Just the ability of getting into the oil industry is so expensive and time consuming. There's not really a big welcome party for new distributors in the market.
In addition to that, large companies will easily devour and take over small businesses through acquisitions and mergers.
In this episode, Matt Laird, president and co-founder of one of Oklahoma's fastest growing industries, Camrock Oil & Supply shares with us his success story of how a small company can still be successful despite its size.
Learn more about his strategy that made Camrock Oil & Supply make its way to the Inc 500.
Overview & Episode Content
- From the Bottom to the Top of the Industry, Who is Matt Laird?
- The Early Days of Camrock Oil & Supply, How it All Started?
- Disrupting the Oil Industry, Is it Possible?
- What’s the Importance of Scaling Personal Attention?
- Running a Successful Business, What’s the Strategy Behind?
From the Bottom to the Top of the Industry, Who is Matt Laird?
Every morning, Matt writes notes in an assorted 4×6 index cards to his wife and three beautiful daughters before he leaves for work showing his love for them. This starts off everything as he begins a new day in his company.
Before all of this, he graduated out of high school and found a drilling rig. He worked his way up into the ranks. Started at the bottom and rose up to eventually owning his company.
Despite the good money, he decided to find another way as he chose his family’s worth. About five years ago, with some of his business partners, they started Camrock Oil & Supply.
The Early Days of Camrock Oil & Supply, How it All Started?
Early on in this business, they were just primarily a filtration company with a whole bunch of filters and people that needed filters. They’ve got really big trucks filled with filters. Those trucks were driven around and realized that those filters are mostly air and there wasn't enough margin, huge invoices but no margin. They began to seek out something that was more profitable and would fit really well with their filter company. And as they added the bulk lubricants they were able to definitely get into a niche.
As far as Camrock as a business, they cover all lubrication and filtration but as far as what they do every day, Matt really did just grow the business. Pulled his way out of operations and focused on moving the needle, finding a way to change the entire scope of the industry.
Disrupting the Oil Industry, Is it Possible?
The way that this deal works is that Matt is in an old industry where there's no influx of new people. Their closest competitor in the lubrication side does over a billion a year. A big company that's not nimble and doesn't care about their quality.
With this big company growing bigger, it's just leaving a huge gap for them to get in with a little better service. At the point where Camrock is now, they do a little better on their lubrication side than what the competitor does as far as quality goes. Basically, if someone uses the company for all of these product lines that they offer, their price is competitive.
What’s the Importance of Scaling Personal Attention?
In the five years they’ve been in business, they’ve lost a few customers to mergers and acquisitions. Camrock’s culture focuses on customer, pricing structure and everything else. It’s not just something sold from the street. Up to this point, it's been scalable at one customer or even scalable up to 200 customers. The company continues to just push that culture into their salespeople so everyone that touches their customer knows the culture, and determination. Because of this, the company hit Inc 500.
Running a Successful Business, What’s the Strategy Behind?
Matt talked about Dean’s bringing his guys to help his business. He would spend his day from 4pm until 5pm every day working on the one thing that he never wanted to do again. So, he followed Dean's programs and basically jumped on Loom, recording the process exactly like you would want it done and whatever that process is, he would email it to Dean.
The next morning when he got back to the office he would have a full process document that was just prim and proper. He would look through it which is perfect and then was able to use that as a training material for his staff as the company grew. This pulled him completely out of the day to day tasks and focused more on other stuff on how to grow the business.
Conclusion
It’s not always about the size of a company, industry or an organization where it’ll depend it’s success but how you were able to come up with strategies on how to make your business grow. Strategies of jumping even into tiny details and making those decisions that would make a great difference.
Resources and Links from the Podcast:
ProSulum’s Website: https://prosulum.com/
Freedom in Five Minutes’ Website: https://www.freedominfiveminutes.com/
Matt Laird Email: matt.laird@camrocksupply.com
Matt Laird LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-laird-77540b59
Camrock Oil & Supply Website: http://www.camrocksupply.com/