Summary

This week on The Red Bucket, we are joined by Tanner Brooks of Peak Industrial Coatings & Linings. We discuss the subtle differences of applying a diverse range of industrial coatings in varying types of facilities. Join us as we cover the challenges associated with coating technologies and service environments. All of that and more coming up next on The Red Bucket.

Timestamps

Click to follow along with the transcript:

•  0:00 - Intro
•  1:28 - Introduction to Tanner Brooks and Peak Industrial Coatings & Linings
•  4:32 - Working in Diverse Markets
•  9:16 - The Importance of Education in the Coatings Industry
•  10:07 - Surface Preparation and Providing Value
•  12:09 - Applying Coatings Without Causing Facility Downtime
•  14:43 - Tanner's Favorite Industries to Work In
•  15:28 - The Challenges of New Construction
•  17:41 - Secondary Containment Applications
•  20:04 - Tank Lining Applications
•  21:55 - Unique Challenges in the Coatings Industry
•  23:07 - Writing Specifications
•  25:00 - Saponification
•  26:24 - Why It's Not Just Paint
•  28:14 - Safety Considerations in the Coatings Industry
•  29:15 - "The Four Questions" [Non-Technical]
•  31:28 - "Tech Tips"
•  32:28 - Closing Remarks

Transcript

Intro

Jack Walker: Welcome to another edition of The Red Bucket. Here we are in sunny Louisville. I said it wrong. That's how you know I'm not from Louisville.

Paul Atzemis: Louisville.

Jack: Yeah. Yeah. You've got to slur.

Paul: Put a mouthful of meatballs, and you try to say it.

Jack: So, anyway, we said we were going to bring this thing on the road. We were going to come out and meet people in the industry. And here we are. We got on the road, drove on over. So, we drove over this morning. So, if we're a little road weary, maybe you'll pick up on that, but probably not. We bring energy to this thing, Paul.

Paul: That's right. If we can keep your mouth off the microphone over there.

Jack: What, you don't want me to rub my beard on this some more?

Paul: No, I don't.

Introduction to Tanner Brooks and Peak Industrial Coatings & Linings

Jack: All right. So, today we have an interesting perspective coming on the show. We have a contractor coming on. But as you guys see, as we talk to Tanner, you'll hear just this wealth of knowledge that comes from him. And his expertise really isn't pigeonholed into one area of our industry. He really has a wide breadth of knowledge. And so that's one of the reasons why we wanted to bring him on the show.

Paul: Absolutely. The discussions that we've had leading up to this have really opened up the eyes of what it is a real world, somebody out doing the work, using our products, using specifications that are written, how that applies to what people are using. So, it's a great thing to be able to bring it to the audience like this.

Jack: Well, let's stop beating around. Let's welcome him in. We have Tanner Brooks with Peak Industrial Coatings. Hey, Tanner, welcome to the show.

Tanner Brooks: Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me.

Paul: All right. So, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Tell us about Peak Industrial. Where'd you come from? How long have you been around? What kind of stuff you work in? Just kind of top-level view, so the audience gets to know you a little bit.

Tanner: Sure. Tanner Brooks. Peak Industrial Coatings. We serve the Louisville, Kentucky, area. We do high-performance coatings for industrial customers. I'm the fourth generation. My great-grandfather started the business when he came home from World War II. And my grandfather and him incorporated it in 1962. So, back at that time, from what I understand, there was about fourteen different paint companies headquartered in the city of Louisville, is the story as I understand it. And I wish I could remember exactly which one, but my grandfather tells a story of one of the owners of one of those paint companies having a newfangled paint called epoxy. And he said, "I want you to come in and paint the Bernheim Distillery." And at that time, my grandfather and my great-grandfather painted houses primarily. And so, his dad looked at him and said, "What have you done? You've sunk the business." They went in, they started using epoxy throughout the distillery, and that job lasted for, from what I understand, well over a year. They went industrial and never went back. So, we used to be the Kimmel Painting Company. And in about 1996, my dad bought it from his father-in-law, my grandfather, and changed the name to Peak Industrial Coatings.

Jack: That's awesome. So, you guys have been around for a while doing this?

Tanner: We have been, yeah.

Paul: And you've got a really great market segment here. You've got a lot of diverse industry, a lot of different applications and exposures that you come into. So, being an industrial painter in this kind of an atmosphere really lends to a lot of different exposures and experiences that you can bring and grow on.

Tanner: Sure. Yeah, that's exactly right. So, within our area, our goal is to serve the local owners and those industrial clients by being able to do anything and everything coatings related in a facility. We do walkways to handrails to secondary containments to tank linings, high-heat coatings. All the surface prep required there within. And roof coatings, fireproof coatings, anything from A to Z, we try to take care of it for our customers.

Working in Diverse Markets

Jack: Well, and I think that's really interesting, too, because a lot of the times within our industry, when people hear industrial coatings, they automatically go to oil and gas. And there's not just an oil field on every corner in Louisville. So, you have to be diversified in order to keep the crews going. Not travel, I'm assuming, but I'm assuming you guys do travel. So, tell us a little bit about what you guys had to do to diversify and what markets you guys play in. I know Food & Beverage is a big one, but go ahead and tell us.

Tanner: Yeah, Food & Beverage is big around here. A lot of distilleries, but there's also a lot of chemical plants in the area. There's a lot of power plants in the area. So, those are home to us. Manufacturing. There's steel plants up and down the river. So, every day I get to tell people it's like the Discovery show How It's Made. I get to go into these different facilities and see from A to Z. I'm a certified coal miner, worked on surface coal mines, and then got to see the coal brought down the river to take it off to the power plants. Get to see the seal plants next door, where they draw all the energy from, and the drywall plants pulling the gypsum from them. And then, you get to go into a food plant the next day and see biscuits or pancakes or anything like that.

Paul: So, you didn't get to wear the same clothes for both days, did you?

Tanner: No, I try not to. In fact, my wife asked me not to wear the same clothes inside the house either most days.

Jack: So, you have that basket right outside the back door. "Honey, before you come inside." Well, and that's interesting because I feel that way too. One of the things that I get excited about is I used to work in Tech Service with Paul, and I would get sent to job sites a little bit more frequently. And I was always more excited when it was something cool being made. I got to go see some wind blades being made up in Iowa. And you really have no idea how long those things are until you're standing there looking at this hundred-foot-long blade for a windmill to create power. So, I always found that thing to be interesting. So, you just said that one day you're in a coal mine, the next day, you're in a food & beverage plant. Can't be the same. Got to be a different approach. Got to be a different approach, not only from how you handle the job from the beginning, talking with the specifier, whether that's the owner or the engineer on site, to even how you execute the job has got to be different. Can we talk a little bit about some of the differences between these markets? They're all plants, but what do you notice that's different there?

Tanner: Yeah. So, before I would even say the differences, what are the similarities? And the big similarities are that we've got to know safety. And my guys, that's really what we've become an expert in. We've got to know safety in every single facility we walk into. Because those things are always the same. And you got to know surface prep because that's pretty much always the same. And then we've got to be professionals at reading data sheets because every day, the coating's going to change what we're working on. And so, we've got to be ready to be able to jump to different things. But with a wide variety of atmospheres, you're talking about different humidity ranges. You're talking about cure times that you got to watch out for. You're talking about needing to know whether or not customers can handle VOCs in certain areas. You're talking about, "Can they just handle the dust that comes with sandblasting or certain types of surface preparation?" Or knowing that when I go into a certain facility, VOCs or not, they want to smell anything about paint. So, you need to know what your customers are looking for, but trying to understand, from their perspective, what their goal is that they need to be accomplished at the end of it, why are they asking for coatings in the first place, is really the key because we're just there to solve a problem. And that problem can change from one place to another. But primarily, it's slowing down corrosion on steel and concrete.

Paul: And that's a really good point of you're there to solve a problem, and you need to understand the need because people are really surprised when they'll call into tech service or something and ask, "Why are you painting it? What is your goal?" "My goal is to paint it." "No. But what are you trying to accomplish with this? Is this something you just want it to look pretty for a little while? Or is there a corrosion problem going on in this area that really needs to be addressed?" And it may take more than just a coat of paint to fix that. And the depth at which that needs to be done, you really have to have a good understanding of what the expectations are, and the customers have to have an understanding of what's entailed to get to their expectations. So, I would add to the other list of things that you guys do—education.

The Importance of Education in the Coatings Industry

Paul: You have to educate your customers, which is from our side, as a manufacturer, we talk with you and try to give the tools that you need. You're the one going to the customers and saying, "Yep. Here's what we're going to need to do to solve this problem."

Tanner: Sure. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, for a lot of guys within our industry, you think about water tower painters. I mean, you don't have to explain what you're getting into with every water tower because they're pretty much the same. For a lot of our customers, when we tell them, when they say, "We need a tank relined," it might be the first time they've ever seen that process in their facility. And for a lot of them, it might be the last time until they retire that they ever see a tank lined. So, what's the expectation around dust? What's the expectation around turnaround time and return to service, and what's that process look like from A to Z? And we've got to be able to really explain it and explain the value behind it, too.

Jack: Yeah. There's a lot there.

Surface Preparation and Providing Value

Jack: As coatings guys, I always think about the actual installation of the coating and the problems that it creates, and sometimes it's really easy to forget about the surface prep, and, yeah, we would all skip it if we could. Right? Nobody wants to do surface prep. Everybody hates it. But yeah, it does create problems of its own just trying to execute the surface prep. And I imagine, if you're in one plant compared to another, it makes all the difference in the world for what you're allowed to create with your surface prep.

Tanner: Yep. Completely true. So, surface preparation is huge. And what do facilities have a stomach for? Because you want to follow the data sheet perfectly, right? I mean, I'm sitting here with Carboline. I want to do exactly everything you guys say perfectly on every single data sheet. And so that always means that we blast things to a white metal blast. And it also means that when we apply the paint, the humidity's always at 50% and…

Paul: 75° Fahrenheit.

Tanner: You got it. In Louisville, Kentucky, that's always the weather conditions.

Jack: How do you bring the lab with you?

Tanner: That's our job. That's what they pay us for. Yeah. But so real world says we've got to go off that sometimes. Right? So, how do we provide a value for our customers? So, maybe they can't handle sandblasting in their facility in order to coat the steel or the pipe rack or wherever. You talk about being in a food plant or wherever it is. So, okay, so what's the next best thing, and how do we provide a good value to them? And a lot of times, it's figuring out what good, better, best looks like for them. And it's interesting because a lot of times good, better, best, really winds up being the exact same coating. But it's three different levels of surface preparation because we know that surface preparation is the key, and it's the biggest part of what they're paying for when they pay for a job from us.

Paul: Or they may be in a situation where it's, "Well, I can only tolerate the time it takes for two coats of paint." Or one coat of paint. And that can be another deviation to the normal process might be, "I have to speed things along."

Tanner: Yep. That's exactly it.

Applying Coatings Without Causing Facility Downtime

Jack: Do you find that universally when you guys do come in for a job now, obviously, if this was a floor, the answer to this question is obvious, but I mean, I would think in a food & beverage plant, work would shut down in the general vicinity of where you're working. Are there other places that you go into where that maybe isn't necessarily true?

Tanner: Sure. Yeah, there's a lot of places, and in fact, that's one of our big selling points with a lot of different types of manufacturing or power plants. We can continue working for certain types of projects without the plant having any downtime around them whatsoever. Now obviously, that depends on the type of work. Is the piece of equipment, the pipeline, is it on, is it running? What temperatures is it running? But for a lot of work in and around a facility, coatings work that provides additional longevity and maintenance to a facility can be done while they're still online. So, it can be a huge value to a customer. But again, it greatly depends on what we're talking about. Are we talking about a tank lining? Obviously, we've got to be down for that, and we're getting into pretty strict procedures. But if we're talking about keeping a pipe rack up and going, that can be done while they're online, which can be a huge savings back to the manufacturer or the facility that we're working in.

Paul: And I'm sure a lot of it comes down to the tolerances of, say, a distillery or a food manufacturing location. I mean, we were talking about a place making pancakes or biscuits is going to be very different than a facility like we're in today, which deals in chemicals. They make pigments. They deal with these kinds of technologies already. So, those smells are already in the air. Those exposures, they're already used to that. So, it's not something that's going to get carried over into their products.

Tanner: No, but it can get carried over into ours. We had one facility we work in that makes a curing additive for coatings. And as we were working and our coating was popping off in about the second brush stroke or the third roller mark, and our brushes and our rollers were drying onto I-beams, we realized that what was getting released from their product in the air was actually force-curing our coatings while we were applying it.

Jack: That's a neat trick.

Tanner: So, there can always be some unique circumstances in everything that we go into.

Paul: Man, that thought process, I mean, we've seen…

Jack: Moisture do it.

Paul: Right. And we've seen like silicones are notorious for that, where they may travel and overspray into separate parts of a facility. But I've never seen it with a curing agent. Whole new aspect for tech service now.

Tanner's Favorite Industries to Work In

Jack: With that being said, if you had to pick, which one of these industries would you be your favorite to work in?

Tanner: That's a hard question. Well, I'm from Louisville, and I guess the first pick would be distilleries because people drink when they're excited, and they drink when they're bummed. So, it's a recession proof industry. And it's a lot of fun when you get to tell stories about the different plants and facilities you've worked in. But truth be told, the chemical industry in Louisville is a healthy industry, and it's got a lot of needs that are very unique, very challenging, very rewarding, and they're just ongoing and regular. And so, we love getting the opportunity to serve those folks on a day-in and day-out basis. And our guys are pretty good at it.

The Challenges of New Construction

Paul: So, we understand the favorite ones or the popular ones. Those are the ones that everybody loves. But, at the same time, there's a tremendous amount of things being built all over the place that add their own level of nuance and difficulties. Can you tell us a little bit maybe about how new construction? How do you deal with that? What do you work with? How is it working in a large group?

Tanner: Sure. New construction provides its own challenges for sure, and the biggest one is that everything's on a deadline, right? It's all going to be done, and it's all going to be done while you coexist with other contractors in the area. And for some reason, electricians never like the painters. That is just real world. But it's not just electricians. Painting provides a unique challenge. When everything that people are working around, they get some wet paint on them or the smells that come from it. And realistically, we know when we look at a data sheet, you just can't put everything in a box. It can't always fit into the schedule that a contractor or new facility needs it to fit into. And so, there's a lot of conflicting priorities to manage when you deal with new construction. And sometimes, the best quality is not always what wins out. It's just trying to get a job done and getting it done in and out. And so, that can be a challenge.

Paul: So, when I first got into sales, my first sales manager told me, "One of the things you always have to be ready for with new construction specifically is the project will be over budget, off schedule and late, and usually out of money, and they expect the painter to make up all of those differences. So, be ready for everything to change constantly."

Tanner: Yeah, that's exactly right. To be honest, new construction's a fantastic part of our business, but for us, we're fortunate to say it's a pretty small part of our business. And I say fortunate because I love the opportunity to go in and work with owners directly and, like we said at the beginning, solve problems. And so, we've had customers that say, look, "EPA stopped by. I need help with a secondary containment." And I don't want to follow the EPA, but I sure do want to be able to help out folks with a secondary containment. That's what we do. I'm happy to be able to help out. Tell me about your chemicals you use because we've got some great teams behind us when I call you guys and our sales rep to say, "Here's what we can use to meet your needs."

Secondary Containment Applications

Jack: Let's explain what secondary containment is.

Tanner: Yeah, sure. So, if you're holding a chemical inside of a tank, that's the primary containment, the tank itself or the vessel. And so, if it spills, the EPA mandates that the liquid therein has to be held in a secondary containment for up to 72 hours until a facility can come clean it up. So, typically, what that looks like is a concrete dyke around a tank or multiple tanks in a tank farm.

Jack: And then obviously, the chemicals are going to potentially attack the concrete, so that needs to be sealed up with a coating in order to prevent any escapage into the environment.

Tanner: Yeah, that's exactly right. And it doesn't necessarily have to be the same type of coating that's lining the tank because now we're hoping that we're only dealing with splash and spill or intermittent contact. So, we can get away with a slightly lesser degree of coating or something that might be more simple to apply. But that's a big part of our business, is secondary containments and putting coatings or fiberglass inlays around concrete dykes and berms to hold in chemicals.

Paul: And although we may say that the chemical exposure may be less demanding, the environmental exposures are typically more demanding on a secondary containment because, like you said, you have expansion joints, and you have drains, and you have pumps, and you have sink wells, pump wells, and then sometimes you have truck traffic or forklift traffic. So, that's a tremendous amount of additional things that you have to think about. So, you really have to, when you're going in to do those bids and to do that, to understand what do I have, what's the exposure? Because the chemical sometimes turns out to be the least complicated part of that whole project.

Tanner: Yeah, that's exactly right. Or trenches. Trenches flow in to and from areas, those trenches can wind up being primary containment sometimes, even though they're designed to be secondary containment. So, really understanding and knowing what exactly it is that a facility needs help with is key. And I've got a list of questions, some of them learn the hard way, that I've got to make sure I ask, such as, "What's the temperature of this?" I thought everything just came out at ambient temperature when I started, but nope, that is not the case. So, there's a list of questions we've got to ask to narrow down exactly what kind of exposure something's going to see. Abrasion is just as important as temperature or chemical or any of those things. So, got to go through it all.

Jack: So, yeah, so that's secondary containment, and there's a lot that goes into that, and it's kind of a different application than even a tank lining.

Tank Lining Applications

Jack: You guys do tank linings, too. We're going more into spraying and different equipment and things like that. You want to talk a little bit about some of the subtleties of coating a tank?

Tanner: Sure. So, tanks, we do have to control the environment, whereas, with a secondary containment, a lot of times, you're just working with what the weather brings you. But tank linings, the surface preparation is every bit as critical, if not more so, because now you're dealing with full immersion contact. And so, we've got some guys that are awesome at spraying. I'd put them up against anybody. And so that's a fun, unique part of our business to be able to deal with tank linings with the lockout-tagout, with the confined space entry. But then dealing with spraying and getting to put stuff on, that's pretty sharp. Unfortunately, we typically can't show it to the world because nobody's ever going to see that tank lining once it's shut back up. So, when friends and family say, "What'd you do today?" I have a hard time explaining it, but we enjoy what we do, and we geek out over it.

Paul: So, back like twelve years ago, when I started with Carboline, I would tell my family that I do specifications and recommendations for tanks. At the time, my 12-year-old son thought I had the coolest job in the world because I worked with tanks. Boom tanks, not storage tanks for liquid. And the day he found out, it was like three, four years that I had been doing it, the day he found out, he looked at me just with the saddest look on his face and goes, "Dad, you just got way less cool." My wife was immediately depressed. She asked me after the first year coming back to work for the family business. She said, "Do you really know how paint dries?" And I said, "Well, sure, but it's not drying. It's curing. And there's oxidation cures and chemical cures." And she said, "Stop. I just wanted to know that somebody actually knows that. That sounds awful."

Unique Challenges in the Coatings Industry

Jack: Being a contractor for as long as you've been, you've obviously run into some unique challenges. You brought up one earlier that you discussed that the curing agent actually was kicking over your paint faster than you were able to put it on. Have you run into any other unique challenges throughout the years?

Tanner: Yeah, sure. I can think of a time when we were requested to do dry ice blasting in a facility due to their cleanliness requirements. And it was over a shutdown period in the winter, so it was cold outside, and as we were dry ice blasting inside the room, what we found was we were actually bringing down the temperature inside the room so drastically that our dry ice was only achieving about one square foot an hour to surface prep the walls to pull the old coating off the block walls. It was increasing the carbon dioxide in the room where our guys were having a hard time. We had to start ventilating the room. And then obviously making it too cold to then go on and apply coatings. You know, facilities come up with all kinds of things that can be fascinating and interesting. And you sometimes just don't know what you're getting into until you've gotten into it and you start exploring a situation a little bit.

Writing Specifications

Paul: So, we've talked a lot all the way around different types of projects, some new design, some redo work. What kind of frequency do you see? Do you see a lot of times where you are expected to provide the specification or the instructions yourself? Or are they being provided to you? What's the blend that you see most often?

Tanner: You know, if I had to put a number to it, I'd say it's 80% specs that we write. And so that comes together with the full spec of, just like we talked about, what kind of surface prep can we do in the plant, what gets them the best value for what they're looking for? So, quite honestly, we're going in with the mindset of how do we solve a problem and then working backward most times.

Paul: That's an excellent method.

Jack: So, for that 20% of the time where you're getting a spec given to you, is there anything that you would want those writers to know about the painting process?

Tanner: There's about a hundred things that I would love to sit down with engineers and architects and go through on specifications. What's going to hold up long-term over decades for folks? What type of construction materials and construction methods are going to hold up long term? You know, we go into places a lot of times, and they'll ask us to fix corrosion coming out of a back-to-back angle iron, and there's only so much you can do in certain areas. So, you're not set up for success. Or put together a specification. I mean, how many times do we still see alkyds over top of galvanizing? I still see specifications. And so, then, I have an opportunity. I come to a roadblock typically because, a lot of times, I'm working with the owner. So, now, do I act in the owner's best interest and put on a coating that I know to be better for this situation and submit change orders and go through this whole process? Or do I do it exactly as the engineer/architect asked for and put on a system that I know to be lesser, even if the value is very similar?

Saponification

Jack: That's a really interesting way to put on it. And yeah, in case you aren't catching on, for those of you who keep specifying it, alkyds don't play well with zinc. Whether it's galvanizing, whether it's inorganic zinc. It's called saponification. Paul, tell us what saponification is.

Paul: That's a great job, Jack. You said that word well.

Jack: Yeah, but I'm asking you to define it. See how I cheated there?

Paul: Yeah, I do. So, basically, it's a chemical reaction that happens. The alkyds react with the zinc, and it truly is a process that's creating a type of soap.

Jack: I was going to say, are we making soap here?

Paul: Yeah, we're making soap. No, not efficiently. And you don't want to wash with it. But the outcome is you've created a layer in between your substrate and your coating, and it causes the coating to peel off. So, if you've ever driven down a road and you pulled up next to a street sign or a light post or something, and you see the paint coming off in great big flakes, it was probably a galvanized light pole that was painted with an alkyd. Because in most people's world, they think alkyd is good industrial paint, and they put it on. On that topic. Epoxies do fantastic on zincs, both galvanizing and organic and inorganic. So, an epoxy would've been great and probably would not have had that same problem. But alkyds, there's a reaction. There's some open locations on the backbone of it that allow it to react, and it's not a good scenario.

Why It's Not Just Paint

Jack: So, you brought up that you like to provide a good, better, and best system when you're working with the owner. You said 80% of the time you're writing the specification. So, you're working 80% of the time to generate this specification yourself. What do you do, or what do you tell an owner to educate them as to why it's not just all paint?

Tanner: Sure. Yeah. One of the biggest challenges that we face right now is, I think, there's a lot of new folks coming into their positions. There's a lot of turnover in the industry, and there's a lot of looking for the short, quick, easy fix. And so, we routinely hear things like, "Hey, make it last as long as I'm in my position," instead of a long term. You've heard that, right?

Jack & Paul: Yes. Yes, we have.

Tanner: "How many years do you have to retire?" "That's how long I want it to last." But the truth is we want to put our name on something that's going to last for a long time. And so, there's an education component with a customer that it's not just paint because we'll hear that a lot. And if you want to change the color, there's a cheap way to do it. But if you want to invest in your infrastructure and you really want to take care of maintenance, there's a ton of benefits that come with it. There's employee morale from seeing stuff that's clean and nice. There's safety that comes from seeing your facility in a well-lit way. There's safety just from having a painter and a set of eyes go over top of piping and equipment and checking for a leak that might be there, little things that you just don't see unless you're actively maintaining stuff. And so often, we see that as soon as that upfront maintenance in a facility goes, it's hard to ever get caught back up. And so, the education to a customer is just really important to keep going with the maintenance. It's more than just paint. We're not just changing the color, but we're really providing a long-term benefit to the corrosion for your facility.

Safety Considerations in the Coatings Industry

Jack: You mentioned safety several times being important to you guys and almost mandatory, which it always is. Safety is always the best thing. What do you guys do in order to maintain that level of safety?

Tanner: So, because we are in so many different facilities, my guys go through several different training programs throughout a year. We typically go through training for each individual facility that we're in, but then we also have our own safety programs that we go through. So, all of my guys are trained on lockout-tagout, confined space entry, first aid, working at heights, and driving lifts. I mean, we've got to keep all this stuff up to par and not just up to par for the facilities that we work in, but because it's pretty easy to go to change your scenery from one day to the next and to not know that your hazards are changing. So, we've got to be able to identify hazards wherever we go and keep our guys safe. So, a lot of times, what our customers are buying from us is really a safe worker first and then a painter second.

Paul: That's a great way to put it.

"The Four Questions" [Non-Technical]

Jack: We've gotten a pretty good introduction to Tanner and Peak Industrial. But really, now we're going to get to know Tanner really well. We're going to do our "Four Questions" segment. This is where we want to get to know our guests, and we ask our guests the same four questions every episode. So, the first one is, Tanner, do you have a favorite sports team or sport, or are you not a sports ball person at all?

Tanner: Oh, yeah. Love sports, love football. Went to the University of Alabama, and my oldest daughter was born in Cincinnati, so we've been claiming the Cincinnati Bengals for years. And my mother-in-law's a Steelers fan, so all the more reason to be a Bengals fan, right?

Paul: Okay. So, movies, TV shows. You got a favorite show that you watch? A movie? A favorite line from a movie?

Tanner: Yeah, I've got four little ones, and my oldest is 13, my youngest is nine, so there's a great span of years where TV just didn't get a chance to happen in my house. So, my picks are going way back. So, favorite movie would be The Princess Bride. How about that?

Paul: Excellent choice. Excellent choice. "As you wish."

Tanner: That's exactly right. Yeah.

Jack: So, then, if you were a baseball player or WWE Superstar, what would your walk-up song be?

Tanner: I'm going to be in trouble for this one, but probably "Fat Bottom Girls." There's no way to spin that well, but man, I love that song.

Jack: It's such a good song. And it would get the crowd hyped, and that's the whole point.

Paul: It is. So, the last one, now that your kids are getting a little older, might be time for some hobbies. What is it you do in your free time?

Tanner: Anything we can do to get outside. I've got an old Jeep and love to take that out. Love to go backpacking, hiking, fishing, although the more I go fishing, the less my kids want to do it. But we were looking for a boat. What size boat do you get with a six-person family? And I finally figured it out. A one-seater. I love my one-seater.

Jack: There you go. Perfect.

Tanner: So, that hunting. Anytime I can get outside, I love it.

Jack: Well, that's excellent. Well, guys, that's Tanner Brooks with Peak Industrial. You can find everything you need from them at peakcoatings.com.

Tanner: That's right.

"Tech Tips"

Jack: All right, and now we have a "Tech Tip" coming your way.

Jamie Valdez: You have questions. They have answers. This is "Tech Tips."

Tanner: So, I know it's simple, but if I had one thing to recommend, it's check the data sheet. You know, the truth is, in our industry, things change on a week-to-week basis, especially over the past couple years. And, for our guys, because we're dealing with so many different products, on any given week, the dry times can change, the mix ratios can change, the humidity requirements can change. There's any number of things that are always different, and so you can never take that for granted. But the other thing is, it's a wonderful training mechanism for our guys. That's probably our number one thing where we go through data sheets on a regular basis. And so, my guys understand the volume solids now, and they understand the square footage requirements, and they understand the application methods because we're going through data sheets. Because we're professional instruction followers at the end of the day.

Closing Remarks

Jack: Thanks again for listening this week. We can't wait to catch you next month. For Paul, I'm Jack. This is The Red Bucket.