Episode 528: Why They Recruit Veterans, Athletes and Musicians with Glenn Gonzales

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell. I'm here talking with Lynn Gonzalez. And Glenn has had a spectacular few years here building Jet it and it's expanded. He's expanded services, he's expanded geographic leaks, has expanded employees and services. And so Glenn, thanks so much for being with us. Go go through that again. How that you, you told me earlier, but we need to hear it again. Just how much have you grown this thing? Just talk about the employees and the aircraft again. You would like 20 something.

Yeah. We've got 25 airplanes here in North America. 26 is in Europe. Just under 200 employees here, just in the U.S. i think we've crested 200. If you include Canada, we should cross through $100 million in revenue this year. And so our business has been scaling very quickly. We've grew through Covid, which I'm very encouraged by. And I think the thing I'm most proud of is the fact that of the people that we work within our that work at jedit, it's the relationships that we all have. You can go to church with anybody in our company, go to dinner, go and party, hang out with them, and everybody seems to get along. And it speaks volumes about the culture of our organization. I'm so proud of these amazing people that work with us.

But not only expanding globally and the number of aircraft, the employees, how many employees you say you're up to now.

Here in the U.S. we're just under 200. And when you add Canada, I think we've crested 200.

Wow. And so the average income from that group of people is disproportionately high, I would imagine, because of the, you know, the skilled nature of the group that you have with you.

We are the top paying in our space for our flight crew members, for our maintenance technicians. So yes, it does require some technical skill. That skill requires years of experience. And you know, we're grateful for the amazing people that we have.

And also the services that you do talk. You go through that again. You do. What are all the different things you do? You don't just offer the flight service.

Yeah. Our primary, of course, is helping people get from A to B. But we also provide maintenance services. We support our own aircraft. We'll support another individual's aircraft that we are trained on. We offer aircraft management services for those individuals who own a whole Aircraft, we're happy to support them and manage their airplane for them. Pulling your airplane in and out of the hangar is a lot more difficult than people want to give it credit for. And so we will support them through that and support them in dealing with the manufacturer and service and support for your aircraft. And then also we offer brokerage services. If you have an airplane that you're looking to sell or if you are looking to acquire an aircraft, we're happy to support you through that effort also.

And people, I mean, just, this just jumped in my mind. If people do want to follow up with you, how do they follow up?

Yeah, just gojet.com that's G O J E T I T dot com. You can find us there, contact us there. Our careers page is live and, well, we'd love to have more great crew members. We try to hire maintenance technicians and pilots who are great people that happen to have a technical skill.

Now, why do you. Was there some particular philosophy you had that caused you to have being on the higher end of the wage scale compared to others in your industry?

Well, it's really hard to find people in every environment right now. There's so many people that are looking for great opportunities. And aviation is a very unique career field. It requires a unique understanding of a number of facets that come together. So for us, we have to pay a little bit more to maintain the expertise and the value that we need.

And the growth of the company and keeping up with that. Let's talk about what you carried out of. What kind of, you know, you talked about the academy. So which academy did Air Force Academy?

Yeah, there's only one, there's only one academy as far as we're concerned. But no, the Air Force Academy is the school that I attended.

Well, I'm talking live from Colorado Springs, right down the road from your alma mater.

Oh, cool.

As it turns out. And so what kind of athletic, in terms of athletics, what we found in, you know, in marketing and the competitive world of marketing, the disproportionately high percentage of the people who excelled had pretty, you know, had several years of competitive sports in high school. And growing up, they learn teamwork. They learn, you know, sacrificing for common cause. They, you know, they, they learned that winning is better than losing. That's what I always say. I was the greatest athlete in the world in high school, but I did, I did notice that winning was better than losing. And so what kind of sports did you play growing up?

I played basketball. I was in a lot of track and field, whether it be cross country or some of the 800 and 1600 medium distance races. But one of the things we try to do is we try to hire veterans, athletes and musicians. There's a common thread between all of those individuals. There's a level of discipline, there's a level of work ethic. A musician who's playing in an orchestra understands that if they are out of tune, everyone in the audience will hear that one note that is wrong. So they understand that same teamwork mindset that our veterans and our athletes understand. So it's when you bring all of those individuals together with a similar background and experience, work ethic, discipline, teamwork, it seems to work well for how we approach business. And I learned that playing sports myself.

And when did it dawn on you that connection between those abilities, those sports, those activities and business?

I think I have two daughters who are young musicians and I've heard them play a lot of notes out of tune. Much better today. But I think in large part that came about with the universal languages. Math, music and sports are universal languages. No matter where you are in the world, two plus two equals four. And you throw a ball out amongst a group of kids and they'll either kick it, bounce it, or something of the sort of toss it around between one another. And then music, you know, it touches our souls. It may not be the music that you understand completely, but if you hit the right note at the right time, it'll touch your soul. And so those are universal languages. And it's that kind of common thread between each of those things that we also find with those athletes, veterans and musicians.

When you look back in your athletic career, you know, we all have coaches. Were there. Do you think the cut. Do you think your coaches, any of your coaches were that influential on you?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, good and bad. The ones I won with.

I'm glad you brought that up.

Yeah. At the Air Force Academy, we lost a lot of games. And I have a strong distaste for moral victories. There's no such thing as a moral victory. You win or you lose. And so I learned those things from the coaches that I won with, the coaches that I lost with.

And any particular thing that you. That comes back to you in running your business that relates back to any of those coaching experiences or situational things that you went through as you were coming up?

Yeah, I think the thing that I would probably rely upon most is the preparation. You spend so much time preparing for the game, and that's what makes you ready for the actual game itself.

And whereas was that just something you noticed or was that pointed out and, and, you know, made a priority?

You know, if I, if I had to, you know, point to a point in time where I recognize it or realize it. One of my mentors, he said, glenn, you've got this business model. If you don't need to change more than 5% of your business model at any point in time, you've got a winning business. And, you know, from our planning standpoint, we, we are on par and right on schedule for everything that we outlined. Much of it you can read in the case study about us. But we've been growing and building the business in line with our game plan that we initially set out. And that's all about preparation.

We've got a couple of minutes left here, Glenn, but you've earned the right to speak to this particular thing. And that is people get confused with how much planning they need to have before they launch something, you know, and how much preparation and things like that. And the, my advice generally has always been you've got to get enough of a plan to where that it could work, you know, and hopefully you've got a model out there of somebody who's been successful and you generally see how they did it or a variation of that that makes sense to you. But if you stop and wait till you try and solve all of the detail before you get started, you'll never, never get off the ground. And how did you speak to that about how you, you know, what you've got to have to start with and then how that evolves because you're speaking to your plan that you have now. We're following it. But that wasn't, probably wasn't exactly all there in place in the beginning.

Yeah, yeah. You know, sometimes you got to start with a 80% solution and you have the mindset that you're going to solve that last 20% once you get into the thick of it, because you may, there may not be a way to understand what those other risk factors that are associated with that 20% are, but if the timing's right and you're confident in your 80%, then you take the leap. And that was kind of the case here with jedit. It was a two year effort to build the business model. It was an effort of communication with tons and tons and tons of people, prospective customers, people who have experience in finance and accounting and fundraising. It was a tremendous effort to gather as much information as possible to outline and build a strategy from. Here's where I am Today I'm going over there, how do we do it? And trying to figure out as many steps along the way.

And would you say the primary driver on that was the questions you had because you had to figure, you know, this was going to be your life, your money, your credibility. And was the primary driver on pulling that information in and getting those answers, questions that you had?

Absolutely, it was. But it was also the conversations with other people. Yeah, what am I missing? What don't I know? I don't know what I don't know. So tell me from your experience with what you've heard from me. And so it requires you to get in front of the people that have the information that you trust, what they have to tell you. I think of it, and this isn't my acronym, but air, we all need air to breathe. So you need access in business, you need information and you need resources. The air that came about, I was fortunate enough to be around a lot of successful business people, that that was the access. I wasn't afraid to ask them for information and to build a business plan around that information. And you've got Google and people to talk to and the library, whatever the case may be, gather as much information as possible and then those resources, once you have a game plan now you can go and ask for resources, whether it's financial resources, time resources, you know, investing your own personal resources. But you've got to have that air, that access information and resources in order to get things moving.

Hey, this has been so much fun, so much information. And I'll tell you this, you're such a low key guy. You kind of, you know, if people, my challenge has been here to not let you fly under the radar. You're so, you're so smooth at how you run your business, how you see things, how you navigate it. And it would be so easy for people to say, yeah, you know, I know that, I know that. No, you don't. You know, the reason I know you don't know it is because you don't have Glenn's track record, you know, and so just tremendous compliment to you for how far you come, how well you come and how well you've done it and really the foundation you have laid for going forward. And I'm happy for the people that are working with you and I'm excited about your future. And so what would you say as a wrap up comment here for that you've learned or that you would say to people, you know, they're building, they already might have something, they might be getting ready to start their own company or they're ready for a whole nother stage. What would you pass on about being the leader, about being an entrepreneur? Any one last thing jumped in your mind?

You know, it goes back to that mindset. I've been here before. Yeah, I've been here for the good times. I've had great experiences and fun. I've been through some tough times, too. And I overcame. I made it through. And you will. It'll suck at times. It sucks right now for famine in our industry. We've got so much demand and so little supply to service that demand. But, well, we've been here before. Different situation, different times. Hard. Take a deep breath, stretch. You'll get into your second wind and you keep pushing through.

I'm going to give you a call next time I'm in Greensboro.

Come see us.

I want to come see this operation. Thanks so much. Thanks so much, Glenn. This has been so much fun, man. Look forward to talking again down the road. Thanks for listening to the Million Dollar Mastermind. If you felt there were any valuable takeaways from this episode, please take a minute and leave us a five star review. Your feedback is important and really helps us get the word out to a wider audience. Remember, we have a valuable webinar that is absolutely free. Register for it right now@whiteallonwinning.com thanks for listening.