Jed Wood was plagued by inconsistencies; Inconsistencies in training, inconsistencies in performance and inconsistencies in maintenance dogged his well control business and sent the 41-year-old entrepreneur in search of, well, consistency. Now, High Arctic Well Control Inc. of Red Deer is the very model of control and across-the-board risk management.

The key to the company's success lies in its in-house training of employees (who now number 110) and the protocols set out for on-the-job performance, safety and equipment management.

With its 20 hydraulic snubbing units, 13 rig assist hydraulic units and seven proprietary stand alone units that combine service rigs with snubbing units, High Arctic is the largest well snubbing service in Canada, says Chief Executive and Co-Owner Wood. With childhood friend and business partner Ken Embury, Wood has parlayed a $100,000 investment in 1996 to the $20 million concern High Arctic is today. In the past 18 months, annual sales have more than quadrupled from $4.5 million. Wood is convinced effective risk management deserves all the credit.

Wood started in the oilfield straight out of high school as a rig worker, soon working his way to Toolpush and finally Well Site Supervisor. In 1995 he came to the realization that there had to be a better way to provide well site servicing, especially snubbing.

"There is no training out there for this. The only way you could train before was to send someone out to hang around and train with other guys. That's primarily how all training works in this industry: You send a green roughneck out and he picks up what he can seeÉand it just doesn't work," said Wood.

"The industry is growing so fast you don't have enough experienced people who want to mentor young people starting out, and if you don't have systems in place, one fellow may tell him to do it this way and another experienced fellow might have his own way to do it, and at that point you're not consistent. You're not consistent in your training, you're not consistent in your systems with your customers, you're not consistent in your processes, and with that inconsistency you have the potential for accidents," he added. " We had to get everybody on the same page and try to do the work under the same procedures. We assessed our risk, which was inconsistencyÉ..we realized the only way we could manage this was to do it in-house - build procedures, document the procedures and train our workers so we all do the job in the same manner."