Delving into the challenges and opportunities in the chemical industry, the importance of building strong relationships and value propositions, and the impact of sustainability on business decision-making, Chad Hall, Vice President of Energy at Integrity BioChem, discusses insights into coaching, leadership, and navigating the ever-changing landscape of the chemical industry with host Victoria Meyer.
In this episode of The Chemical Show, Victoria and Chad discuss the concept of coaching and its application in the business world. Chad shares his perspective on how coaching can be effective regardless of team or company size. According to Chad, anyone in a managerial role can become a coach, regardless of job title. This thought-provoking perspective invites us to reimagine a world where the word “manager” is replaced with “coach.”
Join us to learn more about the following this week:
- Integrity Biochem’s take on the markets in 2023 and going into 2024
- Your customer’s business decisions and how it drives business value
- How to create customer “stickiness” – keeping business versus winning it
- The tug of war between corporate control and procurement control – uncovering value and ROI
- Sustainability and ESG in oil and gas
- Scaling products to take on aggressive sustainability goals
- Coaching versus managing
With years of experience in executive coaching and a passion for helping others succeed, Chad brings a unique perspective to his conversation about coaching, the power of building strong relationships, and the importance of delivering on promises in the chemical industry with Victoria. Join us this week to learn more.
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Additional Links:
Michael Suver Ep13: Bio-Based Chemistry: The Rise Of A Green Chemical Industry With Michael Suver
Michael Suver Ep 44: How The Chemical Industry Is Becoming Sustainable With Cameron Whaley And Michael Suver
The Wall Street Journal: Companies Stall Climate Action Despite Earlier Promises
Watch the Interview with Chad Hall on Youtube Here:
Listen to Victoria’s Conversation with Integrity BioChem’s Chad Hall Here:
Driving Innovation and Customer Value In Energy and Chemicals With Chad Hall of Integrity BioChem
Hi, this is Victoria Meyer. Welcome back to The Chemical Show. Today I am speaking with Chad Hall, who is the vice president of energy at Integrity BioChem, where he drives strategy, growth, and innovation for the oil and gas division. Chad has 20+ years in the industry in strategy, marketing, operations, business development, and technical analysis.He has worked with companies, including Schlumberger M-I Swaco, Smith International and Baker Hughes. He earned his Bachelor’s of Business Administration at Texas State University, and is a certified mission performance level five coach, which I’m really looking forward to hearing more about that. Chad, welcome to The Chemical Show.
Victoria, thank you so much for having me. I’ve been looking forward to getting together and I’m really excited to dive into some of these questions.
I am super excited to have you here. Let’s start with this one. What is your origin story? What got you interested in energy and chemicals and ultimately got you to Integrity BioChem?
Absolutely. So, my origin story, high level is I did not intend to get into chemicals or oil and gas. When I was going to a university in San Marcos I actually had an alumni advisor of the fraternity I was in who was with Raymond James Financial Services. I was actually recruited to do that, I was going to be a stockbroker. I got there and was trying to pass the series 7, when I realized that was not for me. Kudos to those people, but it wasn’t me.
So I’m third generation oil field. My grandfather worked for El Paso which was bought by Huntsman’s technically, the company that owns that now. They were bought several times. So he did refining of chemicals out in West Texas. Then my father worked for Baker Hughes and did some of his own things later. Sometimes, it’s who opened the door for you. There were some doors that were opened for at least interviews, and I landed with Baker Hughes and moved to Weatherford, Oklahoma and I loved working in the field.
I had a very traditional oil and gas career. Starting in the field and then doing various roles. I’m 21 years into it now. All I’ve ever done is oil and gas. I love it. I did work for a handful of companies. The longest company I stayed at and where I got a lot of my training was with Smith International who Schlumberger acquired. So at that point, most of my career had been downhill tools.
Drill bits and WDs motors more on the downhill side and on the tool side. At Schlumberger, they’ll take you and they’ll put you in an HR role, or they’ll put you in a safety role. They’ll put you overseeing a division. Even if you’ve never done anything, especially at the executive leadership type spots. I actually got an opportunity to go work for M-I Swaco, and I was on the solids control division. We didn’t have a lot of interaction with chemicals, but we would go into commercial discussions with operators on the fluid side.
So I did start to get a little taste of chemicals and that was probably my first taste of chemicals. Then as things transitioned, my career had gotten to where it was and a small little chemical company kept calling and I had told them no, but eventually I did decide to go to work for them. They were a startup and that’s where I really started learning a lot about chemicals, specifically around surfactants and really just fell in love with that. I got to spend a lot of time, because of that role, with Dr Schechter at Texas A&M. Very smart professor, and I give him a lot of credit for my learning there. Not all startups made it through COVID. So I transitioned to Integrity BioChem.
It was a nice match because they do the same thing. So three years ago, I started with Integrity BioChem and we haven’t looked back. I love it. I’m still doing surfactants along with a lot of other chemistries.
That’s really interesting from equipment to chemicals, and the reality is we need it. We need that everywhere. So tell us a little bit about Integrity BioChem. One of your colleagues has been on the show previously, but tell us what you see at IBC and what it’s all about.
Integrity BioChem, we’re coming off the heels of some strategy meetings for Q3 heading into Q4, and looking at what 2024 might be. So we took some time to acknowledge that we’re 6 years old and we’re going into year 7 as a company. So that’s a big deal.
That’s impressive. Making it past the 5 year mark is a huge success for a company.
Absolutely. They started before my time, and they started with a smaller footprint and then grew and grew. We’ve recently acquired the 60 acres adjacent to our facility. So we’re 75 acres just south southwest of Fort Worth and Crescent and just growing like crazy. If you go back and you start with what it was, we started by acquiring a technology from the pharmaceutical space. It’s broadly classified as a polysaccharide biopolymer.
That is the foundation of our molecule and what we do. So that started us, but the company really was founded and rooted in the oil and gas or energy division. Our CTO is a brilliant geologist, so he brings a chemistry perspective as a geochemist. It’s really interesting to not just understand the chemical side, but when you’re interacting with rocks down hole that are not homogeneous, and they change constantly, you bring a different perspective than just chemicals. So it’s combining chemicals and rocks. I think it gives us a really unique position for this space. Fast forward to where we are today, we’ve launched our IMI division, Integrity Mining Industrial.
It’s looking after the mining industries, water treatment, paints and coatings. Really taking the technology and functionalizing it, modifying it and creating new chemistry for those spaces. You also look at our Integrity Specialty Chemicals division, and that’s really exciting. We made an entire new molecule. We took our base biopolymer and we’re able to create an entirely new molecule which is a surfactant. We can make HLB ranges from 7 to 19. It gives us a whole new side.
We actually use those surfactants in our oil and gas division. This takes us into personal care. It takes us into HII. It takes us into all these other spaces where we can replace synthetic surfactants with greater performing or equal performing surfactants. Rooted and founded in oil and gas, but growing like crazy into all these other industries. With growth comes a lot of challenges, but also a lot of excitement.
Yeah, that’s really awesome. Michael Siever was on the podcast previously. So we’ll have his episodes linked so that people can find that and listen in because we did have a lot of great conversation about EdenSurf and the other molecules that you guys have developed. Also how you are taking bio based products and bio surfactants to market from a personal care and in other markets perspective, then of course, where you are in energy. So that’s pretty cool. Let’s talk a little bit about the markets. The chemical industry has been flat or down or it’s something this year, nobody’s really happy with where they are. Yet we know that oil prices are up and it seems like oil and gas markets are strong. What are you guys saying generally in terms of business and markets here in 2023 going into 2024?
It’s an interesting market. I think if anyone tells you they’ve got it figured out, I would say they were fibbing. It’s been a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde market. Commodities fell below $90 today, but they were up over $90 last week, WTI anyways. You’ve got rig count going down. You’ve got frack crews that are now published and shown to be going down. That metric itself, there are idle frack crews out there, so I think that market’s even less than it suggests it is.
So I think it’s been a challenge. A lot of people thought in Q3 going into Q4 that frack count and rig counts would be up right at the beginning of the year at this time last year, looking at where we thought things were going. That’s where most people reading the articles and talking to people thought the market would go. People really thought that will shift to 2024. So there may be specifically for the energy side, potential for a hundred dollar oil. There’s a lot of stuff out there that suggests that might be the case.
I’m by no means an expert, and I don’t know that anyone is anymore. It changes so much. But I think the unique thing about the company who’s 6 years old going on 7 years now, is that there’s room for growth because we continue to diversify and create new products. So even though in one side of your industry, there may be some challenges if you have less frack crews. Then that’s not a performance or a price issue. That’s just you have a demand.
Yeah, it’s just demand.
It just is what it is. What’s cool is that even within the energy space, we’re looking at diversifying. We’re heavily involved in the frack market and that’s where we started, but we’re introducing new chemicals to the completions drillout space. We’re looking at products that go into the drilling space. We’re looking at treating profit at the actual mines, which is kind of a mining industry, but it’s kind of oil and gas. You have a lot of these situations where you can actually still grow, even though some of your core business has some adversity. That’s, I think, unique.
Then you factor in not only oil and gas, but you factor in IMI or you factor in specialty chemicals and all these growth in these other divisions. Even if the market in general is flat to slightly down, if you’re starting new in something, you have nowhere to go but up. You can still find growth within some of this. That’s a unique position where we’re at.
Yeah, that makes sense. Of course, a lot of that ties then to your ability to engage your customers and really create the value propositions that they need. As we say, customers always have a choice. Across the industry, and certainly when we think about oil and gas and oil field chemicals, a lot of times people say it’s all about the relationship. If it was only about the relationship, customers would migrate every time somebody shifted. That’s not the case. That business would be following people from company to company. But we know that’s not the whole story. I guess to me, the question I have for you is, what’s critical to your customers? How are they making decisions and driving business decisions and business value?
I can relate to that question pretty much since I started and it’s changed a bit too. I think that you do see situations where you have an individual that has business with certain customer and maybe they change jerseys to go to work for another team and then they take that business with them. That does happen, but those people are unique. Personality wise, they’re just really meant for the role that they’re in commercially leading their companies. Those are few and far between. Otherwise at the end of the day, there’s some really key metrics. There’s a difference between winning business and keeping business. There is a service component to some degree in oil and gas that is critical. Most operations are 365, 24/7. If somebody needs something at 3am, it’s not negotiable.
That’s very unique to our space. I’m sure there’s some other industries that are similar, but to me it is unique in that. So service is critical. That makes doing what you say important, because all it takes is one mess up. It doesn’t matter how strong your relationship is with the customer. You’re out. You’ve got to have a backbone and a foundational customer service group and operations group that can go out and actually do what you said you’re going to do.
Over promising and under delivering, it catches up with you quick. I’ve always said it’s one thing to win business. You’ve got to keep that business. Another thing is, what are you selling? Are we talking about something that is specific to chemicals? Is it a commodity? Or is it something that’s differentiated, patented, or innovative because they’re really different. You need both, I’m not saying one is better than the other. But let’s say that you did work for a company that sells commodities. Price is going to be very important there. A lot of times price is going to win. Service is going to be, 1A or 1B. If you’re doing that and you have someone that has great relationships, that has pricing that wins business, and you can back it up with service. That’s really hard to beat in that space.
If you switch over to the other situation, maybe you’re selling a patented product only that company has. Or maybe it’s not patented because you’re keeping some proprietary things about it, but it’s very differentiated. It does something that other chemicals can’t do, or it does them in a different way. That’s very unique then, with that it’s not just a relationship. You’ve got to be able to go in and build that value prop out and describe, why your product presents a solution to their problem. In this environment that we’re in, it’s not only this lower rig count, and lower frack count. You have seen for several years now since COVID, where people are eliminating chemicals from the frack program. They’re taking chemicals off.
They’re using the bare bones to get a well done. Arguably, in some cases they’re using less than they should be. It’s scary what something might look like.
So why are they doing that? What do you guys see that prompts that to happen?
You had several years ago where operators were forced to work within cashflow. That’s been written about and talked about, and it was just a pivotal movement for the industry in general. With that came a lot of looking at, what do we actually need? You have some situations where people maybe stopped using certain chemicals and their wells didn’t get worse. Why would they go back to those? There was maybe some stuff out there that was over promised and under delivered, like we just talked about. So you have situations like that where you’ve really got to dig in and figure that out. Being able to go in and build that value prop out and really explain to the customer what the chemical does differently, why they should spend extra money on something they’re not currently pumping. That is going to take not just the whole story of the person that goes from one company to the next, they got to have that skillset. Also the product’s got to do what you said it’s going to do. Those are some of the dynamics and you just get into all these sub layers of how that works. So at the end of the day, you do need people out there commercially that have strong relationships. But even then, if you look at those strong relationships, they usually have some really key items associated with them.
Trust is almost always there. The reason they have such a strong relationship is maybe that they’ve gained that customer’s trust. Customers, maybe know your kids, they know your wife, they know your spouse, your husband, you get to where they really trust you. That goes a long ways. As opposed to maybe they don’t have a relationship with someone. It’s because that trust hasn’t been built. I think that has a lot to do with it. Sometimes trust just comes with time.
Then again, it comes with delivering what you said you were going to do and not over promising. These relationships have usually been built over years and years and years and years.
Obviously IBC is a relatively new company. I know when I’ve talked with some other leaders recently, one of the things I’ve heard is that we’re frustrated. There’s a situation where, especially given the supply chain challenges we’ve had over a couple of years, they do business with a company, they pull through and in a very unique situation are able to fulfill their requirements in a way that their regular supplier wasn’t able to do. Then they may or may not keep that customer. In fact, they fuss about it when they don’t. I don’t understand, I pulled through in a really tight situation for this customer, and yet the moment we’re back to “business as usual” we don’t have business anymore.
You would say, well, they’re going back to the customer or their supplier that they’ve been with for the last 20 years. Doesn’t necessarily feel really good. My question to you when you look at a company such as IBC, that’s a younger company, is how do you break that? How do you create that stickiness so that you’re not just winning business, but you’re keeping that business particularly when opportunities arise and you want to turn that unique opportunity into long term business.
I love that word stickiness. That’s a great word. That’s something we use. That aside, you could really dive into something where there’s not just a one word answer. I think there’s probably layers to that. It’s complicated. You really have to dive into that. What you also say is, okay, we’re back to usual. What does that mean? It’s usual because oil prices are back to where it was before, is usual back to, we’ve got our PNL back to where it was and our EBITDA is now where it was before.
Something like that.
Or just your first supplier is back in business, and able to supply whatever their normal products are.
Great point. When you think about it from that side over there, downstream from creating. Absolutely. What you see a lot, and it’s specifically the oil and gas side, is this consolidation is real. You’re seeing companies get consolidated, that is happening. There’s less and less operators out there. In addition to that, because of COVID and even before COVID, we had these smaller downturns all mixed in and around. A lot of people left the industry.
Even though you’re saying we’re back to usual, it feels usual, but maybe that person that you engaged with and understood why you were the best choice is no longer there. So it’s almost like starting over again. Yes, IBC is 6 years old, but if you look at our C team, there is massive relationships within industry, It goes back to the days where they were Magna Bland bought by Univar. You talked about Michael Suber, he comes from that world where he knows people. So sometimes that trust came with the people that are building IBC because they brought those relationships with them. Even though some of my time was started in drilling and there’s people that I sell to now that maybe when I met them or knew them, they were in the drilling space, but they’re also now on the completion space and maybe they’re buying their chemicals. So there’s so many changes on both sides.
It’s a little bit tricky as to say, why don’t we have this business? You really have to dig down and go, okay it feels usual with what has changed on the other side. There’s been a lot of change. Including how the decisions are made on what they buy. Back when I started and maybe it was specific to some of the tools I was selling weren’t involved as much in oil and gas as they were other industries. Now you see a lot of procurement driven decisions. Departments that didn’t used to exist are massive in some of these companies. So the whole entire buying process has even changed for some companies. That’s not a silver bullet across the entire spectrum, but the way in which you engage and even sell has changed.
I hadn’t really thought about that. The perspective of in oil and gas, the drive towards more corporate procurement driven processes versus the end user. I actually usually advise when I’m talking to people, that you got to get away from procurement. Not that you don’t want to do business with procurement, but you find out what’s really happening. When you’re talking to the formulators, when you’re talking to people at the manufacturing site, at the wellhead, and at the use interface about where that value really resides and where the differentiators are. It’s an interesting tug of war between corporate control and procurement control, and they add a lot of value there to figuring out where the use value is for your business, your products, your services, and just how you do business. So that’s pretty interesting.
Absolutely. If you think about it from the uniqueness, to those two buckets that we kind of separated earlier of a commodity type chemical company versus someone that’s doing something innovative with polysaccharide biopolymers, like IBC. It’s very different. So Polysaccharide Biopolymers, it’s our molecule. We’re the only one doing it. So in a procurement Excel spreadsheet, RFQ for the next two years of business, how a dollar amount in a box is not ever gonna be a good thing for an innovative polysaccharide biopolymer that does something very unique and different. Now, I’m not saying that should be compared to butaphosphonase, but to the point of comparing a commodity versus maybe what ours does, is tricky. In the situation with IBC, you’ve got to be able to have conversations with procurement and say, how can we fairly compare our product if it does something that these commodities you’re comparing it to do not. That’s critical.
I think that’s the value conversation, right? It’s not just about price and cost. It’s about value and what the return on the investment is. Figuring out how to uncover that value is the sales person, the marketer, the relationship manager’s job. Figuring out how to apply value and not just cost.
100%, and multiple levels of engagement within the organization. To where you can pull everyone together and really drive exactly what you just said. Yeah.
So sustainability and ESG are clear drivers across the chemical and energy industry today. Everybody seems to have a sustainability narrative, and certainly when you look at some of the products in the markets that IBC sells into. When you think about personal care, there’s huge driver around natural or sustainable products. Is the same true in oil and gas? How are you seeing that? How important is having a sustainability plan and just your sustainability profile to oil and gas customers?
You nailed it in personal care. It’s the starting point. Sustainable solutions. Green solutions. It’s really where it starts. It’s what people are looking for at the conferences. It’s fundamental where those industries are.
In oil and gas today, my opinion is that it is important, but not on the same level as some of these other industries, broadly speaking across. If you were to average it out, there are certainly those that are very interested in it and very focused on it. But right now, if your green solution is not on par with the synthetic version that does the same thing. It’s about performance at the end of the day, the decision still goes to that. That said, specific to oil and gas, what’s been really cool, especially with a company that makes molecules you have a situation where you’ve seen with some of the bigger operators, and the bigger service companies that the word sustainability or the word green has started to enter conversations more than in the past. I’d say the coolest thing that probably gives me an indication that we’re going more that way is even in some larger RFPs, you’ve actually seen sustainability as a metric. It was actually asked for. So I think you’ve got situations where possibly investors are kind of driving that, and demanding it in companies that are publicly traded. Private companies, maybe not as much, and maybe that’s kind of the difference, but you definitely see it going more and more that way.
What we’ve proven at IBC is that you can make sustainable solutions that can outperform synthetic ones. I think that will give people more incentives. Like, okay, this can be done in oil and gas. Of course, I want the greener option, I want the more sustainable option. Potentially, maybe what was the limiting factor before is that those solutions didn’t exist. We’re here now to show that we’ve done that.
That’s cool, and I do think that it’s a growing area. Wall Street Journal just this week had a article about how some companies, particularly some of the energy companies are backing off of some of their net zero and sustainability targets. Partially because it’s really hard to figure out how to achieve these really ambitious goals, because solutions aren’t necessarily in place. Also because they’re wrestling with the financial versus other benefits that go into it. As you guys come, being able to offer some green solutions, it goes a long way towards helping to drive this.
Absolutely. There’s a couple of things there that come to mind, Victoria. We talked about this a lot at our meeting that we came out of earlier in this week, and you have these targets. I’m not familiar with the article you just mentioned, but it’s really interesting and timely. I’d like to check that out.
I’ll send it to you. In fact, I can link it as well to the podcast. So there we go. People can find it. Perfect.
Yeah, I think we’ve got the situation, whether that goal is 2030 or 2050 or like you said, maybe people even pushing it out further. Where we want to be as a company is, what are you waiting for? Let’s do it in 2023. Let’s do it in 2024. Let us work with you. If we’ve got solutions that can help you get there now. We’ve proven that we can beat synthetic alternatives.
If you see this goal of 2050, it’s like, gosh, I’ll be retired by then. I’m in my 40s now, so that seems like so far, why are we waiting that long? If it’s important to you, let’s do it now. I think that’s critical. When we trademarked our new name for IDC, we put it on our website, we spent a lot of time walking down sustainable science for the whole world, but that means something at Integrity BioChem. It’s very powerful when you think about that, and we’re just barely getting started on all the cool stuff that we’re going to work on. Even if not us, I’d point you to some other people that are in the space that are phenomenal. We have specific products that we sell here and there. We don’t sell all the solutions that will be needed to go completely green. There are other people out there that are making phenomenal chemicals as well.
I’ve raised them up and on a platform to say, take a look at these guys and these girls, because that’s powerful. It’s interesting to hear you say we’re going the other way because there’s really no reason to wait. We almost want to come out a little confident and double down and be like, let’s go.
I’m with you on it. Let’s go. The question and challenge that comes with that, though, is scale. So IBC is still a pretty small company. In fact, most of the companies that are developing green and bio based molecules, you inherently start small because you have to start somewhere.
What about scalability? How are you able to scale and support? We’re in 2023, if you have the goal of let’s go, let’s buy those solutions today and tomorrow and accelerate it, not make it a 2050 goal, but make it a 2030 goal. How do you scale to get there?
We love that question because we have a great answer for it. You teed that one up for me nicely. Thank you, Victoria. So I think you’re right. When you look at, let’s talk to surfactant specifically. Regardless of the industry, you have, have the Ram nose. You’ve got the Sephora lipids.
You’ve got a lot of these surfactants out there that are from the fermented variety. Repeatability, potential issues, things like that. There’s some great companies out there. I think some strides will be made along the way to where those can scale. What we’ve done and what’s unique to us is that there is no fermentation with how we make our syntactic. So from a scale perspective we’re already there to what we can take on. You couldn’t throw enough out of this to where we couldn’t handle it based on our footprint of where we’re at, where we’re going and how fast we can build because it’s not the same capex of fermentation and whatnot. Can’t really talk about the specifics much more than how we do it. But I can say, if that’s something that somebody wanted to talk about.
I think more the reason why we’re saying why wait till 2030. Let’s go now. We don’t have a scalability issue. And because we’re not fermenting, there’s not a repeatability issue that you see with some of the some of the products from the fermented variety. So I think it really just plays to what we’re trying to do. Also maybe why we want to be a little extra confident of let’s go now and and here’s the other thing Victoria. I think we don’t have to just go all the way on sustainability. Some of the surfactants we’re selling are phenomenal co surfactants, so maybe it’s not that you just replace the synthetic completely. You combine our surfactant with yours and you take a percentage of synthetic chemistry that you’re currently using out and so it doesn’t have to just necessarily be that you’re switching overnight. In fact, you see that a lot of customers that we’re talking to doing that.
It doesn’t have to just be 100%, but let’s start now with baby steps.
Yeah, and eventually, as you say, it ultimately will take us to where we’re trying to go as an industry. We see this across a variety of product areas and formulations. So surfactants going into home care, it’s not all going to be green. Some of it’s going to be a component of green and a portion of plastics are circular or bio based and then the rest are conventional. We definitely see this happening across a variety of industries and products. You start where you start and then you keep growing. I like that.
Let’s talk a little bit about leadership, and I’m going to turn this a little bit more personally over to you. So you are a certified mission performance level five coach. I had to look up what that was but I’m going to let you explain it. What does this mean, and why did you go down this path to get certified as a coach?
It’s something that I’m passionate about. It probably comes from playing sports growing up and having a lot of cool coaches in my life. I think to some degree a parental figure or a grandparent can be viewed in the coaching/mentoring range. I always sort of gravitated to strong people in my life that are like that. The more you look at coaching in general, it’s very different fundamentally than being a manager. You could look at what a manager does and what a coach does. They both give the same outcome, but they’re very different because I view a manager as almost like telling and instructing and there may be times for that, but coaching is more talking someone through and helping them get their own goals achieved.
So that’s why it’s interesting to me. As to the specific mission performance level five, it’s a company that I was introduced to when I was at slumber day. Really cool company, check them out. If you’ve never heard of them, they’ve got a lot of employees on their team that have been part of SEAL teams or British special ops. They’ve got actors, so they’re all over the map in terms of unique experiences that they bring to the table and they do all kinds of difference coaching. Leadership trainings, public speaking, and things like that. They take you through stories, but one of the classes that they have is a coaching class. I took the first class, and it was by far the best class I’ve ever taken.
I wished I would have had something like that when I started cause this was probably 10 or 12 years into my career when I was exposed to this. What they offered is a certification program. Based on the curriculum that they teach and what it takes to get there, they basically associate a level five accreditation as like an associate’s degree. Which is pretty cool, but that’s a lot of work.
A lot of what you do is, you take the classes, but then you actually have people that you do sessions with. You’re actually given people to mentor and coach. So I think I think it’s a really cool way of interacting with employees.
I find it rare that business and commercial leaders have either the tendency towards coaching or to really the training and the focus on coaching. As you say, I think being a manager is different than being a coach and they play different roles. I personally actually do a lot of executive coaching and see the benefit and value obviously along the way with that. But I guess my question is, how are you able to leverage that? Are you able to leverage that at IBC, and how does that change who you are as a leader?
Ultimately, the best person to answer that question would be some of the people that I’ve had a chance to coach and they could tell you whether I was actually worth a darn or not. All kidding aside, really all that coaching needs is one person that’s interested. You don’t have to have a team of a hundred. That doesn’t matter, the size of your company, if you have one directory port you’re a coach, whether you know it or not. Your title may say manager, but at the end of the day, you’re a coach. I fundamentally pour into this whole thought differently. I think I always thought, what if every title in the world for every industry for every for every job out there, what if the word manager was replaced with the word coach and what would the world look like? Maybe sounds kind of silly or dumb, but in my mind, I think that’s pretty powerful. It doesn’t mean that you’re perfect every time you coach your natural indication, especially type A driven leaders.
You do executive coaching, so you probably see it all the time. It’s like their natural inclination is to want, to tell, or go, or do this. It doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily natural. But just being cognizant that maybe this is a better way to get the end result that you want your team to get to. At the end of the day, you do get a certain age and your view on the world changes. Seeing one of your team members smile or get a win. It’s cooler than you getting the win yourself. What’s really cool about coaching is it’s a lot less about you.
It’s just about the people that you’re around. It’s really powerful. I’m not going to say that I’m great at it all the time. But I think it’s something that I strive to try to be better at and that’s something that is pretty cool.
Yeah, and ultimately helping the people around you get more for themselves, achieve more, build those skills and that confidence.
Yep. That’s 100% what it is. Then you created an environment where they feel like they can call you and be very open with you as to, how do I achieve this goal that I want? Having those conversations where you can sit down, you’ve got to still have goals right? They’ve got to be mutual. They’ve got to be geared around where the company is trying to go, but then specific because we’re all different. We’re all unique in different ways and how someone does it might be different than how the other one does it. And that’s okay.
At the end of the day, how do we get the results? So that’s really interesting and that’s very cool stuff to dive into.
I’m going to throw in a different question here now, and in fact, I don’t normally ask this question. So this may be one of my my new questions that’s going to be coming along on the podcast pretty regularly. What’s one thing you wish you knew before you started your career?
Oh man. Again, that’s probably very related to just personalities, they’re all unique and different. For me personally, it’s that when things don’t seem right, or they didn’t go the way I planned that it’s not the end of the world. It’s probably not just something that I should have told myself, or which I wouldn’t knew when I started. It’s something I’m still trying to learn literally today and that trying to be perfect or sending email at 2 AM probably doesn’t solve a whole lot.
You see that a lot in leadership positions where they’re very driven. At the end of the day, whether you lose your job during COVID or whether you have a boss that is challenging or whether you’ve got personal stuff going on in your life or loss of a loved one. There’s a lot that you go through. Just knowing that it’s going to be okay tomorrow and not beat yourself up so bad. If you have that kind of perfectionist gene in you, speaking not just to myself, but to what I see in some others. When you coach and mentor a lot of people, or if you have kids, you see it across the spectrum and it’s the same. Whether it’s being a father or being a manager. So it’s a long answer to your question, but I think just being able to tell yourself that it’s going to be okay. It’s funny, if you don’t answer emails for a few hours, sometimes problems solve themselves. So you don’t have to always be there for every single thing or every single one. It’s okay to not be perfect.
That’s awesome. I think that’s right. So Chad, what’s next for you and for IBC? What should we be looking for over the rest of the year and into 2024?
My role at IBC currently is very specific to running the energy division, like we talked about. So we want to continue to create products that help our customers on the frac side increase hydrocarbon production, whether that be our best in class micro emulsion flow waves, or whether it’s our prop and embedment mitigation product that is sort of our two flagship technologies, and then all kinds of cool stuff. In my role, I get to work with the team in the lab, and present ideas and come up with potential new products. There’s currently some stuff in the lab that’s going to be pretty special.
We’re going to continue to turn heads, and change the way people look at chemistry design to interact with geology in ways that no one else does right now. So that’s my focus. I’m going to continue to look at launching products into spaces that we’re not currently in, in energy. We’re looking into that and some stuff will be launched in Q4 that we can talk about when it’s launched, but that’s my focus. To grow our energy business and we’ve got some really cool products to do it.
And keep innovating, it sounds like.
Every day.
Well, Chad, thank you for joining us today on The Chemical Show. It’s been really good to have this conversation and to share a little bit more about you and what you’re doing at IBC.
Thank you so much for having me, Victoria. Have a great day.
Absolutely. And thanks everyone for joining us. Keep listening, keep following, keep sharing, and we’ll talk to you again soon.
About Chad Hall:
Chad Hall is the Vice President of Energy at Integrity BioChem (IBC), driving the strategy and growth of the Oil & Gas division. A champion of innovation, he played a pivotal role in EC Max, IBC’s flagship technology—a groundbreaking engineered biopolymer designed to slow proppant embedment. With over two decades of experience in marketing, operations, strategic planning, business development, and technical analysis, Mr. Hall is a skilled coach and manager dedicated to developing high-performing organizations.
Before joining IBC, Chad worked with industry giants Schlumberger, MI-SWACO, Smith International, and Baker Hughes. He earned his Bachelor of Business Administration from Texas State University and holds a certified Mission Performance Level 5 Coach title. He and his wife reside in Prosper, Texas, with their three girls. They are members of Hope Fellowship Church and are involved in serving the community.