What The Funk?

0:00 What the funk has returned and I've got my guy, Michael Tanner. What's going on, brother? Not much. I appreciate this. When you reach out to me to get me on this, my first thought was, man,

0:13 we're reaching the scrape of the bottom of the barrel here. But I'm excited to be on it. And this would be really fun. I appreciate the offer from tripping over the barrel to bottom of the barrel,

0:23 from what the funk to what the - all right, let's not go there Even though I did say we're allowed to swear on this podcast, Michael, you hit my radar. Geez, it must have been about a year and a

0:34 half, two years ago. You just finished up at Mines. And you were doing a lot of kind of putting yourself out there. I feel like maybe some intercom related content. You have an attack you were

0:46 working with. I think - you were - early - Stuart Charlie, the man. Man, right? And you were living up here in Colorado. And then briefly kind of fell off my radar you're doing less content,

0:58 right? things that slowed down for you. You took a job at an operator, King, which we're gonna talk a little bit more about. And then resurfaced, right? You're out there talking to some of my

1:08 old buddies at W Energy Software and espousing the values of some tech that you guys are using today. And I thought, man, this is a guy who I wanted to have on my podcast. I love having younger

1:21 industry leaders who are looking to break the norm. You're not afraid to get in front of the camera. You're not afraid to talk about what you're doing or whatever trade secrets you guys have. So

1:30 I'm thrilled, Michael, that you committed to this. You're the director of FPA at King. We'll get into all that. But the question I always ask for my listeners' sake, who is Michael Tanner?

1:44 Oh man, that's a good question. Again, I appreciate you having me on. I think I'm somebody who's just naturally really curious. I've kind of, we'll briefly touch my background. I've kind of

1:55 lived multiple lives here I work in finance now. I actually started out more in the tech data space, migrated into more consulting, which as you know, it's kind of a jack-of-all trade. You learn

2:06 a little bit of everything. And really, when it comes down to this more, you get that you cut that experience in sales. So I feel like I've lived a bunch of different, and had an opportunity to

2:14 live a bunch of different, really cool lives. In my brief time here, I guess, in the energy industry, specifically the oil and gas. But

2:23 I love learning new things. I love being able to say, last week I didn't know something, but this week now I know how to do it, or being able to switch from darkest to lightness, as I like to say,

2:32 that's probably the reason why. Originally, and to start out, I was really attracted to the tech space, because that's something where you've got a piece of code that's not working. You make a

2:41 change, and now it works, and you're going from dark to light. So that's really what I would say about my core. It is, and it's what driven me in my career to this point. where did you grow up?

2:54 Are you a Colorado kid originally? Because I know you got the minds baseball thing there. I think you did play baseball in minds, but where did you grow up and why minds? I tried to play baseball

3:04 in minds. No, I did. So I grew up in Colorado, I was southeast Denver guy. So for all you local Colorado guys, Parker and Arapaho was my landing zone. A little grand view out there, which was

3:15 a pretty large at that time. I mean, consider it not for Texas, but in Colorado terms, it was a pretty larger, larger school. I heard about mine, through my dad, my dad's a aerospace engineer,

3:26 worked in the defense industry, but had always kind of chirped in the back of my mind, hey, you know, you should go to mine you, should go to mine. It's a really good school, a really good

3:32 school. And I didn't necessarily want to be an engineer per se. I was definitely good enough at math and science to be like, if I wanted to, I could. I was more interested in mainly economics,

3:42 finance. I had this crazy idea. I was going to go work on Wall Street. I was building, you know, early Python programs to try to to predict the stock market things that today are - completely

3:51 outdated, but that was really where my focus was. And that was kind of where I was, let's say, you know, I'll have junior, senior year of high school. Got an opportunity to go to a baseball

4:01 showcase, just kind of like my mom was like, hey, you should go there. One of the minds coaches was there, had an opportunity to talk with him. It's kind of funny. He's a good friend of mine to

4:09 this day, but I joke them. The first conversation I had with him was, hey, there's a spot for everybody in college baseball, but he told me D2 may not be for you. And I was like, oh, okay.

4:18 Well, I guess I'm going to state school then And I kind of resigned myself to like, okay, high school fish, baseball, at least we'll finish and I'll move on. And just, and, and, and, and

4:28 retires, they would say, even though it's hard to say it retires like high school athlete, but I drive and open practice my senior year. One day I get a call from coaches, hey, we got a spot

4:39 open up. You coming? And I'm on my way home. I got multiple buddies in my backseat. Yeah, yeah, I guess. Gilly, give you a call back tonight. So that's actually what really spurred me going

4:50 to minds. To be honest, I hadn't even applied or had been accepted at that point. I was ready to go to CU at that point, which shout out Coach Brian, we'll get to that. But as we were covering

5:00 this, that was fun. But so that's really what got me to mind. And I kind of showed up there wide-eyed and blue-eyed, not really knowing what I wanted to do. Again, I really wanted to study kind

5:10 of finance economics. They did have an economics program there, but as my dad kind of said, you're going to an engineering school, figure out some sort of engineering to do, and then you can kind

5:19 of pivot from there. And that's really what I did. I kind of tried my hand at a lot of different things, fell in and took it that time. I took it in a class called Intro to Petroleum. And that

5:27 really was my first introduction to oil and gas business. I had no connections to this business growing up. My mom lived in Montana, so you knew of the business. But they lived nowhere near oil.

5:38 My dad was, again, worked in the Defense Department. It was more kind of the mechanical engineering flavor. part of the reason I fell in love with the business was the fact that it was really

5:46 everything was so intertwined with economics and that's why I liked it. The entire, and you can go to say this about every industry, so I think it's not unique necessarily to say that, but it was

5:56 the first time somebody explained to me in industry that at the end of the day, if it's not profitable to go drill as well, we're just going to go move on and do something else and for some reason

6:05 that just clicked in my mind and was just like, this is what I want to do. And it was also, and we could, you know, there were people much smarter engineers who would maybe disagree with me, but

6:18 petroleum engineering to me, at least as a major and as an actual practicing profession, seems a little bit more art than science. And maybe there's some science to it, a little bit of art to it.

6:27 When your workspace is 10, 000 feet below, sometimes it's a matter of we've got to gather the preponderance of evidence, whether or not we think there's hydrocarbons here and we're never going to

6:37 know for sure until we pop that. couple hole and see what happens. And so that also attracted me as somebody who had a little bit of an analytical mind and, you know, at some level enjoyed a

6:46 little bit of an argument because you'll never know 100 on any of that stuff. So that really attracted me to the business. Fast forward a couple of years. I took a red shirt 'cause I actually had

6:56 the Tommy John surgery, the ACL for the elbow. So I actually went five, I squeezed four years into five and ended up graduating, both in petroleum engineering, then ended up getting an economics

7:08 degree as well, mainly so that I didn't have to go like work in the field. I liked the oil and gas business, but I was pretty set on, I really wanted to study finance. And I was really trying to

7:18 latch on with some investment banks, some sort of financial institution, but having worked a bunch of odd job internships, I interned at Uber, I interned at a few company that worked anywhere near

7:31 the oil and gas business, the options, especially when I was graduating 2014 to 2015, and all religious, we just fell off a cliff. And so not having the blue chip internships and not necessarily

7:48 really forced me to not get creative but look elsewhere. And so that's actually how I kind of fell into what I would say the world of oil and gas tech and kind of put me on what I would say a more

7:57 non-traditional path really until I got to king. So that's kind of how I got to minds in a nutshell and really would set me up on kind of a product again I mean, very little about the oil and gas

8:09 business before I took that and I'm never going elsewhere now that I know. And then you just ran with it. So is it your mom or your dad that speaks 300 words a minute? Could you get that from?

8:22 Yeah, it's probably my mom. Not the engineer. Not the engineer. My dad is very calculated and he's very by the books, by the numbers and I like that. But I think it's part of the reason I was

8:34 attracted to petroleum engineering was because it's a little

8:40 You know, with my daddy, he works on satellite. So if it's got to be, you got to know the exact precise location. You should always tell me, Locky Martin blew billions of dollars 'cause they

8:46 didn't, they forgot to round correctly. And it's like, oh my goodness, that seems, you know, for me, the oil and gas business, there was that art that got smooshed into it, really allowed me

8:57 to kind of use, not necessarily my creative side, but allows me to maybe use that naturally argument. My mom was a lawyer at one point, so maybe that's where I get it That's interesting. Wow. So

9:09 what was your first job out of school then? So it was a really small oil and gas tech startup, and I wouldn't even call them a tech startup. I think they pivoted more into engineering consulting,

9:19 but I got an internship with a guy who was

9:24 looking to kind to do what a lot of people did kind of in that 2012 to 2016 to 2018 timeframe was. Hey, I've got, there's all these legacy on-prem softwares. I'm gonna take a bunch of them and

9:36 throw them in the cloud. I mean, it was no different than what a lot of those players were doing. And he had a, you know, his own little twist on it. But kind of the differentiator with him was,

9:45 he was looking to bootstrap that startup, which is probably a whole nother conversation we could have on the merits and disadvantages of bootstrapping versus not. But that was just believe was, hey,

9:54 we're not gonna bootstrap this. We're gonna, you know, I'm gonna hire the in-house tech. We're gonna build it ourselves. And then we're gonna, you know, do the cold outreach with, again, we

10:02 shouldn't save that for the end. And really what he was, in order to bootstrap, but he was selling engineering consulting services. He's a professional engineer. So having that PE license,

10:11 low-hanging fruit for PE is just third-party engineering reports. And so that's really where I got hired, mainly as an intern my last year, and then got hired on full-time, or took an opportunity

10:21 with them full-time, when I graduated was mainly being kind of the data analyst for all the third-party reserve report engineering. I'm sitting here now with five screens, combo curb license and

10:31 various license. You can give me any license out there. We've got, we had none of that back then. So it was public websites for me and it was really where I cut my chops in understanding where all

10:43 the public oil and gas data is and I

10:47 wouldn't say building our own databases but having to basically spin up small production and public databases for each of these projects. And then we would take, you had a lot of context in Wyoming.

10:56 So that's probably the state I'm familiar with We did a bunch of work in the powder group basin. We did some stuff in the DJ. A lot of that stuff. BP's got some huge wells in Arapaho County, by

11:06 the way. Has anyone ever known that there's huge wells they drove in 2012? I remember looking those up like, Holy smokes. We could find a few of those. My point is that's really where I cut my

11:15 chops. And I did that for about three, four years. Wow. And I would say that took about 80 of my time. The other 20 of my time, I was just really watching this technology. And we had a few

11:28 different applications that we were trying to build. One of them was a really rudimentary, like, decline curve analysis tool that the goal was to then use internally and test out on our reserve,

11:39 on our third party engineering. It didn't work well at all. It ended up doing it all on Excel. So, the original beta test didn't go well. But what we did actually find some, a little bit of

11:48 product market fit, was it's actually about the, it's basically the same thing that Engage Mobilized, which is now Engage came up with asset tracking. It was more all mobile though. It was based

11:58 on the mobile phone. You know, it was a web app. You could log into it. And while the product didn't necessarily go anywhere clearly, you've heard of Engage and not who we were. It was really

12:09 cool to see that full life cycle of there was an idea. There was a customer that needed how to need seeing the workshop, the idea to design, building, testing it and actually deploying it into

12:20 production which was really cool to see kind of in a full life cycle. Again, kind of gave me a unique perspective. And I got to really see how to get your hands dirty and see something kind of go

12:30 start to finish, which is really cool. So a lot of people looking to see it. I know you, you're back on you've seen that. And it's really cruel to see something from go from idea to, oh my

12:41 goodness, now it's like, not only, we got to the point where it was selling, but you've even met at the point where it's like, oh my goodness, this is selling outrageously well. Yeah, it's

12:50 amazing. Like what you just described, either as an employee or as a founder is the magic. And I love having people on the podcast who have lived that. And it's not easy, like in 2012, you kind

13:06 of mentioned that that timeframe, there was just less, there was less tech, things were less sophisticated. Almost everything like you mentioned was on-prem and things really started to evolve. I

13:16 think kind of 16, 17, 18, you started having these like shout out, Thorson and his crew, these energy tech showcases in Denver, and you'd have 34 different booths, and none of them were big

13:30 companies. So it was all these cool guys who built amazing, majorly cloud-based tech. And I just loved it. I'm like, man, this is, you know, I've kind of been grinding in this arena and people

13:43 being like, yeah, we're not quite ready to go to the cloud. And then boom, it's in your face. You have all these different companies, like you mentioned Engage, but there's a lot of companies

13:52 like Engage, right? Engage had this idea. They started to execute on it and then boom, last week we had iron site a couple of months ago, I had spirit data. They're all sort of tangentially

14:01 doing similar things, but it's, here's a problem that's paper oriented, it's in the field. How do we turn this into a piece of technology and made successful companies out of it, which is awesome

14:14 to see. And even still, there's a lot more room for growth for these kind of earlier stage innovative tech companies within reason. You know, I do think, and I'm curious what you think about this,

14:26 I've said this to some of my clients and just to people in general, that I feel like it is hard to be an oil and gas operator that's always looking at new technology because so many things look and

14:40 sound like something else. How do you, and I understand you have a level of expertise, but how do you differentiate when somebody comes in and really figure out, okay, is this something that I

14:51 already have? Is this something that's an add-on piece of technology? Is this something that will create value for us? Do you seek it out or do you have a lot of vendors coming to you and you kind

15:01 of have to sift through what makes sense to actually take a look at? I think being on the operator's side, you definitely get a little bit more of inbound and outbound, but definitely me being a

15:11 little bit younger and me being a little bit more in the forefront of tech. I luckily have a good sense of what I think we need, what I struggle with and what I think companies that. when they try

15:22 to sell us and what I really had to learn really in this role is, okay, great. I know this tech can help, but I'm gonna try to explain this to management, who is not necessarily in the weeds

15:34 every day and is thinking about non-technical things. I mean, we're not building SaaS here at King. We're trying to get oil out of the ground. So unless you can, the easiest way to tell me a

15:44 tech's gonna be helpful is if you tell me it's gonna get us more oil out of the ground. The problem, there's a lot of the software that works in the background that we need doesn't do that. So

15:52 you're working through that kind of forest of trying to figure out where's the actual goal at the end of the rainbow, I guess, that's kind of the answer that management will say, oh, that's the

16:03 reason why we need to invest this money in X project or migrate from, say, one field reporting data application to another, which we just went through right now, talking about W and we were on an

16:17 older legacy product and moving to that new project. It wasn't until there was an available integration with our ERP system to where we could then go to management and say, hey, now that

16:28 reconciliation process that you've been wanting us to do for six months, not only can we do that if we move to the software, it can be automated and you can see that in your inbox. X number of

16:37 times you want. Ah, now it clicked. This pitch for us, the need hadn't changed for six months. It was how do we convince that to management? And so that's really where the vendors who do that

16:48 well and focus on that upper tier level. How do we convince management that this is something we need? That seems to work better than

16:57 me or specifically some edge here, figuring out how much political capital they're willing to use on some certain product. When really, I don't want to lose any political capital. I need a way to

17:06 convince management that we need this and or ability to give them all the information for them to say, I see where you're at, but here's where I'm at. I mean, that's so good, and I hope for all

17:19 the salespeople listening to this day, they took copious notes because that is something that I preach and that some of my fellow kind of CROs and VPS sales types preach to salespeople is you're not

17:32 going to sell a strategic tool to a tactical person. Right. I'm going to you're going to see a demo of what I have, and I'm going to show you all of the amazing features and functions But for you

17:45 to get approval for somebody to buy this, you have to bring this to Jay Young or whoever the CEO is of your company to write that check. Now, I'm relying on you to describe to him why he should

17:57 care about it, not just you, but

18:01 him. You've got to become a salesperson. I've got enough of a worry about internally than trying to help you sell your product. I mean that a little bit easily, but you're exactly right. And

18:09 that's hard. Right. So of course, I'm going to be more comfortable Anyone's gonna be more comfortable talking to you. You're young. You're into tech. You're receptive to it Oil and gas by

18:19 default is a risk-averse industry and that means not overwhelmingly investing in technology to bring in. So it's actually my job as the salesperson to work with you and arm you and even ask you if I

18:32 can get in front of the other people who are going to make the decision. Otherwise I'm relying on Michael Tanner sales guy for my company selling this product and good luck with that. Yeah I'm I can

18:44 only be so convincing so and I'm only and to get it comes back to this is just how it works the whole idea of political capital. I've only got so much in my tank and I've got 20 other things I'm I

18:57 need I would like to get done how much of that am I willing to get so the more as you said ammo you can give me to basically lay it all out there is extremely helpful and I think if you kind of look

19:07 at the vendors who we and then you know we've probably gone through my three-ish gears here okay we've a lot of different software, what I would call migrations or transitions or onboarding. I think

19:19 the ones that have gone successful and the main reasons we went with it is because it was the easy for management to grasp what the value add was. Yeah, that's such good stuff. Tell me a little bit

19:31 about like, are you guys like 100 cloud with your tech stack? Is that something you've prioritized or is it a mix? Like what does it look like for you? So up until fairly recently, it was really

19:44 mixed. It was actually on print. We had a computer that we had just sitting in a server room that we had completely respawned Windows Server on. And basically every morning, I was running a set of

19:55 scripts that went out and talked to our field data capture apps for production, went out and talked to Quorums, Welles product, you know, for all the daily stuff, went out and grabbed some of our

20:09 accounting information, which was all. having to be dumped in manually via Excel spreadsheets, but you can do that at any point in these scripts or pick it up. So we were really, really manual up

20:19 until about six months ago. Part of that is just because it's really all we needed. And over-complicating the solution wasn't necessary. The problem was we started - we went and do - we started

20:31 running three rigs about eight months ago. And the amount of data we went from here to about here, and the staff saved the exact same, which is fine But the amount of data we were ingesting, what

20:43 we needed to do with that data really changed. We needed it to be a lot more actionable, not just from a reporting standpoint and a look back, but we got to now use this real-time data to look

20:54 forward, specifically when we're talking about like day-to-day budgeting items. And for a smaller operator like us, our budget season is a little bit different than, say, Exxon. We don't just

21:04 sit down for a month and set our budget for the next 2024 We kind of set our budgets on a rolling basis. which means we always need to have a good line of sight on a real-time basis of what our

21:15 data's looking like. So we realized pretty quickly that the, what's happening is getting pretty out of control, just from a manual data standpoint. And we've taken some steps specifically changing

21:28 out our ERP system and changing out our field data capture app, which is the same vendor, WEnergy, has really helped us kind of at least attempt to get the majority of our data,

21:42 attempt to get the majority of the data into just one area where we can analyze it. Obviously that's never gonna happen unless you build something custom. And eventually it would be really nice to

21:53 go there, but really what happened with us was we were so fragmented in the technology stack that we were using and we were able to kind of squash that all down from a majority standpoint, get it

22:05 into one And now we can reference that, now it's more of a weekly. It's more of a weekly update. We still have that onsite server that we use, but it's more of a weekly. All right, let's go out

22:15 and get all the data for the week. Let's throw in our data warehouse, and then that can be used for ad hoc reporting. But the real-time reporting and the real-time analysis, we've worked really

22:24 hard to utilize the reporting tools within the application. This is another thing that I've worked through is

22:33 at King, we have a lot of custom processes. And when I hear custom processes, I mean, you're not doing it normal And I mean that both ways. Custom processes are good, but there's a reason why a

22:45 very successful product has their workflow this way. It's because they've sold it to other companies whose workflow is like this. So if I'm in the middle of it, if I'm in the middle turn and deploy

22:53 a software and I needed them to make some monumental change which causes their software to do this and this, I don't know if it's your software that's the problem or it's my process that's the

23:03 problem. And so what we've had to do is rethink our processes Okay, yes, we've got all these little custom niche things that we do, but if we're gonna migrate to a software, we better be able to

23:15 take full advantage of the features they offer, or there's no advantage to switching other than we've just made a lot of other people money but us. And therein lies the rub. Do you adapt your

23:27 processes to fit the workflows of an application, or does the vendor adapt their workflows to fit your possibly broken processes? And that's a really fundamental question, I think, not just an oil

23:43 and gas but an enterprise business in general. And it's really, I think, shifted more because of the apps world and SaaS in general to the operator or the buyer starting to shift their best

23:57 practices toward what the app or solution will do and say, okay, well, if this is what everybody else the industry's doing, maybe it's what we should be doing too. and it allows us to look in the

24:07 mirror and say, How can we use this as our best practices? No, I think there are like let's take, we're a small operator. So what we're doing is I would love to steal, I want to steal from

24:17 industry best package. If, you know, shoe on the other foot at Exxon Mobil, they're going to have custom process because they're the big boy in the room and that's what's going to happen. But I

24:25 think from kind of our perspective, a smaller operator, it was a chance to as you said, look back and my processes are maybe a little screwed up. How do we shift them to fit that? And we did that,

24:37 specifically in our ERP implementation, and then it was painful. We were in a data purgatory for four or five months, but we've come out on the other side, a heck of a lot better because now we're

24:47 able to use the, we're able to use the actual processes within the system and not be relying on whether it's some third party to come in and clamp on and do what we need to do or just spend manual

24:59 hours of doing things So, I Bye. In my opinion, and this is just coming from my experience, generally, if you're working with a larger vendor, they've figured out what the process is 'cause

25:13 they've successfully sold us to a lot of other different people. So maybe for us, it was a little bit more of a look internal, but I think it does come down to a case-by-case basis, and if you're

25:22 sitting an ex-on, listen to this, I'm not

25:26 talking to you. And you're small enough that being nimble is - Yes. You can do it. Like I don't know how many users log in even to your ERP system, but it's not a lot. Right, and how many people

25:34 are looking at daily production reports or forecast versus actual, it's not a touch, right? So even for like a mid-cap or obviously a large cap company, it's different. And I think you

25:46 articulated that really well. I'm gonna talk a little bit about the move. So like I said, when I met you, I think you were living in Golden,

25:56 had just finished up in the right place. Yeah, it's awesome. And I'll have a question for you about Golden momentarily, King comes calling says, hey, Michael, we think that you fit our culture,

26:08 you're a versatile resource. Why don't you come move to Dallas? So here you are a Colorado kid, a Denver area guy, you went to school in the Denver area, and then boom, now you live in Dallas,

26:18 Texas. Talk to me a little bit about what that move has been like for you. So it's been good. So I, you know, when I left my first job at that oil and gas tech startup, I actually fell into the,

26:28 what I would call the consulting world of the work for yourself. Well, just by accident, the first, what I would say, customer I had, I actually thought I was just interviewing at a job. I got

26:36 done with the interview and she goes, so can you fit me with all your other clients? I remember looking at my blog, like, yeah, I guess I can, actually. Like, you know, it was enough to, I

26:45 mean, it was enough at that time to pay my bills. There was a little bit left over. I'm like, wait, wait, I can go get a few more of these now? So that's, that's what sort of set me on that

26:53 path of a world result, a world for myself. It's where I met Stu. And it's really where I was introduced to the King management team. So I actually, before I joined full-time at King, a little

27:03 over a year ago, I was actually contracted for them, basically doing the exact same thing I'm doing now, but just sitting in that golden apartment,

27:11 hopping on Zooms every day, back when, I mean, we're sitting here in a really nice office and now King's over 55, 16 employees. I remember my first meeting I hopped on, it was basically the

27:20 whole company, there was like eight of us. Now as a contractor at that point, but it's been really cool to see the evolution. And so really through my kind of part-time consulting career with them,

27:30 that's when we kind of had that initial boom, and when I joined, we were probably full-time, say 30, 35 people. Today we sit about 60. And I think it's also important to mention, King is a

27:41 private oil and gas operator, and we raised money from the retail space. So I would say about half of our staff is dedicated to what I would call partner relations, sales and marketing efforts. So

27:51 if you're looking at kind of, from an operations standpoint, I would say there's 20 to 25 of us, if you include finance and accounting in that So, just to kind of give you guys an idea. of the

28:01 level where 60 people's a lot, but I think when we talk about kind of the poor oil and gas operations, it's somewhere between 20 and 25. Oh, that's right. It is, so they called them already

28:15 being a client of mine was like, okay, well, definitely gonna lose them as a client if I don't take this job, but at some point being in Colorado and as much as I love Denver as a city, oil and

28:25 gas is slowly unfortunately due to consolidation and due to everyone shifting focus down to Texas, that the opportunities are slowly shriveling in. I knew at some point being in the oil and gas

28:37 business, Texas was gonna come calling my name. You figure you got Midland, Dallas, Houston, I think Dallas overall all that. It worked out really well with kind of my living situation and was

28:48 an opportunity again to go work maybe a little bit more of a corporate environment considering where I've worked it previously and, Having known the team being able to come in and having, again,

28:60 know the management team, know the processes, feel like I come in with a little bit of, I don't wanna say cache, but a little bit of ability to actually feel like I'm gonna make an impact and not

29:09 just be sitting really, sitting back on my heels to begin with. Now, I'm still on my heels to this day because in the small private world, things move extremely quickly, but I wouldn't want it

29:20 any other way. It's how I like to operate previously, but that's really how I got in, introduced to them, and it's been fun And

29:27 I will say this is my first job was work from home. I was working from home as a consultant, so it took me about seven years before I finally showed up to an office like this, and it's not bad,

29:36 actually. Well, it looks like a nice office, so I'll give you that. And when I get down to Dallas next, I need to plan a trip. I've got a couple of clients down there.

29:47 I've been saying this to everybody in Texas, though, 'cause I go to Houston a lot. I go to Dallas a little bit less, but I go to Houston a lot. And like, hey, when are you coming back to

29:55 Houston, November, because man, it has been hot.

30:01 I'm dying, to be honest with you. So this is my first real summer in Texas. I showed up last year, September-ish. So I got a little bit of like, oh my goodness, this is bad. I'm, this summer

30:13 has, has killed me, but I've made it here. I've slowly gotten here, but it's brutal, man. I'm dying. The office is air conditioned, so you got it. Yes. And I've still got two fans running in

30:23 here. You can't see them, but they're running Do you actually ever get out in the field and where are your field operations? So we're scattered. We have what I would call six different main

30:35 operating assets. So we have, you know, and all of these are, I would say under 45 different, under 45 wells. So it's not like they're expensive. But we have, we have 45, we have about 40,

30:44 45 wells in Colorado. We have two wells in Wyoming. We have about 90 operated wells in the mid-con areas scattered between mostly the Texas side of the panhandle, but we also have some Oklahoma,

30:59 Kansas. We have about eight to 10, what I would call East Texas wells. And then we have our main asset, which is our West Texas asset, our important county asset, which is Northeast Fortin

31:11 County, kind of the edge of the Midland Basin, edge of the Midland Basin, which is, we've got over 17, 000 gross acres, somewhere it's like 14, 000 net that we're in the process of doing a

31:23 five-wheel drilling plan, which has everybody pretty excited. So we're fairly spread out a little bit. It's again, small number of operated wells. Again, we're an oil and gas private partnership.

31:33 So the Midcon asset was one company that we purchased for a small amount. The Colorado was another operator that we purchased. At then East Texas was another operator that we purchased. So

31:44 altogether, they kind of make up the main three fields. And then the West Texas was actually more of a, was a lease-only deal that we started. So the only wells on there are wells that we've

31:53 drilled. Our legacy wells somewhere sit at between 170 and 100 nights. So we're scattered all over the place. I do get into the field,

32:02 which is nice. It's mainly because we drilled a well. We drilled two wells over in East Texas. We haven't completed yet, but we're still sitting on the docks. So I was able to go watch that full

32:11 drilling stock. And it's tough drilling. East Texas cotton dot. Tough drilling, but it's cool to be on -

32:20 really cool to see

32:23 and really what's cool again And going back to what we talked about earlier, the idea of having an idea, seeing it develop, and then seeing the end-getter. When I started at King, I was in the

32:34 meeting where someone said, hey, we've got this. We just purchased this East Texas asset. I wonder if there's anything to drill on it. Fast forward two years later, I've all been drilling where

32:42 I will drill in this thing. Man, again, comp, comp, full circle. I remember hearing when we - this was just an idea. And now that we stand in here, it's pretty crazy So, again. That's one

32:52 thing about King that I really like, is I've been able to see much like we talked really that full life cycle of idea. Let's go get the land, let's go put together the AFE. Hey, this actually may

33:02 make sense economically. Let's go drill this, let's go put together, spud the well and then to kind of see it all through is really fun. Right, and then let's see what the production looks like

33:12 versus what we forecasted on it and what is a cash flow. Like you're looking at all of, I mean, it's cool, right? This is what I like about smaller operators in general is everybody sort of looks

33:23 end to end. My buddy, Rob Hembriette, at Green Lake Energy, he heads up IT over there. But he's like really involved for an IT guy, right? He's pulling up his phone and saying, Okay, I'm

33:34 watching like my real-time skater feed right nowto show what production looks likeon one of our new heads right now. Which is neat, you don't get that from every single IT guy. And also, of course,

33:44 at scale, you can't do that, right? But for a company like them who has 30-some odd wells, yeah, that's what you do. Um, I want to pivot a little bit to, uh, what I like to call rapid fire.

33:57 I didn't prep you for any of these questions, but I know you talk fast. You think quicker. So I'm going to just throw some things at you and you're going to give me your best answer.

34:09 Your favorite restaurant in golden. Oh, um, it has to be golden mill. Um, it's a hybrid restaurant, but it's also more of like a two level bar It's actually new. It's only been there about two

34:22 years, but if you're in golden, you got to hit golden mill. You've also got wheeze is great. You've got the unlimited pizza. If you're a pizza fan, um, I'm trying to think what else is there.

34:30 I actually worked at a, I worked at a line cook at Joe lens, which is right there on Washington. Um, so if you're, if you're, I wouldn't say the food's the greatest, considering they let me be

34:39 the line cook, but I mean, block them only and learn, I was more of the prep cook. I was a line cook. So to this day, I can make a block of all these super quick because of that uh. but i have

34:49 to go to the middle of what he's just a penny Or Sherpa House, I love you some Sherpa House. I don't know if you've met me. I've been to Sherpa House. The Golden Mill, I think it's new, but I

34:58 think I know where it is.

35:01 My favorite, I think, is Alibaba's. Okay, yep. You know Alibaba's up on just right off of six. So I used to live in El Dorado Springs and work in Lakewood. My first job in oil and gas was

35:15 selling software, accounting software at a company called Bolo And every single day, I always told myself, I was gonna appreciate this, but I drove from El Dorado Springs, which is basically like

35:26 South Boulder to Lakewood. And I drove 93 to six every single day, right along the mountains, really through the foothills, basically. And I said, I'm not gonna take this for granted. It would

35:37 be some icy drives in the snow. This is sort of before working from home was okay. So if I had to be in at seven am. for a demo, and I'm looking at the weather, I'm like, I think it's gonna take

35:47 me like an hour and 15 minutes today versus you know the usual. Yeah, holy smokes. Yeah, but I would drive by golden all the time, right? So pick up food for the wife to bring home, not even

35:58 for kids. And ended up hitting up a lot of the places that you mentioned, but good memories and golden is definitely a special place for those who haven't been.

36:09 How many games does the University of Colorado go coach prime win this year in football?

36:16 I was actually looking to schedule a couple after we PTC. So I grew up, my parents both did not go to CU or

36:24 CSU, kind of the two state school. So I had no real affiliation. All I know is when I really started caring about sports, CU sucked at football. So we kind of growing up, the punchline was, Ah,

36:34 CU sucks. Maybe eventually they'll make it back to their glory. It was more that early '90s period, which was when they were really good I was pretty pumped when they signed Coach Prime, I thought

36:45 it was really cool. but I'm full fledged on the bandwagon right now. I was actually at the TCU game last week 'cause I'm in for work. Seriously? But I was on the ticket and I was there, I had my

36:56 coach prime shirt on, it was awesome. I think they'll probably do nine wins, you know. I think they're gonna do nine wins. I think they'll lose the USC, but I think we're gonna have a couple

37:08 more upsets. We'll definitely again, lose the USC, but I'll probably, I'm gonna go nine if you gotta put my neck out there. That's, I mean, that's aggressive I actually went on my DraftKings

37:17 betting app, not that I need to give them any extra pub. They're not sponsoring this podcast or anything, but I went on the DraftKings app and the over-under was like five or something like that.

37:26 I'm like, oh, I'm hitting that over. For sure, I love it. Need what, four more, five more though, and I got it. Nice. Yeah, I think that they're amazing. I love Dion Sanders, like, you

37:39 know, I'm about twice your age or around there. And I remember him being Leon Dion, right? Playing for the Yankees and the Braves and the Falcons and the Cowboys, the 49ers. And he was just

37:51 ahead of his time, kind of with how flashy he was and how sort of blunt and just how talented he was. And I've said this before, even before he was the coach, you know, 10 minutes away from me

38:04 that I just loved that I was put on this earth at the same time as Dion Sanders. That's because he's just amazing. And if you look at some of his interviews now, he had won and maybe you saw this

38:13 It was all over Instagram. He's like, what about me makes you think that I care about your opinion of me, right? Because your opinion of me is not the opinion that I have of myself. And it really

38:26 kind of resonated with me because, you know, we all have so much self doubt and it's easy to take other people's opinions of you as the fact of how you exist in the world. But somebody like that is

38:38 really telling you. Have your opinion of yourself and don't worry about other people's opinions of you. And that is really, really good advice and stuff that I wish that I'd heard when I was even

38:50 younger, to get through some of the self doubt of people saying, Well, I mean, I can't even tell you in the amount. In interviews, I remember in my late 20s, somebody saying,

39:00 Maybe you're just not a sales guy. And I took that to heart. I remember sitting down as an interview. They obviously didn't hire me. Sitting down and having this life crisis, like, Maybe I

39:09 shouldn't be a sales guy. Like, What am I doing? Right? And now if I look back at my track record of what I've done in oil and gas tech, like I'm definitely a sales guy and I'm very accomplished.

39:20 I'm glad that I didn't let that person's opinion overly affect me.

39:26 But it's easy to do that. So anyways, back to the rapid fire question. So over and under, how many years do you think you live in Texas?

39:36 Oh, yeah, I still are other people at my job watching. No, I'm just kidding. I probably put it over under four. I probably take the under. I'm probably here three to four years, to be honest.

39:46 You think you moved back to Colorado? I do, I mean these, I do it. If we're doing rapid fire, we could go over another 10 minutes about why I flip flop, maybe, but rapid fire three to four

39:56 years. The curse of Chief Niwat has officially made its way to you. And for those who don't know about that, they should look it up But I don't think I can ever leave at this point, man. I've

40:07 been here for 20 years come October, which makes this the place I grew up in New Hampshire, lived there for 18, lived in the Boston area for college and a year after, so that made five. And now

40:18 20 years here. So I've actually spent more time here than anywhere than it would be tough to leave this place. You don't realize how spoiled we are with the weather there. I mean, it's everything

40:29 I took for granted, but we can do a whole other episode on just why, what, on CoolSW Colorado.

40:38 I love it. What to you? What does the oil and gas industry look like in five years? Do you think that a company like King or really any oil and gas company starts moving more toward drilling

40:49 geothermal wells? Do you think this is more of a carbon capture sequestration industry? Is the environmental impacts starting to creep in? I think you just saw the other day with Joe Biden

41:00 canceling leases and shutting down pipelines. And where do you think the oil and gas industry sets five to 10 years from now? Yes, I, you know, this was one of the questions you sent over before.

41:13 And I actually, I thought a little about this and a one

41:18 of them, I'm kind of zigging when everyone's zagging on this one. So I think that the theme right now is consol, especially in Colorado, it's consolidation. The only way to stay alive is

41:27 consolidate up and integrate your systems and there's going to be seven operators in five to 10 years. I actually am going to zag on that one and say I actually think that. five to 10 years, you're

41:36 smaller operators, you're kings, and even smaller, are going to have a much more massive advantage of being able to move quickly. For a lot of the stuff that you talked about with your IT, the

41:48 Greenlight Company, you're just able to pull up the stuff on your phone. There are certain companies that, because they're larger companies, as they get bigger, you start seeing layers and layers

41:57 come in, and even you're a king, I'm seeing the difference between how we made a decision a year ago versus how we're making a decision today The timeline takes a lot longer, there's generally more

42:07 people involved. This is another Deon quote I love, a committee has never made the Hall of Fame. That's a very interesting quote, a committee. So if you start having all these committees in your

42:16 decision, it's like, okay, you know, whether or not you come to what a right conclusion is for any one discussion, but the time frame in which decisions go longer, and I think as with things

42:29 rapidly changing, as you mentioned, all the different ways that you could shift, whether it is carbon capture, whether it is. you know, geothermal or, you know, gas buying, buying

42:38 administration or even what assets are going to be probably, I think the ability to move quickly is going to be paramount. And I think smaller companies are actually gonna have an advantage over

42:47 larger companies, even though yes, on a macro level, consolidation probably makes the industry work more efficiently on paper. I don't necessarily know if I buy that. Yeah, I like that. And I

42:58 think that viewpoint is definitely from someone who lived in Colorado and who lives here now The DJ Basin, which is an amazing oil and gas field, 80 of the production is run by three operators. Yep.

43:10 And that was not the case when I first got into oil and gas 15 years ago. It was. Now they're doing cool stuff up there. Not to say that they're just sitting on their hands and doing, not doing

43:20 cool stuff, but at some point innovation has to be, you know, there can't be seven, innovation's never seven layers away from happening. It's usually a guy's got an idea, He's got a ability to

43:31 execute it pretty quickly.

43:34 And I think like you said, that's where companies start, but then just the nature of a growing company, you do have layers and different approvals and that's sort of how things work. Yeah, I

43:45 think that that's a valuable and interesting viewpoint for sure. I wanna talk about sales presentation 'cause you actually gave me a sales presentation and showed me a product that you'd built at

43:55 some point. Any stories where you tripped over your shoes or anything incredibly embarrassing that you've seen in a presentation either delivered to you or were you delivered the demo itself? Oh my

44:09 goodness. I mean, I've been

44:13 in some pretty interesting sales calls. I mean, a lot of the selling I'm doing is more getting relationships and trying to build up trust with somebody because a lot of what I was doing was project

44:23 based. What's funny is what I was showing you was my attempt at taking a project I had worked on which

44:31 was for one of my clients who introduced me

44:34 who happens to be in Colorado who happened to just gotten bought, and they were attempting to figure out it was back during SP 181, and there was a little regulatory shift on what was going on in

44:43 Colorado, and I had built

44:47 something that allowed them to help make them more quickly analyze whether or not a piece of some acreage that they had fell within or out of compliance of this rule, and if it was out of compliance,

44:58 what were sort of the factors that caused it to come out of compliance and not And so that was an attempt to say, Hey, there's actually somebody using this project or this tool that we create, is

45:10 there a way to make it more user-friendly to where more people could do it? And

45:16 the answer is probably no, because as we see here today, nobody else really bought on it, but I think, you know, I would say for me, it was just the fact of just getting out there and saying,

45:26 Hey, I've got somebody that somebody's using, maybe there's a need to see if somebody else uses it. We got one other person maybe interested, but I would say that's gonna be kind of the most

45:37 up-and-ounce, I would say that's probably the only, I would say product sale I've made. I do remember being on a one-call close where some guy posted on LinkedIn and said, Hey, I need some

45:49 database work. Oh, I'll shoot me a message for details. Send me his number a day later. We were doing business togetherand had a contract signed. So that's why I don't highlight. I remember

45:57 thinking, Man, this is easy. I can do this all day Yeah, it's like hitting a home run in your first at bat and then you're like, Oh, okay. They started throwing curveballs, crap. Yeah,

46:07 exactly. Which is when I quit baseball, but it sounds like you could hit a curveball decently. I was a pitcher. I couldn't hit. Oh, you were a pitcher? Yes, I was a pitcher. So shout out Rick

46:17 Rail, VP of Finance over at Cambridge. He was a pitcher at Mines, and I think he topped out at like 92, 93 miles an hour. It's interesting at Mines where it's D2 and there's not a lot of D2

46:28 schools. You have some guys who are like clearly day three caliber and some guys who are D1 caliber, right? So I think you get a real mix in terms of the talent level and you sort of play both,

46:40 right? Like you play D1 schools and you play D3 schools. So you play, yeah, levels are non-conference. We would go play Northern Colorado a bunch, which ironically, you know, in my few years

46:51 there, we were actually fairly similar to that. Mesa, Colorado Mesa overgrant Juxtap, it's kind of the big dog in the R-Mac. And they get a lot of, oh, yeah, they get a lot of kind of X-D1

47:01 transfers that are from Colorado who wanna, it's on the other side, it's on that Western slopes, and kind of, it feels like it's isolated, but it's gorgeous over there at Grand Junction, that

47:10 fruit area, holy smokes.

47:13 But yeah, so I barely, you know, it was kind of funny, the phrase of, you know, the NCA had, they got like, you know, D1, the phrase for D2 was I chose D2. we always joke, no, no, no,

47:27 D2 chose us. And nobody chooses D2, it chose us. But no, it's, but no, but not. Minds baseball, I remember watching my first practice thinking, oh, wow, I can actually play here too. By

47:41 the time we finished, we were second in the division and really rolling people outside of Mesa. Still bummed that we never got a chance to just slip that ring. We were one out of way from a ring

47:50 all out always. I don't always remember. I think that's, that's probably what you remember most is how close you got versus some of those, some of those, some of those wins. But we know great,

47:60 great times there. Of course, I mean, you see behind me I'm a Boston Red Sox fan. So for all the agonizingly close years, they've, they've certainly broken through in the last 20 or so, which

48:10 has been awesome. But I can relate to being one out of way. Final question I want to ask you before we shut this down is you're a young guy, but I love asking my guests this. Like what advice

48:21 would you give to your younger self? And for you, maybe that's even your high school yourself. What advice would you want to give now that you've gained at least a little bit more wisdom? I think

48:32 constantly continue to take advice. I think if you, I, you know, being a guy who I'm very confident in my abilities, I sometimes think I know what's going on. And I think there's been a lot of

48:45 advice I didn't take that looking back, it's like, man, I wish I would have taken that. And if you look at the few pieces of advice I did take, go into minds. There's a few other like decision

48:54 split in there Great advice from people who are in my circle and me being receptive to that has really been helpful. I can, you know, we could talk again for all of the podcast about the advice

49:04 that was given to me that I didn't even consider because I know better than that. And so if I were to, you know, sit myself down, I would say, you know, just listen a little bit more, continue

49:14 to, you know, people who are older than you, they're smart too, you know, they've got some wisdom on them and be a sponge And I think I would definitely say over the past few years, I've heeded

49:25 that. specific advice really well, and just continue to take advice. I don't know it all, unfortunately, even though I wish I did two ears, one mouth, you know, and that that I remember

49:37 hearing that my late 20s and like, I didn't somebody tell me that sooner. And I think one thing that you'll realize to is you do know a lot now, I will say you're you've evolved and you've really

49:49 kind of immersed yourself in all of this. But as I get older, I realize I know very little. Oh, you know, you start and there's levels to how much depth you can get into versus kind of learning

49:59 at a at a surface level. But really impressed with what you got going on. Michael, where can people find you website, LinkedIn, all those sorts of things? Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn,

50:09 just search Michael Tanner. I'm on Twitter. I also have a podcast I do with with the aforementioned Stuart Turley. You can check us out at Energy News Beat. We have a website energy news beatcom.

50:19 I dub it as the world's greatest energy news website. You can you can check us out there. But now I

50:25 Jeremy, again, I appreciate it.

50:28 It's been fun and I hope it's been useful and not getting appreciated. Man, keep crushing out there.