My motivation to start my own company was inspired by working for and noticing other well drilling companies make mistakes that cost customers more money than they should have.
After launching my well-drilling company, I began changing the methodology. Instead of just drilling holes to a certain depth before realizing maybe there is no water (so why keep drilling?), I focused on first finding the water underground. My approach was simple: start a new hole where we know we're close but have a better chance of striking water.
This is how I completely changed the process of well drilling. My team would actually locate where the water was before drilling. If we started a hole and realized it wasn't going to produce water, we'd stop and try somewhere else where we knew we had a better shot at hitting water. This meant customers weren't paying for wasted drilling costs anymore.
It was pretty simple, really. It was just common sense stuff that nobody else was doing. The good part is how fast my reputation spread once people realized there was a more methodical way that gets the results for a lower cost. By 1997, I couldn't keep up with all the calls coming in.
These days, my company runs multiple crews all over the San Francisco East Bay. We're still using the same approach, though—find the water first, then drill smart. Over 1,000 wells later, it turns out doing right by people is actually good business. Who knew?
