The most dangerous person in your manufacturing facility is the one who tells you exactly what you want to hear while they are holding a clipboard and a commission report.

In the world of industrial metal finishing, there is a persistent, comfortable myth that the interests of a chemical supplier and the interests of the plant manager are perfectly aligned. We like to imagine that a partnership is a steady climb where both parties profit from growth, but in the trenches of a high-volume wash line, the math often tells a more cynical story.

If your supplier is paid primarily by the gallon, every efficiency you find is a pay cut for the person supposed to help you find it.

There are seven distinct chemical reactions that occur inside a zinc phosphate bath, which is why most operators treat the process like a temperamental god that requires constant sacrifice. When the coating weights start to drift or the salt spray tests come back failing, the easiest answer is always “more.”

More concentration, more booster, more surfactant, more temperature. We have built an entire industry on the “more” model because “more” is easy to invoice and even easier to justify. But the hard truth of process control is that “more” is often just a sophisticated way of masking a mechanical failure that should have been solved with a wrench instead of a chemical drum.

The Flashlight Test

Imagine a service representative kneeling beside a five-stage washer in a job shop outside Grand Rapids. It is 2:00 PM on a Tuesday, and the line is running a critical batch of automotive brackets. He has a flashlight clamped in his teeth, tracing a clogged riser in stage two where the spray pattern has turned from a fan into a pathetic trickle.

This clog is the reason the parts are coming out with “flash rust” on the trailing edges. The fix is remarkably simple: twenty minutes of labor and a stiff wire brush to clear the calcium carbonate buildup from the nozzle. When the spray pattern returns to its intended 30-psi glory, the cleaner can do its job at the original, lower concentration.

On the drive back to the hotel, the rep stops at a red light and pulls his commission report out of the passenger seat. He does the math in his head. If he tells the plant manager to clean the nozzles and drop the concentration, his quarterly bonus takes a hit that looks suspiciously like a car payment.

For a moment, he understands exactly why so many of his colleagues never carry a flashlight into the plant. It is much more profitable to suggest a $400 drum of “rust inhibitor” to be dosed into stage five than it is to fix the physics of stage two.

This is the central friction of the industrial consumable model. We are asking people to be technical consultants while rewarding them as commodity brokers. Any profession that sells a consumable alongside advice has this conflict built into it, from pharmacies to software licenses to lawn care.

The question we have to ask ourselves-and the question I had to ask as I moved through the ranks of this industry-is whether we are measuring our people by what they move or by what the customer stops losing.

A Legacy of Complexity

The transition from solvent-based cleaning to aqueous systems in the early 1990s provides a historical anchor for this tension. When the Montreal Protocol forced plants to move away from ozone-depleting chlorinated solvents, the sales model shifted overnight.

Previously, you filled a degreaser and left it alone; suddenly, you had “living” chemistry that required titration, pH monitoring, and temperature control. The “Standard Methods for the Examination of Water and Wastewater” became the bible for a new generation of reps.

However, this complexity created a veil. If the chemistry is complicated, the customer relies more on the rep’s “expert” opinion. And if that opinion is incentivized by volume, the “expert” will almost always find a reason why the tank needs another five gallons of alkalinity.

“An incentive is a functional destiny. If you pay a man to find problems that require his specific solution, he will become a world-class problem-finder, even if he has to hallucinate the problems into existence.”

– James M., Financial Literacy Educator

The Invisible Tax of “Chemical Creep”

In a metalworking plant, this looks like “preventative dosing”-the practice of adding chemicals “just in case” the soil load increases, regardless of what the titration actually says.

When I was in the field, I saw this play out in the form of “chemical creep.” A plant starts a new line at a 5% concentration. Six months later, it’s at 6%. Two years later, they are running at 9% because “that’s where it seems to work best.”

No one can point to the specific day the 9% became necessary, but the supplier isn’t complaining. They’ve just realized a 40% increase in revenue without adding a single new part to the line. That isn’t service; it’s a slow-motion tax on the customer’s inability to monitor their own process.

Leading past this requires a structural rebellion against the gallon-based metric. It requires a company culture that is willing to accept a worse number this quarter to become more trusted over the next decade.

This isn’t just “good ethics”; it’s survival in a world where manufacturing margins are getting squeezed by global competition. If a plant manager realizes that their supplier is the reason their “cost-per-part” is climbing, that relationship is dead. It just hasn’t stopped breathing yet.

Corrected temperatures, replaced spray nozzles, fixed rinse tank overflows-these are the “zero-dollar fixes” that build a wall of loyalty around a customer. When a rep demonstrates that they care more about the customer’s bottom line than their own commission, they stop being a vendor and start being an indispensable part of the plant’s engineering team.

The Power of Optimization

There is a specific kind of authority that comes from being willing to say, “You are using too much of my product.” It is a jarring sentence to hear in a sales meeting. It stops the room. It shifts the power dynamic from “What can you sell me?” to “How can we optimize this?”

This is the philosophy that guided me as I moved from being the guy with the flashlight to the person leading the company. You cannot scale a business on the backs of inefficient customers; eventually, those customers go out of business or find someone who actually cares about their titration curves.

The industry assumes the rep’s volume number measures how well the customer is being served, but once gallons shipped became the target, it quietly started rewarding the opposite of good process control. The misconception is that the incentive and the relationship point in the same direction. They don’t.

As a leader, you have to look for the “flashlight moments.” You have to ask your team not just how many drums they moved, but how many gallons they saved the customer through better engineering. It requires a different kind of training-one that focuses as much on fluid dynamics and mechanical maintenance as it does on chemical concentrations.

If your people don’t know how to fix a pump, they will always try to fix the chemistry. And fixing the chemistry is the most expensive way to solve a mechanical problem.

In the end, the value of a chemical supplier isn’t found in the molecules inside the drum. Those molecules are a commodity; you can buy surfactants and phosphates from a dozen different sources. The real value is the “chemical intelligence” that comes with the drum.

If that intelligence is compromised by a misaligned incentive, it’s worse than useless-it’s an active drain on your operation.

Audit Your Audit

The next time your rep suggests a new booster or a higher concentration, ask them to show you the spray headers first. Ask them to check the rinse water conductivity. Ask them if they’ve checked the heat exchanger for scaling.

If they reach for their titration kit before they reach for their flashlight, you might want to ask yourself whose side they are really on. It takes a certain level of character to lead a company like

Austin Morelock does, where the goal isn’t just to fill tanks, but to fulfill a promise of operational excellence.

Manufacturing is a game of inches and pennies. We spend millions on robotic arms and ERP systems to shave seconds off a cycle time, yet we often let thousands of dollars a month literally go down the drain because we haven’t scrutinized the incentives of our chemical suppliers.

It is time to stop measuring “service” by the frequency of visits and start measuring it by the reduction of waste.

The rep who tells you to use less is the only one you should be buying more from.

That is the paradox of the flashlight, and it is the only way to build a manufacturing partnership that actually survives the scrutiny of the balance sheet.