THE CRUDE TRUTH Ep. 54 Jim Holmes, CEO at LFS Chemistry

Saving the environment while helping E&P companies produce more oil and gas. . . . Thank you to LFS Chemistry for helping to make that bridge. On this episode of THE CRUDE TRUTH, we visit with Jim about how he is a premier entrepreneur and building an environmental friendly chemical company in the oil and gas space. He understood the industry needed this change and his worldly experience has lead him to here. Listen to Jim to Jim share tips about being an entrepreneur and more importantly being a positive motivating leader.

Please reach out to Jim Holmes on Linkedin

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Highlights of the Podcast

THE CRUDE TRUTH Ep. 54 Jim Holmes, CEO at LFS Chemistry

Rey Treviño [00:00:00] Innovation. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. And that’s the crude truth in the oil and gas industry. We’re going to talk about that and cast them deep on this episode of The Crude Truth.

Rey Treviño [00:00:54] NAPE is a proud sponsor of the crude truth. Be sure to register for the NAPE Expo 2024 February 7th through the ninth at the George R Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas. Hurry and register today. NAPE where deals happen.

Rey Treviño [00:01:43] Well, good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon. Whatever time of day it is. Thank you, as always for tuning in to another episode of The Crude Truth. Today I bring on somebody that is just an innovator, as my little teaser said there in the opening. Somebody that is really blazing a trail, I should say, in the oil and gas industry, but also blazing a trail with the chemical side of things that we’re doing in the exploration and production. My guest today is Jim Holmes, Jim how are you?

Jim Holmes [00:02:12] I am wonderful. Thanks for having me.

Rey Treviño [00:02:14] Oh, man. Thank you for being here.

Jim Holmes [00:02:16] It’s exciting.

Rey Treviño [00:02:17] Well, I guess I’ve finally got you in. You know, you’ve been. We met through work. I do. A quick shout out to the connection crew.

Jim Holmes [00:02:26] Absolutely

Rey Treviño [00:02:26] Yeah. JP and a man. You did his podcast. So everybody get out there. Take a look at it. They’re on the 45th floor at the Petroleum Club for that one hour, whatever.

Jim Holmes [00:02:37] You spot.

Rey Treviño [00:02:38] It was a good spot. So.

Jim Holmes [00:02:39] But you have it going on here as well.

Rey Treviño [00:02:41] Oh, thank you. Thank you. But. Oh, but you guys, I mean, that was just a spot. So when I called you up and I was like, I want you to come be on the show. I said, I can’t compete with that view, but so much for coming in. And you actually have a plant here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, correct?

Jim Holmes [00:02:57] That is correct. Just just southwest of here towards Crescent, actually. In Crescent. Yeah. Beautiful facility, just over 60 acres. That’s a joint facility with integrity Biochem. Terry U biochemist parent company for for all of this chemistry it’s two wonderful facility just expanding it constantly and really excited to see what’s going to be coming out of there over the next few years.

Rey Treviño [00:03:20] Well, you know, I wanted you to come on to talk about your talk about LFS chemistry and also yourself, because you are an entrepreneur and the things that y’all are doing. Again, you’re blazing that trail. You all are truly you know, I know it was a hooking up, but y’all really are innovating, as we talked about in our little pre-production meeting, that it’s like, Hey, you know, we got to be considerably involved. So let’s talk about you just a little bit and how you’ve evolved to where you are today. We’re back.

Jim Holmes [00:03:48] Well, that’s a it’s an interesting and very long and deep story. And we’ll just talk about the peaks and not so many of the valleys. I got into oil and gas right out of high school essentially as semester, too, in the college was driving back trucks solar disposal for KI energy out of College Station Brian area and just have grown from there get to see chemistry firsthand not very exciting chemistry but we did see chemistry you know tank bottom cleaning and oil water separation and you know d moles and opportunities like that. And it really got to piqued my interest. Then by the time I was in my mid-twenties, started to look at venturing out on my own and got into non engineer background engineering for some offshore work and an all land environmental, and then had my first opportunity to really dive in and and start a company. So 20 2008 was really the first opportunity to get to get indirectly as an, as a ownership. And then three and a half years later, did it again. Then went to a big publicly traded chemical company, figured I would get some global expansion, some more knowledge and an understanding of of big business, if you will. And then in 2019 ventured off again and started office chemistry.

Rey Treviño [00:05:14] Okay.

Jim Holmes [00:05:15] So LFS has been a fantastic run so far. Nothing like starting a company eight or nine months before COVID hits. It shuts everything down. LFS really started his life as lightning fluid services. That’s where the LFS comes from. So it’s kind of a a little bit of a tribute to one of the founding founding partners, which is Will Starnes, who still owns Lightning Fluid Services today. So we started that under the umbrella of Lightning Fluid Services. Yeah, got it up and running and then just split it off into a separate business unit, mostly for for books and insurance and everything else. And that’s where we came up with the name LFS Chemistry to focus more specifically on chemistry. Yes. We didn’t want to create a name that was so locked into one specific area because we know my entire team is very well aware of how the chemistry world works. And it’s not it’s not tunnel vision. You’ve got to have big vision for chemistry. So here we are today. We recovered fully from from three or four months of almost no completions activity, which is where we started our business. And now we’re diversifying quite rapidly from that.

Rey Treviño [00:06:25] Well, you mentioned that that you guys started right before COVID and that you went through this phase. You know, how were you able to weather that storm during that time of cold?

Jim Holmes [00:06:38] So we we were fortunate that in July of 2019, we had our first bulk commercial sales of chemistry into the frack space. And we had just incredible growth going through the rest of that year from July through December really into January and February was incredible growth, actually almost a little bit nervous on the growth because sometimes growth, if it’s not managed correctly, could be a problem from a cash cash flow perspective. You know, I’m not a a wealthy deep pocket person, so I can’t just keep dumping money in.

Rey Treviño [00:07:11] Right.

Jim Holmes [00:07:11] Keep it afloat. But we had built up a nice nest egg going into that. We had some expansion plans which all got put on hold when COVID hit. And, you know, we fortunately no layoffs. No, we just weathered it. We took that opportunity to really focus on designing more chemistries.

Rey Treviño [00:07:28] Okay.

Jim Holmes [00:07:29] So instead of sitting around wondering what’s happening, we had a couple of really, really good guys every day just thinking about the next applications, the next chemistry, how can we utilize specific molecules to do things that we never intended?

Rey Treviño [00:07:43] You know, you talk about the next chemistry. And if we get to my next question is, okay, you mentioned again, another thing in our little pre-meeting was that, you know what, you sold a chemical to an Exxon Mobil or something like that. Next thing you know, you’ve got every other company out there always talking about the next great thing, this and that. So let’s talk about the chemistry side of this and how y’all are truly using innovation on a partner a daily basis and what you all see there and how you all use that to your advantage.

Jim Holmes [00:08:17] Absolutely. So you hit it right ahead. And in the chemistry industry’s a little bit of a funny industry in the sense that there is a lot of resellers out there.

Rey Treviño [00:08:28] Okay.

Jim Holmes [00:08:28] There is a whole lot of small to medium sized chemical companies that don’t actually make it okay. And there’s nothing wrong that there’s a niche for all of it. They may have wonderful logistics, great field support, application knowledge for those chemistries, and you see it all over the place. So what we have to be very balanced in is to make sure we’re not actually competing with ourselves.

Rey Treviño [00:08:49] Okay.

Jim Holmes [00:08:51] So what we do is we started our company with a very specific principle. We wanted to create the best surfactant systems on the planet.

Rey Treviño [00:08:59] Okay.

Jim Holmes [00:09:00] That’s where we started. We’re still building from that today. Now, surfactants is a very broad term. It can be used in almost any chemistry, in any application around the world, from shampoos to oilfield or disaffected based. So surfactant is a is a fascinating chemistry. In fact, you can tune them and adjust them to do almost anything you want.

Rey Treviño [00:09:22] Okay.

Jim Holmes [00:09:23] So that’s where we built our expertise. Okay. And I can’t take any credit for that because I’m not a chemist. Believe or not, no formal education in chemistry other than some high school chemistry classes. We just have some incredible people. And if you, you know, spoke a lot about this on JP’s podcast as well. Yeah, this company doesn’t exist without some of the smartest people in it working with me. I’m just I’m there to set a mission in an interview.

Rey Treviño [00:09:52] Okay.

Jim Holmes [00:09:53] And everybody else has to contribute. So I’m not the brains behind this organization. I try to be the motivation behind the organization. So now I’ve got a lot of background in application or chemistry, so that helps. You know, we’re designing a new chemistry. It’s it needs to do X, it needs to do Y and it needs to do it effectively and it needs to do it at cost, effectively. So how do we check all of those boxes when you’re designing air chemistry? And that’s what we focus on every single day. So it’s yes, we sell a marker emulsion or surfactant or a fancy clay control or something else into an ExxonMobil, for example.

Rey Treviño [00:10:29] Yeah.

Jim Holmes [00:10:30] And the next day, that same engineer that made the decision to use our product is listening to five other sales pitches on potentially similar products that are supposed to do the exact same thing or their take on it. Maybe it does it better. And that’s where all the lab testing and technical experience comes at us. We’ve got to disprove that. So in the frac world especially, you’re fighting for every single sale.

Rey Treviño [00:10:55] Yes.

Jim Holmes [00:10:56] It’s never a well, we did this one horizontal well out in the Wolfcamp B for operator A, We’re going to get the rest of them from now to the end of time.

Rey Treviño [00:11:05] Yeah.

Jim Holmes [00:11:06] Literally the very next. Well, we’re fighting for the next one.

Rey Treviño [00:11:08] Yeah.

Jim Holmes [00:11:09] And start trying to show your worth.

Rey Treviño [00:11:11] Well, I mean, on the frack side of it, the key is to get back obviously, as much, you know, how much more can we open it up and get that oil out of there? I mean, you know, if there’s something better at the same price or less that can do that. As a M.P. company, you are looking like a hero. So the people that run the numbers every time and pay back their investors is like, oh, okay. It’s like, well, let’s go get that that that product again. But what a what a You’re definitely in a competitive space. How do you prepare for that on a daily basis?

Jim Holmes [00:11:47] So a lot of that comes in our in our technical evaluation and expertise where confidence sells. If our team has confidence in the chemistry we’ve created, we’re going to be successful. If we can’t show with the team confidence in the technical aspect, it’s not going to be successful. So you have to be differentiated and that’s one of the areas we’re extremely focused on is how can we stay differentiated from the competition? Sure, we have a flow ed or micro emulsion or whatever you want to call it. How is it different? What does that mean to you at the at the end of the road on that on that particular application, whether that’s acid ising, re stem primary, frac, tertiary or you name it, they all use similar chemistries in different ways. So how do we stay differentiated? We got very fortunate. Little bit lucky in a lot of ways that the timing of COVID actually helped. So that gave us an opportunity to develop what is now our bio based surfactant systems.

Rey Treviño [00:12:53] Okay.

Jim Holmes [00:12:54] And we’ve got an incredibly smart guy on the team was named Neil Hayes. Who, who. Coins, terms and phrases constantly. I mean, he’s a he’s a mean king when it comes to the chemistry space or I always does it. But every presentation has something fascinating in it that everybody can chuckle at or laugh at. But green chemistry back in the day, I think mid-teens to two. Even now, green chemistry had a had a really weird connotation to it. It usually meant that it didn’t perform as well. It was really expensive. That was one of Neil’s taxes. How can we take a green chemistry? Yeah, that outperforms petrochemical based chemistry, synthetic chemistries that are both cost effective and out form. The other chemistries on the market. Mm hmm. And it took years of development, but we have that for a while. So now we’ve been able to insert these bio based surfactant systems into blended systems.

Rey Treviño [00:13:54] Okay.

Jim Holmes [00:13:55] That now outperform a lot of petrochemical, petrochemical based synthetic systems and their cost effectively. And that’s been something that people have been fighting for years. And there’s a lot of bio based surfactants out there. Some of them take too long and too much CapEx to manufacture in any particular volume. There’s processes out there, whether it’s fermentation, which created bio based surfactants. But you have to have massive facilities that look like tours. Brewery, Golden, Colorado to make 100 gallons a day.

Rey Treviño [00:14:25] Oh, Whoa.

Jim Holmes [00:14:27] Are very smart people. Created a system where we can make bio based chemistry by the truckload every day. So it’s it’s a fascinating technology and it’s really catapulted us ahead of a lot of our competition very well.

Rey Treviño [00:14:43] You know when you talk about green based. Yeah. BIOS and you’ve hit you know, you hit the nail on the head that it costs a lot of money to do something in the green energy and it be cost effective.

Jim Holmes [00:14:57] Correct.

Rey Treviño [00:14:58] So what you guys are doing is really a game changer out there in the in the industry because, you know, what are the upsides, you know? Well, can you share with us some of the great upsides to this green surfactant that you guys are using?

Jim Holmes [00:15:12] Sure. So it’s it’s an ability that’s a common, commonly used term in the chemical development world as to an ability. So in the surfactant world, you have not get overly technical on it on the show, but you’re tuning surfactants to various HB range and that’s it’s affinities for water’s or oils and, and its ability to separate would work at those interfaces.

Rey Treviño [00:15:34] Can you say that again? Just a little slower.

Jim Holmes [00:15:37] We’re turning these bio based surfactants to a range of bees so you can have these HP ranges from very low to three, four or five all the way up to 16, 17, 18. And it’s it’s application based. That’s something that was missed in the bio based surfactant world. Matter of fact, Neil coined a new term the other day that the fermentation process or the use of bugs and enzymes to create surfactants, he calls them bug farts. It was really quite hilarious in yesterday’s meetings that we had, but they’re not tunable.

Rey Treviño [00:16:11] Okay,.

Jim Holmes [00:16:11] You have a you have a series of bugs that are digesting.

Rey Treviño [00:16:15] Yeah.

Jim Holmes [00:16:16] You get us the fact that. Right?

Rey Treviño [00:16:18] Right.

Jim Holmes [00:16:18] Ours is not an enzyme based system. So we’re actually reacting biochemistry.

Rey Treviño [00:16:25] Okay.

Jim Holmes [00:16:25] Which means that we can you can add things, whether it’s other chemistries, whether it’s heat, whether it’s cooling, and you can tune the surfactants to come out of that. So now we’re working in an ultra low light surfactant realm as well as. And that’s interfacial tension. That’s where you want to be on the spectrum. It’s a big metric that most employees want to see. If you go to third party, testing is what you’re what’s your interfacial tension on your surfactant at one gbps and my fluid system.

Rey Treviño [00:16:51] Yeah.

Jim Holmes [00:16:52] Also, what’s my surface tension? What’s my what ability or contact angle? There’s a lot of things that go into that. But what really makes this system unique is we can make a lot of volume, which means our throughput at the plant is incredible. So we’re able to make essentially 5000 gallon batches in an hour to 4 hours, depending on what we’re tuning.

Rey Treviño [00:17:15] Wow.

Jim Holmes [00:17:16] Whereas a lot of other bio based surfactants can take days to make a drug to make 5000 gallons. Even though that surfactant is just one component.

Rey Treviño [00:17:24] Yeah,.

Jim Holmes [00:17:24] Right. So you can take 5000 gallons and now we’re making a micro emulsion or surfactant system. We took 5000 gallons. 20,000.

Rey Treviño [00:17:32] Correct.

Jim Holmes [00:17:32] Because this time you add some other constituents to it.

Rey Treviño [00:17:35] That’s a lot of bug farms.

Jim Holmes [00:17:36] Is a lot of bug, but we don’t have any bug farts. So we’re we’re good.

Rey Treviño [00:17:40] Bang. You know, thank you for repeating a couple of things during that. My Jennifer kind of went over my head. You know I just started a I’m working on our towards the Masters. We had a little crash course and they did about an hour and a half segment on the chemistry and very interesting on the bios and I think it’s cool. I’d much rather use a bug inside of something like that. Eat it, you know, because that is one thing that they keep talking about security bugs in the future. That’s where I’m going to be.

Jim Holmes [00:18:10] Living on air. Crickets. Right?

Rey Treviño [00:18:11] Right. But most of their said, here I am. That’s that’s the first thing that came to my mind is eating bugs versus our you know, we use it. But that is amazing that you guys are able to do something like that. And I mean, what do you buy? Chance know what kind of a footprint that’s not creating by using that by just a title? That’s a random question. Just, you know.

Jim Holmes [00:18:36] So what I can equate that to is, is at our facility, we can have a single, say, $5 a gallon reactor. Yeah. Steel jacketed, cool whole nine yards, which for those of you not sitting in this room, it probably takes up about a 12 by 12 foot force space. So call it hundred 50 square feet for space. Now, it does take some power and there’s some pumps off to the side. And so and there’s blenders and motors and everything else happening. But for the for the companies that are doing similar chemistries, but using bugs, they may need 5000 square feet of warehouse to generate the same volume in a day that we can generate in a couple of hours.

Rey Treviño [00:19:19] Wow.

Jim Holmes [00:19:19] So from using all the fancy lingo run around today, the net zeros and carbon neutrals and everything else, we’re much closer to that than most, most of our competition.

Rey Treviño [00:19:31] Wow. So then that means then your customers are not necessarily, well, in any form or fashion, your customers, whether it’s another chemical company that uses your body surfactant to go into this, or if it’s a an oil and gas company itself doing the work that you can actually tell. Maybe you can see we see the planet.

Jim Holmes [00:19:53] Correct. And we have it. We have a couple of customers in this, what’s called the high score or the renewable carbon index or or another term that we’ve coined, which is the modern carbon content models, to give it our own version in a way. And it’s a little more descriptive like is that what they look at? And I’m going to absolutely screw this up, but I believe it’s something around. If it’s renewable and less than 100,000 years is consider a renewable carbon source. If it’s older than a thousand years, which would be our business, petroleum business, then it’s fossil fuel based basketball. So we’ve moved into this modern carbon content, which is fantastic because it really is descriptive of what we’re trying to do. So yes, we have some customers say, all right, if I put in one gallon per thousand into the however many millions of barrels of water that are going to go into my next horizontal well, and I compare that to a synthetic surfactant system that I was using before, how much carbon are we removing from the fluid system? That’s not an easy number to come up with because you got it back in, you know, one GB to how much renewable carbon versus nonrenewable carbons in the original formulas to come up with this. You know, if you if you execute on this many wells in this year, you’re going to save so many tons of carbon.

Rey Treviño [00:21:10] Yeah.

Jim Holmes [00:21:11] It’s a very hard number to come up with. But what we do know is that we are removing carbon from those systems. So are nonrenewable.

Rey Treviño [00:21:22] But that year, what you guys are doing is just I mean, Jim, that’s. That is me. I means, What what lLFS chemistry is doing? You’re saving the environment, helping oil and gas companies produce more. Well, I think you guys are kind of a win win. I mean, what made you kind of what where was it or what was your thought process on this this green light to kind of do that and go go that route? When did that happen?

Jim Holmes [00:21:50] And so some of that stemmed from availability. Okay. There was a obviously during COVID, there was a lot of supply chain issues.

Rey Treviño [00:21:56] Right.

Jim Holmes [00:21:57] And when you’re sourcing petrochemical based products and if you remember in the. April 2020 something around there. And then again in 2021, the Gulf Coast had a series of freezes which shut down a bunch of plants that normally react this static or petrochemical based surfactants that we would use. So we’re kind of stuck. The prices of a lot of those skyrocketed to where our bio based systems became very intriguing. We needed a lot of work done on those bio based systems to get them to be functional in the applications that we had. So that’s what we spent our time doing. And then it’s all North American ag resource product, right? So now we’re making bio based surfactants without importing anything from countries that we’re not necessarily great friends with, which is a big deal.

Rey Treviño [00:22:48] That is huge.

Jim Holmes [00:22:49] Right. So all of our source products that we react in to bio based surfactants are coming from North America. So we’ve got wonderful relationships with soybean councils and we buy a lot of corn feedstock and soy feedstock. And and that’s what we’re reacting to make bio based arachnids.

Rey Treviño [00:23:06] Oh, wow. That’s pretty Cool.

Jim Holmes [00:23:08] So it’s fantastic because we’re not putting stuff on ships. It’s not coming in from overseas. We’re not buying incredibly hazardous materials that we then have to handle and react in to something that’s functional. Yeah, we’re we’re agro sourced right here in North America for a vast majority of it.

Rey Treviño [00:23:26] So y’all are recycling at the same time by using our. Well, yeah, just finding uses for stuff that, in other words, would be waste. I mean, almost not quite, but I always say go back to the future part two where he’s throwing the trash inside the car for the fuel and it is stuff that people don’t want to use or eat, like the corn stock and the things like that that it’s like. And those are the things that you’re using to help save the environment. That’s awesome.

Jim Holmes [00:23:54] Yes. And we have a we have a couple of wonderful relationships, very strategic relationships with like the Ohio Soybean Council, the arable labs in Ohio that really are helping us develop some of the next gen chemistries around those those feedstocks.

Rey Treviño [00:24:12] WO.

Jim Holmes [00:24:13] So, you know, again, it’s everybody around. It’s not, it’s not any one person, it’s not any two or three people. This is a very big process.

Rey Treviño [00:24:23] You have a heck of a team that you built and I think that’s something to highlight right there. It’s like you are you have literally what I call the smartest people in the room are with you. And that’s awesome.

Jim Holmes [00:24:36] I, I am I’m never the smartest person in the room when it comes to our our meetings.

Rey Treviño [00:24:42] Yeah. Well, I don’t mean yeah, I just I agree in your philosophy that it’s like I need to have other people in the room with me that know more, that understand more, to be successful myself and to give this team the success that it needs. Because you say still need a leader, Jim, which you. You know, hands down are definitely somebody that’s out there leading these people, motivating individuals and also making the tough decisions need be.

Jim Holmes [00:25:07] That’s that’s the not so fun part. But yeah. But yes, you know, being a part of an amazing team is is the greatest feeling on the planet. You know, it’s I try to equate it to having a great home life. You know, it’s it’s my second family. It’s everybody’s there to help everybody else around them win. So it’s not a how can I promote myself within the organization that’s if I do this, how does it impact everybody in the organization?

Rey Treviño [00:25:35] Yeah.

Jim Holmes [00:25:35] You know, and and we focus a lot on that. You know, the how can the sales team help the ops team? How can the ops team help the technical team? You know, a lot of the feedback that we get for the technical team comes from the guys on, you know, the boots on the ground right there. They’re out there on location. They’re they’re the ones sampling in and taking a look at fluid systems and what are the pain points and problems for our various customers and feeding that back in saying how can we make this better?

Rey Treviño [00:26:01] Yeah

Jim Holmes [00:26:02] That’s a big part of it.

Rey Treviño [00:26:03] Yeah.

Jim Holmes [00:26:04] You know, the we have some 30 plus year chemists that have been all over the world designing and looking at chemistry, you know, again with between Neal and Darren and and Rahm and and Marcus and I mean, keep going down the list. You know, the threats of the world and you name it.

Rey Treviño [00:26:22] Yeah.

Jim Holmes [00:26:23] This doesn’t work without all of that coming together.

Rey Treviño [00:26:27] You know, Jim, I cannot thank you enough with the with everything you have going on. You know what is just something that. That you could give, you know, to. So, you know, let’s go back 20 years. Let’s go let’s go back to 1988. That there’s a long time ago. And you know, what would you tell yourself differently then? Like like that you could go back and literally tell that 1988 you probably got the Justin Timberlake look going on?

Jim Holmes [00:26:59] Definitely Not. You know. So that’s a it’s a great it’s a great question. It’s something that I think self-reflection is something everybody should do. All right. You know, I, I can I couldn’t even get to. There’s not enough paper in the world to write down the number of mistakes that I’ve made. And but those mistakes, I look back on and say, well, I wouldn’t be we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing now had I not made some of those mistakes. So,.

Rey Treviño [00:27:25] Yeah,.

Jim Holmes [00:27:25] I don’t know that there’s a lot that I would have changed in my life from the time I got into the field at 18 to today.

Rey Treviño [00:27:32] Yeah,.

Jim Holmes [00:27:34] Sure. There’s some pretty low spots or some difficult things that have happened that you’ve just got to look back on and say, How do I learn from this? How does it make us stronger? You know, put my certainly a couple of times to put my family through the ringer on, you know, But I mean, the support from them has been incredible. You know, starting a company when your wife is pregnant is not a not something that I advise many people to do unless you’re already fairly financially set and can take those dives. But we weren’t. But she knew I wanted to do it. I was passionate about it and we made it work, you know? So it’s it’s all of the support that you can have. So, you know, never, never miss an opportunity to meet somebody is probably number one in my book. If somebody calls and says, I think you should meet this, absolutely, I’m there. I’m going to meet you. So nothing may ever come of it.

Rey Treviño [00:28:27] No,.

Jim Holmes [00:28:28] But something incredible could come from it.

Rey Treviño [00:28:29] True.

Jim Holmes [00:28:30] So I never miss those opportunities. And then probably a lesson that actually came from my father long time ago was if you’re ever given the opportunity to speak publicly in any environment, take it.

Rey Treviño [00:28:42] Okay?

Jim Holmes [00:28:43] No matter how uncomfortable it is, take it. The return on that is more than you will ever imagine. So from the time I was getting set in the professional world, any time an opportunity came up where I could be in front of people or speak or was invited to speak, but I never turned it down, no matter how uncomfortable it may have been. You know, sometimes it subjects you you don’t want to talk about, but just having those interactions and meeting those people, there’s incredible people all over the world. So it’s sometimes just having a conversation with somebody leads to a conversation with somebody else that takes you somewhere you never even dreamt of. And that’s really a lot of the LFS story or not was people that I had met in 2000. Eight, nine and ten are now investors in LFS chemistry after we got it up and running.

Rey Treviño [00:29:37] No.

Jim Holmes [00:29:38] You know, there were incredible people that a lot of them went through some difficult times with us back in in 2008.

Rey Treviño [00:29:43] Yeah.

Jim Holmes [00:29:44] With the company that I was at. And they stood by us the entire time and now they’re their partners. So it’s. Shake hands. Smile. Shake hands often.

Rey Treviño [00:29:54] Yeah.

Jim Holmes [00:29:55] Meet as many people as you can. You know, be gracious for everything that you’ve got. But as far as what I consider kind of little things. College wasn’t really for me. I tried it. I tried a lot of it. Yeah. At the end, I didn’t finish. I just put my head down and went to work and got a little dirt under the fingernails.

Rey Treviño [00:30:19] There’s nothing wrong with that. Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with that, John.

Jim Holmes [00:30:22] I look at my family. I’ve got one brother who followed a similar path. Not any oil and gas, but tried college. Didn’t. Wasn’t for him.

Rey Treviño [00:30:30] Yeah.

Jim Holmes [00:30:31] Incredibly successful in landscaping and construction. And I’ve got my youngest brother went to Texas Tech, graduated petroleum engineer. He’s incredibly successful. College was for him. So I think everybody’s got to find their own path. And I don’t think you can force that.

Rey Treviño [00:30:47] That I agree with. I like college, but it is not for everybody because of the the focus in and what’s inside of an individual is what’s the most important part to them if they’re going to be successful or not. I would say, you know, that drive, you know, you hear all the cliches all the time, but it’s like we need other people to truly motivate you. Is that really you know, you know, is that really what gets you going? You know, you got to have it’s got to come from the inside. Don’t matter what it is. I love what you just said about, you know, I don’t you know, about the mistakes that have been made. You don’t have no paper. And the fact that, you know, your scars make you who you are. And there were all my listeners out there. That was one question that I just threw out there at the end. We did not talk about that one before. And so, Jim, I cannot thank you enough.

Jim Holmes [00:31:34] Absolutely.

Rey Treviño [00:31:34] You know. Where can people find you work if they need a motivational speaker? Because that’s possible. I just feel like I just got. They need you to come out and talk because obviously you said, Hey, it’s anybody ever asked you to talk was talk. Yeah, I didn’t speak to How could they find you?

Jim Holmes [00:31:49] So the easiest place to find this, obviously, we’ve got a really big presence on LinkedIn. That’s always a great place to find and network. Certainly listening to the podcast is a great way to do it. We have an absolutely fantastic website for LFS chemistry. It’s simply www dot lfs chemistry dot com can always call, you know it’s part of part of being in the oilfield for so long as that phone rings. 24 seven.

Rey Treviño [00:32:15] Yeah.

Jim Holmes [00:32:16] Especially when you’re traveling the world all the different time zones really you know what your phone’s ringing at three because you’re sitting in Houston but it’s noon in Saudi. You just have to be ready for it yet.

Rey Treviño [00:32:30] Well, Jim, thank you so much for stopping by the studio today. And thank you for being ready for whatever comes your way and and for the innovations that you guys are doing, not only in the oil and gas industry, but to help out the world. Just thank you so much for coming on I can’t thank you enough for and we’ll leave it at that. Just thank you so much.

Jim Holmes [00:32:49] And I can’t thank you enough for the experience. It’s wonderful getting to sit here and, you know, it’s kudos to all of our customers. They give us all the feedback and they give us the motivation to keep keep moving forward. So, you know, it’s a great industry. I love being a part of it.

Rey Treviño [00:33:04] Oh, it is. It is. And that’s the crude truth. We’ll see you all next time on another episode here on The Crude Truth.