There’s a certain kind of person in this industry you run into every decade or so. They’ve been around long enough to know how everything works, but they’re still restless enough to ask why it has to work that way. Eric Montez is that person.
I’ve known Eric for years. We worked for the same chemical company at different points — never in the same office, but our paths crossed more times than either of us can count. Then life moved on, and somewhere between then and now, he co-founded a specialty chemical company called Magnus, built it into a global operation over twelve years, expanded into a new facility in Frisco, Texas, and — almost as a side note — wrote and independently published a book called ‘‘Who Squeezed My Lemons: 100 Unfiltered Truths About Grit, Risk, and Turning Sour into Sweet.’’
I had him on the podcast recently. We talked for just under thirty minutes, and I left the conversation thinking about three things: his book, his business model, and what both of them say about staying hungry in an industry that can make it very easy to go on autopilot.
The Book Most People Would Never Finish
Eric didn’t tell anyone he was writing it. Not his partner. Not his family. His wife thought he was going out for beers. He was at the mall while his family shopped, sitting on a bench writing instead of watching TikTok. He’d been collecting ideas in his phone’s notes app for over a decade — three or four hundred of them, things he’d heard in meetings, in conversations, on planes. He didn’t know what he was going to do with them. Then a LinkedIn post he wrote on a flight from Miami to Dallas — a story about a bad boss — went viral and hit a million views. People started asking him what happened next. That’s when it clicked.
The book he built around those notes isn’t a long read. That’s by design. Eric said he was trying to write the short-form video of books — something built for 2026 attention spans, where every truth has a story behind it but you can pick it up, read a few pages, put it down, and come back. He compared it to ‘‘Who Moved My Cheese,’’ but without the parables. No translation required. Just a hundred things he’s actually learned, laid out straight.
I keep a copy on my desk. I read it in two days the first time and I’ve gone back to it more than once since.
One of his truths — perfection hides pain — was supposed to be number one in the book. But a friend said something to him over a burger in Dallas that stopped him cold: ’’trust is earned, because people deal with a lot of spam all day long.’’ Eric asked him to say it again, wrote it down, and made it truth number one. The lesson about perfection became truth number two. He submitted the final version to the printer about twenty-four hours later.
If you’ve ever gotten stuck trying to make something perfect before you ship it, that story alone is worth the price of the book.
The Business Model Nobody Was Using
Magnus is what Eric built while the rest of us were still thinking about chemicals the old way.
The food service industry runs on equipment that sells once every seven to ten years — combi ovens, ice machines, fryers. That’s a long sales cycle and a thin revenue stream for manufacturers. What Magnus figured out is that the cleaning chemical for that same piece of equipment sells every seven days. That’s the razor and the razor blade.
Eric and his partner took that idea and built a company that puts equipment manufacturers in the cleaning chemical business — by developing formulations specific to their machines, doing all the testing in-house (sometimes a two-year process), patenting the formulations, and branding the product under the manufacturer’s name. The result is a recurring revenue stream for manufacturers, along with differentiation and brand recognition they couldn’t get anywhere else.
Magnus now serves foodservice operators, service providers, and equipment manufacturers across all fifty states, Canada, Mexico, South America, and markets worldwide. Their in-house brand, Workforce, fills the gaps — the commodity items like pot and pan soap and floor cleaners that the manufacturer partnerships don’t cover.
Think about what that means if you’re a hospitality operator. When you buy a combi oven and it comes with a starter kit of cleaning chemicals built specifically for that machine, you’re not dealing with a generic product that sort of works. You’re dealing with a formula that was tested on your exact equipment, approved by the manufacturer, and reorderable through a QR code. Eric’s mantra says it simply: delight the customer and everyone prospers.
That’s not marketing copy — it’s how they’ve kept clients who’ve gone through a two-year testing process and have no desire to start over with someone else.
What Both of These Have in Common
Eric spent most of his career selling chemicals. So did I. We both know this industry can become very routine if you let it. You find your lane, you work your accounts, you ride it out. A lot of people do exactly that and there’s nothing wrong with it.
But Eric is a good example of what happens when you stay curious past the point where most people stop. He built a company around a gap nobody else was filling. He collected ideas in a notes app for ten years before he knew what to do with them. He hit publish on a LinkedIn post without knowing how it would land. Every one of those moves came from the same instinct: don’t wait for someone else to do it.
His book title comes from the lemon-to-lemonade idea, but he breaks it down further — the lemons, the squeeze, and the lemonade stand. The stand is the part most people skip. Getting handed a lemon and squeezing it is one thing. Building something you can sustain from it is another.
That’s true whether you’re a hospitality operator trying to get your cleaning program under control, a manufacturer looking for a new revenue stream, or someone in this industry who’s been thinking about writing a book or starting something new for the last ten years.
Listen to the full conversation with Eric on Cleaning Processes with Jerry: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1851071/episodes/19009502Â |Â Grab the book on Amazon or at whosqueezedmylemons.com