We thought 2016 and 2017 were busy years for us as we began exploring the business of flight in the European sector. We had no idea how busy that would make 2018!
As described in Charter Broker’s December 2017 issue, http://www.charterbroker.aero/mag_story.html?ident=13246 ,
we ultimately worked towards and succeeded in establishing our own AOC to focus on managing business aircraft in Europe. With that done, we thought you might be interested in some of the factors that led us here and what’s happening as a result.
So, let’s go back to the beginning for a moment. If you’re in the private jet management industry anywhere in the world, it’s easy to get caught up in the day to day challenges and requirements of your equipment, your people and your customers. This is an intricate, 24/7 business that can take up all of your attention and energy as an organization. The problem with that is it can result in your executive team losing sight of their own long term objectives. Think about it. How often do you put long term planning on the backburner because everyone’s “too busy”? Too often, we’d guess.
The single most important thing we did was to stop listening to our “too busy” voice and force ourselves to make the time to step back and look at our business annually through the eyes of our employees, our customers and ultimately the marketplace.
By assessing what we’d learned year over year, both good and bad, it helped us do two things really well. First, we could objectively look at customer satisfaction and needs as they applied to our existing business and secondly, we could look at the big picture in terms of examining the business of flight on a global level. This helped us ensure continued world-class customer service and identify where other opportunities for our business model might exist.
We set in motion a planning process that allowed us to gather input from key employees and key customers around the world. We put time into analyzing and organizing the information to develop hypotheses and draw conclusions. But the real trick was getting the right people in a room for multiple days to discuss, debate and finally agree on our goals and priorities. This wasn’t easy but it was worthwhile because once we’d done this, the only thing left to do was create action plans, timelines and assign responsibilities. Only actions make the business of flight happen and our planning process created the pathway.
And that’s how we got to building a business that now serves the U.K., Russia, Middle East and North Africa. In-market analysis by team members, industry observations and taking the time to put it all together showed us what was clearly an underserviced region ripe for a new private jet management provider. The rest was just a lot of hard work!