# Meet John Rogers and Performance Pulsation Control · Beyond the Fortune 500 · Peekgentic Source: https://peekgentic.com/stories/meet-john-rogers/ Beyond the Fortune 500 · Dallas business stories # Meet John Rogers and Performance Pulsation Control Fired in 1996, John Rogers started a company from home with no factory and one car. Thirty years later, it builds heavy equipment for the oil and gas industry from three Texas locations. SLBy **Steven Law**UTD student · Co-founder, Peekgentic Oct. 20, 2026 · 8 min read Dallas · since 1996 ## Running pumps or *compressors?* Performance Pulsation Control builds pulsation dampeners and suction stabilizers, plus field and acoustical analysis, for drilling, well service, midstream, downstream and industrial customers. Pulsation dampenersSuction stabilizersASME code shop ### Hire before you need it. How John Rogers built PPC [Visit performancepulsation.com](https://www.performancepulsation.com) Read next - [SeriesBeyond the Fortune 500: the Dallas companies you drive past every day](https://peekgentic.com/guides/beyond-the-fortune-500) - [StoryMeet Dom Perry and Scrap-It](https://peekgentic.com/stories/meet-dom-perry/) - [AnalysisVision AI on the factory floor](https://peekgentic.com/guides/vision-ai-manufacturing) - [GuideBefore you hire another office person](https://peekgentic.com/guides/before-you-hire) - [GuideWhat to automate first](https://peekgentic.com/guides/what-to-automate-first) **Run a Dallas company with a story?**I'd love to hear it. [Share your story](mailto:admin@peekgentic.com?subject=A%20Dallas%20business%20story) ## In brief - John Rogers was fired in 1996 and started Performance Pulsation Control from home, as a one-man company that had other shops build his products. - His first full year brought in about $1.2 million. When a vendor's late, sloppy work cost him a customer, he bought a bankrupt boiler shop's equipment and code stamps and started manufacturing himself. - Eight lessons for students, from treating every job like a future reference to hiring before you need to. In 1996, John Rogers came back from vacation and was fired. He went home early that Monday and told his wife what had happened. Before the year was out, he had shipped his first order under a company of his own. That company is Performance Pulsation Control. It builds the heavy welded pressure vessels that keep pumps and compressors from shaking their piping apart, for drilling, well service, pipeline and refinery customers. As John put it, this is not a soft business. It's a dirty business that needs welding and machining. I'm part of the Entrepreneurship Club at UT Dallas, and I asked John how he built it. These are the eight lessons I took from our conversation. Performance Pulsation Control · Richardson, Texas Started in a bedroom, *built in steel.* **1996**Founded, from home **$1.2M**First full year, 1997 **2007**Bought Status Flow of Odessa **100K+ sq ft**Shop space, Dallas to Odessa ## 1. Getting fired can be the start In the days after he was fired, John did two things at once. He kept interviewing for jobs, and he started asking people he knew from the industry whether he should go out on his own. Two of them said yes. One went further: he said he would buy from John if John got set up, and he would start sending him requests for quotes. **My takeaway:** John didn't start with a business plan. He started with two people who believed in him and one who was ready to buy. That's enough to begin. ## 2. You don't need a factory to start John's hardest early problem wasn't finding customers. It was finding someone who could build his products. A former coworker had moved to a pressure vessel manufacturer, introduced John to its sales team, and that shop agreed to build for him. He had no office, either. A couple from his church small group let him use their home office, their computer and their fax machine to send out quotes. His first order came in October 1996, shipped in late November, and he was paid in December. He paid the vendor, and what was left went into the bank. **My takeaway:** Start with what other people already have. You can own the factory later. ## 3. Keep shipping when it gets hard Not long after John started quoting, his old employer sued him, claiming he had taken confidential information. He had no non-compete, and he wasn't using anything that wasn't public. At the first hearing, the judge sent both sides to mediation. John's attorney explained that the law only required him not to use his old employer's confidential or proprietary information. So John agreed to exactly that. He was going to follow the law anyway, and mediation was expensive. He was called back to court a few more times over the next year, until the judge told the other side to stop. Through all of it, he still had to build products, ship them on time, write invoices, register the business and get by on one car with no paycheck. **My takeaway:** Fights will come. Don't let them stop the work. Agree to what you were going to do anyway, and get back to shipping. ## 4. Every job is a reference for the next one John's first customers were people who already trusted him from his old job. That trust didn't come from a pitch. It came from how he had treated them for years. How you treat people at today's job may be laying the foundation for a relationship that matters more than the current one. He also couldn't afford to travel everywhere, so he did what he calls the piggyback. He found key people inside bigger sales networks, sold them on him and his product, and let them carry it into companies he could never have reached alone. He knew they were sticking their necks out for him, so he made sure he never embarrassed them. **My takeaway:** Integrity is a growth strategy. And when you can't reach a customer yourself, find the person who can and earn their trust. ## 5. When a vendor lets you down, own the work In 1997, his first full year, John did about $1.2 million in sales as a one-man company. But his orders were small next to the shop's bigger customers. Deliveries slipped, quality slipped, and one customer told him they would never do business with him again. So he became a manufacturer. He called the chief inspector at his ASME inspection agency and asked for advice. The inspector pointed him to a boiler company that had gone bankrupt, with its equipment and code stamps still in place. John hired its quality control man, Jim Baird, bought the equipment and the code stamps, and opened a small shop in Mesquite before moving to Sunnyvale. The next year the company did more than $2 million. **My takeaway:** If the part of the business that decides whether customers come back belongs to someone else, take it back, even when it's hard. John with a welder on the floor. ## 6. Learn from every no, but don't change after every no Before laptops and video calls, John sold out of a three-ring binder full of sheet protectors. He'd flip the pages like a tablet, then fax more information later. Many of his customers had never heard of his products and didn't know they had a problem. He heard a lot more no than yes. He learned from the questions people asked before they said no, and from their body language: crossed arms, leaning back, leaning in. Then he adjusted. His warning: don't change your pitch every time you hear no. Sometimes the answer to "what should I do differently?" is nothing. That person just wasn't ready. **My takeaway:** Persistence isn't doing the same thing forever. It's doing it until the evidence says to adjust, and knowing the difference between a bad pitch and a bad day. ## 7. Give something away before you pitch I told John what we do at Peekgentic, and he gave me the most direct advice of the hour. Most people don't really know what AI is, he said. So assume they know nothing, and explain it simply. He also said to offer something free: something a business owner can do on their own, without talking to a salesperson, that gives them an honest answer. A short survey on how AI could help their kind of business, with results at the end and a promise not to pitch them unless they ask. He said he doesn't see anyone doing that in the messages that land in his inbox. You don't have to invent something new. Cane's still opened up to compete with Chick-fil-A. **My takeaway:** Make it easy for a customer to dip a toe in. And you don't need a brand-new idea. Find a need that's already there and do it your way. ## 8. Hire before you need to I asked John about hiring, because right now Peekgentic is two founders. His first question: "Do you have money in the bank?" Then: hire before you're buried. Every new person is an investment that takes time to develop. If you wait until you're overloaded, you stop looking for new business and end up in the same spot with a new set of clients waiting on you. When I asked him the biggest challenge in his business today, he answered right away: people. People are the blessing and the problem. He suggested testing how candidates think, not just reading their résumés. He also said to write down a mission, a vision and core values early, because they help with everything that comes after. **My takeaway:** Growth doesn't come from working four more hours a day. It comes from people, and from having the time to train them before you're desperate. Dallas · since 1996 ## Running pumps or *compressors?* Performance Pulsation Control builds pulsation dampeners and suction stabilizers, plus field and acoustical analysis, for drilling, well service, midstream, downstream and industrial customers. Pulsation dampenersSuction stabilizersASME code shop ### Hire before you need it. How John Rogers built PPC [Visit performancepulsation.com](https://www.performancepulsation.com) Thirty years on, John sums it up simply: "We're still in business, and the other company's not." Thank you, John. If you want to learn more about what his team builds, their website is [performancepulsation.com](https://www.performancepulsation.com). 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