What The Funk?

0:00 Another week a another location for me. That is not my home office. I was gonna say what basement are you in today? It's not a basement because I'm in Houston. So I don't think you you guys don't

0:11 do Basements here. It's like a swamp in the basement. Yeah, we call those we call basements ponds That's a pond. So, you know Colorado, New England basements people love basements certainly not

0:22 here So I am at Chuck Yates townhome right now in town for nape and at the the top floor. So major podcast location flex here at Chuck Yates townhome in Houston. Well, it's it's a little

0:35 disappointing to see a wine rack and Chuck Yates house behind you with no wine in it.

0:42 They almost be in Richmond, I guess. I don't know. Yeah, I guess so. But yeah, I'm excited even though it's it's super overcast and I can hear thunder coming from from your side and and mats and

0:53 over here. It is nape. I think people are excited to be back in person. We'll see what the turnout Looks like OTC.

0:59 has been going on this week already. So it seems like a decent energy to this point and we'll find out what the networking events and the expo tomorrow.

1:08 Yeah, I've been seeing a lot of reports from OTC and it looks like a lot of people are pretty active down there, it looks like fun to me. I didn't get down there, but, you know, and I'm looking

1:18 forward to hearing how Nate goes. Of course, you know, I'm not gonna be there. This is wedding week at our house. So yeah, it's all heads down. Thanks, sir Very exciting, Tim's oldest

1:29 daughter's getting married on Saturday. So I think you said this is your last, like, bit of connectedness to the work world until you're now on, like, dad duty, picking up trash cans and kegs

1:42 and bottles of booze and all the fun stuff that weddings entail.

1:47 Oh, yeah. It's all about, you know, dying. There were downstairs dying cheese cloth for something for the wedding this morning So I mean, it's nonstop just. We look like our dining room looks

2:02 like an episode of hoarders right now. There's liquor everywhere. You know, centerpiece is everywhere. It's all starts to leave this afternoon. Yeah. I mean, when I'm around, I just call that

2:13 Tuesday, but anyways, Matt Herrmann, Matt Herrmann, we made him wait for long enough. We'll allow you to talk here shortly, Matt. But I'm personally excited to have Matt Herrmann on the podcast

2:26 He's got a super fun website and kind of demeanor, very much out there and in your face about, let's remove the obstacles that make work suck for a lot of people. And also, Matt, you worked

2:41 closely with Marcia Vihull, who Tim and I worked with closely for a number of years and realized we just had a whole bunch of. Friend of the show. Friend of the show. So I figured we wanted to

2:50 have you on. So why don't you give us a little bit of your background, where you from, and then maybe your career a little bit, and what do you have to today with Pod2?

3:02 Yeah man, let's do it. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited about this. We only rescheduled like 30 times, but I think this is perfect. You're the one that had a kid, so. Well, you went and

3:11 had a kid, man, I mean, what do you think? What's going on? Yeah, that's my bad. Guys, I can't be there tomorrow. My wife's having a kid

3:19 tomorrow. She had the kid on her birthday and two weeks before our 10-year anniversary. So, and my other daughter just started kindergarten, so it's been a lot of major life events these last few

3:31 weeks A lot of balls in the air, a lot of balls. Speaking of the air, dude, it is absolute monsoon season out right now. This has completely changed in the last five minutes to a little bit of

3:42 rain to absolutely no visibility whatsoever. Yeah, yeah, here, yeah, just a few minutes ago. So, we're all in Houston, and I think we're all getting hit with thunderstorms periodically all day

3:53 today. Yup, yeah, in different locations. So, sorry, Matt, we'll stop interrupting at some point, Yeah. No, no, no, no. All good. So, so yeah, my background. So born in San Antonio,

4:04 a ghost birds, Greg Popovich is the best sports coach of all time, anywhere ever. Second, I believe you're repping a Spurs hat today. I think when I saw the back of you there, look at that.

4:14 There you go. That's it. Oh, it's classic Dennis Robin, then I'm Spurs legend grew up in Amarillo, Texas. So the place that everybody stops on the way to go skiing

4:26 Yeah, so live there from, yeah, from age of 10 till 18, moved out to play ball baseball in college, of course. And that's how I ended up with a math degree, because I wanted to play baseball in

4:40 college, but wasn't good enough to go to a school with an engineering program. So math was close enough. College in Oklahoma, math and masters in applied math, all that good stuff While I was in

4:52 grad school in Oklahoma City, I was looking for a summer job to

4:60 pay for my wife's engagement ring. And so I was just spamming Oklahoma City with resumes, ended up starting work for AAA in their insurance call center. Nice. Nice. Yeah, awesome. Don't hear

5:14 that often. Very, very fun work. I was three weeks into a nine week training program on how to take a phone call when Jessa Beat called, held me in for an interview. And then, so I went in for

5:28 an interview I was sick, I think, ended up dirtying some, yeah. Anyway, that was an interesting interview. And then, but the next week they called and said, I had the job. And so I went to my

5:41 boss at AAA and I was like, Hey, I got this offer from Chesapeake. And he was like, Go, just go.

5:50 He understood, so I understand. Yeah, he's like, I don't wanna be here either, so just good for you.

5:58 So yeah, that was good. So that's how I got started. After a couple of years at Chesapeake, I jumped ship there and joined Intersite. So when it was, you know, 15, 20 people, I think total,

6:10 was when I joined back in 2013.

6:14 Yeah, but that is early days. Yeah, it was pretty early days for Intersite for sure. We're just starting to become a company at that point. And yeah, it was a lot of fun. A lot of fun. Grew up

6:25 through the ranks there and then we got bought and sold and acquired and did a bunch of merging and all that stuff. And then I left what would eventually be Alsurna in 2019 to start my own gig. Yeah,

6:38 I was wondering, did you, based on that, you left before the name Alsurna kicked in or no, I was there for that. So we bought, I don't know. I think Intersite was the third company that that

6:53 company had bought And then at that point, it became three ESI intersight. whatever, two other companies. And then bought one of those two other companies were the ones that Jeremy and I worked

7:04 for. Navigator. Yup, energy navigator, yup. All right. And then bought Palantir, and then when Palantir came in, we were like, okay, we can't hyphenate again. So, and then marketing came

7:16 up with the name Alserna. And I think that was, when was that? I think that was 18, maybe. Sounds about right. You've got it just for, nobody knows, I mean, I know, but 'cause I've asked the

7:27 question of Zillion Tides, we haven't ever talked about it on the air. Do you know what Osirna means? Why they came up with that? Yeah. Well, can you explain it? How about that, you're gonna

7:36 make me do it? No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, so AU is the symbol for gold. And then Surna is, I think, I don't know, Hungarian or something for thread. And so the idea is they're providing the

7:52 golden thread of information for oil and gas industry. There you go.

7:58 It worked and I remember the guy, Jeremy Green there, I was talking to him about the name and he was saying that,

8:10 I don't know, there was a bunch of debate, a lot of people talking about what the name should be and all that stuff. And he had a great quote. He said,

8:16 the great thing about this is that nobody knows that word. So we'll make it mean what we want it to mean. And I was like, okay, that's, feels like a lesson on branding right there. Yeah, yeah,

8:25 I dig that.

8:28 Yeah, I know. So I want to talk a little bit about those earlier days. So 2013, 2014, I was at Seven Lakes, Tim, I think you were still a navigator. I was still there. You were still a

8:42 navigator at that point. There was a lot of - Cursing you. We were cursing you then. Gosh darn it, these end-or-sight guys. But it was a really hot time for field development planning, which is

8:55 a lot of what you guys did. the rigs and the resources, and even possibly bringing some machine learning into play to try to optimize what might be the most cost-effective means of sort of planning

9:11 out the development of your asset, right? Do you feel like doing, explaining the software and walking EP companies through it, that you understand what best practices should look like, or do you

9:24 feel like coming from an operator like Chesapeake, you learn more of, okay, this is the best way to approach it, technology aside, if that makes any sense.

9:36 Yeah, I think that the time at Chesapeake, you understand how one company does it, right? And you understand the company side of things and why they're not doing things in the most optimal way,

9:49 like maybe it's politics, maybe it's just inertia, like all of the other things that go along with it down to staffing and motivation of individuals and all of the different things that can play

10:01 into why a process might be kind of bad Can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we

10:04 can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can

10:04 we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we

10:04 can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can we can

10:04 we can

10:33 Okay, this company does it really, really well. These companies don't do it very well and start to kind of help the ones on the lower end learn from the others. So you kind of have a benefit to

10:43 the industry, right? Which, which I really liked. So one of the other things that enter site did early, decision they made back when they were just six people was they were gonna go full cloud.

10:56 So no footprint was gonna be at the client site at all And that was, especially when it comes to planning and economics and kind of reserves forecasting, I know that at least early on there was some

11:08 companies that really kind of struggled with that data is not inside our walls. And that was, everybody knows or knew at the time that we're heading towards these cloud things. But enter site was

11:22 really kind of the first, I think technical application that I saw oil and gas that was in the cloud. What were the kind of those early struggles Do you have to face that when you are doing

11:32 implementations? Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah, some of the battles that we'd have to have with IT, especially on trusting, putting things in the cloud, we ran lots of penetration tests and extra

11:45 security stuff and all those things. But then I think over the years as companies started recognizing that, hey, maybe Amazon, Microsoft, and Google know how to secure things better than we do,

12:00 it got easier for sure I think now it may have flipped all around the other way where if you don't come in with a cloud solution, you may be knocked down a couple pegs in your evaluations now. I

12:06 can't remember what year it was, but I remember it was a big turning point whenever Conoco

12:19 Phillips decided that they were gonna go with Office 365 online for everything. And that was like an anecdotal shift in the market. And that was another thing that people would point to and say,

12:30 well, hey, if Conoco can put all of their stuff on a cloud, then, no, why can't we? So that one thing made a lot of conversations easier. Yeah, that perspective is valuable. In other

12:44 industries, I

12:46 mean Salesforce, like I started using Salesforce in 2003, that was cloud at that point, right? They were very much beating the drum on that. And a lot of companies, including one I worked at in

12:56 Boulder, Colorado Rally Software did the same thing. They were like, we're going to be like Salesforce. I think in oil and gas, because Salesforce didn't have mass adoption in general, people

13:05 couldn't point to that one app. Like you make a point about Office 365. And I remember that, but there's actually something to be said for saying, okay, somebody else has done this. They've got

13:17 better cybersecurity and technical people than we'll ever have. We've got two people on staff. Maybe now we can trust Cloud. On the flip side, I do think optionality is good, right? Some of

13:28 these companies still prefer to have things premise for whatever reason. and that's the

13:36 preference of whoever wants to make that decision. I didn't mention this. I think Tim knew this too. I'm in Chuck Gates' place. I'm on this bean bag right now. This is like a human. This is

13:50 large enough for a man like me. So Tim, if you want to jump in and maybe ask a question, I can just sit back and listen. That'll be great.

14:02 No, this was, he did this to me earlier. I do want to talk to what you're doing now. So you left Osurna, what is that, 2019? Yep. Went out on your own here and started something called pod two.

14:16 And first of all, if anyone gets a chance to go see your site on LinkedIn, your profile, I love that little banner at the top. Work shouldn't suck. That gets your attention. But what's pod two?

14:30 What are you doing? How do you, what do you do? Yeah, yeah. So it's evolving, we're two years in.

14:39 When I left Osurna, I didn't have a plan for what I was gonna do, right? So there were several options out there, I had a couple of companies that I talked to about joining that had always kind of

14:49 had this itch to start my own thing, but I just had to get away. So I left there and took the summer off, was the proper, proper sabbatical, like summer of George kind of stuff So it was really,

15:04 really important for me to clear my head and just kind of not jump directly into the next thing. And I think we have a tendency to, okay, if we're doing something and we're not crazy about it, we

15:13 tend to run away from that as opposed to running toward something, if we're not thinking too clearly. So I think that October, so I left in June, July, and then that October, I was talking to

15:27 different friends, different folks, and it just kind of became obvious

15:32 I have to try to start my own thing. Okay, what is that? And so the first iteration was really this tiniest little baby step out from what I was doing before, where implementations for upstream

15:45 planning software, okay, the beginning of it was implementations and the consulting works surrounding those implementations. So whether it's project management, change management, the process

15:55 design work, did a lot of that early on So that was October of '19, first six months were awesome. Yeah, had a lot of success and really, really good. Got some great clients, did some big

16:11 projects and yeah, didn't suffer financially from leaving, you know, my job, which coming from a VP position and jumping out on your own with a single-income household and two kids at home at the

16:24 time, that was stressful. And so that was nice And then in March of 2020, it's funny. funny thing happened. Um, where the world was hiding. What could have happened?

16:41 Yeah. So I remember. So I was at, I was at a bar in Oklahoma city having drinks with, with a buddy, Greg, um, up there that I'd work with back at Chesapeake. And I was up there for, for a few

16:54 different meetings and, and talking to different folks. And we were at a bar, we almost went to the thunder game that night, but then we decided to just go to the bar and watch the thunder game.

17:03 Well, that was the thunder game where they pulled all the, all the players off the court and the NBA season was put on pot, like

17:13 that was

17:16 the game. They were playing the jazz. Yeah. You go bare, right? Go bare going all over touching them. Yeah, the guy that's touched all the mics and, yeah, making jokes. Yeah. So, so that

17:20 was nuts. And so we're sitting there in this very crowded bar in Oklahoma city. Yeah. Like, they're like, Oh, this COVID thing might be actually kind And

17:30 then, and then yeah. So that just shut everything down. I had projects that were prepaid that got canceled. Oh, yeah. That were just, hey, we just don't have, we have no idea what the

17:42 future's gonna be and restructuring and reorgs and all this stuff. So it was nuts. And so, but through that time, it was a good time to kind of pause and I think COVID did for me, what it did for

17:56 a lot of things is, it took what needed to happen in the next five years and made it happen like now. So I kind of took some of the more aspirational stuff that I had wanted to do online courses and

18:09 really diving into more digital business and started working on some of those things. So I put out a self leadership course for new managers that year. So during COVID that summer was really good

18:23 for that. And then as things started to open back up, I'd been talking to friends and my current partner now. about some different ideas about what to do. What else could we do? And so that's

18:38 kind of the latest iteration and where we are right now. As I added a partner in March, he's the best software developer that I've ever met. And we're about to put out a software package, our

18:52 first SaaS product,

18:55 our first paying customer might actually come before we launch, but we should launch next week with the data. Nice. So the scope of POD2 really is that thing of, we wanna make work suck less. And

19:08 we're not gonna limit how we do that. So the consulting work, especially around upstream planning, that's very core customer success work for software companies. We've got a few clients that we do

19:20 process work for growing startups. So startups wanna grow, they need some process, but they don't wanna become this bureaucratic, slow, shitty organization That's the kind of process that. that

19:31 I do,

19:33 and then yeah, so software products and courses and all the other stuff too. Really, really good stuff, man. And I actually think you and I could align because I think as you know with Fung

19:41 Futures, I talk to all these energy tech companies for the most part. And in turn, we're also talking to primarily oil and gas operators and midstream companies. And there's lots of opportunity

19:53 out there. There's also a lot of noise. I think that I used to sort of be annoyed with the operator side for being like, why don't you see that what I have is the best product ever? Come on. But

20:04 it's because if you look around and my friend Dan, who's from Boston, and he's doing some work like analysis for funk futures, he's like, everybody says the same thing. He's like, I go out and

20:15 everyone's saying analytics and AI and machine learn. And he's like, production optimization. And he's like, everybody's saying the same thing, right? So I don't begrudge anyone. for being like,

20:29 there's a lot of noise, there's confusion. How do I know who to trust, what I actually can do it, what you just described sounds like a product that maybe we already have, right? So I think that

20:39 even some of that, that reconciliation of like, so a lot of people have been overloaded with information and buzzwords that all sound the same and getting actual tangible results, I think is where

20:52 you come in to set people up for success And then they can go and execute. Yeah, the other piece that - I mean, whenever I went through this validation exercise when I was starting the business of

21:05 going to 10 relevant people and just talking to them about, here's my business, here's the problems that I think I can solve, and here's why I think I should solve them and getting feedback on that.

21:16 And over the months, through that validation, and since then, people will ask, OK, why would I go with you as opposed to some other consultant? Because I'm honest, right? If I'm screwing up,

21:29 if I don't know, I'll tell you. And so there's this massive, massive need for somebody that people can actually trust. Because software vendors, it's not malicious, but they're biased. Their

21:42 tool is the one that solves the problem. And then the big consulting firms, that stuff gets nasty. And you get millions and millions of dollars and people that become furniture and all of that

21:52 stuff. And so I don't have 20 kids with MBAs that I need to get billable So we can focus on what actually matters. And that's been really nice and really well received too. So when you're looking,

22:05 I mean, I feel the need to get more detail on how you make work suck less. But so I guess the question, so when you're going to a potential client, what is the problem they present to you that you

22:20 solve? I mean, I guess run of the mill. I know there's a broad question, but what is something tangible like that our listeners, us, can. can know about. Yeah, for sure. So, so I think as

22:31 we develop specific offerings, that's that's easier to answer. So the software product that we're putting out, it helps you QC and validate your areas forecast data. Right, there you go. So it

22:44 saves you time, does it better, etc. That's super simple. The, the course, right, will make new younger managers more effective and happier, right? But then for like the general management

22:58 consulting type stuff, it's really got to start with a problem. So with that side of things, I don't go sell, right? I just talk to the people that I enjoy working with and if there's a problem

23:09 that that I can solve for them, then we talk about how that might work.

23:13 I am getting a little more. I'm doing a lot of work around, like I said, integrated upstream planning. So I'm doing a course on that topic with saga wisdom. And so that's all recorded. That

23:25 should be coming Also friends of the show tripping over the barrel alumni. John Tarzan, Mike, what's that guy? Great guys. I love those very impressed had not to not to cut you off, but I will.

23:37 Anyway, had lunch with Mike, what's that key about three weeks ago. And I was down here for her tech and he said that they're growing faster than they even expected to, which obviously we love to

23:48 hear. But it also validates my thinking too, that the knowledge sharing and management component is training is very important and an underutilized. Space, especially with oil and gas, where you

24:00 have these massive age gaps.

24:04 Yeah, for sure. And I mean, broadly, if you look at the whole world, right, the problem isn't finding out more knowledge. It's making that knowledge applicable and adopted, right?

24:15 But yeah, so so I'm putting out, I've written a paper, it might. It's a short book right now, but needs to be edited down on integrated upstream planning and to really. kind of consolidate a lot

24:27 of this stuff that's been talked about from tying corporate to the assets and strategy to execution and all of that kind of stuff has been, there's just been so much noise in that space and not

24:39 enough progress from the industry in my mind. So I'm putting a lot of energy into that. So I'll be putting a lot more out on that side over the next couple of months. Well, it sounds like you've

24:53 got your fingers into a lot of varied, I mean, I'm listening to you and there's a little bit here, a little bit there and seemingly unconnected. Like there's a lot of value points you're getting

25:05 to. So it's, man,

25:08 I don't know. I like to think serially and linearly and

25:13 you're clearly out on a lot of parallel processes here. So it's really cool to hear. Well, the thing that ties it all together is our why. and our purpose of making work suck less, right? So we

25:27 don't care how we do it, but we want to solve the problems that make work suck, right? And those can be, you know, people problems, it can be boss problems, they can be process problems, like

25:38 all of those different things. And so I think as we grow and as we go over time, we'll kind of attack that problem more directly. So focusing maybe a more on company culture, and then maybe

25:50 helping people find jobs that are right for them, and that kind of stuff down the road, but for right now, like you seeing forecast data sucks. Let's make that take less time and do it better and

26:02 faster, right? So our why is a strong foundation. You know, Tim, I think part of it too is I can relate to this a little bit too, because I'm a little bit newer in my entrepreneurial journey

26:16 here, but anybody has a good idea I feel like it's something that can actually be executed upon, right? because I'm like, okay, I'm free. I don't have this one thing, one W2. I can go and

26:27 create whatever and build stuff and make it fun. So I see how things go in that direction. My concern with myself is I can probably sell it, but I still need to be able to execute on it. My

26:37 question for you then, Matt, is yeah, you got Josh. You got yourself. You got Al Pacino, not Al Pacino. Tim, you should look at his website. How do you scale? Right. And that's really the

26:50 quite, like you've obviously got a brilliant guy You've got a lot of experience. You've got executive level stuff. How do you scale? How do you scale this thing? Or do you not want to scale?

27:00 There you go. So that's the other beautiful part is that we don't care how fast we grow, right? Where the quality of life is first over profit. And so right now we've got a bench of contractors

27:15 that we can use and that we pull in when needed to help on things super efficient We hire out as much as we can. So all the accounting, all the automation, we do all that stuff. So we're pretty

27:27 efficient. The other piece is that we're pretty ruthlessly

27:32 prioritized. So anything we're very hesitant to commit to things, and when we do commit, we're going to do them. And so we'll make sure that those things happen. And there you go. There's one of

27:47 them. Get over there, get over there No, get them on camera. That's the best.

27:57 There we go. Oh, what's up, buddy? Hey. Hey. You're going to get some goldfish. You're on a podcast. What's a podcast? It's amazing. We've all dealt with this before. Can you goldfish me?

28:12 Oh, that's the best. So while we get the goldfish situation settled over there, Tim, I want to jump to you real quick, 'cause I do have a couple of questions for you.

28:23 So, uh, are you going to any of the nape festivities this year or is, is this really it? You've got too much other stuff. You're bringing your kid to college. You got your daughter getting

28:32 married. What are you going on? Yeah. This is the, the, the week of Holy crap. What did we sign up for? So we got the youngest moving into her dorm. Well, the middle child moved into her

28:43 apartment and college station Monday. So my wife took care of that fortunately. So I wasn't involved D3 is moving into her dorm tomorrow.

28:56 We basically drop her into the dorm. We pull her out of the dorm, come back here for the Friday, rehearsal dinner, wedding festivities, turn around Sunday morning, drive her right back because

29:07 classes start Monday. It's just, you know, it's just how could we have planned this wedding and this week? It's just, it's just, it's just really crazy And then trying to, you know, close some

29:19 business. We got some stuff happening right now just trying to get that in as it's and spend a little bit crazy week. Nice, nice. Everything's so obvious. Sorry guys. That's okay. I wanted to

29:29 come back to something you said earlier, Matt, that I found it maybe a new question to ask people, which was where were you or what were you doing when you realized holy crap, this COVID thing's

29:41 gonna be a big deal.

29:44 And you said you were at the bar in Oklahoma City, watching the Oklahoma City Thunder game. And for me, we were actually at Lamar University, with my youngest, when someone came in and announced

29:56 at the Houston rodeo, only the biggest thing that happens every year was canceled. Yeah. And we were, what, day three or four into the Houston rodeo, they said, okay, that's it, no more. And

30:06 I was like, well, this is gonna be a big deal. Yeah, that's nuts. So Jerry, what was your story there? When did you know COVID was a big deal?

30:18 I mean, I'll say this, I was at, the W energy software like sales kick off in January. And Pete Waldroop, who I'm excited to see tonight, the CEO of W was cautioning people in January that he

30:33 had some concern about it based on what his international channels were telling him and to just keep an eye on it. And it may get to be something serious. And I was literally like, what an idiot

30:44 this guy is, right? It doesn't know anything. So he was the first one that actually put it on my radar. But it was literally the Oklahoma City night. I was at a local beer bar in Lafayette and

30:54 seeing that on TV, seeing it get shut down and being like, wow, they're shutting it down. And I'm thinking, they're going to shut down everything.

31:01 I'm not going to be at this bar that much longer. Yeah,

31:06 we were at OBS, we were scheduling our user meeting. We were to schedule our user meeting and we getting speakers lined up. And a few of them, one of our biggest clients This is Petranos in

31:14 Malaysia, and we were getting approvals to get them to come over and be able to speak and at our user conference. And it was great, we had Minute Maid Park rented. We had one of the conference

31:26 rooms there, rented, we had a whole thing getting planned. And it was gonna be for March 31st and April 1st of 2020. And in January, we start hearing from our Petronos guys, hey, these guys

31:40 aren't gonna be able to travel. And we were relying on a lot of our international folks We have a big project going with in Spain and another one that we were planning in another country in Far East.

31:52 And we wanted to get these guys here and they couldn't travel. So we started thinking about it and we said, you know, this is not, so we actually shut ours down before everything hit the fan. And

32:04 everyone was kind of like, wow, aren't you? This seems a little weird. You'd shut something like that down. And then it wasn't more than two weeks later at the rodeo quit. And we're like, well,

32:12 okay, we looked like we knew what we were doing but I still didn't have, I still thought, and till the rodeo shut

32:21 now. Well, now there's the whole variant thing, right? We'll see, I guess some people were saying that they canceled the COVID, because of the COVID variant, they canceled some networking

32:30 events here, but it hasn't affected any of the ones that I'm signed up for. So I don't know, that's why I got vaccinated, but that's a different conversation altogether. Anyways, Matt, back to

32:39 you, right? So tell me a little bit more about your perspective, like your ideal client. Do you feel like it is the, like, I mean, Chesapeake was a behemoth when you work there. Is it a big

32:48 company at Chesapeake and an Exxon Mobil, a pioneer, or is it literally somebody who has one or two rigs and just not enough people to manage their asset or somewhere in between?

33:01 Yeah, so I mean, I've got, of the client base that I have now, I've got a couple of software company that's, you know, 10, 12 people and helping them out. We've got a consulting firm that's

33:14 about 20 people growing and doing some process work for them on the. for oil and gas companies. It's got a couple of the largest ones in the US. anyway. Don't have big super majors quite yet. So

33:30 I think it's probably, I think this problem of integrated planning can kind of go in a lot of different directions. It can kind of go across a team. So whether it's interdisciplinary, like an

33:44 asset team. How do they work together? How do you marry operations and finance and land? How do you marry that kind of stuff? All the way up to, okay, how do you marry the executives with three

33:57 business units and 12 assets underneath them? And so, I mean, it's pretty flexible. I think that probably in the mid-size, yeah, the ones that we've got right now are, I'd say, mid to large

34:11 companies. Yeah, because their operations are still, are still humming along. I mean, I think some of the private operators too, that are in a good position, the newborns, crown quests, types

34:22 of companies, you know, probably have the same number of rigs as maybe some of the larger operators in their basin, but probably don't have the same level of sophisticated planning or the number of

34:33 resources either, right? It's just a byproduct of starting small and not intending to be huge. Yeah. Yeah, and some of the, and one of the projects, you know, it's full company integrated

34:44 planning. So from the top all the way down to the bottom, how do we make the whole thing work together? And then with another one, it's, it's okay, operational scheduling in for their US assets.

34:55 We need to figure that out, select a tool, manage the implementation, do change management, like it's all of that stuff. Another one, it's reserve systems. So switching reserve systems, we

35:05 need to, you know, change management, project management process design surrounding the tool, like that kind of stuff too. How do you qualitatively say that you made work? suck less for somebody.

35:19 Seriously, what's a win for you? What's the metric? Yeah. I think it's a tough one. I

35:29 mean, with some projects, there are metrics, right? So there's errors caught and time spent on things and all of that kind of stuff. But the reason that I love consulting, and even if it's not

35:39 the most efficient business in the world, I'm going to do it till I die is because that look on a client's face when their problem is solved now and they get to go home and see their kids at five,

35:52 right? Or like, that's the kind of stuff that I live for. The qualitative side,

35:59 it just depends on the problem, right? So just, this is the same problem that we had, like whenever we do work on planning, right, the real value proposition is better decisions, and these

36:11 decisions can have multi-million or billion dollar impact and So if you make those even a fraction of a percent better, like the money's there, but the things that make work suck, right? It's a

36:24 combination of performance and quality of life. So if we do a better job at work, then yeah, we're probably gonna be happier.

36:37 No,

36:42 I'm going to go. I'm going to go. So from an integrated planning perspective, this is something that I've always found fascinating and oil and gas. Maybe I just don't have enough experience in

36:52 other industries and perhaps it happens the same way. But I feel like there's always been very siloed decision making as it comes to really everything, right? Whether it be vendors to use products

37:03 to align with What metrics are important to you, right? Just any organizational priority tends to be different within these silos. You're coming in and literally trying to integrate all of that and

37:16 help the company see where they should put their funds, not just in the field, right? But across the organization. And I think that's fascinating. Do you feel like you run the risk sometimes of

37:26 coming in and pissing people off? Like, I think that would be a threat as a consultant being like, This is actually what you need to do. And someone's like, But bad. makes me redundant or maybe

37:36 I, you know, like I could see it, you're getting under people's skin. Right, yeah. I'm wondering if you ever come over. You move somebody's cheese.

37:44 Yeah, I mean, the biggest risk on day one is the people that are opposed to transparency. They've got something to hide. Yeah. And the higher up the chain that person is, the harder things are

37:56 gonna go. There was a project. Yeah, I'm not gonna go into that one. Oh, come on, come on. Yeah.

38:04 Let's just say we didn't expand beyond the first project.

38:10 And, you know, especially some executives from particular schools don't like to be called out and shown that something's happening underneath them that they didn't know. I'm talking about Wharton.

38:24 I don't know, I don't know. I'm gonna go ahead and not say the school. Leave the fizz in, leave the fizz in. I'm not just a little concerned of my color shirt, Maybe that's a school.

38:36 But that is one of the things that whenever I'm talking to companies like during discovery and trying to figure out what's going on, a lot of times they'll talk about, we need to be more efficient,

38:44 we need to spend less time doing this or that or whatever, and I won't start a project until I really, really understand why. And if it's a cost cutting thing, like I don't wanna be involved with

38:54 that. So I'll ask like, if let's say we save you, you know, a person or two's worth of time, are you gonna fire him? Or are you gonna repurpose them so that they can focus on what's actually

39:06 important to the business as opposed to this manual crap? And that's a really important thing to understand. 'Cause that's, I do not wanna be, you know, the bobs that come in and try to evaluate

39:19 whether somebody's worth sticking around or not. But at the end of the day, it is a business and clients are gonna make the decisions that they're gonna make. Yeah, we're gonna get out when Matt

39:29 shows up. people get fired. That's definitely not how you want to show it to be. The bats are here, the bats are here. Yeah, but that's what I was talking about later on. And like as we grow

39:38 and as we kind of learn more about really shifting culture and really shifting mindsets in within leadership from this very American idea of work really hard, hustle really hard, squeeze everything

39:52 you can out of people. 'Cause there's a lot of executives that if they see people leaving at five, then, okay, we have too many people, right? And that's just toxic. And I don't think that that

40:05 has a place on Earth.

40:08 Wow. Good on you. Yeah. That's fun. I'll tend to, go ahead Tim. I cut you off. I'm getting ready to take us down another path if you got any more related to that. Go for it. I just want to

40:22 talk growing up Amarillo. I mean, I feel like - I a I'm like feel steam.

40:30 I feel like the exposure most people even in the state of Texas have the Amarillo is driving through and the big Texan women stay what what's it like Yeah the state plays the old the seventy two

40:43 answer sit on the stage in an hour baked potato salad and a bread and all that by the way I've been there did you try and try no no no I in College I would have but as I've gotten older the need to

40:59 try to accomplish those eating goals are like that as just as scary to me but what's what's growing up Amarilla light Yeah it's it's Pretty country and it I mean the city isn't too small has like two

41:14 hundred thousand people so you've got everything that you want probably so there's a there's a local sports team there was a hockey team for Awhile I Dunno if they're still there I know that there is

41:24 still a baseball team there the sod poodles eyes Todd noodles. It's got to be a lumberjacks somewhere, right? There's no trees, dude. There's not a tree, but it just seems no trees out the

41:35 lumberjacks Damn real

41:42 astronauts. I mean for double a summer job. I worked for a railroad company and so and it wasn't BNSF It was like a subcontractor. So we got the worst jobs for half the pay and manual equipment So,

41:55 you know, like you're shoveling the rock with a shovel and you're carrying the ties by hand like all that stuff And and the job that I was on was in herford so one of the largest cattle ranches I

42:05 think on earth and Yeah, so just smelled like shit and sweat and kriya so for an entire summer

42:14 Yeah It's

42:18 interesting and rules was fine. Yeah, I think it's it's a it's a decent mix of you have what you need from a city but you can get out to a dirt road when you need to.

42:28 I Guess it in the in country towns West Texas towns and we have small towns all over the U S I mean there's that portion of the of the community that has born and raised here I'm going to stay here

42:38 the rest of My Life and then the rest of Canada soon as I get Eighteen I'm out was that kind of your your approach her I didn't I didn't have a plan yeah for somebody that's worked in planning for

42:49 their whole career I really didn't have much of a plant life

42:54 so it was your young it was just okay what's the best option in front of Me and I'll go do that so though whenever when I turned eighteen it was what college can I go play ball at and where did you

43:05 play Vernon Regional Junior College up in north Texas and and then I played at USA O in Oklahoma so in Chickasha Oklahoma Chickasha Yeah but man took his shoulder and arm and all kinds of injuries

43:20 ended up dashing the the Big League Dreams were position to play Catcher catcher. There you go. That was my spot. Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't ever good enough to get out of high school with it. So that

43:32 was, that was fine. But yeah. Yeah. I know. I was very thankful and had a lot of fun playing ball through college. Yeah. It was a good time for sure. All right. Fantastic. Especially when

43:43 the horse came in the dorm, but. I'm sorry. What? A horse came in the dorm once? Yeah. One of the, one of the, one of the players at this junior college, he was really good friends with one

43:55 of the rodeo guys. And they decided to bring a horse into the baseball dorm. And yeah, I was walking down the hallway like I came out of my room and saw there was a fucking horse fucking down the

44:04 hallway. Okay. That's basically the response. Oh, you hit us with that. What's going on? Well, there's a horse.

44:13 Oh, yeah. No, everything's good. Except for that one time a horse came in my dorm. Anyways, with that, that heroin folks. Yeah. Well, I hadn't, I hadn't seen Not before, but I'm not

44:24 surprised. Yeah, that is so good, man. Wow anyways congrats on the four week old daughter very exciting Tim congrats to you on kids going to college kids getting married kids having Kids Grandpa

44:37 and then I Guess congrats to me for the I dunno like waking up to the so there we go till her anyways we'll figure something out of the first hour in Chuck's house there yet my oldest daughter is she

44:52 started middle school today sixth grade eleven years old is kind of a big a big step so I think it was an emotional day for the wife but no Yeah you know this is the this time the Big Steps Yeah

45:08 anyways thanks so much for matching less i guess if any of our listeners are interested in there where they go many of our listeners are are kind of ancient getting touchy how do I get in touch with

45:18 you Yeah so all the all the social media is so Linkedin Twitter Email Mad at pod two Dot co all over that of stuff on all my info is on the on the site and pretty easy to get to. All right. All

45:33 right. Well, I think the. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. No, no, go ahead. Please, please.

45:40 That was going to mention the the our site also pod 2co. We we put out some blogs every now and again, got the newsletter, all that kind of stuff too. All right. That's good. It looks great.

45:50 And it's it's comedic. If we can get Al Pacino on the podcast too, we'll let him know that you might have interest in talking to him about a board seat over there at pod 2. So we'll take I am going

46:02 to have to go on this on the website now. It's awesome. It's awesome. Yeah. Matt, you're the man. Appreciate your attitude, your mindset, keep, you know, killing things that make work suck

46:11 my man.