When I walked into Harlan Voss' ranch house, I had a whole pitch prepared. He told me his life story instead, and I realized pretty quickly that the prepared pitch wasn't what this meeting needed.
Voss built his oil company from nothing. Broke at 24, riding a Greyhound bus from Fort Worth to Midland to chase down an investor, he met the woman he'd spend 61 years with in the seat next to his. Daisy Mae Richardson. She was a TCU sorority girl going home for Thanksgiving. Her father co-signed a loan for a man he'd just met, on the condition he take good care of his daughter. Voss did. And the house she grew up in — which hasn't been changed a day since her death — was where he was going to breathe his last.
That's the man I walked in to see.
He controls 36 percent of Stafford Oil and eight of the 19 board seats, and he'd been ready to blow the company up for years — break it apart, sell it piece by piece to the majors, collect whatever he could salvage out of a bad investment. He told me Jim Stafford cost him $200 million. He told me Jim was a liar and had some evil in him. He told me both of those things without much emotion, the way you say a thing when you've made your peace with it and it's just the truth now.
He walked me out to the pasture and asked me to tell him who I was. I gave him the real version.
We came to an understanding. He's going to give me time. I'm going to give him something worth holding on for.
He's 86 years old and he's the sharpest person in any room he walks into. Don't forget either of those things.
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