People you can Trust: Sandeep Bhamber

In this series, we're giving you an insight into the people that make RockWave the trusted partner that keeps our clients coming back for more. They are the people you will work with on your seismic project, so it helps if you know something about them before you start. Break the ice, so to speak. Don't forget to collect your RockWaver bobble-head at the end.

1) Cats, dogs, or neither?

Dogs! They're more loyal, friendly. Just happy, happy creatures. They enjoy sitting next to you, getting stroked, hanging out, going on walks. and they’ve got a face that says, “I love you.”

Cats are a bit, you know… up themselves! They just generally do their own thing.

Whilst I get to enjoy my lunchtime walk, with my dog, Stan. Makes me feel a bit fresher afterwards, a bit more alive again and stops that sleepy feeling many people get after lunch. I love Stan, and actually can't think of life without him at the moment.

2) What was your first job and did you learn anything that you still use today?

My first job, at 16 years of age, was on the women's wear at BHS (well-known department store in the UK).

That could get quite awkward as a 16 year old boy, working at Christmas with all these 40 year old women coming up handing you underwear! Ha.

What it taught me that I still use? I guess it taught me the value of money, because you put all this effort in and don’t get paid nearly as much as you think you should. It was quite a reality check I suppose that everyone goes through. I didn’t really pickup any particular skill other than work ethic, customer service and probably that I didn't want to go into retail. Guess it contributed to cementing my desire to pursue a technical career pathway.

3) When you’re working on seismic projects, what does “doing a good job” mean in practice?

Yeah, so doing a good job for me comes right at the start of a project, figuring out the scope and trying to make sure you deliver to that scope and then bringing the client along with you.

And I guess the sort of the harder bit, or what I try and do is to gauge my clients' abilities in processing and geophysics. It’s a complicated topic after all and what we notice is, particularly in offshore wind, we interact with people from wider geoscience disciplines. With people who have never needed to understand seismic processing jargon.

So I’ll try to tailor my output, and what I’m telling them, to what they know and what their abilities are. Sometimes they’re a project manager with no geophysics background, so I’ll keep my PowerPoints very high level. Other times they’re someone who’s an ex–oil and gas QC person, and then you give them a lot of QCs so they feel comfortable. I try to scope that out at the start, to kind of get a feel for what they’re like and then tailor what I give them.

My start-up meeting PowerPoints are always pretty much the same. We always do the same data load QC, the same review of everything. But then it comes to talking through the processing sequence and that’s where I try to pick up on little clues. That’s when you really start to gauge them. You can tell by the questions they ask, or if they don’t ask any questions at all.

If they’re asking about the depth velocity model building, keeping diffractions, things like that, then obviously there’s an understanding there.

Then later in a meeting, you might show different stacks or examples, and one person will go, “Oh, what’s that stacked with? What angle? What velocity?”, whereas someone else will get talking about a syncline or a tunnel valley and getting all excited—and you’re like, okay, they’re a geologist.

It’s just about listening to people and ensuring you bring them along with you. Making sure they are understanding the information being presented. Everyone should leave the meeting on the same page.

4) We love feedback at RockWave, have you ever had feedback from a client that has really stuck with you? 

I think it took me a while to realise that I tended to have a good rapport with clients. Several years in, it hadn't quite clicked. I’d realised my natural inclination was to handle clients a little differently to others I’d seen. But until someone tells you, you don’t necessarily know if this was a good or bad thing.

Thankfully, I did eventually get some really good feedback about my client interactions. We had this client who had previously been known as quite a tricky customer, but then I got feedback that they liked the way I dealt with the project and how I communicated and got on with them. After that, they would always request to have me on the projects.

It's nice to realise that something I kind of naturally do, is actually one of my strengths. So that's kind of stuck with me and it seemed to have helped me. I can relax a little bit more on a project by just being myself!

5) Can you think of any standout examples of a time outside geophysics when you experienced exceptional service? 

I’ve got one example, and it’s actually a case of poor service followed by really exceptional service. It was when we moved from MK to Cardiff, and there were two different departments within the same company.

So the sales guy, or whoever draws up the quotes, came round to the house, checked everything out, calculated the price, sorted the contracts. He told us that on moving day the removal guys would be there in the morning, pack everything up, drive it over, and unpack at the other end. He said there was just enough time and that the house was about the right size, not too big.

Moving day came, and the guys turned up at about 6am like we expected. One of them knocked on the door, came in, and pretty much straight away said, “It's not packed up. What's going on?” And I was just like, “what?” I told him, “your dude in the office said that you'd do it in the morning”. And he said, “we haven't got any equipment to pack up, to pack anything up. And we just thought we were going to put it on the van and drive.”

At that point I was thinking, “are you ******* kidding me?” But then the guy just went, I can’t remember exactly what he said, but basically, “all right, don't worry, we will get this done.”

And they really did. Four of them just got stuck in, speed-wrapping everything. It probably wasn’t as neat as if they’d had a full day, but they did it properly. They packed everything into boxes, managed to find another van, or some mates with spare boxes, and got it all driven over.

So yeah, it was really impressive. They went completely out of their way to fix a mistake that wasn’t theirs, and that’s what made it exceptional service for me.

I think as a learning for taking into RockWave… it comes down to scope again, you know, like if you've been given a short timeline or short turnaround, but you need to get a project out. Maybe a bit like that project we worked on recently. They only needed it for a secondary opinion on one particular area. They’d already processed the dataset once and it took like a year. We had six weeks. We just had to speed through the whole sequence and use our technical expertise to decide which bits to focus on and which bits to leave out.

6) Desert Island Velocities: If you had a week of velocity picking on a desert island, what one audiobook or podcast and what one album/artist would you bring?

For my podcast I went with a comedy… Parenting Hell hosted by Josh Widdicombe and what's his face, Rob Beckett. It's just, yeah, the right time in my life for it. It's nice to know that other people are having a... ‘horrible time’ as well. That fatherhood is a series of ups and downs it's not super easy like you see on Instagram. That’s my experience anyway. One minute, everything's super with my son. We’re off to nursery and he’s happily shouting “super fly” , so I pick him up and he flies through the air and then, “super fast”, and we run super fast together. “Super jump” next and we do a really big jump. Then the next minute we’re at the nursery door and he’s crying his eyes out on the doorstep and refusing to go in! Arrrgh!

For music, I can be really specific, because it's velocity picking I’ll need something upbeat to keep me awake, so I'll go with a classic... SUM41!

But to be honest it could be anything punk, rock or metal. Whatever you wanna call it, any of that fast paced, high energy music to keep me going, keep me motivated.

I imagine that Pete and Matt are going to choose something from the late 80s and early 90s. You just can't drag them out of that five or ten year period where music was the best, football was the best, TV was the best, everything was the best. Matt and I play Bandle every day. Anything past 2001 he calls “A waste of time”. And then anything in the late 80s, he gets it straight away. Absolutely smashes it.

Read Sandeep's RockWave profile here.