Business – Page 2 – Dustin Monke

‘Crossing’ into new territory: Oilfield entrepreneur enters restaurant business with new steakhouse

Seth Murphy knows next to nothing about running a restaurant.

But he knows what he likes: great food, a place he can both bring his family and conduct business, and a venue that can be used to give back to the community.

He wants The Crossing to provide all of that and more when it opens next summer.

The Dickinson oilfield entrepreneur said he isn’t letting the western North Dakota energy industry downturn keep him from diversifying his business ventures.

“Everyone says it’s a hard industry, and I’m sure it is,” Murphy said of the restaurant business. “But hard is a relative term. Not everybody deals with what we deal with by 5 a.m. every morning either.”

Murphy, the president of oilfield service company SM Fencing, said he wanted to start a business separate from the energy industry that would be able to provide an amenity to southwest North Dakota community.

He and his company believe they’ve found that opportunity with The Crossing, an 11,000 square foot steakhouse and bar under construction on north State Avenue near the Sierra Ridge apartment complex.

Kodee Gartner, the management director of Endeavor West — Murphy’s latest business entity that will function as the operations arm for The Crossing — said being a part of the team starting the restaurant has been rewarding in that they’ve been able to start with a blank canvas and move forward independently.

“What is our vision and how are we going to get there?” she said. “There is no blueprint. This is us sketching it out on a kitchen table, and trying to figure out what this is going to look like and how this is going to go. One of our biggest advantages is our team is deep in common sense.”

When complete, The Crossing will have two levels and ability to seat around 270 people.

Beyond that, Gartner said, The Crossing will have two private conference rooms able to provide space for everything from parties to board meetings, and another area she said can be called a “multi-use space.”

“We want The Crossing to be where people celebrate their life’s biggest moments,” Gartner said.

While the group’s main focus is to bring another dining opportunity to the area, it also hopes to use The Crossing as a philanthropic entity.

Gartner, who like Murphy is from the Killdeer area, was brought on board a little over a year ago and she was sold on The Crossing, in part, because of Murphy’s wish to conduct more philanthropic efforts.

“When I started on, what was appealing was he’s looking for a legacy impact,” she said. “… That’s part of the Crossing’s DNA is there will be social good woven into it.”

Gartner said The Crossing wants to be known as a gathering hotspot and the restaurant of choice for locals, both old and new, and be able to cater to changing social demographics.

“It isn’t a goal to build this to service the oilfield if and when it comes back,” Murphy said. “We’re building this to serve the locals that have been here that input good into the community. The agricultural segment is going to be a big part of what we play to.”

Ashley Lamphier, a business development specialist with Endeavor West, came to Dickinson from the Atlanta area through her friendship with Gartner. The two had worked together in the past, and after moving here, Lamphier said she fell in love with the area and her new company’s long-term plans, starting with The Crossing.

“I really see it as becoming almost a cornerstone of the community,” she said. “I think it’s going to be a big place where people can gather.”

As for the food, Murphy said he wants The Crossing to be as meat and potatoes as it gets, catering first to southwest North Dakotans and staying away from “fancier” entrees. A “simple menu” is planned.

They hope to have a general manager hired this week. That person will be charged with hiring around 30 employees, and running the day-to-day operations of The Crossing.

Murphy said he hopes to hire a manager he can trust to implement a strong work ethic while also being unafraid to try new things.

“None of us have restaurant experience,” Murphy said. “We know what we like. We purposefully didn’t bring anyone into the team that had restaurant experience because the way you’ve always done it is not always the right way. Just because it’s been done one way for 30 years doesn’t mean it can’t be done better.”

The boom’s gone, and some people in southwest North Dakota are OK with that

To get a sense of what’s happening in a community, it’s often best to consult the local barber.

Paul Ellerkamp owns Big Sky Barbers, a two-chair shop he runs with his younger brother in a north Dickinson strip mall.

Their business is a small, but accurate representation of the highs of the oil boom, the slows of the bust and the ongoing market stabilization the area is going through today.

The surprising similarity between the oil boom and now, Ellerkamp said, is his bottom line.

“We’re not turning away 50 people a day,” he said with a small sigh of relief. “… But somehow the bottom line is about the same. We do not see as many oilfield guys as we used to. I won’t even begin to give you a percentage of how much that has dropped off — but quite a few.”

As Dickinson and its surrounding small towns settle back into something similar to the pre-boom world, Ellerkamp said there’s plenty of positives to take from it.

“Overall, if you’d look at it from a person that has been here 10 years, or has lived here all their life, they kind of liked not so much of the hustle and bustle,” he said. “It’s definitely more of the hometown feeling.”

And so it goes for life in Dickinson and southwest North Dakota, where an oil boom brought thousands of people to the area, only to leave many high and dry when prices collapsed in early 2014 and kept falling through early January.

Now, instead of eyeing expansion and trying to track uncharted growth, most businesses and cities are planning for modesty and hoping they can plan for the possibility of both a calm and busy future, should oil prices and activity suddenly rebound.

Major projects and commercial development in Dickinson have all but come to a halt as the hub city begins paying off deficits created by infrastructure and building projects that helped alleviate the booming, oil-driven economy.

What remains of Dickinson’s once hurried building sector is on the public side, where the Dickinson Middle School building is taking shape and water treatment facilities are under construction. New commercial developments — such as stores and restaurants — while still opening, aren’t coming at as fast of a clip as they were the past two years.
However, Dickinson’s economy isn’t faltering — even in the face of low oil prices and uncertain farm commodities and livestock prices.

“We know we’re rebalancing the Dickinson economy now,” Stark Development Executive Vice President Gaylon Baker said in his State of the City speech on Jan. 19. “We’re going to get back to a more normal situation.”

Even the small towns in southwest North Dakota aren’t sweating the slowdown much.

“Some projects have kind of slowed down. Traffic has,” said Chuck Muscha, Killdeer’s mayor. “But I think probably the main people who had the biggest effect is the business owners. When this transpired, things were booming. Now they’re closer to normal.”

Mark Benz, who owns the Grab n’ Go convenience store at the corner of state Highways 22 and 200 as well as petroleum distributor Benz Oil in Killdeer, said the slowdown in activity is noticeable on both the visual and business side.

But, he said he’s maintaining a philosophy of “no rash decisions.”

While the convenience store opened in 2012 at the height of the boom, Benz Oil has been around since 1970. So Benz said he’s seen plenty of highs and lows in the oil business.

“One thing I know from being in this industry this long is it can change awful fast,” he said.

Even in Bowman County, where oil has been a part of life for decades, they’re subtly feeling the effects of the slowdown and playing the waiting game.

Like Dickinson, Bowman County doesn’t have big plans for 2016, County Commissioner Rick Braaten said.

“As far as our road and bridge budget, that’s our biggest one, all we’re doing there for this coming year is maintenance,” he said. “We’re not doing any projects or construction in 2016. We had a feeling funds were going to be quite a bit lower. We decided not to do any improvements on our roads this year.”

Teran Doerr, the executive director of the Bowman County Development Corp., said she has seen people lose jobs, businesses report slower sales and more housing come on the market.

“It almost feels like it happened overnight,” she said.

A carbon dioxide pipeline planned by Denbury Resources to use for injection on older wells in the county is still coming but the project is moving much slower, according to Denbury representatives.

New England, like Bowman, had been planning for 2015 to be the year it began seeing increased activity from the oil business.

Two oil rigs were drilling into the Tyler formation west of the city in Slope County in 2014. If they hit, the town of about 700 people was bound to boom. But the wells didn’t produce and when the prices dropped, Marathon Oil cut its losses and moved on.

“Surprisingly, we are still doing well,” New England City Auditor Jason Jung said.

The city wrapped up the first of a likely four-year street and water project in 2015, Jung said.

The best decision the city made during the boom was not to overdo things, he said, adding that while new housing has sprung up and most new people who came to the area stayed, some are losing their oil jobs.

“The oil, we had some positive effects from it and we haven’t seen the negative effects,” Jung said. “We might be one of the few towns that might be that way instead of the opposite way.”

To the north in South Heart — Dickinson’s unofficial suburb — it was merely three years ago that South Heart Mayor Floyd Hurt stood with a shovel in hand and political dignitaries at his side to break ground on the new Dakota Prairie Refinery between his 300-person town and Dickinson.

Now, the refinery is operating but recently reported a $20 million loss traced back to low oil prices and lack of diesel fuel use in area, a crew camp in South Heart has closed and a planned massive facility for oilfield service giant Schlumberger is smaller than it was planned to be and very quiet.

Hurt said South Heart is still fairly happy with where it’s at, however.

“The best thing to do is just sit tight and wait and see,” Hurt said. “If it starts going up and things start generating again, then make plans to move with the times.”

During his State of the City speech, Baker called it “highly unlikely” that the area’s energy industry would ever again “relive the speed, volume and chaos” of the past oil boom.

And, if folks around the area are to be believed, they’re just fine with that.

Dickinson hotels were half empty in 2015

Dickinson hotels were about half-full in 2015, according to year-end average data obtained by the Dickinson Convention and Visitors Bureau on Wednesday.

Terri Thiel, exective director of the Dickinson CVB, said hotels in Dickinson averaged about 48.2 percent occupancy during 2015, which is down from 71.5 percent occupancy in 2014.

Those numbers are a bit lower than average and close to 2005 figures — long before the oil boom hit the area and when Dickinson had nearly 800 less hotel rooms.

Thiel said the TownePlace Suites by Marriott in north Dickinson, the city’s newest hotel, plans to open Feb. 2.

After a year of plenty, Dickinson’s independent retail businesses prepare for more normal year-end sales

Out of Town owner and manager Brooke Leno, left, helps employee Chloe Jazvic as she helps a customer and Melissa Moos folds clothing on Friday, Nov. 29, 2015, at the store in the Prairie Hills Mall in Dickinson, N.D. (Dustin Monke / The Dickinson Press)

Holidays can make or break the profit margins of small retail businesses.

In Dickinson, the time carries even greater meaning for relatively new businesses — especially those that sprang up in recent years around the promise of the burgeoning energy industry and population growth, only to see commerce wane in the wake of the industry’s slowdown.

“In general, business is slower,” said Brooke Leno, manager of Out of Town and Out of Town Kids in the Prairie Hills Mall. “People aren’t coming in and dropping a bunch of money like they used to. They’re being more strategic about their purchases. It’s nothing that’s going to make or break us. It’s definitely slower and you can tell. But it seems like the last few days, people are getting into that Christmas shopping.”

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Building through the bust: Southwest ND oilfield service company leaders say they’re using 2015 slowdown to improve their businesses

MBI Energy Services CEO and founder Jim Arthaud stands by one of his trucks on Oct. 8, 2015, at his company’s Belfield headquarters. (Dustin Monke / The Dickinson Press)

Jim Arthaud doesn’t look like a man at the helm of a multimillion-dollar oilfield services company.

Wearing a T-shirt and baseball cap with blue jeans, he sits in the office of his senior vice president and watches The Weather Channel while discussing the price of oil.

“Oil’s up today,” he says with a smile. “It’s about at $50. It’s only got $50 to go.”

The 60-year-old CEO and founder of MBI Energy Services follows that statement with a smile and laughter, knowing all too well the price for a barrel of crude oil isn’t doubling anytime soon.

That Arthaud can joke about the price of oil is a telling sign that not all is doom and gloom in the western North Dakota oilfields — at least not yet. Still, following eight years of substantial growth tied directly to the Bakken oil boom, Arthaud looks back on the past 10 months — a unique type of oil bust, as he puts it — and knows he should have seen these days coming.

“I’d say it surprised a lot of people and it surprised me,” he said. “It was definitely a dramatic downturn that a lot of people didn’t see. Obviously, the writing was on the wall. We all should have seen it.”

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