Do You Want to Work for the Business — or Have the Business Work for You?

Claude Thorp told us a story on Wisdom at the Wellhead that I haven’t stopped thinking about. He was driving to Austin and listening to another podcast, and the guest was a woman who had left her law practice and opened a bakery. The bakery was a hit. Really successful. And the question she was wrestling with was simple: Do I want to scale this?

Because if she scales it, it’s not going to be her pie anymore.

I love that line. Because it captures something that every founder in oil and gas has felt but doesn’t always say out loud. You start a company because you’re good at something. You build it because you care. And then one day you look up and realize that the thing you built is now running you instead of the other way around.

Kevin Fischer, my co-host, heard that story and said something that landed perfectly: “Do you want this business to work for you? Or do you wanna work for this business? You gotta make that decision.”

That’s the question. And most founders I know have never actually answered it.

They Want to Own the Clock

Claude works with operators at New Tech Global every day. Small companies, lean teams, people who built something real with their own hands and their own money. And he said something that tells you everything about how the smart ones think about this question.

He said some of his clients — their goal is to travel. Enjoy life. They love the business. They still want to make the financial decisions, the capital decisions, the direction decisions. But the day-to-day headaches of operations? They want somebody else carrying that weight.

Kevin put it in a way that made Claude light up. He said, “They wanna know how the clock works. They don’t care about the inner workings of the clock.”

And Claude added: “And they wanna own the clock.”

That’s the distinction. Owning the clock doesn’t mean building every gear yourself. It doesn’t mean being the only person who can wind it. It means you own the outcome. You set the direction. But you’re not the one turning every crank at three in the morning because nobody else knows how.

I’ve Been the Guy Turning the Crank

I can tell you from personal experience that there’s a season in every founder’s life where you are the business. When Bob Baldwin and I started building what became Total Stream, I was working from a hospital bed. I was on dialysis three times a week. And I was still writing software, still making calls, still doing the work because there was nobody else to do it.

I don’t regret any of that. That season built something real. But I also know that if I’d stayed in that mode forever — if I’d never built a team, never trusted other people to carry pieces of it, never let the business become something bigger than what I could do with my own two hands — it would have killed me. And I don’t mean that as a figure of speech.

There’s a difference between building something and being trapped inside something you built. And the transition from one to the other isn’t always obvious while it’s happening. You tell yourself you’re just being dedicated. You tell yourself nobody else can do it the way you do. And you might be right, for a while. But eventually the question isn’t whether you’re dedicated. It’s whether you’re sustainable.

Where Do You See Yourself in Five Years?

Claude said one of the most important things a founder can do is have some understanding of where they see themselves in five or ten years. Not the company. Themselves. He said it won’t end up being exactly that — it’s going to be different — but if you don’t have some vision of how big you want to be, how much you want to scale, what kind of life you want to live, you’re just reacting.

And then he said something that I think separates the operators who make it from the ones who burn out. He said if you’re really leading and owning that company, you’ve got to think about who you want to be. Not just what the company should become. Who do you want to be? Why did you start it? Do you want to take it in a different direction?

Those aren’t business strategy questions. Those are life questions. And they’re the ones that most founders skip because the inbox is full and the phone won’t stop ringing and there are three fires in the field that need to be handled by lunch.

I get it. I’ve been there. But the founders who never stop to answer those questions are the ones who wake up ten years later and realize they built a prison with their own name on the door.

What a Bakery Teaches Oil and Gas

I keep coming back to that bakery story, because it’s so perfectly simple. This woman was good at making pies. She built something around that skill. It worked. People loved it. And then she hit the question that every successful founder hits: if I grow this, it won’t be mine anymore. Not in the way it is now.

That’s the same question facing the two-person shop that just bought 400 wells. The same question facing the geologist and two landmen who want to drill three wells in the Permian. The same question facing every operator I’ve ever met who started with a pickup truck and a handshake and now has thirty employees and a whole lot of headaches they didn’t sign up for.

Do you want to scale it? Or do you want to keep making your pie?

There’s no wrong answer. Claude was clear about that. Some of his best clients are the ones who said, “I want to own the clock, set the direction, and let someone else handle the operations so I can enjoy my life.” That’s not laziness. That’s clarity. That’s knowing who you want to be and building the business around that instead of the other way around.

Here’s what I’ve learned the hard way. The business will take everything you give it. Every hour, every weekend, every holiday, every ounce of energy you have. It will take all of it and ask for more. And it won’t feel bad about it, because businesses don’t have feelings. You do.

So the question isn’t whether you’re willing to work hard. Every founder I know is willing to work hard. The question is whether the thing you’re building is working for you, or whether you’ve become just another piece of equipment inside your own operation.

Own the clock. Set the direction. And make sure the business you built is returning something back to you — not just revenue, but time, purpose, and the freedom to enjoy what you’ve earned.

Claude Thorp has spent eighteen years at New Tech Global helping operators figure out what kind of company they actually want to build. His conversation with Jeff Dyk and Kevin Fischer on Wisdom at the Wellhead gets into the real questions that founders avoid until it’s almost too late.

Hear the full conversation.