Alright, some of the most fun things in the world are visiting with CEO’s from around the world. What is even more fun is visiting with CEOs LIVE from NAPE. This was an absolute blast with Rachel Collins, CEO, from W Energy.
When delivering low-cost energy with the lowest kWh to United States consumers, we have to look at all sustainable energy forms. Sustainability involves great accounting for investors, growth, and accountability on the production side.
Our conversation is fun, and I learned a lot about the accounting side. We had a great talk about how Rachael takes pride in her employees’ production and the great culture at W Energy. CEOs help define the direction of the company and the internal culture. Culture is critical when shopping for software and supporting partnership firms. Great job, Rachael.
Our discussion included AI and a trustworthy cloud-based energy platform built for upstream and midstream energy companies. Having worked with exploration and production companies getting their data from the field to accounting, on through to the investors, and up to the CEO, having a system like W Energy is critical.
Thank you again Rachel for your time, and we look forward to visiting again! – Stu
Connect with Rachel on her LinkedIn HERE: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-collins-2b8481/
Highlights of the Podcast
Highlights of the Podcast
02:16 – Rachel Collins talks about her experience in the energy sector
03:21 – Profitability of midstream operations
04:11 – Introduction to Rachel Collins’ company and its solutions
05:27 – Importance of accurate data in energy accounting
06:16 – Role of accurate data in decision-making
08:05 – Rachel Collins discusses the use of AI in their solutions
10:47 – Cybersecurity and the importance of secure systems
11:50 – Location of servers and multi-cloud platforms
12:57 – Planning and investment focus for the company’s future
14:39 – Benefits of the company’s solutions for operational efficiency
16:45 – Considering total cost of ownership for software solutions
18:22 – Rachel Collins expresses enthusiasm for her team and company
20:47 – Significance of selling software solutions to the C-suite
22:09 – Investment and growth strategy of the company
23:46 – Consideration of carbon footprint accounting in the company’s roadmap
Check out W Energy on their Website HERE: https://wenergysoftware.com/
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– Get in Contact With The Show –
Stuart Turley [00:00:08] All right. Welcome to Energy News Me podcast. My name is detailing presidency of the sandstone Group. We are at Nape today. And I mean. This is where deals happen. But at the Energy Ladies Beat podcast, reaching happens. And I’ve had some very interesting guests today, but I’ve got even a wonderful guest because if you’re in the oil and gas space and you got oil plans, you got to get it from the pad investor. You got get it to the account and you gotta get it to the CEO. You’re got to do it. It’s got to be right. Because if it’s wrong, you’re not going to make any money. So we have Rachel Collins and she’s a seasoned, w energy sufferer. Welcome.
Rachel Collins [00:00:51] Thank you. Thanks. I’m happy to be here.
Stuart Turley [00:00:53] Yeah. Thank you. And you’ve been in, Houston for about 15 minutes.
Rachel Collins [00:00:57] 28 years. 28 years since I graduated from college.
Stuart Turley [00:01:02] Did you graduate.
Rachel Collins [00:01:03] LSU go Tigers. Oh, I.
Stuart Turley [00:01:04] Love the Tigers. My son in law is a Tigers fan, and I just. I’ve had to learn tigers. I got to install super Mike at LSU.
Rachel Collins [00:01:15] Okay. Oh, yeah.
Stuart Turley [00:01:18] That was real quick. That was a huge supercomputer. I was part of the team that was back behind it, and it was fun.
Rachel Collins [00:01:26] Well, I had a great time at LSU, and I actually have a daughter who is in her sophomore year at LSU right now. Yes. And we have a senior in high school, and we’re sending her this weekend to go hang out with her sister, pick out LSU. They’re going to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. So yes. And I’m, I’ve already told my family I’ma be stressed out all weekend hoping they survive. And yet I did this to my parents, so. And as. All right.
Stuart Turley [00:01:53] Play back some of your kids. Yeah. That’s good. It happened. Then they get more expensive.
Rachel Collins [00:01:56] That’s exactly right. Where the most expensive, phase of our lives right now.
Stuart Turley [00:02:00] Okay. Houston, we were kind of teased, and I’ve worked here for a long time as well, and some, way back in a long time ago. But the bags were about, you know, you train them to get that. But how did you get your experience in energy?
Rachel Collins [00:02:17] So, interestingly enough, I was recruited, from LSU. So my degree was before there was even miss. Okay. And so we had it was at the time Cuba or quantitative business analysis.
Stuart Turley [00:02:29] Oh yeah.
Rachel Collins [00:02:30] It’s a mixture of statistics and computer science. Right and right out of school, I was being recruited by a big group of LSU alumni. Okay. And industry or Andersen Consulting, which is where everyone went. And I went into industry. I had, you know, a lot of alumni from Eunice and Monroe and Lafayette, and they convinced me to get into industry. So I started at, gas pipeline, which is now Kinder Morgan. Oh, wow. I started my career there and got into midstream then.
Stuart Turley [00:03:01] Yeah, we need midstream. Yeah. Midstream seems to be a lot more profitable for folks than people realize. Because once you get it in there, you gotta get it somewhere. Yeah. And it’s the limited partner, on how all that goes through accounting kind of is an important issue for midstream.
Rachel Collins [00:03:22] You know? And I mean, accounting, when you talk about, I love deep vertical market software and stickiness, right? I mean, people don’t change their accounting solutions very often. If you can get in, if you’re stable, if it works right, then you’re in for the long haul. So I think midstream a lot of opportunity there. But accounting maybe even more so.
Stuart Turley [00:03:41] Wow, wow. We have helped a lot of companies with disparate systems. And so if you’ve got spatter on the well pad and you’ve got the pumping, you gotta see if the tank information, you’ve got all these kind of things going on. And tell us a little bit about your solution, because if you had it coming from a straight up everybody, you know, taking. Oh, that’s the wellhead. Oh, that’s the drop oil. You gotta measure it. Get that motor to the account. Yeah, that’s what your stuff does. Look, we.
Rachel Collins [00:04:11] We made an acquisition about two years ago, and it is called. At the time, it was a company called Seven Lakes. And that’s where we really expanded outside of just core accounting. And we got into field service management and field data gathering and then got into production accounting as well. And so to your point, it’s complex. I actually come from downstream retail petroleum before this. Nice. And, I have a lot of experience with the complexity of connecting to meters and all of the IoT complexity. And so we know that it’s it’s very complex to gather the data from the field. Oftentimes you’re in the middle of nowhere and you don’t have internet access. You don’t have hard wired, you don’t even have satellite in some cases. And so you have to be adaptable as far as pulling that data, whether it be from data systems manually, directly from meters. And so we have that capability through our joint solutions. So we can pull in data from the field very easily in a standardized way. And then we also can. Feed that into our production accounting capability. So obviously you have to be able to measure that and account for what’s been produced. And then we have a full platform end to end. So that can also then feed into revenue accounting and your full financial accounting solutions. We don’t have the point solutions that don’t talk to each other. Right. You know can be very.
Stuart Turley [00:05:28] Brittle.
Rachel Collins [00:05:29] And and frankly expensive. We actually have invested very heavily in that full value chain. Oh, nice and highly integrated platform. And I think that’s that makes us unique in this industry.
Stuart Turley [00:05:39] It does sound that way. And as a CEO of a EMV operator, tell me about you’ve got to be able as an MP operator, you have to be able to look at your, investors and say, we did X number of those or we did this. And so, y data into accounting. Yeah. I’m just asking because when I get asked, my CFO, is my data accurate? Is it accurate? Up to the day. And in the old days, it was you had read logs and guys were companies were going by and writing a piece of paper. Yeah. And it’s not that way now, is it?
Rachel Collins [00:06:17] Well, I mean, sometimes. Right. But we’re trying to eliminate that, trying to eliminate, human error and manual data entry. And I think we’ve come a very long way. I mean, there’s still always going to be unmetered wells and things. We still have to accommodate that. But, we’ve focused very much on accuracy of data. I mean, we started as an accounting solution. And so obviously when your users are accountants, you need to make sure that you have reliable and accurate data. And then we expanded from there into other capabilities. So yeah, obviously that’s very important to us to ensure that you have real real time access to your data. Yep. And that is accurate. We also have a very different model in our business where we have seen a lot of software providers that try to monetize the data that is yours. And so getting access to your data is absolutely. And it’s it’s challenging. And so to have your data and then in order to get access to it to be charged again, we’re changing that model where we have an open data model. And a lot of the investment we’re doing, with within R&D gives you full access to your data, because we believe that the value of data is only in sharing the data. Not, you know, compartmentalizing that. So a lot of investment in our data layer right now, in our custom reporting, in our dashboards, we have a lot of visualization tools that have been built.
Stuart Turley [00:07:37] Boards are so cool.
Rachel Collins [00:07:39] People love dashboards.
Stuart Turley [00:07:40] I’m going to be kind of, just upfront as a CEO, a lot of times I said that I could care less about the underneath there or, I don’t know, look at that dashboard. Yeah. And when I have other CEOs look at me and go, hey, where’s my dashboard? I’m like, wait five minutes. And I have to rely on people like the software that, you know, we have folks that, you know how to use that.
Rachel Collins [00:08:05] That’s right, that’s right. Well, we’ve been investing, there because to your point, you shouldn’t have to have a degree in computer science in order to use our software, right, and interpret the data. And so most of the investment here in the past, you know, few quarters has been in custom reporting and in dashboards. We’ve seen Microsoft Power BI. It has taken off. It’s everywhere. Everyone’s creating their own dashboards. And we realized that. So we’ve embraced it and we’ve said we’re going to open up our data model. And if you want to build a dashboard on your own, go for it. We can help you build them by training you on our data model so you understand how to do that. And then we’ve embedded power BI in our application. So you have embedded reports. Oh then we have a variety of ways that you can get to your data and you can export it. Some people still love Excel spreadsheets. If that’s your jam, go for it. You can do that too.
Stuart Turley [00:08:56] You know? But you know what? I’m going to introduce you to Shabnam. She’s with, and, and she, and technology, she’s a, and she’s working with a lot of big folks, and it’d be great to have you guys just have a talk. And part of that reason is somebody says I’m using Excel. I mean, as an I know. So are you using anything I know? Is that something concerning? Because in the cowling area, I was growing on an analyzation of. Yeah. And how what you what are you saying in that?
Rachel Collins [00:09:33] We are I think every tech company is looking at how do we leverage AI? If you’re not, then you’re probably not modern and leading edge. We’ve been looking at specific use cases. So one area that we know we could improve is just documentation support, streamlining support, providing services. Because our theory is that people don’t really want to talk to our support team. They want to figure out how to do it themselves. And so we have been embedding AI within our products so that we can build out self-service capabilities. And so that’s been a big. Part of where we’ve started using AI, right? So we started with support and services, and we’re also using it in our product and engineering teams. So on the back end, how to accelerate our product roadmap, develop high quality code. So a lot of experiments going on and, and we’re going to keep going. Yeah.
Stuart Turley [00:10:27] You know, in security, I, we had I don’t know if you remember the, Colonial Pipeline where the hackers, got in and hijacked. Yeah, that was terrible. And, we are going to see a lot more of that. Yeah. Just with the way the skill of the hackers are, how’s your security?
Rachel Collins [00:10:49] You know, I mean.
Stuart Turley [00:10:50] It’s only as good as your network. Probably.
Rachel Collins [00:10:52] That’s very true. I think that is one area as well that differentiates us. We are cloud native, meaning we did not start as an enterprise licensed software solution. We are not a point solution. Right? We were born in the cloud, and so we’ve always been designed and optimized to be in the cloud. And as a result, that’s quite different than a lot of the other players out there. And so not only do we go through all of the, compliance ourselves SoC one, SoC two, but we have inherited all of the security from our cloud providers as well. So I think that’s fantastic. And then obviously, I mean, we still, continue to invest sufficiently in cyber security is a big problem for every port. I mean, it’s.
Stuart Turley [00:11:35] It is.
Rachel Collins [00:11:36] It’s a scary thing.
Stuart Turley [00:11:38] Yeah. It’s amazing what they’re listening to, you know, and yeah, they keep getting better and better. Well that’s good. Are you servers in the U.S. or are they in several different places or.
Rachel Collins [00:11:51] They’re in both? So interestingly enough, I think that like, multi cloud platform is becoming just the reality.
Stuart Turley [00:11:58] It’s a great backup.
Rachel Collins [00:11:59] Yeah, I mean it it’s just something that it shouldn’t matter.
Stuart Turley [00:12:02] Where you are.
Rachel Collins [00:12:04] cloud is just becoming a commodity. So most of our businesses originated in AWS. We have our Seven Lakes business that will probably stay in AWS. There’s no reason to move it. But we have found, on our accounting solution. We’re a big SQL server database shop. Oh, yeah. And so we are actually in the process of migrating to Azure because of all the optimization that we can take advantage of in Azure. So that’s something. And we’re also seeing his performance improvements and cost savings. So we’re we got one foot in in both.
Stuart Turley [00:12:37] You know I’m sitting here and Michael and I have been doing the deal spotlight. And I just absolutely love Michael Tanner. As we go through and cut the deals and take a look at them and and really work through them. How does revenue help account? W energy work through the M&A process?
Rachel Collins [00:12:58] It’s a great question. I think we we get it. First of all. I mean, we are we are owned by, San Francisco based investor. And so, you know, we understand just the structure of various funds and investors have certain expectations, as far as your throughput, your profitability. So I think that helps. But also, what we’ve learned is just our strategy. Our approach is very helpful for all the consolidation that’s happening in upstream right now. Yeah. Because what we’re seeing is we are, we’re a modular platform. What that means is that we can coexist with complex technology ecosystems, and we can scale up and we can scale down. And some of our customers, they have acquired assets, and the consolidation has actually come to our benefit. Sometimes they divest of assets, and we’ve got to be able to scale down. And what we’ve seen is a lot of our a lot of other players can’t do that. They don’t have that flexibility and adaptability. And we actually can move up and down as our customers have their needs that change. The other thing that we’ve seen is sometimes a customer gets to a point where they might move on to a streamlined accounting solution, such as an Oracle Financial or SAP. Right. And that happens and we can still serve them. We can coexist. We still have niche capabilities because they’re highly modularized that we can integrate within SAP. That doesn’t mean that we are no longer relevant. So I think the way that we’ve architected our solution, it really does, align with a lot of our customers that are looking for that type of flexibility and who are going through high growth nodes and, you know, acquiring assets.
Stuart Turley [00:14:40] If I was a CEO. Oh, I am, but your type clients, where would they say one of your customers say W does this for me?
Rachel Collins [00:14:56] I mean, we we do a lot so thing. So I think if you were to talk to a customer that has all of our capabilities, right, they use our field services, our field data gathering, our production accounting, our financial accounting and our transportation solutions. Everything in between. I think, first and foremost, the value is operational efficiency. That is number one. I mean, we are we’re a one stop shop. You don’t have to have ten different point solutions that don’t talk to each other. You can have one integrated solution. One source of.
Stuart Turley [00:15:33] Truth. I can say once it that you’re one pane of glass. I love from a standpoint of, we talk, you know, the dashboards powered by, you can customize so easily out of power BI. And when you’re dumping it in there, the sky’s the limit. For what a, CEO needs. And I’m just sitting here thinking through all the hot buttons that you’re getting, and I’m, I mean, I’m like, okay. I’m so. Yeah. Right. But, the thing that I’m really saying is, I could almost do the, return, on investment on your software if I had three other software packages in the inconsistency and the data loss. That’s because I’ve done so many disparate system integrations. You’ve got that expense. You’ve got the expense of not knowing. You’ve got the expense. Are these barriers being encountered, or is this, a mix of gas not being counted? The money, the room that you’re hitting on my hot buttons could say more than what? I don’t want to throw those words in there. I could see that happening.
Rachel Collins [00:16:45] 100%. I think that’s one of the things that we, work with our customers the most to help them see, depending on who you’re speaking with, if you’re speaking to someone out in the field, you know, a VP of operations, they’re not always looking at things quite as holistically as you are as a CEO. And so we’re trying to help our customers see the, the total cost of ownership of all these disparate solutions, because oftentimes they’re not looking at it holistically. And to your point, when you start adding up that you have 3 or 4 disparate solutions and you are bearing the cost of hosting those, right? And you have to have operational support and you factor in the labor costs. I think we’re a huge savings. And we, we know two various case studies with some of our largest customers that they’re paying a fraction of what they have paid historically, right? When they’re spread across a multiple, a variety of vendors.
Stuart Turley [00:17:38] I haven’t even seen your price yet. And I already went through and I’ve already come up with an outlier statement. What does that tell you?
Rachel Collins [00:17:46] That it was fantastic. I mean, we have some of our largest customers that are paying 60 to 70% less than they have historically through this whole hodgepodge of, you know, all these different point solutions.
Stuart Turley [00:17:58] How cool is.
Rachel Collins [00:17:59] That?
Stuart Turley [00:17:59] So as a CEO, you’ve gotta sit back and you’ve got to have good people to make all this stuff happen.
Rachel Collins [00:18:05] We have a fantastic task team. It’s the best part of my job is the team that I. That I get to work with. Okay.
Stuart Turley [00:18:12] Physically, your eyes lit up when you started talking about your team. That tells me that she loves her job and B loves her team, so.
Rachel Collins [00:18:22] I do.
Stuart Turley [00:18:22] It.
Rachel Collins [00:18:23] Her. I love it. It’s funny, before the holidays, when we were heading back from the holidays, my husband said, oh, we gotta head back to work next week. And I said, I am so excited. And he said, you’re crazy, but can I come work for you? And of course I said, no, there’s not a chance I will never work together as husband, my son. Nonetheless, I do. I think that our team is absolutely remarkable up front. And, I’m very, very proud of everything that we’ve accomplished since I’ve been here the last year and a half. And I, I sleep like a baby at night.
Stuart Turley [00:18:55] I’m just excited for Dabney and, help him. What’s coming around the corner for w.
Rachel Collins [00:19:01] What’s come around the corner? We have our new term. I mean, look, I, I think that the most important thing that we do is ensure that the customers that we have today, right, are happy and successful, and we still have work to do that we still have some customers that we need to focus on their success. Nice. And they need to make sure that we have a high Net promoter score and that they are a reference table. And once we have done that, then we earned the right to go out and chase new logos and grow inorganically. And so I will say what’s on the horizon, making sure that our customers are happy. From a roadmap perspective, we are investing very heavily in integration. And also as we buy capabilities, as we buy companies, we need to make sure that we continue investing in innovation and data visualization. You pointed out it’s all about getting access to your data and being able to view it in a way that is meaningful to you, to those. A lot of the near-term and then performance instability and all the things that matter. But then in the future horizon, we’re looking at expanding our land capabilities, right? We you know, we know that we have some work to do there. We are looking at, you know, supporting additional commodities.
Stuart Turley [00:20:14] Right.
Rachel Collins [00:20:16] There are quite a, quite a few things that interest us to just expand, you know, the platform capabilities that we have today.
Stuart Turley [00:20:22] You know, I can’t wait to visit with you again, because there’s about when I’m sitting here talking to you, I’ve got about 9000 more questions. And I think we can set up another one later on and, and really, pinpoint out on some of these things because I’m sitting here thinking of about 15, maybe 20 CEOs and that I know their accounting systems are like, maybe.
Rachel Collins [00:20:48] We need to now we need some work. Yeah.
Stuart Turley [00:20:52] There are other technical, companies that are out there that are not selling at the CEO level. You have got to sell to the C-suite.
Rachel Collins [00:21:03] That’s right.
Stuart Turley [00:21:04] Because that man is answering to the shareholders. And once you get to the shareholders and you get to the CEO, you got to have really, really thin, expenses to make good in a volatile oil and gas space, because natural gas is at $2 right now, blowing apart boilers, you know, the 70 to 80 range. Yeah. But if they back end of that and your expenses, you keep your expenses low, you track, your investors are getting. Yeah. And sharing. Sorry. We’re, we’re seeing Rachel in the, investment side of things. You know, people are looking for investors in oil and gas because the ESG model is changing and people want return. Yeah, well, your clients can’t give them the returns if they don’t know about it. And those managers, like we have a plug a hole in something if the accounting system doesn’t provide that information.
Rachel Collins [00:22:10] I agree, I mean, you said so many things that align to our strategy channel. That’s yeah, maybe three points there. I think number one, something that sets us apart is that we might be a smaller player, one of the newcomers, so to speak. But, we have investors, we have expectations from our investors. But what is different for us is that we are in growth mode, and they are investing heavily in our business. So we are investing in our product and we are trying to expand and improve. And so I think that is a little bit different than a lot of the, companies out there that kind of they’re, you know, they built the product and it’s costing, but they’re not necessarily investing what they need to introduce AI and improve the user experience and simplify and make sure that the data is readily available. And so we are doing those things to ensure that in these tight margin businesses, you have full visibility. And not only that, I think we’re building a better product and it’s more economical. And that that to me is the best part of our value proposition, you know.
Stuart Turley [00:23:17] And so fun is the oil and gas industry for so long didn’t monitor itself and the and and it’s now doing such a great job in monitoring and doing things. They have to have this. And I don’t know this answer. So I’m not trying to say to you I have. But one of the things that’s coming up is the carbon tax and the carbon footprints and the accounting for carbon. Have you thought about that, or is that on your roadmap in trying to figure that out? And I don’t I don’t remember throw this out at you. No, it’s
Rachel Collins [00:23:46] Of course we have. I mean, especially, you know, the whole energy transition, renewable, sustainable energy. It’s a big topic, especially from our investors. I mean, we’re San Francisco based investors, and that’s a that’s a hot topic. I.
Stuart Turley [00:23:59] Wouldn’t mind throwing that out right now.
Rachel Collins [00:24:02] So we’re definitely looking at it. But, I mentioned it’s important to us to really stick to our core as well. So we do look at that and we’re thinking about Inorganically. Is that something that just potentially an acquisition in the long run? But I think before we get to that, we want to make sure first and foremost that we continue to serve the markets today, which are upstream of midstream oil and gas customers, what’s important to them? And if they tell us that that is important to them, then that will hit our roadmap. But until then, we’re focused on what they tell us they need from us. And I think that for us is more important than, you know, from an outside investment.
Stuart Turley [00:24:40] View from the the regulators legislation, through regulatory action is forcing a lot. Yes. It’s all about tax the carbon measuring and the accountability. And there’s some products out there. And I’ll do some introductions for.
Rachel Collins [00:24:57] Fantastic.
Stuart Turley [00:24:58] Because it’s coming.
Rachel Collins [00:25:00] It is coming.
Stuart Turley [00:25:01] And it’s a pain in the realm.
Rachel Collins [00:25:03] And we’ve looked a little bit. There are ways to kind of, you know, get the breadth of scope with through acquisition where you can cover some of the energy transition. And potentially, for instance, we really cover physical commodity. We contemplated, should we, support physical and financial commodity. And depending on some of the M&A targets, you could also have some of the capabilities that you’re referring to. So there’s a lot being discussed. how.
Stuart Turley [00:25:31] Cool.
Rachel Collins [00:25:32] Yeah, it’s it’s a great time.
Stuart Turley [00:25:35] To have you on a resource because I’ve got several panels that we have coming up that some of this is just phenomenal for.
Rachel Collins [00:25:42] I would love to. I have probably giving you a little bit of a sneak peek into our strategic, M&A, strategy here, but nice. But nonetheless.
Stuart Turley [00:25:51] Joe Herbert Second.
Rachel Collins [00:25:53] Amendment.
Stuart Turley [00:25:54] So thank you.
Rachel Collins [00:25:55] So it’s been a lot of fun to have.
Stuart Turley [00:25:57] All your stuff on your LinkedIn and where people can reach you on LinkedIn.
Rachel Collins [00:26:01] Fantastic. They hear from you. And, any feedback.
Stuart Turley [00:26:04] So let let everybody know this was the best single podcast you’ve ever been on, right?
Rachel Collins [00:26:10] The the best podcast I’ve ever been on. And the as you pointed out, the most fun that I’ve had on a podcast.
Stuart Turley [00:26:16] So there you have that.
Rachel Collins [00:26:18] Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
