In Pictures: Small B.C. water purification firm has many streams of income
Adam Scheuer’s company works with residential and industrial clients - even NASA
Adam Scheuer’s B.C. water-treatment company, Tiger Purification Systems, started off by focusing on the residential market. But over the years, the company, which trades under the name Watertiger, “very aggressively pushed into more commercial-industrial type markets,” Mr. Scheuer says, citing projects such as hospitals and mine remediation.Rafal Gerszak/The Globe and Mail
Mr. Scheuer, who is president of Watertiger, demonstrates the changing of a filter for a drinking water system. The company has four employees and services some of its clients on an annual basis. Besides exporting systems to more than 40 countries, it has supplied one to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which used the unit in zero gravity as part of a project related to planned manned missions to Mars.Rafal Gerszak/The Globe and Mail
Here is a pH meter at the offices of Watertiger in Burnaby, B.C. Today the company is considering its next move. Mr. Scheuer envisages Watertiger having between 20 and 40 employees if it can expand nationwide and get into bigger-picture design services. “I see us being a bigger player in the market rather than just sort of a local dealer.”Rafal Gerszak/The Globe and Mail
A rainwater harvesting system at Watertiger.Rafal Gerszak/The Globe and Mail
But lack of focus may be an obstacle for the company. “One of the problems that we face is we are so scattered, because we feed into so many different markets, so many different applications, so many different products. That’s always a hurdle to taking that next step up in size,” says Mr. Scheuer, who is pictured holding a cutaway of a Heifitop, a closed-loop filtration system.Rafal Gerszak/The Globe and Mail
Then again, Watertiger can’t afford to abandon the residential projects that have long paid its bills. “We don’t want to let go of the residential work because we don’t have enough of those big, juicy projects on the commercial side,” Mr. Scheuer says.Rafal Gerszak/The Globe and Mail