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Vol. 232 No. 5 |
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| NELL LUKOSAVICH, SENIOR EDITOR |
Keith Mosing:
Building an oilfield empire the old-fashioned way
Building one of the world’s largest family-owned oilfield service companies doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen according to plan, either—if you ask Keith Mosing, chairman and CEO of Frank’s International and executive vice president and COO of Frank’s Casing Crew and Rental Tools.
Over eight decades ago Keith’s grandfather, Oklahoma native Frank Mosing, moved with his wife Jessie to southern Louisiana to look for work in the burgeoning oil fields. In 1938, he started Frank’s Casing Crew out of his garage in Lafayette with his three brothers-in-law.
“He went out to rigs and said, ‘My name is Frank and I’ve got this crew. We can run your casing.’ And they ran it with rope and a yolk,” Keith said. Keith’s father, Donald, joined his father in the oil fields, and when Keith was born he would often sleep on the passenger seat while Donald drove the back roads to work on the rigs.
Keith joined the family business in 1965 at age 14, first working on equipment maintenance and later as an unofficial crew member on the Jaguar transport vessel offshore Galveston. After earning his pilot’s license at 16, college and a stint in the military, he returned to Frank’s and began expanding the company by opening branches in Texas and Oklahoma. Then, with one phone call, “we accidentally went international,” Keith said.
A colleague had a rig shut down and needed extra casing equipment at a site in the Dominican Republic. “It was smaller equipment, and I had an airplane,” Keith recalled. “I disassembled the equipment so that it would fit in the airplane, put some plywood boards down, scattered equipment ... and gathered the crew.”
Keith told the rig manager that he would be there in seven hours. “He asked me, ‘What day?’ and I just told him, ‘No, you don’t understand. I’m flying the crew there myself and will be there in seven hours.’” Keith had never flown outside the US and asked the rig manager to take care of customs issues in bringing the equipment over. “He called me back and [said], ‘Can you put a case of Cokes on that plane?’ So we bribed the customs with a case of Coca-Cola.”
The Dominican job earned Keith a reputation as a hands-on service man, and he began looking abroad for more work opportunities. As he started taking jobs in Indonesia, he quickly realized the opportunities available in the global market. In 1981, he founded Frank’s International, taking his colleagues by surprise.
“At the same time, the Gulf of Mexico was going big,” he said. “The boom was here [in Texas] in ’81, and everyone thought I was nuts.” When recession struck the US oil industry the next year, Keith found that the international market had a thirst for equipment and services. “We were buying equipment at 10 cents on the dollar, and I was just shipping it overseas and expanding,” he said. “The history of the oil field is tragic between ’82 and ’87, but they were my biggest years, when I expanded the most.”
Within four years, Frank’s International opened offices in Asia, the Middle East, West Africa and Europe. Keith would personally visit new job sites, often flying his plane out during crew changes to say goodbye to workers, welcome new ones or fly them home.“I think you’re rewarded with hard work, honesty, integrity and having good people,” he said.
Today, the company has far outgrown its casing crew roots, with operations in over 40 countries—including deepwater and subsea—and more than 100 patents.
Keith, who still keeps a $34 handwritten pay stub from 1967, has no regrets about the no-business-plan approach that has driven Frank’s for 30 years. “I woke up one morning, and Macondo changed our entire business. You can’t put that in a business plan,” he said. When asked how Frank’s has survived the wave of acquisitions of independents by major service companies, his puzzled expression said it all. “How do you know I’m not going to take them over?” he asked right back. 
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