Huge growth underpins Reservoir Group’s success

By Pascal Bartette, chief executive officer, Reservoir Group

When establishing Reservoir in Aberdeen six years ago, the vision was to create an innovative and adequate business model to support emerging organisations and technologies specialised in Reservoir services. Our model is intended to give each of our businesses the opportunity to grow autonomously while providing them a corporate structure and financial backing. We judge it critical that our businesses maintain their individual character and more importantly their exclusive focus, ensuring that service, creativity and product development remains at the core.

We have enjoyed dramatic growth – particularly in the last two years, as during this short period we have brought on board more than 20 organisations of varying sizes – increasing our team from approximately 300 in early 2011 to more than 1000, creating a truly global workforce, present in all key energy centres.

Our Group Headquarters remains based in Aberdeen, the city where our club founding member, “Corpro” was established.  From a modest start in the Granite City in the late 1980’s, Corpro is a sound example of the validity and efficiency of the Reservoir Group model and it is now regarded as the largest worldwide coring provider cutting about half of all cores across the world.

Reservoir Group delivers its services through 8 distinct brands, each of them focused on a specific reservoir related activity, having its own structure, management and more importantly the right level of autonomy.

Our view of the energy sector remains full of confidence. There are still many opportunities for an ambitious and nimble organisation such as Reservoir Group to exploit. The industry panorama is constantly changing with liquid plays now having replaced most of the North American gas shale market. This forced us to adapt and react. Because of our model, we can do this so much faster than many of our competitors.  The client base is also constantly evolving, a larger number of smaller independent operators are in search of innovative ideas to help them understand their reservoir swiftly and adapt their development programs accordingly.  This is a great opportunity for us to bring our formation evaluation abilities and provide in only a number of days the critical answers to our clients formation evaluation challenges.

2013 will be a year in which we will continue to expand our various branches coverage across all geographies as well as to capitalise on the technologies that we have successfully proven in the past year. Among those, Quick Capture our pressure coring system is proving to be particularly promising.

This new-year will be mostly focused then on organic growth but we can’t forget our acquisitive nature as well as the fact that our model appeals so much to so many businesses and entrepreneurs alike who want to join force with us to give more impetus to their future plans and aspirations. We are of course still watching a number of potential new partners and while it is unlikely that we will see the same level of activity in the M&A market as we did two years ago – there are definitely organisations and technologies out there that would enhance Reservoir Group and our existing brands.

In conclusion, how do we judge our success, how do we gauge our performance? Our strong financial results and ever growing revenue are certainly a parameter but somewhat the most satisfying is to witness satisfaction and support from all our stakeholders. We see plenty of happy faces around us, smiles can tell a lot!