Building B2B Brand Authority Through Content Marketing with Mike Konrad

Mike Konrad is the founder and CEO of Aqueous Technologies, a company he launched in 1992 that has become a leader in post-reflow cleaning and reliability solutions for the electronics manufacturing industry. He also hosts two podcasts: Reliability Matters, which focuses on electronics reliability, and The Reluctant Entrepreneur, where he explores the journeys of other business founders.

He describes getting into entrepreneurship as feeling like he lost a bet. In 1980 he was in London with his family, and the flight home was cancelled for three days. They were flying a charter airline, World Airways, long gone now. He and his wife were young with a small baby and no money. The engine broke, and the airline only had one more plane, so they had to bring the engine in on the next flight over and install it before anyone could fly home. The airline kept everyone at the gate for three days, putting them in a hotel at night and bringing them back in the morning so the whole group would be ready the moment the engine was fixed.

Over those few days of conversation with strangers, his wife talked to an older couple who were about to start a new business in the electronics manufacturing space, an industry he had nothing to do with. They asked what her husband did for a living, and she said he was a sales guy. They said they were looking for their first employee when they started the company, and they would need a salesperson. She said she would let her husband know. He did not think much of it.

Six months later he had a bad day at the office and asked his wife whether she still had the number of the man she met at the airport. He called. He was in Northern California and the company was in Southern California, so they flew him down, interviewed him, hired him, and he moved the family south. That put him in the electronics assembly space.

Two issues were colliding in that industry. The first was that the product the company had been started to sell was going to become obsolete within a few years. The technology was novel, but other things happening in the industry would make it irrelevant, and he had not known enough to recognize that before he started. The second, completely separate issue was that a certain chemical was going to be banned. That chemical was widely used in the cleaning process for circuit boards, and the industry was alarmed because no other chemical worked anywhere near as well.

That created a light bulb moment. He pitched his employer on the idea that they should be the ones solving it. Instead of coming up with a new chemical, they had changed the paradigm and come up with a process that does not use that chemical or anything like it, a very green process that happened to work well. His employer did not really embrace the idea.

So he did what any mature 32-year-old would do. He had a tantrum, picked up his glove and bat, went home, and complained to anyone who would listen about how unfair life was. His wife asked him whether it was a good idea. He said he thought it was a great idea. She asked why he was trying to give it away to his employer, and why he did not just do it himself. He says he already had ten toes hanging over the cliff, and that was a gentle, loving nudge.

That is the genesis, and it is why he refers to himself as a reluctant entrepreneur. No part of him wanted to start a business. He wanted to introduce the technology to the manufacturing world, and the only way to do it was to do it himself, because nobody else would. He figured he had the technology and could figure out the business side. He calls that a rude awakening.

He does not think he realized the enormity of the challenge in front of him. The technology was novel and easily ridiculed, almost too simple, with the solution sitting right there in plain view, so the industry did not take it seriously. The only reason they sold any equipment in the early days was that customers had no choice, because the other chemical was going away or already gone. Early customers would say they would buy one of these silly little machines while they figured out what the real solution was going to be. He says they sold in spite of themselves.

Thirty-four years later, their technology is the status quo and conventional wisdom in the industry, and many other companies have adopted similar approaches. That was a very long journey he did not expect, because in his mind the technology was already mainstream while the industry did not see it that way. Their early marketing never acknowledged that people thought they were unconventional. Later marketing did.

There was no internet when he started in 1992. Early versions existed but were mostly limited to government agencies and universities. Aqueous did not have a website or email until 1996, so there were four years of what he calls stone age marketing. The only way to become known was press releases, which were free, and there were far more print trade magazines then than now. Eventually they scraped together enough money to run ads. A full-page color ad in one trade magazine ran about $6,000 an issue, which he says might as well have been six million dollars at the time. They made a deal promising far more advertising later if the magazine cut them a break on the first one.

They also exhibited at trade shows, because back then a show was the only time customers came to you. At one point they were doing 13 shows a year. The time, energy and money were enormous relative to the return, but he felt they had to push all that energy in to get the flywheel turning. In those days the whole message was look at us, look at us, trying to convince the world that theirs was the conventional technology. He describes it as braggadocious chest thumping, obnoxious, borderline sleazy advertising. They were everywhere and they were loud, and looking back he calls it cringeworthy.

Every year at those shows they tried to top themselves, doing something more outlandish than the year before. They became known for it. They had their equipment in the booth alongside magicians and video games. One year they filled the booth with surfboards to tie together surfing, water, control and cleaning. The last major show they did, they rented a waterfall.

The waterfall was 30 feet wide and 15 feet tall, and instead of dropping sheets of water it had thousands of little nozzles controlled by a computer, so images and words fell from the sky. They dyed the water fluorescent green and put black lights at the top, so their brand, their logo and their equipment names fell in brilliant green. He calls it mesmerizing. It cost about $70,000 to rent for three days, and he calls it a horrible investment.

The morning the show opened, someone came into the booth and said it was the most amazing booth he had ever seen and that he could not stop looking at it. Mike was feeling proud. The man asked permission to photograph it to share with his team, and Mike said yes, absolutely. Then the man noticed that the equipment in front of the waterfall was on wheels, and asked whether Mike would mind rolling the equipment out of the way so he could get a better picture of the waterfall.

He refers to the business gods metaphorically, because he thinks someone up there has a sense of humor about business. Sometimes they give you subtle hints and little nudges, and sometimes they hit you in the face with a two by four. That was his two by four moment. He remembers thinking, what are we doing with $70,000 waterfalls in our booth. They do not sell waterfalls and have nothing to do with waterfalls. They were high-tech carnival barkers.

In that moment he decided they were done. They cancelled the rest of the trade show contracts for the year and every ad scheduled to run. Cold turkey. He was suddenly sick of the sound of their own voice, and felt there had to be a better way.

A couple of years earlier his mentor had told him something he thought was crazy: if you want to sell more product, stop talking about your product. He remembers thinking that in no universe did that make sense, because they sell products, so of course they were going to talk about their products. He had rejected it outright. At the waterfall moment the conversation came back into his head, and this time he was ready to hear it.

So they switched to education. To this day they no longer talk about their products. They have not run an ad in 12 or 15 years. They attend one show a year now instead of 13, and it is very modest, with no magicians, no waterfalls and no surfboards, just business meetings with customers.

He calls the approach conscious marketing, and is careful to say he did not invent the term, only discovered other people had already used it. The idea is that they stopped talking about themselves and started talking about their customers. What issues do they have, what problems are they trying to solve, and what are the best practice mitigation techniques to resolve those problems. Not us, just best practice.

He still went to 13, 14, 15 trade shows a year, but instead of exhibiting on the expo floor he was upstairs in the conference area giving lectures, papers and presentations, writing technical articles for journals and trade magazines, and producing white papers. They started monthly Tech Tuesday webinars. He started the Reliability Matters podcast, which deals only with the reliability of electronic assemblies, something his company contributes to.

They started creating value and started being seen as an authority in their space. He is direct that no ad can do that for you. No amount of advertising can make you an authority, and you have to earn it. They put the time and energy in and earned authority status, which is not something they claim. The industry gives it to you.

Once you are recognized as an authority, he says, you become an influencer, a word he dislikes because of how it has been hijacked. Not a celebrity-based influencer, but an authority-based one. And one thing he discovered is that educated people make educated choices.

When they made the switch, everything changed. Beyond the authority and influence, they started attracting an entirely different type of customer. When they were obnoxious and chest thumping, they attracted people who were attracted to that, which was not necessarily the healthiest business relationship and was extremely transactional. When they switched to leading with value, they attracted customers who appreciated that approach, and sales became more relational than transactional. They have been doing it for 12 to 15 years now. Sales did not merely hold steady, they soared, and the quality of clients soared as well. He never saw that coming and did not have enough insight at the time to realize all the benefits the change would bring.

Asked whether anyone warned him during the escalating booth years, he says he wishes he had listened, and maybe people did say something. He was consumed with the image they were creating and the supposed accolades. People would tell him they could not wait to see what outrageous thing he would do next year, and ask how he was going to beat last year. He was in competition with himself, and when you are in competition with yourself you do not hear a lot of outside voices.

He notes that his mentor did not attack what they were doing, because she knew that would not go well. She dropped a seed in his head instead. Most of the pivotal changes he made in his company started with a small seed he did not take seriously at first.

The most valuable lesson she taught him was about what to do with ideas that sound crazy. He used to reject them and try never to think about them again. She convinced him to consider the possibility instead. Put it on the consider-the-possibility shelf in your head rather than rejecting it. Take it off once in a while, look at it, and see whether in a new context it makes more sense.

He has another metaphor for the same thing. The business gods start reducing your options as time goes by. They want you to go a certain way, and when you resist, they start building roadblocks on the other side, closing some doors and leaving others open, until your options narrow to what he calls the burning building moment. You are on the window ledge of a high-rise and the building is on fire. If you stay there is no chance. If you jump there is almost no chance, but it could be a lucky day and there could be a flatbed truck full of pillows passing underneath at the moment of impact. Some of the best decisions he made were made standing on that ledge, and the decision was simply to jump, because there was no other choice. He survived every jump.

The two by four moment at the trade show was the building on fire. The alternative looked amazing rather than scary, and there was no choice. His greater point is that a lot of his major decisions were made when there was no other option, so he cannot really take credit for them. There was no thoughtful weighing of options, no SWOT analysis. He jumped because the building was on fire. What he has learned since is to trust the process and not wait for the fire. Now the moment he hears something that sounds a little nutty, he is attracted to it. He does not embrace it immediately, but he tries to understand why it sounded crazy and what he is not seeing.

The switch in marketing method was instant, and only because they had already been experimenting. They had started playing with the earliest days of webinars, before they were even called webinars, on platforms like GoToMeeting, where half the audience would disconnect involuntarily during the event. They had produced some live workshops that were a little more commercial but had the premise in place. So the groundwork existed. He did not have a grand vision about it being entirely non-commercial, but because of the two by four moment and the experience they already had, they just switched. The framework was proven. They only needed to scale it, which they did rapidly.

The return on that effort was spectacular for two reasons. First, the cost of creating content is very low compared to renting a $70,000 waterfall for three days. A large show would cost them easily $175,000 for three days once booth space, labor, union labor and shipping were all counted. The cost of a webinar is the subscription fee for the platform. The cost of speaking at a conference is the hotel, the airfare and the car rental. There are no ad contracts. When you contribute an article to a trade magazine, they run it. If you want to put an ad in that magazine, you have to buy it. You do not buy an article, because they want your expert advice.

So the monetary cost was very small, though there was a great deal of time, sweat equity and knowledge involved. The second reason was the return: market share, revenue and a higher quality customer. When they had something to say, people listened. When he started speaking at events he would draw more people than other speakers, not because he is a better speaker but because he was known. Being known and respected by the industry, as a person providing accurate answers to highly technical problems without asking for anything in return, puts you in a category of trusted thought leaders. He does not think he intended that as the outcome, and if he did, he never thought he would get there.

On the company's dedication to the idea that reliability matters, he says the origin is not as noble as it sounds. He has the unique ability to clear a cocktail party. When someone asks what he does for a living, he could say he builds cleaning machines for circuit boards to remove residual post-reflow contamination and avoid failures created by electrochemical migration-induced dendritic growth and parasitic electrical leakage. The room empties.

So he needed a better answer, because people do not really care, and the question is mostly a reflex. He started asking himself what they actually do. They build equipment that cleans circuit boards. But what do you do? They make electronics more reliable. How? They have machines that remove the contamination that would otherwise cause boards to fail. So they are not in the cleaning machine business, they are in the reliability business. They make everything you use: the phone in your back pocket, the microwave oven, the television, the computer, your grandfather's pacemaker, the guidance systems on the airplanes you fly, the cruise control and the infotainment system in your car. They make sure that when you turn them on, they work. He adds, you're welcome. Now people are fascinated and ask to hear more, where before he could clear a room.

On mission, he believes a business needs to be greater than the sum of its parts. They build cleaners, and there is an economic force behind that: build for one price, sell for another, make a profit. That is commerce. But why are they in business? To make electronics more reliable. Why? Because they want to make the world a better place. He admits that sounds grandiose and almost Pollyannaish, but he thinks purpose-driven businesses do not have to mean feeding orphans or drilling wells. You can do good for humanity in the nerdiest business possible if you look beyond the business.

That matters more today than at any other time, because electronics are everywhere, and with the Internet of Things, wearables, implantables and everything happening with AI, the impact on the world is enormous. They are the part making sure it actually works. They are also exceptionally green. The technology they invented to avoid those banned chemicals turned out to be the greenest way to get the same outcome, which was not the original mission. The mission was finding something that worked, and what worked happened to be exceptionally green.

Compared to competing processes, each customer saves hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, and as a company their technology saves tens of millions of gallons annually from being consumed and from going down the drain to be treated. The energy cost of making water usable and then treating it in the waste stream is enormous, so there are knock-on effects. Their carbon footprint is smaller because the utilities required to run their equipment are a fraction of the alternatives.

They promote that mission internally more than externally. The team responds to it. They like being part of something bigger than the company and bigger than themselves, and they feel connected to making things work and making the world better. He knows it sounds simplistic, and says it works for them.

They are a small company, about 35 employees, and he notes it is easy in a small company to lose sight of the bigger picture. So they hold a meeting every week, and when an order comes in from a company, they post a bio of that company on the board. What they build, their place in the world. ACME Corporation builds defibrillators for infants in the ICU. They save lives, they impact the world this way, and Aqueous is helping them save lives. That connects the team to a higher purpose.

The point is what the person whose job it is to put widgets in boxes says when asked what they do for a living. Not that they are a shipping manager, but that they work for a company that makes it possible to build defibrillators for pediatric ICU patients. He does not want anyone on the team whose job is welding a frame or wiring connectors to think that is what they do. They make the world a better place by doing that work on that order. He does not know whether it connects with every team member, but he thinks it does.

One reason he thinks it does was COVID. He is in California, the first state to officially shut down. The day after the governor announced it, they received emails from the Department of Defense which, worded quite legally, essentially said do not even think of shutting down, we need you, you are essential. They do a lot of business with defense contractors, so those downflow letters came to them as a vendor, to keep the defense manufacturing ecosystem running. That gave them legal permission to stay open.

They held an all-hands meeting with the team the next morning. At the time everyone had been told the shutdown would last six weeks and then COVID would be over. They told the team that California had ordered everyone to shut down but that they had this exemption, showed them the paper, and explained that the industry needed them and that they had customers and purchase orders in the middle of production. Then they said that if anybody did not feel comfortable coming to work, they should stay home and would be paid, not out of PTO, for the entire time, with no negative repercussions at all. But if they did want to come to work, the company and the industry needed them.

Not one person stayed home, even though they had the opportunity to be paid to stay home. They all came. He attributes that to two possibilities: either they were fulfilled in their jobs and had a good view of the company's mission, particularly in that moment, or they had no desire to spend extra time with their spouses. Maybe a little of both. To him it was the first real solid piece of evidence that people were connected to something bigger, because otherwise he thinks they would have lost half the team.

Those first weeks were a roller coaster. The governor's shutdown order raised the stress, the exemption email lowered it, the question of whether staff would come in raised it again, the staff saying they would come lowered it, and the question of whether customers would keep buying raised it again, since most of them were shut down. The unknown is scary for people and for businesses, like driving at night with no lights. But it worked out. The business did not suffer and stayed busy. Some customers repurposed into medical, building defibrillators and ventilators, so there was still enough work, and the electronics manufacturing industry came through relatively unscathed.

The motivation for the Reliability Matters podcast was to continue the conversation about reliability, since it had become apparent they were in the reliability business rather than just the cleaning business. He wanted to build a larger audience than just people interested in cleaning, which is a narrow subset, and talk to people across the ecosystem about what matters to them. He had played with trade shows, print ads, digital ads, webinars and workshops, and decided to try podcasting. He committed to ten episodes, certain that after ten there would be nothing more to talk about and they would have solved every problem in the industry. That was over 200 episodes ago. He calls it quicksand that sucked him in.

The second podcast came from a collision of his worlds. At a conference in Hawaii he met a professor over breakfast who asked how he started the company. After hearing the story, the professor invited him to come speak to his engineering students, because they needed to hear it. The professor taught at Dartmouth. Mike is a college dropout who lasted six weeks before deciding he could not stand it, and he does not think the professor realized what he was asking. He has now done it for nine consecutive years, and speaks at other universities as well on the subject of entrepreneurship.

As he spoke more in the educational world, he started talking with other entrepreneurs and realized they all tell very similar stories while all believing their stories are unique. The specifics differ, but the thread underneath is common. His business is 34 years old now, so he has graduated to founder status, which he jokes means they pay him to stay away. There was a time when he was very hard on himself, because he made a lot of bonehead business mistakes and almost killed the company multiple times. Then he started talking to other entrepreneurs who had made the same basic mistakes, with different examples but identical causation, until he felt he could write their book for them.

That led him to view entrepreneurship in retrospect as curriculum. When you start a business, particularly the first time, you have essentially signed up for a university course. Instead of a brick and mortar building, instead of frat parties, it is a perpetual school of learning with no graduation date and no diploma. It just goes on and on, and you learn an enormous amount if you stay with it.

He started The Reluctant Entrepreneur with two goals. The first was to de-romanticize entrepreneurship, not to discourage people from entering but to give an authentic view of what it is really like. He cannot count the times people have told him he is so lucky to work for himself, that he writes his own checks, takes as much time off as he wants and charges things to the company. None of that is true, at least not in the early days. Everything is your boss. Everyone is your boss. The owner is at the bottom of the food chain in terms of who they report to. For people giving up a perfectly good job because they envy a life that does not exist, his advice is to stay on that side of the check. For those seriously considering it, he wants them to hear how hard it will be and how rewarding it will be, because the two come hand in hand, like raising a child.

The second goal was for the person already in it who is in the hedge maze of business and cannot see the way out, who may be ready to throw in the towel. They may not realize they are two left turns and a right away from where they need to be, so close they cannot see it because they are too deep in the maze. He wanted that person to hear from someone who had been in the same position. If he had quit every time he hit a wall he thought he could not get around, this conversation would not be happening. His stubbornness and refusal to fail bought the time to finish that part of the curriculum and move on to the next. He thinks a lot of people fail because they run out of steam, grit and determination and doubt themselves, without realizing that is just part of the building process. Like boot camp, where the first thing they do is break you so they can rebuild you into the soldier you need to be.

Asked whether that message gets talked about honestly, he points back to the attributes he started with: bravado, ego, arrogance, naivety, no real assessment of risk. He is fond of his ego, which told him he could do things he did not think he could do. But at one point he had to take that little buddy and put him in the dungeon, taking him out to play once in a while when nobody was around. When he hears some business owners talk about hard times, they throw in a couple of critical moments, but sometimes the purpose is to show how they overcame it, and he thinks their ego is not in the same dungeon as his.

When he decided to tell his story he wanted to be as authentic as he could be. When his wife read the book she was a little critical and asked whether he was embarrassed by some of it. He said yes, he is embarrassed by some of it, but so are the people currently going through the same things, and he wants them to know they are not alone and that pretty much everyone they look up to had their own version of it.

His example: before the internet, before email, they had to mail brochures. At one point his postage meter was out of postage, and the minimum he could add when he took it to the post office to refill was $50. He did not have $50. So he went through the office garbage cans looking for envelopes they had received where the post office had not stamped the cancel mark over the stamp. He cut out those stamps and taped them to envelopes so he could mail brochures. He says it is not a proud moment, it is a sad and desperate one, but he does not mind telling it because it illustrates the persistence required from time to time. Not the whole time, because if it is the whole time you are doing something wrong.

His hope is that hearing stories like that might stop someone from waiting for the building to be on fire before leaping into something better. Maybe they can recognize the sign from the stories he and his guests tell, and recalibrate without having to scour garbage cans for unused stamps. So he does not mind sharing all the bonehead, ill-conceived ideas and mistakes he made, because they are the poster child of what can go wrong and also evidence that no matter how much you mess things up, it can be fixed.

His mentor gave him the line he still uses for that. When she came in to go through the company and figure out what was wrong, he was embarrassed by what she found in the numbers. She looked at him and said this is good news, because if we can see it we can fix it, and today we can see it. He felt enormous relief. He had been nervous about putting everything on display because it was not pretty, and she reframed it entirely.

On the mental side, he says entrepreneurs have to learn to get out of their own way. We are our own obstacle, because we do not want to be wrong and we are attached to an idea or an outcome that we may not be meant to get. Cutting the strings of attachment and getting out of his own way is the single action that has helped turn his company around the most. He is the obstacle every single time. The economy, the pandemic and the rest are contributing factors, but the real obstacle is him. Coming to terms with that requires the ego to be isolated, because the ego's job is to tell you that you do not need to hear this advice and that the problem is everything else.

He used to be the smartest guy in the room, only because he could not afford smart people when the company started. His goal now is to be the stupidest guy he knows, because he thinks he is pretty bright technically, and if he is the stupidest person in the room they cannot fail. Business owners talk constantly about scaling the business, and he thinks they need to scale themselves to the appropriate scale and needs of the business.

He cites the statistic that 80 percent of businesses fail, and argues that is not because business is inherently risky. It is because 100 percent of the owners of that 80 percent failed the business. The business did not fail them. He thinks they failed because they assumed what got them from A to B would get them from B to C, and in every instance he has seen, across hundreds of conversations with entrepreneurs, what got you from A to B fails you from B to C. You have to adapt and scale, and what you cannot learn you acquire through hiring or consulting. You have to be surrounded with the skills required for the size and scale of the business.

His metaphor is a video game where all the rules change at the next level. Or raising a baby who starts on milk or formula, then baby food, then teeth, with dietary needs changing all the way through life. The business needs to be fed an appropriate diet of leadership, and its needs change as it gets older. If the founder and the team do not recognize that, they drive the business to failure.

His closing advice is two things. One is his own: never give up, just keep moving forward. The other he borrows from Steve Jobs: stay curious. He admits that sounds almost too simple, like a Hallmark card, but curiosity is what allowed him to do what he does. He got in trouble as a kid for taking his parents' appliances apart to see how they worked, though the trouble came from not putting them back together. That technical curiosity morphed into curiosity about how everything works, how decisions get made, how doing this results in that. It is what lets him look at something a little nutty, like being told to stop talking about his product, and ask why it does not make sense and what would need to happen for it to make sense. Curiosity is what lets him consider possibilities he would otherwise reject. His last word is that you are closer than you think to the other side of the mountain, probably just short of the summit, so do not give up now.

Mike can be found at mikekonrad.com, Konrad with a K, which links to all of his other activities, including both podcasts.