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The secrets of her success

Moya Cahill has become a major player in Newfoundland’s offshore industry the old-fashioned way... with a lot of hard work and a little bit of serendipity

by Michelle Porter

The first time I reached Moya Cahill by telephone, she was in Norway, taking care of business. The second time I called—just a few days later—she was in Houston, in the middle of the busiest week of her year: “It’s going to be really hard to get my attention this week,” she said.

Cahill doesn’t stop moving. A week later we met at her office in downtown St. John’s. At the top of her game, the president of PanGeo Subsea took a moment to reflect on what it takes to succeed in the fast-paced oil and gas business. “You need to have the drive,” she says. Of course Cahill’s ability to create a successful business in these uncertain economic times can be attributed to other qualities too—a sharp mind and strong leadership, for starters—but it is this drive, the 24/7 work ethic, that really sets her apart.

Cahill begins her day while most of us are still asleep and often works into the evening, long after the rest of us have climbed into bed. Not everyone can do that, but for Cahill hard work seems to be as natural and vital as breathing. “I always wanted to do this,” she says. “I knew from a young age that I would one day go my own way, that I would branch into my own business.”
 
 
That focused drive has been paying off. In 1994 Cahill received the Canadian Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and in 1998 she was named one of the country’s top 40 people under 40 for her work with MNC Group Inc., an engineering and consulting company. Most recently she received the 2009 Outstanding Contribution Award by the Newfoundland and Labrador Oil and Gas Industry Association (NOIA), which recognized her role in the development of the offshore industry in Newfoundland and Labrador over the past 20 years.
 
Fresh from Houston’s Offshore Technology Conference, where she completed the significant amount of the year’s networking and selling, Cahill says her St. John’s-based company is growing into a global enterprise. “The next five or 10 years?” she says. “For us, that is happening in the next two to three years.”
 
After working for two years to establish a presence and a market in Norway, Cahill expects to oversee the opening of new offices in the key energy centres of Aberdeen, Denmark, Houston, Brazil, and Southeast Asia. It seems that players in the energy industries want what PanGeo Subsea has to offer: technology that provides real-time 3-D and 4-D acoustic imaging of the sub-seafloor. It’s all about managing risk, explains Cahill. If companies involved in sub-sea industry activity can work more efficiently, preventing delays, these same companies can save a lot of money—companies that deal with offshore installations such as subsea templates, gravity base structures, offshore wind-farm foundations, and the relocation of drilling rigs.
 
The roots of Cahill’s role in this young technology company reach back almost a decade, to an event where she received an award recognizing her success in business. It was there she happened to meet fellow award winner Jacques Guigné, CEO of Guigné International, an acoustic technology company based in Paradise, N.L.
 
What Cahill didn’t know at the time was that Guigné International was working to develop new acoustic technology for the oil and gas industry. “Years later he knocked on my door,” she says with a smile. It’s those types of encounters, she adds, that demonstrate the importance of “creating relationships and networking throughout life.”
 
In 2006 PanGeo Subsea was created as a partnership between Cahill’s Pan Maritime Energy Services and Guigné International. As head of the company, Cahill’s main role has been to take the locally developed acoustic technology to the Norwegian technological sector. She has already been successful in attracting significant venture capital from both Norway and the U.K., which she says will help to “accelerate the use of acoustics.” 
 
One might expect that the most difficult parts of Cahill’s job would be the constant travel, the time demands, or even the pressure. But she says it’s finding the right balance between the interests of the company’s top-notch researchers working within the scientific side of the company and the interests of those working to commercialize it. “The most challenging thing is to know when to stop the R&D,” she says. “I have to know when to stop developing and when to start selling.”
 
Cahill must be getting it right, because while others in the industry are slowing down, PanGeo Subsea is just beginning to heat up. “Because we are in the business of mitigating risk, because we are saving these companies money, we are insulated,” she says. “We are in a very unique sweet spot".
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