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Why Scaling Up, Smarter Partnerships, And Targeted AI Beat A Race To The Bottom

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We unpack what operators and service companies can do to win in a flat market: scale smart, align incentives, fix power constraints with microgrids, and use AI where it actually delivers. We close with a playbook for leaders and individuals to protect culture, sharpen skills, and stay healthy.

• industry context at ~$60 oil and consolidation pressure
• private operators needing scale and creative capital
• power limitations in the Permian and microgrid adoption
• morale, layoffs, culture, and two-way communication
• experience gaps, mentorship, and cross-training
• asset integrity versus short-term cost cutting
• true operator–vendor collaboration beyond price
• incentives, integrated providers, and accountability
• practical AI use cases with human oversight
• leadership, strategy, curiosity, and personal health

If you're a service company interested in joining the Crue Club Operator Roundtables, we have two passes left and we have two seasons, one running from January till June, and the next one running from August until December. Go to connectioncrue.com. Register to begin getting information about crew club roundtables.


SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to a new Energy Crew Podcast. I'm your host, JP Warren. In this episode, we're going to dive into what we discussed at the Crew Club Operator Roundtable in Dallas. We had a table full of operators and service companies talking about kind of what to do in 2026. Everything's predicted to be a flat market, potentially lower commodity prices. So what are what are companies, what are individuals individuals doing to kind of set themselves apart for success? And then and we kind of broke it down into four different topics. So four different themes arose around this round table. And I have my notes right here. I have my notes with me, mainly because there's a lot of smart people around me. I am probably the dumbest person at the table. So if I am communicating the conversations, the details, what people are talking about, I want to base this off of notes. That way there's kind of not kind of misinterpreting anything or leading anyone down the straight path. So the conversation, listen, uh right now the industry is where it's at. Commodity price around$60 uh right now, potentially going a little bit lower. Um, frack spreads uh reduced, rig count uh only, I think, went up three uh last week. But ever anyway, regardless, it's gonna be a tough market. All right. So what are people doing? What are private operators doing? What are service companies doing? What are people doing right now to kind of navigate this storm? And the four parts we're gonna talk about, I kind of did a little prep board here for everyone. And this just means that I needed probably a thicker marker because you can't really read this. And if you're just listening to this, I'm gonna walk you through this. But if you are watching this on YouTube or somewhere else, uh thanks for uh tuning in. And thanks for tuning in, regardless. So the four sections or the four main themes that kind of uh were brought up around the table falls into number one, what are the current industry challenges? This is a great way to kind of lay the land work, lay the context of what we're all faced with, right? What we're all talking about. The second thing we talked about is the evolution of operator and service company relationships. Gone are the days of low cost, bottom of the barrel pricing. I think those days are far, not far behind us. I think it's still kind of uh being actively practiced, but one crew club table uh brought up the fact that 40% of operators make decisions based on low cost. From that 40%, 70% of those operators go back to pay more to fix those decisions. All right. So what does it look like moving into a flat market when there's not increased activity, when things are flat, maybe reduced activity? How are operators and service companies now working uh more together hand in hand? What does that actually look like? We then uh brought up AI in business. Hey, it's not 2025 unless we're bringing up AI. But more importantly, this was kind of more of a detailed, fine-tuned discussion on, hey, who's actually utilizing AI and for what? A lot of times AI is painted like, oh, it's moving this industry forward. We're gonna be doing this, AI this, AI this. There's these blanket statements. But in reality, when it comes down to it, what are actually people using? What are people actually seeing uh as they incorporate it in their day-to-day tasks? And the fourth uh thing we all talked about is what it looks like for future success for companies and for individuals. So let's dive into that. I'm gonna go again, base my thing, uh base my conversation, the podcast today, off my notes so I don't forget anything. All right. So right now, um, it's one of those things the industry is again coming into uh a flat market, okay? This industry, we would love a boom, okay? We would love a little love, but right now the reality is this it's a flat market, and things just feel different for a lot of people. I mean, you hear uh people that have been through many uh booms and busts talking, and you you you just you you talk to people with some years of experience in the industry, it just feels different right now. It feels very uh unique, very different. It seems like a longer, lower commodity prices. Capital is still kind of on the edge, kind of on the fence. And now we're in this world of MA, right? You have all these big companies becoming bigger, swallowing up other companies. Not only that, it's not leaving the door open for a lot of these smaller private operators, uh the entrepreneurials of the industry to kind of come in and do JVs, farmhouse, whatever that is. So what are they doing to survive? All right. So talking about this, diving into the first block right here, it's no longer gonna be these incremental little changes that people are gonna do, you know, reduce cost here, go lowest bid here, do this here. We have to do step changes in order to survive and thrive as we enter 2026 and kind of move past 2026, these suppressed prices. All right. So the first thing right here that we talked about that we brought up is capital and scale when it comes to private operators. Right now, private operators no longer have the luxury of punching a couple holes in the ground and flipping it. The days of punching holes and flipping properties is no longer here and it hasn't been here, right? So when it comes to kind of private operators in this market, I feel bad for private operators out there. Oh, boo-hoo, private operators. No, but here hear me out. Right now, private operators, they successfully, uh, if they successfully sold their company right now and they're out there, they're all looking for new opportunities, new acreage, new deals, and all that stuff. Right now, the delta between the super majors and the private operators is only getting bigger. So private operators have an extremely tough, difficult uh environment to navigate right now. They need to start thinking more creative, more creative on their capital provider. You know, who are they utilizing for the capital providers, right? Um are they going to standard traditional private equity? Something around the table that's brought up is like, hey, you have to get creative with your financial backer. And sometimes that might mean, hey, let's look international. Let's look on the international side and see where that capital is coming from. Because right now it's very tight in this industry. Um what else? I don't want to forget anything here. You know, so uh one gentleman at the table brought up for private operators to compete right now in this market, they need to be looking at scaling up a little bit, right? So if they present something like, hey, here's 10 wells, make that 30. Hey, if they're asking for, you know, uh uh 50 million, make it 150 million. So operators, in order to scale, to look appetizing to be acquired at some point, they really do have to scale up, scale up their wells, scale up their uh investments, scale up their capital, scale up, all right, which is very uh challenging and kind of contradictory to kind of where we're at right now. So it's a very interesting, aggressive, but a realistic kind of approach to hey, we have to do things a little bit different in uh 2026. All right. You know, then we talked about uh potentially uh considering creative financing like co-investments or JVs or potentially, again, what I just said with international investments. All right. So the scale required for IPO now is only getting bigger and bigger. That's hence we have to scale up. We have to get more wells, bigger, uh more capital. So it's gonna be an interesting dynamic for private operators. And what's difficult too, I've been I was talking to a couple of you know, super um, you know, some bigger companies, and we're discussing like, I was talking to them, hey, listen, I host all these roundtables, a lot of private operators around the table. Are the conversations happening right now to you know divest or to enter farm outs or any JVs or anything like that? And right now, I think the theme right now with a lot of different companies, like, hey, we're actually sitting on our acreage, we're waiting. So right now, there's really not looking, we're looking for acreage swaps potentially, but right now when it comes to farm outs, JVs, we're holding, we're holding off on that right now. Again, I think that's gonna change. I think that's gonna change once kind of dust settles in this MA market, this two-year MA market cycle, which is insane. But again, once I think the conversations start changing, where they start looking at their acreage, start looking at to offload some stuff, I think that's when the conversation's gonna happen. So from now until then, what are private operators gonna do to navigate to that point? Again, it's being sharp, it's thinking creatively, and it's actually kind of maybe going after different plays or teaming up with different people. So that was an interesting uh start to the conversation. And the next thing that was brought up when it comes to the industry challenges right now is power, right? Power in the permian. Right now, I think uh with in Colorado and New Mexico, regulations coming out right now where it's gonna be a lot more difficult, if not impossible, to start building more uh power generation plants, right? Electric plants, right? So right now, the power press, the power squeeze right now is in the permian. We discussed that. And some of the things that people are doing. So, what does that mean when I say power? That just means more um uh centralized or more uh decentralized power. So generators, right? So more generators are gonna be out in the field. And for to obviously generate power to, you know, whatever. So the thing that we all talked about is potentially move from uh smaller, you know, uh generator rentals to larger microgrid um uh installations where you can scale up, scale down. You don't have to have so many generators on site, smaller footprint, but also scalability, which is which is key. So microgrids were kind of taking a part of the uh conversation. All right. So microgrids is one of those things where, again, this fades into these uh these sections over here. When it comes to microgrids, uh power suppliers and operators need to start working together. And that's gonna take a kind of a more understanding on what they're doing, why they're doing this, what their end goal is. Because the subject matter experts, the power companies, the power generation companies, in order to construct uh microgrids that actually meet the demands, they have to understand, they have to have better conversations, more collaborative conversations. So again, uh this is a longer process, better conversations, more conversations, but hey, we're gonna get there together because we have to. All right, we're not gonna be alone in this uh in this journey. And another thing that was brought up as the industry challenges is the talent, morale, and culture of places. Right now, MA is hacking a lot. We're seeing major workforce reductions. I think Kaniko just got done with their first, second, or third wave. I don't know. It was one of the major uh, you know, we have Kanico, Chevron, Exxon, da-da-da. All across the board, you're seeing these workforce reductions, these massive layoffs. So, what is that telling a lot of people that are inside companies? It's very depressing, it's very gloomy, and you're always walking to work thinking, like, am I is today my last day? All right. So when it comes to your talents, the morale and culture, it is so crucial to ensure that your culture, that your company's culture is there to provide support, guidance, framework, transparency, all right? Even if you don't know the answer, transparency, make sure that communication not just goes from top to bottom, but also bottom to top. I always uh advise people hey, listen, to build the culture, it's it's simple as communication. Why don't you ask, why don't you go down the hallway and ask someone that's you know uh below you or in a less experienced role, what do you like about working here? What do you not like about working here? What would make your job easier and what do you think that that could be done to improve the company as a whole, right? Start having these conversations, start connecting with people. Um, again, I feel that stability is created through connections and conversations. So just start having conversations, all right? What else? Um, smaller companies, a lot of uh engineers wear many different hats. They're not pigeonholed as just a drilling engineer, just production engineer. They're often uh wearing different hats on whether it's regulatory, EHS, HSC, whatever you want to call it. So there's a lot of different roles. So, what does that mean? So that means they might be more experienced to maybe get out of the, if let's say things happen in their current uh career, they might be able to take on different disciplines than previous before. But if you're stuck doing just a drilling engineer or just a completions engineer, or just this, just that, chances are your opportunities uh to get outside your discipline is gonna be a lot more slim. So go down the hall. Ask what they're working on. Learn more about kind of other people's disciplines and why they do what they do. All right. Another thing that was brought up was the experience gap. Exec Crew, hey, if you're a man out there, if you're a man that's in a leadership position and you're tired of walking alone, this is Minor Plug, head over to Exec Crew on our school community, free to join, two monthly calls, quick coaching uh lessons, and put a community of men who want to come together, lead, share, get vulnerable, and be themselves. Quick plug as I'm having coffee. Now back to the story. All right, so the experience gap. This whole great crew change has been talked about since when I got in this industry about 20 years ago. All right. It's a constant thing, all right? As you know, experienced people leave, there's a gap in knowledge, gap in this. However, something at the table is brought up, and I've often thought about this too and discussed this as well, is that as experienced people leave, people are thinking, hey, well, we have AI here. You know, we have AI, all this information is loaded to AI. We can just kind of lean on AI to kind of fill that uh fill that gap of experience. I would be very cautious about that, because number one, you need experience to understand if AI is putting out random crap. Number one. Number two, you have to have experience, these people that have just been on the break, that have been out there, that have been in the field, or been in the office and have just worked their way, because they might not have these documents that are plugged into AI. They might not have these white papers or all these SPE papers plugged into their AI system. Again, that's through conversation, that's just through being there. So again, go down the hallway, ping a mentor, get a mentor, start talking to them, start learning about kind of like their experience and what they see and what they and how to respond and react in certain situations. All right. So being over-reliant on AI can be dangerous for you and your team. Another thing that was brought up briefly is asset integrity. As costs and capital and and you know, keeping keeping costs low is crucial to a lot of teams. This asset integrity, some people are around the table are talking about, hey, listen, some uh facilities, for example, they're not built for to last 20 to 30 years like they should be. Instead, we're cutting costs, we're going low on you know the metals, the alloys, and all that stuff. So it kind of leads to potential uh catastrophe, safety issues, uh regulatory issues, um, emissions issues. So if you are building your infrastructure in place, or you're you're building out your assets and all that stuff, ensure that you're actually building over uh quality, not speed or cost or anything like that. Of course, cost is king, but again, I'm tired of having the cost conversation. All right, moving on to section two, operator-vendor relationships. This is kind of what I dig. This has been my platform, is we need to have better collaborative conversations. Not the industry buzzwords that we always hear, it's like, oh, we're a collab, we're a partner, you know, we're we want to partner, we want to collab, we want to do this and all that stuff. Listen, operators are guilty of this, service companies are guilty of this. We say collaboration when it's convenient. We say collaboration because it sounds good, right? You'd rather have a collaborative partnership with a service provider than just view them as a vendor, right? So again, moving away from the collaborative buzzwords and what does this actually mean? What does it actually mean moving forward? All right, and again, these price-driven relationships, these transactional conversations are going away, all right, because conversations, collaborations, small wins, small gains, working on everything together, alignment that builds trust, right? That builds efficiencies and that builds excellence, okay? So if you are an operator, if you are a service company, just like we talked about with the microgrids, you need to start having conversations at the beginning of your projects, right? And not only that, so we talked about trust and collaboration a lot, and we talked about aligning incentives, but think about this. There's a lot of crew club roundtables we have, and then you know, operators just saying, hey, this is what I want to do. This is what I want to do, this is what I want to do, which is fantastic. Absolutely. Again, I feel like the dumbest person at the table, I'm always surrounded by very, very smart, intelligent people. But one thing I'll pose is are you bringing in the subject matter experts of the service companies and getting their ideas? Service companies, they work multiple different basins, multiple different operators. They see a lot of stuff. They wake up, eat, breathe, and live what they do, what they provide. So leaning on your service companies a little bit and asking them questions. Hey, what would you do here? What have you seen that works in this environment? What have you seen that works there? What would you do if this was your well, right? And start having those conversations throughout the entire project. All right. True collaboration, I have my notes right here. True collaboration involves bringing service providers in early. We just talked about that, leveraging their expertise. We just talked about that, and building trust through structured, repeatable processes. Okay. Um, yeah, one I talked about the 40% uh of operators choosing everything on low cost, and the 70% of operators that make those decisions coming back to the table and paying more because of those decisions. So again, really understanding alignment. And at the end of the day, you have to think about this. And I think I talked to this with teams that I sell, that that I train in sales, and I talk about this with operators as well. Operators, you're not buying the cheapest car seat for your family, you're not buying the cheapest shoes for your hikes, right? You're not doing, you're not buying the cheapest uh diapers for your baby. But yet when you go to work, you view price as the the decision maker, right? Think about that, right? You pay for what you get. Service providers, you hate people selling to you, you hate getting pitched to, you hate uh you hate pitching, you hate, you hate when people come to you and sell to you. But why when you step into your role as a professional, it's okay to start having the pitching conversations. It's okay to start having the pitching conversations before you really even know what this operator is going through or what their challenge points are, or if you can fix a problem that they had. So again, slow down and think as a salesperson, what kind of conversations you really want to have and start having those. As an operator, what are you really making your decision on? Yes, price is a very easy thing to dismiss people, get them out of your office, but at the same time, making decisions based on price is really not, I don't think it's really uh reflective of the reality of why you make decisions. All right. Uh, one six one example of a successful uh collaboration. We had this with uh Gavin Fluke up in uh Fort Worth. Um he had a great, great example of collaboration. What happened? He called the service companies and brought them in at the beginning, showed them what he wanted to do, why he wanted to do it. Next thing you know, it was a fantastic, beautifully well-oiled machine from the start of the project to the end. And it was a huge success. And he relates that on his relationship and his ability to collaborate, bringing service providers in and asking them their expertise. All right. Good execution requires collaboration across all disciplines, all right, including vendors and leadership. And this is the key thing. Leadership needs to be involved in collaboration. They need to empower their teams to have these conversations. They need to empower their teams that, hey, get outside opinion, right? Talk to other operators, talk to the service company, talk to this person who's known in this industry for the specific task, right? So leadership really should be promoting these conversations and promoting this collaborative um environment. All right. Aligning incentives. We're still over here. We're still in operator vendor relationships. Aligning incentives, all right? It's possible to achieve excellence if service companies are brought in and incentives are aligned at the start of the project. All right. Um, let me see. Okay, uh yeah, this is what we talk about. This is interesting. I don't know much about this, so I'm gonna I'm actually just gonna read this, all right? Um one company at the table brought up that the idea for service providers to have some skin in the game, right, where they actually invest in the well uh to get part of it. But that's also met with a little hesitation, right? So we're talking about who's taking on the risk. Um this has a this has proven difficult to implement due to capital structures and risk sharing. An experiment where service provider was asked to fund about 20% of the uh of a well was met with a lot of hesitation, okay? So I don't know the point of all the, I don't have any thoughts about this. I'm just communicating what was said around the table. All right. A tiered return structure where partners taking on earlier risk, received higher potential returns, was also attempted, but again, not fully successful. Just because something wasn't successful that we tried, or people have tried before, teams have tried before, that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be tried again. All right, or refined and processed. I'll the details out, okay? Because again, a lot of smart people in this industry, we could figure a way out to align incentives where everything works out for the best. All right. Um, one other thing when it comes to the operator-vendor uh relationships, using a single integrated service provider was mentioned as a way to eliminate blame shifting between different vendors. No one likes blame shifted, extreme ownership, own it, own the job, own the own the failures, and learn the lessons learned. All right. Quick coffee, quick coffee break. All right. Then where do we shift to? We shifted over here. AI and business. Of course, we're gonna bring up our AI around the table. And one thing that we all talk about is listen, we have this broad blanket of AI can do this, AI is here, AI is taking jobs, AI is changing jobs, AI is making everything more efficient. Okay, cool. How, right? What how is it using it? What are people using it for, right? And it's very interesting to be around the table and you hear from smaller private operators to independents to super majors on how they're utilizing AI and what AI they're using, right? ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Grok, or is it stuff built in-house or third-party stuff? So again, what so the question was like, hey, listen, I know AI is a hot topic, everyone's talking about it. What are you actually using it for? And I thought this was so cool. So we had some people at the table that were, you know, seven, five to seven years in their career, and they were using it to like write code and doing stuff. Then you had one uh person who's about fit, you know, 10, 15 years in his career, and he was using it to kind of like compare different vendors uh on you know, key KPIs and actually what which vendor was actually true to performance, which wasn't, kind of ranking vendors, right? And you had one company who just started kind of just kind of dipping their toes in the water when it comes to AI. So they're really using utilizing it for like uh contracts and MSAs and things like that. But the thing is, it's not even, but the thing is, so everybody is using AI in different um tangents for or different for different reasons for their job, right? Whether it's reviewing contracts, whether it's reviewing uh vendors, whether it's writing code. But the thing is though, people need to communicate. Again, this goes to you. Hey, if you're curious about AI, you feel lost in the bubble, it's moving faster than we all know. Just pick up the phone, call one of your contacts and say, hey, listen, what are you using AI for right now? And just have these conversations. It may dawn on you to utilize it for something that you have. You may be able to share something that you've heard about or seen or you're actually you're implementing. But again, having these conversations on what are you using AI for? What are you seeing it actually at value, right? Um teams are using tools like Perplexity and Microsoft uh Copilot, with some companies uh using uh, you know, making making their employees utilize AI. Hey, if you don't utilize AI, then you're not doing your job. While some other companies are saying, we don't want you using AI. You don't want we don't want our stuff dumped in the void. So again, it's a culture thing, it's a leadership thing. What are your leaders telling you when it comes to AI? What do you agree with? What do you disagree with? Regardless, these conversations need to happen of what people are actually utilizing AI for. All right. So uh cost vendor, uh cost and vendor management, uh analyzing frack uh vendor NPT, comparing frack bids, and automating a cost uh reconciliation between uh internal estimates and vendor tickets, right? And it does it like that. All right. Another thing people use them for is process uh efficiency, reducing you know legal bills by running contracts through AI, speeding up coding tasks, generating executive summaries, and improving professional emails. All right. The third thing is data analytics. Using Copilot uh in Excel to analyze data such as identifying top vendors or summarizing daily cost reports has been beneficial. All right. Where are we at now? Okay, now we're at kind of uh limit limitations and breath best practice limitations and best practices of AI in business. All right. So, number one, when it comes to limitations, don't trust AI right now. It's 2025, and I'm sure in a couple years we can all trust AI. However, human oversight is crucial when it comes to AI. Um, I don't care if it's uh it's not that I don't care. There was a gentleman there that was talking, you know, he's been his uh his career about five to seven years, and he was talking about it. He's like, I could easily take what uh AI said and just kind of plug it and go, but I understand what it's giving me, what information is giving me, and I know from my experience, again, experience, if it's right or if it's wrong, or if something's off. So again, having that human oversight is crucial and not just trusting the output of AI. So you kind of need to know, you kind of need to have experience before you actually utilize AI. All right. Prompt engineering, all right. The quality of AI output depends heavily on quality of the input. So prompt hygiene, as we call it. All right, effective prompts can be pages long, specifying persona, thought processes, and formats. So you're seeing some companies now that are recruiting out of college uh students with AI prompt experience, AI prompt engineers, right? So if you are younger in this industry or if you're older in this industry, start leaning in on this AI prompting and actually how to actually use it for you versus going in blind. All right. And now here's kind of the current state. AI is currently seen as a task-specific tool. It's a steroids, as somebody called it, it's a steroids for talent. These general AI models that are here to fix everything, these blanket approaches. I don't think it's up to speed yet. At least that's conversations around the tables. So these are very task-specific use cases for AI. All right. Um, it's putting your employees on steroids that enhance in existing skills by speeding up analysis and comparison, but is not yet fully trusted and requires human verification. Again, you need to know what you're looking for. All right. Uh uh one example was this one uh person at the table uh wanted to utilize AI to make a map, right? To make a map of whatever their location, and it spit out this cartoon looking like Viking treasure map. All right, it was it was humorous, it did the job, but again, that's the whole prompting thing, right? So do we want to look like a Viking map or actual a professional map? All right, now wrapping this up, we talked about, okay, future success and growth. What does this look like for companies? We talked about this. Collaboration, no more bottom of the barrel, low-cost vendor selection, right? You have to look past that and really, really get ingrained with who you're utilizing, service and operators, right? So better collaboration, all right? Leadership. Leadership has to shine during times like this, right? To keep morale up, to keep the culture going, to ensure that your team's skill sets are staying sharp, all right, or you're building on them, okay? So leadership in times like this, you have to have a feeling that your leaders, that your management want to see you grow, want to see you stick around, want to have, want to have you have pride in that company, right? So leaders investing in their people is now more crucial than ever, all right? Strategy and creativity, all right? A focused strategy, patience, and creative solution for finance and identifying opportunities. So for companies, you can't go on your book of business. Well, it's a bust right now. Let's just low cost everything, low price. We've done that game. That's not really a strategy to grow, okay? That's a strategy to kind of keep that runway going. But again, I did a podcast. Um, my other podcast is called Lead with Confidence Podcast. And I talked about how not to turn your customers into junkies by always offering that low cost, a little bit, that hit of that low cost, right? So, what is your strategy? What does that really look like in a flat year? Some companies are telling their sales teams to go out there, get new customers, sell more. How are you gonna do that in a flat market with the same activity, with MAs going on? Is that really a strategy or the message that you want to commute communicate to your team? Okay, all right. That's like going outside when it's pouring out during a hurricane without an umbrella saying don't get wet. All right. I don't know if that was a good example, but go with me here. All right. Now for individuals, we talked about what is it gonna be for individuals to be successful in this market? Number one, some key traits are you have to be creative, okay? AI is here to make faster decision makers, so you have to be creative when it comes to, hey, how are we approaching this operation? How are we approaching this project? Is there something we can do to make this more efficient? Okay. Curiosity, stay curious about things, think about things, put different lenses on. Stay curious. And uh one person, a Fred Miller, said we have to be considerate. We have to be considerate of other people's challenges, other people's uh progress, where they're at. So we have to be considerate of the people on the other side of the table as well as we navigate through 2026. All right. And also, we have to be have continuous an appetite for learning, for learning new things, whether it's AI, whether it's technology, automation, we have to have this appetite to always learn, right? Development. Development has been brought up so many times, but what's so shocking, frustrating, it's frustrating for me because I coach, train, and work with teams about this. People are not investing in their team. You know, people say from salespeople, right? Oh, well, sales, uh, he's got the gift of gab. He can go out there and do it. Oh, he's good at you know, BS and oh, that's that's enough. The sales process, the sales cycle, and how People interact has drastically changed. If you're not investing in your people to get the best, and listen, I'm not saying new skills, just sharpen their skills, right? Give them sharpened tools for their toolbox. All right. Always invest your employee. If you're an engineer, what other certs can you get? Are you going out there and building your network? I'm seeing a lot of stuff on LinkedIn right now. There's a lot of people that have been let go and they make a post, hey, 12 and a half years here, now looking for a job. Start building your networks if you're an operator or an engineer out there, because through volatile times, your network will create stability. And I've talked about this through multiple podcasts previously. All right. I love Michael Irrispe. He brought this up. He he said, listen, what about your health? You know, like we live in this. He said, Do I have it here? No, I didn't. He says our industry is so good at normalizing high stress. We're so good at normalizing living with high stress. So what are you doing for yourself to release that? Healthy things, right? Not getting in a bottle, not doing drugs, nothing like that. What are you doing for yourself? Um healthy, right? Are you taking up new hobbies? Are you exercising? Are you getting your blood work done, right? I mean, I may be guilty of a couple of these things, right? Like I probably should be making doctor's appointments, or I will, but how are you taking care of yourself during these times like this? It's stressful, it's negative, a lot of you know, fear out there, a lot of people not really communicating. So you really do need to take care of yourself, all right? Prioritize yourself and your health uh to manage all this industry stress. So that's kind of the summary of what we talked around the table. Thank you for joining me and listening to me kind of ramble about all this stuff. One thing that I see, the couple things that I see to kind of summarize this is number one, you have to get better at connecting with people. All right. Our networks need to be more robust, not just with who we're trying to get in front of, not just with our target, but people throughout a lot of disciplines. Number two, we have to get better at communicating, right? If you're a salesperson, you need to learn how to actually communicate your values so you don't sound like your competition. You need to get up there and give a presentation that people want to listen to you and want to invite you back to the office, okay? As a uh as an engineer, uh you need to be able to communicate up, manage up to your supervisors if you want to go in a new direction. You need to learn these skills on actually how to manage up. As a leader, you need to learn skill sets on how to communicate to your team, you know, and grow them and inspire them, right? And keep the culture positive. And that's through communication. And for teams, operators, and service companies, collaboration, not a buzzword. Put down some KPIs, put down some alignment, uh, some uh alignment of incentives. Start having conversations, start reaching across the table and saying, what would you do in this situation? How would you go about this task? And just listen to ideas, be creative, be considerate, be collaborative. That's all I have right now. Uh, I want to thank everyone out there uh for tuning into Energy Crew Podcast. Again, this was a recap from the Crew Club Operator Roundtable uh discussion that we had. If you're interested, if you're a service company interested in joining the crew club operator roundtables, we have two passes left and we have two seasons, one running from January till June, and the next one running from August until December. All right, we have about 10 events and about 120 to 130 EMP operators at our events throughout the season. So what's 220 uh throughout the year? 60% are directors or both. Great way to connect. And if you're an operator out there looking to expand your networks without the solicitation, without the crowded conference room floors or anything like that, go to connectioncrew.com. That's connection crew, cru.com. Register to begin getting uh information about uh crew club roundtables. I want to thank everyone out there. Be positive, take care of yourself, do kind, be considerate, and courteous to others because it's gonna be a flat year. But one thing I know, this industry is resilient and we got this.