Executives who build large companies often describe their success as the product of a grand plan. Kelcy Warren tells a more modest story. Energy Transfer’s co-founder and executive chairman told Hart Energy that his company’s rise owes much to timing and quick responses.

Warren said he would like to claim the company foresaw everything and is “smarter than everybody else, but that’s just not true.”

Reacting Well to Opportunity

Warren credits “pure luck” alongside necessity and business skill. The clearest example came in the 2000s, when Enron’s collapse and the struggles of firms that mimicked its model pushed a wave of pipelines onto the market. Energy Transfer bought much of Aquila Inc., the TUFCO System, the Houston Pipeline System and Transwestern Pipeline during that stretch.

Necessity drove the next phase. Falling natural gas prices convinced Kelcy Warren that the company needed more than one line of business. Energy Transfer entered the NGL sector through Louis Dreyfus Highbridge Energy, a purchase that came together after a separate bid collapsed. The $5.3 billion Sunoco deal in 2012 then carried the company into crude oil.

The Vision Behind the Reactions

Warren’s partners see something more than luck at work. Ray C. Davis, who co-founded Energy Transfer with Warren and Ben Cook in 1996, handled the business side early on while Warren focused on long-term direction. Davis has said his partner sees possibilities others miss.

That vision centered on a continent-wide system of pipelines and export hubs. Energy Transfer pursued it through organic projects such as the Dakota Access Pipeline and a second wave of acquisitions beginning in 2014, including Susser Holdings, Regency Energy Partners and SemGroup.

Warren describes the job as one that never reaches completion. A good pipeliner, he told Hart Energy, never ends up with a perfect system. The company keeps refining its network, most recently through the $7.1 billion Crestwood Equity Partners acquisition.

For Kelcy Warren, honesty about the role of chance sits comfortably beside confidence in the results. He summed up the company’s record by saying its reactions have been pretty good. Refer to this article to learn more.

More about Kelcy Warren on https://horatioalger.org/members/detail/kelcy-l-warren/