Mark Marmo, CEO of Deep Well Services is hiring 150+ employees right now. We are talking rookies to admin positions to experienced veterans.
Deep Well Services (DWS) is an API/Q2 registered technology and training company that specializes in high-pressure, long lateral, and multi-well completion and workover operations.
Established in 2008, the DWS family has grown from their small-town Appalachian roots to becoming a premier OFS company for over 70 different E&Ps across North & South America.
Driven by patented data analytics systems and IADC globally accredited training programs, DWS is focused on the continued development and innovation of the most advanced Hydraulic Completion Service on the market today.
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Below is the raw, unedited transcript from our artificial intelligence translator.
Mark Marmo
Mark Marmo from Deep Wells Services.
Jason Spiess
Excellent. Thank you for joining the program here today. As we go to our phone line out to the east coast west Virginia phone number, pennsylvania. I thought email address. I wasn’t sure. So which part of the country are you in today, sir?
Mark Marmo
We are. Well, the company’s located out of pennsylvania. Okay. We have yards in the Haynesville also.
Jason Spiess
Okay. Of course the reason for the interview here is you got some pretty exciting news at least in the oil and gas industry. It is because it sounds like you guys are doing some hiring and that is kind of a rare thing these days where people seem to be figuring out how to find business. So you went out and secured some business. So you guys are hiring? Huh?
Mark Marmo
Well, we’ve been hiring the last actually three years we hired 450 people last year. uh, we want a net at least 150 this year. If not
Jason Spiess
more. What kind of jobs are these that you’re looking
Mark Marmo
for? Everything from working in the field to mechanics, drivers, accounting, you name it? Admin payroll. It’s a little bit everything.
Jason Spiess
Where are you finding the growth? From where? Right now? Where are you out on the east coast? Are you down in texas? Where are you located right now?
Mark Marmo
Yeah. So we, we have, we’re in the Appalachian in Utica Basin, which were extremely active right now. We’re in the Permian. … They are also uh, you know, very strong.
Jason Spiess
We’ve had joe Senate on the program quite a bit over the last couple of years. He’s with um with partners and he’s out of Pittsburgh P. A. He kind of gives us a nice update from time to time on some of the different marcellus activity. Jim Willis from the Marcellus drilling news as well as Tom Shepstone from natural gas.
Now. Susquehanna County of course being one of the big, prolific natural gas counties. Are you guys doing mostly natural gas out in the marcellus or are you, cause I hear Haynesville, that’s a very big gas play too. Are you guys mostly doing gas? Are you doing some oil to or
Mark Marmo
well, we do, you know, done in the Permian Eagle food? We are doing oil and then uh, in P. A. It’s both natural gas liquids and dry gas. Uh, Haynesville obviously use dry gas.
Jason Spiess
So that’s the next question in the bacon where I’m located right now. Uh, they do a lot of wet gas of course, where you’ve got whatever 778 different kinds of molecules hydrocarbons that you can separate apart. Dry gas a little bit different in the Haynesville and marcellus of course with the dry gas, you’re finding some oil activity in the Eagle furred and the Permian as well. Are you hiring down there or all different areas are all four shell place.
Mark Marmo
Okay.
Jason Spiess
So if somebody is listening right now and they want a job. What’s the walk us through the process. I mean it’s tough because you don’t want to give out your cell phone number but at the same time you need people hired.
Mark Marmo
Yeah we do. We will hire as many as we can this year. And the best way to reach us is through our website www dot well services dot com. Get in touch with brandy Blazer, B L A C E
Jason Spiess
- And we’ll have the links at the crude life’s website as well for those different areas. Talk about the genesis of the company, How long have you guys been around? What’s the workplace culture like? Give give perspective employees an idea of why they might want to come work there.
Mark Marmo
We’ve been around since 2008. We mainly operated out of the Appalachian basin until 2018 when we moved into the Permian. And then last year when we moved into the Haynesville, we’re also actually in Argentina right now and soon to be uh in working for Saudi Aramco. So uh lots of room to grow. We give everybody a career path here when someone comes in uh from day one, if they’re going to go into the field as a green hat, we show them how they’re going to get to being a supervisor.
There’s I. A. D. C. Accredited training program. We have here, we’re all about continuous improvement uh and continuous education. We spend probably $300,400,000 a year on just educating uh people from business classes to emotional intelligence classes to well controlled. So it’s a, it’s a culture mainly built upon. Like I said, it’s continuous improvement.
Uh, we are, we are within the main focus here as one team, one family. And uh, we try to treat people with empathy and we have a servant mentality at this company and Uh, you’re not a number, you’ll never be a number. We have 550 people and we go above and beyond to know everybody help them personally or professionally.
Jason Spiess
You mentioned Saudi Aramco, you mentioned, I think it was South America Argentina Argentina. Um, you’ve got four, sounds like four different plays or shale plays or at least oil plays happening here in the United States. Is that gonna satisfy you for a little while. Are you looking beyond that? Um, that’s pretty aggressive what we just laid
Mark Marmo
out. Uh and in 2012 we did $7.5 million will do over 200 million this year. We uh, we grow, we grow responsibly and uh we, we’ve, we’ve just, we’ve proven that over the last 4 to 5 years that we know we, we put a plan out there and we execute. So yeah, there’s, if we, if we can add people, we will uh, we will grow even more, but …
Jason Spiess
you know, one of the issues happening right now is inflation. Of course people are trying to figure out how to make their personal inflation work because apparently the chickens have joined the union now and they need to have egg prices triple to what they were before. That’s my little chicken joke there, But or maybe it’s a union joke, I guess, I’m not sure.
But it was this was actually a cartoon we did in our business newspaper back in 2008 when chicken egg prices rose and it said, what did the chickens join a union? And I thought, boy, that’s funny, That actually came back full circle. But anyway, um, talk, talk to me a little bit about your inflation within the industry. The crude life we started talking about is $100 oil. The new $50 oil back in 2020 because we started seeing the price of steel going up and if the price of steel goes up,
everything is gonna go up. And then then when the price of oil went up, everything is gonna go up too. So we’re starting to think the $50 oil might be, or 100 and $10 oil might be $50 oil. We’re not sure how does that, how you got You guys are apparently figuring out how to make that chemistry set work. But with the spike of inflation that’s happened, how have you guys been able to manage that?
Mark Marmo
The company with a strong balance sheet? We have no debt, Which allows us to be able to free up, we’ve always operated um with high wages, we, we, we have a focus on paying people. Uh, what we feel is 10-15% better to market. So we’ve always been used to running that way and we run lean elsewhere to be able to pay our people more and we aren’t the cheapest.
We’re probably the highest price of anybody in the basis of what we do. And um, yeah, I mean inflation has affected everybody, but when you add value to companies, you can get your price, which can cover that inflation.
Jason Spiess
You mentioned that you’re one of the higher priced. Well, that for me means that you apparently must have the quality to back it up if you’ve been around for since 2008. Um, talk to me about how somebody, if they spend more money up front, how they save money on the long the long haul because that is kind of the idea, isn’t it?
Mark Marmo
That’s it. You know, what, what our focus is, uh, as we add value and we add value by showing up, getting onto that well safely and then getting off as quickly as possible. So we save that that burn rate per day, which is probably when we’re on a pad is about $70-$80,000 a day. Our focus is to get off of that pad a day or two or however fast and safely that we can to save the company that much money.
Um, you know, most, most of our competitors that’s they’re, they want, that, they want that day rate. And uh, what are our focus is, is that if we save you on that day rate, you’re going to give us more wells.
Jason Spiess
Yeah, well repeat business. That’s the name of the game that is. Um, I’m looking at your website right now. Deep well services dot com. Established in 2008, small town Appalachian roots to become one of the premier O. F. S. Companies over 70 different mps across north and south America. So 70 different of them. Huh? Well, you guys have really, You know, talk to me about the different shale plays because that this, this is more, I guess for me, which I find kind of fun because when I
started learning about the industry back in probably, actually when I was introduced to it for me, I found the chemistry of the different regions fascinating. When I was in my former life, I was a publisher and we did a magazine called From House to home. In fact, we had five of them in pennsylvania, eastern pennsylvania. We featured Mario andretti’s house and we were down in uh State College P.
- And Washington pennsylvania, just south of Pittsburgh. And so we we know Pittsburgh pretty well or the pennsylvania pretty well. But what I found interesting, it was a different geography is in, in landscaping, you’ve got seven different areas of the United States for planting essentially different regions. You know if you’re drilling in tuscaloosa, that’s pretty muddy in clay. So you got to spend a lot more money to get that that resource out of the ground.
Whereas you know you get to the Haynesville that’s a little bit more user friendly for the operator, how are these different shale plays that you’re in? Are they able to you know, can you bring the same equipment? Do you got to bring different equipment to a different shale play? How different are they? How similar are they?
Mark Marmo
It’s not so much different equipment, it’s the kind of equipment we’ve built and designed the efficient the efficiencies behind it but the we can handle anything from 10,000 P. S. I. Well to uh you know a £500 PS. I. Well we can handle, we’ve drilled all of the longest laterals, we’ve cleaned out all the longest laterals on uh in onshore us. Uh nobody can compete with us on our pressure or long lateral stuff. So we’ve really designed the company around that where the market was going.
And so you know if you’re in the marcellus uh your you know drilling maybe a 15,000 ft lateral uh it’s not gonna be as high pressure but whereas you’re over in the Utica and you’re on 7000 P. S. I. Well so we have the talent, we have the equipment to really operate anywhere in the world. Unlike anyone else, we have the largest fleet of what we have to do in the world. Um And I would say we’re probably even being a private company, maybe the fifth largest company in the world.
Jason Spiess
I’m caught up on the pressure part because Boy II that pressure seems to be like the secret sauce when you’re talking about any sort of energy extraction and that just seems like such a science. I used to think it was the um the frack chemistry but I think it’s more of the the pressure involved having the that’s like an art, it’s like an art to understand pressure, isn’t it?
Mark Marmo
It really is the people that work on these wells work over the wellhead are some of the smartest people you’ll ever meet. They
Jason Spiess
see the world different, don’t they? They just see it differently.
Mark Marmo
Yeah they really do but you know they get the reputation of being that roughneck. But these guys are in ladies, we have ladies working out there too that are extremely just talented, highly educated and what they do and very intelligent
Jason Spiess
when it comes to the um I don’t know if it be if you want to call it E. S. G. If you want to call it environmental, if you want to call it, I don’t know um reclamation recycling. There’s a lot of different words that you can be a little bit more entry level or you can get really aggressive with the language. So uh talk to me a little bit how you guys are handling that side of the world, whether it be, you know, recycling water or you know, meatless Mondays
or maybe some new emission management thing that we’ve never heard of. I’m not sure but uh that seems to be, you know, E S. G. Reports, everybody seems to be doing one now. So
Mark Marmo
yeah, you can see on our website we take we do we take the E. S. G. Reporting serious? We, I focus everybody more on the social and governance aspect of everything. Um you know, the I guess the politically correct, you know, when you say the environmental were quicker on wells, we’re not using uh as much fuel, we’re not burning diesel because we’re more efficient on the wells, we save chemicals going down whole uh so we do, we do our part on the environmental side of things but the more
the most important thing there is the social governance, it’s the making sure our people are educated, have a great workplace, have career path, are paid well that they can take care of their family and then, you know the governance pieces um we have a quality management system unlike no other, I think we’re the only ones in the probably north America that do what we do that have a A P I Q two Q.
- S. So and then our training program is I A. D. C uh accredited, so you know the social and governance. The governance piece is what I really like to focus on, uh you know, in community, we are Probably gave over $10 million we sponsor a lot of things. So that’s really what I focus on more so than
Jason Spiess
you mind. If I ask you about your journey to E. S. G. You seem like you’re pretty open about it. That’s the only reason I ask and you don’t have to get into the details. I just have, I’ve run into a lot of brick walls, so.
Mark Marmo
Well, I mean, you know, when you’re, when you’re in a position where you need to just be aware of everything that’s going on, you know, you pay attention to it, You want your company even though it’s privately held, you want your company to be like a halliburton or slumber J. And you want to be responsible. Um so you pay attention to those things.
Like I said, I’m probably not, I’m more of the, you know, I think our industry doesn’t defend what we do environmentally very well, we don’t get enough credit, We’re not going to get help from the media uh in that respect that we were all aware of it, we want to be responsible. I actually think that some of the best people in the world, environmental er the E. M. P. S. And the best services so we pay attention to it, we’re always gonna be responsible.
We’re not gonna hurt people, we’re gonna have safe operations and we’re not gonna hurt the environment. I mean we’re drilling in our backyards when you’re in the Appalachian basin. Right? I mean I have wells on my farm so I just have always been aware of it. We pay attention to it I guess. I’m just not as politically correct as
Jason Spiess
most know. And I understand that in fact what you were talking about is very similar to the way that we kind of did it at the crude life where we didn’t so much embrace it as much as we’re aware of it because it it’s to me it’s like this chat chat GTP automated robot thing. If if you’re in the world of writing or arts and crafts and all that stuff it ain’t going away.
So you better figure out how to embrace it into your world or it’s going to take you out. And that’s what I saw with the E. S. G. I went okay this csg is everything if you want to walk to the store and buy an apple. There’s an E. S. G. Score behind that. And then I saw the show called The Good Life and they flat out explained E. S. G. Without explaining E.
- G. What they said was everything you do has a positive and negative score in heaven and hell. And they gave some example of some guy that uh in the 15th century brought his grandma flowers. But because he planted the flowers himself and he watered the flowers and he didn’t use any pesticides and all these different things. It was a positive E.
- G. Score but they called it a good life score or something like that. And then in the modern day when he bought his grandma flowers, it was a minus score because it was mined by you know child labor. And the Ceo was sent an unwanted picks in the middle of the night of his genitalia. And you know, they went through all the different things that we do in today’s society and and that’s you know that’s the S.
- In a vacuum in a perfect world. It looks fantastic, but it’s like communism in reality it doesn’t work because there’s a thing called the human element. And when you introduce the human element, you just got to keep trying to improve. And if you just keep trying to improve, that’s as good as it gets guys
Mark Marmo
really said it, you really said it right and being responsible in your community, helping to develop your community, helping develop people uh making sure you know, they are our people go home every night to their families. That’s where the where the E. S. G. Things should come in. We’re not we’re we have great governance of the company, we have 30% minority.
Uh and none of that stuff is virtue signaling or or being woke. It’s just what we are and when you sit back and you think about it be one of the best industries in the world, art, oil, gas at all of this. They’re one of the most responsible And I don’t think that there’s a better industry in the world. … one
Jason Spiess
of the things that I’ve been speaking about E. S. G. Since 2015, I kind of mostly stumbled into it because we started doing an E. S. G. Report on the crude life every week with the Ceo of Meridian energy group with their refinery that they were going to build in North Dakota. So he saw the pushback that was coming and to his credit, he felt it was very important to do a weekly radio and podcast because we’re on the radio up here, we have about 20 radio stations were on up across five states
in the bacon here. And he felt it was very important to educate the public because he just was apart, he’s from Irvine California is where he lives. So he’s very aware of this wolf culture and the cancel culture and the and the uh anti fossil fuel movement. And so we did it, you know, we we we made sure that every week we had a different engineer on, we had a different citizen, the Ceo somebody involved in the project in some way or another, all walks of life, even if they had problems with
it, because one thing about E. S. G. If you’re civil, we’ll give you a voice that’s fine. So we started getting, you know, different conferences, inviting us to come speak and all these other things. Well, what we found was leadership did not like it, they did not like it because they don’t want to be aware of it, they don’t want to talk about it.
And this is one of those things where I kept trying to tell them no this you can’t look away from this, this is this is connecting with the kids in colorado. They had advertisements that didn’t even have words, All they did was have a woman holding a baby with an oil rig in the background, that was it, that was it, that was the whole ad, so that’s what I was trying to educate people on.
And so I’m very just very happy to hear that you’re accepting the awareness of it, not necessarily the ideology, not necessarily everything about it, but you’re just aware of it. And are you getting any pushback from your colleagues? Because I I didn’t even know you guys had it on your website that is gutsy.
Mark Marmo
No, no pushback, but again, I think it’s um and again it’s just all about being transparent and, you know, just because I don’t agree with what causes climate change doesn’t mean we’re not gonna be responsible stewards in the community and in the in our industry. So yeah we’ve got to be aware we gotta be aware of people that want to put us all out of business. And uh
Jason Spiess
that that was the thing that we kept trying to explain to the average person. And it’s and we do a pretty good job with some of our different educational entertainment style things with kids because It’s the the the kids are the ones that seem to be in the driver’s seat these days. And um if they I went through this with agriculture. So I grew up in the in the 80s where the farmer got taken out by the grocery store and what’s happening right now is the energy workers getting taken out by
the light switch. And it’s right before our eyes because you go to the grocery store you get your ground beef. There’s no such thing as a cow. You go to the you know light switch you turn it on. There’s no such thing as coal or natural gas. No it’s it’s it’s light, it’s power it works just fine. And it was tough because I grew up around farmers and they had a hard time accepting that movement.
You know that everybody was excited about the new grocery store and then they started shaming the farmer. Well that’s what I’m seeing happening right now. Everybody’s excited about these E. V. Vehicles and then they turn around and shame the people who created it because they renewables ain’t doable without fossil fuels. That’s just the way it goes. …
Mark Marmo
People that are afraid to say that it was, it’s not sustaining I think Orwell our industry just doesn’t have enough people that too. That’s um defending it. You know, people like chris wright who do an amazing job for us at C. N. X. We just don’t have enough of the C. E. O. S out there willing to stand up and defend and we’ve got to get better at it because this is the greatest industry in the world. It makes the world go
Jason Spiess
well, you know, you’re doing a good job, you’re coming on this program, you’re being active out there. Um what advice would you have for others to be like chris right from uh Liberty Oil, I’m sorry, Liberty Energy or yourself or some of these other Ceos to get out there or even just backing some, you know, employees to do it as opposed to maybe not the Ceo is necessarily because one of the things we did with the crude life as soon as my hair started growing gray, I got a younger guy into
interview, Harold Hamm immediately because I did not want to have two old guys with gray hair talking on social media. There’s no kids watching that. So I went and I got the young guy, you know, so maybe sometimes it’s it’s not bad to get some younger people to get behind the industry too, but that’s hard to find
Mark Marmo
a big focus of ours is, you know, winning the hearts and minds of the young people. I’m a Western P. A born and raised a kid. I would love to put 100% of the Western P. A. People to work deep. Well we we go out to the high schools we go out to, we actually teach accredited course at Penn state pitt marietta west Virginia on what we do to the petroleum engineers of those schools.
Our focus has been, yeah, I mean, we’re going after the younger community we want to recruit of course, but number two, we wanna, we wanna win the hearts and minds and show them, you know, this is a great industry, you can sustain a family, it’s not 10, 10 an hour. Uh but we’re not, we are extremely responsible. We are, we’re focused on people who are focused on career paths and I mean for somebody in the inner city to come out and make 50,000 At year one as a green hat uh out of, you know,
that probably wasn’t ever going to go to college. How great is that? Within 8 to 10 years? If you go through your competency program, you’ll be making 250,000 and that’s only working six months a year. So we’ve got to get people to realize that this is the kind of environment they can come into that’s gonna, you can build an amazing career and support a family on this, on this job.
Jason Spiess
Well, let’s talk a little turkey here real quick while we have you, we might as well let you have a plug for your company. I mean, I don’t think you need any more business. You need employees, but at the same time, what services, you know, specifically do you guys offer?
Mark Marmo
We are, we are really a technology and training company that just so happen to have hydraulic completion units. These completion units can clean plugs, they can fish tools down hole, they can do work overs. Uh, they can do clean outs toe preps, you name it. Um, and these things can work and we’ve proven that will grow over the world work in any base. So that’s what we’re all about.
Jason Spiess
What’s a hot tap kit.
Mark Marmo
Uh,
Jason Spiess
yeah, I’m looking at your brochure right now and I’ve never seen that word in consecutive words like that. And I thought I knew this industry at least better than the average person. So hot tap kit.
Mark Marmo
Okay. …
Jason Spiess
Okay. Is that, is that an industry term? Is that your guys? Okay. That’s, that’s new to learn something new every day right there. I thought, I, I know I know all the other terms that I’m seeing here, but I didn’t see the hot tap kit. That’s cool. Okay, well, I appreciate the time today. And of course the moral of today’s story is you guys are hiring, You need, uh, was it right? More than 100 people.
Mark Marmo
- … We’ll probably hire over 200, 230
Jason Spiess
people. And these are everything’s from administration to out in the field to, uh, rookies. If you’re a rookie, well, you’ll take them and train them. Huh?
Mark Marmo
We will train them. We’re more than happy to train them. We trained, we were on board at 430 people last year and I think over 30,000 hours of training.
Jason Spiess
Any final thoughts that you wanna? I guess anything we left out or anything you want to reiterate,
Mark Marmo
Thank you for what you do. And we really appreciate the defense of our great industry. I can’t thank you enough.
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