Houston’s J.P. Bryan has assembled the largest private, museum-quality collection of Texana in existence: rifles, swords, rare books and papers documenting the Lone Star state’s past. Today he is writing a book on that history.

But in the oil and gas business, the man is best known for collecting deals and growing companies—and growing people. At last count, he says, nearly 100 former employees have gone on to become chief executives or partners in other energy firms, several of which are public.

Bryan is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Torch Energy Advisors Inc., which since 1981 has managed more than $10 billion and 8,000 wells, through partnerships and acquisitions. Investors have included IBM, GE Pension, the University of Chicago and many of the largest insurance companies in the U.S. and England. He is also CEO of Torch’s E&P arm, Resaca Exploitation Inc., formed in 2006 as a limited partnership, but traded on the London AIM market since 2008. Permian Basin assets are the focus. The midstream assets are held in Quivira Partners LP, which manages 56 gas-gathering systems in five states.

Bryan was CEO and chairman of Gulf Canada Resources Ltd., which he was hired to raise the financing for to restructure and grow. He did, going from C$650 million to C$6.5 billion from 1995 to 1998. In 2001, it was sold to Conoco for $4.3 billion, a year before ConocoPhillips was formed.

He majored in art history at the University of Texas and did post-grad work at the law school and at the Thunderbird School of International Studies. His first oilfield job was two summers as a roughneck in East Texas. Upon graduation, he spent 14 years first as a banker with J.P. Morgan in New York and then as an investment banker with Dominick & Dominick Inc. and E.F. Hutton. It was at Morgan that he was first introduced into the oil and gas finance world, which he came to love.

Other entities include Torch Renewable Energy LLC, with more than 12 wind-power projects in various stages of development in seven states. The newest member of the Torch family, formed in 2009, is Onsemble LLC, which is developing a proprietary wind-forecasting service.

Investor: What was the best advice you ever received?

Bryan: My mother told me when I was very young to serve only those things that serve your interests, not your self-interest. Help others or help something you love, but not to embellish your reputation. And you are never going to lead unless you first learn to serve others.

Investor: What are some of the lessons from your energy career?

Bryan: As a roughneck, I gained a lot of respect for the guys on the rigs. It is hard work, dangerous. They took a lot of pride in their work. I know it is meant to be perverse humor, but I am most uncomfortable when anybody that works in the oilfield is referred to as oilfield trash. It does not suit the people I worked with.

Even in the worst of times, you can make a return if you are a careful buyer of producing properties. You can also enhance value by taking parts of the whole and monetizing them. If you can find ways to remove drillbit risk from the value-creation proposition, you’ll succeed.

I am 180 degrees the opposite of a wildcatter. Find something with more engineering risk than geological risk and you can deploy capital successfully. We always tried to buy producing properties and enhance them with new technology. I’ve found that more profitable than exploration.

If you’re trying to build value and a significant oil and gas enterprise, focus on the longest-life reserves you can get. It is true that in this business, we all destroy a lot of capital. We all pursue the same opportunities, whether it’s the Eagle Ford or the Bakken and soon wildly overpay for the asset. You just can’t escape the basic reality of this business: you need to be the first in, or the very last in after the dust settles, so you can pick up what’s left and cobble it together to create value.

Investor: What is the art of deal-making?

Bryan: To me, the art is those things outside the financial parameters. It is giving the seller something he believes to be of value that does not reduce your profit objectives. It certainly is not bidding the highest price, which requires no art or creativity.

Investor: What other lessons do you have for energy deal-makers?

Bryan: Get away from looking at internal rate of return. Try to buy things with a great ROI (return on investment), at least two times your investment. Don’t take too much pride in being a tough negotiator; you likely won’t end up doing many deals because the guy across the table is not likely to want to deal with you again. Don’t establish artificial barriers against success with a list of what you won’t do.

Always sit down face-to-face. There’s a real temptation today, with e-mail and cell phones, not to. We have moved away from dealing eyeball-to-eyeball. In poker, you don’t do that. You look at a player’s face, the way he places his hands on the table, his body language. That can be essential information.

Always go out to the field. The worst deals I’ve made in my life were when I did not do it, without exception. Go out there and talk to the plant operator or the field pumper.