How to Choose an HDD Contractor: 10 Questions to Ask

Search for directional drilling companies and you’ll get pages of results that all look about the same. Every website says experienced. Every website says safe. From the outside, it’s hard to tell a contractor who lives and breathes horizontal directional drilling from a crew that bought a rig last spring.

The difference shows up when you ask the right questions. Here are the ten we’d ask before hiring anyone to put pipe under something that matters, and what a good answer sounds like.

1. Is HDD your whole business, or a side service?

Plenty of good excavation and utility outfits offer directional drilling as one line on a long services list. That can be fine for a short shot under a driveway. But when a crossing gets long, deep, or complicated, you want a contractor whose entire operation is built around drilling. Ask what percentage of their work is HDD. For us the answer is simple: it’s 100%, and it has been since day one.

2. What’s your completion rate on crossings under contract?

This is the single most revealing number in the industry, and almost nobody asks for it. Crossings fail. Contractors walk away from holes more often than anyone likes to admit, and when that happens, the schedule and the cleanup usually land on the owner. Ask directly: have you ever left a crossing unfinished? We can answer that one plainly. Every drill NCDD has taken under contract, we’ve completed.

3. What have you actually installed?

Not what the rig is rated for. What has the crew, this crew, pulled into the ground? Ask for specifics: diameters, lengths, ground types. Our leadership team has installed well over 50 miles of 42-inch pipeline alone, and we’ve handled everything from utility conduit up to 56-inch pipe, some of the largest HDD installations in the industry.

4. What class of rig will be on my job?

Rigs come in three broad classes: mini, midi, and maxi. The class on site sets a hard ceiling on what your crossing can do, no matter how good the operator is. A contractor should be able to tell you exactly what class your project needs and why. If you’re curious how that works, we wrote a plain-English breakdown of what makes a maxi rig different.

5. Who runs your downhole guidance?

On a long crossing, the guidance engineer is steering a drill head hundreds of feet underground along a path measured in inches. That skill decides whether the bore lands where the plans say it will. Ask who does the steering, how long they’ve done it, and whether they’ve worked both the rig side and the navigation side. The best ones have done both.

6. What ground have you drilled?

Sand drills differently than clay. Clay drills differently than cobble, and cobble differently than solid rock. A contractor who has only seen soft ground can get into real trouble the first time the geology changes mid-bore. Ask what conditions they’ve completed crossings in. Our crews have drilled hard rock, cobbles, clays, and everything between, and we tool up for the ground report, not for the best case.

7. How do you run safety on site?

Everybody says safety first. Ask what that means in practice: Is there a dedicated safety presence in the field? Are there daily toolbox meetings? Does every person on site, down to the newest laborer, have the authority to stop work? Those are yes-or-no questions, and the hesitation before the answer tells you plenty. Here’s how we run it.

8. Will you actually come to my project?

Some contractors quote a wide territory and then get cold feet when the crossing is three states away. Mobilization is a core capability, not an afterthought. We’re based in Minnesota and have drilled in 28 states, with crews and equipment built to travel.

9. Can I talk to a repeat customer?

References are easy to curate. Repeat business is not. A customer who came back for a second and third project is telling you everything you need to know about how the first one went. Ask for one. Every customer NCDD has worked with has come back, and that’s the reputation we protect on every job.

10. Who from leadership will know my project by name?

At a big outfit, your crossing can be one line in a regional manager’s spreadsheet. At a small company with senior people, the leadership knows every active bore, because there aren’t that many layers between the office and the rig. Our management team has 80+ years of combined HDD experience, and they’re involved from job planning through the final pull.

The pattern behind the questions

Notice what these ten questions have in common: none of them can be answered with a brochure. They force specifics, and specifics are where the field sorts itself.

We built NCDD to answer questions like these without flinching. If you have a crossing coming up and want to put us through the list, get in touch and ask us anything on it. Straight answers are the cheapest thing we provide.