Hello everyone. Welcome back to another podcast. We're here today in the Collide studio. I am so excited, also a little bit shocked. The guest that we have today has been on the podcast before, but we both did not realize the time frame of that. The last time Ron Gusek was on the podcast was in 2020. So, we're going on what? We're in 2026 now. So,
Five full years, Ron. Like, I'm still in utter shock. I literally thought I was going to look at that and be like, 'Oh, yeah. You were here like three years ago.'
It feels like it wasn't that long ago. Oh, the five years have gone by fast.
They've gone by really fast. And now, like when you were last on the podcast, we were just talking about this. You were president of Liberty Energy and now today you are CEO. So big congratulations.
And a lot can change within five years.
Yeah, I bet. So tell us, for those that now knowing that it was five years ago when we had you on. Give us a little backstory of who Ron is, where you grew up, a quick snippet of your trajectory and your career, for those that might not have been listeners back in 2020. And then we'll jump into a little bit more details.
All right. Yeah. Quick backstory. So I'm a transplant from Canada that finds myself down here now. I am an accidental oil field services person, I would say. I grew up outside of Edmonton, Alberta, a little town called Ardson. My parents still live in the same place that they have. My dad built the house when I was a year old and mom and dad have been there ever since. That's been home for a long time. I went to mechanical engineering at the University of Alberta, so just in Edmonton, and ultimately ended up in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. I had been a kid who grew up during the 80s downturn when oil went pretty sideways, mid to late 80s, Alberta 35% of our GDP came from oil and gas. It was hard on the province when that happened. And I remember having lots of friends whose parents were out of work and thinking that industry is much too volatile for me. I'm not going to go there.
I'm not going to go there. And so, of course, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, people need that all the time. That's a good stable industry. And so that was where I started out of school. And I spent four years working for a great little manufacturing company doing acoustics and vibration and design work there and had a lot of fun doing it. But I had a roommate who was in oil and gas. He was a coil tuber at the time. And he came home one day and said, 'Ron, we're interviewing for engineers. Would you be interested in a job interview?' And so I went and that was a Monday and they offered me a job on a Friday. And as it turns out, it paid 50% more than I was earning in HVAC. And you know, when you're young, that feels like a lot of money. So I made the jump into fracking. I didn't know what a frack was at the time. I'd never seen frack equipment. I had no understanding of what I was taking on. It turned out to be the greatest thing that ever happened to me.
You know, you look back over the course of your life, you think about those places where you had an opportunity to turn right or turn left, and for whatever reason, you make that decision and you point yourself in that direction. And all of those decisions have had me end up in the place I'm in today, which is just phenomenal. And I don't know why all those decisions happened the way they did, but I'm so grateful I ended up in oil and gas and so extremely happy for it, for where that has taken me and all the people I've gotten to know over that time. Between then, which was January of 98 I guess, I started with a company called Nowsco, was bought by BJ Services, and between then and now I have always pretty much been frack or frack adjacent. I have worked on the service side almost that entire time save for one little stint on the E&P side where I got a bit of exposure to drilling wells and understanding what a completion was like from the other side of the table, and a little bit of work on facilities and pipelines and things. So it was a good learning experience for me. But aside from that little junket, otherwise I have been at a frack company or at a company that did work with frack. So I love it. I certainly love the services side of the world. It's been a lot of fun.
Hi, stories like yours I've always really enjoyed. And you know what I think was so interesting about you too is now when you look at your whole entire past history of where you've been. I mean you took a spot at Pinnacle I remember for about an eight-year term. And was Pinnacle bought?
Pinnacle got bought by Halliburton. Yeah. So that was how I first met Chris and really a good portion of what is now the Liberty family was at Pinnacle. They were opening a Canadian office and I had the opportunity to interview for that job. Again, good fortune and a lot of things that just come together in the right way and I found myself running Pinnacle Canada. I met Chris Wright at the start of that. I guess that was probably May of 2003. I did that. It was really my first exposure to this whole idea of an organization that was culture focused, people first, and great technology. You bring those things together and amazing things happen. We were a small company of course, I think only a few hundred people when Halliburton bought the company at the end of 2008. But one of those very cool places to work that had you at the tip of the spear when unconventional gas was just becoming a thing, and we were out working on all of those first wells in each of those plays. For a nerdy engineer like myself, what a cool opportunity.
I love it. What do you think brought you connected with Chris when y'all met? Like because Chris too, like he now Secretary of Energy, incredible historic career, but he also was always somebody who thought outside the box, did things differently and did it his way. What was it like meeting him and what's your perception when you met him?
There are those people that you meet and right away you know you're going to be friends for life. That you just get along, things click, and you recognize that this is a special person and somebody I'm pretty fired up to be associated with. Chris is just one of those personalities. Of course, for everybody who gets to meet him, you find out what an engaging, thoughtful, kind human he is, passionate about everything that he does, driven, motivated, and all of those things just resonate with me. But beyond that, Chris is also a passionate outdoors guy. One of my hobbies is something called adventure racing. They're these long endurance races out in the wilderness. And as it turns out, I was going out on a 36-hour race two weeks after I started at Pinnacle. So my first two weeks at Pinnacle was actually a trip around the US parts of the company. So I first of all, I flew to San Francisco, which is where it was headquartered, then to Bakersfield, and then over to Houston, and then I was going home, and I was going straight out to this race. And so I was telling Chris about this, and for those who know Chris, he is an avid outdoors person who does a lot of crazy stuff in the wilderness. And so I don't know if that was the first thing that tied us together, but we clicked and we have been friends ever since. And I said when Chris got the Wildcatter of the year award in Colorado, I was pleased to give the introductory speech and I was talking about the opportunity to work with Chris at Pinnacle, but really just how grateful I was that I got a second opportunity to work with such an amazing person. And so that doesn't happen to everybody. Sometimes you only get those once in a lifetime chances. For me, that was a twice in a lifetime chance. And so I was pretty fired up when he started Liberty and had the chance to come and join the Pinnacle team again doing that.
I love it. Tell me about the first starts with Liberty because when Liberty began, Chris went out to start it. Entrepreneurship especially in oil and gas is huge, right? And so many amazing companies have been created through people like Chris with teams, people like you, Ron, of course. So what was that like coming over and the culture? I feel like that is one thing that Liberty has always held very close and something that I know you and Chris were both very passionate about is the culture of the company and you had seen so many different things through your history, especially when you're bought by Halliburton which is a large, very big corporation when you were kind of a smaller outfit at Pinnacle. What was some key things that y'all wanted to make sure that Liberty did culture-wise and continued to do no matter how big y'all got?
That's a very important question because it really is the reason Liberty is the company we are today. We have had a tremendous track record of success; we turned 15 years old this year.
