Oil and Gas Startups Podcast

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1:12 All right. What's up, digital Wildcats, welcome to another week of oil and gas startups podcast. We got Raul in the shop today from TCS, you're going to tell me in a minute what that stands for

1:22 But Raul, where are you in town from, are you in Houston or? I'm from Houston. I'm from Houston. No, originally I'm actually born and brought up in Surat, India, which is a small little

1:33 business town. It's like a monic of India, basically. And then I went, I went school here from there on, you know, where'd you go to school at? University of Houston. Okay, cool. Been to a

1:46 barber business school. Yep. So you're Houston through and through. 18 years.

1:51 between Houston and to buy lately, so you're a US. Yes, yes, it's been a journey there, yeah. I'm still suffering from my last week's, last week's, gently, so. Yeah, a bit. And so tell me

2:04 real quick, first, what does TCS stand for? What do you guys do? So TCS is Transcontinental Energy Services. TCS is an oil and gas service company. We do everything in terms of completion,

2:19 everything in terms of production We've got our own mixing plants. We've got our own workover rigs to build through bill plugs. We've got our own twerking test units, our own flow back, sand

2:40 and wool systems, trucking. We also, in terms of production, we do, of course, the workover rigs, wall testing. So I would say one stop shop, or I would like to say a full blown completion in

2:43 a production company. Got you. And so let's rewind the story a little bit. Tell me, so you go to school, And you use then, how did you get in the oil and gas business? So I traded in my suit

2:55 for the pair of FRs. I was in investment banking right after school, formed a packaging company, surprisingly.

3:05 Then actually went back to India to work as a real estate developer. Came background or she grew the packaging company. And I think it's early 12, 13, we got into the transcontinental, we got

3:20 into the oil and gas business. And it was a stroke of luck. A bunch of deals were brought to me by my friend here.

3:29 But she didn't want to be on the podcast. You gotta give him a shout out. He didn't want to be on the podcast.

3:37 And we did the deal, but surprisingly, we lost millions of dollars doing the deal. We got cheated, we got, we got through over that rough feathers, what I like to call it Yeah, the tuition fees

3:49 for learning.

3:52 Yeah, there's lots of tuition fees when building businesses. We have a big bunch of it, I'm

3:58 right there with you. It was a

4:01 Harvard graduation, I like to call it, but we grew, then we grew organically, we started with a little mixing plan. From there on, we grew into the token test, from there on, we grew into a

4:03 flowback while testing data acquisition businesses, and then we grew into workover rig business, which is about 90 of TCS's revenue today. That's from the workover? Workover, okay, cool. We are

4:28 one of the fastest growing workover company in the Permian Basin today. Very cool. Youngest fleet, all of our rigs are 20, 20, 21, 20, 22. Nice. By far, if I can say we are NOV's largest rig

4:44 buyer this year. Very cool And yeah, so did you guys win? when you started, did you go start off in the Permian or where was the wedge for y'all? We started in Eagleford. Okay. We did not enter

5:01 Permian Basin until 2018.

5:05 Eagleford was our birth. Eagleford was bred in but were almost four and a half to five years. We entered Permian Basin just based on some of the

5:16 Eagleford players And then from then on we expanded into Permian Basin. Right now over 90 revenue actually comes from the Permian Basin. Yeah, I mean, makes sense, just given that activity. And

5:30 that, but yeah, I mean, back in the heyday, you had some overlap between Permian and Eagleford operators, you know, like a pioneer, for example, big operator in both of those. And so you

5:41 start off with, you know, mixing plants and tell, you know, someone's listening they don't know what a mixing plan is. I'm sure a lot of. listeners do, but you know, tell us what a mixing plan

5:52 is so that we can, I kind of want to show the contrast between that and what a full on or cover rig is. So a mixing plan is basically a chemical mixing plant. It's used usually to mix your air for

6:04 in your gel on location to push it down hold during completions, what you're milling plugs, you need a lot of viscosity and different elements and to ensure that you have that use a mobile mixing

6:16 plan on location, you mix your air for, you mix your gel and then you push it through pumps into your into the tanks and then tanks into to basically into the into down hole. Yeah. And so it's a

6:30 size of a, I would say, in general, it's a 80 barrel tank. So it's a size, it's a size, it's a size of a cabin of an 18 miller. Yeah, that's it. That's the best way to describe it. Yeah,

6:43 you know, when you're when you get down with these frack jobs, you have all of these plays and you got to go mill them out and whoops. you know, when you're drilling down there, you got to bring

6:50 all the cuttings back up holes. So you have to pump sweeps and yeah, you got a technical definition for that. I

6:59 just want to say, I know in the world, it's drilling wells, okay,

7:04 drilling wells and podcasts. And that's my life, baby. So, but the reason I wanted to kind of dive into what a mixing plan is, is because it's a pretty big jump to go from mixing plants up to

7:14 full on workover rigs, right? And so, why, why did you all want to go into the business of workover rigs and getting that, you said 90 of your revenue is being generated by that now. So, you'll

7:28 put a heavy focus on that. What was the reason, reasoning for that? There's a bunch of reasons behind going into that, into the work over business. Number one, work over business was dominated

7:39 by very older rigs. Some extremely large players, some extremely small players, zero technology. So, we saw that gap that spread. which says we bring in the technology, we bring in the brand

7:52 new units, we bring in that speed to the operation, which made sense to bring it in because it was lacking in the work for business until up to 2019, I would say. And for us, it made more

8:05 financial sense because we are not a company who is here for two years, three years, four years, and then put it out on the market and sell it and walk with it. We are in for a long term. Any

8:15 business we've done as a company from packaging to real estate to hospitality. Any business we've done, we've been done for a long term. Long term growth is obviously in a position where there's

8:26 less barriers to entry. Workover, call to you being in frack. These are lesser barriers to drilling. These are lesser barriers to entry. And eventually the growth, the size we are looking at

8:37 within the next five to seven years, or we looked at about 10 years from 2019, was in larger businesses, which were larger ticket items, more complicated business, more organized. business. And

8:51 also it made us an ability to provide a full darn key location. When you have a mixing plan, when you have a flow back, when you have a workover rig, all your pumps, your power tools, your lay

9:01 down machines, then you can provide a full one ticket item location. And that is that was our goal. Yeah. You know, I think it's interesting, you know, some of my friends, you know, parents

9:13 back in the day on large both of those service companies work over raise it. You know, you're probably familiar with. And I was always fascinated, you know, even when I started rough necking on

9:23 drilling rigs out of high school, I'd be out there with the scrub brush cleaning the rig and just thinking about the economics of rigs because it's like, man, how fucking cool would it be to own a

9:32 drilling rig? And then I knew, man, I'm forgetting their name now, but this workover rig company started killing it. And I was just like, man, there's got to be like, I love that business of

9:46 owning rigs just because it's cool equipment to own Like, there's something just cool about it, like, who cares if it even makes money? It's just, I got some rings, you know? I call it, I call

9:54 it running nice to you. Yeah. And I want to kind of talk about building a oil fill service company because it's hard. You know, oil fill service, I mean, you got to eat glass and it's just a

10:09 tough business. Now, like I was telling our team the other day, I'm like, yeah, you know, when you're an OFS hand, like, all shit runs downhill. Everything's always your fault You know, it's

10:19 never an operator's fault. And so you got to take the brunt of that. And then, you know, there's always, you know, issues with cash flow and getting paid on time. And then, you know, prices

10:33 for OFS never seem to trend linearly with the price of oil and things of that nature. So it's a very complex business. But one that I've always been fascinated by, like I'm always like, I want to

10:45 start an OFS company, but I literally told Jake the other day. You know, it's like, if you've ever gone through hard times, it's like, hey, it could be worse. We could be running an OFS

10:54 company, and so I got massive respect for the people out there that do it. But let's talk about the actual journey and operations of building an OFS, the challenges, being able to stand out in a

11:08 commoditized type of market, which you kind of alluded to with the technology. But let's talk about all the nitty-gritty stuff we're running into OFS and the challenges I would like to start on a

11:20 funny note saying all my hairs were black before I started. Hey, they're starting to look all gray. Yeah, you still got many black hairs, though, so it's only about 40 gray now. It's a journey.

11:31 We started our journey with, I would say, 10 employees, two mixing plants. I was the CEO, I was the CFO,

11:43 and there was some other help Today we are at 220 employees. with a proper flow management, but it's a, it's a journey which is very highly capital intensive. It is a journey which requires

11:58 millions and millions of dollars every week to sustain. Lot of, lot of, lot of, how do you say it? A lot of, I wouldn't say a lot of babies, but a lot of people who are very needy. And it's a,

12:14 it's a journey which requires a lot of expertise itself. A lot of, we had to gain a lot of expertise over moving over time from mixing plan to all the way to work over rig. Yeah. We had a lot of

12:26 changes in our company. It's, it's almost a journey is like bringing up a baby. You, you, you start with a diaper. You, you, you start with making them walk. You start with feeding them. You,

12:38 you start growing them by making them learn their first bicycle ride to all the way to giving a car for a college. the same way we started with the mixing plant, we grew the mixing plant business

12:52 into seven and eight mixing plants. Thereon, we went into flow back and while testing business, we grew that business.

13:02 And then we went into the work over business, which we grew into what it is today. It's gone from a size of a 10 to 50, 50 to 80, 80 to 100, 100 to 150 to 200 to now almost 300 Yeah. So it's

13:17 been a journey of full of challenges. Challenges are, you're always, of course, short on cash flow as it is. Yeah. Payments from the operator partners are not necessarily late, but they go

13:30 through the approval processes and they're good. Yeah.

13:36 Yeah. That's what, you know, even just forget late payments, but just the cash cycles, is right. Absolutely It's., it's a, it's a investment we have we have gone through some almost

13:48 investment cycle of almost 30, 40 million total. So, and this is all organically funded investment. So we don't have a private equity or - That's impressive, yeah. So - Y'all have any capital

14:00 partners at all? Zero capital partners. Wow. This is all ingrown organically built operation. And so we've gone through challenges of learning. It's a lot of learning. We've learned, we've

14:11 learned how to mill our first blood after being in oil and gas We've learned how to send our first sweep after being in oil and gas. We've learned how to hire new people and actually get insurance on

14:23 board after being in oil and gas. So we've learned at every step of time a new challenge has always presented, which is a holy grail challenge. And we've overcome that, moved to the next one.

14:37 What I like to say is to all the entrepreneurs out there is one thing is persistence You keep on pushing it. with persistence, you'll always learn and you'll always go through those challenges.

14:49 We've gone through challenges of, right today, we have a very, we have top talent in terms of operation and sales and accounting and finance.

14:59 Three years back, it seemed like an impossible thing to hire these people. Yeah. Couldn't even afford a payroll. Yeah. The whole company's payroll was equal to their one-person's payroll. Yeah,

15:08 so couldn't afford it. It is funny when you look back on things like that, like, you know, you're like, man, my, my GNA now is insane and you're like, can't even imagine it being that.

15:19 Absolutely. You look three years back and so, but it's also cool to take a step back and see how far that you've come because, you know, at no point in business, it doesn't matter if you're in

15:30 month one or year seven. I mean, you're gonna have challenges and you're gonna have problems and you step back and you look at, hey, this is what we're at three years ago. You see that you've

15:38 made progress I think it's super cool that you guys have grown up in cash flow and you know kind of just

15:46 surfed over that point, but that's a very important point because this is a capital intensive business. And even with the proper funding in capital, it's still a really tough business. And so the

15:58 fact that y'all have been able to manage and grow this thing within cash flow is super fucking impressive. So kudos on that. But also gives you guys the ability, when you don't have a private

16:09 equity backer or any other capital partner for that matter, gives you all the ability to be more opportunistic and think on a longer time horizon, I imagine, is that the way that you've kind of

16:21 seen it? Yeah, there's two ways I see how we have been able to sustain our growth and develop faster of not having a PE on board, is we have that independence to take our decisions. Just giving

16:33 you a simple example, if you're my operator or partner, and there's a pipe damage, just give an example You

16:42 can ask me for a 60, 000 discount. and I can give it to you. If I have a capital partner, I might have to fight you for that 60, 000 discount. What it does, it puts the 10 million business

16:53 under the scanner. Yeah. If I start fighting you for a 60, 000 discount and I have a 10 million business with you, you don't think twice to give it to me or not again. Yeah. But if I can give it

17:04 to you up and you'll be like, okay, let's move on to the next bet. Yeah. And that has been a lot of our success is those swift decisions take on in timely manners you actually grow that business.

17:15 'Cause we have grown with our customers. Our customers have gone from drilling 20 volts to 100 volts. And we have been with them. The reason we have been able to keep them, is we've been able to

17:24 keep them happy. We both know in an

17:29 OFS industry, you're gonna have issues on location. No locations are gonna be, I mean, there are locations that issue free, but there's gonna be locations that issue. It's oil and gas. It's all

17:37 the most complex operations that there is. Absolutely. You have so much of moving parts. And this has been a major, I'm not saying that having a private equity is a bad thing on board, but it has

17:50 its own restrictions. I mean, those are your financial partners, they have their goals, they have their independence and they have their ways of their motivations and their goals versus what has

17:60 helped us is not being bounded by those ends and has given us a great deal of success and of flexibility. And our flexibility has been our success. Yes, I'll say ultimately what it's afforded you

18:10 is the flexibility to make decisions and execute quickly and move swiftly. And I think that that's an important thing to talk about. Like right now dishwalk headers we're raising a round of capital

18:25 and we've raised some capital previously that just came from friends and family but you have to really look at, okay, why are we raising capital? Do we need to raise capital? What comes with that?

18:34 Because there's pros and cons to everything. There's a lot of people out there like, oh, just bootstrap a business So yeah, dickhead, like. Most people that say that have never bootstrapped the

18:42 business because it's hard to do, right? And so much easier said than done. But there's, you know, right in, there's right capital partners. There's right times when you should raise capital

18:57 for a business. And I don't think that a lot of businesses you have to go and raise massive amounts of capital for, but hearing about it in OFS is actually pretty inspiring because I was like, oh,

19:07 yeah, if I wanted to go start a wire line company or whatever it may be, may need to start with a pretty big injection of capital. But I love hearing the story of like, hey, no, we started

19:17 simple and get a mixing plant and then you have five mixing plants and then you get a workover or a flow back equipment. And so that's a pretty inspiring to hear someone build out this full service

19:29 outfit and do it without any capital. Trust me, it's been a challenge. That has been a lot of sleepless nights involved in it. There's been a lot of number crunching. A lot of time when

19:42 spreadsheets involved in it, but I would say it is possible. Yeah. There is not an always a need to aim and say, I'm gonna start my company with 100 million in my bank. You can start with 100,

19:58 000. You can start with half a million. You can start with a million, too. It's gonna be a longer ride. That's all it is. That's what it really boils down to is patience, right? It's like,

20:07 hey, look, overall my side in the tech industry, when it comes like software development, it's like you can go slow and cheap, or you can go fast and expensive, and there's pros and cons to all

20:21 of these things. So I don't think it's just very binary of one or the other, but I think that there's definitely people that are gonna be listening to this and be like, oh shit, that's actually

20:29 really inspiring, that I don't have to go raise a 100 million round of private equity to get something off the ground

20:37 some of my favorite businesses I like to tell people like these stories like I'm not some very successful like casing companies and they started off with a pair of stolen power talks that they stole

20:48 from their last shop right so they actually started with a bus and nothing just stealing from others and so you know the oil field service industry manages it's fascinating to me because there's so

20:60 many stories of you know I can't tell you how many I probably have more friends that are rich from starting service companies than EP's to be honest and done really well for themselves you know

21:11 growing up in northern Odessa you know start up a shop and have just gone about it in a very gritty way of just slow one break at a time and building it over time and so I'm always just really really

21:26 fascinated by these businesses. Tell me about going through you know like 2020 Obviously with the oil downturn and you said that you're growing with some of your I'd also like to hear like what types

21:39 of the MPs you guys really target, but tell us kind of like going through the downturn and how you are able to survive and manage during that when there's just so much carnage in the industry. So

21:53 2020 was a very interesting year for us because we grew our employee count by 100. Wow. That's got to be like, you've got to be the only OFS company that did that We were small enough a little bit

22:06 at that point. We grew over revenue by 65 actually that year. We entered into the world testing market starting that year. It was

22:18 interesting for us because there

22:21 was an operator called Murphy production.

22:25 We were actually working for them. We were actually waking up the very same day when the world tanked to 35 and this was 25 wells for the next 90 days Ah, so It was a very interesting year because

22:39 for us, why it was different was the reason it's we were, we were by the grace of God, we were at the right spot. We were rigging up the day the market was going down. And this was gonna continue

22:54 for next 90 days. Yeah, so you have three months of runway, right? And this was basically 100 of our people. 100 of the staff, TCS, and - Yeah, so you're fully utilized. So they're fully

23:05 utilized. And 100 of equipment TCS Yeah, I did, you know what? Sometimes, just being lucky is being successful and you need a stroke of luck every once in a while. Absolutely. That you're in

23:15 the right spot at the right time, and so - And what happened was once that job ended,

23:21 we were out west and we were very efficient because our equipment was completely paid off. We were not leveraged. That's not it, yeah. We were not paying any banks any 7, 5, 4 and our yards were

23:35 completely owned by us. So we were not paying any rentals. So for us, it made more sense to keep everyone on board and keep the doors open and keep on working. You know what's so funny about that

23:46 is I've always just been a big believer and like trust me, I understand growing businesses through leverage, but it's much harder to kill a business when you don't have any debt. Absolutely. And

23:59 really it becomes kind of a dumb man's name because you're like, hey, look, I've got, this is my cost, this is how much revenue I have in. And I have any, you know, my cost basis is

24:10 essentially zero. I'm not paying 5 to a lender. And so, but when you go through downturns, guess who survives? Guess who's getting fucking incinerated and used from right now? It's all of these

24:23 commercial real estate funds that had floating loans and interest rates are just absolutely burning them up right now, but I guarantee you, there's some old dude out there owns all of his properties

24:35 and he's a cash buyer and he's probably coming in and scooping that things up. That is exactly what we did. Yeah. We bought a rate for half a million dollars brand new. Did you really? One

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25:36 off of your first instance. And so the URL is going to be digitalwalkcutterscomenergyx. We bought more than more than 5 million worth of

25:44 iron

25:46 for a million bucks on cash deals. So what it did was it gave us a lot of leverage because you walk into operators saying I have a brand new equipment and at that time cream of the cream operators

25:60 and helpers were available. You walk in with that and you say I'm going to do a job which is going to be 20 lesser than anyone else's in the market space because I'm not leveraged at

26:11 all. You're cost of capitals lower so you also can just do jobs at a cheaper price as well. So that's actually very interesting. We did it more efficient at a cheaper price We had that war from

26:24 Double Eagle.

26:28 We did all their 150 wells or something during COVID. And it was more efficient and better equipment and a better procedure which we could provide because we were not leveraged. And that helped us

26:41 out a lot to grow as a company because we realized the importance of new equipment, the importance of cream hands, how much efficiency wise it makes a difference. On the back end, you have better

26:53 hands, you have better operators, you have better knowledgeable supervisors You're running your equipment down less. Yeah. You're charging back less to your operator partners. The second most

27:04 important part during COVID, and actually overall as a motor at Transcontinental is honesty and transparency. I think transparency and just being genuine and authentic and the oil and gas business

27:16 goes such along the ways. You know, I climbed up the ranks of oil filled services pretty quickly and I'm just convinced that is because I was. just honest and transparent company man asked me a

27:30 question and I'm not going to sit there and bullshit them and tell them hey look I don't know but give me five minutes and I'll go figure it out and get back to you and just having that level of trust

27:40 and honesty goes such a long ways and a business is driven by handshakes and also a business is filled with a lot of shucksters that will run extra chemicals and not tell you I mean, it's a model.

27:55 Our model is we want to work for a customer for next 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, whatever their life cycles are, till that time, rather than working for them for one year or six months, five

28:05 months, and then turning them home and then trying to find another client. It's the worst thing you can do to your business. So this is all super fascinating because if I was ever to go start any

28:17 type of OFS business, I mean, this is how I always thought about it. I'm like, man, if he could grow within cash, have no debt, just good. It's kind of crazy that I'm having good customer

28:30 service and being honest. So simple to do. Yes, it goes such a long ways, which is just crazy because I feel like that's table stakes like each day. I think it's more inner feeling to be honest

28:42 with you. Being honest and transparent is a more management's inner feeling than the actual numbers in spreadsheet. Because if you set it within yourself and say, no matter what happens, my losses

28:56 are my losses It's not my customer's losses. And I'm not gonna make it into a loss for them. The moment you start adopting that strategy within you or your management starts starving within

29:05 themselves, that is when that transparency comes out. And it might be a little longer road, a little tougher road, because your numbers are gonna look weaker when you do that. But on a long run,

29:15 on a spread of three years, five years, seven years, it's a beautiful road. That's what I just don't think most people have low time preference and they don't think on,

29:26 long enough time horizon to where they think about the big picture. They don't think in terms of 10 years, right? They think in terms of one to two years. And usually that leads to unsustainable

29:36 businesses and business models. So, you know, you made a comment too about, you know, having good hands and good talent. Always think about the drilling company I broke out for Savannah drilling

29:49 back in 2010. They moved on their rigs from Canada. And one thing that stood out to me as I got more experienced in the industry, I didn't notice at the time when I actually worked on the rigs,

29:59 but how much all of their hands cared, how knowledgeable they were, how particular they were about keeping care of the rigs and maintenance on the rigs. And it's like, man, those hands made

30:10 everything for that company. And there's a snow coincidence that we ran circles around all the other rigs on the lease and would drill wells twice as fast of them because there was a sense of pride

30:21 among the hands to take care of equipment and be knowledgeable and things of that nature and so I've always found company culture and OFS to be an interesting topic. This whole debate over the last

30:35 two years about work from home and remote work and tech, like, dude, I cannot help but roll my eyes because I'm like, dude, fuck y'all. Like, you have to go sit in an air conditioned office, I

30:45 pour you like, well, Fs hands, you don't have a fuck, you're out there in 110 degrees, working your fucking ass off and I've had people ask me, like, how would you create good culture and OFS?

30:56 And I'm like, it's a really good question because it's tough, right? I mean, these are typically hard jobs, labor intensive and long hours. And, you know, from me, it was always like, you

31:09 know, just having bosses and managers that actually seemed to care and give a shit would go a long way, too. And so, interested in your, like, what your takes are on trading culture at your

31:20 company and, and OFS. So, TCES has a, has a culture Every single hand, every single operator, every single field supervisor, every single management team member. Working here works as a family.

31:33 We eat bread together, we drink whiskey together, and we pour it together and we work together. That's the culture we have. I can tell you, I think every single hand or an operator in our company

31:47 has probably had a beer with me at a certain point in Midland, at certain day, with him or with other management members We are a very open thinking company, too. It's out and open. My phone

31:58 number is out and open. Other management members, phone numbers are out and open. Any issues, we encourage our people that give us a call. Let us solve the problem. We actually have a very,

32:10 very less turnaround rate. Our employee retention numbers are pretty good.

32:17 It's, we don't, we've done as far as buying cars to houses from medicals to just giving paid time off a longer, longer point of time, we do everything. We are a human company. This comes from,

32:34 in me at least, it comes from my family. I was brought up in a family where house was an open access for every employee of the company back in India. We

32:47 had set up MRI centers for our employees. We've set up MRI centers for the community So that mentality has flowed into the whole TCS system.

32:58 I can assure you, any employee with a medical emergency, family emergency, economic emergency, will not go hungry from our yard. That is not gonna happen. Yeah, you know, that's also at the

33:12 end of the day, I think what good culture is is treating people like humans and treating them like adults and, um, creating a place that, um, at least know that, okay, I'm respected here. It's

33:24 funny you talked about having your phone number out in the open. I remember my last company in venture. Not a huge company, I think 200 employees. So it's a comparable size to you guys. And one

33:38 of our hands was told to email the CEO and ask them about like if this travel expense could get approved or something. And he did that, he emailed them And the CEO flipped out that one of the

33:51 project managers was contacting him directly and emailing him. And I was just like what a pretentious prick to be like, no one from the company can email me or call me and understand that there's

34:04 processes and that need to be followed. But it's a really that big of a deal as someone from your own company hits you up on an email like get over yourself. And so. I got a call yesterday, one of

34:16 our operators could not get into an ADP app and said, Can you reset my password? I said, Sure, I can. I shouldn't have reset for him. Yeah, 100 is. I hope you do that. Yeah, like maybe a

34:26 dick to you and make your life harder to operate. So man, all super fascinating stuff. I don't get to get a ton of OFS entrepreneurs on the show. And I love when I do because it's like actually a

34:41 business that I have this weird sick and twisted affinity for like, I want to run an OFS company.

34:49 But I just think that it's, you know, I think why I like it is because, you know, it's a tough and it's a challenge, but it's also just fun because you're out there actually doing shit. And when

35:01 they talk about getting work over rigs, like, I just think rigs are cool as shit. I've been on biggest deepwater drill shifts in the world. You know, I've been on rigs all over the place. And it

35:13 doesn't matter what rig it is, I'm like, man, just rigs are awesome So I'm super jealous that you guys get to. We had a very good experience recently. We went to one of the ad nogs, the drilling

35:27 site in Abu Dhabi. I'm not sure if you're supposed to discuss this or not, but anyway,

35:34 they built a whole island to actually do a land drilling on an offshore, where they could have done an offshore, right? Yeah. It was pretty cool to see the whole island. Yeah, I think he's

35:44 manmade island instead of drilling. Yeah. No, it's uh. Very fascinating Fascinating the amount of engineering and human ingenuity in the oil and gas industry, you know, every time I go offshore,

35:57 um, especially on deep water drill ships, so just like, this is. The world needs to see this because this is just insane engineering. And yeah, you talk about making a whole manmade island,

36:09 like, this is things that you just like think of. I always, uh. I always tell my. So a lot of my friends are in manufacturing. Yeah tell them that we make a factory in a day.

36:21 and disemble them in three days, every single time. That's what we do. We make a new factory, we break a new factory, we again make 10 miles away. They're probably just like, you know, it's

36:34 funny. How does it work? I had a friend, he was a consultant. All of his work was in manufacturing, especially with like semiconductors and things of that nature. And he came over to oil and gas

36:43 and just couldn't wrap his head around some of the processes And I'm like, Hey, like dude, this isn't a static standalone manufacturing facility, like these are mobile operations.

36:57 You need to get a guy like him out on a rig up and put some work in the sandwich where it goes into moving around. But for you guys, real quick before we wrap this up, what's your goals as one of

37:11 the founders and the guy that's leading the charge? What do you want to do over the next? Let's call it five years about the company. So TCS for the next five years is expanding its geographic

37:22 footprint. More than the service line footprint and we're explaining now the geographic ones. We are in process in establishing in five countries in the Middle East. Another very important

37:33 challenge we've taken on is we're actually in a process to bid for a gas block, a complete gas block in India It's a 527 kilometer gas block, it's about

37:47 144, 000 acres with the Indian government. We actually drill the gas walls. That's crazy.

37:52 So we're trying to be an OFS side as well as the operator side in this case. These are

37:60 the current projects in the next world we have. Over the span of the next five years, we'll be concentrating a lot on carbon net zero technologies, RD. We've got a sizable RD team

38:14 whose sole focus is to work. in two different divisions for next three and a half years, which is net zero, saving the emissions for our operator partners and automation. We are actually in a

38:29 process to see how we can start eliminating

38:34 work over hands and operators straight in line, not eliminating them in general, but getting them off the floor or the snubbin basket or the floor But that's what's, man, all right, let's take

38:48 five minutes and dive into this. Because it's really interesting is, you like an offshore rig, it's fully automated and it never displays jobs. You still have all your hands out there, but

38:59 they're out of line of fire and out of harm's way. And so I don't think it's ever when you talk about automation, it's never something to be scared of like, oh, the jobs are going away like, no,

39:10 jobs just probably gonna be easier and less dangerous So that's really cool on net zero.

39:17 So, what do you think the opportunity is

39:22 on the completion side, like with workover rigs? You know, I've seen a lot of electrification of like, wireline units and frack fleets. So there's an opportunity there to do that. So actually,

39:36 we're in the process with one of the manufacturers to start building electric workover rigs. Man. We

39:44 have figured out the power generation side of it. Yeah Yeah. We are working actually on the, on the motor side of the things right now, which we, we know we, we are done on that RD phase where

39:57 we know we can run a workover rig actually electric down hole. Yeah. But the process now to be what we're in the process to figure out is how to run them on the road. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's,

40:09 I can't put a, I can take a test line, put a workover rig on it. No, no, you can't and I'm not sure if you know what I'm saying, I'm not sure if you know what I'm saying, I'm not sure if you

40:13 know what I'm saying, I'm not sure if you know what I'm saying, I'm not sure if you know what I'm saying, I'm not sure if you know what I'm saying, I'm not sure if you know what I'm saying, I'm

40:13 not sure if you know what I'm saying, I'm not sure if you know what I'm saying, I'm not sure if you know what I'm saying, I'm not sure if you know what I'm saying, I'm not sure if you know what

40:13 I'm saying, I'm not sure if you know what I'm saying, I'm not sure if you know what I'm saying, I'm not sure if you know what I'm saying, I'm not sure if you know what I'm saying, I'm not sure if

40:13 you know what I'm saying, I'm not sure, I'm not sure if you know what I

40:16 You know, like in Wireline, you know, they're taking, you know, essentially, Hey, you drive the truck out to location. It's diesel, but then you bring out a battery pack and run it off

40:24 electricity. And then, um, starting to see these hybrid wire line trucks, um, where you got battery built in, but these trucks are huge. Um, and so that's why I was like, you know, he still

40:36 drive it out there. Diesel and take, you know, take a, um, battery pack, but makes perfect sense. It's like, Hey, so I think you forgot the power generation side of it And you can run it,

40:47 but imagine that'd be crazy. Like, like, think about a quiet rig. So the, so the standalone stop in units, we've, we're finishing the RD. We're about about six, seven months out on an RB.

40:58 We're actually launching in standard of standalone, uh, uh, division completely. Cool. And we will start with all electric units are going to be electric. The whole thing for the pumps and

41:08 everything. Cool. So it's going to be, it's in, it's in. I want to come see that when you guys, uh, when you guys get it put together and I want to come see that because I think that that's

41:16 really fascinating, you know, sometimes I'm like, man, I kind of, you know, remember like late nights on a drilling rig, like all the noises put you to sleep, right? Like, there's something,

41:27 there's something about, you know, the, the, the brake handle and just the diesels running and so I've, I've ran by some

41:36 of the operator partners and the million dollar question is, how am I going to figure out if I don't hear my pop? Yeah I'm going to say, are you going to know something drunk? That's when you know

41:44 something's wrong because like, hey, there's something that sounds different. It was, you know, pump twos offline and that's so, and that's such a real thing to it. So that does not surprise me

41:54 that that's some of their feedback is like, how, there's, there's, there's two things you can do, right? Either you can have an all electric silent one, but you can have a pump noise. Yeah. I

42:03 can provide you with both, but that's all I can do. That's so funny. You know, I can, I choose to grab it easily. Yeah. That's pretty funny That's super cool, man, and just fascinating story.

42:13 Like I said, super impressive what you guys have built and I'm sure that a lot of people that are listening to this are going to think the same. So if you guys are listening to the show and you want

42:25 to work with a badass OFS company, hit them up. Where can they find you guys? Do you have a website or you got LinkedIn?

42:33 TCSUS is our website. Cool. We're on LinkedIn. Cool. Instagram. We're all over the social media. Awesome. We are well marketed company thanks to Mr. Tim Taylor Oh, Tim Taylor, I see the guys.

42:43 Okay, cool. Shout out to Tim and Midnight Marketing. So cool, man. Well, we'll leave some links in the show notes if you guys want to reach out. Just click the links. And dude, thanks for

42:53 taking the time and coming in and doing this. Thank you for having me.