Jody Crook is a fourth-generation oilman. His great-grandfather got his start with Atlantic Refining in the 1930s and both his grandfather and father worked for Getty, so oil and gas “was really in my blood.”

He knew he wanted to pursue oil and gas from the get-go, but when he was about to graduate from the University of Oklahoma’s Petroleum Land Manage­ment program in the late-1990s, the low price of oil incentivized him to stay in school an extra semester and pusue a double-major in finance.

He has worked at Enron, Southwestern Energy and Jones Energy in a number of different roles including land, operations, business development and A&D, and earned an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin while working at Jones.

Eventually, he felt the itch to get out on his own, and with four other partners, this year formed Tenet Energy, which is currently raising equity and anticipates deal flow by year-end. He took time to sit down recently with Oil and Gas Investor and share a little of what he has learned over his career in the industry to date.

Jody Crook

Investor What was the environment like when you were near graduation?

Crook In late 1999, the price of oil was $9 per barrel. Upstream oil and gas jobs—there were virtually none. I had interned with Texaco, Mobil, and with Burlington Resources. I was focused on being a landman and a career in oil and gas. No jobs. Saw that coming late in my last semester, and said, man, I have to have a fallback.

Investor Your first job out of college was at Enron. How was it?

Crook For a young person, that opportunity was pretty compelling. Prices had started to recover, and I actually had some upstream opportunities by that time, but Enron presented an entirely different view of the energy industry.

I was in the analyst and associate program. I had one rotation in natural gas trading and another in LNG before North America switched to an export model. For me, it was positive exposure to many smart people from all over the globe.

Investor After working at Southwestern Energy and Jones Energy, you felt like you had to strike out on your own. Why?

Crook For me, it didn’t happen fast. It’s that growing sense of something inside of you that over time, you have a very different view of how to do things. You see good ideas fail to gain traction and opportunities left unpursued, and you don’t see a good reason why.

There’s a point when you realize, I have to step out. I realized I had a clear choice. Either resign myself to being a role player, come in in the morning and focus on a “to do” list, and do those things to the best of my ability. Then hang it up at the end of the day and come back and do it again tomorrow. Or, is it something that consumes me?

I couldn’t do a job anymore. I needed something more; I wanted to be consumed by something that I woke up thinking about. So for me, it was weighing that, and understanding the risk and return.

Investor What are the hurdles?

Crook Jones put me in a good situation where I could take some risk—every person’s in a different situation; there’s family, there are bills that have to be paid each month. Financially, you have to put yourself in a situation where you can step away from a salary for a year or two. That’s a barrier. That’s a tough hurdle.

But you get to the situation where you think, well, what if I don’t do this? You start looking at the potential regret. For me, what really pushed me out was, I got to the position where I realized, well, if I do fail, as long as I don’t screw up the reputation and relationships, I should be able to go back to a similar situation. And if I went back to a similar role, I’d be so much better at that job.

Because stepping out, getting in front of private equity and understanding that’s where capitalism is found in a pure form, that collision between the ideas and opportunities of a management team and private equity—whatever I do from here, I’ll be better at it.

Investor What have you learned about yourself?

Crook I think the value of people, the value of relationships. I think it’s kind of funny how, in a capitalistic system, the focus is always about profit; that’s the end-game, and that’s what we’re ultimately seeking. But when you start putting people ahead of profit, things tend to work out much better.

Who are the people around you that are making this happen? I think a lot of it is, when you get those right people, the right projects seem to be there. And then, when that happens, the profit seems to follow. I believe we have that at Tenet.