Balancing Purpose & Profit: Lessons From a Social Enterprise Startup with Shannon Lemanski

Full Transcript

Note: the following transcript was generated by AI and therefore may contain some errors and omissions.

Over 8% of our population, when you turn on the tap, the water that comes out, if the water comes out, it’s so salty that you may as well go stick your head in at King’s and take a sip because it’d have less salt in it. It’s brown, it smells like eggs. It could contain arsenic, uranium or E. coli. This is water that you would boil before you served to a dog. I’m not bathing my three-year-old in it and you definitely can’t drink it. Things that we just take for granted living here on the coast doesn’t exist in remote locations. And I’m not talking…

the middle of NT, although they do have problems there or over in WA. I’m talking in Queensland. Before we get started, the team here at the Coast and Commerce podcast want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where this podcast is created, the Kabi Kabi and Jinibara people. We honour their rich culture of storytelling as we share the inspiring stories of business leaders across the Sunshine Coast. We pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging. Let’s get on with the show.

G’day and welcome back to the Coast and Commerce podcast. I’m Ben Amos from Innovate Media and on this show, we bring stories from inspirational business people across the Sunshine Coast to you to help you in whatever you’re doing in business on the coast. And today we’ve got Shannon Lemanski from Aqua Ubique. Now Shannon, when I was first introduced to you, it was actually here at our studio when we had an open morning here with Caloundra Chamber of Commerce. And the person who introduced me to you said you have to hear Shannon’s story.

And that got me intrigued because I love good stories and I love good business stories. So guys watching this is an interesting story and you’re really going to get a lot of value out of today’s episode. But Shannon, before we get into that, tell us who are you? What do you do? What’s Aqua Ubique? Easy Ben. Who am I? I’m 15 years full time in the military before I transitioned. Decided that I needed to spend more time being a father and looking after the, at that stage, 18 month old daughter that we had. She’s now three.

moved to the Sunshine Coast because the wife grew up out the back of Brisbane and we were coming up here every weekend. So we figured why keep commuting to the holiday destination when you can live here, moved up here and started a business. So what is Aqua Ubique? Yeah. We pull drinking water out of thin air. Out of the air. Yep. So we take the humidity that’s available in the air, regardless of whether it’s an office, an air conditioned office, Alice Springs, doesn’t matter where you are, doesn’t matter how dry you think it is. There’s always water available in the air. We harness that.

We condense it into drinking water, we filter it and remineralise it and we dispense it as premium drinking water. Very cool. And I remember when you first told me about this, basically, it’s like an alternative to the office water cooler with those big bottles on top of the kind of cooling tower thing that you stick your cup under and press the button. So it’s basically the same thing, but without the bottle on top and without needing to get those bottles coming in, right? Correct. That is exactly what it is. So the way that we’re, or our catch cry effectively is the water is better for you, better for the planet and building better communities.

So better for you in the sense that we can save a small business 30 cents a litre on their standard office water core. It’s healthier for you because it’s got less minerals, sorry, less chemicals than tap, more minerals than bottled, no micro plastics and no PFAS, so they’re forever chemicals that you’ve seen in the media recently. So there’s none of any of that. Better for the planet. No single use plastics, those bottles are gone. And the transport emissions of getting those bottles to you, they’re gone as well. And building better communities. And this is the thing that really sets us apart.

You would have been aware that there’s the UN Sustainable Development Goals. SDG 6 is fresh water for all. Recent report out from the UN only this year, 2.2 billion people globally don’t have access to fresh drinking water. How many of them do you think are in Australia? So 2.2 billion globally. don’t know, million people? I’m just pulling a number. Double. So more than 2

In Australia? 8 % of our population. When you turn on the tap, the water that comes out, if the water comes out, it’s so salty that you might as well go stick your head in at King’s and take a sip because it would have less salt in it. It’s brown, it smells like eggs. It could contain arsenic, uranium or E. coli. This is water that you would boil before you serve to a dog. I’m not bathing my three-year-old in it and you definitely can’t drink it. And unfortunately, in lot of these communities as well, bottled water is more expensive than soft drink.

So that leads to the kids in these communities in particular drinking a lot more soft drink, which then causes dental issues, chronic health issues, diabetes, all these other problems because of the fact that the things that we just take for granted living here on the coast doesn’t exist in remote locations. And I’m not talking the middle of NT, although they do have problems there or over in WA, I’m talking in Queensland. We’ve got islands up in the Torres Strait and a couple of hours north of here. They’ve been on boil water alerts for months and

There’s not enough bottled water landing on the island. Therefore, particularly if you’ve got kids, what do you do? Yeah. So what we’re aiming to do and how we’re different is with the machines that we’re using to get into small businesses to replace their standard office water core. Not only is it better for them and all those things that I’ve just covered, for every five that I can get into a small business, I can put one in community. So I can get it into the health centres or the schools where the most vulnerable are in these communities to actually start making a difference and fixing.

a problem that shouldn’t be a problem in Australia. Yeah. It’s very cool. I mean, one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you on the Coast and Commerce podcast, Shannon, is to explore that idea of that bigger picture and purpose behind the business. But I did promise our listeners and viewers a story. You know, I think we really probably need to take it back to what started, what prompted this whole idea for Aqua Ubique in the first place for you. Yeah, you’re right. And it is a good story. So like I mentioned,

12 and a half years in the army full time. Part of while I was in there, I was deployed over to Papua New Guinea for a couple of weeks doing a reconstruction job. So the unit that I was posted to at the time, every 12 months we go over there and we’re rebuilding schools, hospitals, army barracks, that kind of thing. 120 soldiers, we couldn’t drink the tap water over there because it wasn’t certified. So it means that I had to get bottled water in. We generated quite a lot of plastic.

There wasn’t a rubbish service in the area that we working in either, that was me. So therefore, crush the bottles, throw them in the truck, take them down the tip. When I use the term tip, being pretty generous, I’m talking burning piles of garbage, probably half the height of this warehouse at least. Jump out of the truck, I’m now this deep in mud and we’re shovelling the plastic bottles off the back of the truck. The locals that live at the tip, because they have no other option, come up to us.

Please sir, can you not crush these bottles? And I’m like, sure, whatever, they’re rubbish. I don’t care. What do you need them for? I was expecting them to say, we’re gonna hang them on strings on the way in and out of town and we’ll sell them for a couple of cents. Cause I’d seen some of the other locals doing that to provide for their families. No, no sir. If these are uncrushed, we can capture more rainwater for our kids. And it means we don’t have to give them dirty creek water. Sure. That’s a no brainer. Yeah. I go back and tell the rest of the contingent guys.

I know for the last three weeks I’ve been telling you to crush the bottles. I know I finally got you to do what I ask as the good logistics officer that I am and at that stage new guy to the organisation. Ignore what I said. Do the opposite. Leave them uncrushed. Fast forward two weeks. This activity, because it happens every 12 months, you get the last two pallets of water and you put them in the shipping container. So it means the next year when the activity rolls around, if we can’t get water in time, you can pull out the old pallets and go again.

The two pallets from the year prior we hadn’t needed this year, which therefore means that the water in that bottle had now expired. It expires? Apparently. There’s a number on the side of the bottle that says, once you hit this number, this bottle is no longer safe to drink, apparently. Best before date. Anyway, don’t get me started. That is definitely a story for another day. But anyway, so we’ve now got these two pallets of water, unopened, still shrink-wrapped, that we can’t drink. So I’m now taking these down to the tip, and I’m now throwing these out on the tip.

The locals initially didn’t want to touch it. They looked at it and went, no, if these Aussies are throwing this off the back of the truck, there must be poison, there must be plastic, there must be something that’s in it, must be open a bottle, drink it in front of them. Guys, there’s nothing wrong with this. It’s just the number on the side of the bottle and that’s why we can’t have it. They thought we were absolutely nuts. I didn’t realise how life-changing that scenario was until, fast forward a couple of years later, I’m listening to another business podcast at that point in time and I came across this technology.

I wasn’t focused on that experience in Papua New Guinea when I first came across the tech. There was particularly one of the last jobs that I did in the military. I was a logistics officer for a particular army unit that was doing a lot of amphibious stuff, so working off the back of Navy ships. And the hardest thing to move around the battle space was water. Particularly reconnaissance forces, they’re three days in front of the ships. The guys have got solar panels to recharge all their communications. If they’re doing their job properly, then they’re not expending ammunition.

They’ve carried in enough food. But if you leave a soldier on the beach without food for three days, he’ll be hungry and tired and pissed off when he gets back to the ship, but he’ll probably get over it. You leave him without water for three days and he’s dead. If the weather’s bad, if I can’t watch a helicopter, if I can’t get a boat out the back, how do I get water to these guys? So that was one of the hardest issues I had to solve when I was in that job. So when I first came across this tech, went, that’s the problem that I want to solve. But when I started having some issues with

with selling into defence because that is a long drawn out process. I’m like, why? Why if that’s the problem that I was passionate about? Why am I still so passionate about this technology, even though the big problem that I thought I was going to solve is now proving really difficult? Thought back through it. I had a business mentor is like, yeah, but what’s your why? I told him the defence story and he’s like, not cool story. There’s something else go deeper. We went a couple different levels deeper and it was back to that that scenario and that that experience that I had in Papua New Guinea. I’m like, okay.

That’s why I wanna do it. So I knew there was a massive issue in the near region. So I grabbed the tech, went, okay, we’ll go overseas. But before I do that, I’ll just double check that we don’t have any issues in Australia, because we’re a first world country and surely we don’t have any problems here. Got a bit of research later, I found out how bad the situation is Australia. I’m like, we’ll solve this problem first. And once we solve this one, then we can start going global. I think that realisation moment for many people

listening who haven’t really heard that statistic before around how much of the Australian population doesn’t have access to clean drinking water like you just assume we do, right? You know, maybe there’s a handful of disconnected farms in remote Queensland that have some ball water or bad tank water or something. That’s kind of my perception, right? But you’re not thinking that it’s as systemic as it is in some of those areas. And I think that’s quite a shocking moment.

You know, think people don’t understand that. I can understand that that kind of prompted you to action there, but you’ve started a business, right? You haven’t started a charity like a water charity, right? Correct. Tell me, talk me through that idea. So, you know, what kind of prompted you to, basically start a startup and bring a product to market to, as a way to address, hopefully that problem. Exactly. So what’s

What’s the hardest problem that you can solve in a philanthropic space that’s got no money? Excellent. Why did I start down this journey? But anyway, we’re getting there now. I looked at it and went, okay, if this is the problem that I actually want to solve, and if this is the thing that I’m passionate about, where does the money come from? And charities are excellent. Charities do a lot of good work. And I’ve got a bunch of mates that run charities. And they do really good jobs, provided they can get grants and provided they can get donations.

And the current economic climate, grants, short of, depending on where we are in the election cycle, donations, it depends. The first thing that will get cut back out of a lot of household budgets during an economic crisis will be, we really want to give, but we need to put food on the table first. Right. So, okay, let’s not rely on donations. Let’s not rely on grants. If we can get either of those, that’s awesome, because we can supercharge the work. But we need an ability that we can at least cover our own expenses.

And it’s very much the concept of purpose over profit. So I need a business that is still profitable, but rather than that profit going to a bottom line that can be dispersed out to whoever, that profit then does good work. And that’s why I went, okay, so I need to set this up. And that was when I had the realisation that the tech in its current form, is it perfect? No, and we’re doing some R&D to improve that. But is it good enough to get started? Definitely, it can be life changing today.

But the people that need the tech can’t afford it. And that’s the reason why this technology has existed for 25 years and it hasn’t taken off. The people that need it can’t afford it and the people that can afford it don’t necessarily need it. So then it was a case of, okay, how do I turn that paradigm on its head such that the people that can afford it, it has an economic benefit for them, it has a social impact for them, it has a environmental impact for them, and it starts solving this issue. And that’s where it took me.

at least six months to crunch the numbers properly and get it to work. And it was a really tough problem to solve. But it was a case of going, the competition is not other atmospheric water generators, manufacturers. The competition is the product that I’m looking to disrupt, which is 15 litre bottled water cores. So how do I get under that price point? How do I have the business model such that this thing can support itself? And what would otherwise be cost as profit goes into impact.

Well, here’s the thing, right? You talk about a charitable approach would be just trying to seek donations, right? And like you say, you know, that’s one of the first things for people to stop doing in many cases. But in a business, you know, a business particularly of a sort that, you know, has a need for a water cooler, you know, in a waiting room or in a meeting space or an event space or a large corporate office where they, you know, want that ability to, you know, have

Freshwater on tap like that. That’s not something they’re to cut from the budget. You’re going to get a bit of staff upset if that happens. So it’s not about kind of seeking donations from people. It’s about supplying them a service that they’re already paying for and provided you can get the economics right, I’m assuming. Then that’s going to fuel the bigger picture of the purpose of AquaEB. Correct? 100%. So it’s very much the, what is the product? What is the…

the issue that people are currently solving. We need fresh water wherever we need it in all those locations you just mentioned. How’s that currently being solved? There’s a number of different ways. There’s water filters, there’s inline water filters, all those bottles, big bottles and little bottles. Okay, in those settings, in any of those ones, can I actually replace any of those solutions with this technology? Yes, I can. I can replace 15 litre bottles. Cool, how do I set that up? Because people that…

have had these coolers, have had them for years, provided that the deliveries show up on time and the water tastes good and it’s not left out in the sun, the chances of someone rolling off one of those providers is pretty low. So it needs to be cheaper, healthier, cleaner, greener. There needs to be a definitive benefit for why people are even looking, they’re even on Google looking for an alternate provider. So if there’s one that’s cheaper, cleaner, greener, and doing good work, that’s generally when I get people to go, ooh, what’s that?

Yeah, and that’s the power of that story, right? Particularly when you can tell that story about the bigger purpose. And you talked before about the idea of purpose before profit or purpose over profit. you know, profit is still important, right? Or else you don’t have sustainable business. But I think when you can connect people to that purpose, then that can drive more profit. it’s very much a case of, we’ve just picked up

social enterprise status through the Queensland Social Enterprise Council. And one of their questions that they assess you against is, is your business model actually sustainable? Are you only looking for grants and are you only looking for donations? And if you are, then you get struck off because that’s not a sustainable business model. It’s very much the concept of profit for purpose. So you are still profitable. is still a business that can stand on its own two legs. It’s just made the conscious decision of, we’re going to use this for good. Yeah.

So you are at, I guess, the startup stage, you’re very much still the startup stage in this business. Can you tell us kind of where are you at with Aqua Ubique now as of the time of this recording in late 2024? And what sort of traction are you starting to get across the coast or across Queensland? Yeah, perfect. So the company itself has existed for coming up on two years. The first 12 to 18 months of that was very much, okay, I this technology exists, but

If you jump on Google and there’s a number of different manufacturers that come up and there was a bunch of scams and other issues with this style technology where people with some really slick ads go, here’s the thing, the thing’s cool, it’ll do all this. It doesn’t. So it was very much taking the tech, having a look at it, working out what are the marketing claims, what can it actually do? And only bringing to product market that one, I was confident is going to do what it says on the can.

And two, it’s actually sustainable in the sense that I don’t have to keep changing the filters and dealing with all these other issues and bits and pieces, particularly given my military background. And I’m going to try and put it out in these remote areas. I can’t have stuff that needs a specialist technician or a set of left-handed screwdrivers every five minutes, because that’s what makes technology fall over in these locations. So we dug into the technology. We made sure it does exactly what we say it does and that it was sustainable.

in so doing and then went, okay, now that we’ve got a piece of technology, we’ve got a solution, we know what the problem is, now let’s crunch the numbers on the economics to make it work. We solve that problem and went, right, let’s take that to market. And it was actually, so the Sunshine Coast was the perfect place to do this. When I first moved up here, so I always had that entrepreneurial bug and you’re always gonna do a business, I just didn’t know what it was. Found out about Forward Fest 2023. At this stage, I didn’t know,

Craig Josic, didn’t know Gavin Keeley, I didn’t know anything to do with the chamber, I hadn’t met you, I knew no one on the coast. I just knew I wanna do a business something, that sounds like a cool place to go. At that stage though, three days, expensive ticket, am I actually gonna get anything out of it? I’m so glad I went to that festival. So the connections that I made there, walked in with an idea. I had business cards, the company had been set up, we didn’t exist on LinkedIn yet.

Got a funny story where effectively I was sitting in the venture capital, one of the venture capital panel discussions. And because at this stage it was very much, I’m focused on the tech, I’m still trying to sell to the military. So it’s tech, tech, tech. I’m like, before I go start talking to any of these angel investors, I should probably exist on LinkedIn, because the first thing they’re gonna do is hook me up on LinkedIn, and if it says defence consultant, gonna, who’s this guy? So literally made the company on LinkedIn while I’m sitting there.

shook hands, hi, I’m Shannon. I’m the co founder of Aqua Ubique is my business card. Fast forward 12 months from there. Because of the the network that I built from that festival and the people that I met, and just the coast is very much a place where hey, I need help with this and you just ask for for help and people go, I can, I can either help you or I can refer you to somebody that can help you. allowed us to go in less than 12 months or just over 12 months, go from

the concept of a business to a product that had been verified and then got launched at Forward Fest this year. So we were the official water sponsor for Forward Fest just gone. And that’s where we launched the product. There was a pitch competition as part of that. We won that pitch competition and we’ve just taken off from there. So we’ve now got product in market. We’ve had the Sunshine Coast City Council come on as customers. We’ve got James Cook University that’s come on as a customer. We’ve got a couple other big ticket items that are going at the moment as well.

And we’re currently rolling these machines out across the coast. Yeah. Congratulations. Cheers. Quite a journey. Just to clarify what you are, what you have in market now is functioning water coolers that replace those bottled water coolers in an office environment. And the economics make sense. So if you’re a customer with one of those 15 litre office water coolers, we can save you on average 30 cents a litre on that water that comes in that machine. It’s very cool.

We won’t go too far down that, but I do encourage people who are watching or listening, if that kind of sounds like something that they might be interested to reach out to you, Shannon, and make sure that you have that conversation with them. but what I do want to talk about is this idea of, you know, having that, that bigger picture, that bigger why behind the business, you know, you could be now focused on what a great business model. can just, you know, scale this. I can get as many of these water coolers into as many offices as I can.

raking the money from air, right? Effectively. mean, it’s, know, simplifying it, right? But that’s not, that’s not your journey. That’s not what you’re trying to do. You mentioned before, you know, for every five coolers that you can have, you know, in an office workspace somewhere, you bring, you’re able to bring that to community in Australia. What does that mean? Does that mean that you’re delivering, it’s like, you can take one of these water coolers and stick it in a community somewhere? So that’s exactly what we’re working to do.

So we’ve split it up over three horizons to go, what do I need to do in the next 12 months to get this business up? What do I need to do in two to five years after that to keep moving? And then what’s out in Northstar? Where do we want to be in five years from now? And what’s the direction that we’re heading in? We can see the potential for this technology to solve the solution of freshwater globally. And I know how lofty and high in the sky that sounds, but it’s very much that that is our

North Star, that’s our guiding direction, that’s where we want to go. Now let’s break it down into the granular level of how do we need to do that. Does that mean we get hundreds and thousands of millions of office water cores and roll them out everywhere? No, because the bigger this technology is, the more efficient it is at scale. So we want to hit that happy medium between it’s not a water treatment plant, but it’s something that’s still portable and it can service whole communities. when there’s quite a journey that we need to go on a product journey to get to that level.

So starting right now, fix, disrupt the market that exists, build the business. The joy of startup is it’s not so much what’s on fire, it’s what’s got the biggest fire. So therefore running from fire to fire and dealing with these things, but knowing what it is, which means when the times get tough, when there is cashflow issues, when you’re doing 18 hour days because you have no other option.

Money’s not enough to keep you going. And if you’re doing it to get rich, you’ll burn out in six months and go, this was too hard. And you’ll go back to whatever job you had previously. You’ve got to have the purpose and the drive and the focus. And that comes from what’s the underlying why. So right now we’ve got the office water coolers. The next step from that is scaling it up to a 20 foot shipping container, completely solar powered and self contained that we can set out in communities. We’re working. we’ve submitted for a federal government grant for that one. And if we’re successful with that.

that will generate a machine that can do 100 litres per day in Alice Springs. The next step from there is there’s another form of water from air capture technology that’s currently within one of the leading research providers within Australia. And we’re working to commercialise that to then get that into the bigger units as well. And again, it’s very much a case of make the thing bigger, make the thing more efficient, get it to the people where it needs to go and support it.

as best we can. I’m sure you’ve learned a lot about your market in the last 12 months. What’s the biggest objection that you have to people? To me, it seems like a no-brainer. Here at Innovate Media, we’re probably not at the scale. We have quite a small team that we really need this. We’ve got a filtered water jug in the fridge. It’s all good.

You know, for businesses out there that already have these kind of large bottled, these 15 litre bottled water dispensers, it seems like a no brainer that you would just switch over to Acrobic. Like why not? But what’s the objection? do you, what are the common objections you get? So one of the, and the best analogy that I’ve heard from this is, we’re doing an accelerator at the moment and this story came up. So a guy walks into, think Western town, guy walks into town.

And there’s a ranger sitting there on the deck on his rocking chair and he’s got a dog lying next to him. And every so often the dog yelps. Couple of minutes later, the dog yelps again. The guy that walks in town asks the ranger, why is the dog yelping? He’s lying on a nail. Why doesn’t he just move? It doesn’t hurt enough. And that’s very much the mentality that we’re trying to overcome with this. People, particularly when they’ve got those bottled water cores,

It’s something that it’s just there. The delivery guy shows up. They just don’t think about it. So because of the fact that it doesn’t hurt enough, you need to find the people that go, do you have a water cooler? Yes. Do you like it? I’ve never really thought about it. Okay. If you haven’t thought about it, what about this? I that that’s, that’s cool. But it’s finding those people to then go, we’ve got one of those. can see the benefits that are, and you’re doing all this good work as well. That’s the cherry on top. Okay. We can make the switch. Yeah. It’s just about getting that.

that change of mindset into your customer. The change of mindset and knowing who the customer is. that way, because this, it makes sense at scale. If you’ve only got a small filtered jug in the fridge, then it doesn’t make sense. So it’s knowing, niching down and knowing exactly who the customer is that we’re going to start with, which also helps because it means that we can target our marketing to exactly who that person is to then go after them. You know, when I first heard about

what you do and what the product does at Aqua Ubique. One of the first things that I had was just, I couldn’t even believe that it existed. Like understand the idea of, I guess, condensation and how you can get water droplets from air, but not at the scale that you could be, basically 15 litres of water cooler, office water cooler could be replaced. So tell me, how do you help potential customers kind of understand not only

how it works and that it can actually do what you say it does. there’s probably some questions around also the quality of the water that comes out of this thing as well when it’s generated from whatever air is floating around their office space. 100%. And that’s definitely one of the questions that come up other than the, does it work? It’s then, is it safe? And what’s the background behind it? And I can talk about the science until the cows come home. And if people are interested to…

to go through how the process works, then you can jump on our website. There’s an awesome video that you guys did for us actually, that takes you through exactly how that works. But the best way for people to experience it is to try it. Okay, should I be worried? Potentially. Now, so what I’ve got here, this is some of the water, and for the people watching, this is some of the water that’s come out of the machine that I’ve currently got run up in the warehouse.

This is coffee by the way. So I haven’t got anything to compare it with. But from my coffee that I’ve been drinking. So this morning that would have been humidity in the air. Okay. Is it this, this is like whiskey tasting or something like wine. It smells like water folks. okay. Let’s have a go.

I mean, that’s pretty good. that’s tastes like pure filtered, tasty, water. And your machine cools too, right? So that’s how it’s coming out of that. That’s how it comes out. So you can set it anywhere between four and 10 degrees. You can set the hot tank between 70 and 90 degrees. So you can get freezing cold boiling water, touch of a button ready to drink. Very cool. So you know, for those listening, you know, definitely

Go to Aqua, what’s the website? Aqua Ubique. AquaUbique.com.au AquaUbique.com.au What does Aqua Ubique mean? Aqua, water, Ubqoqie, ubiquitous everywhere. Everywhere. Water everywhere. I like it. Very cool. So AquaUbique.com.au is the place to go. .com.au. .com.au. Thank you. AquaUbique.com.au. You can obviously taste that for yourself when you get one of these machines in your workplace. But I’m interested, just as we wrap up here.

And before the trucks that are floating behind us get noisier again. Sorry about that, but we’re pushing through. Before we wrap up here, Shannon, I want to know what’s the future here. Like where, where’s the vision of Aqua Beak in the next three to five years, you’re going to solve the water crisis in Australia. To do that in three to five years, probably a bit ambitious, but Hey, I’ll give it a good crack. No, it’s very much. We know the North star is water for everyone everywhere.

catch-cry the company for a reason. So the next three to five years is get the tech, make it sovereign technology and bring high paying, high skilled manufacturing jobs to the coast as well. When I first set this up, it was always a case of, let’s get it into the defence force. Doing that means you need a sovereign supply chain. And when I started looking around the coast, all the manufacturing assets and all the manufacturing skill sets that I need are already here. So get in the technology.

building it on the coast, using Australian made technology to solve our own problems at home and then using that to then expand from that. Well, cheers to that. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming on the show. It’s been a really fascinating story and we got a drink after we cheers don’t we? Yeah. Aqua. That means water. In case you didn’t know. Thanks Shannon. This is, you know, it is an inspirational story and you know, there’s obviously a real

value to businesses out there to consider changing their office water cooler into an Aqua Ubique product. But also the bigger picture behind it, I think, is what’s really inspirational for those who are listening or watching today. So thanks for coming on and sharing your story. Ben. Really appreciate it.