Strong leadership is never more critical than when the going gets tough. Lance Turner joined FTS Inter¬national (FTSI), one of the largest pressure-pumping service providers in the U.S., as director of finance in April 2014, when the com-pany was still in fast-growth mode from the shale boom. The company’s intent was to get its financial house in order in preparation for going public. Instead, as oil prices cratered, FTSI found itself in survival mode.

Turner has been a lynchpin in the company’s culture and operations shift. His first mission was to assem¬ble a finance team from scratch, which has since guided the company through cost cutting and a renewed focus on efficiency. He was promoted to vice pres¬ident of finance in February 2015 and, less than a year later, to CFO. Along the way he added responsibility for the accounting and IT departments.

A native of Fort Worth, Turner graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a master’s degree in professional accounting. He joined EY and spent the next 11 years taking advantage of every opportunity he could to broaden his skill set: a stint in audit, a move to Dallas to work in transactions on both the buyside and sellside, a change to the restructuring group and even a three-month posting to Santiago, Chile, via EY’s pro bono program for emerging market entrepreneurs.

Turner kept in touch with clients through the years, and one day former client FTSI asked him to join its team. He viewed the offer as a chance to fill a remain¬ing gap in his experience—an in-house position with a service operator, and one he greatly admired.

Colleagues at FTSI credit Turner with “innovating the company’s working capital management to become best-in-class, navigating the challenges of a major system implementation in IT and leading a critically timed debt offering just before market conditions wors¬ened in 2015.”

In his spare time, Turner enjoys golf, cycling and ice hockey. He spent a recent weekend helping out with work on land his parents own. He recently completed the MS-150, a two-day, 150-mile fundraising bike ride benefiting the national MS Society, and he volunteers with Habitat for Humanity. No matter the task, he takes pleasure in and gains a sense of accomplishment from hard work.

In a recent interview, he discussed how FTSI has managed through the downturn.

Lance Turner

Investor What made you decide to join FTSI?

Turner Someone asked me my idea of the perfect company, and naturally I defaulted to thinking about different clients I’d worked with while at EY. FTSI came to mind. It gave me an opportunity to challenge the status quo and make impactful changes at one of the largest oilfield service companies.

Investor What did you tackle initially?

Turner One of the first goals was to build a finance team. In anticipation of going public, we needed a disci¬plined group that could support a public company. And, we needed to rethink how we monitored, tracked and communicated our performance.

For a long time the company’s growth had been built around short¬ages of equipment in the indus¬try, high pricing and high margins. Detailed operating metrics and analy¬sis were not a priority. But we needed to understand the story behind the financials—why the company was performing the way it was.

We also needed to establish credi¬bility for the financial group and build relationships so that other depart¬ments would reach out to us for opinions on customer pricing, contracts and more. We worked to become a reliable, hardworking, accurate business partner.

Investor What steps did you take as the downturn progressed?

Turner We were geared up as a large company with some $2.4 billion in revenues with a high-cost support structure. We had to change the mentality of how everybody thought about costs, overhead and ordering. It starts with salaries but trickles down to copy paper.

We reassessed everything from our banking rela¬tionships to our process for inventories. We stream¬lined operations and focused on working capital. We had a typical bank facility based on receivables, and looking forward, we knew our borrowing capacity would drop as receivables declined. So we refinanced our bank facility with an offering of $350 million of senior notes in May 2015. This gave us a significant cash reserve to survive.

Then things got even worse. We sharpened our focus on cash preservation by driving efficiencies, controlling costs, managing working capital and selling unused assets, including real estate.

In the process, we achieved savings greater than we ever thought possible.

Investor E&Ps sometimes say they use downturns to prepare for growth. Did you do that as well?

Turner We have expanded our customer base to more large producers and built new relationships. We’ve emphasized efficiency and how we can reduce down¬time for customers. We’ve managed to keep 50% of our fleet working, which is higher than the average across the industry.

Investor Want to venture a guess on the timing of a recovery?

Turner We expect to see some improvement next year but to what level, it’s hard to answer. We need higher commodity and service prices. The current prices are not sustainable, and they are impacting the industry’s capacity to provide services.

—Susan Klann

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