You're listening to the Oil and Gas This Week podcast with Mark LaCour and Jake Corley.

This is the show for busy oil pros who quickly want to keep their finger on the pulse of the industry.

Welcome back to another episode of Oil and gas this week. You're listening to episode

135. What up, Mark? You know what's up, Jake. We're dying of the cold, the extreme Arctic

cold in Houston right now. It's actually in the 20s, which it never gets that cold. I actually had to

scrape ice off my windshield for the first time ever. I've lived here for almost 15 years. Crazy. Absolutely insane. The second time it's snowed this year. We just see it. We had the floods.

And we've got snow. It's just like the end of the world's coming. And literally in two days.

So we're recording us on a Wednesday or three days. Saturdays will be back to 70-something degrees.

That does not surprise me at all. Speaking of surprising, if you'd like to surprise us and support the show, it's going to be back to 70-something degrees. It does not surprise me at all. Speaking of surprising, if you'd like to surprise us and support the show, it's really easy to do. Just leave us a review. That's all you have to do to support the show. We got a really good one by Nick Zaf. Great pulse of the industry. I've been out of the industry since the downturn, but I'm hopeful to return soon. And this podcast is a great way to keep informed on current events in the oil and gas industry with quality commentary from Mark and Jake. So Nick, man, big shout out to you. Thank you for leaving us a review. Be like Nick. Leave us a review and support the show. Well, Jake, this show is going to be a little bit different because every year, my company, Model Point, we do the predictions

for the year. And so in November of 2017, we did our predictions for 2018. And that's what

you and I are going to talk about today. You ready to jump into this? Let's do it. All right. So the first

one, online supply chain searches. Online supply chain searches have grown over 1,700% in oil gas from

2014 to 2016. And there's a reason for that. The reason is the old guy in the warehouse,

somebody like me, that if his boss said, his manager said, hey, we need some more one-inch ball valves.

He knew all the ball valve vendors, right? He played golf for them. We went for dinner, went drinking, went hunting with them for years, 15, 20 years.

And so he had vendors A, B, and C, and if they couldn't supply what he need, he had paper

catalogs he would pull out and find what he needed.

Well, unfortunately, that guy has retired or taken a package and is gone, and we have a

bright young person right out of school that has that position in the warehouse now. So when his manager says, hey, get me one inch ball valves. What do you think he does, Jake? Google's it. Yep, pulls his fun out and Googles it. So really big companies out there, really huge service companies, their marketing departments are aware of this and they're working to try to get ahead of this. You know, if you're a big service company and everybody knows your name and people buy mud pumps from you, I'm telling you, starting now and in the future, if you don't rank for mud pump when somebody searches in Google, it's going to hurt your business. And eventually, somebody much smaller than you, that's much more nimble that understands how to show up in supply chain searches is going just to go pass you up. And we have no choice. It's where we're going. That's where the world is going, but it's where our industry is going because we have this influx of young people. And I promise you, Jake, and I work around young people all the time. When they need something, they don't pull a paper catalog up. They don't read a book. They Google it, usually on their phone. So number one, predictions for 2018 is online supply chain

searches are vital and you need to get ahead of this. And actually, if you're a company out there, we'll give Patrick a plug and you want to know how to do that, reach out to Patrick. He's a co-host on the HS&E show. That's what he does for living with Lean Orfield. He's really good at it. It's so funny that you mentioned this on here just because, I mean, you and I both know Marty Dietrich over at Supply 20, and he's been working on solving this problem for like the last

like two or three years. And so you're having all the people who are looking to actually buy. This kind of goes by to our talk that we did at the geo convention last year. All people who are looking to buy or Googling, but then all the people who are selling are still selling in PDFs. You know, it's either PDFs or some of the kind of documents

and so where they're listing 25,000 different ball valves with different specifications.

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