Episode Transcript
[00:00:13] Speaker A: Here we go.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Well, welcome. Welcome to AI world. You have jarrett Brelsford here, representing Mesa Services.
I am joined by a couple of guys that I think I've known for about 39 years now, roughly, give or take.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: Probably so, but yeah, go ahead and introduce yourselves. Clay brillsford with Bass Engineering, a Mesa company. Today.
[00:00:43] Speaker C: I'm Jim Bass. I'm retired from AI. Used to do a little development work on yep, just a little. Just a.
[00:00:53] Speaker A: Uh while we're kicking it.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Off, I clearly I don't have a script or anything, but why don't you go ahead and just kind of talk a little bit about if you can remember that far back when you all met and how you met.
What's your earliest memory?
[00:01:13] Speaker A: I'll take a shot at the the way I remember it. Jim and I have known each other for we went to grade school together, but in high school, through scouting, we knew each other a lot.
But I remember very clearly a physics class I think we were in. And we were at these lab tables, and there were four of us at the table, and everyone was talking about what we were going to do for a summer job.
So I'm talking to the guy next to me, and, well, I'll probably go back to work for the city again. And Jim is sitting across the table, and he said, hey, my dad needs a strong back and a weak mind. I think you probably qualify for that. Why don't you go talk to him? And I knew his dad because of scouting, and so I'm eternally grateful for that opportunity, because it did turn into a career in corrosion control, but I got the job.
[00:02:25] Speaker B: But hold on. You mentioned your other buddy was working for the city. I've heard stories about you and your time with the city. Was that pre Bass, or that was your first round of shoveling coke?
[00:02:36] Speaker A: No, that was pre bass. Yeah. I started cleaning public restrooms, and I.
[00:02:40] Speaker C: Think you weren't really interested in doing.
[00:02:42] Speaker A: That for another summer career. Yeah, I felt like I had seen that, and maybe you get a lot of time to think when you're out there by yourself cleaning public restrooms, and you think about your life and what choices you've made, maybe what else could you do?
Shoveling coat breeze was actually a pretty good step up.
[00:03:08] Speaker C: Shoveling coat breeze. Tamping coat breeze.
Ditches.
[00:03:13] Speaker A: So from there, I did interview with his dad, and I got a red hard hat.
[00:03:19] Speaker B: Rookie hard hat.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: Red hard hat. I was pretty proud of it, but we wouldn't start until the summer when we got out of school. But Jim said, hey, there's a little opportunity if you want to get ahead in life. And so we'll meet down at the railroad tracks. We've got a train load car of coke breeze to unload. And I thought, that sounds great. I have no idea. And so I'll let Jim pick it up from there.
[00:03:49] Speaker C: So generally we would get three of us, me and Clay and a friend of ours, Lowell. And we got paid $90 to empty, I think it was 40 tons of coke breeze. And it would generally take about three days after school. And we'd work three or 4 hours after school each day and unload the coat breeze. And so we each wound up with $30, and we thought that was great.
[00:04:18] Speaker B: So $10 a day.
[00:04:20] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:04:21] Speaker B: For 4 hours.
[00:04:22] Speaker A: 1975.
[00:04:24] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:04:26] Speaker B: $2 an hour all in. Yeah, where I started it, quite honestly.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: So that's where it started from there, Jim and I and the friend Lowell. And so we went to work in the summer.
[00:04:45] Speaker C: Where is Lowell?
[00:04:46] Speaker B: Do you think he's going to be listening?
[00:04:47] Speaker A: I hope he will. I hope he will. Because he was a big part of the story.
[00:04:51] Speaker C: We'll have to send him a link. Yeah.
[00:04:54] Speaker A: So we went to work in the summer, and the project that Jim had lured me in on was actually a magnesium anode installation. And back in that time, a lot of people have heard of hotspot surveys. And so these were old crude oil lines that were laid in the early days of the East Texas oil boom.
[00:05:18] Speaker C: Bare and pitted.
[00:05:19] Speaker A: They were bare and they followed the creek lines because early days there were no pumps, so they just used gravity to move the crude oil. And so the pipelines we worked on followed the creek lines. So you can imagine summertime in East Texas and you're down in these creek bottoms and following the pipeline.
We had various jobs, but we had a truck that your dad had given us and I think had promised us that the truck was going to be destroyed after we probably couldn't hurt it. Yeah, it was in that kind of shape.
So he could give it to 1718 year old young men and say, here's your job.
So we would go pick up the magnesium anodes from a warehouse, bring them to the job site, and then we would also flag the locations. Well, I got the job of working with the inspector.
And at that time, I didn't wear my red heart hat.
[00:06:32] Speaker B: I think you wore FRS either.
[00:06:34] Speaker C: No.
[00:06:35] Speaker A: So we were in jeans most of the time. We didn't have a shirt on most of the time. At most we might have a ball cap on.
But my job was to go with the inspector. And he had a Nielsen model 715 Locator, and he course had the receiver. And my job was to man the transmitter, get it set, and then follow him. And when he kicked the dirt, I put a flag down. And that was pretty quiet communication, I quickly learned. When he kicks a dirt, you put a flag down.
Well, at some point he said, go bring the transmitter forward.
And so me being a young guy, I want to make a good impression, I start trucking back down the right away. So I'm running down the right away and it's summer and it's East Texas, and I'm wet with sweat.
He neglected to tell me that I needed to turn the transmitter off before I picked up the ground rod. And of course he's watching. And I reached down and grabbed the ground rod and I'm pretty sure all of my hair stood straight out. I must look like a cartoon.
So I'm trying to recover from that and figure out what has happened. And I gathered everything up eventually and trotted back up the right of way only to have the inspector look at me and say, I bet you'll never do that.
First safety lesson that I had. And yeah, you learn by doing.
But Jim, I know you must have some memories of that summer summers.
[00:08:21] Speaker C: So I definitely have memories of that summer.
But then that continued really for about four summers in a row. We worked all that summer. We went down to a. M. And we were roommates together. And by the end of the summer, going off to college looked pretty good.
But then by the end of two semesters and two sets of finals and everything going back to work looked really good. So we repeated this cycle for about four years where we couldn't wait to get to work in the spring and we couldn't wait to get back to school in the fall. Is that pretty close?
[00:09:01] Speaker A: That's really accurate.
[00:09:03] Speaker C: During that time, we install a lot of deep ground beds, conventional beds, tank anodes.
[00:09:12] Speaker A: Tank anodes. We travel the country.
We mentioned Lowell. And so again, you have to remember at that time, we're living on the road a lot. And so at that particular time, the foreman on the crew was responsible for choosing the motel, but there was only a set amount of dollars that were given out for that, and it wasn't.
[00:09:37] Speaker C: A very big stack and it wasn't.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: A big stack of money. So the foreman would always shop for the cheapest motel room because they're trying.
[00:09:45] Speaker C: To make money off of this small stack.
[00:09:48] Speaker A: And so to help with that, we were told that the college boys would all room together.
[00:09:56] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:09:57] Speaker A: So we would be three of us in a room. There was generally a roll away bed involved. And I can promise you whoever got the roll away was going to get folded up in it during the night and the latch latched, and it was going to happen because we weren't very rock paper.
No, I'm not sure how we decided that, but everyone got a turn in the roll away, and I know every one of us were folded up in it at some point.
[00:10:24] Speaker B: Yeah, that sounds, again, eerily familiar to some of my early days at Bass, the same type of motels that you.
[00:10:34] Speaker C: Had put me of. One of the most notable, I think, was Stella's Wildcatter.
[00:10:40] Speaker A: Stella's Wildcatter in Jenna, Louisiana. Yeah, I don't stella's is still in business.
[00:10:48] Speaker C: Cinder block.
Very interesting. Yeah.
[00:10:54] Speaker B: So tell me about so y'all did this all through college. At some point, y'all had to make the decision of, is this really what I want to do for the rest of my life?
[00:11:05] Speaker C: Yeah. So I'll let Clay talk about that first because Clay was able to complete college in four years, and it took me about four well, I don't know. They said, you're not quite ready to leave.
So I had to stick around. And so Clay got to make the first decision.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: So it came time to explore permanent employment opportunities. And so being a good Texas A M engineering graduate, we went through the whole interview process.
And one of the interesting stories that came from that at the time, there was a company called Amico Pipeline, and we had done work for Amaco Pipeline. And the inspector I was going to interview with Amico Pipeline for a job. I was going to fly to Chicago, Illinois, and apply for that. And the inspector had actually put in a good word for me. And so when I got to the interview, they said, well, we know you're here, and, you know, you're interviewing for a job in our corrosion control department, but we've heard good things about you and your experience in the industry, and we'd like to make you head of our corrosion control department. And I thought, oh, my Lord, what has he told them? I shovel Coke Breeze. I put anodes in the ground from that. I was scared to death, number one. It's like they have no idea how little I do know, how little I do know.
But anyway, went through the whole interview process. Interviewed for a lot of companies, but my love was Bass Engineering. It was this perfect mix of the technical, the science, the get to go play outside, kick around in the dirt, and solve problems.
[00:13:08] Speaker B: How much of it was that? It was home. It was Longview, Texas. Did Longview, Texas have a hold of no.
[00:13:14] Speaker A: No, not at all. As a matter of fact, if you're listening, no, not at all. In fact, my now wife at the time, she was my girlfriend had an opportunity to go to work for Arco, and they wanted me to go to Alaska. And that was my first choice.
That would have been different. Yeah. But for me, my girlfriend, I think maybe fiance at that point, but she said, well, if you do that, you're going by yourself.
And that influenced my decision. And so I ended up with my second choice, VAS Engineering. And again, I'm grateful for the opportunity.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: What year was that?
[00:14:01] Speaker A: I would have been doing the interviews in 1980 and went to work January 4, 1981.
[00:14:09] Speaker C: So then about four years later, when they finally said that I had accomplished.
[00:14:14] Speaker A: A college degree he's being rather humble. Very humble. There's a master's degree and a doctorate in engineering that happened along the way.
[00:14:25] Speaker C: During this time I had to decide then what I wanted to do. And I looked at different things, but ultimately I was the same way. Clay, my love was know dad's company all I figured I'd go back. So went back and started working and I was going to do and while I was in graduate school, I had done some work for a company where I wrote software on PCs.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: What was a PC then? What was a personal computer?
[00:14:58] Speaker C: It was a big box that ran really slowly and it had a screen with dots about the size of my finger on it, made a lot of noise. It had generally floppy drives. And then Jared and clay it's. Mr. Han.
So anyway, so I went to work and at Bass Engineering and I was going to design ground beds and do stuff like that. And one of our customers said, hey, we just bought this disc and it's called Dbase and I was wondering if you can write us a software application to track our frozen records. And so I said, Let me get back to you. So I went and got out a magazine that we did things in and I read an article on dBASE. I said, yeah, I can do that. So we went back to them and said, yeah, we can do that. So we got their disk, installed the Dbase, and six weeks later we had the first very basic version of what is now PCs and they started using it.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: And we had a huge marketing department that we worked with at the time, me and Clay.
[00:16:17] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:16:18] Speaker A: And so we had to come up with a name for this thing. So again, being engineers, we name things for what they do. So we came up with the just grab you by the face title of Catholic Protection Data Manager.
[00:16:37] Speaker C: CPD.
[00:16:38] Speaker A: CPD.
So that's where the name came from. I think it took us about ten minutes to come up with that.
[00:16:46] Speaker B: And then I have this image still of the newspaper article of you guys in that top corner office with one of those air conditioning style desktop computers. And there was a big article, I'm assuming that was probably a week or two after you.
[00:17:04] Speaker C: Somewhere in that time, guys were on.
[00:17:08] Speaker B: Top of the World Longview News Journal was in.
[00:17:10] Speaker C: Exactly.
We completed that application. Somewhere along the way we got an article in the paper and then, well, we hit the road. And at nay shows we would set up our big computer and we would show people what we had done. And eventually somebody would say, well, that looks kind of interesting. Why don't you come meet us at our office and show the group? So Clay and I would hit the road and we literally were rolling the computer on carts and set up in their conference room and we would demo it and very slowly, one client at a time, we would bring another client on board. And the first four or five years, every client was a custom application. They showed us what they wanted and we wrote an application specifically for them to meet their data management needs.
Somewhere around this started in 1985, around 1990. We were getting enough customers that we said we need to standardize this. So then we had our first, what we called the standard Cpdm. And it kept growing from there.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: Interesting sidelight is Jim mentions the travel.
So Jim always had an interest in learning to fly.
[00:18:42] Speaker B: I'm trying to figure out how to.
[00:18:43] Speaker A: Transition into, uh he always had an interest in flying. There was another young man that worked in the group and he too wanted to learn to fly. So Jim and this gentleman went and took flying lessons. And so of course, they really excited about that. And Jim got his VFR rating, visual flight rules. Then he went on and got his IFR rating. Then he bought half interest in a Cherokee Six, which is a six place plane, which is a pretty good size plane to just fly around the country.
[00:19:22] Speaker C: For a private plane.
[00:19:23] Speaker A: For a private plane. But it was a single engine, six place plane. So then the travel became wheel the confused PC out to the plane, throw it in the back, make sure it's balanced, crawl in the plane, and off we would go to wherever we needed to go, tulsa. And so Jim Piloting. I'm riding right seat. So in that day and time, you had sectionals. And sectionals are like a roadmap, but when you unfold them, they take up the whole cockpit. And so he's basically putting me through ground school, flying right seat while he's piloting the plane.
A lot of our travels were in November 17286. I still remember the tail number. There you go, here we went.
And a lot of good adventures that go with that. There's a lot of stories about lightning and storms and night travel. There were a lot of flights at night.
[00:20:29] Speaker C: Coming home?
[00:20:30] Speaker A: Coming home, or going out.
[00:20:35] Speaker B: Somewhere around 1985, yeah, I learned to.
[00:20:39] Speaker C: Fly about 87, 88.
[00:20:41] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:20:44] Speaker C: Then, you know, so it continued to be Clay and Jim, the marketing sales department. Jim was the development and support department. Eventually we hired a couple of developers.
But then in the mid 90s, man named Mike Gloven, who lived in Denver, Colorado and worked for Trigon Engineering approached me and said, hey, I've got this integrity management software and you've got this Cpdm thing. And everywhere I go my customers are saying, y'all's two applications need to work together. So he said, maybe we could just form a company and get our two applications working together. So we formed Bass Trigon. Trigon spun off the software port, bass Engineering spun off the software part.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: Clever.
[00:21:38] Speaker C: Again, again, just a name.
[00:21:43] Speaker B: Generating machine.
[00:21:44] Speaker C: Yes. Engineers coming up with names we thought we knew what marketing was, but we found out down the road, didn't have a clue. Anyway, so we formed Bass Trigon, and the product started growing more because Mike was helping with the sales and stuff. And then along about 1999, mike's vision was to grow this a little bit, sell it, and then keep growing it. And so we sold it. We sold Bass Trigon to corporate. And this probably wasn't my parents favorite move.
Corporate was an intense competitor of Bass engineering. And so we had to have some long discussions about how this could be Corporal. We continued to grow. We became a corporate company. And Corporal had this guy that they had hired as a salesman, and his name was Steve Hamblin.
And Mike said, Jim, I want you to meet this guy, Steve Hamblin. He said he's selling anodes and stuff for Corporal, and he'd like a little bit something different to sell. And he said, I think he could really help us.
So I sat down with Steve. He insulted me about 14 times during the first conversation. I said, yeah, he sounds like our guy.
[00:23:20] Speaker B: Perfect.
[00:23:23] Speaker C: I'm not sure about this, but Mike, if you think this is going to work, let's know. Steve and I start traveling. And so at first, Steve becomes proficient. By this time we had the Allegro Fill computer, and we had gone through a couple of iterations of it, and he got really interested in the Allegro, learned all about it. So first thing he really started selling was the Allegro. And then as time went on, I went on all the sales calls with him initially, and he became very proficient at PCs. And eventually he decided I didn't need to come along because sometimes I got in the way of the story.
And there were certain things that he needed to say from a sales perspective.
[00:24:11] Speaker B: That he didn't really comfortable saying in front of you.
[00:24:13] Speaker C: He just didn't need me hearing.
Around 2003, Corpo needed to offload some businesses and right size a little bit, I think is the right term here. And so they put Bastrigon up for sale. And American Innovations had this product called the Bullhorn Remote Monitoring System. And they thought it might make sense to take a PC, a compliance data management system and marry it with a remote monitoring system. Kind of makes sense.
So we eventually got sold to American Innovations in 2003.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:25:04] Speaker A: Now, that's the bass. Trigon corporal piece.
[00:25:09] Speaker B: So backtrack a little bit. So back in those late 80s, early 90s, that girlfriend of yours started working.
[00:25:17] Speaker A: In the same industry she did. So there's a piece of the story there.
[00:25:27] Speaker C: So as the software was growing, like I said, probably around 90 ish or so, we had like one developer, two salesmen here.
And some of the clients were saying, can you take all this data we have on Sheets and get it into this software? I said sure. So we were looking for people that could sit down and type data in. And so this girl that I'd grown up with that was married to my marketing department here, she was available and kind of looking for something to do.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: Right.
[00:26:07] Speaker B: Had a six year old. Had a seven year old.
[00:26:09] Speaker C: At the time, the kids were kind of getting into school, and she said, I can do that.
[00:26:14] Speaker A: Right, absolutely.
[00:26:16] Speaker C: So she worked for us probably ten years or more, and probably until we started moving things to Denver or something like that, because all the while, while.
[00:26:27] Speaker B: You'Re doing all this Bass trigon, you're still bass still at 3200 Brent Road. You're in a dark room downstairs.
[00:26:35] Speaker C: There's Cindy.
She first started doing data entry, and then she started training the clients.
And then she happened to be an English teacher. Some of our clients want some stuff written down about how this thing works.
Then she says, oh, I can write a manual. So she went from data entry to manual writing and training.
[00:27:02] Speaker B: So now she's on the plane with.
[00:27:04] Speaker C: The PC and you yes.
[00:27:06] Speaker A: She wrote many a flight riding right seat, because now I don't have to be there.
[00:27:13] Speaker B: I got kicked out.
[00:27:14] Speaker A: I'm out. And so go back to your Bass engineering world and go play in the dirt, and we'll do the technical stuff. And so Cindy rode many a flight with Jim, getting her ground. Yeah. And she appreciates to this day, by the way, so she still flies commercial, and she's very tuned into what the plane is doing.
[00:27:37] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:27:39] Speaker A: It was very much a family event and made up a large part of our life was built around corrosion control and customer facing activities.
[00:27:51] Speaker B: So, again, while he's doing all that, what's going on in your world?
[00:27:55] Speaker A: I'm back on the Bass engineering engineering, design, construction side of our world and trying to build that side of the business, creating a technical services team, continuing to support our installation services, and make all of that go.
[00:28:16] Speaker B: How many rigs crews would you say.
[00:28:19] Speaker A: Bass was running at that time when I started?
Well, we had multiple crews, but everyone was a jack of all trades, so they could transition between job activities very well. And that's a credit to Jim's dad, Calvin Bass and Charles Eaton, his partner. And Jim's mom, Lillian Bass.
[00:28:43] Speaker C: So really ran the show. She let the other two we all.
[00:28:48] Speaker A: Work for Lillian, but she was kind enough to let us think that we had some role in the business.
So it was very much a family mom and pop shop. But it was a great incubator for entrepreneurial thinking.
Just boots on the ground, learning from the dirt up type environment. And again, just great experiences along the way. Exposure to software development, how that's tracked in the industry today, and just the business side of that, how the business is transferred through different hands at different times, that kind of leads us to where we're sitting today here at AI World in Austin, Texas. An AI sponsored event.
[00:29:40] Speaker C: Yeah. So then Clay continued. Clay and my dad continued to grow Bass Engineering. And along around 2004, 2005, they were in their 70s. They were looking to actually retire and not just work less. And so it's kind of like, okay, so what do we do with the business? And I think we looked at things like, we could just keep operating it, know, Clay could run it, or we could sell it to somebody. And we talked to a couple of companies, american Innovations being one of them.
[00:30:19] Speaker A: Right.
[00:30:20] Speaker B: But that's a story in of itself, too. And I mentioned that last night when talking with Jim and James was how that conversation happened between you and Rich and the opportunity that was Bass Engineering. It was very last minute, if I remember correctly.
[00:30:33] Speaker C: Yeah, we were talking to another guess because I was already working for Rich. And I think I just kind of casually mentioned I can't remember how this went exactly. You may know the story better than I do, but the way I've always.
[00:30:52] Speaker A: Heard it was you probably heard it from Rich. And of course, I know Jim. Right. And so Jim's pretty focused on programming, doing what he's doing.
[00:31:01] Speaker B: Task at hand.
[00:31:03] Speaker A: Yeah, very much a task at hand. And then it occurred to him that, wait a minute, I have another partner in this business, and he's kind of in this fine businesses world. Maybe I should mention to him that we're trying to sell the family business.
And so Rich's side of this was he was literally standing in a taxi line in Las Vegas, and he got a notification that Jim had at least told him, but he got a notification that Bass Engineering was for sale. And this was on a Friday, I think, and bids were due on Monday.
And so Rich spent the entire weekend doing the valuations and coming up with pricing to put a bid in. But in the end, lo and behold, we all came together. And so at that point, it's kind of a reunion for Jim and I because we've been apart for several years, although although still in the same office, still in the same building, but chasing different paths. But now we're together again.
[00:32:09] Speaker B: Under one Friday lunches was about all you guys had in common.
[00:32:15] Speaker A: Well, I didn't get invited that often. Friday lunches for that group was whataburger? And it was a bunch of developers, right? Software developers. So what can I contribute to that?
[00:32:26] Speaker C: So back up just a couple of years when AI acquired Bass Trigon, we were very much in the mode of a problem gets reported, we're going to fix it later that day. We're going to send out a new disk to the client, and everything's good. So AI had a little bit more structure, but we weren't really aware of this structure. And so one of the very early things that happened, we decided we needed to have a user's group meeting. So we had a users group meeting at a place called Lakeway, and I think it's on Lake Travis, and we're at this users group and in the you know, the night before, Russell Reed had made some changes to the Allegro software. And the next morning, Hamblin's passing out update this to the clients. And the VP of Development is like, what is going on here? We don't just pass out disks that haven't been tested. And I said, It's okay, russ tested it. He said, no, we don't do things that way. And then a little bit later in the day, I'm giving a talk, and I thought it might be a good time to tell the clients that we're working on a brand new major version. And they're like, what? Again? The VP of Development said, you haven't told me about this. I said, Well, I didn't know I needed to. I just did. This is what I do. We develop software anyway, so for the better, AI brought some structure to us as far as QA and as far as planning the next version.
[00:34:08] Speaker B: Roadmaps.
[00:34:09] Speaker C: Yes, roadmaps.
And the product did very well for the next 1015 years with Hamblin out making promises.
Once he got to where he could fly on his own and do demos without any help, he would go out and do a demo to Major Pipeline Company, and he would come back and say, bass PCs does such and such, right? And I said, no, it really doesn't, Steve. He goes, well, it seems like it should. I just told XYZ Major Pipeline Company that it did it and they're going to buy it.
This happened over and over, but the development team would go to work and we would make it do something pretty close to what Hamblin had promised. And over a period of ten years, the product grew a lot in functionality because of Hamblin's random promises that he would make to prospective clients.
[00:35:15] Speaker B: You could call that somewhat of a mobile users group because he's out getting that feedback that's true that we now have every year here. But he's going through and saying, of course we'll do that. It does that already.
[00:35:27] Speaker C: He would say, It does it already. Right. And I think maybe sometimes he had an idea it maybe didn't do it, but this was just his method of getting me to do then. And then on the Bass engineering side, I would imagine AI brought some structure and business practices.
[00:35:46] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:35:46] Speaker C: Helped Bass grow significantly after that.
[00:35:49] Speaker B: What did you know about running a business in 2005?
[00:35:53] Speaker A: Absolutely, I knew everything I needed to know. Typical 35 year old, whatever I was. Don't know what you don't know. Absolutely.
I'm perfectly qualified to do that.
[00:36:06] Speaker B: You said you were 35 and five.
[00:36:09] Speaker A: Well, maybe not so good.
[00:36:11] Speaker B: You've got some talking.
[00:36:13] Speaker A: Maybe 45, 47 or. Let's go with 47. Little quick math there.
But nonetheless, you learn on the fly. And so American Innovations was wonderful to bring leadership training and structure and budgeting and all those things that Jim mentioned about the structure of running a business behind the scenes. So just invaluable time, 15 years, 16, 1717 years with American Innovations was a wonderful run for Bass Engineering Company.
[00:36:50] Speaker B: 17 years with them. And then we've been a part of Users Group, or Bass has been a part of Users Group now for almost all of that.
[00:36:59] Speaker A: So much, absolutely.
[00:37:01] Speaker B: What year it was, where we had our own designated track, pure pathology, protection, field, data collection, CP design, you name it, we were given our own track to take and run. And yeah, like you said, it's been, I would like to think, pretty invaluable for where we are.
[00:37:23] Speaker A: Absolutely.
So a really great run with American Innovations and then led then, as you mentioned earlier, in 2022, the sale to Mesa.
But again, so much of this is just a book. It's a story. It's a chapter by chapter by chapter version of a life, of a business. And it continues to this day. And it's just a new chapter and look forward to what it can do. I know Jim can look at the product today and remember how it started and then look at where it is now, probably think, oh my goodness, I didn't quite have this whole vision. I had a vision, but it wasn't quite this vision. And the same is true for Bass Engineering. So it's been a great run and look forward to a lot more good things to come.
[00:38:23] Speaker B: So in typical fashion of Jim and James here, if there was some advice that you two guys because I know you're coming up on retirement here pretty soon. Jim's enjoying retirement as we speak. What advice would you guys give to some of the younger folks that are just now entering this.
[00:38:45] Speaker C: From the for the technical people, the developers and the trainers and everybody involved with PCs, I would say. What kind of built PCs was listening to the clients?
Listen, understand what they want, and then show them how you can offer them a solution for their pain points in dealing with their data, data collection, et cetera.
Listen to what the client says.
[00:39:17] Speaker A: I think for me, it's embrace the uncertainty that comes with it.
Whether you work in a small service company, whether you work for one of the large majors, there's uncertainty in our world, there's uncertainty in our industry.
But we have a job to do. And so embrace the uncertainty, but go after your job. Go after, be where your boots are.
[00:39:48] Speaker C: Don't be afraid of the uncertainty and don't be afraid.
[00:39:50] Speaker A: Just embrace it and let it become a part of your life. Let that energy drive you to be good at what you do. Engage in it. Don't be afraid of it. Don't try to hold it at arm's length, get in the mud, the blood and the beer. Do what you have to do to understand as much as you can. This is a wonderful it's probably one of the most open, friendly industries that exists in people helping people. And if you embrace that and engage in that, you'll find it's a wonderful community to work in.
[00:40:28] Speaker B: Cool.
Well, with that, I think we're going to wrap it up here.
[00:40:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:34] Speaker B: Thanks, guys.
[00:40:35] Speaker A: All right, you got it. Thanks for setting it up. See you all.
