Eddy McLeod and Eddyvision Lightning Talk podcast with Jim Panton, Managing Director of Panton McLeod

[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to this special edition to one of our Executive Exchange podcasts, today I am talking with a fellow podcaster, Jim Panton.
[00:00:10] Piers Clark: Jim, good to meet with you.
[00:00:11] Jim Panton: Morning Piers, great to be on here.
[00:00:13] Piers Clark: Give me a little bit about who you are, who you work for.
[00:00:16] Jim Panton: I'm Jim Panton. I'm the managing Director of Panton McLeod. Been in the industry since 2011 when I took over from my father. And we've been on a journey in the last, 12 to 14 years, growing a medium sized business working in the drinking water side looking after treated water storage and some treatment work, assets, inspections and cleaning and robotic activities in that field. Building up to us being acquired last February by the Stonbury Group.
[00:00:42] Piers Clark: Congratulations on being acquired. I hope that goes well.
[00:00:45] Jim Panton: Thank you very much. Yeah.
[00:00:46] Piers Clark: Now, one of the things you've been doing is these things called Lightning Talks. They're many short podcasts, which are for operators in particular with an operational focus.
[00:00:56] Piers Clark: So tell me a bit more about these Lightning Talks. Why did you start them? What are you covering?
[00:01:01] Jim Panton: Being a small business, we were always struggling a little bit to get our message out to the industry and we ended up stumbling into some YouTube videos probably nearly 10 years ago now, just promoting who we are and what we do.
[00:01:14] Jim Panton: We invented our mascot, Eddy McLeod. My father's side of the business Panton McLeod, but there was never a McLeod involved. There was a friend briefly who didn't get involved in the business, so McLeod never existed, and people always asked who is the McLeod in Panton McLeod? And eventually we brought our mascot in who was an elephant called Eddy McLeod to write an answer for that question.
[00:01:33] Jim Panton: So Eddy McLeod then became a channel for media and marketing called Eddyvision. And we started doing some videos and then we started doing some live events. And in those live events, we did regular kind of presentations, but we also did 10 minute rapid fire, lightning talk presentations.
[00:01:49] Jim Panton: The next iteration now is podcasts. We're trying our hand at that and the Eddyvision Lightning Talk podcast is our operationally focused chat with operators in the water industry every two weeks.
[00:02:01] Piers Clark: Excellent. I've known you for a long time, I never realized that there wasn't a McLeod and that the elephant that you've created was merely a fiction. I feel I've been cheated.
[00:02:10] Piers Clark: So you've just touched on it there the podcasts are short, sharp with an operational focus, correct?
[00:02:16] Jim Panton: Absolutely. In the industry, if we go to conferences, if we go to events, if you read industry magazines and publications everything tends to be very strategic. It's all about the regulatory funding cycle. It's all about the kind of 2050 challenges that we all face.
[00:02:31] Jim Panton: Let's face it, we all recognize that and those are important, but actually I, because we are a small business, we operate right at the pointy end, let's call it in the operational field.
[00:02:40] Jim Panton: I sometimes feel the biggest challenges not necessarily at the strategic end, they're at the delivery end. You've got operators running assets that are on their knees. That we know there's underfunding, we've talked about that at strategic levels for years and years.
[00:02:55] Jim Panton: But the real implication of it is, it's a bit like having your car that's breaking down and you don't have the time or maybe the money or the service garage isn't available and you're limping around in your car that's about to break down and you're doing everything you can to keep it going without it actually stopping until you can finally get that chance to do the service that it needs.
[00:03:14] Jim Panton: Sometimes we find that the people we're helping operationally are in that kind of a world where the treatment plant is, just about on limits and they're just doing everything they can to keep it going. And there's some really interesting stories in.
[00:03:25] Jim Panton: And obviously we work in that field quite a bit, so that's what we're gonna try and draw out in some of these discussions.
[00:03:31] Piers Clark: Excellent. Well, I wish you the very best with it. It sounds fascinating and I'm delighted to help spread the word because as you say, people entering the industry need to have access to some of the knowledge, which is unfortunately leaving the industry.
[00:03:45] Piers Clark: So it's brilliant.
[00:03:46] Piers Clark: Thank you for sharing it and good luck.
[00:03:49] Jim Panton: Thank you very much for having us on and love your podcast too.