Payne: Starting off the day, I go into the office and make sure that our Rig Up, our ISNetworld, and our PEC accounts are up to date, and that all of our training’s up to date. I have a calendar system—an Excel spreadsheet I came up with—that keeps up with our employees. I’ll print that out and go through it. It tells me, for instance, when I last had a medical examination done on a guy. You know, having them seen for their DOT [Department of Transportation] physical. Or for their annual review, or their HazMat [Hazardous Materials certification], their crane training, their forklift training. The spreadsheet is not much more than a calendar, but, with 92 employees, it’s hard to remember the last time you did, say, a forklift training with someone. So by doing this, by going into the spreadsheet and highlighting it in red, noting that this month is the month when this employee needs this training, and so on, it helps to organize the training sessions. Because otherwise, you’re going to be training one guy at a time. Or two guys. It’s always better to get a classroom full of guys—to get them together and go in there and interact with them. The questions are better, the interactions are better, and the actual learning environment is better, too. They keep each other in check, and keep each other accountable.

Payne: Yes. When you get into West Texas, the biggest worry is oilfield traffic going up and down the road. Midland, Texas, is terrible with that. My guys have to drive a certain amount of miles a day. Well, I’ve got to have them in good equipment. I’ve got to have them in safe equipment. Our name’s written all over the side of that truck. So our reputation is with our employees and that’s where it starts.

Payne: Anything beyond first aid is considered recordable. You can go get an X-ray, you can go get an MRI or something like that. Just to diagnose—that doesn’t make it a recordable incident. So on that scale, we’re sitting good. I mean there’s always room for improvement. Everybody’s shooting for zero, of course.

Payne: Like everybody else, our performance is compared to a national average [of accidents on the job]. That average fluctuates, year to year, based on how many accidents were reported nationwide. And then your own safety performance is weighed against that national average, to determine where you stand. Right now, the national average stands at about a 1.7. That’s what’s known as a Total Recordable Incident Rate [TRIR]. It is a calculation of the number of recordable OSHA incidents per 100 full-time workers during a one-year period. The lower the number, the better a company’s safety performance. Here at Integrity, we are sitting on a TRIR of .98, which is good. We had one recordable accident in 2019, early in the year. In 2018, we had zero recordable incidents. But even at .98, our number is good enough that we can get work with anybody. You need to have a TRIR that is better than the national average if you want to work for the Devons, the Apaches, the EOGs, and other big operators. Each one might have a slightly different benchmark, but they all want as good as they can get.

Payne: One thing that I say, when I’m out talking to clients or customers, is that we understand that we represent them. Integrity Wireline is its own entity, yes. But we’re working for that client, that company. And we know that when we do good, they look good. There’s a principle in the working world: if you want to succeed at work, make your supervisor look good. So we, as a company, do that for our clients. We give them the best service and the best safety quality out there.

Payne: We give our employees safest tools, the safest equipment, and the safest training in the oilfield. I will compare our safety standards to anybody’s. I came from a corporation where safety was the job—it wasn’t just an added chore—and I brought that emphasis here. There’s no reason why a small business cannot have the same culture as a huge corporation. As a matter of fact, we pride ourselves on the relationships we have with our employees. We have more individual, personal relationships. So, that’s one thing: our safety, we take that first. That’s the first thing we discuss in a company meeting on a Monday morning. Safety.