By myself and another partner with money out of our own pockets and designed made here in the USA. And the American dream is still alive.

It's a little harder to get to right now, but it's still alive and well here. And I think that there's a lot of irrigation contractors out there big and small that can look at a product like this and realize that they can grow their business, that they can take this to their. Existing user base, customer base and upsell them very easily.

And there's very little labor involved when it comes to installing these and the ROI is, so I would just encourage everybody to, to look, obviously look at the product. Thank you for your blessings on this as well. And realize that we have, we have a winner here and it just takes a couple of guys to start using these and the word spreads.

And this is a great conversation piece. What you hear a lot is that the prices are going down, competitors. It's a very, it's a very tough market. You have these guys, it's tough to compete. Prices are going down. And I think that. That's always been the case, right? As for as long as you're, as anyone's ever in business, it's always a competition.

It depends on how you want to position yourself, right? And what your strategy is. And I'm a big fan of having conversations with your customers. Asking questions, educating them, and even bringing something like this retro regulator just to the table and saying, Hey we offer these. This is what it does.

If you're, if a competition's not doing that, you look more like an expert. You know what you're doing. You're looking out for the best interest of the customer, whether they choose it or not, I think just adding something like this to the conversation will help your business. A hundred percent. And there are a lot of guys out there now in the irrigation industry, they're using social media.

They're using Instagram reels to to showcase their, the jobs they're doing, the repairs they're doing. And something like this could be a great tool for them to showcase. An alternative to replacing the entire sprinkler head. Very cool. Thank you, Kevin. I guess my last question would be if somebody wants to reach out to you to learn more and, or they've got an idea for something and they want to, share that with you, how could they contact you?

Absolutely. You can contact me by email directly. Kevin at praxis, mfg. com or info at praxis, mfg. com. You can also follow us on social media at H2O wise. We do regular postings of products videos how to guides, things of that nature. But we're happy to entertain and that we're very responsive.

We're a small company but we're very responsive and we like to move fast and develop unique and disruptive products for the marketplace. Fantastic. Thanks so much for sharing the back office information on the retro regulator. And I look forward to continuing to watch you guys grow.

Pretty awesome. So thank you. Thank you for having us on your show and I look forward to chatting with you more.