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Hi everyone, I’m Adam Mayer, an undefinable piece of life currently exploring the cosmos in a human-shaped space suit 😉
But in more conventional terms, I’m an entrepreneur in the oil and gas industry, with a passion for technology and personal evolution. Planning to make my transition to doing NLP coaching and trainings part time over the coming months while I continue to create things on the physical plane as well.
Grew up along the east coast–Pittsburgh and Baltimore–and went to school at Wake Forest where I double majored in business and computer science. Got my start doing IT consulting at Accenture for a large federal government client in Washington DC. I quickly got tired of sitting in a cubicle at a large corporation and wanted to start my own business. I co-founded the Entrepreneurship Society at Wake Forest and had had an interest in starting a business for quite some time.
A couple years into my time at Accenture my dad decided to get into the oil business in West Texas, and I saw this was a great opportunity to help start a company. Originally I was going to wait for him to get things going, but after a year of waiting, around the time of my 25th birthday, I decided that with no guarantees of making any money at all and living off of my savings, screw it, I’m taking the leap and going to Texas! I ended up sleeping on the couch in the 1-bedroom apartment my dad was renting at the time, until he brought my mom down and got a two bedroom. Ended up living with my parents for two years while we got the business off the ground.
When I got to Texas I had to learn the oil industry from scratch. I learned about geology and petroleum engineering, oil and gas investments, and started helping my dad screen deals, and eventually started generating our own prospects. Within a year or two of my arrival we found our first project and with no previous reputation in the oil business, raised $10 million to drill 21 oil wells. We had put together a 150-page prospectus for the project (deals are commonly done with little to no prospectus via the good old boy network) that detailed every aspect of our plan to show investors that even as newbies in the industry, we had done our homework and had a solid plan.
And then the real work began… I spent the next 6 months of my life living in a trailer home in the middle of nowhere in the West Texas desert, building infrastructure and drilling wells. One of my first days on the ground, my dad tasks me with managing a dirt moving crew to start building the foundation of our oil tank facility. So suddenly I’ve gone from a cushy lifestyle working with computer systems in a cubicle in DC and going to happy hours, to managing a track loader, a dump truck, and a bulldozer… I was petrified. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. But I just had to figure it out as I went.
I managed dirt crews, electric crews running power lines, built roads and well locations, managed crews of laborers building our tank facility and doing other oilfield plumbing. I learned how to use a pipe wrench, did plenty of manual labor myself, and even learned how to operate a bulldozer. And I wondered on a daily basis, what the hell did I go to college for again? This is not exactly the glamorous way they paint entrepreneurship on Shark Tank… I learned quickly that the wrong people operating heavy machinery could cause VERY expensive problems VERY quickly, so it was a management training boot camp and trial by fire. I had to learn how to carefully manage people twice my age with 30 times my experience while staying in rapport. And it was just me and my Dad down there managing things, and it required everything both of us had in us, so I had no choice but to learn as I went and make the best decisions I could with limited information in this alien world. And every day there was a new, big, gutwrenching, potentially expensive problem to handle or avert.
Once the drilling started, I would get calls at 3am to go out to the drill rig to sample rock cuttings and look for oil shows as we drilled through the “pay zone” (rock formation containing the oil reservoir). I learned about drilling, logging, and frac’ing (there is no “k” in hydraulic frackturing, despite what the media might indickate ;)), and eventually about the production side of things once we brought the wells online (every well we drilled was productive to some extent, though some wells were more productive than others).
I then spent the next year and a half of my life as the “pumper,” or the guy who drives around to the wells every day, checks on them, and records data about them. As a computer guy, I saw how wasteful it is to have a guy driving around to every well every day, so I started using my “free time” to build my own IoT system from scratch to remotely monitor and control our wells, including both the hardware boxes that go at each well, and the software. This “free time” usually consisted of sitting in the passenger seat of an F350 pickup truck driving out to the oil field, frantically writing code at 7am. But I did it, and now we rely heavily on my system for remote monitoring of wells and oil tanks, automated text message alerts and automated well shutdown when there are problems. We can check the field from our phones and in one case I was able to shutdown a problem well in the desert of West Texas from my seat at the gate of the airport in Hong Kong.
So I was working about 15-hour days, with a 3-hour round trip commute to the oilfield, 6-7 days a week, in 20 degree cold to 110 degree heat, doing manual labor and managing operations for about 3 years in total. And I hated it. I was totally miserable and my adrenals were totally shot. This was not what I thought I had signed up for, at all. About once a month I would have a meltdown and have to do some “primal scream therapy” (PST(R)) out in the wilderness to recover. But when the alarm went off at 5:30am every day, all I knew was that no matter how exhausted I was and terrible I felt and thought there was no way I could possibly do another day of this, I just HAD to get up, or else the business would fail. And that was my mantra, I just couldn’t give up, I had to get up and keep going. I discovered far more resources than I ever thought I had, and at the same time I was hitting the bottom.
It was in hitting the bottom, as happens to many, that I started getting serious about personal development. Started listening to Brian Tracy audiobooks on my way to and from the site, and then my parents got my brother and I tickets to go to Tony Robbins UPW for Christmas one year. And then I discovered NLP and TJC from an Airbnb host in Austin who some of you might recognize (that’s a story in itself about being guided by the universe…), and here I am in the Master Trainer program today learning how to teach Primal Scream Therapy! I mean Time Line Therapy(R)!
So now I’m working to make my transition to doing NLP coaching and trainings, plus finding ways to build technologies that are centered around human well-being and prosperity… so making the technology more human and making sure the humans are up to the spiritual challenge of the great power that comes from utilizing high technology.
Very excited to be sharing this journey with you all and to get to know those of you I haven’t met yet. Thanks for reading my long story if you made it this far!
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Adam, you’re an inspiration.
Your story shows me one thing which is good to be reminded from time to time.
Now matter what you’re dealt, is what you make of it that counts. -
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Hey Adam,
Thanks for sharing! Good on you for going out and doing something different and turning your life around 🙂
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Welcome to the Primal Scream support group! HAHAHAHA
Wonderful story!! Dang, Adam, get it!
Good to see you on here 🙂 -
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