By Amanda Leon, founder of OilMoney.io. Houston-raised, came up in the Houston marketing team of Vallourec, and has run Unrth, a brand and growth studio for oil and gas and industrial companies, since 2017, with her boots on client locations in Midland and Odessa. Last reviewed October 20, 2026.

Before I came back to oil and gas, food franchising taught me where the good ideas live. The people making pretzels in more than 300 locations around the world had way better innovations than I could have ever dreamed up in the headquarters office in Pasadena, California. Lift works the same way: the know-how lives out where the rods and pumps are, with the people who touch them every day, and if you sell lift, a good share of it lives with you.

Right now buyers give the credit for that know-how to the logo on your shirt, and it starts over the day the logo changes. If you sell rod lift, ESPs, gas lift, plunger lift, or production chemicals to production engineers, lift specialists, foremen, or pumpers, put what you know under your own name, where it stays when you change companies.

Where the Barrels Are Coming From

ExxonMobil reported record Permian production of more than 1.8 million barrels of oil equivalent per day in the second quarter of 2026, in results released July 31, 2026.

Preliminary Railroad Commission data for July 2026 put Martin County first among Texas counties for crude at 19,833,432 barrels, with Midland County second at 18,418,690. If your territory covers those two, you were working the top two crude counties in the state that month.

How Lift Splits Across the Basin

A Texas Tech paper by Bassel Eissa, published April 9, 2025 for the Southwestern Petroleum Short Course, used public data to study lift choices. It found the Midland Basin skews toward ESPs and rod pumps, with lower gas-oil ratios and shallower depths, while the Delaware uses more gas lift because of deeper wells and higher gas-oil ratios. The authors call those industry preferences rather than firm conclusions, so use them to plan your windshield time, then let the production engineer tell you what is running on his wells.

How Much Water Comes Up With Each Barrel

For every barrel of oil produced in the Delaware Basin in 2024, about 3.7 barrels of water came up with it, according to Enverus data cited in WaterBridge's 2025 prospectus. Whatever lift you sell there moves that water along with the oil.

Where Midland Lift People Meet Every Month

The First Monday of the Month Artificial Lift Club meets the first Monday of each month at the Petroleum Club of Midland to work through artificial lift problems and solutions. Lunch is $15, cash at the door, and each meeting pairs a sponsoring company with a speaker. Check the club's page before you go.

When I asked my mentor how he was able to build such a successful business, he told me, "I'm not smarter than anyone else. I just knew how to surround myself with people who are smarter than me." In lift, those people are the hands in the field and the engineers at that lunch. For meeting Midland lift engineers face to face, the lunch is the better spend, so go. Posts keep the conversation going between lunches, and the good ones give credit to the people who taught you.

The bigger room is the Southwestern Petroleum Short Course, next listed for April 19 to 22, 2027, with average attendance of over 1,300 and exhibit space for more than 90 companies. For the oil companies in Midland itself, see Oil Companies in Midland, TX: A Map for the People Who Sell to Them.

Six Reads for Lift Reps

Artificial Lift Sales in the Permian Basin: Who Picks the Lift and Where They Meet goes deeper on who makes the lift call in this basin. After that:

Every role we write for is listed at Permian Basin Oil and Gas: Field Guides for the People Who Sell Into It.

The Warm Walk-In™ in Four Moves

Expertise you wrote down once doesn't clock out. The Warm Walk-In™ puts your lift know-how into your positioning, your profile, and your voice guide under your own name, and all of it stays yours if you change companies.

  1. Capture. One story dump a quarter, typed or spoken from the truck.

  2. Rig up. Positioning, voice, profile, one signature offer. Four to six weeks. Yours forever.

  3. Run the rotation. Posts in your voice on a fixed calendar, three to five a week, never more than one a day. Your name in the right conversations. A fresh lead magnet every quarter.

  4. Read the quarter. A plain-English video review every three months. Saves, messages, meetings. Not likes.

You approve every post before it goes out.

From a Dormant Profile to 4,232 Followers

A fourth-generation Permian service-company founder who hated marketing. His board nearly killed the project over ROI. We spent June to October 2025 building his name, then started posting for him, in his voice, with his yes on every post.

From Sep 15, 2025 to Oct 19, 2026: 270,955 impressions, 104,386 people reached, and followers up from 1,974 to 4,232, with 61% of them working in oil and gas. LinkedIn's Social Selling Index ranks him in the top 1% of sales professionals in oil and gas.

Before the work, his LinkedIn profile was dormant. His know-how never was. If yours lives in your head and under your company's logo, it can live under your own name too.

No name, by policy. It's his name, not ours. Read the full story.

Get Your Bison Walk-Around

Does your profile show the lift know-how, or just the logo?

Send us your LinkedIn. We'll send back the Bison Walk-Around: five minutes of plain English on what's costing you callbacks and what we'd build. No call. No invoice. We give first.

Get your Bison Walk-Around

Sources and As-Of Dates

The Warm Walk-In™ is an original method created by Amanda Leon and owned by The Valours Creative Innovation LLC.