Roger Jarvis

Taking chances is never easy, but Roger L. Jarvis (BSPE ’76) knows that without risk, there’s no reward. In his more than 30-year career in the petroleum industry, he has developed and sold at least five start-up companies, taking risks that all ended in success. Now as he closes in on another company sale, he’s already looking at new ideas for his next business venture.

Jarvis credits his petroleum partners and peers for helping him establish such an impressive career, but his innovative ability to identify risk and carefully use it to his advantage is a skill all his own.

“Taking risk for risk’s sake is a losing proposition,” he said. “You really have to understand where the risk lies. If you see no risk, then you haven’t done enough work because the risk is there — always.”

A native of Monett, Mo., Jarvis said he first caught the entrepreneurial bug watching his parents run a small accounting firm. When his father died when Jarvis was nine, his mother carried on, continuing the business and raising Jarvis and his two brothers. In high school, he was an all-star athlete, playing golf, tennis, baseball, basketball and quarterback on his high school football team.

As an outstanding student, Jarvis dreamed of a career as a marine biologist, and his strong test scores earned him a partial scholarship to Stanford University. Unfortunately, he said the remainder of Stanford’s tuition was still too steep of a price to pay and “might as well have been a billion dollars.”

However, when one door closes, another opens and The University of Tulsa came calling. Jarvis dared to take another risk and embrace an area of study foreign to him; the petroleum engineering department was actively recruiting students with strong science backgrounds and offered Jarvis an opportunity he could not refuse.

“Where I was from was really not the oil patch by any means,” he said. “Tulsa actually recruited me and along with that came this scholarship. At a time that a kid like me needed direction, needed help, they took me by the hand and said this will help you and make it financially possible to attend college.”

Jarvis received a Kermit Brown Engineering Scholarship, which included financial aid and part-time employment opportunities in the oil industry. During both the school year and the summer, he traveled to the Rocky Mountains, the Gulf of Mexico and Texas for work at Amoco, Chevron and Sun Oil. By the time he graduated from TU, the young student was already a working professional, primed for the oil boom of the early 1980s.

“Tulsa really kind of found me and then supplied all those things I was short of — direction, motivation and a view of what my future might be,” he said. “It was just a beautifully designed program by Kermit Brown and Dr. Jim Brill. They were the primary forces in making that program what it was and taking it to another level.”

After graduation, Jarvis went to work for Amoco, but the entrepreneurial spirit soon hit him and at 24, he and a partner launched an engineering and geological consulting business. It was the first in a series of at least five companies he would create. Few people accomplish what
the young entrepreneur did in just his mid-20s, but Jarvis had found his niche: identifying opportunities in oil, gas and shale, building capital and then selling the businesses to larger companies.

One company sale in particular created the opportunity for an interesting detour on Jarvis’ career path. In 1981, Jarvis founded Barrick Exploration Company, a partially owned subsidiary of Barrick Gold. After building up the business, he sold it to cattle and horse ranching giant King Ranch in 1985 and was then asked to manage the ranch’s oil and gas subsidiary.

“King Ranch had participated in several of our ventures, and they were changing the guard from a management point of view,” he said. “The family member who ran their oil and gas company was looking for a successor and came to me.”

Jarvis accepted the offer with an initial plan to stay two years. Eventually he took over management of the ranch’s overall operations and stayed seven.

“We turned King Ranch Oil and Gas around pretty successfully, and two years later I was offered the top job, running the parent company,” he said. “One thing led to another and I ended up running this fairly big, diversified agribusiness with 5,000 employees and 22 million acres around the world. It was fascinating and taught me a lot.”

After King Ranch, Jarvis said he realized he needed to return to his original career path and challenge himself with another risk. He did so with a grassroots start-up that eventually sold for $2.7 billion. His reputation as a savvy business entrepreneur grew; and in recognition of his many accomplishments, he was named to TU’s Engineering Hall of Fame in 2010.

Jarvis’ family — his wife, Jamie, their four children and three grandchildren keep him grounded.

Jarvis remembers that first bold move he made as a teenager to attend TU. Abandoning his dreams of a romantic career in marine biology for a life in the aggressive world of oil and gas was risky business, but it proved to be a decision he’ll never regret.