Everyone feels “Lucky” to work in Lucky Services’ family atmosphere
A 100-person group hug?
If they weren’t still so busy, this could happen at Lucky Services
Trickle-down family values: Respect, mentorship and friendship start at the top at Lucky Services
Taylor Well Service: Nope. Triple
A Well Service: Nope.
Dwayne’s Well Service: Nope.
Royal Flush: really nope!
Naming a new company is not as easy as it looks. Lucky Services founder and CEO Dwayne Taylor listed the above as among three full pages of naming possibilities he considered when starting the company in Hobbs, NM in 1986.
One day the family, including Taylor’s mother, was at dinner when Taylor, with an air of desperation, announced his naming dilemma. Mom suggested he call the fledgling firm “Lucky” in memory of his late father. Taylor says hardly anyone knew his father as anything but that nickname, acquired in the Marines while stationed in Japan after the Korean Conflict.
Dwayne Taylor recalls his father as a “hard worker. He taught me from an early stage what it took to work.” Lucky had the young Dwayne cleaning restrooms at his service station before or after school, along with other chores.
Before the filling station days in Denver City, Texas, Lucky had worked on drilling rigs for what was then Humble Oil (now Exxon). The young Dwayne spent many days in the field when rigs were being moved from one site to another, hunting rabbits and roaming grasslands where the mesquite thorns scratch the sky. He started in the oilfield himself at the tender age of 16.
That ethic of hard work and dedication to excellence did not stop there. His son, Chad, who also works in the family business, learned the same lesson. Chad grew up knowing Dad would be gone for days, sitting on a rig, which meant Dad’s homecoming was “like Christmas,” actually consisting of gifts for Chad and his sister, Heather. Chad remembers Dwayne coming home for one day off, a time in which many dads would insist on relaxing. But Dwayne instead would take the kids skiing all day, return home late at night, then arise well before dawn to return to work.
Chad’s path to the oil business was rockier than his dad’s, although it started at about the same age. After getting into some unnamed trouble, Dwayne told him, “It’s time for you to go to work.”
The elder Taylor put his son to work with Lucky Services’ first employee, Fernando Acosta—who not only taught the young man the ropes of the business and more about hard work—he taught him Spanish. “He was very patient with me,” Chad recalls.
Recently promoted COO Robert Reyes says of Dwayne, “He’s like a second dad to me. I turn to him for advice on everything,” not just business.
Chad, in respect of both Reyes and his dad, says this a typical feeling around the various Lucky offices. “There are a lot of guys and gals that have worked for Dwayne for 15-20 years because he treats them like they’re family.”
“Robert and my dad are definitely my mentors,” he continued.” It’d be hard for me to fail with these guys on my side.”
With all this, Dwayne’s biggest splash in world events happened during the last prolonged downturn—in an event in which then-future son-in-law Ed Lauer was blown away by the father of the girl he’d been helping with statistics homework.
What was it? Read about it next time and see if you remember.
