By: Marissa Cole
In October 2025, Austin Williams lay in a Midland hotel bed staring at the ceiling, running the same question on a loop. The founder of Upstream, a Dallas-Fort Worth-based oil and gas accounting and advisory firm, had just worked the Permian Basin Oil Show hoping to come home with signed clients. He came home with handshakes. In the same stretch, three clients had given notice, due to either divestitures or internalizing the role for future growth. The pipeline was thinning, and the firm had just added a third employee whose salary now had to be covered from a shrinking runway.
The question on the ceiling was blunt. Roll it up, or go all in?
“If I rolled it up, the team was going to be fine. They were skilled. They would land somewhere,” Williams recalls. “But the thing I had built goes back in the drawer. Done.” The thing he had built was a lease operating statement tool he had been refining inside a single Excel workbook for sixteen years, the quiet engine behind his firm’s client relationships. Going all in meant expanding Upstream with the launch of Upstream+, a decision platform built on sixteen years of industry experience.
He went all in. Within roughly four months, the company had a minimum viable product. Paying users followed within five. By the six-month mark, the platform, now called Upstream+, had landed Williams a ten-page cover feature in CIO Views magazine. It is the kind of compressed timeline that gets founders invited onto podcasts, but Williams draws a different lesson from it than most.
“The decision is not the brave part,” he says. “The brave part is the next morning, when you wake up and start doing the work whether you are sure or not.”
That instinct, action first and confidence later, runs through the way Williams operates the company day to day. The most visible expression is structural. Upstream does not run on a traditional org chart, with a chief executive at the top and staff arranged in descending tiers. Williams describes the model as a round table, and he means it as an operating system rather than a slogan.
“If one person on a five-person team is rowing in a different direction than the other four, the whole boat slows down,” he says. “I would rather lose twenty minutes in a meeting hashing out a disagreement than lose three months of momentum because somebody felt unheard.” When a team member disagrees with a direction, work stops until the disagreement is worked through. Then everyone rows again, together.
The philosophy has a practical edge in his industry. Accounting teams are usually treated as cost centers, hired to close the books and stay quiet. Williams argues that this wastes the most informed people in the building. The person closest to the data sees the spending trends, the waste, and the leaks before anyone else does. At Upstream, the accountants sit inside the strategy conversations, not downstream of them.
The same insistence on alignment shows up in how the firm bills. Williams refuses hourly billing, an industry norm he considers quietly corrosive. If he is not at his desk with a client’s file open, the client does not get charged for the hour. Every engagement is a fixed fee. “You sign a number, and that is the number,” he says. He is candid that the honest version of outsourced accounting leaves thin margins. Commercializing Upstream+, the firm’s decision platform, is allowing Upstream to diversify its revenue while giving the broader industry access to a tool that had already proven its value with clients.
Perhaps the most instructive leadership moment in the Upstream story, though, happened at a kitchen table. After the August crisis, Williams had been hunting for ways to diversify revenue, floating patents, partnerships, and capital raises. His wife, Megan, listened to all of it and then pointed at the thing he could not see. It was time, she told him, to commercialize his product. Williams did not initially understand which product she meant. She had to spell it out: the interactive lease operating statement tool he had been giving away free with every engagement, the thing every client kept asking about.
“I genuinely did not see it,” Williams admits. “I thought clients hired us for the accounting work, the experience, the relationships. She told me our clients valued all of that, but the statement tool had become the one thing that truly set the firm apart.” He called Anthony Piccolo, founder of Performance Scoring, who would become the technology partner behind Upstream+, and shared his vision over lunch. Three months later, they had a working product.
The episode shaped how he treats input from every direction now. The person closest to your work, he argues, usually sees your blind spot the fastest, whether that person is a spouse, a junior accountant, or a client. A leader’s job is to make sure those voices actually change something, which loops back to the round table. In his telling, culture is not a set of values on a wall. It is alignment, repeated.
The round table doubles as a retention strategy in a market where specialized accounting talent is scarce. People stay, Williams argues, when their voice demonstrably changes outcomes, and they drift when it does not. “People do not quit jobs. They quit feeling unheard, unseen, and replaceable,” he says. In a firm whose entire product is the judgment of its people, keeping that judgment in the room is not a soft benefit. It is the business model.
Today Upstream+ serves more than forty independent producers, non-operators, and private-equity-backed operators, and Williams says the goal for Upstream+ is nothing less than becoming the industry’s standard interactive Lease Operating Statement. Ambition aside, he keeps returning to the same unglamorous fundamentals when asked for advice: do what you said you would do, protect your people, listen to the person across the table, and start the work before you feel ready.
The ceiling in that Midland hotel room, he notes, did not supply an answer. The next morning did.
More about the company is available at upstreamreporting.com, and Williams writes regularly about leadership and the energy industry on LinkedIn.
