| Ashton Oil Field Services: Strength in Culture |
| Exploration & Processing | |
| Written by Meghan Flynn | |
| Wednesday, 30 June 2010 | |
 The exciting combination of passion and talent is resulting in great opportunities for this new oil and gas drilling contractor, despite the challenging market. “We were able to bring on board highly skilled, key personnel that, in a good market, wouldn’t have looked twice at us,” Riggs said. “And I know without good people, all the technology or funding in the world won’t make a company successful.  Scott Riggs, CEO “I decided it was time, so in 2006 I filed articles of incorporation and started following my vision to build a company that would provide unparalleled service and quality to its customers,” he said. Ashton, owned by the Ashton Energy Group, will start digging its first rig in June in the Permian Basin. Riggs mentioned Ashton’s CFO, Darrell Parlee, and executive vice president Steve Manderfeld, shared his vision and spent hours meeting in his home office over the last three years, drawing up plans for the company. The company opened an office in Pennsylvania but decided early this year to focus its first efforts in the Southwest. Since then, Ashton’s started operations in New Mexico, led by chief business development officer Dominic Herrald and David Lawrence, president. Today, Riggs and his team are focused on creating a culture of safety, caring, and passion that will see the company through whatever future challenges lay ahead. “We are just starting out and all of us, with more than 100 years of executive management experience, have this opportunity to lead a company the way we’ve always wanted to; the way we feel a drilling company should be managed,” Riggs said. “Ultimately, people are creatures of habit, so it’s best to establish these principles up front.” He explained that his goals for the Ashton culture boil down to two concepts. First is the fact that a person spends more time with his coworkers than anyone else in his or her life and ought to treat people accordingly; he said he’d like it if everyone treated each other like it was their birthday every day. Secondly, he referenced Tom Peters’ philosophy that businesses, as a rule of thumb, must involve everyone in everything. Riggs said keeping people involved and working together is the best way to generate innovative ideas and grow a company. Strong values He said when he and his team talk about values, they emphasize safety, caring, and accountability. “I don’t point fingers, because whenever I think someone else made a mistake, there is a way I’m also responsible for that outcome: maybe I didn’t communicate my expectations effectively enough, or didn’t provide enough resources. That’s the attitude I expect from the people here as well,” Riggs explained. As for caring, he said he always makes a point to ask about his co-workers families and home life, and he emphasizes the importance of positive reinforcement in the work place. And Riggs said safety should, of course, be the most important value of any drilling company, since the work they do is dangerous and demanding. But that too stems from genuinely caring for employees and co-workers. Currently, Ashton is working with a world-class safety consulting firm with fully licensed trainers and a wide variety of services, and that is helping the company build up its own safety department. In the meantime, Riggs and his team will be visiting the Permian Basin rig, and all of the company’s rigs, on a regular basis, asking employees to look out for each other and everyone to play a leadership role in making sure everyone gets home safely each night. Strong communication The challenge, however, is in establishing these values through good habits and creating concrete processes that perpetuate them. Riggs said that’s why Ashton will have a clear management structure and firm practices in place from the beginning, but more importantly, will also emphasize the importance of communication. “If everyone understands these values in the first place, then its easier to follow the process we’ll lay out, but its also possible to change them as we go without sacrificing our principles or losing our way,” he said. That’s why he and Lawrence met with each of the 13 employees Ashton hired for its first drilling contract in the Southwest and emphasized to them that, in order to maintain the culture they hope to create as the company grows, Ashton will need to support its employees and build from within. And that, Riggs said, is the best way to build a truly successful company. His advice for companies looking to establish this culture in their own business is to pay that same level of personal attention to employees; to ask about their lives outside of work, communicate to them that you appreciate their hard work, and celebrate their successes. Communication, he said, breeds passion for their job and a loyalty to the company. “When you have loyal, passionate, and skilled people, expect a masterpiece,” he said. |
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