The Values That Built Atlas Oil with Robbie Rankey

In the four decades since Sam Simon founded a one-truck fuel distributor in metro Detroit, Atlas Oil has grown into one of the world’s leading supply and trading businesses. The scale of Atlas today is unrecognizable. But its core values look much the same.

Simon—Atlas’ owner and Chief Executive—says fostering a culture around these values remains his top priority. Even as Atlas has expanded to hundreds of employees, he still personally leads new hire training sessions on the company’s core values and how they inform its work.

We spoke with Robbie Rankey, Executive Director at Atlas Oil and Simon Group Holdings, to understand how these values show up on the ground. Rankey brings a unique perspective on what it takes to sustain a culture inside a fast-growing organization.

Sam Simon credits Atlas’ success to its core values. How did those principles shape the company at the start?

Atlas has eight core values: Passion, Persistence, Pride and Image, Customer Focus, Solution Driven, Collaborative Innovation, Do the Right Thing, and Connecting the Dots.

It’s important to understand that these weren’t codified later, the way values often are at large enterprises. They were present from day one, when Atlas was just Sam Simon selling fuel by day and delivering it by night.

Take ‘Pride and Image.’ It means understanding that how you present yourself is a signal. Your brand’s image reflects what’s going on beneath the surface: the quality of work, the level of investment, the care you bring to the job.

When Atlas was still a small business without a lot of capital to spare, Sam had to decide what kind of trucks to buy. There were plenty of options, some very economical ones. But the best on the market at the time was Mack Trucks. So that’s what Sam bought, even if it was a stretch financially.

A Mack fleet communicated a certain look and feel to our customers, which mattered. But more than that, it signaled that Atlas was never going to cut a corner on service—even if cutting one would save a buck. We invest in the best the market has to offer, and that helps us earn our customers’ trust.

Let’s talk about “Connecting the Dots.” It’s a bit less intuitive than some of Atlas’ other values—what does it mean in practice?

Energy and commodities markets are dominated by huge, global companies, and with that scale often comes bureaucracy. At Atlas, we work hard to remain a very flat, nimble organization. That’s where “Connecting the Dots” comes in.

In practice, it means employees are empowered to challenge conventional thinking, make connections others might miss, and pursue new ideas. We’re connecting the dots, between people and ideas, to better serve our customers and build our business.

I’m a lawyer by trade, so when I joined Atlas, this was a bit of a foreign concept to me. I was used to working within a very defined role. But when you trust people to be creative, and encourage them to bring ideas directly to leadership, you create opportunities for innovation that don’t exist in more bureaucratic corporate structures.

I think this is one of the things that makes Atlas most unique. It’s not unusual to see Sam Simon at a whiteboard with a new hire, mapping out an idea together.

That brings to mind another one of Atlas’ core values: Collaborative Innovation. Can you speak to how collaboration and innovation manifest in the business?

This is another value that’s best understood through an example.

For years, we followed the industry-standard approach when fueling equipment at digging sites. These were designated “hot zones,” which meant machinery had to be powered down periodically. It was a cumbersome process that created delays—but it was simply how things were done. Until someone at Atlas questioned it.

A field engineer in Victoria, Texas came up with an idea for a multi-hose fueling system that could operate continuously, without requiring downtime. At first, it sounded far-fetched. But when Sam was visiting Victoria, he took the time to sit down and hear him out.

That conversation led to Atlas funding an initial prototype and building a team around the engineer to develop the concept. The result was more than 40 patents and a step change in Atlas’ ability to serve customers in these environments.

By taking every idea seriously—and working together to bring the best ones to life—Atlas has produced real technological breakthroughs in the energy industry, like this one.

Atlas’ values put a clear emphasis on service—particularly “Customer Focus” and “Solution Driven.” How does that set the company apart?

In the energy and commodities space, there are many companies with strong resources and capabilities. That’s the baseline. If Atlas wants to serve its customers at a higher level, we have to go beyond that. We operate with the mentality that we will run through walls for the people we do business with.

In practice, that means being relentlessly solutions oriented. We always find a way to get the job done—even if it requires thinking outside the box or making an extra investment.

It also means putting the customer at the center of every business decision. Atlas doesn’t cut corners or look for ways to save money if it comes at the expense of service quality. Customer outcomes are our north star.

This can sound like familiar corporate rhetoric. But people who work here will tell you they haven’t experienced this level of customer focus anywhere else. The “run through walls” mentality reflects how people actually approach their work every day.