Trace Blackmore

Trace Blackmore did not set out to become the voice of an industry. He learned water treatment from his father, worked alongside him at a company called National Chemical, and when that business was sold in the early 2000s, he went out on his own. Trace started Blackmore Enterprises in 2004, in Lawrenceville just outside Atlanta, and he built it around a stubborn idea: he wanted to treat water the way his father had taught him, carrying lab-grade test kits into the field so his team could get the best result on site. People told him it was too expensive, that customers wouldn't appreciate it, that he might go bankrupt. As he puts it, he has been doing it since 2004 and has not gone bankrupt, and he still describes himself first as a water treater and only second as a business owner.

Blackmore Enterprises is the day job, but the thing most of the industry knows Trace for is the microphone. Industrial water treatment, the chemistry that keeps the cooling towers, boilers and pipes of factories and big buildings from scaling up, corroding or growing the wrong kind of bacteria, is a scattered trade. The people who do it often drive long distances alone and arrive at a plant to run their titrations by themselves, with nobody nearby to bounce a problem off. Trace's whole thesis is that the work is lonely and highly technical, and that the field gets better only when the people in it can talk to each other.

Trace Blackmore's answer was a podcast, though he is the first to admit he stumbled into it. He did not even know what a podcast was in 2015, when a member of his mastermind group suggested he start one, and it took him two years to work up the nerve. In April 2017 he recorded what he cheerfully calls the worst first episode in podcast history on a Bluetooth headset, and Scaling UP! H2O was born. The early turning point was a piece of advice from his first hire, who listened to that first episode and told him plainly that it wasn't him, that he needed to bring the same energy he had on a conference stage to the microphone. Trace took the note, and the weekly show has since grown past 400 episodes and a listenership he affectionately calls the Scaling Up Nation.

Trace Blackmore has poured the same community instinct into the Rising Tide Mastermind, a peer group he founded in 2019 and named after the John F. Kennedy line that a rising tide raises all boats. The premise, in his words, is that life is hard, so why do it alone, and especially why do it alone with people who do not understand your industry. A mastermind, for the uninitiated, is a small confidential group that meets regularly to swap problems and hold each other accountable, and Trace credits more than a decade inside one for much of where he has ended up. His own mission statement for all of it is disarmingly small: raising the bar in the industry, one water treater at a time.

There is a recognition layer to the story too, the kind Trace himself never brings up. He is a former president of the Association of Water Technologies, the main professional body for the trade, he holds the Certified Water Technologist credential and a LEED accreditation, and in 2020 his peers handed him the Ray Baum Memorial Water Technologist of the Year award. None of that is what makes him interesting. What makes him interesting is that a working water treater looked at how isolating his own profession could be and decided to build the connective tissue it was missing, which is exactly the kind of person I like to put on the (don't) Waste Water microphone.

“The premise is, life is hard. Why do it alone? And especially why not do it with other people that understand your industry, so you don't have to explain your problem by explaining to somebody what water treatment is.”

He is, in the end, a tradesman who became a publisher: the rare water-treatment lifer who decided the most useful thing he could build was not a better chemical program but a room big enough for everyone who runs one.