FourQuest Energy

To be the leaders in the energy industry by providing quality and excellence in our services, backed up by solid and innovative engineering— that’s the mission of FourQuest Energy. While many companies have similar missions, it’s very few that actually fulfill on it, in the way that FourQuest Energy has.

Karl Gannon, Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at FourQuest Energy explains their success like this, “FourQuest has actually achieved an annual growth in excess of 100 per cent since inception, even during the 2008/2009 recession. Our full-time compliment of personnel has grown from four to over 160 full-time staff in three and half years of operations; this number is continually increasing due to our fast and aggressive growth plan. Consequentially, our recruitment drive is constant worldwide. We currently have operational facilities in Canada, United Arab Emirates and Kazakhstan with intended expansion into Asia, Russia, USA and Latin America over the next few years. Our revenue for FY2011 will be in the region of $33 Million.”

The success and foundation of FourQuest is found in its four directors, who have extensive international experience in the pre-commissioning and turnaround services field. These visionaries include: Nik Grgic, President; Karl Gannon, Vice-President of Sales and Marketing; Zoran Bajic, Vice-President of Engineering; and Dave Wilson, Vice-President of Special Projects. These four business savvy minds worked in the energy industry from the ground up and understood not only client needs, but the fundamentals of success in the energy industry.

The directors all determined that the precommissioning field was sorely lacking in engineering support, and they engineered procedures based on real engineering calculations. Taking this into their business model, they architected FourQuest to fulfill on the following seven key objectives:

• Quality of products and services and financial soundness.
• Employee attraction and retention.
• Quality of Management.
• Development of new markets and innovation.
• Corporate reputation management.
• Reduction of expenses.
• Acquisition, merger and divestiture.

Today, FourQuest Energy enjoys the challenges of fulfilling on major contracts with the majority of the major oil companies in the last three years and more importantly has been awarded a significant portion of work by word of mouth from previous contracts. FourQuest has also been nominated as a finalist (Energy Services) for the Ernst and Young (Prairies) 2011 Entrepreneur of the Year.

Nik Grgic, the President of FourQuest, explains success in this way: “To start a company from zero and grow it to the current annual revenue in excess of $33M, we heavily relied on the hard work and entrepreneurial spirit of our key people. In order to sustain and properly manage our growth, we are prioritizing the implementation of a proper organizational structure. This means establishing and empowering new managers to oversee our growth and still maintain a “yes, we can” attitude. In order to maintain the highest level of satisfaction from our clients, we have implemented the ISO 9001 quality standard system.”

FourQuest Strategy

The FourQuest strategy is to grow the company predominantly in oil-producing and refining countries. Their founding region is the CNAR (Canada and North America) with the vast majority of the work in Canada. FourQuest is now planning on moving into the U.S. and MECR (Middle East and Caspian Region), to become fully operational by the spring of 2010. Further development is planned for the FER (Far East Region), EAR (Europe Africa Region) and the SAR (South America Region) with the intention of all regions being fully operational within the next 5 years.

Karl attributes their success to their team. He says, “Every service company would like to say they have the best and most technologically superior equipment; however, coming from an international operational background myself, I can say with complete clarity that some of the best work scopes I ever completed were executed with equipment that was far from being the best, and yet achieved optimum results because of the team I was working with. What we have accepted as a company is that we have to frequently take paradigm shifts with regards to recruitment methods to get the people we want. We also have to accept that the likelihood of getting an exact fit ‘off the shelf’ are more remote, emphasizing the need for strong support, training and commitment after they are employed.”

Karl looks into the future to ensure the success of today. He says, “In an industry that is booming again, it is easy to lose focus, a ‘bird in the hand’ so to speak. Setting your targets and goals well in advance and keeping to them is paramount. I frequently say to my team that you should always be thinking at least two years in advance; if you are thinking about strategies for the here and now, you are too late.”

Nik describes the culture of FourQuest as progressive, “Management does not ask employees to do anything that they (management) either wouldn’t do themselves or actually didn’t already do. This applies to any aspect of our business from sales targets, to hard work in the field, to working on challenging engineering procedures.

Our company has a tolerance for risk and mistake. At FourQuest, we do ask our employees for lots: lots of hard work, dedication and innovation. We are moving fast and our people make mistakes, rarely, but they do. Instead of punishing them, we learn from them and do it better next time.” www.fourquest.com