OGYP #003|Mark LaCour & Starting an Oil & Gas Business

Oil and Gas Young Professionals Podcast

OGYP #03: tl;dr Mark LaCour

In this episode of The Oil and Gas Young Professionals Podcast, Mark LaCour speaks candidly about how he got into Oil & Gas, started his own Oil & Gas company, and how he went from sales expert to podcast co host. Mark finishes things up by giving some advice on how to get your career started.

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About Our Guest: Mark LaCour

Mark LaCour is the Director and founder of Modalpoint, The Oil & Gas Sales Experts. Modalpoint is a consulting company that helps you figure out where your product or service fits into the Oil & Gas industry. Modalpoint accepts clients from any industry, but the majority of their clients are large Tech companies. Mark is the cohost of Oil & Gas This Week, The Oil & Gas Careers Show, serves on the API Houston Board, and volunteers to educate teach students about STEM in Sugarland, TX.

The easiest way is to connect with Mark everywhere, but feel free to follow the links to find him on Linkedin, Twitter or his website, Modalpoint.

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OGYP #003|How to Start a Business in Oil & Gas with Mark LaCour
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James Gordey: Welcome into this episode of the Oil and Gas Young Professionals Podcast and I’m your host, James Gordey Gordey. Today, we’re going to speak to Mark LaCour of Modalpoint, the oil and gas sales expert. On the show today, Mark speaks candidly about his background, getting into the industry, what it’s like to start a business in the oil and gas industry and, finally, Mark offers some young professional specific career advice. Let’s get into the show this week.
All right, today in the show, we’re going to welcome in my friend, the oil and gas sales expert and also the voice of the oil and gas community online, Mark LaCour.
Mark: Hey, James, how are you doing, brother?
James Gordey: Great to have you on the show.
Mark: Yeah, it’s great to be here.
James Gordey: Okay. So, a lot of people know you from your work and your show and everything like that and they know Modalpoint. They know that you’re the oil and gas sales expert. But we haven’t really gotten your full story and background. So, could you kind of just take us through your history in how you got into oil and gas?
Mark: Yeah, it’s actually funny. It’s got to the point now that when we go places publicly people recognize me. My wife keeps telling me, “Don’t let it go to your head. You’re not a movie star.” But, yeah, my story is a little bit different than a lot of people in this industry. About 23 years ago, I had met the woman who is my wife now, at that point she was my girlfriend, and I wanted to quit traveling. I wanted to stay home more.
And I happen to know some senior people at the phone company in the east, which is called BellSouth and which no longer exists. And so I went to them and said, “Look, I need a job where I don’t travel as much.” And they go, “Mark, we have the perfect position for you. But we just need to warn you it’s had declining revenue for over 30 years.” And I go, “I want it.” The truth is I had no idea what it really was. I just wanted the job. So, they gave it to me and it was their strategic sales manager for their oil and gas booking business. So, BellSouth, the phone company in the east, basically gave me all of their oil and gas accounts.
Now, I knew absolutely nothing about oil and gas but I wanted to make money and I wanted to do a good job so what I did at first is try to set meetings with some clients they gave me just so I could to talk to them to understand what’s going on. And the first company that agreed to meet me was Chevron out in San Ramon, California. And the person that agreed to meet with me was a lowly procurement guy. He was the only one that will meet with me. So, I jumped to the plane, flew up to California, put my suit on, went out to their corporate headquarters in Pleasanton and went through security, get to the guy’s office and I walked in, knocked on the door, walked in.
He’s at his desk and he looks at me. He doesn’t stand up. He doesn’t offer me his hand. He doesn’t even say hello. And he goes, “We have been paying tariff rates for over 50 years, why the hell should I be talking to you right now? And that was my introduction in oil and gas.
James Gordey: Oh, it’s baptism by fire.
Mark: Yeah. And so, if you fast forward to right now, that guy is now in charge of all supply chain for Africa for Chevron. I’m the godfather of his children and he’s one of my best friends. And needless to say, in my learning my accounts, I worked really hard to understand the businesses. Not how can Mark make money or how can BellSouth make money but what is the business of Chevron? What is the business of Haliburton or Baker or BJ Services or Shell or Exxon? How are they different?
What I did is I made sure I did high quality work. And they eventually took notice. I’ll give you good examples. Schlumberger would not talk to me to save my life. I could not get a meeting with them for anything. So, by this point, I had grown the oil and gas book of business for Bell substantially and I had a pretty good support staff. So what I did internally within Bell is every year, as I did better, they want to jack my quota and what I would do is I would negotiate my quota but I also want head counts of dedicated customer service people, dedicated sales engineer, get dedicated service manager.
By this point, I had dedicated customer service personnel. And so I put them on a project. And this was back in the ’90s. So, back then, companies were just transitioning to Ethernet networks for their employees from dial up. And so one of the problems a lot of companies had especially for executes is they have a separate dial up line, phone lines, for their modems for their computer. And when they would switch to Ethernet, because the people that were installing Ethernet were actually the IT guys inside of the company and the people that were responsible for the phone services was a separate group, they didn’t talk to each other.
So often what would happen is a company would switch to an internal Ethernet network but nobody would tell the people at the telecommunications so they would never cut off these phone rhythms so they just kept billing month after month. So, I put my customer service reps on that for Schlumberger and I come to find out, yeah, Schlumberger was in that exact situation. So, I literally went to Schlumberger with a check for $49,000 for their refunds. And they talked to me. And they said, “We have never had a vendor that has brought us a check back.” See how I understood the business and made sure I did really good work for them as I grew, my reach within oil and gas business?
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James Gordey: Yeah. I mean, that makes absolute sense. You understand the business and you’ve figured out what things that are kind of having, causing issues for them, that maybe they don’t even know about and you bring it to their attention to build up some equity there.
Mark: Yeah. And so what happens is they start to see me not as a vendor but as an asset which then opened up a whole world to me. So, I’ve been offshore multiple times. I don’t want to mention the names of the company now because probably people could still get in trouble. But I would go, “Hey, I want to go offshore company XYZ.” And they go, “Oh, meet me at the heliport in Lafayette.” And they would just put me on a helicopter and I’d go offshore.
I’d been in mud plants. I’d been in refineries. I’d been in pipeline companies. I’d been in network operation centers or the disaster recovery centers, through tubing, coil tubing. I’ve not only see it. I’ve touched it. I’ve done it. I know how it works. And this is over a span of 20 years. And so, we built that book of business and it was awesome. And speaking of learning the industry, I actually learned the industry so well that when somebody like, say — Baker Hughes corporate would issue an RFP for like this tired North America, I would go to the Baker Hughes offices who actually make money for the company as opposed to corporate procurement who caused money for company.
I go, “Hey, corporate want to make us bid against MCI or Sprint or whatever. And the guy that I knew there thought of me so highly, he’d pick up the phone and chew procurement out.” And so I would be able to carve out my pieces of RFP at the price points I wanted. And this wasn’t me leveraging Baker Hughes. This was Baker Hughes seeing the advantage of working with me, having that one contact, knowing that you cannot run and oil service company without communications.
And so, this is a great finding. It’s a great learning experience for me. I built a great team. We turned that book of business that had declining revenue around. We actually grew that book of business. And then we get to Katrina. So, for the two years before Katrina, Hurricane Katrina, I had been lobbying my management to let me move to Houston. And if people don’t remember the old BellSouth SPA, no, yeah, SBC, phone territories. So basically, BellSouth ended in Louisiana and SBC picked up in Texas. So, it was outside of BellSouth territory.
James Gordey: And where were you living?
Mark: At that time I was living in New Orleans, which is another long story.
James Gordey: Got you.
Mark: Yeah. I lobbied my management to move me from Atlanta to New Orleans so I’d be closer to my clients and it was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. I was still jumping on the plane every week, fly to Houston, didn’t matter if the flight was shorter, but New Orleans is a wonderful city to explore, spend the weekend in. But the truth is, it’s small. It’s not a great place to live. Maybe you live and you learn.
So, I lobbied my management for two years to move to Houston and they didn’t want to. In fact, my direct manager believed in [0:07:48] [Indiscernible], believed in telecommunications. He wants to see you every day. Luckily for me, he got a new manager. So, the VP of sales for that region. And she was much more open-minded. So eventually, with a bunch of pleading and promises, they allowed me to move to Houston as a trial. So, it wasn’t even perfect. In fact, they couldn’t even pay me.
The BellSouth payroll system had never paid anybody in Texas before ever so they had to go get somebody to write some code so they can even pay me. And so I put my house on the market, sold it almost immediately. I moved to Houston. My wife and I, my three month old at that time, and two weeks later, Hurricane Katrina came through.
James Gordey: Yeah, of course. I mean, I was living in New Orleans at the same as well. That changed not just life for everyone else living in New Orleans but also just for the entire region.
Mark: Yeah. And so what a lot of people did not know you can’t run a refinery or a pipeline without telecommunication, without connectivity, and everybody connected back to Houston. And so all the refineries in Louisiana were down. All the pipelines were down. And we’re not talking about companies being to make money. You remember this, James Gordey. You couldn’t buy gasoline.
James Gordey: Yeah, you couldn’t buy anything.
Mark: You couldn’t buy anything. The infrastructure, critical infrastructure was destroyed. And this could bring a tear in my eye. I have a movie clip of New Orleans’ flood and the BellSouth CO on pointers [Phonetic] is lit. And we’re bringing in supplies on the third floor. Because 100 years ago, when BellSouth engineers designed that building, they knew that one day if New Orleans is flooded, they knew the water level, where it would be, whether you have to build a ramp so they could offload supplies. So, the BellSouth CO stayed up, which means our communication stayed up. Everybody else was dead. So, we’re the only telecommunication provider out there.
Unfortunately, because the way things were basically configured, everybody else’s network failed to [0:09:39] [Indiscernible]. So, when the Sprint network went down, it dumped the Sprint traffic on BellSouth’s network. When the MCI network it went down, it dumped the MCI’s traffic on Bell’s network. When the AT&T network went down, it dumped — And so, the Bell network was so overloaded that nothing could get through because of time. If you remember, texts would get through because texts don’t have a latency component to it.
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So, eventually, texts would work its way though and you would actually get them. So, when Katrina happened, I was the only BellSouth person that anybody could reach. Not that my guys were dead. There was just no way you could call them. There’s no way to communicate with them. So, I put together an emergency hit team. I put together some engineers in Atlanta and some project managers in Miami and we started hitting this thing head on. And so I did stuff that was crazy. I did stuff that broke company policy, broke laws.
There’s the Exxon refinery right there at Chalmette. We had to get communications up. So, we had connectivity at the BellSouth CO but how do you get it right down the street to Chalmette. We can’t string any fiber or wire. So, there’s just this old technology called microwave shots. So, I looked up in our internal tools. I found some microwave engineers for Bell that were retired. I pulled them out of retirement. I had no authority to do that all. But they were good for the cause. They got out and they went and break the microwave shot from the Bell CO down into the Shell refinery and got Exxon talking. And guess what? That refinery got lit and it started producing some fuel which then helped the problem there everybody is dealing with.
We did that one by one, piece by piece and it took about a year to get all that stuff fixed and done. And even, James Gordey, this is funny, even just a few months ago, I have somebody from the Exxon refinery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana call me about a circuit that my name was actually on the tag for. It’s still touching. But we did really earth changing work. We did the right stuff. One of the things I’m so proud of, and this is why I love this industry so much, is all of these deals are dead while the chips were down, while people were worried about their safety.
My own tech crew had to be quartered by the national guard. All this work was done on handshakes. So, what was even a handshake was a phone call. And the thing I’m most proud of, when all this stuff was done, every one of those bills were paid. No questions asked. You don’t see that anywhere else.
James Gordey: That’s really amazing story. I mean, there’s just you and your team and all these people just working together to take the roles and then throw them aside and just say, “Look, people actually need help. We’ve got to get this thing up and running again.”
Mark: Yeah. When it’s all over, when everything was back to somewhat normal, I get called in to corporate office in Atlanta in the COO. So, my boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss. We’re sitting there — Remember old dot matrix print sheets, the green and whites with the dots on the sides, there are holes on the side?
James Gordey: Unfortunately, I don’t, Mark.
Mark: Yeah. I hate myself. Some of the audience out probably never. Anyway, he had this dot matrix printer printout that went to the floor and he had a red pen. So, his admin walks me in there, sit down and he’s taking these and he’s going through it one by one with the red pen. He’s going, “Broke FCC law, broke FCC law, broke company policy, broke state policy, broke company policy, broke FCC law.” And so at first, I’m watching him do this like, “Oh, I’m going to get in trouble.”
And then he kept doing it and he kept doing it. It’s like, “Damn. I’m going to lose my job.” And he kept doing it and he kept doing it. It’s like, “I’m going to go to jail.” I was like really scared. And when he got to the bottom of the list and he put it down, he took his rimmed glass off and he looked at me, he goes, “Mark, let me tell you something. I’m damn proud to have you on our team.” He goes, “In this situation, you did the right thing. Thank you.” He goes, “Any other situation, you’d be out of here so quick. But this was the right thing to do because this was a national disaster.”
So, love the company, love the work. A lot of the relationships that I use now at Modalpoint started back then. And it was just — it was a horrible time. A lot of people lost everything they had. Unfortunately, some people lost their lives. But at the same time I saw some of the best things in people come out. I saw competitors work together because it needed to be done. It makes you believe in humanity again. But that’s how I got my start and it was a great way to get your start because I took the phone companies oil and gas book of business. I wasn’t siloed into one segment.
So, I didn’t just know service. I didn’t just know upstream. I didn’t just know downstream. I didn’t just know midstream. I got to see it all, which now helps me mentally to have kind of universal look at this industry.
James Gordey: That’s one thing you definitely preach to people especially in the down market. You just understand how the pie, it’s bigger than just your one segment and how it all fits together. I mean, if you know how it works, you can find the opportunities there.
Mark: Yeah. It’s one of the things I’ve never noticed. This is my fourth downturn I’ve been through but I’ve never noticed how upstream-centric the Houston culture is. So, the funny thing is you go talk to anybody in the city and you read the newspapers and they talk about how it’s all doom and gloom. But if you pick your head up and look around the population in Houston is going up. That’s why traffic is so bad. There’s not enough class A office base. They’re tearing down perfectly fine class B office base to sustain class A office base.
The reason, of course, all of that, you have two things going on. You have companies like in Anadarko closing remote offices because of local crisis, but they’re bringing their people back where, which means those jobs are back here now. The other thing that’s going on is the boom in downstream which is right here in our backyard.
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So, you have all these downstream construction companies, the EPCs that are eventually the companies that are going to run these petrochemical plants [0:15:09] [Indiscernible]. They’re bringing their people here. So, Houston is actually doing really well in this environment but if you listen to news you would never think so.
James Gordey: Yeah. One thing that was really striking, if you just drive around or you’re going back to Louisiana when I go visit home and you’re going just driving around the city, really when you take a line and you draw it through downtown, everything in the west is kind of upstream-centric and it’s very white color. But you and James Gordey Hahn, your show always said go downstream. And people — where is that maybe? That’s East Houston. That’s anywhere east of downtown, the ship channel and they just go over there and you literally see construction and CapEx and just everything is booming over there.
Mark: Yeah, yeah. So, if your listeners work in this industry and they’re worried about stuff, my advice is back up, take deep breath. It’s okay. This happened. This can happen again unfortunately. But learn other parts of the industry so that you’re not chained to one of the segments if things go downhill, let’s say, but you can jump to the other segments when things are just fine.
James Gordey: Okay. So, how did you, Modalpoint, eventually you started your own company. Why did you do that and how did you go from this Katrina story where you just did a tremendous amount of work to help people out to now you’re the oil and gas sales expert?
Mark: Yes. So, BellSouth got bought by AT&T. At that point, it was no longer good fit for me. That was right along the time telecommunications were being commoditized. So, I went to work for a startup. I think everybody has at least one startup in their belt. That was great because I had to learn humility. When I had the BellSouth name behind me, I could talk to anybody I want. In fact, one of the things I used to do, and I can’t believe I’m about to admit this on your show, but if I wanted to know a company, and it was in BellSouth territory, let’s say it was in Halliburton, I would put my BellSouth hat in and I just walk in.
I mean, I never got stopped. I just walk in and start talking to people. When I went to work for a startup you couldn’t do that. So, you had to learn how to develop business when people had never heard of your company. Let me tell you, that is way harder than when you have name recognition. That was a good learning experience for me. Unfortunately, that startup eventually didn’t work out. And then I worked for a big research company, Forrester Research, which is where a lot of my research methodology came from.
Great company. I had the oil and gas key accounts. So, the most important accounts. I learned a lot. I mean, a lot from them. That was another position where our clients didn’t see me as a vendor but as a trusted advisor. So, somebody like Exxon is getting ready to renew their SAP contracts. Well, I had people that worked with SAP on my team that I would bring in and help them understand here’s what SAP will back now. Here’s the price points they’ll hit. They won’t go lower than this. Here’s stuff they will give you but they won’t tell you they’ll give you.
So, you save ExxonMobil $10 million on SAP, on contract renegotiation. All of a sudden they like you. So, that was a great gig. And I still have friends at work over there. Unfortunately, they decided to cut my commission and it just quite honestly pissed me off. If you’re a sales person and somebody capped your commission, they’re basically saying, “We want you to work this hard but no harder.” And that just doesn’t fit my personality. So, Modalpoint actually was my wife’s idea. She came up with it.
She goes, “You know, we’re at a point now where we could take a little bit of a chance. You have all these hundreds of companies coming to you, want you to help them sell oil and gas. Why don’t you start a consulting company to do that?” And, James Gordey, between you and I and our listeners here, I told my wife I didn’t think it was a good idea. But the truth was I was scared. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to pay my rent, that I’d end up living on the street, blah, blah, blah. But eventually, I talked to enough people and I got some letter of intent and I made that jump. So we started Modalpoint I think December 26 and January 13th we had our first client and I haven’t stopped since then.
James Gordey: Yeah. I mean, that’s really amazing, with some courage of your wife, you’re able to just go out and you have become an entrepreneur and start your own business and now you’re really just, have established yourself as just a key part of the oil and gas community both on and offline here.
Mark: Yeah. Let me back you up. Between the starting and middle point and what we’re doing now, there’s been a lot of failure. I have done everything wrong at least once, sometimes two or three times. I tell people this all the time especially entrepreneurs. It’s not hard to work for yourself and make money. It’s really not. What’s hard is to make good money without working your butt off.
That’s the difference. It took me a couple of years to figure out how to get there, how to do high quality impactful work that drives real value for my clients. So, in my case, it’s very measurable. I affect your top line quickly. So, if you’re a sales organization and you engage with me, you see your sales revenue growth rather quickly. If it doesn’t, that meant I failed. So far, knock on wood, I’ve never failed. So, that means that my clients see me as invaluable. I mean, it’s not that I’m a trusted adviser anymore. It’s like I’m part of the family.
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And how you could think that feels from my end where at the end of the day some CEO claps you at the back, looks me straight in the eye and sincerely says, “Mark, we could have never done this without you. That you.” That feeling is worth what they’re paying me for. In fact, that feels rather worth than what they’re paying me.
James Gordey: Yeah. Also, in the early stages, you’ve told me offline personally, maybe you started out doing one thing and then it was important that you failed but the failure is important because you learn from those failures and you ask your customers what they would pay you for and now you’re doing exactly that and you have more business than you can even deal with.
Mark: Yeah, let’s break that down because listeners thinking about starting a business or has one needs to understand this. So, when I first started Modalpoint, I had a good idea and I went out and I sold it. I sold it not because it was good idea but because I was a good sales person. I didn’t know that. Because I sold it, I thought I was on to something. So, I spent the next year trying to replicate that and I couldn’t and it was a grind. We had just enough revenue coming in to keep everybody employed but we couldn’t really grow and I kept trying to repeat the sell and I couldn’t do it and I couldn’t do it and I couldn’t do it.
And eventually after about 18 months I had come to a realization that it wasn’t working. I didn’t know why it wasn’t working. I didn’t know what was going to work but I know it wasn’t working. So, I literally shut my company down. I laid everybody off. I gave them all a little package and then just stopped. And I went back to all the people that I engaged with that did not engage with me and I went with my researcher hat on, not my sales hat on.
And I wanted to understand why they didn’t engage with me. And what I found out was that companies will outsource everything — HR, legal, IT — but they don’t want to outsource their sales teams because they want to own that customer relationship. Unfortunately, when I started Modalpoint, that was my idea, and I managed to find a company [0:21:52] [Indiscernible] outsource their sales team so I sold it. And so I went back once I get my researcher hat on and I asked people what would you be willing to pay me for?
And after doing enough research, I come to find out what they would be willing to pay me for is to help them figure out where their product or service fits in oil and gas industry, who would buy it and what is the value that that it actually brings. So, we then started Modalpoint again for the second time on a different track of doing actually just market research for oil and gas. And that’s been a totally different journey for me. Instead of feeling like I’m pushing a boulder uphill, quite frankly, I’m running down the hill and boulders are chasing me.
So, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you have a small business, if it’s not working, if it’s a struggle, stop. Take your ego out of it. Back up. Look at the bigger picture. Figure out what’s going on. In fact, a great way to do this is ping some of your peers, not friends, not people that are close to you because they won’t tell you the truth because they like you, but people that are similar to you in their career path, let them see what’s going on and you’ll be surprised the stuff that’s obvious that they’ll point out to you that they won’t see yourself because you’re too close to it.
James Gordey: Exactly. I mean, what you really could have done, you could have, like you said, swallow your ego and you could have gone back and saw that this wasn’t working as well as you thought, got some feedback, made some tweaks of the product and kept going back and improving it incrementally. You could have, instead of taking 18 months, you could have done that after your first customer or after six months or just reduce the cycle time there to get feedback and improve your service for your consulting company. And, I mean, you did that eventually.
Mark: Yeah, eventually. But because my ego was involved, because I knew I was right about this, I didn’t see that. I was too close to the problem. So now, it’s funny, after going through that experience, I have a bit of the opposite problem. Because now, every time there’s something not quite going right, I’m wondering is this a failure? Should I stop it? I’m a little bit too much of the other way now. There’s a balance in there somewhere and that was a good place to be. But I’m telling you, if you’re in that situation, if you’re an entrepreneur in that situation, gather as much of the facts as you can and get some of your peers look at it and they will quickly show where their constraints are, where the holes are.
James Gordey: Yeah, Mark. That’s an awesome story. So, moving on from that, now we’ve kind of established your background and how you’ve established yourself as the oil and gas sales expert and you’re a successful entrepreneur in the oil and gas industry. So, most of the people know you, and I know you, directly from your work on the oil and gas career show, but first the Oil and Gas This Week Podcast. Can you take us back to the beginning, maybe just when James Gordey Hahn approached you and had this idea and how it grew into the wild success story that it is today.
Mark: Yeah, he makes fun of me. So, this is the real back story. When I had my own company, I wasted a lot of money with digital marketing. I mean, a lot of money. A lot of them are really good at digital marketing but they just don’t get it. So, I’d have monthly meetings with these companies and they showed me how many new page views they got me, how many likes they got me and I would go, “My phone is not ringing.” And they would go, “But, yeah, look at all the traffic, look at this.” What they didn’t really get is that marketing has to drive sales results. Marketing for marketing data itself is not valuable to an organization. It needs to sell a product or service.
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So, after wasting a bunch of money not getting any results, I was basically disgusted with the whole group of people. I didn’t really see them as being useful. James Gordey Hahn found me and I didn’t really even want to engage with him because of the way I was thinking about this and he eventually talked me into it. And I actually gave him access to be able to look behind the scenes in my WordPress site which is all I had at that point. And he came back to me and he goes, “Dude, I can’t believe it.” And I go, “I didn’t think I was doing too many things good.”
He goes, “No, no, no, no, no.” He goes, “I’ve had a lot of clients. I’ve never seen anybody do everything wrong. Somehow, you’re doing everything wrong. I don’t know how you have any business.” So, that instantly said, “Maybe, I should talk to this guy more.” So, James Gordey Hahn initially becoming a vendor of mine and taught me, or actually I paid him to teach me, how to use social media properly to drive sales results. Because there’s a million ways of doing it wrong. There’s only a few ways of doing it right.
And so once he taught me that, I now that have knowledge in my head, and so my people, my interns and my virtual assistants, they now do most of the work for that but I can check up on them. If they make a mistake, I can correct them. I have a bit of a thing about my business that I don’t like other people to know parts of my business that I don’t know. It doesn’t mean I do it but I like to at least know how it’s done. And so that’s where it worked really well for me. I mean, it’s ridiculous. You keep talking about oil and gas sales expert. Really Google that about me.
If you Google oil and gas sales expert, you’ll see me come up one, two, three, four, five, six organically. And imagine what that’s done for my business. Imagine if anybody in the world types in oil and gas sales expert and they see me first, second and third? I mean, my phone just rings. So anyway, that’s how my relationship with James Gordey Hahn started. So, we went from him being a vendor to becoming — maybe not friends yet but really good acquaintance. We’re good business acquaintances. We had high trust relationship with him.
And so then about, I don’t know, 13 months ago, 14 months ago, maybe a little longer than that, he came to me, “We need to do a podcast.” And I go, “I don’t have time to do a podcast. It’s a waste of time.” And I really thought it was a waste of time. And so he’s on me, on me, on me. And then eventually I just want him to shut up. And so I said, “Okay, I’ll do the podcast.” Still, not believing it was worth my time. Just to get him to shut up. And that was the beginning of the Oil and Gas This Week, me wanting him to shut up.
So, once again, I’d be the first to admit I was wrong. The podcast has had great success, great growth rate. People love it. They find it very useful. And then surprisingly enough, we have companies who want to sponsor us. So now, revenue string for us which none of which I thought we’d never get to. But that’s the story of the beginning of Oil and Gas This Week.
James Gordey: Yeah. And, I mean, what is it? 59, 60 episodes later, you all are number one in the search rankings and you have a huge community of people and friends that you’ve met through the show?
Mark: Yeah. And if you’re a podcast person, especially if you’re a marketer in podcasting, our numbers don’t equate our revenue. We should not be making this much money as we do. The reason that we are is that our podcast audience are so loyal and so our sponsors — we don’t take sponsors who are trying to sell anything. We take sponsors who are trying to get exposure. Our sponsors know that when you listen to Oil and Gas This Week, the odds are those ear buzz in your head 45 minutes every week.
It’s not like a radio show we could flip through the stations or banner ads we can just ignore them. You hear our sponsorship message because you listen to our show. And that’s very valuable for companies that are trying to just to take knowledge about what they’re doing differently or what they didn’t know. And so that’s why we have such great success. And then in the success of those podcasts has spawned other podcasts. So, I can go into it here but we have other podcasts in the works that we negotiate sponsorships with. I would not be surprised, James Gordey, if two years from now that there’s four or five podcasts all built around different subjects, all built around Oil and Gas This Week, which is the original one.
James Gordey: Yeah. I mean, again, to go back on the revenue and the loyalty, you have a little nook in people’s lives every week and you build up that customer loyalty like you discussed and customer intimacy. And, I mean, there’s real value there. It’s almost like we get to hang out with you and James Gordey once a week. And we feel like we’re a part of your life and we interact with the first Q&A and everything like that. I mean, that’s really valuable. It’s like you said, you were receiving news about not just ads or banners but real companies that solved real problems and provide services to people who are directly your audience. So, I mean, there’s no better advertising than that, I would say.
Mark: I mean, I really think of everybody as a family. You and I met through the podcast. I meet people probably on a monthly basis that I feel like I’ve met before but we’ve never met in real time. It’s all been virtual. But because of that level of communication is one step below just email, business — I mean, one step above — you develop intimacy with your audience and you get o know them.
[0:30:01]
I’m 50 years old. I actually think this is pretty cool. When I was younger, you would have to do all this in person which would take a lot of time. I now have pretty deep personal relationships with audience members of ours that are in Africa, that I’ve never met. And I just think it’s awesome.
James Gordey: Yeah. I mean, you all are building the online community for the oil and gas industry. Maybe this is, I don’t know, sort of like a family tree. And, I mean, maybe I’m not directly owned by you all but this is a part, James Gordey Hahn and yourself have helped me make the show. And we hope that it just kind of further the oil and gas industry and maybe help people out and provide some value to them, every week at least here on the shows.
Mark: Yes. So, you’re part of the tree, right? You came in, you have a desire, you want to help, it’s genuine, we help you because it’s genuine from our part and we help others because it’s genuine. And you eventually help others and you start thinking about that over the next ten years and it’s just a great thing.
James Gordey: Yeah. I mean, like I said, when I found the show, I just, like most people do, I was just so eager for that content and I just consumed it and I’ve binge watched it and I reached out to you all. And I mean, it’s accelerated my personal network beyond what I could ever feel like. So again, speaking on network acceleration and things like that, could you kind of talk about how you suggested I get more involved when I asked you what I should do, when I first reached out and said that I like the show in the form of the API Young Professionals?
Mark: Yes. So, I’ll make sure I understand what you’re asking me here. Are you asking me why I thought you should join the young professionals?
James Gordey: No. Well, that’s part of the question. Let’s walk that back though. Let’s talk about the group itself, why you started it, what you hoped to accomplish and why you suggested people like myself join?
Mark: Yeah. So, here’s the cool thing. I get to be totally honest about API because I know none of them listen to podcast. I know they don’t even how to listen to podcast. So, the American Petroleum Institute is one of the largest political groups in the US. We represent the rights of the oil and gas industry to congress. But we also set the standards. So we have a standardization group for almost everything offshore. If you go offshore and you wash your hands, that soap has to meet some API standard.
Now, those efforts take money. So there’s all these local chapters all over the world. The largest local chapter is the API Houston chapter which I am on the board of. I’m the Director of Public Relations for the API Houston chapter. So, they call me the kid on the board. Remember, I’m 50 years old and they call me the kid. Does that kind of give you a visual of what it looks like? And so these are some very senior people in oil and gas industry. I mean, they’ve done, they’ve forgotten more than I know about it.
But they’re from a different generation. And I’ve been a member of API Houston for probably 15 years and it was a couple of years ago, two to three years ago, it hit me. We had a luncheon and I’m looking around. It’s like everybody in here is the same people that I had been going to these lunches for the past 15 years. i see no new people. And then I started looking around and put people together in buckets in my head as far as age. It’s like I don’t think there’s anybody in here below 35.
And so you think about that long term for an organization, the end result is not pretty. If you have no new blood coming in and everybody is getting older, at some point it will disappear. So, I bring it to the attention to my API board and say I think we need to start a young professionals group and they didn’t agree with me. And it took me 18 months to get approval because it was something new. And if you knew the oil and gas industry, nobody likes anything new in this industry.
It took me 18 months of political rally and calling in my favor cards [0:33:44] [Indiscernible] to get enough votes on the board, because this had to be voted it, to try it. But it needed to have happen. It needed to happen, number one, just to save API Houston even though API Houston didn’t know they need to be saved. Number two, the world has changed. The way, James Gordey, that you and your peers think and do things is radically different than the way I and my peers do things. Is one better than the other? Quite frankly, I used to say no they were just different. Now, I will say, no, your way is better.
In one of my conference rooms, I just installed a big plasma instead of LCD and one of my interns was with me and so I’m trying to figure out how to turn the darn thing on. So, I grabbed the instruction, she grabs her phone and Googles it. She figures out how to turn it on quicker than I did. And that was like a revelation. Whoa, it’s better. I don’t think that way. I know I can and when I need to I do. I don’t think first thing to grab something and Google it. It’s not just my generation.
So, if you think about from that point, I have an obligation when I see that there’s a problem here, if I think the younger generation’s way of doing things is better. I have an obligation to try to bring it to oil and gas industry. I don’t want that way of thinking that, talent edge, to go somewhere else. That was another reason I started. Now, we could spend a whole show on all the hoops and failures and everything else that’s happened trying to stand up to this group. But I now have a very solid group of leaders there, which you are the leader, James Gordey.
[0:35:11]
The reason I thought you should join is I saw your energy, I saw your passion. I needed that in this group. But I also saw that you had a thirst for knowledge and you want to learn about this. So, I thought that was a fair trade. And so I invited you to join and you did and I’m so glad that you joined.
James Gordey: Yeah. I mean, you just speak on that. Now, the API and professionals, what we’re trying to build, if you’re not familiar with it, in addition to what Mark says, is we kind of figured out that there’s a real hunger to accelerate and just grow your career and normally people, that effort takes the form of joining networking organizations. So, what we’re trying to do is build an organization where there’s different niches and everything like that but what we want to do is build one that’s catered to actually accelerate your career and build the professional, young professional organization.
So, we want to hear from people that listen to this show and maybe our members out there or just anyone else that has some feedback, what do you want and are your curious about knowledge? How do you want to accelerate your career? How do you want to network? Do you need help knowing how to network? You need resume help? Do you want to know how to get in? Anything like that, we want to hear from people.
Because like we were talking about earlier with Mark and his customers, his clients, the customers are the under 35 demographic in oil and gas for both this show and young professional groups. So, if you’re part of another group, reach out to us as well. We want to build a family here so we can further the oil and gas industry and get some creative innovative ideas to cause disruptive change for the better in the industry.
Mark: Yeah, great stuff. And I’m telling people if you’re a young professional in oil and gas or you’re thinking about getting to oil and gas, reach out to James Gordey, reach out to the Houston API Young Professionals Group. They have been so helpful to so many people. They’ll be happy to share what they know. And if they don’t know they’ll tell you and point you in the right direction.
James Gordey: Okay. So touching on that, Mark, could you give some advice to people on — you always, we hear you on the career show talking about just career advice as a general topic, but could you give some specific advice to people who are maybe graduating from college or are part of the under 35 demographic in oil and gas?
Mark: That entered the industry or will enter the industry?
James Gordey: I mean, just could be anyone outside or in, I mean, just you always give career advice to people in general but could you talk to the younger people out there?
Mark: Yes. So, if we’re doing some broader base such as oil and gas focus, I can tell you a couple of things. So, first thing is experience is more — this can sound horrible. Experience counts for a lot, a lot more than education used to. Six, seven years ago, if I was looking at two recent grads and if that was for an entry level position and one had an MBA, I would pick the MBA. It’s not like that anymore. People are looking for the degree plus experience. So now, if you have a bachelor’s degree and you did an internship doing whatever this work is or you have an MBA who doesn’t have internship, the guy with the internship will get picked up.
So, if you’re looking at your career path down the road, try to get some experience. Try to pick up an internship. I would suggest that you only do paid internships because in my experience companies that do interns where they don’t pay don’t really put energy back into developing that intern. Just remember, if you try to get internship and you start a year ahead of time, don’t wait until April to try to get a salary internship.
Another thing is be proactive about that. Even companies who are not actively looking for interns — I know several big oil service companies that don’t actively look for interns but probably hire about 50 a year because interns reach out. They say, “Hey, do you have any intern opportunities?” They go, “No, but tell me what you’re looking for.” And they’ll find a place for them. This industry likes to help young people in the right way.
So that’s important, trying to get some working experience. The other thing is show some patience. I know that you probably should be VP after two years but people in my generation think that that won’t happen. So somewhere in the middle ground is where the reality is. You need to have a little bit of patience and know that it’s going to take a little bit of time. Other thing is you need to have a plan for your own career path. So, if you’re going to work for a medium to large company, they’ll develop a career plan for you and you’ll have yearly performance reviews that are tied back to that career plan.
But that’s the company that you’re working for, working with you to figure out how to best use your talent. That may not necessarily be the best career path for you. For instance, I mentor a lot of young people and in the last couple of years, their career path is: I go work for a larger oil and gas company. I learned XYZ. I then start on side my own little company at [0:39:48] [Indiscernible] at large company XYZ. I make the transition. I’m running my own company. That’s the right career path for them, which doesn’t match up. Trust me, if you’re working for a large oil company and their career path for you, they don’t have it at year five, which you could go work for your own company.
[0:40:01]
So, it’s just the state of the world that we’re in. The other thing is always be open to learning. The moment you stopped learning is the moment you stop progressing. We actually put time in our calendar to learn something new every month. At a high level, it’s kind of some advice I would give to people. The other thing is look in places — if you’re struggling with finding a job, look in places that need your skill sets but that wouldn’t normally look.
So, if you have a degree in electrical engineering and you’re struggling to get a job in the oil and gas industry, if you’re looking upstream to service, you’re not getting one right now at 2016. So, look at downstream. They’re hiring like crazy. But they also need electrical engineers in medical. I mean, you may have never thought about that. Because you don’t think of electrical engineer in medical. Think outside, think where your skill sets both fit not necessarily what markets you traditionally been working.
James Gordey: Well, can I ask you one question? If there’s people that have already secured jobs and, again, there’s a lot of more senior people that work at these companies, if I’m showing up on day one, what do you want to see for me? What do you want from your new hires? Because you never get a second chance to make a first impression, how can a young person that’s starting at a big company or just any company impress and give what the older generation wants to see from them?
Mark: Yeah, that’s a great one. So, first thing, you need to show a little bit of respect whether it’s deserved or not. Just fake it. Second thing, be open to picking up additional work. So, if they want you to do XYZ, ask them, “Is there something else to do? Is there a special project?” my generation loves to see go-getters. We love to see people go the extra mile professionally. So, if you do a little bit of that, that will make you rise head and tails above your peers.
I mean, I work with a lot of millennial and I hire them as interns and I have mentored a lot of them. And the ones that stand out to me are the ones that are hungry, that want more, they’re willing to put the work in. I see a lot of them that have the talent. And I see a lot of them that want to put just enough work in. And I’ve gotten to understand that the reason they’re like that is their world is not work. I respect that. I get that, right? They want to do a good job but no more than that so that they can spend time in their own personal interest. I totally get that.
In fact, I take Thursdays off and teach high school because it’s my passion project. So, I’m kind of in the same boat. But when you’re first starting, especially with people, Gen Xers like me, don’t show that. Show them that you want to go the extra mile. It’s only a short term thing. But once you set that perception, a new place, once they start to think of you a certain way, unless you do something really stupid and screwed up, they won’t ever change the way they think about you. So, you do that for a little while and then you back off to doing just what you need to do, a good job, but they still think of you as a go-getter.
James Gordey: Really great stuff, Mark. That makes a whole lot of sense. I mean, oil and gas is resistant to change and a bit old fashioned. So, if you need to — Just kind of think about what your parents want you to do when you’re going to work, that can go a long way, for sure.
Mark: Yeah. I mean, the world’s changed because of technologies. And the world, it’s actually my opinion, is much better than what it used to be. I have virtual assistants from Malaysia do work for me. A few years ago, I couldn’t have done that. I would have jumped on the plane. I think that’s awesome at the same time my money is going to support a family in another country that can use that money. My generation is not as technology savvy as millennials and then you talk about the oil and gas industry, which has this big risk aversion.
So, another thing you can bring in quite simply is your love for technology. I’m not saying go teach them how play on Facebook and Candy Crush. But if you’re a new hire some place and somebody is trying to set something up, instead of them calling IT, go help them with it. It’s probably second nature to you. But to the older guys, it’s a bit of a struggle. And when they see that you make a personal effort to help them, that’s huge.
James Gordey: Yeah. Again, that’s an example of just going out of your way to just help people. I mean, the oil and gas industry, you always say, it’s about people first. I mean, at a human level, just level with people and just figure out anything that they’re dealing that maybe you can help with that’s not even so tough for you.
Mark: Yeah. This is an industry of people doing business people. And one of the things, and a lot of millennials I think have a bit of a struggle with especially when they step into corporate America, not the small business, entrepreneurship, but when they step into corporate America, is they feel intimated and they lose their social skills. It’s not that they don’t have social skills. They have them. But when you walk into that floor at ExxonMobil and there’s 8,000 people there that you don’t know you get intimated and all of a sudden you start shutting down.
So, here’s my advice to that. Fake it. Fake like you know what you’re doing, that you’re not scared, that you’ve been there forever, that you know everybody. If you fake it long enough — and I didn’t make this up. This is psychological principle. Your brain will start believing it and then you start being that. So, I’ve seen this unfortunately quite a few times where very bright promising young person comes into large company. They had a huge future in front of them.
[0:45:04]

But because they get intimated because they’d never been in an environment, they shut down socially and then people’s perception of them is that they don’t work with others. And that’s not what it is at all but that’s the perception because they’ve been shut down socially because they’re scared.
James Gordey: Yeah. Sort of like psychological muscle memory, fake it until you make it, and then eventually you will. All right, Mark. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We’re coming up at 45 minutes here. I just want to thank you for coming on and giving me your time and everyone else out there, also giving us your time because we know that your time is valuable. And I appreciate you giving me just some, a little bit of your day to just sit down here and learn some things and pick the brain of the oil and gas sales expert, Mark LaCour.
Mark: Yeah. You’re very welcome, James Gordey. I’m glad I could be here.
James Gordey: All right, until next time, guys. I appreciate it, Mark.
Mark: For you, brother.
James Gordey: All right. So, that was Mark LaCour, speaking directly to you, the oil and gas young professional or anyone who might be interested in the oil and gas young professional. So, that was the show. It’s coming to your iTunes feed, your podcast feed every Wednesday morning at 7:00 a.m. Central Standard. That’s when the show comes out every week so you can know to expect it there. If you aren’t ready, if you’re just listening to this somewhere other than your iPhone or in the iTunes feed on your podcast or anywhere like that, subscribe to the show on iTunes.
You can do that, just search or type in oil or oil and gas and the oil and gas young professional pod feed will be up there in the top five. Hopefully, if we get some more reviews that will be even closer to Mark’s show, as number one or up there neck to neck with that show. So again, reviews are the major, major key to helping the show out. It’s the number one thing you can do to help other people find it. So, we got one more review. That puts us at four. This one is from Brian Mahn. Brian is a friend of the show and he has reached out to me on Twitter. And he’s just all around great guy to know.
So, this one’s called rising stars, interviewing rising stars. I can’t believe this was the inaugural #OGYP pod. Pretty much flawless. He’s a natural. James Gordey Gordey is a rising star and I’m excited to see his influence uniting the next generation of the young oil and gas professionals. Listen to this podcast. Listen for him around the industry… Oil and Gas This Week Podcast. Search gas, and follow him on Twitter. Keep up the great work, content and interviews, James Gordey.
All right, Brian, thank you so much for that. All right, so that puts us at four interviews right there. And I’m going to ask, if you would, go to Jamesgordey.com/review and leave me one. That’s a personal favor I’m asking of you. And if you do that, if we just get one more, that will bump us up to five, which means when you search the show it will show the average iTunes rankings and it will make this pod a lot more legit. So, if you could, just leave us a review. And also, there are some people listening out there. I know, I see the numbers. Reach out to me. Hit me up. Some people have done so but I really like to hear from everyone to get your feedback just to know you.
So, the easiest way to do that informally would be on Twitter. And that’s @James_gGrdey and all my other contact information, LinkedIn, Facebook, everything like that, email, you can find on the show notes for the show. And that’s going to be Jamesgordey.com/ogyp03. It’s ogyp03. I appreciate the time and I’ll speak to you all next week.
[0:48:51] End of Audio

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