YMC Royalty Company LP

Decision-making in uncertain times

My first decision to enter the oil and gas business came with a lot of uncertainty! On a bright summer day in 1979, I got a call from my brother Aziz. I was in Edmonton, Canada living a middle-class Canadian life with a secure government job and a few side hustles. Aziz asked if I could go to Kansas in America and try to buy oil leases there and he had mentioned the same opportunity to another family member.

I jumped at the opportunity without thinking twice. I packed my bags, took vacation time off from my job, made a calculated risk and left to join an oilfield industry without any prior knowledge or education. I was hungry and eager for a better life and my decision-making came with an inbuilt confidence that I could do this despite the odds.

However, the other family member told Aziz that he had to pray and needed divine intervention to make a decision. My decision to go to America didn’t come easy but it became a pivotal point in my life as an entrepreneur.

Leaders must make quick decisions. Sometimes they are spur of the moment decisions, otherwise they need to be thoughtful and analytical. Your coworkers look upon you to make decisions especially in uncertain times like these.

I’ve been challenged to make quick decisions and thoughtful ones in my business on a daily basis. Just recently I had to make a major decision whether to drill wells on a large leasehold that we operate in Texas with short deadline. Here, I chose the thoughtful, analytical route. I hired an independent Texas geophysicist consultant to give me his assessment and he gave the green light. I then hired another independent consultant and cross-checked his report and finally made the decision to go ahead. In instances like these, going with the experts’ advice is the correct way, and trusting people with knowledge is a proper way to handle such a task. Here, you have to make thoughtful decisions especially in uncertain times when you are dealing with a volatile oil market.

In the mid-eighties, I decided to move my operations from Wichita, Kansas to Houston. I was apprehensive as I had fallen in love with the sunshine in Los Angeles and had owned an oilfield in Bakersfield, CA. Moreover, my first visit to Houston was a disaster as it was muggy and terrible. However, I knew I could interact more with large energy banks in Houston than in other parts of the country. I made the decision to move to Houston in 1985. This decision came with extended thinking, calculated risks and a study of future opportunities.

As a leader, you must communicate clearly during your decision-making process. For example, always make sure that your engineers and field workers communicate well with each other. I’ve had experiences where miscommunication between engineers and field workers have caused a well to be drilled at a wrong location incurring a tremendous waste of money and resources.

In uncertain times, it’s easy for us to sit idle and follow a world that says, “everything is uncertain, it’s a global phenomenon.” Like other businesses in our country, my oil and gas and real estate businesses have been affected by Covid-19 which has caused low oil prices and economic uncertainty. But I am making more decisions each day than I was making a few months earlier. I’ve moved from my semi-retired workday of 4 hours to working over 10 hours daily . I don’t brood over uncertainty. I am focusing on what’s certain and taking decisions that will help me and the people around me.

I look at the cause and issue at hand and make decisions as a leader telling my operations crew about what we can actually accomplish now with what we know. A leader must make decisions and not sit idle siding with the collective thoughts of the world, instead, he should act with what he has available.

This is the right time to add value to your business and to be creative. For example, If you own a donut shop, transform the way you deliver donuts by offering drive through service, send free delivery donuts to your most loyal customers and treat them with empathy.

Remember, some of them are going through hard times as well. This is not the time to be self-centered, instead, be collaborative. If your business is hurting, discuss the issues face to face with your vendors, landlords, so forth, negotiate mutually beneficial terms in your contracts and leases, pay the lease rental as a percentage of your gross income because of the current losses until the economy gets better. Look at creative ways to spread the message that you are open for business and that you are still the best, the most affordable and the cleanest donut shop in town!

In these challenging and uncertain times, make decisions that add value to your business. Don’t sit idle listening to a world filled with stories of gloom and doom. Be consistent, persistent and positive!

Find out more about me in my best -selling book “From dirt roads to black gold.” Note that 100 percent of the proceeds from the sale of this book will help people in need through my foundation, the YBC Foundation.

Disclaimer:
The views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not represent the opinions of any entity whatsoever with which I have been , am now or will be affiliated.
The author does not warrant or make any representations concerning the accuracy, likely results, or reliability of the use of the materials on its website or otherwise relating to such materials or on any sites linked to this site. The author makes no warranties, expressed or implied, and hereby disclaims and negates all warranties including, without limitation, implied warranties or conditions of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement of intellectual property or other violation of rights.

Consistency + Discipline = Success

Consistency plus discipline equals success.

Consistency has helped me in my personal and business life, and I value it as the number one trait for success. In the sixties as a teenager in Pakistan, I used to bike ride around 5 miles every day from a small town we lived into a neighboring village where I was born. My father owned land there where we obtained daily fresh buffalo milk. Often, I had to milk the buffalo, carry around five liters of milk in a big pail and bring it home. In my early teenage years, my father had delegated this job to me, and I could not get out of it. Very soon, it became my consistent practice.

Later, I learned a few other consistent practices during my Army time, like waking up early, exercising, practicing good hygiene and table manners. When I first moved to Canada, I took on multiple jobs like selling pots and pans, driving a cab, selling used cars, working as a security guard and a maintenance technician. During that time, I consistently stayed on various schedules and delivered on every job I accepted.

Looking back, the consistent practice of milking a buffalo and biking five miles a day has helped me later in life. I enjoyed being consistent in my early years and would quote that “Everything is possible to achieve in this world, but it requires consistent efforts.”

I developed this habit of “Consistency” to a greater extent after I started building my businesses. When I started my first oil and gas business in a side room at my garage in Chanute, Kansas, I would wake up at the crack of dawn and be ready for my coworkers to arrive at 7 am. I continued to stick with this routine as we grew from a two-worker firm to a much larger firm a few years later and I still stay with the same practice. I wanted to show my co-workers the wise use of time and consistency are very good practices. If I, as a leader, I didn’t follow these practices, how could I expect my co-workers to follow me?

“If I can do it, you can do it too” was my mantra.

Being consistent is tricky. You need to condition both your brain and your heart to allow them to be in harmony to make coordinated and consistently right decisions. Otherwise, it can pull you away in a different direction!

Today, we hear the term disruptive quite a lot. We have disruptive leaders, disruptive technology and people have fallen so much in love with this word. I’ve had disruptions in my business and life several times, but consistency has always overpowered disruptions. Just before I moved from my family and businesses from Wichita to Houston in 1985, oil prices fell to $8 a barrel. This was totally disruptive for my personal and business life. So, instead of panicking and disrupting anything, I took positive consistent steps. I was consistent during that time and thought through to hedge the volatility of oil markets. I started closely watching all my costs, added some real estate portfolio and it paid off well.

I believe that anyone with a consistent work ethic along with a long-term goal will always outperform a disruptive leader who looks for short-term results.

Here are a few tips to be consistent:

1. Consistency + discipline = success
2. You need to work hard and be self-motivated to consistently do work that adds value
3. Humility and steadfastness are key traits you need to build a consistent work ethic
4. Fairness and respect for others is important to maintain as you build consistency
5. Consistency requires patience, rigor and discipline. It won’t happen overnight!

Has consistency helped you in life? I’d like to hear your stories!

Find out more about me in my best -selling book “From dirt roads to black gold.” Note that 100 percent of the proceeds from the sale of this book will help people in need through my foundation, the YBC Foundation.

Disclaimer:
The views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not represent the opinions of any entity whatsoever with which I have been , am now or will be affiliated.
The author does not warrant or make any representations concerning the accuracy, likely results, or reliability of the use of the materials on its website or otherwise relating to such materials or on any sites linked to this site. The author makes no warranties, expressed or implied, and hereby disclaims and negates all warranties including, without limitation, implied warranties or conditions of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement of intellectual property or other violation of rights.

Workaholic! Why I am not.

Are you a workaholic? People have often asked me, and my simple answer is No! A workaholic is a person who is deeply addicted to work. Since most of us are now at home either working or thinking of work, I would like to explain why I am not a workaholic:

1. Consistent work ethic: For the past 4 decades, I was consistently the first person to be at work and the last one to leave. This valuable habit developed at an early age. I was a young trainee officer in the Army and that forcefully taught me self-discipline. For example, the daily discipline to wake up at around 5 am even if I didn’t like it. This has stayed with me and I still do it to this day.

2. Rigor: I followed the rigor of having a dawn to dusk schedule most of my life before the unfortunate illness of my wife. I would be at work at around 6 am and leave at around 7 pm. The long daylight hours in summer increased my productivity allowing me to inspect wells at oil and gas fields, talk to pumpers, get back to work and do other daily office tasks. On Saturdays, I worked half days with a skeletal crew, and this gave us time to analyze our work during the current week and to be ready, (preplan and make projections) for the upcoming week. We did a lot of problem solving together during after hours and on weekends.

3. Freedom to work from anywhere, anytime: I did not make it mandatory for co-workers to stay with me from dawn to dusk. Since I was mostly the last one staying, I would encourage co-workers to go back to their families especially if they were married with kids and generously allowed telecommuting before the word became fashionable!  However, most coworkers followed my work habits.

4. Multitasking: Fortunately, I feel that I have the God-given gift of being a good multitasker. My view is contrary to the principles in the book, Deep Work by Cal Newport, that encourages people to stay focused on just one task in a highly distracted world. I personally can handle, manage and delegate a legal question, talk to my field guys, address engineering questions, address well production issues, monitor costs, respond to an accounting question, solve another issue simultaneously, and so forth. I try hard to research the tasks and issues at hand and try to find quick, simple, ingenious ways to solve them. You may call it multitasking but for me it was a deep passion for work and a mastery of skills that took me several years to accomplish.

5. Work smart and take risks: My passion for work allowed me to work smart and take calculated risks throughout my life. If I had been just a workaholic, I would have ended up working long hours with nothing or little to show for at the end of the day.

6. Create the right environment: I was fortunate that my wife was on board with this, which is very important.  You need to manage those who nag you about focusing more on domestic chores and not work harder and consistently. Our family worked as a unit understanding that I was the breadwinner, had to earn money, pay all of the bills, and educate children, who knew I was deeply passionate about my work. So, create in your homes a good happy balanced unit that moves positively in harmony.

7. Work-life balance: My young grandchildren ask me: “Papa, why do you still work?” I am semi-retired, close to 70 and honestly, I don’t need to work. But I still do more work than most youngsters today and I am not a workaholic. I had traveled around the world with my wife, kids and grandkids. I spend my leisure time wisely and I balance my work, home and general life. In fact, I really raised my 2 younger children and continued to be involved in their lives until they were both happily married.

8. Always be available: I dislike “out of office” reminders sent from people saying that they are “unavailable.” I don’t even understand this concept for anyone in business.  In a deeply connected world, I do not understand how you can fake being unavailable! I am always available to all of my staff and family on a 24/7 basis and I’ve never felt it uncomfortable responding to them in a timely manner, wherever I am.

Now, you may wonder why I am not a workaholic! I have had a great work-life which was balanced with my home life. Together, my wife and I raised four children who are all well-settled. I did all of this and without being a workaholic and I believe you can do it too!

Find out more about me in my best -selling book “From dirt roads to black gold.” Note that 100 percent of the proceeds from the sale of this book will help people in need through my foundation, the YBC Foundation.

Disclaimer:

The views, thoughts and opinions  expressed in this article are my own and do not represent the opinions of any entity whatsoever with which I have been , am now or will be affiliated.

The author does not warrant or make any representations concerning the accuracy, likely results, or reliability of the use of the materials on its website or otherwise relating to such materials or on any sites linked to this site. The author makes no warranties, expressed or implied, and hereby disclaims and negates all warranties including, without limitation, implied warranties or conditions of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement of intellectual property or other violation of rights.