Raised in Tulsa, Will Eagleton grew up with one goal in mind for his future career: he wanted it to be something that would take him outside of his hometown. Following that motivation, Will chose degrees in International Business and Spanish while in school and patiently waited for the right moment.
“I hadn’t heard of H&P until I was asking around about jobs and my uncle suggested it,” he says. “He knew people that worked at H&P and heard they were always looking for people that were bilingual and were willing to travel internationally. It sounded like the perfect fit.”
Will got hired and started his H&P journey working on Rig 308 in Wyoming. Several months later, he was asked to return to Tulsa to take on a Business Analyst role, working on the RFID asset tracking project. His opportunity to travel outside the country came a little over a year later when he was asked to go help start up an operation in Mexico as the country Administrator. After the Mexico project ended, and after a short stint back in Tulsa working in the Revenue Group, Will moved to Seguin, Texas, where he took a job as the District Administrator to help open a second office that would support H&P’s work in the Eagleford.
“Working down in Mexico and South Texas were some of my most memorable projects,” he says. “I enjoyed working in those dynamic environments and supporting our operations, both in the back office and also with the warehouse teams.”
In December of 2015, H&P offered him a position in the Supply Chain group that would relocate him back to Tulsa.
Today, Will serves as the company’s Senior Manager of Sourcing and Procurement, and he follows a different motivation than what first led him to join the H&P family 14 years ago.
“I’m constantly motivated by the people that I work with in Supply Chain and in our regional warehouses,” says Will. “We have a dynamic team and every day we get to show up and solve complex problems together. So far, we haven’t run out of ways to keep improving what we do.”
For Will, these improvements include finding new ways to take more friction out of the process of getting high-quality, reliable goods and services out to our people in the field, particularly rig managers and maintenance personnel.
“If we can make it easier for our employees in the field to get the parts they need, we can give them some of their time back. I would much rather a Rig Manager be able to spend time with their crew, or with the customer than deal with a supplier, quoting parts, or coding invoices. I want them thinking about safety and performance, not this supply chain stuff.”
These days, the Supply Chain team is spending most of their time combating scarcity issues and price increases from suppliers. Much of this work, Will says, would not have been possible without the teamwork, knowledge, and patience of Operations and other support services at H&P.
“It’s up to all of us to keep the ideas flowing and the company running as effectively and efficiently as possible,” he says. “We have to stay on the lookout for ways to improve our offerings, our departments, and our business overall.”