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Welcome to What the Funk? with Jeremy Funk. A series that highlights the unique personalities within the Oil and Gas Industry and the stories they have to share.
0:00 we have Tyler Thomas on what the funk I'm going with a podcaster voice to start things off today. You didn't expect that. But that's what we do on what the funk we keep you guessing. We don't
0:13 really keep you guessing we just sort of interview people and shoot the shit for 45 minutes and that's what we're going to do. But you are Tyler the second Thomas in to come on this podcast. No
0:24 relation though to Chevy Thomas and of Oklahoma City fame Chevy if you're listening now you're famous apparently but no relation to Chevy but you are indeed a Thomas in checking in from Austin Texas a
0:39 fun background at LSU guy go Tigers have had a few of those on this podcast before some of which we have common connections that we found out when we spoke a few weeks ago you launched a business
0:52 you're going to talk about your business you're taking the entrepreneurial route I'm not going to steal all your thunder but you know I'm going to hit you with the question that I have to hit you with.
1:01 Chez, who are you, man? Who's Tyler Thomason? Yeah, thanks, Jeremy, appreciate the intro, man. Yeah, so I'm Tyler, I am from Spring, Texas, in northwest Houston, just south of New
1:14 Orleans, that's where I grew up. I grew up a family of four, I got an older sister. I studied in high school, I played golf and lacrosse I grew up into LSU, I've been
1:31 a guitarist and an artist to kind of grown up for years, I've been playing guitar for almost 30 years now. But yeah, went to LSU, like you said, go Tigers, petroleum engineering degree, and
1:46 then jumped on into the industry.
1:50 So, growing up in Spring, Texas, home of Josh Beckett, Boston Red Sox, World Series Champion, It's funny because like, you know, my life being a New England kid. The only times that I'd ever
2:02 heard of places like Spring Texas is when a baseball player, of which there are probably a lot from Spring Texas that have made the major leagues. And then all of a sudden you get into oil and gas
2:12 and you go to Houston a lot and you realize, oh, I'm actually gonna go to or through Spring a ton if I'm ever going to the Woodland. So what was it like growing up out there? Like it feels like
2:22 suburbia for sure, but also really nice, nice homes, a little bit more nature certainly than what you get as you get closer to downtown Houston on 45. Like, what would you say your life was like
2:36 growing up in Spring, Texas? Yeah, good question. So, you know, we were right next to Tomball growing up and Tomball was like, you'd call that the boonies. I mean, it was farmland. You'd go
2:50 have pasture parties in high school.
2:55 But like, yeah, Spring was kind of out there and then the Woodlands, you know,
2:59 George Mitchell kind of started that, kind of posted that into kind of in the middle of nowhere. I mean, just south of Conroy, we just started that, which was really cool. But yeah, spring was
3:10 kind of out of the middle of nowhere, Old Town Spring, around like I-45 there. That's the original spring and that was kind of the place we'd go. There were bands that would play at some coffee
3:22 shops
3:24 and there were some really good restaurants there. But man, yeah, it was kind of suburbia back in the day. You're on up and now it's the city's kind of engulfed it like an amoepa.
3:34 Yeah, yeah. I'd see. I like to hear those, that sort of evolution story because I've only known it as suburbia, like pure suburbia, right? And you know, it makes sense just geographically 40
3:48 miles or whatever from downtown Houston that there was a point where it was just way out there. Like, why would you live out there? But then with the woodlands, you're kind of like, It's where a
3:58 lot of people live. I would assume a lot of oil and gas executives live, some of my business partners live there. Like when I go to spring, I have places to stay, pools to dip my toe in. There's
4:06 lots of restaurants, it's a good spot. So spring is home, but you decided to go to Louisiana, LSU for college. What drove you to LSU? Why did you pick LSU over any of the Texas schools? So I
4:23 did apply to some Texas schools, but I did have some really big influence. Some friends of mine at the time were Cajun. They ended up going to LSU. That's one reason why I wanted to kind of jump
4:36 over there.
4:40 Staining Texas would have been awesome too, but at the same time at that point in my life, I kind of wanted to get away a little bit. I didn't want to, you know, AM was real close, like an hour
4:49 and a half, hour and 45 from the house. You could come home and do laundry, which would have been nice, but it's too close.
4:57 You know, Baton Rouge, about five hour drive from spring. And I wanted a culture change too. And, you know, going to Louisiana it's like, it's like going to a different country, so. Totally.
5:09 Yeah, with cuisine and just people, like meeting people and hearing where everyone was from in Louisiana, you know, learning the ins and outs of the little sex, you know, the sex of Louisiana
5:21 and areas.
5:24 I got paired freshman year in a dorm with a buddy of mine still to this day. He was from Slidell, like on the North Shore, like onto train, and he would always refer to like, Yeah, back in North
5:36 Shore. And I was like, What do you mean North Shore? You know, I had to learn everything, 'cause I knew nothing about Louisiana. And I had buddies that would, you know, go hunt squirrels and
5:47 frog and go gator boppin' with baseball bats and canoes at night with spotlight So like, we learned it all, so. It's, it's just so funny to me, like it that it's so like exactly what you would
6:03 think happens and then to actually see it and do it is, is kind of funny. You know, I was on a mini vacation last week, which is part of why I push this podcast. Thank you for allowing me to do
6:15 that. But I was up with family in, in Grand Lake, Colorado, which is beautiful. It was actually, you know, I've lived out here in Colorado for 22 years is my first time going up to Grand Lake,
6:27 which is very close to Grand B, which is the home of the Killdozer. If you remember the Killdozer story from Thomas in odd years ago. Killdozer? No, refresh me. I want to hear this. Oh, it
6:41 made national news. It was wild. And like, you can't really go out there without being like, wait, didn't something happen out here? And then like, you know, go down the rabbit hole of
6:49 Wikipedia or various different YouTube shorts But there was a
6:53 guy who, um, he was like a. a muffler sales, you know, like he owned like a muffler shop and it was a welder and he got really annoyed with the city and sort of like the in crowd in in Grandby
7:08 and felt like they were holding him back and holding him down. And he got this crazy idea to get a bulldozer and basically like turn it into like an armored tank pretty much. And in
7:29 2004, he decided to like basically take this bulldozer, this tank like all over Grandby and just start like wrecking shit, you know, like driving through various buildings and you know, the
7:42 places of the people that he didn't like in City Hall and stuff like that. And they were like trying to shoot through it, but they couldn't, you know, because it was like an armored tank pretty
7:51 much. So like pretty incredible
7:56 like engineering by this guy to get it to that point. But anyway, as long as you're short, that happened in Grammy. So you go there and you're like, oh yeah, you kind of go down all the history.
8:04 Yeah, this is why this place is famous. Right. That's like, you know, I mean, it's terrible, but like it sounds like he was like saving up people's names for over the years, you know? And it
8:17 reminds me of Billy Madison, that guy. He's like, I'm glad I called that guy.
8:23 Steve Buscemi's character with the Red Lipstick on. Yeah. That's my generation of Adam Sandler from New Hampshire, so he's like a legend for people like me. But yeah, no, it's really funny that
8:37 I knew, for some reason I was like, hey, he's writing down names, I'm like, he's gonna say Billy Madison. But yeah, so anyway, so it's beautiful out there. Grand Lake, especially, it's
8:46 awesome. I mean, the views that I had, I'll set shoot you a text and send you some of the pictures, but super idyllic and awesome But I was talking to, you know, we had a house with like, 14 of
8:57 us my wife's out of the family and you know you think about in-laws and people like to bitch about that I actually really get along with my wife's family I think they're they're awesome in some ways
9:06 it's like easier for me than my own family because there's less of that like historical emotion you know what I mean like yeah it's all like just kind of like love you know and and they have a lot of
9:20 kids and grandkids and all that so I was talking to my mother-in-law and we were talking about like the reasons why you go to college and it's really kind of funny like why you choose a school at the
9:34 age of 18 and I remember for me
9:39 I toured a couple of different schools everywhere I applied to was in New England it'd be like you know a Texas kid only applying to schools in Texas maybe Louisiana maybe Oklahoma and I went to the
9:52 University of New Hampshire for a tour and actually really liked it. but the last stop on the hour and a half, two hour tour was at the gym. And I saw three kids working out at the gym that I went
10:03 to high school with. And like, I didn't have any problems with them, but it was just like, ah, just too close to home. You know what I mean? Like, how do I like reinvent myself in college if I
10:12 know everybody here? So that was it. Had those guys not been in the gym that day at that time, I might have gone to the University of New Hampshire. You know, but it's as simple as that, you
10:24 know? It goes back to what you said, which is, you know, not necessarily family, but just people, when you were growing up and you were, you know, growing out of your shell, you almost wanna,
10:35 if you're around those people, you almost wanna show them, like, hey, this is where I'm at now. Like, look, you know what I mean? Like, look how far I've come, you know? And there's like
10:42 some sort of pressure there sometimes. Yeah, yeah, I was sort of wondering, I'm like, man, if I didn't see those three guys working out in that gym at that time, like I might have, Adlai, and
10:52 that would have changed the entire trajectory of my life. right? The last guy I had on this podcast was fraternity brother at Brandeis and everyone had met him, right? So it's pretty cool to think
11:02 about that. And just funny when you, when you look back at what influences the decision for you at 18 years old. But nonetheless you, you left spring, you go to LSU, you decided oil and gas.
11:12 Why did you decide to be a petroleum engineer?
11:16 Yeah. So I went in, I went in as mechanical freshman year, you know, just picking something that could branch off and change to something else, which it ended up doing. But patrolling, I did,
11:28 you know, some of my buddies growing up, I did have a lot of family friends, like kind of influenced, say, Hey, you should really get into oil and gas.
11:36 You know, for multiple reasons, but, you know, the networking, the people, you know, people typically do really well in oil and gas too, very successful, things like that. So they were
11:45 saying, Hey, you need to go this route I was like, Okay, cool, sounds good. So, like, December freshman year, I switched from mechanical. and it did put me a year behind because you know how
11:57 you get into that block scheduling in college. You got to start, you know, first semester freshman year doing this class, so it kind of pushed me towards the end of college and kind of cram. But
12:08 each summer was really cool. I got it. I got a job in a bunch of different companies, you know, different disciplines every summer and then every Christmas break too, which you'd think I would
12:20 have gone home for three weeks and just hung out, but I worked in a file room at a deep water oil and gas company in Houston, you know, three weeks straight with their deep water production group.
12:31 Just learning, you know, Christmas, it wasn't enough to do a big project like summer, but I was just in a file room doing tiny projects, filing things, finding things, helping guys with like
12:42 logs and learning things. So, you know, that was really cool. So that kind of morphed me into a petroleum engineer through college and through the industry too Like I got to work with. Some
12:54 bigger companies like Devin, EOG, like Haliburton, and stuff like that through the summers and stuff, which was really awesome. It got a lot of field work, so. Yeah, so is it easy to get those
13:08 types of internships? 'Cause like for me, that was completely foreign. I didn't know a single person, you know, being new England that got some sort of internship.
13:18 First of all, working like in a field
13:23 Like, and then of course in the energy space or oil and gas, like people would get internships at like, you know, like a law clerk or, you know, at Bear Stearns or something like in finance in
13:34 New York City. And they would come back and be like, yeah, that was cool. Like I took the subway to work and all this stuff. But I didn't know anybody that did like what you did. Was it just
13:44 sort of commonplace for petroleum engineers, like where you went to school, where it's like, hey, there are opportunities available for you to actually like get. into it and figure it out on the
13:54 fly. Or did you kind of have to pursue it yourself and it was reserved for like the top tier of petroleum engineers? So LSU, along with many colleges that have petroleum engineering, a lot of the,
14:07 you know, the career fairs for colleges that come around. So they're really supported by industry companies coming in and advertising and seeing, you know, what kind of talent is at each school.
14:17 But freshman year, the summer after freshman year, I'd say that's real tough It's who you know, really, at that point. It's really tough to get an internship. But if you do get one, typically,
14:30 it's in the field somewhere, and a lot of times, it's with a service company, which is awesome experience. My freshman year, summer, I did get one with a family friend. And it was
14:45 called Mariner Energy. They were bought by Apache at some point, but they're deep water division. and so that was the first internship I had and then subsequently every Christmas I worked with that
14:55 same team but that was the first work I had and then from there that kind of springboarded me for the next summer to Albert field internship so you know your grades your GPA I didn't have like a
15:08 really high GPA in college I was more on social side of things could you know present do a lot of things I just didn't have like the high
15:18 GPA so it took me another you know Halbern a lot of guys get a Halbern or Schlumberger or bigger cues maybe after freshman year but I had to get like the who you know play that card you know so but
15:30 from there it's like dominoes you know you're junior year and senior senior your job but like sophomore junior year sellers typically those fall in place relatively easily with an operator in the
15:41 office so doing like reservoir drilling or completions or something like that so
15:48 did um Did you like it? Like did you get sent to some places that maybe you never thought you would go to for whether it'd be like onshore or offshore? Was it fun or was it kind of grunty? So the,
16:00 I've never been offshore. So I'd love to at some point get some experience but the weirdest one was Halliburton and it wasn't anywhere far. I mean, I didn't go, I mean, I wasn't even out of Texas.
16:14 But I went down some deep dark roads in Texas. I got paired with, I was out of Caldwell, which they closed that yard, but that's West of College Station, so I lived in College Station. And we
16:27 were catching jobs doing a lot of Austin Chalk cement. So I was on a cement crew, which is 24 hours a day. And then a frat crew for some of the time as well, which back then, it was mostly
16:38 daylight ops. So the frat crew was more desired. You'd go, you know, six am. to seven pm. or eight pm, which you'd get a good night's sleep.
16:48 cement was crazy because like one of the craziest times was
16:53 you know I lived in college station it was about 45 minutes from Caldwell so I drove home after a whole day at the yard helping doing maintenance on bulk trucks and working at the bulk plant for
17:04 cement you know the big bulk towers filling orders and stuff and I go home I had contacts at the time take out my contacts like shower lay down in bed and dispatch calls me and I'm an intern I want to
17:17 impress I want to make sure I don't decline anything they go hey we got a job going out two hours from now so it's like 9 pm. so 11 pm. going out at 11 I was like shit okay yeah cook with me down
17:31 I'll be there you know in an hour so I get up after you know I didn't sleep and I get up get there popping the guys you know F250 for a cement job and then we got the big pump two pump trucks and the
17:43 bulk truck bulk trucks on location but the two pump trucks too so we're driving
17:49 And we had
17:52 this group from Mission, Texas. So like Wild West, call it Wild West, Wild South Texas group that came to catch a job. And I'm prepared with these guys and they were crazy, really great. Said
18:04 the craziest things, craziest jokes, wouldn't stop talking,
18:10 wouldn't sleep. Like we rigged up that overnight. We're waiting for the rig to circulate for like six, seven hours And then they go party and I'm like, dude, I'm not doing that. When I take a
18:20 nap.
18:22 It was just like that, catching jobs with those guys was fun, but it was pretty wild back there. Like, do you see any women while this is happening? Or is this just like all dudes, all dudes
18:34 summer? No, that like, when was this, 2007, 2006, I mean, it was just all dudes. And I think the only girl I saw, I mean, I had a girlfriend at the time, I think the only girl I saw. that
18:48 entire summer was like an engineer from Ann Darko in the woodlands at the time that came out to the field during the frat job for the day. I mean, there's no clock, right? You just run and run
19:02 until you die kind of thing.
19:05 Yeah, I mean, your girlfriend's like, Oh, I gotta help you cheat on me up in those wild fields. And you're like, Don't worry, it's all dudes. It is literally all men. And they're just
19:16 drinking 17 red bowls a day These guys are psychopaths. Some of the guys, too, were from KBR, Kellon Brown of Root, and they just got back from Iraq. And those
19:28 guys were wild. You know, they did a lot of the logistics and road building and construction over there. So they come and they're in charge of water trains for these crack jobs. And I'm working
19:39 with these guys, learning all their hand signals. And, you know, it was wild. Those guys are crazy. I mean, it's really fun to hear those such a contrast to what you would do in school, right?
19:52 You're in school and there's probably like, they're giving you a copy of PhD when or something like that. You're figuring out how to crank out some type wells and run decline curves or look at
20:03 historical like IP rates or well logs and learn all these different terms and terminologies and have speakers come in. And then you're like in it, like you're working basically a construction job,
20:17 like for the course of the summer. So you get to apply it and see all different sides of it. So when you graduated and it was time to go out, like did you have a job lined up? And like what did
20:28 you do? What was your first job with this kind of confluence of experience that you had? Yeah, so
20:35 EOG, I was in intern for them a couple summers before I graduated. I did EOG then Dev in, and then I ended up getting full time with EOG I wanted to try another company. I love GOG so much. You
20:47 know, the recruiter at the time was like, Hey, you know, if you want to try another company between, for your last summer in college, do that just to make sure you love UOG. And I did, and
20:58 they let me come back, thank goodness. But yeah, so I got a job in East Texas in the Hingsville for EOG. And you know, cut my teeth out there in the industry, you know, high pressure, a gas.
21:11 You know, I didn't know any better You know, I just kind of like jumped into it, you know, 13, 14, 000 VSI crack pressures. Like, okay, this is how it is,
21:23 but you know, at LSU being in South Louisiana, that's a huge offshore deep water culture. So you don't learn multistage fracturing. And I don't think many colleges taught it back then, but now
21:36 they do, but you know, jumping into it was like, oh my gosh, this is totally different than, you know, blowout prevention and a deep water, subsea tie back.
21:49 So yeah, so that, you know, blessed to have a job with EOG and kind of went around for eight years with them and kind of did the Texas tour with them around different divisions.
22:01 What a great experience. I mean, that company is, I remember reading an article, God, it must have been seven or eight years ago at this point in, well, is it Forbs or Newsweek or Bloomberg or
22:13 something where it was talking about how EOG was the apple of oil and gas, and I think it had more to do with how the company's structure was and how they had a lot of cash, but at the same time, I
22:26 was working at a company where I was analyzing a lot of data in terms of production. Their IP rates would just blow everybody else's away. I don't know how they do it, but I would just ask the
22:39 fellow engineers and the geophysicists I was working with, I'm like, Like, so why doesn't everybody just do it like how EOG does it? That's the question everybody's kind of asking in the boardroom,
22:51 like, how were these guys getting 1800 as an IP rate? And we got 1200 and we're second in the basin. Like how did they do that? You know? Um, so God, I would think like, you like started at
23:04 the top. What made EOG special? Cause you mentioned that you loved it and got good experience, but like what, what did from the inside made that a special place? Yeah. So when I joined Mark Papo
23:18 as the CEO and then followed by Bill Thomas, you know, kind of threw out my tenure there at EOG, but the culture, like those guys, those guys were really good guys, really smart. And then they
23:33 hired good people and then let those good people do their job, which in any industry, that's what you want to do. You want to find good people and just go like you guys know what to do, go And
23:44 they would nurture the new engineers. I was kind of, I'd say I was probably the second class of engineers to get hired out of college. Early on in 2000s, they just had a bunch of
23:58 people, maybe I'd say 40 and above, and then they said, Hey, we got to get back into the college pool. So there's just this gap. There was a huge gap, not to start to cut you off, but I
24:11 noticed that too, right, because I broke into the industry in 2007, beginning of 2008 I was, I don't know, 28 years old, and I felt I was very young for the industry. I think that was around
24:25 the time that people like yourself were starting to get hired in younger engineers, but there was nobody in their 30s. There was a pretty massive age gap from people who were in their 40s,
24:36 certainly people who were much older, and then a few people in their 20s.
24:42 And then I guess your way of ushered in and brought in this new generation, but that gap that you just outlined. was real, and it was kind of crazy, culturally, right? 'Cause these are like, do
24:54 you look at these people as like your crazy aunt and uncle, or your parents, or peers, like, you know, how do you make friends and all that, right? It's different. Yeah, yeah,
25:06 that gap was, you know, like you said, real prevalent, and then, like I was saying, the culture that I already argued was really cool. The South Tech, you know, when I moved from East Texas
25:15 South Texas, the Eagleford was really expanding. It was real, you know, that's where all the funding's going in a lot of companies, and EOG had most of the oil window, which was awesome. And so
25:27 we kind of had, there were seven areas,
25:31 seven or eight, eight areas, excuse me, at EOG. And they basically assigned each engineer to, in each discipline to an area So I had this like 150, 000 acre area, which is huge, but of the.
25:47 of the 550, you know, other engineers had some other stuff. But I remember my manager and our ops manager too, they were the coolest guys they had that, you know, they basically said like, Hey,
25:60 man, you're gonna screw up. I go, What? Yeah, man, just try stuff. You're gonna screw up, learn from it, and just move on. Like, don't be scared to screw up. And I go, Dude, this is
26:09 awesome. So, you know, there were little screw-ups here and there about with the team, like trying engineering things. We were on the completions team And that was the, they lifted the veil off
26:22 of us to allow us to basically like, Hey, don't be nervous for your job. Don't be nervous for this. Like, try cool things, figure it out. And then like, Let's roll. Figure this out and be the
26:31 innovators. And that's kind of how UG is still to this day. That's awesome. 'Cause you don't think of that with companies of a certain size. You become so systematized that it's almost like this.
26:44 but what you're telling me is that they at least then, and hopefully still now, we're like, Yeah, but try to try to be better. Like, try to come up with something that's different 'cause we can
26:54 always go back to what we know works. Yeah, oh yeah, you can always go back, yep. But I would think that that culture doesn't necessarily, so then you go somewhere else and you're like, Whoa,
27:05 so you mean I can't do things differently? I can't screw up. Yeah, yeah, you go somewhere and they're like, Hey, just do what works, keep your head down Yeah, yeah, don't do that again. So
27:17 how long were you at EOG and then what came next? And I want to jump into the rest of your career and certainly your entrepreneurship as well, but how long were you at EOG and then, you know, keep
27:27 your story going, I like this. No, cool, yes. So I was at EOG for eight years, 2010
27:32 to 2018. And yeah, I moved around, I was at Tyler, Texas, San Antonio, Texas and then Midland. And when I was in Midland,
27:41 I was a lead Completions Engineer for Texas, so all the Completions in Texas. I was kind of over some of the new engineers and especially interns coming in and we did a lot of really cool projects,
27:53 not just completing wells, but I mean all kinds of patterns and figuring things out. And then I got an opportunity, you know, I was in Midland for a couple of years My wife, we, you know, my
28:05 wife, Michelle of 12 years now, we had our son in San Antonio, we moved to Midland. We had our daughter in Midland, you know, we wanted to move closer to family, so an opportunity came up to
28:19 move to Austin and I was like, I had no idea I would be able to move to Austin in the oil and gas industry. It was kind of a wish, but never, you know, never pursued, right? Yeah, there's so
28:29 few companies there and oil and gas, I mean, yeah, if you were going to go straight into tech, sure.
28:35 But so did you name your daughter who was born in Midland, Jessica because of Jessica and back in. No, it's actually born this funny that my mom was actually born in Midland. And at this the
28:48 hospital in Midland, the one delivery hospital, and I think it's the same hospital just renovated obviously
28:56 since back then. But yeah, my daughter, my daughter's name is Chandler. We didn't, we didn't name her just after. That
29:04 was big time national news. It was like, you know, that Midland hit my radar and what was that? 1989? Maybe 80, 89,
29:12 I guess was baby Jessica down the well. She was like, there's like a couple days, right? I think so. That was crazy. That would do. That was. And I guess, you know, then I was curious about
29:23 it. So I remember telling my older sister, who was like, I don't know, probably like 11 or 12 at the time and like super into that story. I'm like, Hey, this is what first time I went to
29:33 Midland like 15 years ago, I'm like, Hey, I've got a business trip. I'm going to Midland, Texas. She's like, Is there any chance you can go to the house where Jessica, I'm like, I think
29:41 somebody probably just like lives there. Like, I don't think you can just trespass and see it. She's like, oh, it'd be amazing if you could go and like take a picture. I always wanted to see it.
29:50 But some wild, I don't know. Like in middle and people are like, oh yeah, yeah, that thing. I'm like, does that thing? No, dude, that was huge national news. What do you mean? That's what
29:57 put Midland on the map for me. Yeah, so still in Austin, which means now you've been there for what about seven years? So it's home, right? And especially, man, my kids now are 15, 13, and
30:12 seven. It would be really hard to move 'cause of school and friends and our friends and just comforts, right? Like this is where we're at. It was probably a lot easier for you to move in 2018 if
30:26 your kids were younger than it would be now. But there's not that much oil and gas. So logically, yeah, go get on and do something else that you can do in Austin. Tell me about this company. Is
30:37 this a company that you started, that you acquired, that you bought? Like tell me a little bit about this CTA Evolution. Yeah, so CTA Evolution was a company that I actually started back in 2020,
30:49 but I was kind of moonlighting and getting the company going on a patent and development and engineering and testing. And so this past January was when I said, okay, I need to focus full time on
31:02 this and see it through and really, you know, give it my all. And that's what I've been doing So what CTO Lucian is is a company that provides downhole logistics solutions for oil and gas companies.
31:15 There's never been a service like that. And what that is, you can almost imagine it like the Amazon of downhole. So if an operator needs something brought down hole, whether it be a fluid tracer
31:29 rod, fluid tracer technologies, which are helpful in knowing flow assurance, where flow is coming from, my tool and can clean out a well lower on the way down. And then before you pull out of the
31:42 hole, it can deploy different solids, whether that be tracers, like I said, solid chemicals, diverters, things like that. So you don't have to pump them for the surface. So that's kind of
31:53 where it all spawned in 2020. And fast forward to today, we've got a field trial
32:00 and wolf came up well. We've got some really good things lined up on the future,
32:04 been growing the business since then. So,
32:09 been really exciting. And we've got some really good things coming down the shoot now, partnering with some other companies and things like that. So, we're really excited.
32:19 So you've made quite the pivot, right? You've gone to the sales side, the entrepreneurial side, getting away from working at an operator. What are some of the things that have surprised you some
32:32 of the critical differences, I should say, between being on the. operator side versus now being on the vendor side. Yeah, so I guess, you know, it's like being on the service side, but also
32:46 it's being on the vendor side to service companies as well, which, you know, we all know in the industry, you know, when you're at an oil and gas company, when you're decision makers and you're
32:57 spending money, you know, you get invited to a lot of things, you get, you know, taken out to lunches, you know, golf tournaments, things like that. You know, when you pivot to the sales
33:08 side, now you're the one doing that. And then even on the vendor side to service companies, you're now taking service companies out instead of operators. So it's, it's been this thing, like,
33:19 and I kind of knew that going in, you know, it makes sense. But, you know, going through it is something that's, that's interesting. It's fun to wear different hats. You know, this is just
33:30 one of those things I think along my career journey, I was called to do is just Go this route. So But yeah, that's a big, uh, some big differences there, like all the paradigm shifts and things
33:40 like that.
33:43 Are you traveling a lot to West Texas? Like you're just getting in your truck and driving out from Austin or what's, uh, like, what is your, what is your day and week look like? And I know when
33:53 you work for an operator, not every day and every week is the same anyway, but what is it, what is it like for you now running a company, having some pilots out in, in West Texas, but being
34:04 based in Austin, what's your day like? Yeah, so, you know, if it's a travel week, typically like on any sales side, Tuesday to Thursday is the best time to hit people up. So Monday, usually
34:18 Monday morning, I get up, do a workout here in Austin, around the house, or the gym, and then I'll hop on meetings. I got some weekly meetings with some people. And I'll just try to get in
34:29 front of as many people as I can on calls,
34:35 product development, just things like that, trying to run it all, you know. And then on a travel week, same thing, Tuesday to Thursday is kind of like the day. So for instance, this coming
34:44 week, I'm gonna be in Houston. So I'll drive to Houston, stay the night, stay two nights, but West Texas, same thing. You know, San Antonio's an easy day trip, but yeah, no, just hop in the
34:59 truck and go, you know, bring the tools, bring your marketing stuff and be ready for anything and get food smoothies or something on the way in to meet with people, you know. Yeah you've made
35:11 'cause this hear to me to fascinating, it's always know. You hardware and products physical some some services, and tech sell typically I, right? guy a sales I'm, so know, you So already.
35:11 wasn't if it point this at friend your probably is, buckies
35:28 this pivot I love it when the operators come over to this side.
35:34 how do you get your business? Like this isn't 1984 where you just pick up like a phone book and start going through and look for like listings of oil and gas companies. How do you segment your
35:44 market? How do you approach people? Is it phone call heavy? Is it LinkedIn? Is it referrals? Like how are you getting business opportunities right now? So it is kind of all the above as you know,
35:57 but referrals is really, really heavy on referrals And you know, you may talk to one guy that connects you with two people and one of those people may not be helpful, but you can help them or maybe
36:11 the other guy that, you know, it all branches off it. It's this huge, you know, Kevin Bacon, three degrees of Kevin Bacon scenario where you're jumping in and just trying to make a trail, find
36:22 one person, get a meeting with them. Oh man, maybe that was the wrong guy on the team, but at least you got in and you saw this guy when you were in your office. Now you have that connection and
36:30 you can go reach out to them.
36:33 And then linked in also, that one's kind of an easy one, and it's a little saturated, but sometimes you get a phone number, an email, and then
36:43 email over some docs, see if someone's got some time, or see if you can drop by their office for lunch, coffee, or whatever. So I'd say all the above, but your question about how do I do it,
36:56 coming from the operator side, 15 years on the operator side, directly in a sales world
37:02 I've been on the other side of the desk on the operator side, and I
37:09 know what they're thinking a lot of times. And, you know, I always give sales guys my time. You know, if they drove in to Austin or were stopping on the way from Houston to West Texas, I'd be
37:21 like, dude, just come in, let's talk for a minute. I got a minute, but I would never just shut it down. No, you know.
37:30 I see where they're coming from, but being on the sales side now, it's like, you know, I get it. Everyone's real busy. So just keep trying and try to build relationships. Yeah. Well, a couple
37:41 more questions for you. And then I'll let you get back to selling or Friday afternoon with the family, whatever it is that you do at this point in the week. But
37:53 talk to me about who you sell to, right? So if you find an oil and gas company or you find a services company, who at that company is going to care about what you have to offer? Or should care?
38:05 So, so this being a tool that can carry down different diagnostic tools in oil, like the tracer rods, like long, you know, long-lasting dissolved tracer rods that help give you data. I'd say a
38:18 reservoir engineering and production engineering teams are really teams that could benefit from this tool.
38:25 Completions, sometimes, completions, but I'd say production, you know, What this allows production engineers now is, once they get the handoff from completion and after
38:36 Flowback, they can do diagnostics now that they couldn't do before on just a normal clean out. And the tool can clean out it well. So those are the teams I'm really focusing on. And it's been
38:48 really helpful
38:51 talking to a lot of these teams because you hear what they need. A lot of things I didn't even think about, like on the refract side of stuff A lot of South Texas companies are
39:02 doing refracts. You can't really do a whole lot of diagnostic tracer work and understand how well it is performing. You just kind of do it because it's already stimulated. You run a liner and
39:11 cement it and repurf, but like, everything's so connected behind pipe, it's hard to do. So if you run like a distributed tracer of ray in a lateral, it'll tell you where the fluid's coming in at
39:24 after a refract, which is huge data that you can't really Um, you know, on the front end with like liquid tracers on the fraction, but just little things like that. So like some companies came up
39:36 with that, you know, and said, Oh man, I said, Oh man, this is great. Okay. Well, let's start talking refraction. I had no idea. When I first started this thing that we'd be going down the
39:44 reef that I had. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool though. Right. Like, and I think that that's important for just being an entrepreneur anyways is pivoting. Like it, and they'll probably will be
39:55 more pivots, maybe as you get into more natural gas heavy wells Right. Seeing where you could apply there, where, where can people find you like website and LinkedIn like what's the best place if
40:06 you're a production engineer, reservoir engineer, giving this a listen, you want to get better downholed diagnostics. You want to support, you know, somebody in the industry that knows their
40:15 stuff. That's, that's kind of, you know, given it the, the old college try, where can people Yes, I, on LinkedIn, I've got my own personal account, but also a CT evolution account. So you
40:27 can do Tyler Collison or CT evolution, but we also have a CT evolution website. It's wwwctevolutionllccom.
40:38 And it kind of goes through some of the bullet points of the tool and some of the projects that we're working on. And
40:45 yeah, and then just my email or phone number as well, as you can find out on the website, the CTA Volusion LLC website. Like Dion Sanders, you ain't hard to find. Yeah. Anyways, I appreciate
41:00 you coming on today, Tyler. I definitely want to check a little bit more about some of your sales techniques, approaches, how you're getting into the market, since that's near and dear to my
41:10 heart. But for now, Mr. Thomas, and thank you for coming on. What the fuck? Appreciate you, Jeremy. Thanks for your time I think you should have a really good day and thank you so much, man.