Midstream Services
FINALIST
Brad Childers
CEO
Exterran Holdings Inc.
When Brad Childers became CEO at Exterran Holdings Inc., the future did not look too bright.
The company was facing a lot of debt, a historically low stock price and several consecutive years of losses. The company was formed in 2007 through a merger, but there was not a good integration plan in place to bring the two organizations together. The result was a bad culture and a poorly performing company.
Childers became CEO in 2011 and saw the fundamentals of a good business. They just needed a strong leader to come in and put it all together.
Not all the decisions that Childers made were popular. He eliminated personal printers and company cell phones and made changes to the work schedule. He reined in unprofitable pet projects and re-evaluated the company’s product mix.
He needed to cut costs. But he wanted to get these painful steps out of the way quickly so everyone could move on and see the positive outcomes that would be the result.
His goal was to create an environment where the company made money, employees were rewarded for their dedicated effort and everyone had the chance to live their lives and spend that valuable time with their family that doesn’t come around again.
It’s why Childers is always looking for ways to do it better and make work more efficient, such as when he identified a technology to use touch-screen devices to track activities performed in the field on a real-time basis.
The information provided will help the company make better decisions regarding resource allocations and material levels needed. It will also help identify process inefficiencies, improve equipment performance and eliminate redundancies.
The key to earning the support from employees who had heard similar claims from other leaders in the past was Childers’s willingness to get out in the field and answer the important questions that allowed the tools to be effective.
How to reach: Exterran Holdings Inc., www.exterran.com
