Zero
BidOut is rapidly becoming the procurement platform of choice in the oil and gas industry.
Colin Burton of Punchlist Zero sat with their Co-Founder Rodney Giles to talk about BidOut’s eyebrow-raising growth and what the future holds.
PL0: Please give us a brief summary of what BidOut does and how the company can benefit suppliers and clients alike.
BidOut is a supply chain SaaS platform. We connect oil and gas purchasers or buyers with oil and gas suppliers, typically oilfield service companies. BidOut primarily focuses on drilling and completion activities with around 80% of our activities here in the lower 48 United States with the balance of transactions coming from Canada.
BidOut helps operators source great suppliers. In the last couple of years, our tool has been very valuable to companies, as increasing pricing volatility required the sourcing of new suppliers. We take all the communication aspects and put them on the BidOut platform, so there’s a single point of contact. We’re making sure we get the required information that’s submitted and so forth.
PL0:What are the benefits of having one platform for the procurement process in the oil and gas industry?
Typically, in the bidding process, there’s a ton of back-and-forth communication and files being exchanged between vendors and suppliers. BidOut gives our customers a single repository of all the information and communication. We have internal chat rooms, and internal question and answer. If a supplier asks a very detailed question, once that question is answered, we’re going to disseminate it to all the other suppliers as well.
We’re streamlining the procurement process. We do bids anywhere as small as a couple of $100, shockingly enough, up to $100 million. We’ve heard from several of our clients where they’re receiving million-dollar bids on Excel sheets printed out with sharpie markups. Then, these suppliers take cell phone photos and text them to a top 20 US oil company. And that’s a real bid submission that ultimately got awarded! So our goal is to keep all that in a single repository and drive accountability.
PL0: What unique experiences did you and your cofounder Tyler Cherry bring to this business? How has that helped play into its current success?
Well, Tyler and I, we’ve actually known each other back since we were in junior high, almost probably 25 years ago, and we reconnected several years ago. I built and sold several technology companies.
After one of my first technology companies, I went out and bought some oil and gas production in the form of oil and gas royalties and minerals. So I’ve been very familiar with the oil and gas space and some of the technical challenges thereof.
Tyler has been running oilfield service operations and companies for the last 20 years or so. And he came to me with the idea and said, “Hey, look, we’ve got this very old way of doing things. I think we can maybe build some software around it. Can we make something work out?”
It just so happened I was looking for a SAS-related idea. We started whiteboarding and brainstorming and really getting this off the ground several years ago.
PL0: What’s the growth plan for 2023?
Well, we just made three key sales hires yesterday, and our goal is to focus on growth. We’re looking at 700% to 1000% growth rate this coming year.
BidOut has clients all over the place that are very interested in our product. We’ve got a couple of bolt-on components of our platform due out in the next six to eight months that I”m really excited about.
PL0: What would you like to see the BidOut product look like in five years?
Well, we like to say that we are focused on all things procurement. So we want to make it easy for buyers to buy complicated technical services in the oil and gas sector. We’re very oil and gas-focused, so we want to look at offering new suppliers, trends of pricing, and better tools.
One of BidOut’s chief aims is to allow buyers to really purchase services faster and with a lot more efficiency. So anything in the procurement space is a big focus.
At the end of the day, we hope to be the largest oil and gas procurement platform, and I think we’re on track to do that.
PL0: How does a supplier qualify for the BidOut platform?
Well, most of our suppliers are brought in from our buyers, so a lot of our buyers come to us and are creating a bid. They’re going to disseminate that bid to anywhere, typically between three and sometimes 20 or 30 suppliers. Thus, our network of suppliers happens to grow organically through our buyers, but we still get a lot of organic sign-ups from suppliers.
It’s free to onboard our platform and connect with operators. We’ve got over $10 billion of operator CapEx on the platform now.
I look forward to seeing that number continue to grow!
