The Supplier's Perspective: Partnering for Progress with Matt Clemson, Oldcastle Infrastructure, USA

[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange 15 minute podcast, in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, inform, and educate other water sector leaders from around the globe.
[00:00:10] Piers Clark: My name is Piers Clark and my guest today is Matt Clemson from Oldcastle in the United States.
[00:00:18] Piers Clark: Matt, brilliant to have you speak to us.
[00:00:20] Matt Clemson: Awesome to be here, Piers. Thank you for having me, really great to be here.
[00:00:24] Piers Clark: This is a really special podcast 'cause to date, we've really only spoken to executives who are utility leaders, and this time we're going the other side of the wall. We're going the other side of the divide.
[00:00:36] Piers Clark: We're talking to a leader of a big business, and I know you prefer us not to say just how big it is, but it is one of the biggest infrastructure providers in the United States serving the water sector, Oldcastle. And to hear what it's like being on this side of the fence and the journey you are taking your business on.
[00:00:53] Piers Clark: But before we get into that topic, we always like to start by learning a little bit about our speaker. So take me through your history. How did you get into the role you are into today?
[00:01:04] Matt Clemson: I'm Matt Clemson, division president for our national solutions business at Oldcastle Infrastructure. What does that mean in practice? Well if I were to simplify it, I would say if it touches water, energy or telecommunications, you can be pretty sure my team is probably losing sleep over it. So, I've spent most of my career in building products and in the infrastructure world. I guess that glamorous intersection of concrete and pipe and grit.
[00:01:33] Matt Clemson: Before Old Castle, I was at various different roles in the infrastructure and building products world. From strategy and development to finance and supply chain, and a few things there in between.
[00:01:46] Matt Clemson: Today I oversee a large infrastructure division, 30 plus operating sites, 2,400 employees, all of whom live, breathe, sleep the passion that we have for improving water infrastructure and somehow despite all that, my kids still think I just pour concrete for a living.
[00:02:04] Piers Clark: Excellent. What I love there is when you talk to executives and utilities, they often talk with that same sort of hunger and passion around, you know, I lose sleep at night worrying about the assets, and you are doing exactly the same on the supplier side. The way you described that was if it touches water, then there's someone in my team who's thinking about it, worrying about it, trying to work out what the next step is.
[00:02:25] Piers Clark: Now, you also said pouring concrete, that's traditionally what Oldcastle's done. You've been big in pipes, but you are on a journey. The business is evolving as the world is changing. Talk me through a bit of that and some of the challenges and opportunities that throws up.
[00:02:39] Matt Clemson: That's exactly right. So, for those who don't know Oldcastle Infrastructure, we connect and protect the world's most critical utility infrastructure from the source to the consumer. It's across three really key markets: water, energy, and telecommunications.
[00:02:55] Matt Clemson: But in water, we provide infrastructure from the curb stop at your house into the wastewater treatment plant, and every mile in between there. And I think people traditionally think of us as a concrete pipe and a precast company. And yes, we build a lot of that. We're certainly a leader in that, but over the last several years, we've expanded into full water lifecycle solution.
[00:03:20] Matt Clemson: So, today we're providing water transmission solutions like pipes, manholes, fittings, catch basins, meter boxes. Those things that collect, convey, connect our infrastructure. We also provide water treatment solutions, media filtration, hydrodynamic separation, grit removal, deep infiltration, those things that capture and clean water.
[00:03:45] Matt Clemson: Now, we're starting to layer in a digital element with smart solutions through things like leak detection or digital monitoring or predictive analytics. And it's all because we're being asked to solve deeper problems for utilities and the way we do that is by making the invisible visible through those digital solutions.
[00:04:08] Piers Clark: And I want to talk more about the digital, but I actually just wanna make sure we take everyone on this journey, because you've been doing the collection systems, which traditionally it doesn't feel very exciting.
[00:04:17] Piers Clark: Collection systems, they're not even under pressure. What are you worrying about that It's easy? It's a pipe that goes from the house to the sewage works. Why do I need to worry about it? And actually it's got far more complicated and there's quite a lot of solutions that are required there. And when you are talking about grit chambers, those are inside the utility fence. You are selling those to the wastewater operator on site or that's the things inside the system or both?
[00:04:41] Matt Clemson: Yeah, it's actually both. And you're exactly right. Yes, we started in the collection in the conveyance world and what we figured out pretty quickly, and actually, our heritage, even just as short as a decade ago was kind of a narrowly focused, product oriented company, focused in the drainage space.
[00:04:58] Matt Clemson: And what we figured out was that the problems our end customers are facing are increasingly interconnected across the water cycle, stormwater, waste water, clean water. And we also realized that our end asset owners didn't really care what we thought about ourselves. We may have said we were a concrete company but that didn't do anything to solve their problem.
[00:05:22] Matt Clemson: So we quickly started thinking about the world through their lens, thinking about the world through the challenges they were trying to solve. And so what we recognized was this world between treatment and transmission was becoming increasingly interconnected. And if we were going to help solve some of those problems in a deeper way, a more critical way for them, we were gonna have to bring those two worlds together. And so that's how we've shaped our solutions today.
[00:05:51] Piers Clark: That all sounds brilliant, but I want some examples. I want something that's gonna make that come alive. Which is always a bit cheeky because that's where you go, oh my God. I've now gotta give an example that actually justifies the point I've just made.
[00:06:01] Piers Clark: But can you give me an example to justify those points?
[00:06:04] Matt Clemson: How much time do you have? I could give you example after example but here's a recent one.
[00:06:10] Matt Clemson: City of Haley, Idaho small town population about 10,000. They were losing water, but they didn't really know how much or where. It turns out they were losing about 59 million gallons of water a year. That's not a leak, that is a part-time river. But like most communities, they really didn't have the budget to dig up half the town looking for it.
[00:06:35] Piers Clark: So this was non-revenue water. This is water being lost from the supply side, not from the collection side.
[00:06:40] Matt Clemson: That is exactly right. I talked a little bit about digitally enabling our infrastructure and the platform that we've created to do that we call CivilSense AI driven leak detection system. So, acoustic sensors, pressure, modeling digital twin of their network. We found 22 previously undetected leaks, many completely invisible from the surface.
[00:07:04] Matt Clemson: And so for a utility and for a city like Haley, that's peace of mind. That's budget relief, that's resilience. It's a great example of how we used to be the pipe people and now we're helping utilities avoid unnecessary pipe replacement. It's maybe a bit of a strange business model when you think about it, but it's absolutely the right one to solve utility and city problems.
[00:07:28] Piers Clark: Brilliant. It's really interesting because you've gone from being simple contractors to being much more intelligent, much more informed, much more delivering, wearing the shoes of your clients and putting in place solutions that work.
[00:07:40] Piers Clark: How have the clients responded? How much have they gone "You know what, you are infringing onto our job, we do that"?
[00:07:45] Piers Clark: Or how much have they welcomed you in and said "Thank the Lord that you are doing this"?
[00:07:50] Matt Clemson: I really think it's way more the latter because what we found through talking to them and through better understanding what it is they're solving is that they don't need somebody to drop off a product. They don't need somebody to drop off a grit separator or a pipe.
[00:08:06] Matt Clemson: What they need is somebody involved from the early stages around problem discovery, the early stages around feasibility and design of the challenge they're trying to face, to somebody who can be involved every step of the way.
[00:08:20] Matt Clemson: Somebody who can help navigate the regulatory landscape, the design and engineering upfront, all the way through manufacturer and installation. And then increasingly it's, "okay, you're the expert on this product or this infrastructure. How do we maintain it?"
[00:08:37] Piers Clark: Yeah. The best people to know how to run your product are gonna be the people that have designed this.
[00:08:41] Piers Clark: Now I'm gonna ask a slightly different question of what, bearing in mind the audience listening to this are mostly utility executives, what behaviors do you like to see from the utilities that make the job of helping them easier?
[00:08:55] Matt Clemson: That's a good question. A couple things that I think are most helpful and allow us to be even more of a critical partner and bring even more high performance answers to some of those challenges to them.
[00:09:07] Matt Clemson: One, bring us in earlier, the earlier you bring us in around understanding and scoping the problem that you're trying to solve, the more and more we can bring to bear expertise and experience solving these problems. It's not just products for us, it's how we bring all of those things to bear and the earlier we're involved the better.
[00:09:28] Matt Clemson: And I'd say the second piece of it is, give us the details. The more we can understand the very specific challenges and some of the nuances of those challenges, we can help, I think, pretty uniquely solve some of those challenges.
[00:09:42] Piers Clark: There's definitely a thing about sharing the vision of what does success look like?
[00:09:46] Piers Clark: What is it we're shooting for so that we all know when we can pat ourselves in the back of a good job done?
[00:09:51] Matt Clemson: I'll give you another example maybe that'll help bring this to life a little bit. So, I talked a little bit about grit in a wastewater treatment plant setting.
[00:10:00] Matt Clemson: Lake Illinois, they had an older grit system capturing maybe 10%. The rest was going downstream, tearing apart equipment. And so basically every day, they were pumping sandpaper through their facility.
[00:10:14] Matt Clemson: So we retrofitted the plant with an integrated upstream primary treatment system. The new treatment system is capturing roughly 88% of the grit with individual components, capturing over 90% of that. So that means lower maintenance, longer equipment life, more predictable performance, and all without rebuilding the entire plant.
[00:10:38] Piers Clark: The bit I like there most is " It's capturing roughly 88%". That was quite precise. Roughly 88%.
[00:10:46] Piers Clark: Now, you teased me earlier with, we've got some AI solutions. I've gotta ask, how do we get AI in a collection system? Give me an example of AI being used in the pipe network.
[00:10:58] Matt Clemson: So we are using machine learning-based sensors and software in a variety of places throughout water infrastructure and that may surprise you. Yes, it's being used.
[00:11:10] Matt Clemson: We're using AI and machine learning around predictive failure as well. It's not enough to just know that, hey, we should go put sensors on 10% of our infrastructure network. You've gotta know which 10% of your infrastructure network to go put the sensors on if you want those to be effective. And as part of our CivilSense platform, we now have a predictive failure capability that is AI based as well, that is able to pinpoint these parts of your infrastructure network are where you need to go actually place acoustic sensors. So there are some really interesting ways that AI is being used today.
[00:11:50] Piers Clark: That was really good. If you can get an understanding of the asset condition through AI and predictive analytics, that would be brilliant.
[00:11:58] Piers Clark: Matt, it's brilliant hearing the passion you've got and the technical insight from the supplier side and also that sort of call to the utilities to meet you halfway. Share as much knowledge as possible because that same passion that they have for their business, you share.
[00:12:15] Piers Clark: Whenever I meet anyone in the water sector, whether they're on the utility side or on the supplier side, they're usually driven by the same passion, and that is serving the communities that they live in, making sure that they've turned the taps on and water comes out, they flush the toilets and the effluent goes away. It's brilliant to see.
[00:12:33] Piers Clark: So we're coming to the end of our time together, and I like to finish with the question of what would you do if you could go back 20 years? Would you still be on this side of the fence or would you have gone on the asset owner side?
[00:12:44] Piers Clark: Take me back 20 years and you don't look very old, so I'm assuming 20 years ago you were 10.
[00:12:50] Matt Clemson: Boy, that is the nicest thing that anybody has said to me all week, Piers. Thank you.
[00:12:54] Matt Clemson: 20 years ago, I could have never imagined myself in this role. I would've never thought that I'd be responsible for a division managing effluent to treating effluent and ensuring the clean water gets to the places and the people that it needs to get to. I am beyond fortunate, I am beyond lucky to be doing what I'm doing and finding real passion and purpose like our 2,400 people do every single day for what we do.
[00:13:22] Matt Clemson: If I were to give myself some advice two decades ago, I'd tell myself to be more curious. I think the best leaders out there in any industry aren't the ones with the answer. They're the ones asking the questions that other people are often afraid to ask or just don't think about asking.
[00:13:42] Matt Clemson: I think that's a unique part of where we are actually in the water industry too. The way we are developing new, innovative solutions and it doesn't matter if it's on the product side, it doesn't matter if it's on the service side. It doesn't matter if it's in the digital and technology side. But the way we deliver new solutions to solve these really, really challenging problems that the industry is facing is by being curious.
[00:14:09] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark and my guest today has been Matt Clemson from Oldcastle, and we've been having a little exploration as to what it's like on the supplier side of the utility-supplier relationship.
[00:14:24] Piers Clark: Hope you can join us next time. Thank you.