Richard Emery – Building Private Jet Sales Teams – EP.251

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(00:00:00) – Intro

(00:02:37) – Richard’s career and background

(00:05:47) – How do you organize a high-performing sales team?

(00:15:06) – Identifying ideal customer profiles

(00:24:55) – Developing a customer outreach team

(00:28:51) – Having discipline and focus on a sales team

(00:39:34) – Leadership philosophies

(00:51:54) – What can CEOs do to make their sales teams more effective?

Alex Bridgeman: Well, Richard, thanks for coming on the podcast. It’s really fun to see you and chat with you more. Also, I’m excited to hopefully see you in Dallas on a trip coming up here. But I’d love to dive into all things business aviation. We can start on the sales side; that’s a big part of your background at Gulfstream and Hawker Beechcraft and whatnot. So, I would love to kind of hear about your experiences at those spots and some of the maybe kind of lessons learned through that time. 

Richard Emery: Sure. Alex, thank you. It’s a pleasure to be on your podcast, and yeah, I’d be happy to discuss my career kind of in sales and what I’ve done with various organizations, all of them great companies, all of them filled with great people. And I really enjoyed the time that I spent doing that. 

Alex Bridgeman: Do you want to start with walking through your career? 

Richard Emery: Sure. Yeah. So, my career, I started out as a young guy coming right out of school, I worked for a company called Canadair, which was building the Challenger 600 and Challenger 601 at the time, and it was a Canadian owned company. I spent some time in sales support with Canadair. I left there. I joined a large completion center called Casey Aviation, where I helped with strategy and acquiring new businesses that were outside of the completion and MRO realm. We were trying to grow the business in a way so that we could kind of offset some of the sine waves that happen in business aviation with more services. I went from there to Bombardier where I managed an 11 state territory selling the Challenger and eventually the Global Express, and then moved out of Bombardier and was recruited to go help United Airlines start a fractional business, which was very interesting at the time. It was pre-9/11, so it was an interesting time in that world, very young days, NetJets. And we did that through 9/11. That kind of ended that business for United Airlines, and we weren’t able to find a buyer for it. So that’s when I was asked to come in and help do some consulting with Gulfstream, which led to me helping to reorganize the sales force at Gulfstream and then becoming a vice president of sales over there. After Gulfstream, I migrated to Hawker Beechcraft where we were trying to turn around the business. The business was owned by Goldman Sachs and Onex, and they were bringing in a new management team which I was part of to try to go see if we could save the company and grow the business. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out. So, we wound up shutting down the Hawker line and then taking Beechcraft through bankruptcy. And coming out on the other end, we operated the business for about 18 months and then sold the business to Textron. And so, very involved with sales organizations and sales restructuring and that sort of thing in all of those companies. 

Alex Bridgeman: So, I like the- I’m fascinated by sales as a background. It’s a small part of my background, mostly in housing data, not necessarily airplanes. Airplanes sound way cooler. But what I find so interesting is the development of a sales team and that, like how do you organize a high performing sales team? Can you talk about what that looked like at Gulfstream and maybe how that carried over to turning around the sales team at Hawker?

Richard Emery: Sure. And I think kind of previous to that, I had the incredibly good fortune to have some folks that were really, really great mentors to me when I was at Bombardier and Canadair and some of the finest salespeople in the business, guys like Brian Moss and Keith Garner and Ed Osgood and Jeff Nye. A lot of these guys were the best in the business. And so I was fortunate because that’s how I learned. That became my baseline for how you do everything. And so, when I went into Gulfstream, I was asked to come into Gulfstream and take a look at a sales group that had done very well historically, but the CEO had a new paradigm for them in that he wanted to look at a sales force that was focused on existing customers and a sales force that was focused on new customers. He wanted to grow the new customer business. And so, we did that and put that sales force together, wound up looking really, really hard at process. And what I’ve historically found in any new situation, Hawker Beechcraft or Gulfstream, is the organization didn’t lack expertise. It didn’t lack effort. What it really lacked was structure and rigor and discipline. A lot of people will tell you, salespeople hate structure, rigor, and discipline. They want to be out there doing their own thing. They want to be- They’re the hunters. They’re the guys out in the field and all that. I don’t really think that’s the case. And so, what we were able to do is we were able to bring that structure and rigor and discipline into the sales force and to the sales side of Gulftream and create some processes there and identify some weaknesses there that then allowed the sales force to have better support, better tools, a more focused mission, and then turn them loose and then let them go. And with the better support and the better tools and the more focused mission, they were able to accomplish more than they had ever been able to accomplish. So, that’s really what I found both at Hawker and at Gulfstream. And I’ll give you an example. When I went into Gulfstream, we would have these weekly meetings, and you would get all the sales guys on the phone, and we’re talking about deals and what your pipeline looks like and that sort of thing. And we kind of discovered that out of the storytelling that took place on those calls, you could glean some information that was important to are we going to get this done or are we not going to get this done. And I would start to talk to these sales guys, and they’d be on the road, and they’d be in Washington, DC, or they’d be in Florida, or they’d be in Chicago or wherever. And at three o’clock in the afternoon, I’d reach out to them, and they would pick up the phone and they’d be in their hotel room. I said, what are you doing in your hotel room at three o’clock in the afternoon? Shouldn’t you be out in front of clients? I know, but I got to get this report into Gulfstream, and I’ve got to enter all this information, and I’ve got follow up calls with this guy, and I’ve got to make sure we get these FedExes out this afternoon and all this stuff. And so, I started asking the question, I said to the sales force, how much of your time are you spending on administrative duties? And we figured out that each sales guy was spending somewhere between 65 and 70% on admin. The company had made the decision that we’re not going to have admins for the sales guys. They can go do this themselves. And the equation was not that difficult. Salespeople at Gulfstream are the highest paid people in the company. They are responsible for generating the revenues of the business that supports everybody else in the company. And we quickly figured out that we could go hire, let’s just for simplification purposes, I don’t remember the exact numbers, but let’s say that we had 20 sales people. We could go hire six admins and have each admin support three salespeople. And all of a sudden, they went from spending 65% of their time on admin stuff to 15% of their time on admin stuff. And not surprisingly, you started to have better pipelines. You started to have more conversations with potential customers. You started to understand what the existing customers needed better. And we were able to flip that over and began to have record sales simply from a function of asking the question, where are you spending your time? So I think when a lot of people think about sales, they’re thinking about, oh, these guys are out whining and dining customers and playing golf and doing all that stuff. And that’s kind of an old madman model. It’s the old days and two martini lunches and all that stuff. That’s not the case anymore. It’s a profession and it’s a skill. And you have people out there that are very, very good at it. And it’s a very important role in a company because, quite frankly, nothing happens until something gets sold in a company. So that’s really what we were focusing on at Gulfstream. When we went to Hawker Beech, again, walked into an organization that didn’t lack expertise or effort, but it did lack a lot of structure, rigor, and discipline. And we brought that into the organization. We changed the way we talked about opportunities. And we basically had a language that defined how you were doing in a deal, and we took that language from just the sales group into management across the company. So, everybody was speaking the same language, so everybody understood where we are in the sales cycle, what was happening, what the expectation was, when the revenue was expected to be accounted for. We took a Tuesday morning sales meeting that was lasting an hour and a half, and we got it to where it was about a 30-minute meeting because there was no more storytelling. It was very simple. It was this account, I’m at this stage, my next action is this, my expected outcome of that action, best case scenario is this, worst case scenario is this, that’s going to happen on this day, and then my next step after that will be this. And that’s it. And we really did some serious training around that to where we could create ideal customer profiles. We could create that. We could stack rank customers based on their ideal customer profile. And we would know based on this profile that we had developed, I could tell pretty easily whether or not a deal was going to get done in a month, in a quarter, in six months, or whether or not we should really be spending any more time on that and should set that one to the side and go focus on something else that might be more productive. 

Alex Bridgeman: So, what was the ideal customer for Gulfstream versus Canadair versus Hawker? How did that profile change at each location? 

Richard Emery: That’s a great question. So, it really came down to identifying when somebody bought a Gulfstream product, it’s not difficult, when somebody bought a Gulfstream product, why’d they buy it? Some of them bought it for the brand. Some of them bought it because they felt like Gulfstream had better support than some of the competitive companies. Some of them bought it because the chief pilot or the aviation department manager had always flown Gulfstreams and that’s what he was comfortable flying and they didn’t have to go retrain the whole department and they didn’t have to do that. And so, we just started finding reasons why people were buying these airplanes, and we would say, okay, how important is that reason on a scale from one to ten? If somebody bought an airplane, and this happens all the time, it drives the aircraft sales guy crazy, they might buy an airplane because the client liked this interior better than this interior. It had nothing to do with the airplane, but they just liked the way this interior felt better than this interior. That’s very low. That’s a one. If they’re buying the airplane because of the power of the brand, that’s probably more along the lines of an eight or a nine because that’s translating itself across many different people involved in the sale from the pilot to the chief of maintenance to the CFO to the CEO. Support was a huge part of it. How well did you support the airplane when it was fielded? How easy was it for these people to get the support they felt like was a requirement for operating that airplane, and how often did you exceed that customer’s expectations? That was a big one. And quite frankly, a lot of your listeners probably know Brian Moss. And Brian’s built a career around support sales airplanes. Because at the end of the day, really a G600, G650, a Global Express are all going to do the same thing for you. The cabins are about the same. They go about the same speed. Two pilots needed to fly it, if we’re going to have one flight attendant on it. They take off from about the same runway, get to the same altitude. They have the same cabin pressure. So now you’ve got to start thinking about what differentiates each airplane from each other. And I would say that one of the most apparent differentiators is who can support that airplane better as a company. So, those were things that we would look at and that’s how we would create our ideal customer profile. What kind of mode were they in? Were they in a buying mode? Were they in a I’ve got to solve a problem mode? Were they in kind of a stationary mode? I don’t really need to do anything now, but maybe I’d get interested if the right deal came along. So what kind of modes they were in. And then ultimately what was in it for the guys who were buying the airplane. And I really think that when you get into a complex sale, like selling an airplane or selling a service like investment banking or real estate or any of those things, it’s a complex sale. You’re not typically just dealing with one person. You’re dealing with multiple people in an organization. And each one of those people in that organization have a different motivator for why they’re doing that transaction. And until you understand what each of those people’s motivators are and until you understand kind of what mode each one of those people are in, you may get a deal done and be surprised because, hey, I don’t know where the hell, I don’t know why these people just popped up, they wanted to buy an airplane, we sold them an airplane, this is great. Or you might have a deal that you’ve worked on for years and it never gets done and you don’t have any understanding why. Well, you probably didn’t understand what was going on with each of the people that were involved in the sale. Something in that universe is holding you up, and you weren’t able to identify that. So that’s really what we worked hard on is really understanding the landscape around each customer and who was involved, what they were trying to accomplish with that acquisition, and then how could you overcome objections and push back to get to the result that you needed. 

Alex Bridgeman: I could imagine some of your customers being like corporate flight departments, fractional owners, individuals. Was there any like unique- what were some of the most unique customers that you interacted with at your different brands? You don’t have to name any, but I’m just curious, what are some of the more unique out-of-the-way experiences you’ve had? 

Richard Emery: Oh, I mean, really, I think aircraft salespeople could get together and write a book, and it would be a bestseller based on the stories that take place. We all have crazy stories. It’s a fascinating job because you get to interact with some of the most influential people in the world, especially if you’re selling large cabin aircraft. You’re dealing with the guys that are on the cover of the magazines all the time and the CEOs of Fortune 100 companies and the billionaires and that sort of thing. So some of them have bigger personalities than others. And some of the stories were tragic, some of them were funny, some of them were kind of stories that just made you really understand the way a person thinks. I mean, we had a story of a colleague of mine that flew a CEO down to South America on a demonstration flight. And the CEO was a big man, very overweight. And they land in Santiago, Chile, and this guy goes up to a mine, and he dies right there on the spot at the mine. And so now they’ve got to figure out how to get him back. They’ve got to get him back in a helicopter, they’ve got to get him back to the airplane, they’ve got to get him to the embassy, they’ve got to get him back. I can remember getting a phone call on this flight – I can’t believe that this just happened, what do we do? Kind of thing. Funny stories of wealthy people that would send aircraft sales guys on errands on a demo flight, to go pick up a package for them. And they would bring it back to the individual. And it would be a very exotic piece of jewelry that was worth millions of dollars. The salesperson didn’t understand what he had sitting in his hotel room for three days. And stories that really showed the character of a person. I remember delivering an airplane with my salesperson in Miami to an individual. And the individual and his wife came on the airplane and we had some champagne for him. It was his first airplane and whatnot. And the guy is walking around his airplane, he turns around, he had tears in his eyes. And I said, is everything okay? He goes, everything is great because I just- He said, Richard, I’m from Cuba. I grew up in Cuba, and never in my wildest dreams would I have ever expected this to happen to me in my life. And so, those were the parts of doing that job that were rewarding and were fun and just woke up every day being thankful that you were doing what you were doing. A lot of hard work, a lot of late nights, a lot of traveling, a lot of frustration involved in it. Because a lot of times, there were things outside of your control that you couldn’t do anything about that caused you to lose the deal. 

Alex Bridgeman: And when you’re- you mentioned developing like a new customer acquisition team. What’s the outreach process like for reaching people who might buy a Gulfstream? I assume it’s more sophisticated than cold calling for a $40, $50 million jet. What is that like? What are you doing as a team to generate new leads, new customers? 

Richard Emery: It’s a process. So, kind of like anything, if you’re going to start with a sales process, you start with who has airplanes. Okay, so let’s start with your list of everybody that has airplanes. And then let’s say if we’re trying to sell a G450 or a G550 or a G650, that’s going to eliminate a big chunk of those people with smaller airplanes. And then you can even parse the list further to who has bought used airplanes and who has bought new airplanes originally. It’s changed quite a bit in the last probably five to seven years, but there was a period of time where a used aircraft buyer never bought a new airplane, and a new aircraft buyer rarely bought a used airplane. With the market dynamics that have happened over the last five, seven, nine years, that’s changed. So, in that case, it was let’s find the new aircraft buyers. Let’s find the people that like to buy new aircraft. Then you go from there to, okay, who’s running their flight department? And you start there. And you start calling on the aviation director or the chief of maintenance, that sort of thing. And all of the time, you do know who the CEO is, and you’re marketing to the CEO with pieces. We would have mailings that would go out and these were very sophisticated marketing pieces. They might cost, you might be sending them to 500, 600 people, they might cost $40, $50 bucks a piece, and you were really trying to get your brand in front of them to have them start thinking about your brand. And of course, you were doing other things. You were sponsoring events. You were sponsoring things that the CEO world usually liked to attend. Gulfstream, we were always a part of the World Economic Forum, we were a part of super  bowls, of NASCAR races, of the Forbes 400 dinner. So, you find events that these people like to attend, and you sponsor them and you attend them and you hope to start building a relationship with folks. Because at the end of the day, this was about brand, product, and relationship. And you could probably switch out brand and product as one and two, either way you went. But at the end of the day, I found that the folks that I had really good relationships with, if we had the right brand and we had the right product, you could do a lot of business with those people. 

Alex Bridgeman: At one point you mentioned that the focus and discipline at each brand as a sales team was off. I assume these are kind of aligned where there’s a, if you’re not focusing only on your ideal customer, you’re kind of going off into these other areas or there’s a lack of discipline on cutting off a discussion that’s clearly not going anywhere. Can you talk more in depth about what that- what you meant by having a discipline as a sales team and a focus? 

Richard Emery: Yeah. So, it’s really, I think you can take it as, I always worked off of structure, you’ve got to have the right structure, you’ve got to have the right rigor, you’ve got to have the right ethic and work ethic, and then you’ve got to have discipline. And because you can waste a lot of time and money in selling aircraft, especially. You think about it, think about a demo flight. You’re charging these folks to go on a demo flight. You’re spending a couple of days flying them around. You’ve got crew, you’ve got maintenance on the airplane, and all that. And if you’re not focusing those efforts in the right place, that’s going to become a big time waster for you. So, part of that structure and rigor and discipline is ensuring that your sales organization is aligned with the company vision and the company values and what the company wants to do during that period of time. So, there might be periods of time where a company is more focused on, hey, we’ve got to move more units because we’ve got to keep our manufacturing facility busy, and we want to build a backlog, so salesforce, I need you to go out and get units sold. Let’s not focus quite as much on margin contribution, let’s focus more on units. And that decision is usually coming down from the CEO’s office and the board. And so you incentivize your team and you build your strategy for that quarter or that half or that year around that incentive. It could go the other way. Hey, Wall Street wants to see us with better margin contribution. So, I don’t care if I sell fewer airplanes, I’m going to sell fewer airplanes at a larger margin contribution. You align yourself with that. That was the discipline that we focused on, being aligned with the company’s vision, what senior management was trying to accomplish, and then focusing our efforts on that. You could pretty easily weed out and figure out where people were wasting time pretty quickly. And believe it or not, that will be shown in a pipeline chart. So, your traditional pipeline kind of looks like a V. It’s open at the top, and it gets narrower as it gets to the bottom. And your mandate as a sales leader and a salesperson is to be putting stuff in the top of the pipeline and then moving through the stages. And then coming out of the bottom of the pipeline with a sale and revenue and margin contribution. When I first went in to Hawker Beech, I found that the pipeline actually looked more like a circle with a small entry out of the top and a small entry out of the bottom. And so what does that mean? Well, that meant that we weren’t focused enough on bringing in new potential customers at the top of the funnel. We were spending way too much time in the middle talking to customers, making sure our customers knew we were there, working on stuff with them, and we weren’t getting deals coming through the bottom. So we literally had to build a strategy around how do we change the shape of this pipeline? How do we start? What do we need to do to start bringing more potential customers in the top, being more efficient with our time in moving them through the pipeline so that we were generating more revenues and margin contribution at the bottom. And so, you incentivize that differently. 

Alex Bridgeman: So, what got people moving from the middle of the funnel to either out or down funnel? Is there something the sales team could do to kind of nudge the conversation either forward or out? 

Richard Emery: Yeah. I mean, it gets to a point where eventually you have to ask for the business. I mean, eventually you’ve got to ask somebody, hey, are we going to get a deal done here or not? But what happens, and that was part of a culture that was taking place, is they were very comfortable talking to their existing customers much more so than going out and finding new customers. And so that’s why that thing got stuck in the middle. And so, we went in and recrafted our messaging, restructured our contracting, restructured our marketing, and incentivized our sales force to go find new business. And they did, and that pipeline slowly changed and became a healthy pipeline. But it’s a process. And developing an operating rhythm and a way that you talk about sales internally and then starting to change a culture to create a more driven sales process, it’s really hard. This is not something that you just go snap your fingers and you bring in a few new folks and you fire a few folks and everything changes. You have to really, really work on how you see things, doing things differently, and you cannot over-communicate with the folks that are there, what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, what you’re trying to accomplish, how they’re involved in that, how they can help that. Because fundamentally, people want to be successful, and they want to know that they’re contributing to the success of an organization, and they want recognition for that. And so, what we really worked hard on, what I really worked hard on was just over communicating again and again what we’re trying to do, why we’re trying to do that, how that’s good for them, how they can help, and just building that culture of performance in there. I’ll tell you one story. At a place that I was at, I had a conversation with a current owner. He wanted a proposal for a new airplane, and so I got a proposal put together and took it out to one of our administrative folks and said, hey, can you FedEx this to these guys? They’d like to have it tomorrow because we’re having a meeting tomorrow afternoon, and they want to discuss the airplane. Oh sure, I’ll be happy to do that. So, about the time of the meeting, the next day comes around, I get a phone call, it’s the guy, he goes, where’s the proposal? I haven’t received it. I was like, oh, must be something happened with FedEx. Here, we’ll send you a PDF of it, but let me go understand what’s going on. So I walked out and I asked this individual, I said, hey, did you FedEx that proposal out yesterday? And this individual said, oh yeah, I FedExed it yesterday. I said, oh, well, we need to put a tracer on it because it didn’t get there. And so can you track that down and understand why it didn’t get there? And she goes, oh no, it wasn’t going to be there today. It’ll be there tomorrow. And I said, what do you mean? She goes, we only use two-day FedEx. We don’t use overnight FedEx. And I said, well, who said that? And she literally reached up and grabbed an 1800 page employee handbook and put it on her desk and turned to the page that said, all FedExes will be two day FedExes. And I said, would you mind if I see this handbook just for a second? And she handed me the handbook and I walked over to a trash can and I threw it in the trash. And I said, listen, it’s not your fault, but here’s the deal. We’re not going to hide behind company policy in order to protect our jobs. I said we’re just not going to do that. That culture is gone. We’re not doing that anymore. And if I ask you or if any senior person that you work with asks you to do something, go ahead and do it, you won’t get in trouble for it. I promise. And that’s what you found in a lot of those organizations, ingrained culture that you had to change. And it’s hard and it takes time to do that. 

Alex Bridgeman: I love that story. It’s a good segue to the leadership aspect of any of these sales teams and just broader teams that you’ve been a part of. I know you’ve thought a lot about servant leadership and the importance of empathy as a leader. Can you talk about some of maybe the philosophies as a leader you had within each of these teams to change that culture? 

Richard Emery: Yeah. So again, I’ve been extraordinarily blessed with great mentors, I mean, with guys that were just really, really good and really led with servant leadership. And so, that served as a great foundation for me to use that to kind of build my own leadership style and how I interacted with people. And the first thing is, I think, servant leadership and empathy go hand in hand. And so, you can’t be a servant leader if you don’t have empathy. It’s just not going to work because it’s false. You truly have to empathize with people. And I’ll tell you that servant leadership doesn’t mean soft leadership. It doesn’t mean- and empathy doesn’t mean, oh my gosh, so sorry this happened, and I know you’ve done this time and time again, and I’m just trying to want to make you a better person, I’m trying to make you want to do things better. No, that’s not what servant leadership is about. Servant leadership is about leadership. It’s about setting goals, setting boundaries, setting rules that you expect everybody to follow. And when somebody doesn’t follow them, it’s sitting down and understanding why that happened and having the hard conversation of let’s not do this again and here’s why and all that. And then if it happens repeatedly, then you have to make a change. So it’s not a- I think some people’s hear empathy and they think it’s kind of the coddling type of hey, I’m going to coddle everybody. It’s not at all. But I’ll give you an example of a couple of folks that I worked with, and I won’t mention names, but these were two CEOs of companies. And one CEO of a- they were both Fortune 100 companies. Once CEO, when he would come into the room or the hangar, wherever you were, wherever you were meeting with him, that guy would go to every employee in that facility, shake their hand, and spend two or three minutes talking to them. He knew their name. He would ask about their family. He’d ask them how they were doing, what’s going on. I mean, literally, he’d stand there for 30 minutes while he went around and talked to people, and then he’d come up to you and he was so gracious and whatnot. This is a guy that had taken a business to the pinnacle of its business. This is not a guy that was some softy. But he really cared about each person that was in his company. And then there was another guy that used to hold these investor meetings. He’d bring in a lot of people, hundreds if not thousands of people. He oversaw these meetings, and he’d have his direct reports get up and do a presentation on their part of the company, what they were responsible for, had they met their goals, what did they plan to do the next quarter, and if they didn’t meet their goals, it turned into a public flogging. I mean, he would just berate these people. And the question was asked, why do you do that? He goes, it’s discipline. It’s discipline. I’m teaching them to be responsible for what they need to be doing. The only way to do that is to do it this way. One guy, you’d have all of his employees would run through a brick wall for this guy. If he asked them to do anything, they’d do anything that he asked. One of them, now it starts to become only results oriented. So what are they doing to get the results that they’re getting? Are they doing things the right way, or are they just doing things to get the results? So, in my mind, servant leadership is the first guy. And it’s not about being in charge, it’s about taking care of those in your charge. It’s almost like being a parent. It’s almost like being a great parent. You’re always learning so that you can pass what you’re learning down to your kids so they can be better people going forward. And so that’s kind of the way I looked at it. I didn’t think of myself as being in charge of anybody. I thought of myself as being a teammate with everybody. And so what did we need to do as teammates to be the best performing team that we could be? And we kind of talked about it at the beginning here of giving your reports the right support and the right tools so they can go do their job the best way possible. And then getting out of their way. By the way, that’s a huge part of this. Micromanaging is killer. And I’ve worked with and for some micromanagers, and I hope I’ve never been one. But people that are just constantly, are you doing this? Are you doing that? Are you doing this? Are you doing that? That will deflate a person more quickly than almost anything. And it’s really about what you measure. With my reports, it was I didn’t care how many overnights you had in a week, I didn’t care how many calls you made, I didn’t care how many meetings you set, unless you were not performing. If you’re performing and you could get your performance done by being on the road two nights a week and not five nights a week, that’s okay with me. If you’ve figured out how to do that, could you tell us how you’re doing that, so maybe we can learn and maybe we can let your colleagues know how you’re doing that, why you’re so successful. I’ll never forget, in one job, I was a top airplane salesman for a company, and I got a dressing down on a sales call because I had not spent enough nights on the road. But I had sold more airplanes than everybody else. And so that really stuck with me. I was like, I’m never going to be that person that’s going to do that. But really servant leadership, I mean, it’s not about being the smartest, it’s not about being the most powerful. It’s really about supporting your people, giving them the right support, giving them the right tools, and then driving continuous improvement, driving to just continually get better, and how do we continually try to be better than we were yesterday. In fact, I’m a huge fan of hiring. I made my career by hiring people that were way smarter than I was and, in many cases, way better than I was, and challenging them to challenge me. And then it’s been great to watch those people go on to have really great careers. So that’s kind of how I think about servant leadership. 

Alex Bridgeman: To the moment of getting dressed down for not traveling enough, what other moments come to mind that told you, oh, I’m never going to be like that, or that’s a great idea, I want to do that with my own team? Are there other moments on either side of that that stick out to you? 

Richard Emery: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s kind of a culmination of things. If you’ve been managed, I mentioned the micromanaging. I had some guys, I’ve worked for some folks that were real micromanagers. And I mean, every day, you had to submit a report of every call you made and what meetings you’d set up and what was your plan tomorrow and where were you going to be every single moment of the day. And it’s just a killer. It just drains you to go out and work your tail off and then have to come back to the hotel room and then have to answer all these questions and fill all this stuff out. I don’t want my people to be drained. I want my people to be energized. Now, if you’ve got an underperformer, at some point, you’ve got to sit down and ask the questions, why is this person underperforming? Is it because they’re not making enough calls? Is it because they’re not setting enough meetings? What is happening here that’s causing this to not- this individual to underperform? And then on the other side of that, it’s just, I keep saying it, I’ve just watched some great leaders in difficult situations really just stand up, take the responsibility for the situation that the company was in and talk about why the company was in the situation. At Hawker Beechcraft, we were in a really tough place for a lot of years. And Bill Boisture, just I’ve never been more proud of the guy. I mean, he just stood up there and he said, here’s where we are. This is why we’re here. Here’s where we’re trying to get to. This is how we’re going to do it. And I need your help. I need everybody here to be engaged for us to be able to make this happen. And I’m here to support you in your role to make this happen. I think your life is, you just keep accumulating different experiences and knowledge and that sort of thing. And for whatever reason, my antenna was pretty attuned to the leadership piece of the thing. 

Alex Bridgeman: How have you seen other CEOs effectively enable their sales teams? As an aspiring CEO myself, what can I do to make sure that my sales team is performing well and has what they need and has the right guidance? What can CEOs do to make their sales teams more effective? 

Richard Emery: Well, I think the first and most important thing is to recognize the importance of sales in the organization. Obviously, that depends on what kind of business you’re talking about and the nature of the business. But recognizing that the sales team is an important part of the business and it’s vital to the success of the business and spending time with that team is super important. A lot of companies I’ve seen where the CEO spends very little time with the sales team. He spends a lot of time with the guy running sales, but then he spends eminently more time with the CFO, the operations guy, all of that stuff. I think that matters for motivation for a sales team. And then understanding that, and it really comes down to, in my mind, making sure you’ve got the right people in the right seats. Because if you’re a CEO and you’ve got a bad sales leader and an unmotivated sales force, you’re probably not going to feel like sales is really the thing that gets you up every day to go visit with those folks. So you’ve got to have the right sales leader. And then the sales people have a responsibility there too to communicate well with their sales leadership and with the executive leadership of the company. So it’s a two-way street of communication. But I think the most important thing a CEO can do is recognize the importance of sales in the process and to find the time to go spend time with them and understand what they’re doing. And it’s hard. I mean, you’ve got a million things on your plate as a CEO. You’ve got investors, you’ve got shareholders, you’ve got operations, you’ve got finance. I mean, your plate is full every morning when you wake up. And so, your challenge as a CEO is to make sure you’re not letting any part of your universe go without you focusing some time on it. And historically, what I found in a lot of companies is sales is the last place that time gets focused. 

Alex Bridgeman: What topic, if we missed discussing it, would make this an incomplete podcast? 

Richard Emery: I think we’ve hit on a lot of the topics. I think the biggest one that ties into all of this is really understanding everybody’s role in the company, the importance of that role, and then being able to recognize those people for what they do. As a leader, whether or not it’s just a sales leader or a company leader, you’ve got to understand how each piece of your organization is contributing to the success of the company. And then you’ve got to understand the dynamics that are motivating the people in that part of the organization to do what they do. And then you’ve got to support those dynamics. And so, I think the best thing that a leader can do, whether you’re a sales leader or any type of leader, is listen and treat people the way you want to be treated. I mean, there’s nothing better, I think, than when you’re talking to somebody that in an organization is above you, you can tell when somebody’s actively really listening to what you have to say, or it’s just kind of spending the time bouncing off their forehead and coming back at you every time you’re talking. It was great. I will tell you that I learned so much from these guys because I could go up to a guy’s office like Bill Boisture, and I could walk in and say, Bill, we’ve got an issue. I need to talk to you about it. He would say, great, come in. Let me know what’s going on. And we’d have a conversation, and within a day or two, there was an effort to try to, what are we going to do about this? And the folks that always worked for me knew they could walk into my office any time or pick up the phone any time and go, Richard, we’re not doing this the right way. We’ve got a problem, and this isn’t working, and let me- I want to tell you why it’s not working. And I would listen. That didn’t mean they’re always right. That didn’t mean I was always right. But if I wasn’t right, I was more than happy to say, okay, how do we make this better? 

Alex Bridgeman: Absolutely. Well, Richard, this is a good place to close. Thank you for coming on the podcast. It’s been super fun to get to chat with you and hope we get to see you soon in Texas. That would be a ton of fun, but I’m sure we’ll find other fun ways to work with each other too. So, this has been a lot of fun. 

Richard Emery: Well, Alex, thank you for having me. I’ve enjoyed the conversation.