A born promoter, Dave Yager winked at a visitor before dryly remarking: “It’s good to be old.”

Hardly a senior citizen, he meant it’s easier to get things done in the oilpatch after you’ve been around awhile.

Yager has been around. And the first important lesson he learned was the value of good . . . no, outstanding contacts.

Example: In his scuffling days, Yager once complained to a wealthy acquaintance about how tough it was to raise investment cash.

Larry MacDougal, Business Edge
Dave Yager is no slouch as an oilpatch entrepreneur.

“I went to all my friends and was only able to raise $250,000,” Yager moaned.

The response: “You have the wrong friends.”

So during 13 years as publisher of The Roughneck (1979-92), he became acquainted with the heavyweights within Alberta’s energy and service industries, while gaining notoriety via his occasionally acerbic commentaries in print and on the air.

Nor is he any slouch as an entrepreneur. Which is why his latest project is worth more than a passing glance.

Last autumn, Yager spearheaded a rescue mission on behalf of Patch Safety Services Ltd (PSS-X), a Calgary-based public company that found itself taking on water at an alarming rate.

“It wasn’t that they had too much debt, they had the wrong kind of debt,” Yager remarked with a wry grin. “It was all due the same day.”

Patch directors asked Yager to toss them a lifeline. So he looked into the five-year-old company and stumbled across a few pleasant surprises. Upon analysis, the ex-Roughneck boss described Patch as “a good company with a bad balance sheet.”

He was impressed by the commitment of Patch’s 55 full-time employees, the quality of the company’s client base and its fleet of safety equipment. And with operations in Red Deer, Whitecourt, Grande Prairie, High Level and Fort St. John, the company seemed well positioned to hold its own as a minor but competitive player within a $250-million Western Canadian industry.

In short, Yager examined what appeared to be a corpse and found a pulse.

So he whipped out his contact list and grabbed the nearest phone. By October, 2003, he had raised $2.4 million on the condition that most managers and directors step aside. Meanwhile, Yager took over as president/CEO, while simultaneously chairing a new board.

And that’s how the one-time Roughneck got into the oilpatch safety game. Yager hasn’t wasted time on his main priority: Scouting for potential partners.

“We’re on our way. There’s people who want to talk,” he said. “We’ve got a good board. We’re serious guys. I’ve already talked to four other companies and I’m confident we’ll be expanding in the first half of this year.”

Patch Safety Services is Yager’s first turnaround assignment. But when a project takes his fancy, he never hesitates to take a swan dive into deep water. He claims to be “powered by constructive ignorance.”

“What helps you in business is what you don’t know. Because if you ever stopped to think of everything that can go wrong, you’d never start,” he said.

A University of Alberta dropout who turned to life on the rigs during the booming 1970s, Yager subsequently moved into sales. He rose quickly. By 1979, he’d managed to squirrel away enough capital to buy The Roughneck, for $200,000, from Canadian Petroleum Hall-of-Famer Lloyd Gilmour.

“Through the ’80s, I got to meet all the movers and shakers. I didn’t think they looked all that much smarter than me,” he grinned.

By the time he sold The Roughneck, the trade mag’s annual sales had risen from $200,000 to $1 million. He applied a similar magic touch to a down-hole tools manufacturing concern, which started turning a profit after Yager bought it from an advertiser for $1 million.

Then in 1989, Yager teamed with Bob Tessari, who was pushing development of a new, portable top-drive drilling system, although they were “hopelessly under-capitalized.”

Yager staked his home mortgage on the success of the enterprise. (He ultimately sold The Roughneck when the partners needed to raise $75,000 to repair blown hydraulics on the rig’s top drive.)

As co-founders of Tesco Corporation, Yager and Tessari began selling investment units for $25,000 apiece in 1989. Eight years later, the units were moving for as much as $60,000.

Post-Tesco, Yager played a key role in the growth of Integrated Production Services Ltd., which “started with nothing but an idea” and ultimately went private in 2002 with market values of about $90 million.

So it isn’t just who you know, after all. It’s what you know.