From Field Engineer to Energy Trading: Five Things That Took 25 Years and Five Continents to Learn

Nobody plans a career like mine. You survive it, and then you look back and pretend there was a strategy.

I started on drilling rigs in Brazil. I ended up running a country operation for one of the world’s largest oilfield services companies — $350 million in revenue, teams spread across multiple basins, and a phone that never stopped ringing. Then I walked away from the corporate structure entirely to build two businesses from scratch: a consulting firm and an energy brokerage.

Along the way, I worked on five continents. Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Europe, and bits of Asia. I’ve reported to people who were brilliant, and to people whose primary skill was surviving reorganizations. I’ve hired hundreds, had bright people from Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and Oxford on my teams, fired more than I’d like to remember, and learned that the best talent often sits in places where nobody bothers to look.

Here are five things I know now that I wish someone had told me at the begin…