• August 19, 2017
  • Mark LaCour
  • 0

When you need Oil and Gas experts.

Oil and gas experts, five ways to pick out the best. If you’re looking for an oil and gas experts, there’s a reason and usually that means there’s a problem. Typically a business problem that you can’t solve yourself or maybe you want a different way to solve it. So you need oil and gas experts to come in and help you.

There’s a lot of people out there that claim to be experts on a lot of different things, especially in our industry. But we’ve learned over the years there’s basically five traits that you need to look for, to help you pick out the oil and gas experts that you need.

Oil and Gas Experts Must Have Experience

Number one, experience. There is nothing that can replace hands on experience. Nothing that can replace years and years of doing the same thing over and over again and doing it well. That hands on, executable, rubber hit the road experience is  so valuable. And if the person you’re talking to doesn’t have that experience, go somewhere else. Quickly!

Now that experience leads us to our next thing, knowledge. A lot of different things make up knowledge. Knowledge is formal education, knowledge is self-taught. Knowledge is things like networking and seminars and traveling and being open-minded. That book of knowledge is all of the tools that your oil and gas expert needs in their tool box. That they then will use in combination with their experience. Either one of them by themselves may give you some street cred, but those two together is the cornerstone of being an oil and gas expert.

Risk Tolerance

Risk for Oil and Gas ExpertsThen, here’s a big one. Our oil and gas industry has very little risk tolerance, and rightly so. Because when we make mistakes horrible things happen, but your oil and gas expert has to have fundamental grasp on his own or her own risk tolerance.  There’s an old saying in business systems that nobody ever gets fired for hiring IBM or SAP. Which is true.

But I’m telling you there’s a whole bunch of companies out there that go out of business because they made the wrong decision. They went down that route of only buying from the big companies. So there’s a balance there, what is the right thing to do, what is the safe thing to do, where is the middle ground? If your oil and gas experts do not have a good grasp on what their own risk tolerance is, they can’t help you make good impactful business decisions.

Creativity. Essential for an Oil and Gas Expert

And here’s one you may have never thought of, creativity. You have to be creative as our industry is facing new issues, new problems, new talent sources, new workforce, new government regulations, new geopolitical risks and new technologies. So the old ways of solving business problems aren’t always applicable anymore. Which means your expert has to have creativity. If they only want to solve problems they way they always have in the past, that won’t be useful anymore. Can he or she take their knowledge, experience, and risk tolerance and combine that with creativity to solve problems? In a way that is more productive and with a larger financially benefit?

Intuition. Hard to Measure but Super Valuable

And then intuition. The intuition thing is hard to measure, that’s your sixth sense.  It’s something that is hard to quantify and it’s not something based upon your formal education. Instead it’s based upon years of doing the same thing, and then your hunches or intuition starts helping you make the right business decisions.

We have this happened to us all the time. I’ll walk into a new company that either asked me to speak or asked me to come in and help them  solve a business issue they’re dealing with. And within ten or fifteen minutes of talking to their executives and leaders, my intuition kicks in and starts pointing me toward the problem. And the thing I think is so cool about this is, a lot of times it’s not something I am consciously aware of. And it’s also not something they’re aware of at all. Because they’re in that company, that world and they don’t see the true root cause of the problem. They see it as something else. So intuition is super, super valuable, but that intuition you only get after years of working in this industry.

There you go, five ways to help pick up the best oil and gas expert; experience, knowledge, risk tolerance, creativity, and intuition.

So, hopefully you found this valuable. If you did, can you please take three seconds to click the social share buttons here and help us share this blog post?

Folks I hope this helped. We will see you next time.

Oh, and you may want to also check out Oil and Gas Expert. 10 Ways to Become One