"Five years ago, I had a beeper," says Greg Dragon, who with his brother Adam runs the crews. "Somebody would leave a voice mail, I'd call back, prioritize—out-of-water calls always come first—and make up paperwork assignments for the day. We all now have Verizon Droids. So we stay in continual contact with each other through e-mail." A crew will call in, say, half an hour before finishing and be told where to go next. Greg and Adam use project-management software to triage. Every manager in the office can see, and suggest changes to, the schedule.
"It is all at our fingertips," Grace says. "And we have GPS to see where every vehicle is at all times, how fast they're going, in what direction, what's best to deploy, who to divert. Adam can e-mail me an address, and GPS will direct me to the exact location—and by the time I get there, all the specs from the job, all the geological information about the region, past wells, and so forth, are right on my smartphone. That's all just come available in the past three years. It has made coordination much easier and many, many times faster."
To work at Capital Well, at least on the drill sites, you need a certain amount of physical strength, clearly, but what the network technology really enables is something like the playmaking ability of a basketball team. Every manager of the partnership, older and younger, sees the whole court. There is a division of labor, and getting to know the setup, operation, and limitations of the equipment is critical. But even more important is learning what you can expect from your colleagues: Who is best to troubleshoot a complicated pump spec, who knows how to run a line through a very old fieldstone foundation, who will just get out and dig if the backhoe threatens to damage the deck.
"I'm not looking for the strong guy," Swain says. "I'm looking for the player for tomorrow. I want employees to have knowledge to diversify; knowledge is power. The young guys joke when I say this, but they buy it." The chemistry among the employees, the desire to win, is the secret of the company's efficiency, a kind of intellectual capital that emerges only after a year or two if the company can retain the people it has trained. All the more reason for Swain and Mike Dragon to give the young people a horizon of innovation and succession to work toward. Recruiting good people who are as trainable and loyal as the four—that is the key to the company's future growth.
When one imagines the recovery of American manufacturing in the new green industries, it is far more realistic to think about thousands of companies like Capital Well taking on new people, producing holes, installing pipes and hardware, and programming pumps than to think about assembly lines producing, say, the pumps. There are nearly 12,000 well-drilling companies in the U.S. If every company hires 25 more people—Capital Well employed nearly 45 people when it was drilling 400 wells instead of 250—that's 300,000 well-paid "manufacturing" jobs, enough to reduce the unemployment rate by at least one point—and this is before the multiplier effect in employees' communities. In New Hampshire, competing geothermal installers such as Ultra Geothermal, Bill Wenzel Heating & Air Conditioning, and Dragin Geothermal are growing fast, with plenty of room for additional growth before they start suffering from the commoditization afflicting companies in well-drilling alone.
"All that's missing to drive this new industry is informed consumers," Swain says. "So we've got to get our employees talking about it, and this gets our customers talking about it." The company is still taking baby steps with its customers: seminars, the Capital Well website. But the real marketing is dozens of personal conversations with customers on-site.
"We just save people money," Grace says, "so how can we not embrace this? Especially with new construction, I always bring up geothermal. I'm so passionate that they have to have it! It starts as an appointment to bid on a well. Then we look deeper into the costs and benefits. We want people to make a rational decision." Swain, understandably, is more focused on established customers. After 25 years, there are a good many calls from early customers whose well pumps need replacing.
"We spend time with homeowners," Swain says. "If they have to put in a new well, we encourage them to drill deeper, to take advantage of low financing costs, to make a countercyclical investment. Even if they don't have the resources to retrofit their homes now, or they want to wait for their gas furnace to run out its useful life—whatever—we tell them they should prepare for tomorrow." A couple of homes in a small town put in a geothermal system, a couple of homeowners start to sing its praises, and the thing starts to snowball. "We all need water," Swain says. "We have to heat our homes. As soon as we start building new construction again, this thing will be huge."
Bernard Avishai is an adjunct professor of business at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a visiting professor of government at Dartmouth College. His most recent book, Promiscuous: "Portnoy's Complaint" and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness, will be published in April.
