Meet Leslie Tipping, One of DFW’s Fastest-Rising Mineral Managers
From six-figure surprises to $250 million under management, the founder of Tipping Mineral Management is redefining how mineral wealth is found—and who gets to keep it.
On a Friday afternoon in August, Leslie Tipping is on cloud nine. At the Lovers Lane office of her company, Tipping Mineral Management, she and her team had been auditing a new client they had won from another firm. In the process, they discovered deed errors. So, they corrected the records, notified operators, and worked with a landman to identify wells where royalties were owed.
As a result, Tipping received word that an oil company was sending her new client a check for $608,000. For Tipping, it was a thrilling validation of the meticulous, puzzle-like work she relishes.
There’s not a lot of glamour or adventure involved in her industry. The work of a landman isn’t done by wearing a hard hat and standing next to a well, Tipping explains. It’s done in courthouses, looking over title abstracts, and at kitchen tables, negotiating leases with owners.
At her company, she sits on the other side, helping mineral and royalty owners make the most of their assets. A year after leaving large fiduciary institutions to establish her firm, Tipping has drawn on her field experience and eye for detail to fuel rapid growth. And even more expansion is ahead, she says.
“I didn’t leave a big institution to start a small firm,” Tipping says. “I left a big institution to start a better one.”
The Making of a Landman
Growing up in Kingwood near Houston, Tipping initially swore off a career in oil and gas. Her father was a petroleum engineer, and she had seen firsthand how the bust of the ’80s impacted her friends and family—including her mother, who ran an office supply store.
After graduating from Texas Tech and attending South Texas College of Law, it didn’t take Tipping long to realize that a legal career wasn’t the right fit. She shifted to estate planning and probate, where her knack for precision proved valuable. A move to North Texas after her first child put her closer to family. “You go where the babysitting is,” she says.
Friends in oil and gas encouraged Tipping to become a landman. By 2003, the Barnett Shale in North Texas was booming. She knew how to navigate estate planning, probate, and even genealogy, and frequently had dealings with energy companies while working in Houston on behalf of clients. It made perfect sense.
Tipping is zeroed in on opportunities involving the Permian basin—especially because North Texas is home to a bounty of mineral owners.
Tipping landed a job at Carla Petroleum and began learning how to “run title,” the process of researching and verifying the history of ownership of mineral rights or surface property. She took to it well and liked that the work involved precision. She was quickly promoted to crew chief and had about 30 people working for her at the height of the Barnett Shale boom—including her father, sister, brother, and brother-in-law.
But there were challenges along the way. When natural gas prices dipped, Tipping found herself having to lay off her dad. Rather than fire her sister and brother-in-law, too, she left her post and promoted her sister, Teresa, to crew chief.
Tipping went on to land a mineral management position at JPMorgan. She was initially wary of joining a trust company. “I had negotiated leases with trust departments before, and I was never impressed by their knowledge base in the oil and gas industry,” she says. But she found her landman background served her well. After about three years in the role, she was lured back into the field by the promise of the Permian Basin, where she again ran title and negotiated leases. “I really wanted that experience, because that was clearly going to be a very hot spot,” she says.
She then took on a post overseeing mineral management and business development with Northern Trust, a Chicago-based wealth management firm. During her overall 10 years with the company and five years in leadership, she brought in specialized landmen and petroleum engineers to deepen expertise for mineral owners.
“That said, it was still basically a check-box service for a large fiduciary organization,” Tipping says. It was a good job, she adds, “but it got to a point where I felt like there was something more I could do.”
Exploring New Opportunities
Tipping spent a year weighing whether to strike out on her own. “The bureaucracy of global corporations makes getting work done difficult,” she says, “having to do all sorts of reporting to the fiduciary organization and the corporate chain of command, versus actual mineral management.” By opening Tipping Mineral Management, she adds, “we’re able to be nimble; we’re able to be proactive.”
External forces were at play, too; three separate people had approached her to suggest she start her own enterprise and offered to invest. “You can’t deny what the universe is throwing at you,” Tipping says.
She knew the perfect person to provide guidance: her father. He walked her through the potential risks but ultimately told her it was inevitable—she would do whatever she set her mind to. He was right.
She launched the firm last year with backing from Ryan and Sean Bellomy, brothers who had started their own oil and gas company in 2009. They first encountered Tipping during her stint at Northern Trust and were struck by how her field experience informed her approach—an uncommon advantage among mineral managers.
“She has to be the best mineral manager any of us has ever come across,” Ryan Bellomy says. “It’s not because we benefited from her [expertise], but because of the way we were treated when we interacted with her.”
Dallas-based Bellomy Group specializes in acquiring and managing non-operated working and mineral interests in the Permian Basin. At larger institutions, trustees often stonewalled offers without explanation, leaving the brothers to question whether those trustees were truly aligned with their clients. With Tipping, it was different. She built transparent, personal relationships with mineral owners and made sure they understood how each decision affected their assets.
“I think that’s maybe what attracted us to her,” Ryan Bellomy says. “She wanted to get to know us, because she wanted to know, ‘Who’s leasing my clients, and do I trust them?’ Nobody from one of the large banks is going to reach out to you proactively and say, ‘Hey, I want to learn about your business.’”
The Bellomys didn’t necessarily always win a lease with Tipping, he adds, but the decision was always fair, and they always got an explanation.
“It’s a unique skill set and industry,” Sean says. “There aren’t very many good ones, to be honest. I really don’t know why that is, but I think so few people work in the field long enough to really get that field experience and expertise and understand the industry from the ground level.”
Fueling the Next Chapter
Tipping knew that launching her own company would require rapid growth in the first year. Revenue closely follows oil prices, and she had her own “what-ifs” to face. What would happen, for example, if another disruption like the pandemic came along? She’d have to battle it on her own, without the protection of a larger institution.
So, she set aggressive pro forma goals for year one—and met them within nine months. Now, she’s confident in what the second year will bring. The company is nearing $250 million in assets under management with more clients coming on board.
Long term, her goal is to redefine mineral management—combining technical, legal, and fiduciary expertise to serve as true stewards of family resources, not just processors of royalty checks.
The Bellomy brothers see that philosophy in practice. They cite her 24-hour response policy and her firm’s proactive approach—rare in the industry. And they see it in her relationships. “She could be at a bar in Midland or in a boardroom in New York, and she fits in,” Ryan says. “She’s polished, she knows what to say, and she gets along with anyone.”
In the future, Tipping intends to explore diversification. “We’re looking at being able to support the mineral and landowners who are looking for more solar and wind projects and other opportunities in those areas,” she says.
But for now, she remains zeroed in on opportunities involving the Permian and says Dallas is home base for investors. “A lot of the companies that are drilling out in the Permian are headquartered in Houston,” Tipping says. “Houston might be drilling the wells, but DFW is cashing the checks—and we need to recognize that.”
Feature written by Audrey Henvey for D Magazine | November 2025