What The Funk?

0:00 Ladies and gentlemen, we've returned on what the funk and I have a friend, CEO of Progressive TSL, Chris Walcott checking in from across the pond. How you doing today, Chris? I'm doing great.

0:12 Thanks, Jeremy. Yeah, good to. Good to see you. It's 8am my time, which if my math is right, it's about 3pm your time. So different phases of the day. Hopefully you're still hanging in there

0:26 as I'm just, you know, kind of wiping the crust out of my eyes But, yeah, I met Chris at the nape conference earlier this year. Now, nape is one of those shows where if you go every year, like

0:41 I have for 15, you know, 13 of the last 15 years or something like that, you start to kind of know where everybody is, right? There's the same companies have the same booth placement. You see a

0:54 lot of the same faces. Then all of a And then all of a sudden there's a new face that has an ER pieces. and it's progressive TSL, we come over and start talking and realize, okay, these guys are

1:04 not from the US based on their accents. Let's find out a little bit more about progressive TSL. So very fascinating Chris, what you guys have built sort of the, what you've done over the last 20

1:17 years to create what was a services company to now being a tech-focused company. And I think it's a fascinating story. Your journey is one where you've had success internationally and now you guys

1:30 are pushing hard into the US. I think it'll be a successful ride for you. But before we get into all of the business stuff, the question that I ask everybody on this podcast is, who are you? Who

1:41 is Chris Walcott? Oh gosh, that sounds like the million-dollar question. Doesn't, who am I? So yeah, I'm Chris Walcott, you're right. I'm the CEO of Progressive TSR.

1:52 So, well, where do I come from, I guess, is what makes me who I am? Yeah, so I was brought up in Cardiff in South Wales, which is just to the left-hand side of mainland Britain. I was brought

2:08 up in Paddy, you know, in the suburbs. Father was at university. My mum was a stay-at-home mum most of the time. I had a really nice upbringing, really nice childhood. And it's a bit of a joke

2:23 in our family, but up until the age of probably about 16, 17, you know, typical youngster, very patriotic, really loved where I lived, all that sort of thing. And I can remember saying to some

2:35 of the people, you know, I'm never leaving Cardiff. I left Cardiff at 18. And about a year later, I'm saying to her, I'm never going back. Of course, neither of those things have turned out to

2:45 be true, but yeah, and I guess for me, I think, one of the key things was, as an upbringing was, actually was actually leaving home. getting away from the hometown, seeing a bit of the world,

3:00 having a bit of fun, a bit of adventure. But, you know, nice upbringing. My parents were always very encouraging. Very encouraging for me challenging. I'm quite different from my father, for

3:14 instance. Dad's really academic.

3:16 Unfortunately,

3:24 I didn't do terribly well at school. I'm very dyslexic, which meant my exams weren't a great success. And the other thing I often say to people is the computer saved my life,

3:29 for two reasons. One is I got into computer at an early age, really lucky to be in my young teens during the appearance of home computers. Whether it's Condor 64s, or Ataris, or ZX81s, or

3:44 whatever, that was what I was into. And

3:48 I think the other thing that's really made a difference to me is that being dyslexic, my, my spellings, terrible, I miss out words, routing, you know, every day my computer roots back

3:60 everything I ever type into it. And that means I can present professional stuff, professional words, professional documents consistently. And, you know, people take, you know, you've got to do

4:14 that sort of thing to be incredible. So, yeah, so, yeah, nice chartered, and computer saying my life, I think that's a sum Well, there's obviously a lot more since then, but I think that's a,

4:26 that's really interesting to me. And I've seen this with friends, with

4:31 colleagues, not an issue for me. Like, I was always, I'm not dyslexic, I guess I should disclose that. But, like, I won the spelling bee in sixth grade, and it was always like a really good

4:41 speller, and writing had never been an issue for me. So, it's one of those things where, before computers were so prevalent, it used to bother me when people would miss spell things, Right or

4:52 type things out of order or use there. there, blue, blue, in the wrong context. But maybe I was being a little bit judgmental and some people just had a learning disability, for example. But

5:05 now, I didn't know that about you and we've worked together now for months. So it just shows the power of computers and the suggested edits can really be a huge benefit. So that's cool and it's not

5:18 something that I knew. I wanna talk about whales So like over here, right, and I grew up in New England, right? So we learned a lot about the revolutionary era, was always sort of intrigued by

5:32 England and we thought more just about the UK, Great Britain. But whales was just sort of this little sliver that that's there. What is it like growing up in whales? Is it like a fishing community

5:43 because it's on the water? Is there like a, I mean going to London, London's like a massive international city And of course, you have the beautiful countryside. and a huge soccer presence and

5:56 pub culture. Is it similar in Wales? Is it like an extension of England or London? England, do you feel like it's completely different? Well, I think in Britain as a whole, whether you're

6:08 Welsh, if you're Scottish, Irish, Northern Irish, whatever you are, you're always terribly proud 'cause you're the smaller part of the group. So it makes you more patriotic, I guess And, you

6:22 know, when you're in Wales and it's a football match between England or a rugby match between England and Wales, we're all supporting Wales. When it's Scotland these ways, these England, we're

6:32 always supporting Scotland. But there again, you know, it's the, being the small player, I guess. But there again, I think personally, and I think a lot of people are, and most people are

6:44 also proud Brits on the international field. Yeah. You know, we do have our own home teams, football and rugby, et cetera, and also sometimes some things you

6:57 don't. So, you know, like the Olympics, it's the United Kingdom competing. We get behind the national team. So, you know, it's like being a small town next to a big city, isn't it? It's the

7:03 same thing. And, yeah, Wales, Wales, I say generally, it's a beautiful countryside.

7:09 It's got a sort of a legacy of old industrial. It was the biggest coal exporter in Victorian times in the world, absolutely massive ports and docks and that sort of thing. But obviously, in recent

7:23 years, in the 70s, 80s, 90s, you know, with the same cross of Western world, you know, decreased and industrial sort of sectors, you know, you've had to move and, you know, we initially set

7:35 up the company back in 2004 in Wales. I guess what we found in nature of oil and gas is, Wherever you are, it's an international business, you know.

7:47 Oil, oil, gas, we sell it in dollars, wherever you're located, you know. And, you know, I think we, so I now have a family, we all live in London. And I think the reason we live in London

7:60 and not in carbon is really around international connections. It's the market, I got a lot, even for international companies, a lot of the headquarters are here. And it's one place we can easily

8:12 get to our customers from over there in the UK There are

8:15 more than a dozen flights a day to Houston, really easy. If you want to go to Africa, super easy. But also when our guys have to come together, they can all get here really easily. So we do it

8:28 for ease, but I'm still proud of Washington. Nice, yeah, yep. Tiger doesn't change his stripes, I get it. Well, I learned something already on this call, and that's cool, 'cause I feel like

8:40 for like the World Cup, soccer or rugby, Wales has their own team.

8:52 So Soka, what's that? Oh, I'm sorry, I said it was early over here, Chris. Football, not the football like all of the posters and things behind me, but football. Like for the World Cup and

9:05 rugby, Wales has their own team and England has their own team. But you just said for the Olympics, it's just the UK, right? So everybody's competing for whatever, the top three spots in the

9:17 100-meter dash, it could be one person, two people from Wales, somebody from South India, that's cool. So

9:25 maybe just, I would guess in that case, everybody in Wales plays football or rugby. And those were rugby. The national sport was rugby for sure. You know, I played rugby in college. It's a club

9:38 sport over here, at least where I went to school. And my kids, not my oldest, but my middle.

9:47 and my son, who's six, they both play rugby over here. So it's starting to grow over here, which is cool. 'Cause like I played football in high school, football is a very violent sport. There

9:58 were injuries that I used to say long lasting. It hurts. People don't take it for granted, sorry, American football. People take for granted when you just watch the games, how much it hurts when

10:09 you get hit in the elbow with the helmet But it is brutal, had rugby been an option when I was younger, it was just soccer or football. So if rugby was available, it's a lot of the same concepts.

10:24 I probably would have played that and really enjoyed it playing in college. But it's cool to see my kids playing out there. My son's in an eight and under team. They play flag. And my daughter is

10:34 on a 12 or 13 and under. And it's full tackle. I mean, they rock and have scrums And it's really cool to watch and see all these women out young girls, I should say, it's really neat. So you

10:49 grew up with that, I didn't. No, no, absolutely. The school I went to, I went to a normal state school and

10:59 we never played football in junior school. So up to the age of 12, we never played football. We played in the playground at break time, but generally it was a school sport. It was rugby in the

11:07 winter, it was cricket in the summer and that was quite normal then. Now it's different for sure And footies are a big fit soccer, it's a big thing

11:18 in Wales as well, but

11:21 in the '70s, for instance, rugby Wales was really stunningly good. You know, it punched well above its weight, so it made us all a bit more proud. And things come and go and you can't be the

11:32 best everything for always, so you get to go with it. I

11:36 mean, that's true in life. It's true in the software space. It's true in the oil and gas world I mean, just yesterday, there were a couple of acquisitions This industry is so acquisitive over

11:48 here that I almost take it for granted when you say, oh, XEL resource has just got acquired for3 million, or Kerris, oil and gas here in Denver, 18 billion to a new private equity company. And

11:59 these are massive deals. And they just sort of, they happen and that people don't really bat an eye because of the nature of the industry. But nobody stays on top for too long, right? There's

12:10 always somebody that's gonna take you over at some point. And that's part of the excitement as well, isn't it? Is, you know, you've got the opportunity to, you know, that little company can be

12:18 the challenger and do something exciting. And, you know, over the years, we've worked with, you know, a company called Crystal who's now harbor energy. Yeah. Small company, got funding,

12:28 proactive funding from harbor and took over a series of shell assets in the North Sea. You know, and you see this again and again in this industry where small upstarts, you know, They break the

12:42 mold, they do something

12:50 different and that's exciting. That's what I, that's excitement being involved in having a little part to play in it. Yeah, I mean, what Matt Wilcox and who he's the chief growth officer at

12:57 Inverris, an old industry friend of mine, he came on this podcast a couple of years ago and said something that always resonated to me and we kind of asked him why he loves the oil and gas industry

13:07 and he said, it's the closest thing to a modern day treasure hunt, right? If anybody gets kind of a wild hair and can get some funding and has an idea of where they can hit that pay zone, right?

13:18 They can start going to a gas company and there's no discrimination involved and there's a lot of science and super cool, but modern day treasure hunt indeed and for you, let's talk a little bit

13:29 about progressive. So you mentioned 2004, my math says that's 20 years, congratulations, that's an insanely long amount of time to run a company. I know you've got 60 or so clients at this point.

13:39 Talk to me about kind of the evolution of after school, you leave Wales, you head into England. What happened in that meantime, that led you to starting progressive TSL 20 years ago? Yeah, well,

13:51 well, I guess, I guess, yeah, I left home, I I I left, I left school at 16, and I went to what we call a technical college. So really focusing on electronics, a little bit of computing,

14:03 computing was quite new then, I guess, or, you know, it wasn't, it was becoming more normal. Then 18, I became basically an apprentice for the National Air Traffic Services, so the Air Traffic

14:16 Control Agency in

14:19 the UK. And to your apprenticeship, and it was, it was fantastic. You know, I got to work on everything from radar, to instrument landing systems, to air traffic control panels, and the air

14:30 traffic control centers. Brilliant, very exciting, loved every minute of it. And at the end of it, you, you, you try to get a posting to the

14:41 the location and the team that you wanted to work with. And I was really lucky. I got initially

14:49 a post into a development lab. And then we developed embedded systems, so which will be used by the air traffic control centers and the tower in the towers. And then about two years after that, I

14:58 got a posting to the

15:02 UK National Air Traffic Control Center. So basically the mainframe computers, which do all the air traffic control management and radar processing, all that sort of stuff, I worked actually

15:13 developing the operating system for that mainframe. And I did that for a couple of years. Again, I really loved it. It was really good fun. And I was about 23 or 24. I, you know, my scooting

15:27 wasn't, you know, brilliant, but the company supported me to do a degree on day release. So I got a day off of a week, a week at a college to get a degree, absolutely loved it. Hard work, but

15:37 I loved it. And then one day I got an opportunity to do a bit work in the US in the States and I got

15:45 a contract with the Federal Aviation Authority at the Tech Center,

15:53 just outside Atlantic City. I was there for, I don't know, nine months or a year or something like that. It was really interesting for me going to this States, it was like, you know, you're

16:03 going to have a theme park, you know, it's

16:07 in those days, the UK was very different from the US, I think we're a lot more similar than we were there, but it was a great opportunity, and I was there for about a year, and

16:17 then I got a contract opportunity, so that was a contract. And then I got an opportunity to work for the European Air Traffic Control Center, and I worked there for, I know, four or five years.

16:26 That

16:27 was in Germany initially, then in Belgium And again, you know, what I really looked at, probably the most exciting thing was, I got to. live and work in the US. I got to live and work in

16:40 Germany. I got to live and work in Belgium. And for someone who's got the most appalling language skills, I was very lucky that I was working in an industry which is predominantly English language.

16:51 So, you know, in fact my German and French is nonexistent wasn't a problem.

16:58 But I guess I got to about flirty and, you know, it was time to come home. I don't know why, just,

17:05 you feel the pull at some point. And I came back to the UK and I worked for, you know, a couple of UK

17:13 centric organisations and then I got an opportunity of PricewaterhouseCoopers and that was really good for me. It really, I think the great thing with PricewaterhouseCoopers was I suddenly learned

17:27 how to be a consultant

17:30 I learned how to deal with situations which I don't know, I would have found frightening before,

17:38 going to organisations and having to be the expert in front of people, that did me a lot of good. And subsequently I worked with firms like big international firms like Fujitsu Services, big IT

17:49 services and software provider. And so I did that until I was about 30 and the 30th that it wanted to. And then

18:01 had some changes. We had we had kits in my wife. We I was well, you know, I'm sure I've told you Jeremy, but it was one of those projects which over delivered. So

18:18 we had treatment daughters, which was a big life changing thing for us. We got to pause this right here. You had triplet daughters and they're now what about

18:24 19. They're all 19. Wow. So you thought, okay, this is going to be wonderful. We're going to have a kid, right You're? in your early 30s. You're bullish on your career. your wife is building

18:36 a career, Marianne, right? And then actually it's not one, it's not two, either. It's three. What goes through your mind when you get this news right away? Well, yeah, and we did know about

18:49 that being through before they arrived at the course. And I can remember me, Marianne was sitting in the doctor's surgery or whatever, you know, having a chat with me, he said, Well, I've got

18:59 some news for you. The great news is you're pregnant, Marianne's pregnant And he said, Yeah, but, you know, it's something unusual here. He said, Well, Jessica, you know, it's not one. I

19:10 think, Oh, my gosh, wearing twins. And then it's triplets. And I also described it as big, You're so pleased. But it's like someone hit you over the head with a really big book. It doesn't

19:17 hurt, but it's quite a numbing feeling 'cause he suddenly started thinking, Oh, my gosh, that's where we're gonna live. How are we going to afford to live? All that sort of stuff. And, but,

19:28 you know, there were lots of challenges for sure and there's any parent has challenges, get used to it. And, you know, there were difficult times. I think, I think, I don't know if it's

19:39 everyone, but I think our brains have been developed to forget the painful bits and you, you remember the good bits. Yeah. Well, that's, I think that's the only reason why people have multiple

19:48 kids, not triplets. You know, it's sequential order is the mom forgets the pain. Because there's no way, I mean, after seeing my wife give birth to three kids and she did it all naturally.

19:59 She's, she's a stud.

20:02 It's like, that was so painful for me to watch. And I wasn't the one doing it. And she still wanted to go back and do it again. I'm like, I'll never forget after the last one, after Ezra came in

20:14 2018, she just looked over at me, she goes, I'm never doing that again. I can imagine, I can imagine, I think she remembered the pain of that one. But you're right, like, there are a lot of

20:25 things where you go into the gym or whatever it may be, you experience pain, but you don't remember it. You tend to forget the physical pain.

20:34 So I'm absolutely right and I think now I've got to stage my life where I really do believe in any of us we can pretty much do anything you just got to be a little bit determined and you know okay

20:46 sometimes it's not going to succeed but you learn by your mistakes and you push on we can we can all do anything we can change you know nowadays in the modern world we're not like you know my parents

20:56 generation you had a job for your lifetime that's not how life is nowadays you move about and it's different but it's good fun. Yeah I mean you know you and I have chatted about this a little bit

21:07 your dad was a professor right yeah so was mine and my dad worked at Plymouth State Plymouth you know obviously everywhere New England has a Plymouth somewhere Plymouth New Hampshire, Massachusetts,

21:18 Vermont, Maine. You guys have Plymouth in England right?

21:23 He worked at Plymouth State he was a professor there for I don't know 40 41 years my mom was an an elementary school art teacher. She did that for 30 years. like, that's just how it was. And here

21:36 I am, I get a job in sales a year and a half later, I'm moving companies, 15 months after that, I'm moving companies, three years after that, I'm moving companies. I mean, I worked at more

21:46 companies in my first, you know, by the time I was 25, then my parents did combined in their whole career. It's just a different piece now. No, you're absolutely right. And we joke, me and

21:57 Marilynne Joe kept me now again about the fact we bought our last home, you know, our home we're going to stay in forever, about seven or eight times now.

22:06 Because things change and

22:10 I don't know. And

22:17 it's the world's more dynamic for sure. And I think when I was when I was on my 20s, I think the UK was less, a lot less dynamic. And I think when I went to the States, it was a much more dynamic

22:19 sort of environment. And I think Europe is all like that

22:23 as well now. But yeah, and I think change, it keeps us on our toes I agree. I found London to be very, I'm not sure. This is the right term. It almost felt like an American city. Like to me,

22:35 it feels like a combination of Boston and New York. Boston, I think, in terms of architecture and maybe weather a little bit. And then New York, just in terms of size and scale. Everything's big

22:48 there. There's a lot of people running around, talking loud on their cell phones, running in and out of

22:54 the tube or the subway, right? A lot of professional sports, very international feeling But it didn't feel to me like I was in a foreign country, right? It felt very much at home, despite being

23:07 overseas. Paris, on the other hand, felt like a different world, I thought. Yeah, I think that's true. And I think often, if you were to ask a Brit who's traveled a bit, I think I haven't

23:16 been to Boston, but everyone says Boston is a very

23:20 European-style city. When I say European, it's just like cities here. But I was in New York a few weeks ago for a week, I love New York and you're right in many ways So I would say the big

23:34 difference I always noticed, it's like being in the Grand Canyon, you're walking down the street, not very wide, but it's so vertical, you know, that there's towering buildings, isn't it? We

23:43 have some tall buildings, but we are proactive for sure. But you're right. I think the stars are very similar. It's very dynamic, it's really buzzing. You know, you go down, oh, you know, I

23:52 spent a couple of days in NASDAQ, NASDAQ and meetings and things, and obviously you go out to time to go, it's really exciting I really love the fast-moving, and you're right, it's very

24:03 international, you've got people from everywhere, and you can be from anywhere, it can be anything, and that's okay. Yeah, as long as you can afford it.

24:14 Well, yeah, absolutely. I would say New York's certainly more expensive nowadays than London, but equally you're right, I think it's tough. And that's the thing I guess we worry about now is

24:23 without kids, is what are they gonna do? You know, it's hard to put the foundations in place when you're a youngster now that is in these sources. So I worry about that too, and I guess possibly

24:39 more so for my daughters just because I'm not a female. So I don't see the world necessarily the same way that they do, but I don't know what they're gonna do. I'm sure if you asked them today,

24:50 they'd be like, I don't know, I'd like to make money so I can buy stuff and go places, but I don't think they have much of a plan. I feel like when I was in first grade, there were less options

25:01 And I was like pretty certain I was gonna be a lawyer. Like it was like, what are you gonna do? You're gonna own your own business, you're gonna be a lawyer, you're gonna be a doctor and started

25:08 going down the path of like, okay, I'm gonna be a lawyer. Eventually I got out in the world and I said, oh, I don't want to keep going. School, like I'm more interested in technology, I want

25:18 to travel and I got into sales. But I don't know, I mean, so now your daughters are 19. Are they in school?

25:26 Yeah, so one of them is in college, started their dance degree,

25:31 another one's going to do a dance degree in this September starting, and then my third daughter, she's more academically focused, she's going to be starting a chemistry degree in next September.

25:42 So I think

25:46 chemistry, I think you've got, you know, maybe a more defined route. Although saying that, you can still do anything if you get a chemistry degree. I think the dancers, Poppy and Olivia who are

25:58 both dancers, I think for them it's more challenging to say to being a dancer, if you have a short lifespan as

26:04 a dancer, you know, physically. But there are things you can do afterwards, whether it's, you know, in theatre management, dance management, choreography, all those sorts of things. So, and

26:13 what we encourage them to do now as parents is, we don't tell them what to do. I think we've seen enough, we've seen enough, like, especially tell someone, tell someone to ask me what

26:28 to do, I'm going to do the opposite, that's just how it is. So, we try, we try and be supportive of their choices and know, they'll make their own way. And I think we're going to be surprised

26:34 by what they end up doing. And that's part of the fun of being a parent, I think. So to pivot a little bit, right, you and your wife, Marianne, you work together. And when I sent over the prep

26:47 questions, I said, this is, you know, oftentimes these are very generic kind of canned questions. What was your upbringing, hydrogen to oil and gas? What does your company do? You know, what

26:57 do you do outside of work? All these things. But as I'm writing these questions for you, I said, that's unusual, and it's really interesting. So what is it like? Did you and Mary Ann start the

27:08 company together and just generally speaking, what's it like working with your wife? You spend all of this time together at work, and then you spend time together at home. How do you guys not get

27:18 sick of each other? How have you made it work both business-wise and personally working with your wife for 20 years? No, indeed. And, you know, so. I really first properly met Marianne. It was

27:30 actually in Toronto, Canada,

27:33 and which was a business conference. So my gosh, that must be back in, oh dear. I'll get into trouble now. I'll say the wrong year. That was back in 2001,

27:45 something like that. I think, so first I would say Marianne, so Marianne, she's worked in the oil and gas business, all her working life, all her working life. And her skill is really

27:56 financials It's accounting, it's financial reporting, and the systems which do that. My skill, I come from a software development background, and I did that for 15 years, 20 years, and then I

28:11 sort of moved into business analysis and project management and consulting, et cetera. I think the strength we have is, we don't do the same job, but our jobs are very complimentary. So they do

28:25 overlap. but we do have a different skill set. We have some same, I think we have some same, I don't know, I was going to take features. You know, in software, a feature, I think Neil Woodit

28:36 thought is a bug. So for instance, both me and Marianne are quite deadline driven. We are,

28:44 I think we both recognize that we're both, we are both quite driven as well. So as I said a few minutes ago, you know, you tell me I can't do something, I'm going to do it Say we're Marianne,

28:55 we're both, you know, we're both really good at taking a difficult situation and sorting out a problem or a challenging opportunity and closing it, you know. That's where our strength is. I would

29:08 say that, yeah, we talk about work a lot of work. We talk about work a lot at home and we talk at our dinner table, we have the five of us, we like doing things like eating together as family,

29:16 all that sort of stuff And our girls, our daughters are

29:23 all quite opinionated in their own way, which is great as well as we are.

29:29 and it seems to work. There are times when, you know, you know, it's like running a business, Jeremy, you know, you never get away from it, but we both do something we like doing. And then,

29:40 okay, all jobs have days when the, oh, no, I don't do that report, do I? It's a bit boring, but you get it done And. I would say the benefits by far outweigh the negatives of working together

29:53 We're all very well together and we've, you know, we have our disagreements, but we can both express our own opinion and we don't seem to fall out over it. Marianne just tells you what my opinion

30:05 is. And you nod and say, thank you.

30:11 It's probably worth noting too, this is not like a five person company, right? So it's not like the two of you have to work hand in hand on everything. I could tell just being in the office,

30:20 right? You're generally focused on sales, customer success, delivery, overall running of the business. She really focuses on deployment, management of financial and technical resources and

30:34 things that she does well. So you're not necessarily in each other's hair all the time, but you do work in the same office and live in the same house. No, you're absolutely right. And in recent

30:44 weeks, Marianne's been in London She. spent quite a lot of time in the last few weeks in Houston. She came back from Scotland, from Edinburgh, working with a client. She came back last night In

30:56 the last few weeks, I've been in Lagos, Nigeria, I've been in New York. So we both travel a lot. So yeah, there are times when we're in different countries or different continents. Even when

31:04 we're in the office, we actually sit at far ends of the offices together. We've got, I don't know, 20 people between us. And but you're right, we do different things, but we, they all

31:04 interconnect, but we, we're not working with each other 247, that's for sure. And we've got a, you know,

31:26 You know, we go back 20 years ago, it was a Chris and Marianne show. The Marianne and Chris showed me that. But now it's, it's, you know, the progressive TSL team show now. I really believe

31:36 that. And the great thing is we've got that team who, who are really good. A lot of them come from the oil and gas is, I'd say half of them come from oil and gas business. We've got guys who've

31:46 been, I know, engineers or, or, or drink venture accountants and then the other half come from consulting companies You know, companies like, I know, Accenture or TCS or whoever. So, yeah,

31:57 and, and, yeah, so, yeah, we enjoy it. And as you know, as you say, it was our 20th, you know, 20th birthday celebration last week, where we had the team, we had clients, we had partners

32:11 here, you know, amazingly, the weather was fantastic, which is quite remarkable for the UK. And it was a really nice time So, yeah, I think that's something, I keep going, I think we'd like

32:23 to celebrate the success as a team as well. Yeah, when a project goes live, when we win a little bit of work, we like to crack open a bottle of something sparkling and we've got a lovely terrace

32:35 on the back of the office outside with the team

32:40 and have a couple of drinks. Yeah, I mean, I found the company culture over there with your team to be strong, to be pretty open-minded, to be relatively diverse, certainly, right? People from

32:52 all over the world, like you said, in different backgrounds. Certainly a lot of oil and gas subject matter expertise, but also a lot of technical and consulting background as well. What is

33:03 Progressive TSL? Like, I could explain it in a nutshell, but I wanna hear it from you, right? What do you guys do, and why do companies choose to do business with Progressive TSL? Okay, so I

33:13 would say, what do we do? So we redeploy the systems to help an oil and gas company, actually, an energy company. Now, it's broader than just oil and

33:23 gas, but 90 of our customers' oil and gas companies, So we deployed the system to help them manage their financials, their accounting, their procurement, their inventory management, their

33:32 maintenance, the asset maintenance, right through to ESG as an area we're focusing on now. You know, things like Power BI reporting in ESG,

33:43 you know, in Europe, it's all about CO2 emissions in the US. Well, every conversation starts with the word methane, sorry, methane

33:54 And when we're working with African clients, you know, it's around the social aspects, you know, people there focus on actually, they want to have electricity, they want to have other things

34:03 which, you know, Europeans have and North Americans have.

34:07 So it's about deploying the technology to help companies, you know, start-ups, help start-up, start-up quicker and be more effective to help mature companies actually be more efficient, to ensure

34:19 that people are able to control the money, to ensure people can, you know, understand the current status of the company, that we're reporting, but also look forward to planning. And we do a lot

34:30 of work around people doing financial planning, but also tying in financials with production levels, with asset management maintenance plans, and tying all that stuff together. So the complete

34:42 solution, back up, the solution for Northern Gas Company. And when I say Northern Gas Company, that's companies from maybe two or three employees, which maybe a young start, right through to

34:54 companies listed, whether they're listed on the New York Stock Exchange, maybe on the London Stock Exchange, or maybe on in Toronto or wherever. So from companies of a few handful of people,

35:06 through companies of hundreds or even thousands of people. So a big range. And so you also have to keep going again now. So you also ask, why did they engage us? And I think what we've realized

35:20 over the years is, We're really good at technology. there are lots of companies good at technology. But I think the thing which makes us quite unique is we're really good at technology and we know

35:29 oil and gas. If we're having a meeting with the maintenance team, our guys understand the equipment in the field. If we're meeting the supply chain management team, our guys will understand the

35:42 challenges a buyer has around sourcing equipment or the financials team, the importance of budget management and

35:51 budgetary controls and the appropriate authorization So we talk, you know, we talk about AFEs. We talk about the things oil and gas people talk about rather than talking about technology yourself.

36:00 Yeah, I think that's well described and I would add to that, at least from what I've seen to this point is when you think ERP, like you think SAP, you think

36:12 Oracle, you think NetSuite, you think big, robust, expensive CIOs losing their job because they want to over budget and deployment. I think what makes the progressive TSL pitch attractive for a

36:25 potential buyer is modular. You could just start with one thing. When you have two or three people and you put in a basic general ledger, joint interest billing, joint venture, revenue accounting,

36:38 and then you start to grow out from there. I think that's actually a big deal because so many of these companies can't afford to buy an SAP, right? You're absolutely right and when we're talking,

36:51 and we've had customers have used SAP and moved away from it. We've had customers that moved from

36:58 all sorts of systems to our solutions. What we always say is, whatever you buy on day one with us, we can guarantee you can keep it and add to it, we're out throwing it away and starting again.

37:10 I can remember many years ago, and we learned this lesson, it must be 15, 16 years ago, and they were saying we're

37:17 not an operator, we're never going to be an operator. Two months into the project, it said, oh, by the way, we're operating now with a new asset we bought, you know, and it's inevitable, you

37:26 know, things change, you know, you have some success, you're going to campaign, you need to manage your inventory, you have

37:34 some success, you're going in production, you know, that's the problem you want. And, you know, we have companies where we have worked for them for over a dozen years, and initially we have

37:46 just deployed, as you said, the financials, the general ledger, the joint venture accounting And now they have infantry, procurement, asset maintenance, all those things, and it's the system

37:58 to be able to grow with them as an organization. Yeah, because that's a big deal, right, getting to somebody early and allowing them to scale. I think what we've seen over here, I have a

38:10 background in the ERP, you know, finance and accounting space is, there's sort of been segmented tools in the market where this product gets you from here to here. and then you gotta get to

38:19 something that's mid-market. And then from there to there, do we have to eventually go to something more enterprise? I feel like that's just unnecessary. A company shouldn't be ripping and

38:28 replacing your RP systems every three years. It's expensive, it's time consuming. And that's not what they're designed to do, right? That's not their core business. You're right. And we started

38:41 to work with a company in the last couple of months and they come to us And it's very clear, they've come to us because yeah, we've got some great systems but we've got knowledge of our business.

38:54 And I won't mention the software names but we will be there either the third or fourth iteration of systems. And that is so frustrating to us because we think if only we had worked with them 10 years

39:07 ago, you know, they could just be adding to the system now as they go up. And you know, the cloud has made such a difference to us all You know, that's supported this sort of thing. dynamic,

39:19 add it, take it away. You could be flexible, it should be the norm now. And it was a small company, SAP Brilliant System for a very mature organization, a big organization. If you're a young

39:26 agile company, you know, you might be twice as high as in

39:35 six months time or 10 times as high as in six months time. You know, you need to have those systems to actually support those changes. Yeah, yep, and I just feel like I see it a lot A CIO or CFO

39:50 or both make the decision to move to SAP and then two years later, they're gone. Because fundamentally, you spend too much money, you spend too much time on what you shouldn't be spending so much

39:52 money and time on. But, you know, it puts you in a different tier of being able to get

40:06 a job if you've implemented SAP, right? That you'll get fired from if you do SAP again, but alas. So I wanna talk a little bit about what you're seeing from an ESG perspective. Because I know you

40:18 have a client and we can either mention the name or not, that's really focused on the carbon capture sequestration. And I find that to be super fascinating because it's hot, it's buzzword-ish over

40:30 here. The companies that do CCS, CCUS, do they have to do account, do they have to manage their assets differently, or does it look very similar to what a traditional oil and gas company does?

40:42 Yeah,

40:44 so we're working with

40:48 a company at the moment, as you say, and they come out of the UK, they also have presents in the US now, pushing forwards big time. And I think initially what we realised with them is that they

40:58 are just like an oil and gas company, because oil and gas companies, if you're spending the way you're operating, you've got new pressure, so in the British North Sea, for example, you've got to

41:09 be carbon neutral value by 2030 around your production.

41:14 a way of achieving that, what companies are doing is they're investing in organizations who are doing things like carbon capture, so you can use some extent as an offset etc. And

41:26 carbon sequestration I find very interesting. I know it's a young technology, but the company we're working with, they have pipeline, they have gas fields and they're just doing it backwards.

41:40 They've got their joint venture partners. They can pump CO2 into the pipeline but into a gas field. I think that's really interesting. It's so similar to oil and gas and also the hydrogen

41:51 production as well.

41:54 I personally, I'm a believer in, there's going to be some form of transition around energies in the future. Oil and gas is not going the way tomorrow, but that's for sure. But equally, I think

42:04 we're going to see more of a mix of energies in the future and we're going to be doing more carbon capture. I think in the US, obviously lots of It's a pressure trying to be a thing. methane

42:13 emissions, making sure they're controlled and managed, and you've got fines and all those sorts of

42:19 things, which focuses things. And at the end of the day, the thing which will focus a change in the business, or we're seeing in the business, is

42:28 this economics at the end of day, that's what drives business. And if I was talking to an organisation a couple of weeks ago, and they were saying that they were driven to address methane emissions

42:41 in the US, because the refines coming in, but actually, they focused on it. And they actually see it as being, it wasn't a cost-neutral thing, it's actually a thing they've done and made money,

42:52 because they focused on emissions, and they focus on actually productively using and selling the gas. And if you focus on it, there are ways in which you can, there's an opportunity with every

43:04 problem. That's essential. Yeah, I mean, totally agree. You know, we worked with a company in the US called Earth view for a while. Really all of. 2023. And it was early on in the year, a

43:17 lot of tire kicking, not a ton of interest in, interest in learning about what they were doing, but not interest in deploying solutions. Toward the end of 2023, and I know now into 2024, a

43:28 tremendous amount of companies deploying these methane emissions monitors, because like you said, the fines are now more robust. And companies are viewing this as, okay, this isn't just a

43:41 tracking device. This is actually a solution that if we can catch a leak fast enough and prevent it from going into the air and putting it into the pipe, we make money. So like you said, there's

43:52 opportunity where somebody might have looked at, all right, is this just purely like an environmental greenwashing play? Actually, no, this is a potential cost savings revenue increase technology.

44:04 And I think that mindset is now starting to permeate the space a little bit more I want to talk a little bit, Chris, about. US versus kind of international because my line of sight is mostly on

44:18 what happens here in North America and even more so in the lower 48 of the US. You've been doing business internationally for a long time. You've been doing business in the US now for a while and

44:28 have onshore offshore companies that are working with progressive TSL. But some of the differences that you see are generally speaking, is there a lot of similarity between an operator in Africa

44:40 drilling onshore offshore, someone in the North Sea versus someone drilling in the Gulf of Mexico or in West Texas. Similarities differences. Yeah, so at the end of the day, whether you're

44:51 onshore offshore, deep water, shallow water, all those sorts of things, they're obviously very similar to

44:57 wherever you're located.

44:60 I would say challenges regionally are things like logistics. If you're working in a very remote area that they know or in a desert, you might have issues around equipment getting damaged by sand

45:10 storms or. I humidity, all those sorts of things, but there's nothing really terribly different. I would say the differences I noticed with the US to Europe and Africa, I would say one thing is

45:22 that, well, one thing's a cultural thing, the US oil and gas market is very dynamic. You know, you are a country of people who are very accepting of technology. You know, it's very progressive,

45:37 aggressive, of course, as I said at the time there, you're very progressive around adopting new technologies and new ways of doing things. Look at the drive of shame over the years. That's been a

45:45 real game changer in the real world. I would say other differences, I would say, well, lots of similarities. You do accounting, you do joint venture accounting. You know, you have to do the

45:57 maintenance, all those sorts of things. I would say one area of big difference is

46:02 in Europe, in Africa, you know, the state owns the stuff below the ground.

46:10 You know, in the UK, New York and Africa, the state in the UK, the king, the king now, so it owns the mineral rights, the oil and gas. In the US, it's very different. The royalty divisions

46:23 and shares of the assets below the ground. And that's something we had to work on. We had to develop solutions for that, to make sure, you know, as a company, you know, it's no good for us,

46:33 trying to sell you a system which will do, but enjoy the adventure of counting, but it won't manage the royalty management. That's just not gonna work in the US. So, what we've had to do is

46:44 invest in those areas to make sure we can plug those gaps where we might have had five or six years ago. But, you know, the US is different in some ways. You know, if you're working in Africa,

46:56 lots of challenges around logistics if you're working in

47:00 sub-Saharan Africa or somewhere like that. And you just learn, there are different solutions to say, this at 10 of variation everywhere you go. And it's actually being aware of it. So you're not

47:12 going into customer or prospect and say, Oh, well, how do you do that? Or, How do you do this? You've got to say, Well, you know, you do it this way, and this is how it works in

47:26 our system. And I think that's really important. So, yeah, so there are differences. There are more similarities and differences, that's for sure. Yeah, I think you mentioned a couple of

47:32 things there. Even, you know, state by state, there are differences, whether it be in taxes, right? Or how certain items are reported to entities, it's different in Oklahoma versus Texas

47:45 versus Colorado and California, even from a regulatory perspective, environmental perspective, there's differences, but at its core, like you still need to be able to, you know, procure, you

47:57 still need to be able to create an AFE that people are then either opting into or not, right? There's gonna be some level of joint venture accounting. Yeah. Mobile field, mobile applications,

48:07 whether that's onshore or offshore. So where there are similarities that the differences are in the minutiae, it seems like to me, but that's my two cents on it. Yeah, no, I absolutely agree.

48:19 And you're right, the, you know, you mentioned mobile solutions, you know, for example, whether you're in a remote location in the field, whether you're on an offshore platform, yeah,

48:30 everyone carries a computer with them because of a phone or a PDA

48:46 or whatever And that is really flexible to make things data collection that's source, really important, all those sorts of things. But the US, yeah, yeah. And I would say the US, I would say

48:46 the dynamic nature of the US, the US, you've got

48:51 a very entrepreneurial spirit. And I would say an area where we're catching up is US, you can try and fail and try again and succeed. And that's brilliant And I think in Europe, in the old days,

49:04 you try and you fail. That's it.

49:08 I think now we've adopted that style where, you know, try for, you learn by it and you try

49:17 to go, and that's good as well, but we're behind the curve on it. And we're catching up

49:20 to this and watching it. That's fascinating to me because I actually think it's sort of almost a motto amongst entrepreneurs. It's like you're constantly failing. And it's really about how you

49:32 bounce back and keep going and evolve that people look at you and respect the fabric of what you do. So, I don't know, I fail all the time. And it's just a matter of when can I get a couple of

49:43 wins and a couple successes to keep going? Yeah, and so one thing I say is, people have a problem in our company and the team. I would say, you've got a problem or challenge. Will you make a

49:54 mistake? You come and you own it, you talk about it, you don't hide it and then we'll address it. And if there's a problem with something we're doing for a customer,

50:05 our responsibility to sort out and make it go away. Yes. 100 and we will do that. And I think, well, I think that's the key thing. And I think don't make the same mistake twice. That's

50:17 everything I'm gonna say is, you know, learn by your mistakes. You know, don't be too stubborn. You know, get on and resolve it and don't make it again. You know, the plenty more mistakes you

50:26 can make somewhere else. Yeah, just make a different mistake for the first time. Exactly. Don't repeat the same one. I'm gonna put you on the hot seat for a minute 'cause we got just a few more

50:34 minutes here and just fire a couple questions at you that you'll have to get a little bit deeper on. But one is like, what self? Call it younger you give your would advice 21, 22, 25 year old

50:47 Chris Walcott, knowing what you know now, the benefit of hindsight. What would you tell to you Chris Walcott if he came to you for insight on what do I do in my life? Okay, so if I had my time

50:57 over again, I don't really have any regrets, What I do recognize looking back at myself is, I don't think I had enough confidence in my 20s. And I would say, I have a lot more confidence now. I

51:08 would say hesitate less, just get on and do it. There's always a reason not to do it. And don't worry about, when I was in my 20s, we were worrying about things like having a job for life,

51:19 having a pension, all

51:23 that sort of stuff, in your 20s, you can make some mistakes and start again, just get on and do it. Yeah, I love that. I am very relatable to me for sure I mean, I've said this on this podcast

51:31 too and talked about, you know, I started funk futures when I was about 41, 42 years old. I firmly had the idea of what I wanted to do with funk futures at about 36 or 37. Something was keeping

51:45 me from doing it. I don't know what. Maybe it was my wife getting pregnant with her third kid. Maybe it was worrying about having a pay for insurance versus a company giving me insurance, putting

51:53 money into a 401k, having managed taxes. I could go on and on about all the anxieties the reasons that I didn't do it. But I knew what I wanted to do, right? So for me, it's sort of that

52:03 continuation of that's even into the 30s where there was either a lack of confidence or a fear of the unknown. And now looking back on it, I just kind of laugh 'cause it's like, well, what's the

52:12 worst thing that could happen? You fail and then you get a job, that's okay too, right? If that's the worst thing that would happen, I can live with that. Absolutely, I've said this before, if

52:22 I ended up not being in a job tomorrow, I'll be down to Starbucks working. I have no issue with that at all. I'll do whatever I need to do And actually, the other thing I would say is that, I

52:32 think for me personally, a great thing for me to be marrying her. I think she's very supportive of me. If I want to do something, she's always a supporter of it. And vice versa, you know, I'm

52:44 also very supportive of her. And I think that's really key. You need someone, you need someone to help push you a little bit, don't you? Yeah, I mean, I'd be nothing without my wife. I don't

52:53 know how she has the stamina to do everything She's just built like. Like a CEO, she gets up every day between 5 and 530. She packs the kids lunches, she gets ready, she does work, checks emails,

53:04 works all day as a total boss and leader picks up the kids, works at night, makes dinner. I don't, I mean, I feel so lazy saying all that. What do I do? I just stumble downstairs at 730 and go

53:14 to work for 10 hours. Like I admire her and things, but I think we all need that. Another question, progressive TSL. You're making a more aggressive pitch into the US and seeing that there's real

53:27 opportunity and need for your solutions over here. What does progressive TSL organization look like in three years, in five years? Do you think you have more formal US offices set up? Is North

53:39 America a big part of the play? Do you continue to expand internationally? Do you go outside of oil and gas more? What does progressive look like? And I know it's hard to do that when you're in

53:47 the day to day, but what does it look like in three or four or five years? Okay, I think firstly, internationally, we work with oil and gases at the end of the day. whether that's Europe,

53:56 Africa, North America, well. I think our aim is, we see a big opportunity in the US market. We think at the moment there's, in the sector we work in, in the systems that support the back office,

54:10 there's a lot of old legacy systems, which, you know, I'll be frank with you, Jeremy is, they are systems which are older than they should be, under-invested in, and just inertia makes it

54:24 harder for people to move away And I want to change that. I want us to deliver to the US, to more companies in the US. I want,

54:34 you know, every project we do is a success. We won't have a failed project. And I want us to have more reference of all US projects. And I think in five years' time, I would love to have a team

54:46 based out of the US focusing 100 on US delivery. That would be the thing which made me really happy. So that's what we're gonna do. I think that might be closer than five years out, right? Just

54:59 giving the amount that people are flying to Houston right now and the amount of resources and exposure you're getting. I could see that happening one or two more deals and maybe that becomes a

55:10 reality where you've got a Houston office or something like that.

55:15 Gosh, I tell you what I want. The problem I'm looking forward to is having to choose an office absolutely fantastic. Yeah, no, I mean, I know you want to flatten New York That's a different

55:25 conversation though, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, oh gosh, that would be lovely. Yeah, I just, yeah, yeah. Jump on the plane on the weekend, maybe. Yeah, exactly, so two more questions for

55:38 you and then I'll let you run. One is, what is your favorite city to do business in? Internationally, it could be London, it could be Houston, it could be New York, it could be Lagos, I know

55:50 you've mentioned that Paris Where is it? Where's your favorite place to travel to for business? So I do love London, and I always refer to London as being my adopted home, and I

56:03 feel so welcoming. It's fantastic.

56:08 I love Lagos. I think Lagos is a, it's a, in some ways it's a crazy city. It's very fast in Nigeria, it's very fast, it's lots of challenges, it's quite exciting. But

56:21 I also say, I love New, I love Houston as well You know, the Houston is, in comparison to us in the UK, it's, it's physically, it's a massive place. Yeah. Because you can jump in, you can go

56:32 to NASA, all those sort of exciting things. So I think in reality, sorry, it's a bit of a, it's the annoying answer is, I think what I really like is being able to operate in different,

56:42 different cities. I think they are so different. I think London, Houston, New York, Lagos, oh, this is going to go on I just like being able to work in different places and live in different

56:50 places and, you you know, if I was.

56:56 If I was in Taylor Swift's league, I'd be having an apartment, a condo in each

57:04 of those, you know? That'd make me happy. Yeah, yeah, you'd have your own private jet and be causing all the emissions. But anyways, that's a different conversation. Chris, where can people

57:11 find you, find more about progressive TSL? You know, social media, all those sorts of things. Where can you be found? Absolutely. If you Google progressive TSL, you'll find us, for sure And

57:25 also, you can search on LinkedIn. We do a lot of social media, predominantly on LinkedIn, a little bit on Twitter. But have a look at our website, find out more about us. Pick up the phone.

57:35 We're really happy to meet whatever you are. If you want to talk about an opportunity to do some work together, we'll swing by your offices next week. Progressive TSL, one to keep an eye on Chris

57:48 Walcott on LinkedIn, he can be found and intriguing player in the modular ERP space. for oil and gas and energy as a whole, keep an eye on these guys. Chris, thank you so much for coming on today.

58:01 This was a ton of fun. Thank you very much, Jimmy. It's been really fun for the hair, so.