In this episode of Business Blindsports, we're venturing into the often-overlooked world of mineral rights with Blake Harris, a seasoned oil and gas entrepreneur with a transformative career story.

Blake shares how his journey began in the heart of Texas, where his early career as a landman and a turn of events in the oil industry sparked his ambition to own and operate in the mineral rights sector. Blake shares how his first deal didn't go at all as anticipated. However, instead of causing him to back out of the industry, he dug deeper, figured out what went wrong, and mitigated the risks in his second deal so it didn't happen again.

They also discuss Blake's evolution from short-term transactions to embracing a more robust, long-term investment philosophy, exhibiting the patience and passion it takes to build a lasting business and now fund in the oil and gas sector.

Key Topics:

• How Blake started as a Pumper in an oil field
• A Landman's role in US mineral rights ownership
• How the Landman secures leases, company lays off workers
• The first oil deal that fell apart
• Understanding what went wrong in the first deal
• Anticipated drill schedule not met, revenue affected
• How the first opportunity lead to learning opportunities and self-discovery
• Why Blake Became obsessed with owning oil and gas
• Stories about some of the sellers
• Diverse property owners impact mineral buyers' challenges
• Why Mineral owners are advised never to sell their minerals
• How to make decisions based on economic value added

We wound the company down and the 3 partners went our separate ways. And so one of the main things that I wanted to do whenever I started my own shop was just look at this in a more patient way. How can we buy these properties and own them and cash flow them and just build a portfolio of cash flowing properties that, like I said, the with the wells pumping continuously, and we just we we try to build a position in all the best basins in the United States and just build a cash flow machine.

Mhmm.

And in my mind, that was gonna be less stressful than having to buy deals and sell deals constantly.

Mhmm. Welcome to the Business Blind Spots podcast where we talk to founders, entrepreneurs, industry leaders, business professionals, and learn about mistakes, challenges, trials they've had in the past and what they've learned from it moving forward. And maybe hear some great stories along the way. Today's guest is mister Blake Harris. He is the founder of Brazos Royalty LP. How are you doing?

I'm good, man. How are you doing?

Good. Good. You are the, you are the first person on the podcast. I appreciate

you coming on. Thanks, man. Something nobody can ever take away from me.

Yeah. That's one thing. You'll always be a winner on on one thing. But, I wanted you to be the first guest because I think your story is pretty cool. You have how old are you? 35. You're 35 years old and you have a ton of experience in your field. And the way that you got to that space is very interesting. And I I think that people would be benefited from hearing your story.

Cool. Yeah. So, why don't you start? If it's okay with you, why don't you start with giving us a rundown of kinda who you are, your background, where you went to school, and kind of what steered you in this direction? Yeah.

So was born and raised in Longview, Texas, went to, after high school, enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserves. Right. Right. And did that and then went to a and m, continued to stay in the reserves while I went to Texas a and m. A and m.

Is that a community college?

Not at all, man. Well, probably the best university in the world.

If you don't say so yourself.

So was there did the 1 week in a month 2 weeks out of the summer? Throughout their early years at a and m and then the summer before my senior year at a and m, our unit got activated. I was here with the rangers, VMGR 234, out of Fort Worth, and we got activated. We went to Sicily. We were there for 5 and a half months. Yeah. So just, like, no That's awesome.

Yeah. I'm sure you hated every minute of that.

Man, it it was amazing. Came back, graduated from a and m. At this point, I was, I really hadn't even thought about oil and gas. The really, the main focus, the two things that I was going back and forth with was whether or not I was gonna go to law school or commission and become an officer. And if I'd gone the officer route, I I think I was I was prepared to career it. And so while I was kinda weighing those two decisions, I got an opportunity to move out to Midland. Oil was, like, at a 100 and, you know, $120 a barrel. This is, like, 2013 time frame.

Now someone who is not familiar with the area, what's Midland?

It is it's West Texas, Permian Basin in the heart of the Permian Basin is about 4 and a half hours west of here At one time, it was there were more millionaires per capita in Midland, Texas than any other city in the United States.

In LA? Yeah. That's amazing.

It's it's just, when you get there, it looks like one big job site. There's so much oil and gas production. I mean, Permian Basin is one of the most prolific oil fields in the entire world, and there's this little town compared to something like a Dallas. You know?

Do do you know the population roughly?

I mean, it ebbs and flows with the price of oil. That's something that's interesting about it. You know? So I'd when the price of oil per barrel's up, maybe there's 200 I'm totally guessing here, but, you know, 150,000 whenever the price is down, there's less. Yeah. Yeah. A lot less. But f 250's tanker trucks everywhere, and I had a lot of fun living out there. And that was kind of my one of the first things I learned that I love about the industry was the people.

And in Midland, pretty much everyone out there is in the oil and gas industry. I moved out there to be a pumper, and I didn't know what that was. The HR corporate term for that position is a a lease operator, but people in the industry know that position as a pumper. And what you're responsible for as a pumper is making sure that the, how the engineers at the the company that produces the wells want the wells to perform or project the wells to perform, you do your best to make sure that you're the boots on the ground out there going to that well, checking it every day, fix it if there's any problems, making sure that you keep it flowing, doing your best to maintain the pressure that the engineer wants, and reporting the water product the water production, oil production, and gas production. And so I did that and really learned a lot about the the industry. It was just so new to me. I also realized that I loved the volatility of it. There was just something that's exciting about oil could go to 20.

It can go back up to a 100, you know, and it kinda kept you on your toes because, job security in that industry is largely dependent on the price of oil because it is largely impacts the economics of the company that you're working for.

I've heard a lot of day traders say something similar.

It keeps you on your game. So there was something about that that I liked. And then, also, I really saw that there was a lot of opportunity in that industry to dream as big as you wanted to dream. I mean, you would meet people that had started their own businesses and were super successful. You would meet people that had tried to start a business and didn't succeed, but they may have had ideas of why they didn't succeed, you know, and they were just they were open to talk to you about that. It's a lot of down to earth, really good folks out there. So that really got my wheels turning on maybe owning a business in this industry is something that I could eventually do one day. And the more I was out there, the more I fell in love with it.

The more I fell in love with the idea, and the more I believed in my ability to do that or at least try it. So but I knew that in order to do it, I needed to learn the business side of the industry. Mhmm. Didn't really know where to go to start that and happened to meet a guy at a wedding. His name's Matt McWilliams, also an Aggie, who was a land man, and he said that, the company that he was working for was hiring independent landmen to come work for him. What's a what's a landman? A landman is somebody who secures the rights, for the, underground real estate, the mineral rights Mhmm. For these oil and gas companies to drill the wells and a land man researches who owns the underground real estate, how much do they own. When these wells get underground real estate owners, the mineral rights owners.

So land man's actually the call him the tip of the spear, so to speak?

Yeah. I guess you could say. So I really didn't know what a land man was, but in in talking with Matt and some other guys that I knew that were landmen, I started to realize, you know, this is this is an entry point to learning about the business side of the industry, and so I dove into it and became a landman. And I'd love the industry already up to that point, but, being a land man really showed me, you know, the people in the industry were great, but what I really started to learn was the people that own the underground real estate that this entire industry sits upon are what make it so adventurous. You just the the United States is the only country in the world where we can own the mineral rights. What? Yes. Everywhere else, it's state owned and then, there's other countries that they they call it the crown owns, the royal family. Like Canada, for example, the crown owns all the mineral rights there.

So what does that look like if you're if you're a landowner in Canada and they wanna drill on your land? They just drill on your land?

Yeah. And then the the crown gets paid for it.

Do the landowners get any sort of royalties? Do you know?

I don't know for sure. But surface you know, if they own the surface to in the United States, typically, there's some surface agreement that gets worked out. At least in my experience, the the e and p companies, the companies that drill those wells and produce those wells, their their intention is not to, be strong-arm these surface owners. You know, they wanna be respectful to those people. A lot of times, those E&P companies, their intention is to to have a lot of projects or activity in that local area. You know, since they're incentivized to treat people fairly if they wanna continue to do business where they believe to have found oil or natural gas. What was the process from you learning about the business as

a land man to you starting your own shop?

I was a land man that was contracted by an e and p company securing leasing rights. So I was going out to mineral owners and and, acquiring leases for these e and p companies to drill wells. And at the time, I didn't I didn't I thought no one even sold minerals, and I'd even told there were mineral owners that I had talked to about leasing that had asked me if, you know, I knew anybody that was interested in buying them, and I was just naive at the point. And I'm telling these owners, you know, I wouldn't why would you sell your minerals? You know? Why don't you lease these minerals to us so we can drill drill these wells? The price of oil collapsed. OPEC met on Thanksgiving Day, decided to increase production, and that took oil from, you know, around a a 120 to within a few months down into the thirties or twenties, if I remember correctly. I know it went down into the thirties. I don't remember how long it took exactly, but it was fast. And, so the the e and p company that I was contracted with, they they laid let the landmen off down there because there was no need for them.

They weren't gonna drill any more wells. I did not wanna leave the industry at this point. It was kind of a pivotal moment. I, I didn't know how many opportunities there'd be in oil and gas, but I knew that I wanted to stay in it. So was meeting with anybody I can meet with, having conversations with with any of them, and met a guy that was starting a company buying mineral rights, and I went to work with him. We started buying mineral rights together and grew that company, ended up becoming a partner in that company. And when I started to buy mineral rights, that's when I I really learned the you know, I I like, I had told mineral owners before that my limited naive advice would be to not sell. But then as I I learned to buy mineral rights, I learned that it really does provide a service to a really niche set of people.

And What do you mean? There's so in the US, like I said, it's the only country where we can own these mineral rights. There's, right now, estimated between 10 to 15,000,000 mineral owners in the United States.

Mhmm.

And every generation that passes, that number typically increases because a lot of times what happens is when these owners pass, they pass the they they pass these interests down to multiple layers, so it gets divided up, more owners are created. And what these owners own is an asset. It has value. And if you wanna liquidate that or you need to liquidate that, where are you gonna go to do that? Mhmm. Either I mean, you can't just walk down the street, walk into your bank, walk into financial service office, and and figure out how to do that usually. So

It's a really good so it's a tangible asset but it's also not a tangible asset. Right?

Yeah. I

mean, it's real but it's not something sitting in an account. It's just something on paper. Right. That's interesting. So you you so for the first deal you bought, so how did you find the person to begin with? What was that negotiation like? Was it someone that you had previously told, like, hey, don't sell your don't sell your rights? Like, can you talk about what that looked like for you? Yeah.

We so the partners at the company that me and 2 other guys that were partners the company that I was working with, there were times when we would put our own money into the deals that we were buying, and we had generated this opportunity out in the Permian Basin, and we had all this information on how we thought that the wells were gonna perform, when we thought that they were gonna be drilled, and backing all that into how much we should pay for it. Right? And what I did was put, at the time, to me and my wife, a considerable amount of money in that deal. And the deal didn't work out how we expected it to or projected it to.

Was that a uncomfortable conversation at home?

You know, surprisingly, it wasn't. She understood it. She's she's awesome. And, but what I did was became obsessed with why that happened

Mhmm.

And really started to dig into it. And what's funny is I feel like I ended up learning more about myself than I did investing in that deal, like, that I wanted to own minerals. I just the idea of wanting to own them and I think reached for it and bought it because I wanted to, not necessarily because I needed to. And through that process, what is that? What does it mean? And what does it mean to own you know, what is that? What does it mean? And what does it mean to own this? And

Can I can I ask about the first deal some more? Yeah. So you said it didn't pan out. Was it mathematical? Did were were assumptions made that didn't align with the the reality of the situation on the ground, the whatever the E and P schedule was? Did the price of oil have something to do with it?

Yeah. It's so it's it was really the, the timing assumptions and when the revenue was gonna come in is what didn't pan out. So whenever you're looking at these deals, it's based on main factors in that are how much product is gonna come out of the ground, oil or natural gas, and what's it gonna be sold for? And when when are you gonna receive that that money? And the projections that I had made was that wells were gonna be drilled over a a certain number of wells were gonna be drilled over a certain period of time and the wells were gonna produce x amount of barrels. The wells didn't produce like I had projected them to. The and the wells weren't, All of the wells weren't drilled in the time frame that I was expecting them to be drilled. And that was had a lot to do with the, price of oil going.

Yeah. So so you you spend your own money on mineral rights and are you checking like, is there was it Rig Watch? There's several on, And so can can is that what you use to project the the drill schedule or do you have someone inside at an E and P company? Which is exploration and production which they're like the Exxon Nobles and the cactus drilling. Right? Like neighbors Yeah. That are they're the ones actually boots on the ground. They're putting the pipe in the ground to extract the natural gas and and the oil. Right? Right. So when you when you're projecting and and I don't wanna get too granular and bore everyone listening. But this is fascinating to me because right now, this is your entire business.

Right? Yeah. So a very successful company. That's really what I wanna learn about is what misstep or what did you make at that point? And and how did you isolate that? And what steps did you put in place to not make that mistake again?

So it was the information in this industry is all over the place. The it is it's it's not uncommon to to hear from people within companies what's gonna happen. You know? What

what are

they when are they gonna drill wells? What do they project these wells to do? At the end of the day, it's all, no no one really knows for sure. I mean, a drill schedule can change at the drop of a hat. You know? So a drill schedule is something that an e and p company would have that's literally just, hey. This is the schedule of when we're gonna drill these wells.

Mhmm.

And you do your best just based on experience and relationships and whatever resources you have to try to replicate in your own research what that drill schedule is. I thought that I had done that correctly with the this particular opportunity, and I hadn't. You know, there was supposed to be I don't remember the exact number, but let's just say there was, you know, 32 wells that were supposed to be drilled over a 5 year period, and only 8 of them got drilled over that. You know, it's been almost 5 years, since I bought that deal, and only 8 of them have been drilled. So that's a lot of revenue that I was anticipating on getting within a 5 year time frame. Yeah. And as you know, when you're running the discounted cash flow, the time sensitivity is huge.

Yeah. Absolutely.

My first thought whenever I was really digging into it was I I don't I don't wanna have to put value on stuff that has to happen in the future. I went ultra ultra risk.

Mhmm.

Risk sensitive. You know? Just I don't want yeah. I don't want to buy something that there's got to be a lot of wells that have to be drilled and they have to perform at x over the future Unless I'm unless I'm putting some huge discount rate on it.

Like a lot of pins, you don't want something where a lot of pins have to fall into place in order for your bet to be successful. Right. That makes sense. Can I ask can I ask a question? Yeah. Okay. So do you have do you did you have kids at this time? Yes. Yeah. Okay.

So young man, young wife, young boy, just starting out your partner at your shop and you lever the substantial part of your personal capital into buying a deal that doesn't pan out. I'm interested in what your actual mind because I know you're a marine so we we get you're a badass. We know you're an Aggie. We don't hold that against you. But what was your mindset outside of, like, okay, how can I keep this happening again? Like, what was your mindset, okay, I still gotta get up early. Let me let me figure out what went wrong. Let me back to the drawing board. Was it like, hey, am

I in the right wrong industry? Can can you walk us through that? It wasn't that negative of an experience to to go through it. I it was you know, you hear a lot about going back to being in Midland, you know, you hear a lot about the guys who are successful in this industry that they didn't it's not a it's not a perfect journey to becoming know, you know, I feel like I've I've got, you know, a skin on the wall now. Like, I've put money in a deal. It didn't work out. Welcome to investing in the oil and gas industry.

That's one of my favorite phrases, by the way, skin on the wall. Yeah. You know? Get a deal in the door. Whether you win or lose, you got a deal in the door.

That's right.

I love that. So based go ahead.

The other thing too that I think made it not so much of a negative experience was deal flow. We we had a considerable amount of deal flow. And so I knew that other opportunities would come up. I knew that I would learn from this opportunity. Like I said, became obsessed with wanting to know what had happened, why it happened, and, like I said, ended up learning more about myself than I did the property that I was investing in and just focused on continuing to generate more deals and buy the ones that I wanted. Hit, you know, hit the pitches that I wanted to take. So what what did you actually learn about yourself? Like I learned that owning mineral rights is something that I had I'd never been a mineral rights owner, and I dealt with mineral owners for years up to this point. And I had seen the kind of opportunities that owning minerals creates in terms of passive income and owning an asset for yourself and it being real property.

I was I love the idea of being like the people that I dealt with for so many years up to this point. And so whenever this opportunity became available, I could see it. This is my chance to be a a mineral owner.

Mhmm.

So I reached and was thinking more about just being a mineral owner instead of this is my opportunity to run a sound economic evaluation and own a property that I really feel good about and that I feel is derisked and is gonna provide passive income for me at a certain rate, you know, over x amount of years. Mhmm. And I feel good about that based on the amount that I'm paying for it. And so as I'm going through it, it's like, well, I got exactly what I wanted most. I own minerals. But now why don't you focus on the financial and economic parts of the opportunities that you're buying now that you, you know, you own the minerals? And so it's really been an ongoing journey from there to continue to just learn how to yeah. Every look at every deal and make the best decision.

One of the things that you said that I really like is you became obsessed. Right? Not just with owning minerals, but why was why did that deal go bad? And what can you do moving forward to change that? And and I know some people who have started their own businesses and have fallen flat on their face, which is to be expected as you're getting started. And they they never quite recover from that. They can never let the fact that that deal didn't pan out go. Instead of going to to maintain their pipeline and deal flow, they they will they will fixate on why it went wrong instead of, like, how to fix it. Right? So let's jump ahead a little bit. So how do you since I know what you're doing now a little bit, like, how did you go from your partnership into running your own shop with institutional

backing? So it all starts, I think, with the obsession and the love of it.

Mhmm.

Became obsessed with and and fell in love with owning oil and gas as an asset. Wells pump continuously, and I can't control how much money is printed and put into circulation. But what I can control is how I hedge against that. And so oil and gas, like most real assets, is a great hedge against inflation and continue to buy deals with my own money much smarter than I had the first one and found a capital partner that saw the asset the same way that I did and was generating more deals than I had money to buy. I was talking with this capital partner, like I said, who saw this asset the same way that I did, and we decided to set up a fund and start buying these assets. Not like the not like the first one that I bought, but in a much smarter way. And it's weird looking back because, you know, the going back to being the pumper out in Midland and seeing the opportunities that could be created in the industry and then taking the dive to being a land man to learn more about the business side of the industry, telling people that they should not sell their minerals, end up becoming a mineral buyer, and then falling in love with being a mineral buyer, falling in love with oil and gas in general, and then now setting up this fund and focused on being a fund manager and continuing to be a mineral buyer. I have a lot of questions.

Alright. So you've got your new your new LP set up. You've got institutional backing. You're rockin' and rollin'. You've got a team of buyers. But what I will ask is, what lessons did you take from doing business at your old shop that you've implemented with your new shop?

I would say the the main lesson is how can we be patient about this? Because at the old shop, with as much fun and success that we had, and it was a blast. And I can testify because whenever I first met you, I did

a lot of business near where it turned out where your office was. So when I came up there, everyone was having fun, great energy. Yeah. And that was a cool office space, man.

It was. I appreciate that. It was. It was it was a great place to be, and the we had a lot of fun, had a lot of success, but one of the things that was just a constant, not problem, but just stressor maybe, is everything was real short term. So we were buying properties, and we were selling properties Mhmm. To make our money. And we had, a lot of times our financing was 12 month financing.

So you weren't buying and holding and making, making your off of cash flow. You were buying and basically flipping? Correct. Okay.

What was the average time of the of the flip? 30 to 90 days. Oh, wow. Yeah. And so it was real fast. We we built a big team up and to do it. And so it was just it was harder, especially doing it now versus how we were doing it then. It was just harder, and it was a it was a stressor to to depend on we gotta go find an we have we need to go find an opportunity. We need to sell it within 30 to 90 days to cover all the expenses for what we were doing.

And so we wound the company down, and the 3 partners went our separate ways. And so one of the main things that I wanted to do whenever I started my own shop was just look at this in a more patient way. How can we buy these properties and own them and cash flow them and just build a portfolio of cash flowing properties that, like I said, the with the wells pumping continuously, and we just we we try to build a position in all the best basins in the United States and just build a cash flow machine.

Mhmm.

And in my mind, that was gonna be less stressful than having to buy deals and sell deals constantly.

Mhmm. That makes sense. So how do you do how do you go about, instilling the love of the mineral rights in the mineral buying process with your team now?

I don't know. I I I just hope that it's something that happens. I know it's it's genuine in me that I really do love it. And so, I mean, I talk about it all the time. And, it you know, people on the team don't like it. I I don't I don't know that they don't, but I can give them a hundred reasons why I love it. You know, just I think I think some of the things maybe with especially the buyers is just the fun situations that you get in. Here, give me an example.

There was this there was this guy named CJ Tibbs out of Dallas. He and I were working a deal together, and it was this lady and we buy half of her minerals and, she was she was pretty difficult to deal with and she wanted to, she said she only wanna sell half. She called us 2 weeks later and wanted to sell the second half. So CJ and I go down there to meet her in person to close the deal, and we show up, and she has a Rolls Royce Ghost in her driveway. You know? So there's there's situations like that. There's another one.

She she really enjoyed the first half.

The there's another one. I get a phone call one day or an email. I'm sorry. I get an email one day from a guy who responded to a mailer. I call him, and he has a noticeable African accent. And he was from the East Coast, And this property that he was calling on was way out West Texas, Culberson County. So I'm kind of confused just because it's I don't wanna make any, you know, assumptions or judgments, but it's just this is the first time this has happened where some random property out in West Texas, some guy with an African accent from the East Coast is the owner of it. Not that that's, you know, impossible, but it just Sounds like a Nigerian scam.

It was it was it was just odd, compared to other experiences that I'd had. So he wants to sell. I'm looking at the title records, and he owns it. Yeah. I mean, I'm talking to the owner of the property. He wants to sell, and he has his attorney work with me on the transaction. And his attorney I end up talking with him and ask him, you know, what what this is. Yeah.

Yeah. How did how did he get this property? You know, expressing to him, this this seems odd. And the attorney was an East Coast guy too that I believe was not the guy ended up being from Nigeria. Mhmm. I believe the attorney was Nigerian as well, and there was trust there, which is why he was the attorney for this, mineral owner. And he ends up telling me that this gentleman from Baltimore had moved from Nigeria and had always wanted to own a ranch in in Texas.

Mhmm.

And so he gets on eBay after he's made some money in real estate. And he gets on eBay in Baltimore, and he buys, it was 86 acres, I think, in Culberson County. Mhmm. Surface property. And the the landowner that had owned it before him had bought all of the mineral rights to the property, and I imagine didn't realize that he had because when he sold this 86 acres, he sold all the mineral rights with it. And so I

don't know.

You know, you've got this guy from Nigeria, like and going back to the United States being the only country in the world where we can own mineral rights. Mhmm. You got this guy from Nigeria, moves to America, gets into real estate, makes some money, wants to own his ranch in Texas, buys this ranch and or buys 80 6 acres in Texas, has no idea that he owns the mineral rights on it. Cimarex comes around and drills one of their best producing wells in the Delaware Basin Oh

my god.

On this guy's property. You know? So what are the odds? That's so

were we talking 7 figure payday for this guy?

It was 6. Yeah.

Come on. What like, mid 6, high 6, low 6?

Mid 6. But he was only selling a portion.

Oh, that's amazing.

You know? So he sold all of it. But, you know, I mean, it's it's stuff like that where it's in you never know what you're gonna get. I mean, these the different types of people that own these properties and their different knowledge base of the properties are just, you know, you'll you'll find people sometimes that own 1 acre, and they act like they own the whole state of Texas. Mhmm. You know? And a lot of these owners too think that they're they're sort of a negative cloud over mineral buyers that we have to fight against because, historically, the information wasn't available. And so when you go back, you know, 30, 40, 50 years in talking with some of the guys that have been doing it that long, you know, that they'll say, like, you know, your ability to buy minerals was it was it was hard to find the information. You had to go to each courthouse in person, figure out who owned it. You almost had to have information about where the wells were gonna be drilled in order to know what to buy, and there really wasn't there was a lot of there was a lot more risk associated with it then than there is now, so they were trying to buy it for as cheap as they could possibly get it.

And there was this sort of stereotype that if a mineral buyer wants to buy your minerals, he knows way more about it than you do, never sell your minerals. There's also a generational sort of saying that is that is pat that has been passed down with these minerals about never sell your minerals, never sell your minerals, never sell your minerals, and that's I think is that? Well, I think I think what it it's well, you'll ask mineral owners sometimes, you know, why why do you never wanna sell your minerals? And a lot of them won't give you an answer. I don't know whether or not they have one, you know, but they'll just say, you know, I've just been told to never sell my minerals. And the mineral rights ownership is what you'll hear in the industry a lot, a bundle of sticks. So there's a lot of different things that come with owning minerals. You can, you have the right to receive lease bonus money for a company to come in and and say that they want to drill on the property, lease bonus or delay rentals. You have the rights to receive royalties if there's wells drilled on it. You have the rights to produce your own minerals.

So if I own the minerals underneath your ranch and I want to produce the minerals that I own, I legally can drill a well on your ranch.

Mhmm.

If I have the rights to ingress and I have the rights to ingress and egress as a mineral rights owner so I can come on and off the property, the surface property. You know? So So what farmers have said is that they had been told for a long time, you know, from generations before them that it was because a lot of these minerals, especially out in West Texas, it was agriculture first. And, so, you know, you can imagine, like, if you've got if you've got 640 acres in your farm in cotton and that's how you're feeding your family, and then Self life. Yeah. And then you wanna sell your you know, if you need to sell your minerals or you wanna sell your minerals, cotton field and taking away part of your crop units.

Part of your production.

Yeah. Yeah. And so I think that that's been that's been passed down, but now all of the information that we have is available. So it's there's nothing that we know that that a mineral owner, couldn't find out themselves. That's amazing. It's a it's a great industry. It's, you know, it's actually one of

my favorite things about business but also oil and gas in West Texas in particular. There's a guy I'm trying to get on the show. He worked for 1 of the huge E and P companies, and recognized a need for a certain type of business. Left a a, mid 6 figure job doing extremely well for himself and started a business with a partner with 23,000 cash. And they, already hit 10,000,000 this year in in revenue. Yeah. And they're doing amazing, just from recognizing a need and falling in love with something just like you did. But for someone who is getting started in business, who is a a young entrepreneur or old entrepreneur and and they're listening or watching your story, what what what do you think the main takeaway could be from your story as far as their business philosophy?

I would say think about try to think about every decision based on the economic value that's being added. And if you think of if you force yourself to think about and it it you know, you can't do it with everything, but as much as you can, as as much as you can think about the economic value that's being added with each decision that you're making for your business, I think that significantly decreases the chance of you making some decision like I did in the 1st mineral deal that I bought, where I bought something just because I wanted to own it instead of really thinking about the economic impacts of what I was doing. And me, it's all about cash flow. I know some people aren't that way, but for me, it's all about cash flow. I know that I can go to sleep at night, wake up in the morning, and the cash flow is continuing to come into the business. I don't the oil and natural gas sell itself, so I don't have to have the pressure of of, you know, running a big sales team or having to having to hit sales numbers every month

Mhmm.

And be patient. Build it for the long haul.

I like it. And, you know, you can apply that to whether you wanna open a franchise in a certain neighborhood or you want to start a new a new product or a new market. I think if people, have that philosophy or practice that philosophy, they'd they'd be ahead of the game. Yeah. I know you're a busy guy, man. You're building your own empire. So I really appreciate you coming in and telling your story. And I I hope that someone who is listening to this can get a a good takeaway.

I appreciate it, man.

Yeah, man. Thanks for having me. Yep.