Business View Magazine | July 2020

133 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JULY 2020 BLACK MOUNTA IN SAND especially in the Permian Basin. As a private equity backed firm, Black Mountain Sand started out being the small fish in a big pond, up against many publicly traded companies that had been around over 100 years in the industrial mining industry. So the company had to work hard to gain an edge and make a name for itself. The team focused on being diligent and aggressive in the pursuit process, spending a lot of time in front of every potential customer defining their value proposition to illustrate how they could be good partners. How Black Mountain Sand could make them money. How they were building facilities that would be sustainable. And that they would ultimately deliver on and exceed the service quality that even the “big guys” were offering at the time. “We’ve really made good on our promises and our customers have appreciated that,” says Gillespie. “We do what we say we’re going to do. When we advertise start-up dates, we hit those dates. And we make every effort to be and immediately started working with EPC contractors to design and facilitate the build; meeting with clients to promote the product; figuring out what kind of contracts to pursue. That was the origin phase. Gillespie admits, “We’ve moved so quickly in the last three years that the early days feel like a lifetime ago. We went from start-up phase into full-scale mode pretty fast. And since then we’ve built three facilities in the Permian Basin – two are large flagship facilities; one of them is a smaller satellite facility. Our next step after that was building two facilities in South Texas and a third in Oklahoma. Six facilities in three years, totaling about 17 million tons of annual capacity at those mines. The next phase is about execution. We’ve done all the building we’re going to do for the near-term and so it’s incumbent upon us to take the facilities we have and figure how to maximize production and lower costs to deliver consistently for our customers.” Oilfield services is a highly competitive market,