Episode 356: 02-18-16
On this week’s show, Bruce Turkel discusses how your brand evolves over time, Alexander Pickens Cordia shares why he thinks it’s time to buy in the oil and gas sector, and UHealth Dr. Paola N. Lichtenberger discusses Zika virus facts.
Build your Personal Brand
Bruce Turkel, CEO and ECD at Turkel Brands, uses a unique combination of creativity and business acumen to help companies build their businesses by making their brands more valuable.
Turkel is a serial entrepreneur who has created a number of successful companies. Currently, Turkel is focused on his brand management agency (www.turkel.info) headquartered in Miami, Florida, and his Hispanic market advertising agency (www.OrigenGlobal.com) with 19 offices throughout the Spanish-speaking world.
Turkel is also an accomplished speaker, author, musician and artist.
We discuss how your brand evolves over time.
Oil and Gas Investment
Alexander Pickens Cordia is founder and managing partner at PICK energy, a private consulting group in the oil and gas space. PICK energy analyzes deal flow across industries, connecting projects to capital.
Cordia focuses his attention in oil and gas, seeking projects that make returns for investors of all sizes in today’s ever-evolving market. His knowledge of the paper markets, alongside his access to industry-leading information, give Cordia and his team a competitive advantage in their ability to quickly align with and execute some of the best projects in the industry.
We discuss oil and gas investment and why he thinks it is time to buy into the oil and gas sector. When the market tanks, it’s time to buy!
Zika Virus Facts
Our UHealth special guest is Dr. Paola N. Lichtenberger, a specialist in internal medicine and infectious disease. We discuss the facts and fiction surrounding the Zika virus.
Episode 356: 02-18-16 (To download, right-click and select “Save Link As”.)
Transcription:
Jim Fried: We are back and we are back with a great edition of Fried on Business. We’re going to talk with Bruce Turkel about personal branding and what happens as your brand evolves. We’re going to talk with Alex P. Cordia about oil and gas and we’re going to get the show started right away with one of the South Florida’s best philanthropists, one of my favorite Dolphin guys, Michael Mandich. Michael, are you out there?
Michael Mandich: How are you doing this evening?
Jim Fried: I’m doing great. How about you? It’s a front end of a fabulous weekend for you. Tell me what’s going on with the Dolphins Cancer Challenge.
Michael Mandich: We’ve officially kicked it off. Tomorrow night we’re hosting our kick-off ceremony here at Sun Life Stadium where we will be hosting with a lot of Miami Dolphins players, 2500 people and we’re going to have a nice broadcast on CBS4 hosting our Dolphins Cancer Challenge there live, 30 is going to broadcast 7:00 to 7:30, so it’s going to be exciting atmosphere and then this Saturday, over 3200 participants will either ride, run, walk or simply donate, come out to a concert. For the first time we’ll be hosting a concert and we’re really excited to announce Melissa Etheridge and Sheryl Crow this weekend.
Jim Fried: That sounds really great. It sounds like all kinds of things good. Can people still get in on the action? Can they go to the website and donate? We had the dean on last week. He’s riding with that mangled foot of his with Carlos Magoya, so, I got all kinds of friends riding in this, so awesome. I keep getting emails.
Michael Mandich: We have quite a few people and yes, dean Goldschmidt will be riding along with Carlos Magoya doing the 100 mile. And I’ll be joining them but there’s no more time for the ride. Yes, there is time for the 5k, however, they will have to come on Saturday morning, our run, our walk starts at 11:00 AM and we have it staggered start so our longest ride begins at 6:30 AM and then it goes all the way until about the noon. Idea of that is we want everyone finishes here at Sunlight Stadium and them shortly after it at 2:00 PM Melissa Etheridge will go on stage and then at 3:00 PM we will have Sheryl Crow on stage. So we want people to stick around and enjoy that. So people can either purchase tickets for the concert or the 5k which gives the complementary access to the finish line celebration.
Jim Fried: That sounds great. They can get more information on the website. What’s the website?
Michael Mandich: Website is dolphinscancerchallenge.com and we’ve raised over $11.5 million to fund cancer research project here in South Florida at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center. As you said before, this thing has really become a mega fundraiser.
Jim Fried: It’s awesome. I go to Sylvester. I’ve sponsored three or four different doctors on the ride and I want to point out that everybody can go to the website and you can look for people you know or just donate to Michael’s ride. You can still donate. It’s really important and 100% of all donations go to the Sylvester Cancer Center. And Michael, I want to thank you and your whole family for the dedication and we just got to say, in honor of your dad and everything, I just got goosebumps. Thank you so much for everything you do.
Michael Mandich: He’s riding around with the windows down – a big smile on his face.
Jim Fried: And a green lizard in his hand, God willing.
Michael Mandich: And the support that this community has given, you got in part in honor of him but in honor of thousands of people who are facing similar situations with cancer.
Jim Fried: Michael, I want to thank you for coming on the show. I know you got to get back to all the festivities and thanks again from all the people you’re not going to meet for all the great funds you raised to cure cancer here in South Florida.
Michael Mandich: I appreciate it, Jim, and have a great program. Thank you very much for your support.
Jim Fried: It’s our pleasure. We love your event. We’ll be right back after this. We’re going to have Bruce Turkel. We’re going to talk branding. He’s the expert, I’m going to learn, so are you. Back after this. AC, it is yours.
[commercial break]
Jim Fried: We are back and we’re here with Bruce Turkel. He’s the CEO of the, what do they call your firm, Bruce?
Bruce Turkel: Turkel Brands.
Jim Fried: I wonder why. Bruce is my favorite branding expert. We come on, we kick it around. Bruce, welcome back to the show.
Bruce Turkel: Thanks. It’s always fun to be here.
Jim Fried: I love you man. So, when I was prepping for the show and I was looking at your new LinkedIn site and I noticed that you evolved and changed a bunch of things on your LinkedIn description since the last time I was there. So it seems to me like you’re evolving what you’re producing to support your branding.
Bruce Turkel: Let’s not just make it as about me as much as I would like to talk about me but instead let’s talk about why that matters to everybody who’s listening.
Jim Fried: It’s all about them.
Bruce Turkel: Exactly. It is all about them. And we’ve spoken a number of times on your show about developing your authentic truth, making that part of your brand and then disseminating that message. So what you need to do as you build the sites whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all the different social media opportunities that you have, is to make sure that you’re communicating who you are. Remember we’ve said many times people don’t choose what you do, they choose who you are. Today, products are generic. You can get them anywhere. So if someone is going to do business with you, they’re going to do business with you. What you bring to the table is now more important than ever of part of the equation for building a successful brand.
Jim Fried: That’s really cool because I put out all this content with the radio show and my involvement in the community and I put it out differently on different channels if you will, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, they all get different delivery systems so they all bring them back to my website for the radio show content and then they can go browse all the different things that I have there basically for them.
Bruce Turkel: That’s exactly right. You’re a social media monster. You show up everywhere. The thing is though, because you’re the practitioner and you have people who do the work for you, you start to think as a practitioner that all those pieces are separate. But to the listeners, the viewers, the audience, the customers, they don’t know that. They see something on Facebook, then they hear you on the radio, then maybe they read something, and they don’t see as different distribution channels, they see it as Jim Fried. Therefore, all those things work together in order to get them to what you want which is your website and in fact your radio show. Once they listen to you on the show, they hear your personality, they’re listening for the information, of course, they’re listening for your ability to interview, of course, they’re listening for the quality of the guests you bring in, of course. But more importantly than that, they’re listening because it’s you.
Jim Fried: That’s really terrific and we’ve had enormous growth in all of our social media platforms and in all of our different distribution networks. But one of the things I noticed when I was on your, I guess it was either homepage or LinkedIn page, you now have got a portal, I really didn’t understand what it was, I didn’t spend enough time to really get what that was. What’s this portal thing you’re doing?
Bruce Turkel: Here’s exactly what the opportunity is also the problem, or the liability is the asset. We have all these different ways of communicating with each other now, we have LinkedIn, we have Facebook, we have Twitter, we have Pinterest, we have Instagram and then we have email and then we have tweets, and then we have an office phone, and then we have a cell phone. And at some point, it becomes almost embarrassment of riches. We have too many ways for people to find us. So the question becomes, how do you consolidate all those things. And I found this amazing and inexpensive, I have to add, piece of software called My Digital Portal. If you want to see mine, you go online, it’s http//bit.oy/BruceTurkel. When you go in there, you have access to all of my information right on your smartphone instantly. So what’s the first thing you see when you turn it on? Of course, you see my logo. And then you see my TED speech. Why? Because someone who is going to hire me to do their marketing work or to come speak at their conference, or wants to read one of my books, what are they going to be most impressed with? My TED speech. But then you can drill down and get all my other information. When we come back, I’ll talk a little bit about how to configure it, what it cost, because it’s an amazing tool.
Jim Fried: We still got another, what, minute left in this segment? So we’re going to do that, I guess why aren’t we going to a break a little early and bring Bruce back for a longer segment? And yes, I use bitly’s too. They’re awesome. They help you track everything. All right, we will be back with branding expert Bruce Turkel about how to build and market your brand after this. AC, that means it’s yours.
[commercial break]
Jim Fried: We’re back and Bruce has been helping me get my brand here together while I’ve been working here on the sideline. Bruce Turkel, he’s the president and chief, what is it, creative director?
Bruce Turkel: Yes.
Jim Fried: Okay, chief creative director of Turkel Brands. They’ve created some of the most iconic brands here in South Florida, the Miami brand and also you worked with a bunch of other people, Nike, all kinds of stuff like that.
Bruce Turkel: Yes. Discovery Channel, Bacardi, Hasbro.
Jim Fried: Not bad. Plus, you give a great speech, you gave us one last year at the UF Conference. It was terrific.
Bruce Turkel: Go Gators.
Jim Fried: There you go. Heat them up. Now, getting back to it, I was commenting how I’ve noticed the evolution of your LinkedIn page and the rest of your social media content and my favorite part of your content outreach is your weekly blog. I always find something really interesting and apropos, I love the thing about where you compare the new movie to Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Give me a little bit of that. That was awesome.
Bruce Turkel: Sure. I don’t know if you know this but Deadpool, which is the new movie out about a superhero is now the best selling R-rated movie ever.
Jim Fried: Potty mouth superhero.
Bruce Turkel: Yes, potty mouth superhero. And it did, I don’t have numbers in front of me, either $138 million or $183 million in three days, more than The Matrix. The numbers were amazing and when you ask a lot of people about Deadpool, they’ve never even heard of it, they don’t know what it is, yet the sales are through the roof. And then you look at what that character represents. He’s a guy who has snide comments, nasty comments, politically incorrect comments, he says what he thinks. There’s a direct parallel right there to what’s going on in politics.
Jim Fried: Combing over my hair right now.
Bruce Turkel: Which ever side of the isle you’re on for Trump and Sanders where they say what they think or they say whatever they want to say based on who their audiences are. Remember, all about them. And so what we’re seeing in the movies, in politics is the same thing, it’s the way people respond to the zeitgeist of what’s out there.
Jim Fried: So they’re gassing everybody up because everybody is a little bit aggravated with what’s going on because we’ve had this – I don’t want to talk politics but – people are probably somewhat disappointed about, they’re not getting what they expected and now I’ve read – I don’t want to talk politics – but anyway-
Bruce Turkel: Especially with me you don’t want to talk politics.
Jim Fried: Exactly. We don’t want to talk politics on the show. But let’s talk a little bit about your TEDx speech because I thought it was great the way you had the little pun, the one about your TEDx speech. Tell everybody what your TEDx speech is a little bit about.
Bruce Turkel: My TEDx speech quite simply was titled ”Forget mindfulness, try never mindfulness”. And the idea was that everybody was so busy being mindful, we keep hearing about it, having your feet on the floor, having your butt in the seat being present in the moment, that we become all these little narcissists running around thinking about ”What am I doing? What am I thinking? Where am I?”. And if you want a market, I’ve already told you, marketing is what? The three words, all about them. And so instead of being so mindful, stop being never mindful, stop paying attention to who you are and what you’re doing, start paying attention to your customer. That’s why you build your brand, now about you but about your customer, how do you matter to your customer, how do you resonate in the life of your customer.
Jim Fried: Sorry, sometimes my question comebacks are little bit slow because I’m internalizing what you’re saying and projecting it into my mind on the little screen there. There’s this new show I like to watch, ”A Billionaire”, ”Billions” or something and the characters are all sitting in there watching the flame on their phone and it’s just hilarious, while they’re doing their mindfulness. And they’re both narcissists.
Bruce Turkel: I’ve got nothing against mindfulness. It makes a lot of sense to do it. Sit down, meditate a little bit, get calm with yourself, I dig that. However, when you’re building your brand you have to look outward.
Jim Fried: Yes, and most important thing in a lot of businesses looking outward, I’m always looking outward and I have to put together all kinds of little pieces and the pieces I put together are the messages people are sending me and I have to pick through them to understand what part of that works for me.
Bruce Turkel: All the little pieces you have to put together is why that portal we were talking about earlier works so well because what happens is it takes all of your communications, your website, your brochure, your business card, videos if you have them, audio which you have, Youtubes, Vimeos, all these different components that we all have flying around and it gives you one place, one portal on a smartphone for people to access all of it. By doing that, you don’t have to have a business card, you don’t have to carry brochures, you don’t have to have video, it’s all incorporated in one place. It’s inexpensive, you can send it to one person or a million people for the same price. It’s $200 a year. Think about the savings. If you go to mine, I told you it’s bit.oy/BruceTurkel and down at the bottom it says ”Get my own” or ”I want my own” or whatever it is. Click on there. It’s amazing. And what happens is every time someone else uses one, you benefit.
Jim Fried: It’s really just getting together and creating a community and that’s really what it’s all about. A lot of people today don’t really realize that and I love these commentators. We’ll go back to the analogy of never mindfulness for a second. I love these announcers that they go ”I really can’t figure this out, this is a strange election here”. I really don’t think it is. I think that everything is just the way it always is. It’s about the people in the country and what they’re feeling at the moment. They go ”Why are the young people getting all fired up for this candidate?”. Maybe they forgot the ’60s when they got all fired up for JFK.
Bruce Turkel: The candidates we get are the candidates we deserve. Like them or dislike them, what people are feeling and thinking is what the candidates respond to. The candidates that get no traction are the ones who stand up and say ”This is what I believe” and everyone goes ”Yes, who cares, I don’t”. The candidates that get traction are the ones who look at the audience, figure out where is the audience going and then figure out where is the alignment between where the audience is going and what the candidate’s message is.
Jim Fried: I’m glad we’re taping this so I can replay it and listen to this. It goes way to fast for my little old brain here. It’s on tricycle time today. This is great. Now, we have you on all the time because another one your seven ideas is to repeat, repeat, repeat. I guess the portal helps you repeat.
Bruce Turkel: Absolutely. For example, you said to me before you love my TED speech and you said I gave a great speech at UF. You’re nice enough to recommend me. But how about if you said to me ”I really like you come speak at our association” instead of me saying ”Yes, let me send you my whatever” all I have to say is ”Go to this address and then you have my TED speech on your smartphone”, which means the next time you go to your board meeting, you pull up the phone and you can share it. And if three other guys can’t make it to the meeting and they go ”We might want to hire that Bruce guy but we might want to hire some other people” you say ”Hand on, go to this address and open up this portal, watch the guy talk”. Nothing succeeds like success, right? So if they see me they’re going to hire me. This gives me an almost free, again $200 for a month, big deal, I mean a year, $20 a month, big deal. This gives an almost freeway for me to distribute it to as many people as I can get it out to.
Jim Fried: And it’s distributed in a way that you can still control it and you can also track who’s seeing it.
Bruce Turkel: That’s a great thing you just said. You can still control it. I control it in the cloud. So let’s say I send it to you with all my information. Then I get something that’s better that I want to put on there. All I have to do is upload it to the cloud and the one that’s in your phone changes. So when I was on Bill O’Riley, I put that in, when I was on CBS evening news, I put that in.
Jim Fried: Wait a minute. You’re on CBS evening news?
Bruce Turkel: I was. You haven’t gone to my portal. I was on twice.
Jim Fried: I looked it. I see FOX, I see MSNBS, I did not see-
Bruce Turkel: I was on with Richard Quest twice.
Jim Fried: What was it about?
Bruce Turkel: One time we talked about one of the cruise lines and issues they were having and one time we talked about design team in Italy and they got into some trouble commenting on their opinion of gay marriage, and on and on and who their market was and again, we were talking about how do you talk directly to your audience. It was great. But now that you know about my portal, you can go on there, you can click and you have it. It’s so flexible and upgradeable. It’s amazing.
Jim Fried: How about your band stuff? Is it available through that too?
Bruce Turkel: It’s not-
Jim Fried: Come on, it’s supposed to be, at least some people can learn about you.
Bruce Turkel: Now that you said that, that is just brilliant. Now that you said that, I am going to put my band stuff on it.
Jim Fried: I get an A in branding.
Bruce Turkel: And while I’m here, hang on, I’m pulling up the list, I’m going to tell you what our band is playing because we got four gigs coming up.
Jim Fried: Please do that because I want to take my wife to hear you.
Bruce Turkel: The band is called Black Star and we’re not stars either, I just want to make that clear.
Jim Fried: We can have AC be your announcer, then you got one on stage with you.
Bruce Turkel: So we’re playing at Black Point on Friday March 11th, we’re playing at Coconut Grove Sailing Club Saturday March 12th. We’re playing, this is a fun one, at Deering Estate Seafood Festival on Sunday March 20th and we are playing at the Barnacle and Coconut Grove on April 3rd.
Jim Fried: I’m definitely going to go because I work in Coconut Grove, I actually get free available parking in Coconut Grove. So I got to hit that. So Bruce, we talked a little bit about everything. I just want to bring in, we’ve only got a couple of minutes left and I want you to run through your seven points for branding. One, two, three, go.
Bruce Turkel: Point one: all about them, stop talking about yourself, start talking about your customers. Point two: hearts then minds. We all talk about facts and figures, stop it. Talk about the emotional connections between your consumer and your product. Point three: make it simple. Point four: Make it quick. Point five: Make it yours. What do you own, what do you promote that when people see it they’ll know it’s yours. Point six: All five senses. We don’t just make decisions based on what we see and what we hear, it’s what we smell, what we taste, what we touch. Make your brand sensual. And point seven: repeat, repeat, repeat. Once you figure it out, you say it over and over and over. If you want to see how I say it over and over, go to bit.oy/BruceTurkel.
Jim Fried: I can’t wait to have you back here, coming back next month. We’re going to do it again, we’re going to have a great time. AC will be your cape man like for James Brown had the cape man. You got AC as your cape man. We will be back after this with UHealth. We’re going to talk infectious diseases. What a great follow.
Bruce Turkel: AC, let me hear an ”Oh, yeah”.
AC: Oh yeah. Ladies and gentlemen.
Bruce Turkel: All right Jim, thank you.
Jim Fried: It’s my pleasure Bruce, thank you. This is great.
[commercial break]
Jim Fried: When he sings ”I feel nice like sugar and spice” that the guy comes in and puts on the cape for me and I turn it to super health man. And we’re going to have a segment now with Dr. Paola Lichtenberger. She’s a UHealth infectious disease doctor and the director of the Tropical Medicine at UHealth. What a great title, what interesting stuff you must do. Welcome to the show.
Paola Lichtenberger: Thank you very much. How are you?
Jim Fried: We’re doing great. We’re always fired up and we had Bruce on. I’ve actually been looking forward to this one for a while now. Help me calm the fears out there. Is little mosquito, is it going to take over the United States and throw us into a pandemic, is it?
Paola Lichtenberger: No.
Jim Fried: When you watch TV you think that’s what they’re talking about out there. It’s just ridiculous.
Paola Lichtenberger: Actually, the mosquito and Zika virus are things found in the United States but only in the southern part.
Jim Fried: Doctor, we’re having a problem with your phone. If you’re on a cellphone, can you get closer to a place where you’d get a better signal? We’re having a real problem here.
Paola Lichtenberger: Can you hear better now?
Jim Fried: Slightly. Do you have a hard line you can call us back on? Just keep going. We’re going to give it a shot here. Just go do the best you can.
Paola Lichtenberger: Can you hear better now?
Jim Fried: A little bit better now, yes.
Paola Lichtenberger: Okay. The problem with mosquito is that the mosquito lives in tropical and sub-tropical areas. And South Florida actually is hot and carry the mosquito as well as probably the southern part of Texas. So yes, there’s a risk of having Zika virus infection acquired in the United States will be in those areas, probably not in the other ones. In the other ones the mosquito is going to be just a concern for people who’s traveling around in the areas where the outbreak is going on right now.
Jim Fried: I see these pictures and I grew up here in South Florida and they look like the big hairy mosquitoes that have white dots on them, that I use to call salt mosquitoes that are out there day and night, usually little black ones are only out at night. Is that right?
Paola Lichtenberger: Usually, the mosquito is not going during the day. This mosquito goes around during the day and it’s a black mosquito that has white long legs and has white stripes on the legs.
Jim Fried: I know I grew up in South Florida, we knew all about yellow fever thing and turn over all the standing water so there’s never any standing water. What are some other tips people can use?
Paola Lichtenberger: Sorry?
Jim Fried: What are some things people can do to eliminate the mosquitoes and other infectious diseases that are born here in tropical-
Paola Lichtenberger: The best way is to make sure to take control of the standing water. Mosquitoes like to breed in the standing water. So every water that is placed in cans and in the plants, in the outside containers that lasts for more than a week are the ones that are going to breed the mosquitoes. So my recommendation is once a week to clean the containers. The mosquito doesn’t go into air conditioned area so if you have the disease, it’s better for you to stay on the air conditioner so you don’t get bitten by a mosquito and you don’t infect others.
Jim Fried: What are some of the other infectious diseases that are tropical in nature that we have here in South Florida?
Paola Lichtenberger: Because we have this mosquito we have the same risk of having dengue, chikungunya and Zika virus. So these are the three most important ones that may be at risk but we also have a lot of other tropical diseases that are here.
Jim Fried: So what are some of the things here in South Florida that we have to look out for to keep our health and wellness here in the tropical climate?
Paola Lichtenberger: Making sure that we take appropriate care when we go to mosquito areas and there’s mosquito season, where’s rainy season and lot of sun, we need to make sure that we use repellents. One important thing that people don’t know is that actually when you are using some protection and you are using at the same time the repellent, you have to wear first the sunscreen and then the repellent because if you put first the repellent, then you’re going to inactivate it by the sunscreen.
Jim Fried: So let me repeat that. This is actually really important. This is a new thing I’m learning here. So you got to put on the sunscreen first and then you put on the repellent. What is the most effective repellent? Because some of the stuff just never seems to work.
Paola Lichtenberger: The most important repellents are those who contain deet D-E-E-T and those who contain picaridin. We have commercial deet in brands are usually those who contain at least percentage of more than 20, those are the ones that are very effective.
Jim Fried: So it sounds to me like we’re heading towards the stronger stuff, not really the stuff that comes in the first way but more like the second way, stronger stuff. Now, we’ve talked about standing water, we’ve talked about tropical things. Is there anything that comes specifically from the ocean that we need to be careful about?
Paola Lichtenberger: From the ocean?
Jim Fried: Yes. Maybe tropical disease that comes out of the ocean. I don’t know …
Paola Lichtenberger: Actually people who have liver problems should stay away from eating raw fish or oysters. In there is some bacteria called Vibrio vulnificus and actually it’s around and we have tropical diseases every year here by people eating oysters when they have liver disease and that’s the Vibrio vulnificus.
Jim Fried: That’s actually pretty good. I was out there grasping for straws but I think I nailed it good one there. We’ve only got a couple of minutes left Dr. Lichtenberger. What is the message that you want to get out to everybody? Maybe people are turning in a little bit. Maybe we should calm everybody about the Zika thing again.
Paola Lichtenberger: The most important thing is remember that South Florida is similar to a tropical area so we should consider ourselves to live in a tropical area. So we be very careful about mosquito infections and be very careful when we have fever and a skin rash to go to the doctor. And if you’re planning to get pregnant you should go to the doctor and consider not to travel.
Jim Fried: Okay, I’m just going to say it this way. So those little small heads on the Brazilian babies, is there a chance that’s going to start happening here?
Paola Lichtenberger: I doubt that is going to happen here, but we have to raise education.
Jim Fried: Dr Lichtenberger, your phone is dying out again, but we’re also running out of time so I want to thank you Dr. Paola Lichtenberger, she’s UHealth’s infectious disease director of tropical medicine at UHealth. For more info, I guess they can find you at uhealth.com.
Paola Lichtenberger: Yes. Thank you very much.
Jim Fried: It’s our pleasure. Thanks for calming everybody down, including me. I really appreciate that. Bye-bye. We’ll be back after this with more Fried on Business. We’re going to talk oil and gas. Is there blooding the water? Is it time to buy? Alex P. Cordia knows. We’ll be back after this with Alex.
[commercial break]
Jim Fried: We’ve got Alex P.Cordia. He’s my buddy. We talk oil and gas. Last time we were talking on the phone last week. I said: ”Alex, why I always like to buy real estate when it’s troubled assets, when it’s real estate own, when it’s in trouble?”, and Alex goes ”Maybe it’s time for people to look at the oil and gas industry too”. Alex, welcome back.
Alex P. Cordia: Good to be back. Thanks for having me.
Jim Fried: It’s my pleasure. We read all this stuff about geopolitical implications of oil and gas prices, the stuff like that. What I see is an opportunity to buy. What do you see?
Alex P. Cordia: I see the exact same thing. It’s just like any other market. When times are tough the industry is stressed, that means things are on sale.
Jim Fried: That’s right. Distressed real estate, that just gets me going. I got all the money I need to buy distressed real estate. So people must be looking at what’s going on there. And it was a little bit of spike last week, wasn’t there?
Alex P. Cordia: That’s right. There was. There were some talks between two previously unfriendly nations, Saudi Arabia and Russia and they got together in a room and they decided that there was a problem that needed addressing and they’re beginning to have conversations about how to get it back on track. So I think what we’re looking at in 2016, year of supply and demand re-balancing.
Jim Fried: So if that happens, then it sounds to me like there’s a big opportunity out there with some distressed assets and we don’t have to talk about the man camps in North Dakota, we can simply look in Texas where there’s got to be a whole bunch of opportunity that you’re seeking every day.
Alex P. Cordia: Absolutely. I’ve been looking at deal now for about the last 18 months and obviously over those last 18 months the market has been evolving every single day. And my focus has shifted essentially back to the basics. And the basics always work in just about everything, from business deals, athletics to anything else you can put your fingers on. I’m looking at a project now from a company out at Dallas and have aligned myself with them and working very closely with, it’s called Alliance Petroleum. They’ve got a great organization, they stick to what they know which is shallow, vertical drills and when they get down there they find steady producers. It’s inexpensive to do so. They’re profitable at $30 oil and that profitable $30 oil is something that is not easy to find these days.
Jim Fried: No, and it sounds to me like what you’re really talking about is what I call blocking and tackling, going back to the basics. So if the industry is now blocking and tackling that means to me that there must be going and looking for the least expensive places to reopen that they closed last year. Did they close a mall? What happened with that?
Alex P. Cordia: The banks started doing re-determinations back in October last year. They gave these big time credit lines to companies, E&P companies that were going out and buying a tremendous amount of acreage. And so when oil is at $100 and your revenue is based on $100 oil, everybody is in the money. But when you have that same amount of production and oil ends up $30, you’re now out 70% of your revenues. And that credit line wouldn’t have been issue at $30 the way oil is at $100. So banks are coming back and saying ”Wait a second. We gave you too much money, we need to get some of that back”. And a lot of companies these days are saying ”We spent it”, or they put it in the other stuff and they’re very eloquent. And that’s cause of big time problem in the industry, so what you’re going to see here before long is when these companies cannot come up with the cash to return to the banks, there’s going to be a fire sale on acreage.
Jim Fried: We call, it’s a short sale basically. You buy it for less than the mortgage. It’s just like real estate. This is amazing. I love this stuff, Alex. We got to talk about this some more. I’m loving it. So Alex, how do people get information from you and on your stuff and your ideas?
Alex P. Cordia: They can look up the project that I’m currently on. It’s with Alliance Petroleum like I mentioned earlier, Dallas based, managing partner oil and gas company. And they can find them on the internet or they can look me up and contact me through a myriad of ways. It can be through social media, through my email which I believe is connected to something on your website. There’s a bunch of ways these days.
Jim Fried: What do you see coming now with oil coming up? What do you see as some of the opportunities that are coming in Texas as it also up in the north-west where the tar sands were up in the man camps in North Dakota and British Columbia. Are those going to be able to be producing again or did they ever stop?
Alex P. Cordia: They won’t stop. Once these wells are drilled they’re going to flow, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to cap them. It isn’t good for the integrity of the well in the first place. But what you’re not seeing is new production. So you got two different kinds of wells, you’ve got the big horizontals that everyone is pretty familiar with after the advances of the horizontal drilling and the big time hydraulic fracturing. And then you’ve got your traditional vertical well. And the big horizontals, the reason they’re different is they don’t work as well as they did is because you’re drilling them real deep and real long and that creates tremendous amount of production. These are big time wells. They come on at 1000, 1500, 2000 barrels a day in some cases. That’s a lot of oil. But what they do that’s different is they produce that quantity for very short period of time. So they can drop 80% of their production in a matter of months. So it’s tremendously important that you have high oil prices as soon as you drill those wells. Obviously, that’s where both of your revenue is coming from right up there in those upfront months. But in a traditional, vertical well, a conventional vertical well, it’s pretty steady production over the life of that well. So say it produces 20 barrels a day, the next year it may produce 19 and then 18 and then 17 so on and so forth. Now, obviously those are numbers that, you can’t hold me to those exactly but it gives you a pretty good idea that it’s consistent production. So one year isn’t necessarily anymore important than any other year. So you can buy it low and let it ride up as the price increases.
Jim Fried: It sounds to me like you’re looking at big vertical wells these days.
Alex P. Cordia: Not even big. You can go shallow. If you find the right field, there’s a lot of older proven fields in the state of Texas that, when you look at then from a map, it looks like they got a real bad case of chicken pox and all those dots are producing wells and they’re everywhere. That’s a good sign. It means that there’s steady production in that field and if you got a fairly competent driller you can go out there, drop a line and pretty much hit it. In some places that’s shallow, and that what that does is that it makes the upfront cost of paying for that well very inexpensive.
Jim Fried: It sounds to me like I got to go get a geo-tactical engineer and maybe just hook up with you. Listen, I’m running out of time. So I got to have you come back in the next few months and give us another update so we can talk about geopolitical profit taking when you tell me how great you did on your investments. Is that all right?
Alex P. Cordia: That sounds good to me. I’d love to talk to you about the results. I’m sure they’ll be great.
Jim Fried: I can’t wait to hear it. Alex P. Cordia, Alex thanks so much for coming and giving us the oil and gas scoop from the well head I guess it’s the best way to say it there.
Alex P. Cordia: Yes, sit. It’s always good catching up with you.
Jim Fried: You’re the best. I want to tell everybody that we continue to work real hard with my wife and getting her ready and getting her her transplant. It’s highly technical, it isn’t easy but we still have love and hope in our hearts and we know we’re going to get there. I want to thank our sponsors, I want to thank the Related Group, Spectrum Mortgage, UHealth, Warren Henry Automotive, Magnum Energy Solutions, Engineered Tax Services, EarlyShares, list is amazing, KIND Snacks, the NFL Alumni Association, The Bergstrom Center for Real Estate Studies, we’re broadcasting live next week from The Bergstrom Center for Real Estate Studies Trends Conference, you can still register online or just call Nicky Wagner at 352 273 0312. Other sponsors include Miami Marlins, the CCIMs, South Florida Business and Wealth Magazine, Xpresso Marketing, Social Media 305, Lauren’s Kids. Everybody, please go out there and like our show and tell your friends. I want to thank you, our listeners, without you we wouldn’t have a show. Join our community, give us feedback and comments, tell us who you want to hear from. Tweet me @JimFried, @FriedonBusiness is the show. Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube. If you missed today’s show it’s going to be up on our webpage www.friedonbusiness.com. This is Jim Fried for Fried on Business. Look for us next week Thursday at 6:00 on 880 AM. We’ll be broadcasting live from the University of Florida Trends and Strategies Conference. Why? Because I just love doing this. Remember this is not a rehearsal, this is your life. The person who wants to do something finds a way, the other finds an excuse. Now go out there and make it happen. AC, it’s yours.
