How to Build an Oil & Gas Team from Scratch in 60 Days

Two people. Four hundred wells. Sixty days.

That was the situation when Claude Thorp described the Rushmore project on Wisdom at the Wellhead. A two-person staff had acquired 400 wells, and they needed a full operation stood up — not in six months, not in a quarter. In sixty days. Accountants. Production accountants. Production engineers. Operations manager. Back office. Everything from the technical side to the books. Built from nothing, running by the deadline.

I was part of that story. Total Stream helped NTG take over the whole operation, and I can tell you — when Claude described it on the podcast, he made it sound smooth. That’s because by the time we were done, it was. But standing inside it while it was happening? That’s a different feeling entirely.

Most people hear “400 wells in 60 days” and think the hard part is speed. It’s not. Speed is just pressure. The hard part is getting the right people in the right seats when you don’t have years of working together to fall back on.

This Is What NTG Was Built to Do

Claude has been at New Tech Global for eighteen years, and the core of what they do is exactly this: helping companies fill the gaps they don’t need full-time. That’s how he described it. Not staffing in the temp-agency sense. Connecting clients who need projects with the right team, the right technologies, and the right processes.

NTG’s core client is what Claude called the small deal guys. Two land guys and a geologist who want to drill three wells. Think about everything that operation needs beyond those three people — production accounting, regulatory, field operations, HSE, data management, back office. No small operator is going to hire all of that full-time. But they need all of it to run right.

Now scale that up to 400 wells acquired by a two-person team, and you start to see why NTG’s model exists. They’re not just filling seats. They’re standing up entire operational teams that function as one unit from the day they hit the ground.

Last year alone, Claude told us NTG’s venture service line supported 132 clients across six different basins. That’s not a one-off. That’s a machine built for exactly the kind of problem the Rushmore project presented.

You Can’t Do It All in House

Here’s what Claude said about partnerships that I think applies directly to how a project like Rushmore gets done. He said NTG always knew that maybe 30 or 40 percent of the functions they’d need, they could handle with staff in house. Another 20 or 30 percent, they could cover through individual consultants they knew. But some functions — the specialized ones, the technology layer, the things that require years of development to get right — those live inside partner companies.

That’s where Total Stream came in. Claude said it directly: “We weren’t gonna go out and develop what Total Stream had developed. And yet we needed that function that our clients were gonna require.”

I appreciate that, because it’s honest. And it’s exactly how I think about it from the other side. We didn’t build Total Stream to replace what NTG does. We built it to give their clients — and ours — the data and production management layer that ties everything together. When NTG stands up an operations team and Total Stream provides the platform they’re working on, the client gets something neither of us could deliver alone.

Claude also talked about their partnerships with SLB’s digital and integration group, with OpsGeologic for geoscience, with Baker Tilly for accounting. Each one fills a specific capability that NTG doesn’t try to build internally. And each one works because the partnership is deep enough that Claude knows what his partners would do before he even calls them.

You can’t build a 400-well operation in sixty days by starting from scratch on every function. You do it by already having the right partners in place, already knowing how the pieces fit together, and already trusting the people on the other end of the phone.

The Right Connector

Claude used a phrase that I think captures the whole thing. He said the team you build needs to be “the right connector.” Not just the right people. The right connector.

That’s a different way of thinking about team-building. Most operators think in terms of roles. I need a production engineer. I need a pumper. I need an accountant. And those are real needs. But what Claude is describing is something bigger — the idea that the team itself is a connecting piece between the operator’s goals and the work that has to get done. Every person on that team isn’t just doing a job. They’re connecting the vision to the execution.

I’ve seen the other version of this. I’ve seen operators throw bodies at a problem — hire fast, figure it out later — and end up with a group of people who are all technically competent but don’t function as a unit. They’re a collection of individuals, not a team. And the operator ends up spending more time managing the people than managing the assets.

What NTG did on the Rushmore project was different. They didn’t just fill the roles. They built a connected team that could operate as one unit from day one. And they did it in sixty days because they’d already done the hard work — the relationship building, the partnership development, the years of learning what works and what doesn’t — long before the deal ever closed.

What This Means If You’re Sitting on a Deal Right Now

If you’re a two-person shop looking at an acquisition, or a small operator about to take on more wells than your current team can handle, the Rushmore story should tell you something important. You don’t have to build everything yourself. You don’t have to hire fifteen people and hope they figure out how to work together. You can bring in a partner who’s already done it — who already has the people, the processes, and the relationships to stand up what you need, when you need it.

But here’s the part that matters most: that only works if the partnerships are already built. If you wait until the deal closes to start looking for help, you’re already behind. The operators who can move in sixty days are the ones who invested in relationships long before the clock started ticking.

I’ve been doing this long enough to know that the best deals don’t fall apart because of geology or economics. They fall apart because the team wasn’t ready. The Rushmore project didn’t fall apart because NTG and Total Stream had already spent years building the kind of trust that lets you move fast without cutting corners.

Sixty days sounds impossible until you see it done. And then it doesn’t sound impossible anymore — it just sounds like what happens when the right people already know how to work together.

Build those relationships now. Not when the deal shows up. Now. Because when the clock starts, you won’t have time to go looking for trust. You’ll need it already in the room.

Claude Thorp and NTG have been building operational teams for oil and gas companies for decades. His conversation with Jeff Dyk on Wisdom at the Wellhead gets into how partnerships, trust, and preparation make the difference between a scramble and a smooth standup.

Watch the full episode.