North Dakota, December 2014.

In late 2014, oil prices were collapsing. Our clients on Wall Street were apprehensive. Was the Bakken shale boom finished? Was the rig count about to collapse? How severely impacted would the equipment and service companies my team covered be?

Rather than go on vacation, I headed to the oil patch that last week of December, 2014.

I walked rig sites in winds that reached 40 degrees below zero. I talked to roughnecks, drilling supervisors, equipment leasing companies, and the people running the frack sand transload facilities that the entire industry depended on. I watched what was actually happening rather than listening to the talking heads guess what was happening.

What I saw was a more nuanced picture than either the bulls or bears figured. Yes, activity was slowing. But the operators who had survived previous cycles were already pivoting — renegotiating service contracts, focusing capital on the best producing wells, and cutting costs wherever possible. That meant some frack sand providers - the low-cost ones - stayed busy while others saw business dry up. I was there to see the difference first-hand.

That trip is the moment I understood something that set me apart from my peers on the Street. It wasn’t my Excel skills - every analyst can build a model. It was that I was willing to go the extra mile to understand conditions on the ground, talk to people hard at work up and down the supply chain, and come up with an investment view that was truly differentiated.