As some of you are aware, I acquired Smart Chemical’s Completion and Water business unit, now called Refined Completions, this year. It’s been such a journey, and I’ve had the opportunity to put many of the lessons I’ve learned into practice. You see, we were scheduled to close in January, but it didn’t actually happen until May of this year.
I’m not going to say it was easy to wait, but I can say that I was significantly more patient than I would have been in the past. Even though we were in a hurry to get this done, and make it happen, we took time to get clarity around the contract and agreements between Smart and Refined Completions.
There were some roadblocks along the way that we didn’t anticipate and if we hadn’t been intentional about it, the consequences of rushing through would have been catastrophic, both financially and emotionally.
The biggest lesson I learned was that when things don’t go the way you want them to, you have two choices: The first is to force your way through it and make it happen. I spent 39 years of my professional life doing just that, and the consequences were revealed in Refined by Failure. Or secondly, you can stop and ask, What am I missing or What do I need to learn?
This was the first experience in my professional life where anytime there was an obstacle or a pause, my mindset was that I would trust God, believing He had the best intentions for me, and I would focus on understanding what He was revealing.
Looking back at every turn, it was protection. In September of 2023 we were going to buy the whole company, and it turned out that the financial partner was someone we shouldn’t have been doing business with. They were the wrong choice, and that door closed.
I was going to go from one bad partnership to one that would have been an order of magnitude worse. We would have been $51 million in debt and owned only 40% of the company. Because of the pause, we now own 100% of the company and our debt is $31 million less than it would have been.
The entire process was very slow, and we had to work through so many things. My working frustration is Tenacity, and closing this deal took a great deal of tenacity. Thankfully because of Working Genius, I understood when I was drained and grouchy and more importantly, my wife understood. But there were also times when I was energized during that process because instead of focusing on needing to be tenacious, my focus was on what God wanted versus what I wanted.
I just now realized that I had unintentionally spent my life continuously putting myself in my working frustration by always forcing my will over His will.
Now that we’re getting Refined Completions off the ground, I realize that I didn’t have a good enough plan in place to communicate WHY we acquired the company. I haven’t done a good job of communicating our WHY and our vision to my team members and now we’re catching up.
We’ve definitely had moments of good communication, and because I know each of my team members’ Working Geniuses and am committed to a culture of teamwork and authenticity, it will be so much easier to get everyone on track than it would be if I was shooting in the dark.
Using Working Genius in conjunction with Who Not How, we can structure our team in a way where people working together can use their geniuses to support their team members’ frustrations. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle: each person is one part of the whole and if you know where to put them, you can create something amazing.
Comments