The Story Behind Blue Collar University®

How Blue Collar University® Came About

I come from an entirely blue-collar family and ancestry. My grandparents, aunts and uncles and father were all blue-collar. I learned most of my mechanical skills and the basis for forward thinking from my uncle Bill on the family farm in Louisiana. He also told me that the days of the family farm for over. He encouraged me to go to college and learn something different.

The things I learned as I learned to work?

• Mental work can be as energy consuming as physical work. ^[1]
• A little extra effort up front in the mental department could save a boat load of back breaking work in the physical department.
• Working with others typically produces better results than working alone. (Still a hard one to swallow…)
• It’s okay to fail as long as you learn from your failure.

I graduated from high school when I was 16. I bent my age and got a job offshore is a cooks helper. The following summer my father got me a job on a construction crew is a laborer. The wages were pretty good but I wanted something more. I didn’t want to have to wait between jobs. So I found a job in the oilfield as a mud logger, which was like a very, very, very junior geologist. I traveled from drilling rig to drilling rig for years, working two semesters out of the year and going to school one semester. I was working on my degree in geology. It wasn’t too long before the company started sending me all of the new greenhorns to train. It turned out that not only did I know what the job was and what we were looking for but I could teach people that. It’s one thing to know a job. It’s another to be able to teach it.

I had to pay my own way through college. I compressed a 4 year degree into 10 years, but I made it. In that time I also developed a work ethic that caught other people’s attention. I ended up being a drilling fluids engineer and was then hired by an oilfield consultant. In working for this consultant, Reese B. Anderson, I learned even more about mechanics, geology, oil and gas exploration and production drilling. I learned to manage my own projects. Along came the recession the 1980′s and the oilfield went bust. I had to leave the field I loved the year before I graduated from college.

The only job I could find that paid anything to keep my family above poverty was for an industrial dismantling company. The owners hired me as a project superintendent, sent me to Chicago for 10 days training which turned out to be about three, and then sent me to Oklahoma to my first project. I was to be in charge of tearing down an entire refinery that was built during World War II. I had to rely on the people that I was working with and the only people that I had that were experienced was one field foreman, who was also a druggy it turns out. So I had to hire local talent. Learn how to do some jobs and then train them on how to do those jobs. I had to monitor the whole process and use my head to keep people safe, keep us from blowing each other up. I had to do all the paperwork, sell equipment and manage the whole project. Thirteen months of never ending heat, cold, sweat and snow. And management experience you’ll never get in an MBA course.

After years of traveling around the country doing industrial dismantling I got hired by a refinery service company in the San Francisco Bay Area. I had all kinds of titles from operations manager to engineering manager to shop manager to whatever, but I was allowed to operate fairly independently of the rest of the group because of my knowledge and what I was working on. I was in charge of doing the drafting and having our machinists and welders produce products to help refineries fix leaks. I also was crew scheduler. I was also a trainer for safety. I survived two buyouts. After the second buyout they reorganized and sent my job to Houston. I became a field tech rep. Chevron Richmond refinery was my new home as it were. I got to know the maintenance, projects and the turnaround people fairly well. Because of my ability to work with people. I did some things that I was told to not even worry about but did them anyway. Some divisions of Chevron gave us their business where we hadn’t had any for years.

I took a job finally outside of the 24 seven hustle and bustle selling steel plate, cut to size and shape because of my background with people and with industry I understood what the customer was looking for. Better than most and how old top sales positions for the three years I was there I wasn’t the top salesman because the top salesman at a shipyard is account. But I was able to work with manufacturers and other machine shops. I was able to increase our margins by a large amount over my predecessors.

A man I previously worked with then hired me to go back into refineries. I did this for about for six months to try and help bail this company out but it was too late and they filed bankruptcy. Once again I found myself out on the streets. My wife and I discussed it and I started a handyman business which did pretty well for a couple of years and then I decided I wanted to be more. Someone actually asked to be their business mentor. As time went on I felt I was wandering aimlessly so I wrote a One Page Business Plan. It was so powerful I immediately saw a use for it in helping middle and new managers. I contacted Jim Horan, the author of the One Page Business Plan and he became my mentor.

While talking with Jim that he said this: “I don’t know why you avoid blue collar. You know those people, and you know the pain they are in and you have the tools and skills to help them. Why don’t you?” The short version is that there was a lot of pain associated with being a blue collar manager. But then I realized I have the pain reliever.

I decided to go back to blue-collar and help the people there. And I came up with the term Blue Collar University®. The thing is I know what it’s like to be an untrained manager. I know what it’s like to have to learn from scratch. I know what it’s like when the company doesn’t have the internal resources to reach and teach.

So if there is any way I can help either blue or white collar managers and supervisors understand just a little more about themselves, their jobs and each other, I am here. Just call me at 925.757.7473 or email me here.

Bart Gragg