The Achieve Podcast - Dr. Paul Barattiero (Echo Water)

Welcome to the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight the leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs who are building meaningful businesses and shaping their industries. My name is Jesse Warner. I'll be your host today. We're excited to be joined by Dr. Paul Baratero, who's the owner and founder of Echowater. Paul, it's a pleasure to have you on the show today.

It's great to be with you, Jesse.

So our audience can get to know you a little bit. Give us a quick backstory of your business. What do you do and kind of how did it all get started?

So 16 years ago, I founded Echo Water. We are a technology company that delivers hydrogen gas to the human body. So I started it because my wife was really sick 20 years ago. 20 years ago, I helped my wife heal. She had a lot of medical issues, and because of the hydrogen gas and, and the water, she was able to be with us and live a wonderful life. You know, we were married 10 years at the time, and like I said, she was really not doing well. Now, of course, we're 32 years married, and she's doing, doing, you know, much, much better. But that was why I started Echo was really after helping her. I was like, there's got to be a lot of other people that have issues that don't know what to do about it. A lot of husbands who may not know what to do about it.

And how has your business changed as it's grown? What did it look like when you started it and what does it look like today?

So 16 years ago, of course, I was the only person in talking about hydrogen and talking about how hydrogen had benefits, and people thought I was crazy. And then a few years, like a couple years later, the studies started, you know, really being evident, and they were like, oh, you're brilliant. And so back then, 20, you know, in, in, in 2011, um, there was very, very little research showing the benefits of hydrogen and why hydrogen was so critical to the body. Today we have over 2,000 studies, 200 disease models. And, and back then I was teaching and educating on hydrogen and people were like, what are you even talking about? You know, and I would talk about the fact that our bodies are designed to create hydrogen gas in our colon. And like just last Friday, I did a TED Talk in Dallas on the fact that hydrogen is critical to the body. And in fact, our colon is a hydrogen ecosystem. And people really don't understand this, how critical hydrogen is for the proper function of the body. But we have a hydrogen generator in our colon, in our intestinal tract. But when we have gut issues, which it's estimated up to 90% of the population have gut dysfunction, they lose the ability to create hydrogen gas. And therefore the body's no longer efficiently managing oxidative stress and inflammation. And so this is really the impetus of what we do is we reduce oxidative stress and inflammation. Which is leading cause of disease. And then there's 1,000 other things in the body like stomach acid that you have to have hydrogen for, like a lot of different things. And so today, after Joe Rogan talked about our water 3 and a half years ago and it 10x'd our monthly sales, it's a different landscape today. Everybody knows who's in the natural medicine industry, everybody knows about Echo Water, but also there's a lot of scam products that have come in. So in the early days, you were all about pushing and building your company. Well, then you get to a point where you grow from $400,000 a month to $4 million a month in business, right? And all of a sudden you have all kinds of companies coming out with scam products on Alibaba and Amazon. And now you're, your problems are a totally different set of problems where you're trying to do— your attorneys are doing 5 takedowns a day because people are using your IP or doing whatever. So, you know, it's very interesting. I, I, I really never thought that would be the reality after having such tremendous success, having to have a bunch of products that weren't even really hydrogen products, but were being sold as hydrogen products. And because they were a bottle that made bubbles, people assumed it was hydrogen, but it wasn't. So, you know, the complexity of that's really interesting because like today I have a company that is using my picture on their website. They're a competitor, and yet they have me on their website, and we're going to have to have the attorneys go after them. And, you know, it's just a, a crazy world that we live in. But the complexity of the pro— of the company now You know, we had 1,500 square feet, uh, that we were using, a total of 3,000 square feet in the facility. You know, today we're 17,000 square feet and automated equipment to ship. And, you know, it's a, you know, every celebrity you can imagine. We've got the Raiders, the Dodgers, the 49ers, the, you know, everyone from Tom Brady to The Rock to Leonardo DiCaprio to Jake Paul to Grant Cardone, that are using our water every day. You know, Ronaldo, the amazing soccer player. So I used to sit on airplanes and people would ask what I did and I would tell them and they would— it was like I had no idea what I was talking about. And today they're like, hey, aren't you that guy that did hydrogen water? So that part's kind of fun, you know, where people are like, hey, you know, I kind of know about that. And yet we're still probably 1% of people know, oh, if I drink water with hydrogen gas, it's gonna help my joint pain, or it's gonna help my brain, or it's gonna help my diabetes, or it's gonna help this. So we have a lot of work to still do, but it's definitely a different set of problems today than it was back then. You know, back then I was the CEO. 3.5 years ago, I hired a CEO to run day-to-day 'cause I just didn't wanna do it after 13 years of doing it. I just was like, ah, I mean, I'm gonna enjoy home a little more. So, you know, it's, it's wonderful, but growing companies just typically is a different set of problems once you've grown it, right?

Yeah. Well, first of all, congratulations on the growth and success.

Thank you.

Uh, sounds like a labor of love and also hard work, right?

Yes, yes.

Um, when you look at sales marketing outreach, where are you seeing the most traction? What, what seems to be working and maybe what's not working?

Um, what has worked for us is influencers that actually market, not like your open box stuff. You know how you have influencers all the time doing unbox? What really works is partnerships. What really works is people who have credibility and large followings that have had an issue and the water has helped them with that issue and they talk about it. That, that's really where you're benefited is they have a following or they have a platform. And like a Joe Rogan, right? Joe Rogan talked about it really, he doesn't— he didn't know anything about it. He just liked it and drank it, and he talked about it, and it 10x'd us, and it stayed 10x'd for a while. And of course, you know, so he, he has a lot of credibility. Like, Joe Rogan is one of the most incredible people on this planet now, with the largest following in the entire world. But people trust him because he doesn't you know, he does things in a certain way. He does it with integrity. He talks about things, you know, and so they, they do trust him in, in that way. And so, you know, it's, it's, it's a blessing that we have that. But those are the best kind of promotions. They are the ones that are coming from a story perspective of how they were benefited, because other people can resonate with that. You know, I, I'll tell you a story. Zac Efron, who when I met him had very serious gut issues, Dr. Pompa introduced me to him and said, hey, Dr. Paul can help you with your gut issues. And so I remember sitting with Zac and he was like, you know, I can only eat 10 foods. And here's this person who obviously is good-looking specimen of a man, right? Like, he is successful, he's a movie star, everyone would know his name, he has all the money you could imagine, right? The fame. And yet he's on what we call a mono diet, and he's like, I can eat 10 foods, that's all. And I said, well, just drink the water for 2 weeks. He's like, what do you mean? I said, no, no, I'm telling you drink the water for 2 weeks and you'll be able to eat whatever food you want. And he's like, seriously? I'm like, yes, I've been telling you that for 3 months. So he does it. He goes and he starts drinking the water every day, like I said, 3 to 6 of the bottles. And, you know, when I say bottle, I'm not meaning— I'm meaning, you know, a device like this, right? And so drink 3 to 6 of those a day. And you'll be eating whatever food you want. And he literally called me back 2 weeks later. He was in the Hamptons, and he says, I just finished eating dinner, and I've had— I ate food I haven't been able to eat in 10 years. And he goes, I love you so much, and I love your— I love your water. Tell everybody I love it. I love you. It's great. Um, and if there's anything you ever need, let me know. And Of course, I've never called that favor in, but the reality is that's how simple it can be. People that are struggling, which is a lot of people in this world, are struggling with health challenges or gut issues, and therefore they have food allergies because of the gut issues. They can get help quickly, and it's not expensive. You know, you, you think about what food costs today in our day and age, it's, it's way more than it used to be. So things don't seem as expensive anymore because, you know, food's like $50, right? You think like, I'm not going to go anywhere at a decent place and get a dinner all in for, you know, $20, $30 is pretty much your minimum these days. So I love the fact that we can take someone who has gut issues or immune function issues or arthritis or whatever, and then Literally within a couple weeks, they can be living their best life, feeling great. And, and I, I just, I love that. I get really passionate about that.

What a great success story. Obviously somebody like Zac Efron, the, you know, the celebrities that you're talking about, Joe Rogan, they're— them being able to just tell their story, right? And yeah, having your product there and that placement there It does magic for you.

Yeah.

Paul, there's a, there's a lot of talk right now and buzz, AI automation. How are you finding ways to use it in your business today?

It's very rare that a day goes by that I don't use AI. And, and not using it as a search engine like a lot of people do. I have it writing contracts. I have it looking at contracts. I have it comparing contracts. I have it doing a lot. I mean, there's so much AI can do, but I will say you got to be really careful because AI can give false information. AI can make stuff up. You have to go in and tell it what parameters you want it to operate within. And, and I have, and I also ask questions in a very, very, very specific way so that it can't give me anything other than appropriate information. And I tell it, you have to give the references where you got the information from. And so That's wonderful. As a company, we use AI for customer service and, and sometimes the AI outperforms the humans when it's short, quick things. When it's more in-depth problems, of course a human's always better. But for short questions and things, AI can do such a great job in answering questions for people online or whatever. The other thing that we use AI is for, for lead generation, believe it or not. We, we built a whole model that goes out and finds leads, and then we have call centers that, you know, go after that, which, I mean, technically you could make an AI agent do it for you, but I just don't trust that yet. I, I think it's better to have a human involved, but you know, there, there's a lot of things that you what's the word, potentially could use AI for. And a lot of people are doing some really cool things. I have a buddy of mine that does stock trading with AI. I mean, there's so much you can have it do that's beyond where most people see AI. But there's so much money going to, into AI, but really the data shows that only 1.6% of all searches are AI. People are still Google searching. People are still searching conventionally. They have not really moved over to AI. It's the early adopters like me who use it every day for business and stuff, but it really hasn't. Become everybody yet.

As you try to scale, obviously you've gone from being—

you said 16 years, 20 years? Yeah, yeah.

Um, that journey, I was— from yourself to where you are today.

Yeah.

What are some of the constraints that show up as you're trying to scale and grow? I think time, people, systems, capital. What, what are those constraints that you kind of keep bumping into?

Uh, it's legitimate people that can promote. That's been the biggest constraint because our biggest challenge is education of the public and having a voice that is trusted or appreciated or carries weight like a Joe Rogan or someone else, uh, even a Will, um, you know, so some of these really big podcasters, right? Some of them have great voices, some are not. It depends on what, you know, what they're doing. But I would say the biggest constraint for us is that it's getting the education to, you know, Joe, who's driving to work in the morning with joint pain, and he does not know that drinking water with hydrogen gas can relieve completely his his joint pain. Um, it's, it's that kind of stuff where it hasn't distilled down to the general public to that level. It will, and it should have already been there, but we had this, uh, process called COVID, which effectively you had very little health advancement in the world over a 3 to 5 year period. It kind of stalled all medical advancement. And so we need another 3 to 5 years to, to get what would have normally, um, in a normal process gotten to the public. It didn't because there was like a pause button that was pushed in medical advancement. And so I, I would say that's our biggest challenge. And it's, it scaling.

I'm very lucky.

I've never taken any money for For Echo, I still own almost 90% of the company. I've just given ownership to some people that have done great things for the company. But the biggest challenge is culture, always keeping the culture that you want, making sure those that are hiring have the same culture as you. Otherwise, the culture gets away from you pretty easily. And see, whoever's doing the hiring is going to hire people similar to them. So you really have to make sure that the culture that you want as an owner is the same as all the people that are going to be in charge of the hiring. Otherwise, culture will be, will be created and managed and promulgated through other individuals, and it'll end up that it wasn't ever the culture you wanted in the first place because, you know, you may not be doing the hiring as things get bigger and bigger. You know, we're not a huge company compared to, you know, many, a lot of other, but then we're huge compared to a lot of companies too, right? So, you know, we end up with 52 employees, and today I don't even know every employee that's with the company. It used to be that I did know every employee. Then it got to the point where I didn't anymore. And so, you know, and especially some people work from home. So when would you ever meet them unless you brought them all in? Right. So I would just say the complexity of companies, challenges, what have you, but one of the biggest challenges For someone like myself, where you have a company that's valued at hundreds of millions of dollars already and you're going to where these— everyone is saying, look, in 3 years it'll be a billion dollars valuation. And you start to say, well, okay, that's cool. How do we actually get to a point where you would feel comfortable exiting and having it still go the way it was when you were the guy, right? And who is it? You get to those kind of numbers and it's a different group that's buying. Usually it's, you know, it's not like a small little company or some company for $20 million. I've done that many years ago. That's it. That's, that's still a private equity group, right? You don't have a ton of people that are walking around going, yeah, I'll buy it for $20 million or $40 million. Well, now you get to $200 million, half a billion, a billion. It's a very different group that's looking at that. So, it's a strategy you have to deploy. That's a multi-year strategy to plan for that kind of thing. And you have to make sure you choose the right kind of partners to be on that journey with you because Otherwise, you know, there's no one person that can do that, right? I've never sold a company for $1 billion. So, you know, it's like getting married. Your first one, you don't know what you're doing. Oh, now, if you got married a second time, maybe you know how to do a wedding now, but that's not what you want to do. Well, in business, maybe your second company you sell for $1 billion, you got it covered. But the first one is all new, right? Everything's new. Oh no, what are we doing? So all those kind of challenges, those are the things that I think about. Those are the things that, you know, I want to make sure we're staying on brand. I want to make sure that we are staying ahead of the pack. We're the largest company in the world in our space. We're the original company in our space, and we want to stay that way, right? You have to keep innovating. You have to keep doing all the things to create new products and make sure you have new The apps that are controlling your products, you're always improving the app, right? And having it work great so it connects with Apple and Whoop and all these things, you know, and there, there's a lot of stuff that gets into the business and the model and the branding and the, you know, compliance and blah, blah, blah. So it, it, it's, it can be a lot.

We just got a couple more questions for you here.

Yeah.

When you look at the next stage of growth, what are you most excited about?

I'm most excited right now about reaching more people, to heal more people. That's what always excites me. It's not the money, even though I have to deal with that kind of stuff. That's not what makes me happy or at all trips my trigger. It's the families and the lives that can change with a really simple thing like drinking water with hydrogen gas in it. So, Echo Water, implementing that, you gotta drink water anyways, right? But this water will drastically change the reality. And people who have diseases who may not have them after you're doing it, and people that have pain that won't have pain. That's where I'm really happy, and I am grateful for those benefits that, that people experience. And so what I'm most excited about is increasing the education platform, how many people we're reaching. And I just put together a deal yesterday that's going to do that. And so that's really exciting.

What advice or thoughts, lessons would you share with other leaders or entrepreneurs who are on a similar journey to you?

Um, gosh, there's a lot, but if there's people on a similar journey, they've already been beat up like I've been beat up. They've already had employees that were dirty. They've already had people that have tried to harm the company to take it over. They've already had people that have tried to steal products that are employees internally. They've already had, you know, all the stuff. But if you're getting a company to a few hundred million dollars and you've already had all that, so you've navigated those things and, and then you typically get better at watching and listening and spotting the problems before they happen. That's really what people need to become good at, is looking at patterns, looking at what people say versus what they do, looking at, well, wait a minute, this person was doing this, this, this, and all of a sudden there's a change in their behavior. What? Why? I need to go look into that more. You know, I never knew, or I never thought I would have to put someone in prison, right, for doing inappropriate things in the business. But there's someone sitting in prison today, uh, for doing inappropriate stuff. You just never think, uh, that that's the reality of what you're doing. And so I said, I think there's two things. Um, A, do everything you can to not have employees have access to things they don't need to have access to and shouldn't, so you're not dangling, unknowingly dangling a carrot in front of them so that they make a decision that lands them in prison. Number one. Number two, you know, Watch for those diamonds in the rough who really can be one of the greatest human beings in your organization that want to grow and want to be something else and continue to grow in their abilities. And the final thing I would really say, and I believe this is the most important, which is why I'm leaving it to the last. Is make sure that you are true to your relationships with your loved ones. There is nothing worth sacrificing those relationships. No amount of money, no amount of success can replace family, and there's no trade-off where you win by trading time for the business instead of your children or a husband or wife. And I would say stay true to those commitments and stay true to those relationships above all. And I believe that putting time to family, especially your immediate family that you have created with a spouse, or if you have made children, if you've made people, that needs to be your focus. And of course the business is important, but under the premise— sometimes people will say, I'm doing this for them, but then they don't spend time with them. And at the end of the day, the children aren't going to be like, oh, it was totally worth it, we never saw him, but, and now he's dead. 'But we have all the money.' You know, that's never— I, at least I've never heard anyone ever say that. Usually they're like, 'I wish I had more time with my father or mother.' Um, and, and almost they don't like the money because of the price that was paid to get it. So I don't know, maybe that'll help somebody.

Well, Paul, thank you so much for joining me today, for sharing your story and your insights. For those listening, if you want to learn more about what Dr. Paul Baraterra is doing with EchoWater, I invite you to visit their website, echowater.com. And that'll wrap up today's episode of the Achieve Podcast. A big thank you to our sponsor, Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executives for growing businesses. And if you enjoyed today's conversation, follow the show, share with another entrepreneur who'd also find value in it. And again, thanks for listening. We'll see you on the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.