A large percentage of our clients are in the Oil & Gas industry and for them, times are tight. With the industry plagued with layoffs, stalled/cancelled projects, and few new projects most are struggling to stay afloat.

There are some exceptions, however. These exceptional companies are still alive, some are turning profits, and they are positioned to dominate when the industry turns around.

Can your company be the exception?

To be an exception in these economic conditions, you need 3 things:

Understand clients

Understand your capacity

Organization

Understanding clients (AKA the hand that feeds you) is vitally important when contracts and projects are hard to come by. If your company fails to deliver quality equipment and services in a timely manner or stick to a budget, there are hundreds of other hungry companies that can and will take your place at the table.

The companies that we see at the tables right now that are well positioned to remain are 100% client oriented. They know that project and asset owners are running lean and will not tolerate babysitting contractors. With this knowledge they are being self-managing and proactive. This means they report on progress and status well and deliver service and equipment as expected. This also means that data deliverables (reports, documentation, etc.) are delivered in concise, consumable packages to the appropriate people.

The bottom line here – be easy to manage and keep your seat at the table.

Understanding your capacity is key in these market conditions when many companies are running lean and money and teams are finite resources. With a lean team, the conventional wisdom is “make due with what we’ve got.” This means that engineers are doing document control, accountants are managing cost, project managers are doing procurement. This can work but it is terribly inefficient and exacerbates the lean conditions.

That is the conventional wisdom. The companies that are doing best are applying what we’ll call the prevailing wisdom. The prevailing wisdom is “There are a lot of really talented people that need work. Let’s put their expertise to work – even if it is only for a week.”

A good example of the prevailing wisdom is a client that has a few small maintenance contracts from previous work and a medium-sized contract (for them). They could have slugged the project through by sheer force of will or hired additional project staff to accommodate the additional workload. They exercised the prevailing wisdom and contracted engineering, project management, and document management support from their vendors on an as-needed basis. It was a win-win. They found scalable workers to adjust capacity to achieve the above objective of understanding what clients want and delivering it.

Organization seems like a less critical component of the project if business is slow and money is tight. Really, how much data and information do you need to manage if business is slow? The answer is more than you’d think.

What happens is one of a few scenarios. 1. Your business is running lean and not a lot is going on so your team organizes things in their mind. 2. Lean teams have to do more and spend effort on important things like keeping clients happy and managing capacity, so organization takes a back seat. 3 Organization was Carl’s job and he doesn’t work here anymore.

The point is that projects tend to get disorganized when you run lean and sooner or later a strong gust of wind blows your tent flap open and the clients see that you are disorganized. That is not good and can affect your seat at the table. A strong wind in this case can be missing a shipping date, failing an audit, or entering another boom period as many are forecasting for sometime in 2017.