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From water survival to responding to a fire, safety training is so vital in the oil and gas industry and can mean the difference between life and death.
Oil companies look for quality, flexible and thorough training courses — that are taught by experienced professionals from their respective fields — for their current and future employees to learn from. Those such classes are provided by M&A Safety Services, a full-service safety training provider designed to train employees that live, travel and work in the oil and gas industry.
“What we’ve done is hired trainers that are experts in their field,” said Bryan Aucoin, co-owner of M&A. “When it comes to crane and rigger training, we’ve hired folks who have been running cranes all their lives. When it comes to first aid/CPR, we have guys who have medical experience, such as EMS personnel.”
Although M&A was established in 2016, Aucoin and his partners Travis Martin and Don Romero bring many years of experience in Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) and in production, construction and drilling.
M&A has two training centers: one in Gray and the other in Youngsville. Each 20,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility contains 17 multimedia classrooms, two indoor heated pools, METS-5 HUET Simulators, TEMPSC’s, hydraulic cranes, confined space simulators, fall protection simulators and multiple firefighting simulators designed to simulate various types of fires.
The courses at M&A don’t require minimums; if only one person is scheduled to take a particular class, then that person will be trained by an M&A professional. There are also no cancellation fees.
“The oil and gas industry is a very last-minute industry, especially today with COVID and the down-market,” Aucoin explained. “A lot of our clients don’t want to train their employees unless they have a project to put them on; they don’t want to spend that money on training unless they have somewhere to send them to earn that money back. So, a lot of our training is last-minute.”
From Top 10 companies, such as major operators, to smaller businesses that serve the oil and gas industry, nearly 600 clients trust M&A Safety Services with their safety training needs. M&A’s professionalism, flexibility and dedication led the company to grow from one facility with about 15 employees in 2016, to two facilities, an administration office and 100 employees by 2020.
And they don’t plan on stopping there.
“COVID has changed so much. But for us in Houma, with our Gray facility being such a new facility — still less than one year old and coming online in a down-market — our goal right now is to get that facility running on all cylinders,” Aucoin said.
“From there, we have some plans to possibly go to the Houston area. We have operated in that area prior to this company, so we know we can be successful there because we have a lot of strong relationships there,” he continued. “Once we get Houma going, Houston will be next on our radar.” •
