You Can’t Run Full Speed Without Trust

For a while there, I called Claude Thorp every Friday at ten o’clock. Whether I needed to talk to him or not.

That probably sounds like a waste of time to somebody who runs their calendar by efficiency. Ten minutes on a Friday with no agenda? No deliverable? No action item? But Claude knew I was going to call. And I knew he’d pick up. And over time, that rhythm became something neither of us had to think about. It was just how we operated.

When Claude brought that up on Wisdom at the Wellhead, he said it casually — almost like it was a small thing. But then he said something that stopped me: “Not everybody answers the phone.”

He’s right. They don’t. And that’s the whole point.

Everybody talks about trust in business. It’s in every mission statement, every pitch deck, every leadership book on the shelf. But Claude Thorp said something on the podcast that I think cuts through all of it: “If you don’t trust, then you can’t run full speed.”

That’s not a motivational quote. That’s an operational reality.

What Trust Actually Looks Like in the Field

Claude described a scenario that anybody who’s worked with partners will recognize. He said when a need like Total Stream comes up in a meeting with a client, he can pick up the phone and catch me. Right then. And the client sees that. They see that the person Claude is recommending actually answers when he calls. That one small moment — a phone being picked up — transfers trust from Claude to us before we’ve even said a word.

I’ve thought about that a lot since he said it. Because it’s true. Trust doesn’t transfer through contracts or capability decks. It transfers through moments. Small ones. A phone answered. A Friday call that never gets skipped. A promise kept when it would have been easy to let it slide.

And Claude made another point that I think gets missed in most conversations about partnerships. He said that if you’re going to connect people to work together — whether it’s a consultant and a client, or Total Stream and one of NTG’s operators — you can only do that if you really know those companies well. And knowing them well, he said, is not reading their bio. It’s knowing what they feel. What they really want. What their goals are.

Do they like PDP production, or do they like to drill appraisal wells? If you don’t understand that about your client, you don’t know what they need. And if you don’t know what they need, you’re guessing. And guessing is the opposite of trust.

The Place Where Trust Actually Gets Built

Here’s where Claude said something that made everybody in the room smile, because it’s so true it hurts. He said the place where you really build trust is when you get in a situation where your head might spin around and you throw up guacamole.

I’m keeping that line forever.

Because he’s exactly right. You don’t build trust on the smooth projects. You build it when things go sideways and you find out what the person across the table is actually made of. Do they disappear? Do they point fingers? Do they start reading the contract to find the exit clause? Or do they pick up the phone, tell you what happened, and start working on a fix before you even ask?

I’ve been on both sides of that. I’ve had partnerships that looked great on paper and fell apart the first time something went wrong. And I’ve had partnerships — like the one with NTG — that got stronger every time we hit a rough patch, because we handled it together instead of handling it through lawyers.

All projects, all things, are not smooth. Claude said that too. Nothing’s smooth. That’s just the reality of operating in oil and gas. The question isn’t whether things will go wrong. The question is whether your partnerships are strong enough to absorb it and keep moving.

Ninety-Nine Percent

Claude threw out a number that I want people to sit with. He said 80%, maybe 90%, maybe even 99% of the value that NTG has is in the people who’ve carried fifteen- and twenty-year relationships. Not the brand. Not the service lines. Not the tech stack. The people. The relationships.

NTG has 130 staff employees. Claude told us roughly 40% of them have been with one of the founder companies for over ten years. He’s been there eighteen years himself. Their partnership with SLB is fifteen to eighteen years old. Their partnership with Total Stream has been built the same way — conversation by conversation, project by project, Friday call by Friday call.

I think about what that means for the rest of us. If 99% of your value lives in relationships, then every time you skip the follow-up call, every time you let a connection go cold, every time you treat a partner like a vendor instead of a teammate — you’re eroding the most valuable thing you own.

I’ll be honest, I’m not naturally the best at staying in touch. I get buried in the work just like everybody else. But Claude’s number stuck with me. Ninety-nine percent. That’s not a nice-to-have. That’s the whole business.

What Running Full Speed Actually Means

When Claude says you can’t run full speed without trust, he’s not being philosophical. He’s describing what happens operationally when trust is present versus when it’s not.

When trust is there, you don’t have to second-guess every recommendation. You don’t have to build three layers of approval into every decision. You don’t have to wonder if the person you’re relying on is going to show up. You just move. And the speed difference between a high-trust operation and a low-trust operation is enormous. It’s the difference between a team that can take over 400 wells in sixty days and a team that’s still arguing about the org chart.

Claude and I have built that kind of trust over years. Not because we signed a good contract. Because we had a lot of conversations. We ideated on things together. We worked through problems on multiple clients. And over time, Claude got to the point where he said he knows what I would do if a client asks him something — before he even calls me. That’s what trust at speed looks like. You don’t have to check. You already know.

I grew up in a family where my dad read scripture to ten kids every night at the dinner table. He taught us that your word is the foundation everything else gets built on. I still believe that. And I’ve watched it play out in this industry over and over again.

The operators who build on trust don’t just survive the cycles. They come out the other side with their partnerships intact and their reputation stronger. The ones who treat trust like a nice-to-have spend every downturn rebuilding from scratch.

Build the thing that lasts. Answer the phone. Show up on Friday. And when somebody’s head starts spinning and the guacamole is flying, be the person who stays in the room.

Claude Thorp has been building teams and partnerships at New Tech Global for eighteen years, and his take on trust in oil and gas is one of the most practical things we’ve recorded on this show. This conversation will change how you think about the relationships that actually run your business.

Watch the full episode of Wisdom at the Wellhead.