Les is a graduate engineer with over 30 years’ experience in well engineering and operations management. After graduating with an honours degree in Mining Engineering in 1984, Les started his career with BP Exploration as a Trainee Drilling Engineer. During the 8 years that Les worked for BP he gained experience both onshore and offshore in the North Sea and in The Netherlands with increasing levels of responsibility.

In 1992 Les moved to Hess, where he worked for 4 years as a Senior Drilling Engineer on various CNS new field development wells and West of Shetland exploration wells. In 1996 Les moved to Talisman as the Drilling Team Leader for the Ross Field Development and subsequently the Halley ERD project. Whilst working at Talisman Les also helped set up the Drilling Management System for this new Operator and he also studied for and achieved an MBA.

After 5 years at Talisman Les moved to Enterprise Oil as their Drilling Superintendent for mobile drilling units in the North Sea. However within a year, Shell acquired Enterprise Oil and Les elected to move to ADTI in order to work with some of the smaller Operators that were setting up in the North Sea at that time.

His first role at ADTI was that of Wells Project Manager on the Ardmore field development. This was a high profile full turnkey design, drill and complete project. It was completed on schedule, on budget and without a reportable incident. After the completion of this project Les was rewarded with a promotion to the position of Operations Manager and became a member of the senior management team, a position which he held for the 9 nine years. Les was responsible for all aspects of ADTI’s operational performance including QHSE, Budgets, Cost Tracking / Reporting, P&L, Personnel, Materials and Logistics, Customer Relations and Service Company Relations. He was also jointly responsible for maintaining the ADTI management system to ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certification. When ADTI was sold by Transocean to Sun Capital Partners in February 2014 Les was promoted to the position of Operations Director and became a member of the board for ADTI Limited. In the first year as a standalone private equity backed company, ADTI delivered an EBITDA of £17.5M on a turnover of £161M to the investors, a record for ADTI. Unfortunately, when the oil price dropped significantly in early 2015 the backlog of work fell away and Sun Capital decided to wind the business down solvently and it was eventually signed over to the liquidator in August 2015.

After a short break Les has recently been assisting Wellperform negotiate and complete their investment in Chris Dykes International Ltd. Les is a commercially astute and safety-focused senior leader with an extensive knowledge of all aspects of well delivery including conceptual design, detailed design, hazard and risk assessment, well planning, regulatory and permit processes and operational management. He also has significant service sector senior management experience which has honed his customer focus and commercial acumen.