Why Dreaming Matters

SPEAKER_01 0:28

I've been thinking about dreaming. So that you can say the title of my um uh presentation or talk to you is dreaming. So what is that all about? Thank you. I I guess it's can you hear me? So I read a book recently, and um the author said if you're not dreaming, you're not really living, you're just existing. So I want to live and I want to and challenge you all to live uh by dreaming. And dreams um can move us, can change us, can motivate us. And recently we just celebrated Martin Luther King Day, and I think all of you probably have heard I Have a Dream by Martin Luther King. And if you haven't heard it recently, I encourage you to Google Martin Luther King and um get an echo. And Martin Luther King said, and I can't even come close, the the way he said it was so dramatic, but the dream was much more impactful. He said, I have a dream that one day we'll live up to our creed that all men will be created equal. That's a pretty audacious dream. And it cost them dearly, didn't it? Dreams can be costly, they can be rewarding, but they can be costly. I've been a fan of watching and reading about Lewis and Clark. They had a pretty audacious dream, didn't they? They took a bold step to cross the country. There was a lot of risk involved, but we read about them. The name of that book is Undaunting Courage. That ought to tell you something. Well, recently we had a Super Bowl. So it made me think about a football player close to home, Terry Bradshaw, a Louisiana boy, had a dream when he was a high school kid that he'd be a great football player one day. And I think if you don't know who Terry Bradshaw is, please don't tell anybody that you don't know. Just go find out. Terry Bradshaw earned four Super Bowl rings. He's a Hall of Famer. Did he throw interceptions? Yes. Did he get sacked? Yes. Did he throw incompletions? Yes. Did he get hurt? Yes. But he has four Super Bowl rings. He had a dream. So I'll tell you about two Lafouche Parish men who had a dream. Alan Denos, my father, and Siriak Kiro, his uh my uncle, two brother-in-laws, in 1947. They had a dream that they would start a business of their own. There were jobs available at the time, but they wanted to start their own business. So they had a dream, so they bought a boat. Let me tell you what a dream come true looks like. I'll show you what a dream come true looks like. Does that look like a dream come true? Well, that was it. That was the original investment or uh the vessel that started the Dan Ossinkiro Company. And I'll share a little bit about our story, our history, our dream with you, not so much to tell you about my dream or our dream, but hopefully to challenge you, to inspire you that you should have a dream. You should be living. And if you have a dream, you're living. And if you don't have a dream, maybe you're just existing. So along the way, I got to follow my dad. It was a different era back then, a little less complicated. So as a youngster, I got to follow my dad and hear about his dream and how he interacted with people and how it was important for him to do certain things. So I was uh a witness to how he lived out his dream, his hopes, his aspirations, the things that he anticipated. You know, my father spoke French before he spoke English. So did my uncle. Neither one of them were formally educated, but that didn't prevent them from having a dream. And it didn't prevent me from hearing about his dream along the way. From one boat, then one of them worked on the boat, one of them worked at home trying to do maintenance, hustle jobs, those kind of things. That led to an opportunity one day where an oil company guy said, Hey, Alan, we have these inland oil field that we have to get to by crew boats, and we're having a little trouble getting the service we need. Would you go buy those boats and I'll let you work them for us? So they bought the boats. Well, then they found out there was truck there was a reason why the boats couldn't get there on time. They were sinking, the boulders didn't work, and so they had to really go to work to make this dream a reality. Apparently they did because a few years later, in the I guess early 1950s, that same guy, we call this the Yell Out the Window story. My dad was walking across the parking lot at the Gulf Office in Cutoff, Louisiana. I don't know if you all know that they had a Gulf Hall had an office in Cutoff, Louisiana. The window opened, and the manager said, Alan, come see I want to talk to you. So my dad went inside, talked to, uh began to have a conversation with the guy. He said, you know, we have some, we have an offshore platform. This was the early 50s. The offshore oil industry was really started in 1947, the same year our company was started. So it was it was an infant, infant uh operation, offshore oil and gas. And the manager said, Alan, I'm having trouble finding people to work on the offshore platform. We can't keep them, we can't keep it running. You think you can help me? So this is what Alan did not say. He did not say, No, I have a dream of being in the boat business. Call somebody else. He said, I think I can help you. So he went to work and he hired some guys and sent them offshore. We like to say the rest is history, at least for Dan Oss it is, but I think more importantly, for the oil industry. My dad, uh, the way he told me the story, he says, you know, Hank, my people were fishermen, oshnemen, trappers. We lived on boats. We knew about the water. If it broke down, we had to fix it if we wanted to come home. If we ran out of food, we had to eat what we caught. He said, if the weather was bad, the weather was bad. He said, your mama's folks are farmers. There was a transition from mules to tractors in those days. They didn't know how to fix those tractors, but they figured it out. When it was time to plant, they planted. There was no excuses. When it was time to harvest, they harvested. He said, those boys were natural offshore problem solvers. They made it happen. Well, you know, I probably missed the point. I said, man, that it was lucky. You were lucky to be walking across that parking lot on that particular day, weren't you? So there was a little bit of an uncomfortable pause. And he says, maybe I was lucky, Hank. But he said, you know, I was in that office three, four, five days a week. I walked up and down those halls and said, Can I help you? You need anything? What can I do for you? He says, sometimes we've got to work for our luck. Do you have a dream? Is it hard? Are you working for your luck? He was working for his luck. Lucky for me that, in a sense, I was following along with my dad because in 1958, my uncle, his partner, passed away at the age of 48. In 1970, my dad passed away at the age of 49. I was 21. My brother was 24. We were at a crossroads. Was that dream his dream? Or could it be ours? Were we gonna move on or take on the challenge? So my brother and I said, let's try it. Let's do it. I don't think we said let's try it. We were c we don't know, we were 21 years old. We thought we could do it. It was good to have a mama who supported you. Mama said, y'all can do it, boys, go for it. So we did. But you know, it wasn't easy. We had to buy out the cure alls. That cost money. We had to find bankers who were willing to uh trust the 21 and a 24-year-old. We had customers, some customers said, Oh, well, they're young. We better go someplace else. We had some employees that said, Man, my future's at stake here. Can I count on y'all? But some said, let's give the boys a chance. So they gave us a chance. Some customers, some employees. We uh began to try to save our company. Then we began to try to build our company. It was a grind, it was work. We had seen somebody else, my father and my uncle, have a dream and live out that dream, grinding, working. Well, things started to happen positively. One day, a customer walked into our office and said, I have this production field in Redfish Point. And we have some crew boats, we have some production operators. The man who owns it wants to retire. Why don't you all think about buying his business? Anyone know where Redfish Point is? I didn't think so, I didn't either. It was right south of Intracosa City. Anybody knows where Intracosta City is? A few of you do. So anyway, we bought this business. We sent a good old boy from Lafouche Parish with his family, moved in the trail in Intracosta City, and began to provide service there. Well, the next thing you know, we find out there's a heliport in Infracosa City, and a lot of people were going offshore. So we started hanging around the heliport and started building an offshore business. We said that works, let's go to Cameron. We went to Cameron, we went to Galveston, we went to Morgan City, we went to Burris, and we had, you might say, accidentally come upon a recipe that helped us find a way, uh leverage to be close to the people who were going to work. We could build an office, we could open an office in Houston and Lafayette, but we wanted to be where the people who executed the work were, and they appreciated that we were there. So our business started started growing. One day, you're gonna find out that um I'm not very strategic. Things just seem to happen. One day a guy who we had crossed paths with was working for an old company, wasn't even a customer. He says, Um, we have some construction crews offshore, and we need uh, why don't y'all consider bidding? We're bidding it out. Why don't y'all consider bidding on it? An invitation to bid on construction work, sure, we bid. We won the bid. We didn't have a welder or a welding machine, and we were in the construction business. So my brother and I decided, we flipped the coin, I guess. He started buying equipment, and I started looking for people. I was recruiting welders and fitters and riggers, and he was buying equipment. We put everything together, went offshore, started working on these three-legged jack-up barges that service the platform. One day one of our uh superintendents came in and said, you know, we're working on these jackup barges. They have a little deck space because the shallow water platforms are shallow or small, there's not much room, there's no place for us to live. We live and work on the jack-up barges. He says, Why don't we have our own? We never thought about having our own. He says, Most of the time I'm operating that thing because I put it exactly where we want it, where we need it. And he says, I can run that. I guess we're a little naive. Were we bold? Were we innocent? Were we brave? Uh but we built the Jackup Barge. And then we built another one and another one, and we had ten of them. And two that we were operating for somebody else at one point in time. It was kind of uh stepped into it. Now, I could tell you, spent a whole afternoon telling you where I lost money, where we lost money, where we failed, but that's not fun for me. So I'm not gonna tell you those jobs, those experiences. I'm gonna tell you the good ones. Well, after a few years, the lift boat business, you know, the cycles, there was no work. We're gonna contemplating uh laying people off, um, putting out boats on port risks, which means reduce the insurance and reduce the risk. We get a call from somebody who used to work in the Gulf of Mexico. He says, I'm in Nigeria now. The Niger Delta in Nigeria is just like the Mississippi River Delta, shallow water production platforms. We need some lift boats. Y'all want to send some? We're about to tie them up. We bid on it, we send the boats. Operating the boats in Nigeria was just like operating the boats in the Gulf of Mexico, very similar. The guys from South Louisiana went, operated them, it was perfect. Now the culture, the environment, and the politics in Nigeria was quite a bit different than what we were used to. We figured it out. After a short period of time, somebody from Venezuela called and said, You want to send a boat to Venezuela? The smart one in the family said, if we can work in Nigeria, we can work anywhere. Send a boat. Operating the boats in Venezuela was just like operating the boats in the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of America, except the culture, the politics, and things were quite a bit different. We had to learn that also. The challenges. Were we naive? Sometimes we might have been naive. Were we bold? Sometimes we were bold. Were we foolish? Maybe so, but we had a dream, and we were going to pursue that dream. The dream was ours now, my brother and I. And then there was another generation, the third generation, Mark and Paul and Eric, were coming of age. They had been challenged to go off, find their way, develop their own dream, their own experience. But then there was an interest in coming back. I would say more than an interest. There was a compelling calling from that vision we had to come back. So you have a dream? Is it compelling enough that people are going to stand up and support you? That your teammates are going to come in and say, why don't we go into this kind of business like building a lift boat? Why don't you take this job in Intragosa City or Redfish Point? They wanted to come back because I think the dream was real. The people were real. The people that went offshore in the early 1950s and changed, in my opinion, the face of offshore oil and gas were the people that live in our community, problem solvers. They looked like, to me and you, they might look like ordinary people, farmers and fishermen, but they were anything but ordinary. And I think that appealed to Eric, Paul, Moore. And they wanted to come back and be a part of that. Not long after they came back, we landed a very significant offshore contract with a major oil company. And I guess it was the fall of 2009. In the spring of 2010, there was a catastrophic accident offshore. I think you would uh might know it as the Makondo incident. And we all just started working for that company. You know, there was a lot of tension here. All of you probably remember some of that story, what it was like. Fishing was shut down, drilling was shut down, lease uh operations were shut down. Our customer, which was we were new to them and them to us, said we need some help. Of course we want to help. So said we're sending you a contract. Got the contract. I'm ready to sign the contract, and we're gonna go to work. One of the Danos guys, who wasn't a Danos uh family member, he was a long-trusted Danos employee, walks in and says, We're not signing that contract. We can't. I said, we sign it all the time. It's the same thing we always sign. He says, it's different. And he challenged me. He challenged us. Paul and Eric and Mark were around. So he challenged us to make some adjustments to make the contract fair. We did. We asked, the company said yes, it's this is fair. If we'd signed the original contract, it could have been a catastrophe for us. But somebody stood up. When you have a dream, do you have somebody that walks alongside of you to challenge you? Do you allow somebody in your circle to step up, to speak up, to stand up? You should. Dreams are important, but we need teammates to carry out our dreams. The next generation was witnessing something quite unusual in the industry because of what was going on at the time. And because of the challenges and the opportunities we had to help our customer, the third generation, Eric, Paul, Mark, and the third generation of teammates began to realize we had more potential than we ever dreamed of or that we ever thought of, because we were pushed, we were challenged. We saw what we could do collectively. So we began to dream bigger. More services, more geography, more customers. And it happened because, I would say largely, because our teammates, our local teammates, joined together, solved problems, saw how we could be more than we could be individually or even collectively as a local company. In the process, we outgrew our facility, and we had to thought about relocating. And we started a pretty comprehensive search. Where would we build a company headquarters? When it came down to it, we said, we decided we're gonna build it where the people, the heroes, the people who solve problems, the ordinary people who have extraordinary ability and talent live and work. So we stayed here. We didn't go to Houston, we didn't go to New Orleans or the North Shore. They decided, the next generation decided this is where we ought to be. This is a great place. There's great people. Dream, my friends, dream. Grab your friends and your colleagues and let them dream with you. I'm gonna close with one story about the vessels of opportunity, which is what we were managing during the uh Makando spill. We had an opportunity to Hire a lot of uh fishing vessels and uh shrimpers and ushermen and recreational fishermen because they couldn't make a they couldn't make a living. They were they were everything was shut down. So Dan Oss was representing the oil company, and we were uh using, they were being paid to help clean up uh and service the oil spill. It was this is what allowed us to see, made me see what our real potential was. Well, one day I'm walking across my parking lot, coming into the office in La Rose, and I see a lady who I recognize walking across the parking lot. And uh she's affectionately known as Madame Chevrette. Does anybody know Madame Chevrette from Lafouche Parish? From Lower LaFouche? Mrs. Shrimp would be the interpretation for Madame Chevrette. Well, she was an advocate for shrimpers. She spoke to politicians, she spoke to associations, she spoke to groups on behalf of the local shrimpers. And her husband was and is a shrimper, and she was at the office helping to facilitate their billing to us, to the oil company, and their payments. So she was walking, she's a lively, spunky woman who represents the shrimpers well. And she came up to me, she says, Hank, I want to tell you something. So um Hank started to get a little nervous. She came up to me, she said, I want to tell you a story. She says, You know, my husband's out there cleaning up all. I said, Yes, I know. She says, he told me sometimes the oil gets on his equipment and it's a mess and it's difficult. I'm thinking, this is not going to a good place. She said, sometimes he tells me that it's hard for him to breathe and his eyes burn. I said, this is definitely not going in a good place. She said, I'm gonna tell you what I said to him. And then she grabs my arm for special effects, right? I can't run from Madame Chevrolet if I wanted to. She says, and now she's looking at me, we like this. She says, I told him, Beb. Y'all know what Beb means? Honey, darling, sugar. It's an affectionate name. She said, Beb, when you can't take it anymore. Pick up your equipment and go to clean water. She said, breathe some fresh air. Get better. She says, then go back over there. Pick up that all. She says, we gotta save our coast. We gotta save our shrimp. That's the kind of people that live here. Resilient people, hard-working people, problem-solving people, never give up people. Would we ever want to move our headquarters to someplace else? I don't think so. We want to be where those people are. People who dream, who embrace their friends and their colleagues, let them walk alongside of them. Thank you, my friends. Dream and include people in your dreams.