Business View Magazine | December 2018

218 219 segment.Hager admits,“Unfortunately, it’s not the type of business that lends itself to starting in a small manu- facturing shop and growing larger. It has to be a ‘go big or go home’ strategy. So,we had to raise money to get it started–the number, I thought,was around $8 million. I learned later it really needed to be more like $12 million. Suffice it to say, it was a path paved in entrepreneurial blood, sweat, and tears for my wife and I, but the Hager family survived.And we finally got the company started with an absolute dream team.” Big Elk is a relatively new name in the industry, but the firm’s leadership team has been in the industry a long time,which speaks to the reason for its success in obtaining market share so quickly and is a critical com- ponent in the firm’s overall growth strategy. Between 120 and 150 employees work at the company in various capacities.According to Hager,“The short explanation of what we do is: we manufacture the ‘cash registers’ that manage the buy-sell transaction between pipeline companies. It’s similar to the utilitymeter on the side BIG ELK ENERGY SYSTEMS LLC GEOFF HAGER Founder and CEO of your house.We’d call that, on a residential level, a custody transfer meter because when you turn something on that consumes natural gas, it turns a dial when it passes through that gray box and you get a monthly invoice based on how far that dial is turned.We build the same thing on a much larger scale.Your house meter might flow $5 a day worth of natural gas.Our systems would flow up to $12 million worth.” Big Elk is one of the biggest suppliers of large specialty pipeline equipment to TransCanada and Enbridge, north of the border, and large U.S. clients, EnergyTransfer andWilliams, as well as many other major “interstate” customers whose pipelines cross state lines.The launch of Big Elk’s wholly-owned subsidiary,M3 Energy Services, is a huge milestone. M3 is a proprietarymethodology for “proving” large volume gas meter systems. Excitement is rising at the company with the first customer commitments for this “revolutionary” service starting in 2019. Hager explains,“Every place you have a custody transfer meter for liquid commodities like crude oil or NGL’s (natural gas liquids), the buyer and seller negotiate a prover service into their contract to make sure–‘prove’–it’s measuring properly.On the gas side, that prover service doesn’t exist.The only way to check accuracy is to pull the whole system out of the line and send it to a flow laboratory. Because that’s not practical or economical, only two percent of U.S. companies do it.The need for a system like M3 has existed for 20 years.A lot of technical barriers prevented it from happening, but our team finally developed a system that worked– it’s a patented and proprietarymethodology and we really think it’s going to take off.” Big Elk has full engineering and design capabil- ities and often performs those services for clients. Because its equipment sits between two party’s pipelines, and manages a buy-sell transaction with them, Big Elk deals with a buyer of their products,