By Bob Percy
Aviation is my specialty – I’ve worked in this industry for over 25 years. Before coming to JetRight Aerospace Holdings, LLC, I worked at Embraer Aircraft Maintenance Services as the COO and Managing Director. During my tenure, we implemented an excellence program, where I learned a lot about how to implement lean processes in organizations to improve the quality of customer experience, and where it quickly became a career focus of mine. When I founded JetRight Aerospace Holdings and its child company JetRight, I wanted to not only provide excellent services in all things aviation and aerospace, but also to pass on our business knowledge to up-and-coming aviation businesses.
On one side of the business, we provide a variety of aviation and aerospace services, including charter services, fleet management, maintenance and more. But also as a holding group, our other function is buying small- to mid-sized companies that need help taking off and making sure they have the right foundational pieces to move forward on their own – things like strong company culture, employee engagement, revenue streams and quality safety systems.
In the two years since we started, we’ve grown to 58 people and three business units on our services side. Plus, on the holding group side, we have four different development program tracks that we offer: our “Quality SMS” program focusing on building better quality and safety systems, our “Fuel” program focusing on maintaining the well-being of employees and associates, our “Grow” program focusing on associate development and our “Rewards” program focusing on creating formal reward and recognition programs. Needless to say, we have a lot of moving parts and have managed a lot of growth in a short time.
We have been successful in helping the companies we take under our wing because our own team is already flying straight. With the help of our business coach David Pierce from Petra Coach and the Rockefeller Habits – the business strategies that the legendary John D. Rockefeller used to build his empire – we’ve now made our different units, programs and people feel and function like one.
The good news is that other companies can take advantage of what we’ve learned and achieve similar growth. Here’s how:
Align the team
Our business coach helped us realize that the first step is not to set sales goals or 10-year initiatives – it’s to make sure we have the right foundations in place. Keeping everyone on the same page across many moving parts is made significantly easier when we can all unite under the same core principles. After all, alignment is the key facet of the Rockefeller Habits.
In our first-ever planning session, we worked to outline our core values and core purpose. That doesn’t mean that we came up with them out of thin air, but that we discovered them. We told stories about people who epitomized who we are as a company and what they specifically did that stood out. As we talked, key words and phrases appeared. We realized those were the values we already had, but they had not been identified and promoted within the company. Similarly, we were led through a process to define our core purpose – we all knew what we did, of course, but it was important to state it in a way that means something and is motivational.
We worked together as one team so that these foundations would encompass everything that all our units and divisions would hold dear and implement every day. Now, our core purpose, “Give businesses the tools and resources they need to ‘knock it out of the park,’” and our core values – such as “attention to detail” and “whatever it takes” – are things that we practice across the whole business. We make sure to use them in our everyday language, in how we hire, in the partnerships we form and in the work we do.
Once we had our foundations in place, we could look ahead and set goals. The three business units meet together to discuss five-year and 10-year goals, as well as our annual goals. Then each unit has its own quarterly planning session to outline three-month goals that support the bigger initiatives. This process ensures we’re all aligned with where we want to go, while having the freedom to get there in the best way for each business unit.
As a result of our alignment, we all have a mutual understanding and appreciation of what the company values, what we’re here to do and what we want to accomplish, which has instilled deep pride in our company and our work.
Focus on people
We got into this business to do things differently than what we had seen before – meaning: to do it right. We wanted to create a company staffed with a group of like-hearted people that work hard to impress customers in every aspect that we can.
To do that, we’ve always made our people part of the equation. We say “people + process = profit,” and we live by that. We place a big focus on the well-being of our employees, rather than only focusing on processes or revenue. In turn, the result has been streamlined processes and increased revenue.
We’ve been very intentional about developing a culture where team members feel supported and engaged. This can entail group initiatives like company events, birthday celebrations and publicly recognizing team members’ “wins,” as well as one-on-one interactions, mentorship and letting people voice their concerns. Each piece of our culture helps our team bond and work together for something bigger than what any one person could accomplish.
We’ve found that if you make employees’ jobs easier and more enjoyable, then they’ll be able to assist the customer better. That’s the true secret formula to customer service.
Improve continuously
To make sure we are constantly impressing our customers and blowing their expectations out of the water, we make it a priority to continuously improve ourselves – individually and as a company. We work with Petra to make our own culture and processes better, so we can also set up the companies we oversee for their own success. Plus, we place a high value on ongoing personal and professional development.
Our organization is unique in that we get to help a lot of different companies improve, even while we seek to improve, and I’d say we learn as much from them as they do from us. When companies leave our group and move on to function independently, they have the groundwork in place to keep the momentum going, and we are confident that we can help more companies like them.
As our business coach has told us many times, “You can’t change a company in six months or less, but by implementing these tactics little by little, you’ll start to see the improvement over time. When you look back in one, two, three years, you’ll see how far you’ve come.” And that’s proven to be true. In a company like ours, it’s crucial that the changes happen across the board. That way, we’ll all be on the same page as we move toward continued success.
Bob Percy is founding partner and chief operating officer of JetRight Aerospace Holdings. He is a diversified aviation and aerospace professional with deep experience in leadership, technical operations and continuous improvement programs, and his specialties include team growth, operations management, organizational strategy, strategic growth, continuous improvement programs and quality and safety systems. He is a champion of JetRight’s mission to be an all-around example of excellence.
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