Andrew Dugan started out as a manufacturer's rep in Colorado, running around to wastewater plants in two states selling other people's equipment. Three hundred or so plants later, he used his engineering degree to get into consulting, and then, in his words, didn't particularly love it.

So he took a personality and career test. It came back and told him he should be a journalist, a teacher, or a copywriter.

"And I said, well, what's that?"

That's the origin story of Water Rights, his copywriting business, and now PUMA, the agency he's building for companies selling into utilities.

Niching down defies logic until it doesn't

He tried to branch out early, and water pulled him back. Anyone who has niched down has heard the objection. Why limit yourself? Why not just do B2B, or anything bigger than this?

His answer is the one I've landed on running a fractional CMO practice in water. The niche does the first half of the conversation for you. Clients don't have to explain the industry, and you skip past who do you sell to and who's your competition. As Andrew put it, the value isn't that he's the best writer in the world. It's that nobody has to teach him anything first.

There's a business case too, which he was direct about. Niching let him charge more, sooner.

His advice is to look for a through line rather than a category. He has a friend who does excavation marketing, which touches water lines, septic systems, and plenty that has nothing to do with water. Specific enough to be memorable, broad enough to keep you fed.

Start where they are, not where you are

Look at the conference slides and case studies in this industry and you see the same pattern. Graphs on graphs. Everything organized around the technology.

Andrew's job, as he describes it, is translating that into something a person wants to read. He interviews the operators using the product and the engineers who support it, and he looks for what it does for them, not what it does mechanically.

The reframe is simple. Instead of "the XYZ5000 solves this problem," you write "this city fixed the problem they had," and then you get to the product.

"If you're going to catch the attention of the people you're ultimately selling to, it really has to start with where they're at and not where you're at."

He loses this argument sometimes. Revisions come back, the founder wants it product forward, and at some point you let people do what they're going to do.

A good case study is a sandwich

A bad case study names the product six or seven times in five hundred words, including in the title, and spends almost no time on what the customer was dealing with.

A good one leads with the client's objectives and their KPIs. The title names a city so the reader can see themselves in it. The opening is about what utilities are facing, whether that's budget shortfalls, labor, or tightening regulations. Then you talk about yourself in the middle, and close on the results the client got.

Client, you, client. Andrew calls it a sandwich. If you want the in-house version, make three buckets, challenge, solution and results, and sort your project notes into them before you write a word.

If your CEO is asking about leads

I asked what he'd tell a marketing director with a small team and a CEO asking about pipeline. Three things.

Audit how you show up in person, because this industry runs on relationships and trade shows are still where they get made.

Qualify your list honestly. Not every product fits every plant. A hundred thousand gallons a day and the Denver metro are different businesses, and pretending you serve both costs you the specificity that makes messaging work.

Then don't skip the phone. Utility people are out in the field, email isn't always how you reach them, and a voicemail lands more personally than another unopened message.

What AI actually took

Andrew is candid that AI has eaten part of his business. The SEO blog work that kept him busy early on is largely automated now. What survived is long form, and above all case studies, because you still have to get an operator on the phone and ask what the product did for their Tuesday.

His broader read is worth sitting with. The flood of generated content has made authenticity more valuable, not less, precisely because it's so easy to fake. Work that's fast and easy for its own sake reads like fast food, "all calories and no nutrients."

The takeaway: the hurdle isn't technical

I asked what he'd want a water marketer to leave with. He didn't hesitate. Humanize the technology.

"The biggest hurdle we face isn't a technical one. It's one of messaging, and it's one of buy-in, and it's culture. And that can only be shifted through storytelling."

The tools in this industry are good, and utilities need them. What's slowing adoption isn't the engineering. It's that we keep describing these products the way we understand them instead of the way a plant manager experiences them.

Listen to the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

Find Andrew on LinkedIn, or at runwithpuma.com. If you've got a water company that needs content, he's your call.

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