TETRA Technologies is a good example of how top-level leadership can impact a company. The provider of completion fluids and other oilfield products and services experienced a dramatic 90% stock price deterioration beginning August 2008, as the oilfield supply declined less than 60%. The outsize fall culminated with the resignation of the company’s long-term CEO in March 2009.
Since that time, data from EnergyPoint’s independent customer satisfaction surveys show TETRA has begun to rise from the ashes, earning more positive reviews from customers while simultaneously gaining back more than half its market value.
To be sure, the business and culture needed to change. Before current management took control in May 2009, TETRA received what can only be characterized as low ratings in EnergyPoint’s benchmark surveys. As a couple of past survey respondents put it:
“Equipment in [the] field [is] not reliable and personnel in [the] field lacking in experience, knowledge to see that operation of equipment was faulty.”
“In my opinion, TETRA is the worst company in the [oil]patch”. Tough medicine, to say the least.
Contrast these with comments the company received in more recent surveys:
“Professional service at a good price for the most part, the company’s people are focused and responsive.”
“A smaller but well-run and no-nonsense kind of supplier that you can count on.”
Although relatively small, TETRA competes in many of the same segments as some of the industry’s largest suppliers—including Baker Hughes, Halliburton and Schlumberger—each of which possess a range of offerings and organizational capabilities. And recent improvements at TETRA have not been constrained to a single aspect of its organization or culture. Virtually every metric we follow on the company is up.
The improvement is especially strong in the area of technology, reflecting an ability to better develop and apply technology in more value-creating ways. Job quality, and service and professionalism, and health, safety and environmental (HSE) also show improvement.
In short, for a company that was so far down, things are certainly looking up.
