Sami Hayek was a teenager when his family arrived in the tiny northern Alberta hamlet of Wabasca. It was a far cry from Lebanon.
Hayek was just a toddler when his dad passed away. There was no family nest egg. Growing up, his mother, Souad, had this advice for him: “There is no backup plan.”
Knowing that, Hayek began working in the oilfield as a teenager. But, he harboured a dream — to one day start his own business.
“I didn’t have a dad, but a couple of my older siblings were entrepreneurs. I looked up to them. I had figures in the family who I looked up to. But it was my mother who was the driver, pushing me to do more. She passed away last year, but she was as tough as nails.”
Two decades later, he’s got two companies — one that services the oil fields and another that trains staff to work in the energy industry. His company, SATO, trains about 500 new operators a year, and 69 per cent of them are new Canadians.
“Regardless of their background, SATO is providing them that opportunity so they can break into the oil and gas sector,” he says. “We also get a lot of people who were born in this country, are unemployed, and just don’t know how to get into the oil and gas sector.”
While Hayek has come a long way from the Wabasca days, the rise of Pitbull Energy hasn’t been steady. It’s been a rollercoaster. During an oil slump, he cried at night when he spoke to his sister. He pleaded with the bank for just a few hundred extra dollars worth of credit to cover a worker’s road trip.
The energy industry is stabilized, and Hayek says that drilling is now done on a more measured basis that should insulate against future boom-and-bust cycles. And he says Alberta has given him opportunities he would not have got in other parts of the world.
“In Alberta, it’s all about the handshake — and then it’s up to you to sink or swim.”
This article appears in the Nov/Dec 2024 issue of Edify
