The Lumpy Start: What a Kid Wiring Gas Turbines Can Teach You About Where Leaders Come From

I sold my first software system lying prostrate on my living room floor, showing it to somebody because I couldn't sit up. I think he bought it out of pity. But he bought it.

That's where the story starts. Not a boardroom launch. Not a funded startup with a pitch deck and a plan. A guy on a floor, too sick to stand, building something he believed in during the worst season of his life. Around that same time, Bob Baldwin and I were working out of a garage building what would become Total Stream. I'd developed diabetes from the stress. I was on dialysis three times a week. There were stretches where I was working from a hospital bed more days than I wasn't. Nobody in their right mind would have looked at that situation and said, "This is where a company gets built."

But it was. And I've never forgotten that, because it taught me something I still believe. The stuff you build during the hardest seasons is the stuff that lasts. The foundation doesn't get poured when everything is going well. It gets poured when nothing is.

Then Eric Fidler Told Us His Version

We were recording Wisdom at the Wellhead, and we asked Eric how he got into the industry. He called his beginning a "lumpy start," and I had to smile, because I know that phrase from the inside.

Eric is a Georgia Tech graduate, but his first year didn't go the way anyone planned. His parents told him he needed to start contributing more to his education. The work he'd done up to that point, restaurants and amusement parks in New Orleans, wasn't going to carry him. So a friend helped him land a job as an electrician, wiring gas turbines for Baker, CAC. Atlanta, 1979.

When he said 1979, I told him I'm in the same vintage. Same era. Same industry. Same feeling of being young and having to figure things out with your hands before you had any credentials to back it up. My version was a farm near Billings, Montana. Ten kids, eighty acres, a father who was a carpenter and a farmer and who read scripture to us every night at the dinner table. I was selling cucumbers out of my garden for spending money by sixth grade. Different geography, same education. You learn what things cost by paying for them yourself.

The Difference Between Showing Up and Digging In

Here's the thing about Eric's story that separates it from a thousand other summer job stories in the oilfield. A lot of guys could have been in his spot. Wiring turbines to pay for school. Showing up, doing clean work, punching out. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's honest work and it gets the job done.

But Eric started taking the equipment apart. He wanted to understand how the turbine actually worked, not just where the wires went. The controls in those days were a mix of pneumatics, hydraulics, and whatever early electronics were available. None of that was his job. His job was the wiring. But he couldn't leave it alone.

That one instinct, the refusal to stop at the boundary of what somebody was paying him to do, is what opened every door that came after. He got pulled into fixing processes that weren't working. Things other teams were struggling with. He was given those opportunities not because he asked for them, but because he'd already demonstrated that he understood more than his role required. And that deep knowledge of how production processes interact, that understanding he built by taking things apart on his own time, is what eventually sent him overseas as a young man with big responsibility and big authority relative to the company's revenue stream.

Nobody planned that trajectory. Nobody handed it to him. He built it by digging into things that weren't his job until they became his career.

The Pattern I've Watched for Forty Years

My dad had a lesson he taught through a cucumber garden. He told me that if you don't take care of your customers, you're not going to have the results of it. Simple as that. He was talking about selling produce, but he was really talking about everything. The work you do when nobody's watching, when nobody's paying you what you're worth, when the conditions are hard and the reward is uncertain, that's the work that builds the person you're going to become.

I've watched that pattern play out in this industry for over forty years. The people who built things that lasted, the companies that survived the downturns, the leaders who earned real respect from the people around them, almost all of them have a lumpy chapter somewhere in their history. A season where nothing lined up and they had to build anyway. It's not a requirement. But it's the most reliable predictor I've found.

See, the guy with the clean resume and the straight-line career path might be excellent. You don't know until something goes sideways for the first time and there's no procedure for it. The guy who came through a lumpy start has already been in that spot. He's already proven he can build something with nothing but his own resourcefulness and stubbornness. You can't train that. It either got built in the hard years or it didn't.

What This Means If You're Building a Team

Ask about the rough chapter. The next person who sits across from you with a gap in their resume or a winding career path, don't skip past it. Ask them what they built during that season. Ask them what they learned when nothing was working. That answer is worth more than the degree at the top of the page. Eric's career started because somebody noticed a kid on a shop floor was doing more than his job required. Be that somebody for the people on your team.

Throw your best people at hard problems early. Eric got handed broken processes to fix because somebody saw he could handle it. That's how you find out what a person is really made of. You don't wait until they've earned the right to struggle. You give them the struggle and watch what they do with it. The ones who come back with questions instead of excuses are the ones you invest in.

Tell your own lumpy start. I didn't want to talk about the living room floor for a long time. It's not a proud image. A guy too sick to sit up, selling software out of desperation as much as conviction. But I've learned that the people coming up behind me need to hear that story more than they need to hear about what Total Stream looks like today. Because when they're in their own hard season, wondering if it's worth pushing through, the polished success story doesn't help them. The messy one does.

Final Thought

My dad farmed. He built houses. He raised ten kids on eighty acres. He never had a career that would impress anyone on a LinkedIn profile. But he built people. He taught us that the foundation matters more than the frame, and that the work you do in the dirt is the work that holds everything else up.

Eric Fidler wired gas turbines in Atlanta in 1979 because his first year of college was lumpy and his parents told him to figure it out. That kid on a shop floor became the engineer who led the design of a production facility in China that flowed first oil on the promised date, on budget, with the automation working. They'd never done it before. They still haven't done it since. And it started with a job he took because he needed the money and a curiosity he followed because he couldn't help it.

If your start was rough, that's not something to apologize for. That's the foundation. And the people who skipped it will spend the rest of their careers trying to build what you already have.

Eric Fidler's career started on a shop floor and took him to a hundred countries. On Wisdom at the Wellhead, he tells the whole story, the lumpy parts and all, and what four decades in automation taught him about where real leadership comes from.