Biting Off More Than You Could Chew

Picture a young guy walking into an office in Houston for a job interview. He is good with numbers. He is good with Excel. He has never managed a bond portfolio in his life. Across the desk is a woman who is currently responsible for about a hundred million dollars in assets. He tells her what he thinks he wants to do. He tells her how he sells himself. She listens, and at some point during that conversation, she decides she is going to hand him about twenty million dollars in bonds and let him figure out how to buy and sell them.

He walks in on day one. He has never seen a Bloomberg terminal in his life. Six months later, he is pretty much an expert with one. Not because he took a class. Not because he had a mentor walking him through it. Because somebody trusted him with work he was not qualified for, and he refused to walk out the door until he figured it out.

That is Alex Economides telling Kevin and Philip how he got his start. And the way he summed it up was honest in a way you do not hear from a lot of people. He said that is kind of the story of his career. Biting off more than he could chew, and then figuring out how to chew it anyway.

I sat with that line for a while after I heard it.

Every Builder I Respect Has a Version of This Story

I did not go into oil and gas because I had a petroleum engineering degree and knew exactly what I was doing. I went into it because the work was interesting and somebody was willing to let me learn. By the time I had fifteen years of field experience across drilling, completion, reservoir, gas management, and operations, I had been handed more work I was not qualified for than I could count. Nobody cared. The jobs needed doing. Somebody had to figure out how to do them. And the guys who kept getting handed the next thing were the guys who had figured out the last thing.

Then Bob Baldwin and I decided we were going to build software. Bob and I were petroleum engineers. We were not software guys. We had a garage, a personal crisis I was working my way through on dialysis, and an idea that the industry needed something better than what it had. We were not qualified to build integrated well lifecycle management software. Nobody we knew was. So we sat down and figured out how to do it.

The first copy of that software, I sold lying prostrate on my living room floor. The buyer was a friend of a friend. Honestly, I think he bought it out of pity. That is not a story I tell to be humble. That is what actually happened. We were not ready. We had not figured out the sales process. We had not figured out half the product yet. But we said yes to the work, and we kept saying yes, and thirty years later the company is still here. Total Stream exists because two guys who were not qualified to build software refused to walk out the door until they had.

The Guys Who Only Take On What They Know

Here is the other half of this story, and it is the part the motivational posters leave out. For every Alex and every Bob-and-Jeff in this industry, there are ten people who only ever take on work they already know how to do. They stay in their lane. They protect their competence. They guard their reputation. And they never build anything bigger than what they started with, because building something bigger requires doing something you were not qualified for yesterday.

I am not saying those folks are doing anything wrong. There is a kind of career that works just fine staying inside your training, doing the job well, collecting the check. That is honest work, and I respect it. But nobody ever builds a company that way. Nobody ever writes a patent that way. Nobody ever walks into carbon capture twenty years into a career in finance and publishing and helps figure out how to turn dirty diesel exhaust into food-grade CO2.

Alex has two US patents on how to make carbon markets work. When Philip asked him about it on the show, Alex said, and I am not paraphrasing, technically speaking, you are talking to the person who owns the patent on how to do this. That is not something you say if you stayed in your lane. That is something you say if you kept raising your hand for work that was slightly past your reach until the work caught up with who you were becoming.

The Part Most People Get Wrong

The mistake a lot of younger guys make, when they hear a story like Alex's, is they think the lesson is to fake confidence. Walk in and talk yourself into something you are not qualified for and the universe will reward you. That is not the lesson. That is a good way to get fired, sued, or quietly blackballed by everybody who notices you oversold yourself.

The lesson is subtler than that. Alex said something later in the conversation that I thought landed it better than anybody else could have. He said the thing that actually made him successful was persistence, and a willingness to learn. He said a lot of things are easier than they seem when you look at them from the outside, but you have to get in there and actually learn how to do them. You have to, in his words, get your hands dirty.

That is not confidence. That is the opposite of confidence. It is a willingness to be the person in the room who does not yet know what he is doing, and to stay in the room long enough to learn. Most people cannot tolerate that. They bail the moment they feel out of their depth, because feeling out of their depth feels like failure. The builders I have respected over forty years understood that feeling out of their depth was the beginning of the work, not the end of it.

Why Alex Can Walk Into Any Industry and Be Useful

Alex has now worked in high finance, international energy publishing, and carbon capture technology. Those are three completely different industries. When Philip asked him how he fits himself into industries he has less experience in, Alex gave an answer that I think every operator in our space should think about. He said, fundamentally, he does math for a living. Math does not care what industry you are in. The math of calculating a levelized cost of electricity is the same math as calculating a levelized cost of carbon capture. What changes is the widget. The discipline underneath the widget does not change.

That is a consultant's answer, and it is also true. But there is more to it than the math. Alex then said that the hard part, the part that separates him from a lot of other people, is that you have to learn about the business. You have to understand how the company actually works. You have to ask the right questions and care about what the answers are. He said, almost in passing, that a lot of times his clients do not even know what problem they are trying to solve. His entire job is helping them figure it out.

That is the real skill. Not the math. Everybody in our industry can do math. The skill is walking into an unfamiliar room, being willing to not know, asking the questions that get you to the actual problem, and then bringing what you do know to bear on it. That is what biting off more than you can chew actually looks like when you have been doing it for twenty years. It stops being about courage. It becomes a way of working.

What This Looks Like in Our Business

I have watched this play out in oil and gas for four decades. The company man who got promoted into operations without a business degree and learned how to manage people by doing it. The landman who ended up running acquisitions because she was willing to learn the deal structure piece at night. The drilling engineer who walked into his first production engineering assignment with no experience and figured it out in six months because the well was not going to wait for him to enroll in a class.

Every one of those people, I would bet on again. Not because they knew what they were doing on day one. Because they did not, and they stayed anyway. That is the trait. That is what makes somebody worth investing in, hiring, partnering with, or getting on a podcast.

See, the other guy stayed safely inside what he was certified for. You raised your hand for the thing nobody else wanted to touch. Ten years later, you are the guy the rest of the industry calls when they have a problem they cannot solve. That is not luck. That is compounding willingness.

Final Thought

My dad raised ten kids on a farm in Montana. He was a farmer and a carpenter and a man who could fix just about anything that broke, not because he was trained in any of it, but because we could not afford to pay somebody else to do it. When something broke, he learned how to fix it. When the house needed a new room, he built it. When one of the kids needed something none of us had the money for, he figured out how to make it. He did not walk around talking about grit or resilience or any of the words people use now to describe that kind of life. He just stayed at the work until the work got done.

I think Alex and I grew up in different worlds, but we learned the same lesson from the people who raised us. You do not wait until you are qualified. You say yes to the work, and then you become the person who can do it. That is how every real builder in this industry got started. That is how a young finance guy in Houston ends up holding two US patents on carbon markets. That is how two petroleum engineers in a garage end up running a software company thirty years later.

Competence is not what gets you in the door. Willingness is. Competence is what you build on the way through.

Alex Economides is a fractional CFO at Occam's Technology and an energy transition advisor to New Tech Global. He holds two US patents on carbon market design. On Wisdom at the Wellhead, Kevin Fischer and Philip Richard sit down with him to trace a career that moved from high finance to international energy publishing to carbon capture technology, all driven by the same instinct: say yes to the work, then figure out how to do it.