Joseph DeWoody’s college football story takes a while to get to the celebration. He arrived at Baylor in 2000 without a scholarship, a defensive tackle trying to find a place. By his senior season, he was the starting center. The familiar sports ending would stop there, perhaps with the award he received as Baylor’s offensive lineman of the year in 2004. DeWoody’s subsequent career makes the less photogenic part of the job seem more interesting: paying attention while other people do something everyone can see.
He now co-leads Valor, the Fort Worth business he helped found in 2018. Its work includes mineral rights management and oil and gas accounting. There are maps, leases, production records and payments. The customer wants the whole thing to make sense. A promising asset can come with a thoroughly unpromising filing system.
A place on the line
The early Baylor record is wonderfully resistant to a tidy montage. DeWoody redshirted his first year. In 2001, he appeared in one game and recorded a tackle. In 2002, he moved to the offensive line and played in two games. A season later, he appeared in all 12, including three starts at left guard, and earned a scholarship after working into the rotation.
Those are modest increments, recorded before anybody knew what business he would eventually build. A new position. More playing time. A place in the lineup. By September 2004, Baylor listed him among three starters who had originally arrived as walk-ons. The starting center had been assembled over several seasons.
He was also studying business, completing a bachelor’s degree in 2005 and an MBA in 2006. The combination put entrepreneurship and finance alongside an unusually practical education in depending on the people beside him. An offensive line is a rather unforgiving group project.
DeWoody grew up in Fort Worth and attended Southwest Christian School. His high-school record includes all-state football recognition and all-district baseball honors as a first baseman. Competition was part of the picture before Baylor; persistence supplied the college chapter.
A customer who kept coming back
After Baylor, he entered the family’s oil and gas business, Pendragon Oil. His work exposed him to the industry’s connected tasks: leasing, accounting, prospects and the monthly administration that follows production. There was plenty to learn after the well had been drilled.
Clear Fork Royalty followed. DeWoody founded the mineral and royalty acquisition business with his father, Michael, and Ryan Haggerty, his brother-in-law. The family connection was literal. So was the responsibility: buying an interest means dealing with someone who has a reason to sell it.
By 2016, Clear Fork had customers across 24 states. One South Texas customer had sold interests to the company 20 times over four and a half years. DeWoody said the customer valued the speed of the transactions and the help keeping track of what remained. That anecdote supplies something an award cannot: a person choosing to come back after already knowing how the company behaves.
“Doing the right thing should never be conditional.”
Joseph DeWoody / on Clear Fork Royalty
The company received the Greater Tarrant Business Ethics Award in 2014 and a Better Business Bureau Torch Award in 2016. These recognitions belonged to the business, rather than serving as a character certificate for every future decision. Their place in his career is nevertheless specific. Transparency was already a public business commitment before Valor existed.
When a family asked for help
The idea behind Valor grew out of work DeWoody was already doing. While managing oil and gas investment partnerships, he was approached by a family with substantial holdings that wanted help managing its interests. His existing approach brought land knowledge to the accounts. He wanted the software to make the same connection.
The problem was organizational as much as technical. Accounting tools held one part of the picture. Land records and maps held another. Professional firms could concentrate on one discipline while leaving the owner to join the pieces. DeWoody wanted accountants and landmen working together, with information connected in a common platform.
In 2018, he assembled a team and secured investment from oil and gas families in Midland and Fort Worth. Valor would combine professional services with its own mineral.tech software. The founding idea was close to the workbench: give the people managing the asset a more complete view of it.
In a 2020 interview, DeWoody emphasized the importance of clarity in fees as well as client data. He questioned the convention of charging a percentage of gross revenue merely because the industry had done so before. The proposition depended on an owner understanding the service being purchased, along with the asset being managed.
His description of the team was equally revealing. It included professionals who owned mineral interests themselves, sometimes across generations. That gave the business a particular point of view: the person looking at the report might also know the experience of receiving one.
The bank needs an answer, too
As Valor developed, DeWoody discussed a further audience for the same work: banks whose clients held oil and gas interests. Some lacked a complete technical staff for those assets. A bank could have a relationship with the owner and still need outside help with the specialized administration.
That is an unglamorous but consequential place to build. The assets already exist. The institution already has obligations. The opening is in doing the continuing work well enough that another organization can rely on it.
Today, mineral.tech organizes ownership information, digitized records, accounting and production data. Its features include mapping interests and tracking revenue by well, county, state, product and payor. Clients can inspect their information online. For the professionals, the practical value comes from being able to compare things that otherwise live apart.
DeWoody’s professional credentials include Certified Professional Landman and Certified Mineral Manager. His public biography also lists training in coding and technology, along with brand strategy and digital marketing. The combination helps explain the range of work involved in building a services company: understanding the asset, organizing the information and explaining the offering to a prospective customer. His career has also included industry representation and public service. Governor Rick Perry appointed him to a six-year term on the Texas Board of Professional Geoscientists. Alongside running businesses, he has participated in the institutions surrounding the industry in which those businesses operate.
Valor describes the platform as software powering its team, rather than a standalone software subscription. That choice helps explain DeWoody’s business. A dashboard can present a discrepancy. Someone still has to understand it, investigate it and carry the work forward. The service relationship continues after the screen loads.
2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026. Valor’s 2026 listing reports 58% revenue growth over three years.
The growth record has a public marker. Valor entered the Inc. 5000 at No. 572 in 2023, returned in 2024 and 2025, and ranked No. 4,070 in 2026. The list measures revenue growth over a three-year period. It offers evidence of expansion, with each year belonging to a different measurement window.
Fort Worth, with the sleeves rolled up
The business has a national footprint, while DeWoody’s public life remains closely connected to Fort Worth. He appears on the Fort Worth Chamber’s board roster and the Camp Bowie District’s board list. These are local commitments alongside the work of managing interests spread across producing regions.
There is also a museum evening with a less conventional dress code. Joseph and Kimberly DeWoody chaired the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History’s annual Mad Scientist Ball. Valor’s photographs show colleagues gathered around a table and the couple speaking at a lectern, in lab coats. An executive wardrobe occasionally benefits from pockets designed for a different profession.
In 2025, the Chamber recognized him with the Susan Halsey Executive Leadership Award. He also received D CEO’s Energy Services and Technology Executive of the Year award that year, having won the same category in 2021. A further recognition followed in July 2026, when he was named to the Dallas-Fort Worth Titan 100.
Outside the award announcements, his own answers are more pleasantly miscellaneous. He has described himself as a karate black belt, named London as a place worth revisiting and identified cowboy boots as a splurge. These details do not explain a company. They do make the person easier to imagine outside its conference room.
Room for the next conversation
DeWoody shares Valor’s leadership with Clifton DuBose, a friend since kindergarten. The relationship predates the company by decades. Their careers eventually supplied different experience for a shared enterprise, with DuBose bringing an oil and gas law background.
Looking ahead in September 2026, DeWoody described opportunities to do more for operators through accounting, owner relations and regulatory services. He also said acquisitions were under consideration. These remain ambitions, rather than completed transactions. They extend the company’s existing premise into more of the work surrounding an energy asset.
He has also argued that automating repetitive tasks should leave professionals with more time for clients. That sets a useful standard for the next phase: the owner should get a better conversation as well as a quicker process. Efficiency has a recipient.
There is a line back to the former walk-on in all this, without requiring football to explain every decision he has made. A center works where the play begins and other people’s progress depends on getting the details right. DeWoody has found a business in the continuing responsibilities around valuable assets. The work begins again each month, whether anybody is keeping a highlight reel or not.