Darren Tompkins - CEO at Vader-Rey Companies

Welcome to another CEO Wisdom Podcast. We have Darren Tompkins with us today, recruiting CEOs. He's a Houstonian member, pro wrestling ring owner, and won the Innovative Product of the Year Award. Darren, welcome to the pod. You did a lot of things. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you're building.

Thanks, Charles. Yeah, so I am founder and CEO of Vader Ray Companies, which is 3 different entities. It's Vader Recruiting, VaynerRay Engineering, which is like project workers on the EPC, oil and gas construction side of the house, then VaynerRay Virtual, which is a virtual professional program that we use to help CEOs and owners and that type of thing get their time back, uh, kind of offload the work they don't want to do themselves.

I love it. Did you start it out in the Army?

Yeah, yeah, I had a nice long stint in the Army, 13 years, uh, right out of high school to get out of, uh, the small town I grew up in, like a lot of people do. Um, was a, you know, lower listed NCO. I was a promotable sergeant, hit ROTC, and then came out and got an oil and gas job offer. And that's how I ended up in Houston.

Interesting. And how did the oil and gas go? You spent like 12 years in the industry or more?

Yeah, I'm still, I'm still there, right? We're, we're just in services now. Before that, I was a GIS and GPS manager for a bunch of different operators— Chevron, Sunoco, that type of stuff. Energy Transfer was my longest stint. And, um, just, you know, here in Houston, you're— the oil and gas is so huge, you know, everything's based on what the, uh, how high is a barrel of crude going for today, right? When it's high, people invest in innovations, they hire, and when it's low, people get cut loose and, uh, they start penny-pinching. So got kind of tired of that and moved into recruiting as a way to get out of the W-2, uh, and start doing something that benefits me and my family and the people around me.

And what's been great about the oil industry, right? Like, I guess it creates a bunch of jobs, provide people petroleum. There's also been natural disaster, right? Like, what ones— what was the one, uh, was it ExxonMobil or Chevron, like on the coast of—

That was a, that was a long time ago, man. Um, yeah, that— there's been— and for operators, you know, you're talking about the BP, um, that's one that everybody remembers because, uh Uh, it was, it was so huge, right? And they weren't quite sure how to, to fix it. By then I was out of the operations side. I was in a, uh, what they call SCADA project manager, which is still on the IT side of the house. But yeah, it was big here for a long time. Still is. I mean, Mark Wahlberg was in a movie about it. So yeah.

Yeah. And who did you study in that field for greatness? Because there's a, there were a lot of oil barons, a lot of successful ones, right? Like, did you study any companies or entrepreneurs specifically back then?

Back then, no, not really, man. In fact, I had been asked about a quote for a book recently about who was the first like really big oil and gas guy you met. And when I was at Sunoco, I got to meet the company or the CEO for the pipeline company. Wasn't really impressed. It wasn't until I got to Energy Transfer where I met Kelcy Warren and Mackie McCray in a coffee break room of all places. Um, where you, you know, you rarely see those guys in public nowadays. But the story is they had some old crappy coffee machines. They brought in these new espresso type things, you know, packet, like K-Cup type stuff. And they were just kind of standing there, not— they didn't know how to operate it. And I'm like, let me show you guys, uh, how to operate your new equipment. And, um, you know, they shook my hands. I would see them here and there after that. But those were the 2 first guys. If you really want to study What they built. It's just damned impressive.

And what was your first entrepreneurial experience after the Army, the oil and gas stuff? What was your first successful business?

My first entrepreneurial where I just built the company was a nonprofit, um, the Houston Zombie Walk and the Houston Halloween Festival. I still get people that ask me about that today, um, using Halloween as a young— as a method to get young people involved in their community. We benefited children and animal charities. We put on these massive shows that are Halloween charity walks with a concert at the end. We've hired everybody from Vanilla Ice on down to do these shows. COVID kind of gave us an out because by then it was so big and we had other things going on in the country. We were able to remove from that. And then I really started thinking about starting my own biz, even though I was working in a W-2 for some international search firms and the local boutique firm here. But I knew I could do it better and do it cheaper and faster, to be honest. And that's how we got here.

Nice. And what about the hot sauce one? Was that the first stint or?

Yeah, Headlock. Headlock Hot Sauce was a COVID hobby that went just hockey sticks astronomical really fast. But the political climate and the economic climate here right now, it's tough. You and I talked even in the introductory call how hard it is to just make a buck in retail. And, um, we just realized we've got these 2 businesses that are going great, but what's the one that's really gonna have legs to stand on for a long time? The recruiting thing works, you know. Um, Headlock is still here. We're much more— um, in fact, we sent out a bunch of stuff this morning, but we're, we're focusing our efforts in Vader Ray. Um, but Headlock is still fun. It got— I was able to do a heck of a lot with it because it is pro wrestling themed. You read my LinkedIn job title. I do own a pro wrestling ring, still do. It's on long-term loan. to a federation here in Texas. And it's just a big, loud, you know, entity that was a heck of a lot of fun, but a very big education in being an entrepreneur and the big highs and the big lows.

And why wrestling? I know it's strong in American culture and Mexican culture as well, where I am. I studied Brock Lesnar not so long ago. That guy has a hell of a story. Like, how did you get into it?

When, you know, when I was, uh, I came from a divorced family, you know, we, when I was very young, it was a really nasty type thing. And when, as a kid, you know, you look for outlets when you're dealing with childhood trauma, right? So mine was, you know, cartoons, comic books, and pro wrestling. It was on every couple of days a week and they're larger than life people, right? And it was always good versus evil back then. You had the good guys and you had the bad guys. There was no really gray area like there is today. So, um, I just was drawn to it. It's just something that stuck with me throughout my whole life. And when it came to like developing a product that's big and loud like hot sauce, headlock just really rolls off the tongue and it gives you images of big dudes, you know, and beer and hot sauce kind of go together pretty well. Yeah. So I was at the central, I can't think of the name of it. It's skipping me. Mexico City, the ancient arena down there where they do lucha wrestling.

Guadalajara or Mexico City?

Mexico City. Mexico City. We were there for Yeah, Día de los Muertos, a year and a half ago, 2 years ago now, and got to go to my first big lucha wrestling show. Oh my God, we're talking 12,000 people every weekend.

One another, and the people in the crowd are like fighting and playing.

Every weekend it's like that. We're here, you'd have to go on a road show like the WWE or something to, to see that many people crammed in. And it was very much a, um, Yeah, this is my thing. I'm glad we did this. Of course, Headlock was booming at that point. But again, you just look at the economics of everything. Things slow down, the tariffs hit, the taxes and everything else. It's just like, what's really going to be longevity for us here as a business and a family? So Beta Ray all the way.

That's crazy. You said tough childhood. Have you watched the Michael Jackson movie?

I have not, but of course I lived through those years, so I know exactly what he had to go through.

Yeah, exactly what you said. He retreated in Peter Pan's books. Like, that was his thing. I mean, for, for all this weirdness, like, the, the movie was like very good. And yeah, his father, father was very abusive if he was depicted like that in the movie. But, um, yeah, no, it's hard when you start like that. Um, how did you get over these, uh, these traumas throughout the years?

You know, the military helped, obviously, and then sports. I was a big athlete in high school.

Military worsening these traumas? Because—

No, because you You know what? Here's what the military does, and in its basic form, the U.S. Army brings a whole lot of people together from different parts of the country, and you are forced to live with these folks for a very long time. When we're talking about basic and AIT, right? So you meet people that are very similar. You meet people that are very different, right? And then you talk about things because you do have a lot of downtime where they don't. You know, there's no TV or nothing, so you're just talking, and that just being able to up. to kind of get yourself out there amongst this fantastic group of men, and there were women too, um, was a good way of like talking your problems out. Because the Army does present you a lot of problems because they want to see how you're going to solve those problems and accomplish whatever mission that, that you've got. Um, that did help quite a bit. Um, you know, and I throw that out there now, like, if you've got a million problems and you're young enough and you could— you can do push-ups and make weight, The military is the last bastion of equalizer and opportunity here in the U.S. You can just go enlist anytime you want and go do it, you know, change your life overnight.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's true. And the discipline that you learn and yeah, the physical activity is very important, right? You mix all of these together, you should get systems and scalability, right?

Which is like, yeah, yeah. So it teaches a lot about project management. Um, one of the questions I usually get is what was it like transitioning from military leadership to corporate leadership? And my favorite story is like, You know, in the Army, if you've got privates that are messing up, you just make them do push-ups and you berate them and tell them how bad they suck, and then you do a corrective action. Can't do that in the corporate world because HR will be at your door really quick. Um, so I had to, I had to like learn to massage my, uh, leadership techniques. But hey, it all worked out in the end.

Yeah, it depends what orgs, right? I mean, if you work for David Goggins, probably gonna be like that. Uh, yeah, maybe there's also like in-betweens, right? Like, um, Yeah, I guess in my case, you know, like talking about hiring, I don't recruit employees anymore. I recruit partners, right? And I have a weird funnel, like ex-clients become my partners. They're all founders and CEOs, by the way. Then I give them rev share and equity. So I don't have really to deal with mediocrity and telling people to do pushups. You know, they already bring their A-games. They're already like super experienced, right? So. Have you? Do you get that philosophy? Do you still have to deal with like these humans? Because I managed like two thousand of them in the last ten years. I had like pretty big agencies, and I just couldn't stand it. One day I was like, yeah, fuck it. I'm not. I'm gonna stop the hiring machine. I'm gonna stop outsourcing my problems and broken systems, right? Like, and I'm just gonna outsource it to AI and only work with the best. And I've never been. happier and free-flowing since then.

You know, you hire the best people, you're going to get the best work out of them. And that's always been the way in business, you know. Um, when you're talking about like scaling companies and all that, you know, you're gonna hire some great people, you're gonna hire some people that are not so great that you thought would be, right? Um, it's very much a kind of individualistic type thing because you as the business founder, owner, right, there's a lot of factors that go into that. How much money can you spend? How fast do you want to scale? You know, who are your customers? Do you have clients that can Not only bring you business, but do you have the support system to scale with that? You know, the frontline folks. But you also have to give people opportunity to shine. And I've experienced that many times, you know, hiring somebody to do this very specific job. Well, they weren't that good at it, but man, they could do these other great things too. So we've had very low turnover. And that's been because, you know, we give people a chance. If they just can't do it, just let us know, you know. And that's the problem with folks, especially here in America. Nobody wants to tell you that they failed or they're doing it wrong, right? They want to show you 50 things of how they either did it right or they circumvent the goal line to try to stay around. You know, we in the recruiting community, we say, you know, hire slow and fire fast. You know, take your time hiring those right people. But if you've got any itch in your head that I don't think this person is going to work out, just cut them loose because you're doing yourself a disservice. by keeping somebody around that's not going to be able to do the work well. And you're doing them a disservice because they're not going to get anything out of this in the end. You know, um, you'll both be happier when the time comes.

So who do you target with your business? Like, let's talk about Vader Ray. Who, who do you work with? Is it still like, uh, oil and gas, or—

We do a lot of different businesses. We are generalized, which means we can service anybody because we're expert at finding the right people and getting them hired, right? We are in Houston, Texas though, so there's a lot of oil and gas engineering, data center development, infrastructure. We call it critical infrastructure type stuff. We fill jobs that are C-suite, partners, board members, all that stuff. We just did one of those this week, all the way down to, you know, Charles's Midland wellhead company needs like 5 electrical engineers for the next 6 weeks or whatever. You know, that's where Vayner/Ray engineering comes in so we can support those folks. It's a wide variety because there are so many people like me. Uh, in the oil and gas in Texas infrastructure industry, it's, uh, it's a, it's a fight every day. I mean, it's not an easy business to be in, but when it works, it works, you know. And you've, you've experienced that yourself in the past. So go with what works, go with what you know, and hopefully it'll work out in the end, man. We're still in the middle of it, so we'll see.

And what will happen to humans in the AI revolution that's currently happening? How do you leverage AI nowadays in conjunction with working with humans?

Yeah, we are a very AI-forward company. I founded the company on AI, using it to do the simple things, right? Setting up the company, getting the SOPs in line and all that. We are excellent at finding the right folks because we use AI as our initial reviewer, right? Charles, you send us somebody, we will rate that resume against the job description, the hard hits that you have to do. It'll come back with a numerical number for us. Usually, it's like an 8.8 to a 9.4. Then we'll do the interview. One of our people will call that person up, do the interview. We have a worksheet, long worksheet. We'll rate it again, both those documents. And then that'll tell us, is this really worth— somebody worth sending to Charles's company? Because we're not sending you 50 resumes. We're sending you 3 or 4 stellar folks, right? It used to be this process could take 2 weeks because it's paper trail that goes through people, right? Now it goes through AI. We can have this done in a day or less, like a standard workday, depending on how fast you want to move. Part of the problems we've seen is we can move so quickly that your company is not ready to actually interview or hire anybody because maybe you brought us on too early and the project isn't starting for 3 months, or you're just so busy with your regular company things that you don't have time to do the interviews, you know. And that's the killer for both you and us because People that are sitting around waiting like, D, when are they going to interview me? Man, I don't know. Like, we're calling them every day. They're going to get bored, think you're not interested, and they're going to go find something else. And now you just lost that stellar potential candidate. You know, in oil and gas, there, there, somebody has to be able to go out there and physically make things happen. You know, AI can't replace that yet. So somebody's always in the pipeline. Somebody's always climbing a tank. Somebody's always welding. You know, doing the very specific oil and gas things that need to happen. So AI, good for people like us that, uh, can use it to move their business, but I think it's a ways off to really dominate oil and gas.

And your candidates, do you expect them to be AI fluent?

We don't have to, but here's what we, we discover if they're AI or not, because guess what? They send us an AI-generated resume. And we can pick that up in a heartbeat. We know the buzzwords. Our recruiting agent that we've been used, you know, programming for 3 years now can pick it up. Okay, what do you think the percentage chance is that this was created by AI? And they'll tell us this is an AI-generated thing. Uh, and then we'll go back to you like, look, Charles, you've got to tailor this to yourself because if you're not taking a vested interest in your resume and your, your job search, why, why are we going to send you Because you look so generic, right? It's okay to use AI to help you do your resume to your organization, right? But you've got to put your character into it.

How do you get your clients? What's your favorite go-to-market method?

It's referrals, man. That's the only thing that really works. We've done plenty of other networking groups and mastermind type things and cold calling. Like, we've done a little bit of that. But all of our— we started with referrals. We had no VC money, none of that. We just bootstrapped it with people we know that we had done work for previously, right? When I was in the W-2 world. And they said, hey, you're going out on your own, man. We're coming with you for sure. So, we cut them all a discount, described the new company about how much it could save them versus traditional folks. And it's worked for us for the past 3 years. It's been great.

Interesting. What's been challenging about that? specific business?

Like I said before, there's a— there's probably 10,000 recruiting companies here in Houston, or, or, you know, independent recruiters that are calling you every day. So if we call on you, I know there's 50 other people that did it that day. That's why the cold calling thing never works. You've got to have somebody to refer you. Hey, Dee's a good guy, you should talk to him, you know. Um, other than— because you're just going to be on the phone all day, it's not going to be any kind of good return. Um, and then you have to understand, like, what are the additional things you're offering them? Is it just one and done, which is a terrible business model, or is this a long-term strategic partnership, which is the only thing we do?

Interesting. So this year, uh, it's you, your co-founder, you have a couple of employees. What are your top goals?

Yeah, we are looking to expand. So we are interviewing right now somebody that we are hoping is going to be our first like true business development executive, um, to use their network to, you know, help ours out. Of course, we had dollar, uh, goals and all that kind of stuff. Here in the States, it's September 17th. Once October 31st happens, Halloween, everything starts to go down. Like, everybody's thinking about Thanksgiving, they're thinking about Christmas, it's the holidays, think about their extended time off. So we're in a sprint right now to get as much business as we can, get the name out there as much as possible, and set ourselves up for a great Q1, um, next year. I think I mentioned in our pre-call, November 1st, our planning for the next year is done. If you're doing your, in your company planning where, okay, give me that report the end of December, man, you've already been left in the dust by everybody else. So we give ourselves a long runway to make that happen.

There you go, Darren. Thanks for being on. Where can people find out more about you?

Yeah, man, you can check me out on LinkedIn. I'm there all the time. Darren Tompkins. VaderRay.com is the website. VaderRayRecruiting.com. We're doing a lot of these podcasts now. It's been fantastic meeting high-speed folks like Charles because he and I have both done competitive stuff with high rocks and ultramarathons and that kind of thing. So yeah, man, check me out.

That was Darren and Charles.