Running Commercial and Bizav MROs at Scale with Trey Bryson – EP.262

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(00:00:00) – Intro

(00:02:18) – Trey’s Career Journey in Aviation

(00:03:47) – Differences Between Business and Commercial Aviation

(00:06:02) – Unique Requests in Aircraft Interiors + Challenges and Innovations in Aircraft Maintenance

(00:36:57) – The Impact of Economic Downturn on Business Aviation

(00:46:25) – Advice for Ambitious CEOs

(00:47:34) – Conclusion

Alex Bridgeman: Well, I’m excited that you’re able to join the podcast and have a conversation all around like building companies as an ambitious CEO. And you’ve been in a bunch of different really interesting aviation businesses on the commercial side. So, I’m excited to chat, and we’ve, of course, been chatting back and forth for a couple months now. And I think it’d be fun to start just with an overview of your career to this point. You’ve been in MRO and completions and a whole bunch of other stuff, and I think giving a walkthrough there would be a fun place to start. And yeah, don’t mind Otis back here. He’ll just fall asleep, I think.

Trey Bryson: All good. And thank you for having me, Alex. I appreciate the opportunity. Yeah, I have done some different stuff. I started my career in business aviation, spent many years in BizAv, working on from King Airs to Gulfstreams, really enjoyed that phase of the business. Spent some time in manufacturing in the VIP world, VIP, VVIP. Got to spend a really fun time in the completion side of that, in the hangars building out the actual airplanes. That was some of the funnest work that I’ve done. And then just recently, the last six or so years, transitioned for the first time and only time into commercial aviation, which has been interesting. It’s very different on this side of the business, and I’ve enjoyed learning what that looks like as well.

Alex Bridgeman: What differences stand out most to you?

Trey Bryson: Speed. Speed is, to me, the biggest difference. The quality, safety, and compliance standards are very, very similar across all of aviation, but the speed at which we move, the days that we spend in check on commercial airplanes, the volume of manpower that we apply to those checks is very, very different than Bizav or the VVIP world.

Alex Bridgeman: And that’s just driven by how much more financial impact there is to every aircraft in commercial versus Bizav?

Trey Bryson: I think so. I mean, I think that’s the easiest way to say it. I mean, if you look at a commercial aircraft as an asset that fits in our hangar, having maintenance done to it, then it’s not flying passengers, it’s not flying, it’s not generating revenue. Where I think, the same could be said for business aircraft or VVIP airplanes, but those aircraft are, we’ll call them primarily used for individual transport and not per se the generation of revenue.

Alex Bridgeman: Where does that show up in terms of team structure on the speed front? So, a commercial business you mentioned just has more manpower as part of that, but structurally or cadence wise, what do the differences look like between BizAv and commercial? Like if you were to take your experience in commercial and apply it to BizAv with the same speed, how would you organize your team?

Trey Bryson: Yeah, I mean, a lot of it just turns into bodies. It’s just the number of bodies. If you go commercial to BizAv, of course, the commercial aircraft are larger, so they can accommodate more bodies, but it’s not proportional. If you look at commercial to BizAv, the amount of days that we would schedule call it a G5 down for a 12-year check versus something comparable in commercial aviation would be at least one and a half, if not 2x the amount of days. And that’s primarily driven by the manpower application to the aircraft.

Alex Bridgeman: Gotcha. That makes sense. And on the completion side, you said that was some of the funnest work that you’ve done. What are some of the most interesting gadgets or interiors that you assembled? Any unique requests stand out to you?

Trey Bryson: Yeah, of course, the ones that stand out are the ones that we couldn’t accomplish or couldn’t certify. Believe it or not, there are just as many requests that are made that we just can’t certify in an aircraft. And so, even in that world, sometimes the answer is no. That’s never a popular answer, but there are the bounds of the forest to understand. We’ve done a lot of really neat stuff. In one 777 that we did, we installed a lighted dance floor in the forward part of the cabin. It was just what the customer wanted, and so we designed a lighted dance floor. In another aircraft, we installed a, I would call it a modular gymnasium in the aft compartment of the aircraft. We always- I think we all worried about what exercising during turbulence might actually look like, but to date, no reports of anything bad.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, I was thinking maybe there’d be like a weight set there, but if you hit turbulence and those weights go flying, that could be pretty dangerous potentially.

Trey Bryson: Yeah, not good, and any kind of cardio equipment during turbulence wouldn’t be a positive either.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, that would be pretty heavy. You have to lock it down in some way.

Trey Bryson: And I guess, ultimately the fear would be falling off of it during some kind of unexpected turbulence as well.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, no kidding. No koi ponds though, nothing, no waterfalls? Can you put those in? Like little fountains, can you do that?

Trey Bryson: I’ve not seen that. Years and years ago, one of the most interesting things that we worked on was a hot tub, was a hot tub actually in the aircraft. And the biggest challenge to that was the evacuation of the water in a timely fashion. In case of an emergency, you had to be able to evacuate the water from the very small, very prototype, one person, very expensive hot tub that was designed for said aircraft.

Alex Bridgeman: So just to make weight, essentially?

Trey Bryson: The system was configured to where the CG of the aircraft was not substantially impacted by filling and removing the water. So, basically, the water tank, the supply tank, and the return tank ended up being the same tank and co-located in the same spot. That would be a problem for the pilots if we moved water, a large volume of water from the aft section of the aircraft forward. That’s going to change the CG of the aircraft and change flight characteristics and quite honestly be illegal. So, we struggled to work around how to get that, and I think ultimately everyone was disappointed on the size of the hot tub that we could actually make that work, but we did the best we could.

Alex Bridgeman: How many could fit in it? You said it was one person?

Trey Bryson: One. Yeah.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, a hot tub is kind of like a place to hang out, not necessarily just a cold plunge type tub.

Trey Bryson: Yeah, we had to sell this one as one person therapeutic only. That was all they could get away with there.

Alex Bridgeman: Seems like it would pair well with a sauna. Like a sauna, it seems like you could put something like that in.

Trey Bryson: You could. I’ve never done that and just what flashes into my mind when you say that is basically the manner in which you’re going to create the steam, there would almost have to be electric, considering the requirements we’d have to work around for certification.

Alex Bridgeman: What else made that part of your career really fun and enjoyable?

Trey Bryson: To build, I mean, when you think about these VVIP airplanes, I tell people that don’t know or never been in one, think of a five-star hotel and just everything is beautiful and everything is elaborate, and there’s so much customality to it, to take an air- oftentimes to take an airplane in with just an airline interior in it, so overhead bins and seats and galleys and whatnot, and that’s the way the aircraft would arrive to us. And of course, we’d gut the airplane and go through a huge modification process on the airplane and eventually start to load it with this custom-built furniture with the most intricate of inlays and stonework and glass and just beautiful, beautiful furniture and to turn that into basically a flying top end office with these beautiful bedrooms and sleeping facilities. And when the airplane actually rolls away, you’ve built something that’s not only just beautiful and unique and cool, but it’s truly one of a kind. And that was always special.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, no kidding. You were, you led Jet Works, an MRO business after that. How’d you go from interiors to Jet Works?

Trey Bryson: So Jet Works was, I was one of the founders, founders and co-owners of Jet Works, which was a business aviation part 145 repair station. We focused from heavy turbo props into larger corporate jets. And I had been in business aviation and had been in maintenance for many years. I was young enough to take a stab at something at the time. And my partners and I got together and just decided that there was a place in the market for that. And so, we just jumped out and did it.

Alex Bridgeman: So, place in the market, what specifically did you notice the opportunity being?

Trey Bryson: So, when we looked at basically the business aviation maintenance, modification, and repair market at the time, we saw that there were the OEM shops, so the OEMs have their own repair facilities, and then some very highly established organizations that had been in the business aviation maintenance business for years. And so that was level one. And then we decided that level three were a lot of, and I hate this term, and I’m going to use it anyway, mom and pop shops, but much smaller maintenance organizations specializing in certain models of aircraft. And we thought there was a middle ground. We thought there was a middle ground for a facility that maybe looked more like the higher-end facilities and was sized a little more like that but wasn’t necessarily again mom-and-pop, if you would, in size, scope, and whatnot, and we saw that as a real need in the market and we set out to fulfill that.

Alex Bridgeman: So given your commercial experience, kind of back to the speed front, if you did Jet Works over again and you started over, how would you go about building that team?

Trey Bryson: There’s no doubt I would use some of what we’ve learned here on the commercial side in relation to what we could provide to customers, because again, with good planning and the right number of manpower, you can expedite these maintenance checks, honestly, faster than I probably would have believed you could until I got into the commercial side and went, wow, okay, this really is possible. And I think, of course, there’s a cost associated with that, but I think there are operators, even business aviation operators, that would see the value in that. So that’s certainly one thing that we would do over given that opportunity.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, it seems like speed and throughput would give you more volume to perhaps make up for a lot of that, but also, a returning customer who’s excited and accustomed to faster turnaround, especially if you’re faster than, substantially faster than the average MRO or 145 in BizAv.

Trey Bryson: One thing that holds constant about aircraft maintenance, whether it’s business aviation, commercial aviation, it’s a, I tell people, and I think some people get the wrong idea when I say this, but I’m like, it’s a negative business in that it’s necessary. It’s a necessary business. I mean, and I equate people, if you go and have the- if you pay to have the old changed in your car, when is the last time you got super excited about going to get the oil changed? You just don’t get excited about that. It’s a necessary evil. But what makes aircraft maintenance, actually, I call it negative is when that aircraft inputs this hanger and we start to do our work, we don’t know what we’re going to find, nor does the customer necessarily know what we’re going to find. And generally, those aren’t big, bad, scary things. These aircraft are incredibly well-maintained, but the aircraft comes in, and you don’t know. Until you take the aircraft apart and you actually do the inspection, you don’t know how long it’s going to take. You don’t know what the end cost is going to be. There are a lot of variables when that aircraft shows up, and that’s not a good feeling for anyone.

Alex Bridgeman: How do you plan around that?

Trey Bryson: History. You look at there are so many predictable things that you can go look for. If you have, for instance, if you do a steady diet of 737s and certain phases or timed checks on 737s, you have a very good idea of what to… and the same is true for Airbus aircraft or any airplane for that matter. But these aircraft that have been in service for many years, you have a really good idea of what to go look for and what to expect.

Alex Bridgeman: And especially if you have a team that moves pretty quickly, you have more reps doing a lot of the same work orders and same jobs, so you have a lot more predictability if you do find something on how long it’ll take to fix it too.

Trey Bryson: Absolutely. It’s rare that, it’s not that it never happens because it does, but it’s rare that we are seeing first of type repairs on a lot of the aircraft that we do. So, there’s a really good chance we’ve seen it before and know exactly how to attack it.

Alex Bridgeman: Does that change if you’re working for that new aircraft, one that maybe was released in the last 10 years and is now flying? I think like a G700 that just came out and is starting to fly, like maybe there’s probably a lot of crossover with earlier versions, but there’s still going to be new things you come across, but like a 737, it’s been the same since the 60s, so you’re probably not going to run into too many brand new things. How does that change with older versus newer aircraft?

Trey Bryson: It does and certainly would be true the G700 or any BizAv aircraft coming into market, but there are a few new or what we call relatively new commercial variants or even new aircraft in the commercial side as well. And so, that history that I just talked about, the fact that we lean on, it’s not there, to your point. It’s not there at all. And so, we don’t necessarily know what to look for. And then even- and so, when we find something, one of the key publications for any aircraft is called the Structural Repair Manual, and we call it the SRM. And the SRM is just an assortment of approved repairs by the OEM that had been amassed over the years based on these consistent findings that we find in the aircraft. And quite honestly, by the nature of how that manual comes to live, on a new airplane, it’s a very skinny manual. There’s very little to it. And so, in the newer variants, the aircraft, we don’t have approved repairs to go do on these certain areas and each one of them then quite honestly requires new and unique engineering.

Alex Bridgeman: So, when you find like a new issue you haven’t seen before, how do you make sure the entire team learns how to fix it? So, you figure out how to fix it, you find it in the manual. Is there some way to or some process that you use to document that repair so that the rest of your team, not just the people who worked on that repair, but the rest of the team now knows how to fix that in the future?

Trey Bryson: No doubt. And that happens very much between, when you’re in that phase with an aircraft, then you typically have the airline customer, the MRO, and the OEM are very jointly linked together. We have a program similar to that today in one of our facilities. And so when we run across something in doing that, then our engineering team along with that of the airline partner and the OEM are in many cases on site and working that together. We ultimately, I would say, co-develop that repair, if you would, with a lot of emphasis being on the airline partner and the OEM. And then that information is then made available, not just through our organization, but to others in the industry that may run into the same thing.

Alex Bridgeman: And how do you disseminate it through your team? So, once you’ve made that repair, is there a weekly meeting you announce, like here’s the new processes or new repairs that we documented and here’s how we did them? How does that get out from that initial nucleus team?

Trey Bryson: So, we do do that. We do that in crew huddles. And I find this is, it’s not funny or unique, but I find it interesting, let’s say the structures guys, our structural mechanics that are, the guys that are fixing the corrosion in the structure and cracks and different things that happen to the aircraft, they may be on another line, but when they hear of a finding, a unique finding on a new airplane, they’ve already been over and looked at it and looked and assessed it when it was found and are kind of watching the repair going back together. Not only do they have to do it one day, but it’s also just a professional interest to them. And so, we officialize that in the crew huddle, if you would, but quite honestly, it’s old news to those guys because they’ve already been intrigued enough to come check themselves.

Alex Bridgeman: Do you take pictures of the repair or video as it’s being done so you can show later or look at it later?

Trey Bryson: Always and all the time. Everything is documented via photo and video.

Alex Bridgeman: Have you tried any Oculus or the Vision Pro to record the viewpoint of an AMP, like as they make some repair or work order?

Trey Bryson: We’ve done a bit of that. I know that there’s some other companies or other entities that are doing more than we have. We’re constantly experimenting with technology. One of the things, and this is Trey’s opinion only, is while the aviation maintenance market, it doesn’t feel small to me because it’s the world that I live in every day, if you look at it in terms of industry, it’s relatively small. And so, the investment in technologies is not always on the leading edge, if you would, because there’s such a small market to ultimately go sell those successful technologies too. In many cases, it just doesn’t make good business sense. Now, in the last 30 years, I’ve seen that change fairly dramatically. There’s a lot more research going into better technologies today than let’s say there were 30 years ago. And we do a pretty good job. I think we do a pretty good job trying to stay up. Probably an opportunity for us there.

Alex Bridgeman: What would you be most excited to test out and use?

Trey Bryson: There’s really some cool technology that’s continuing to evolve in skin mapping of the aircraft. One of the- over the last several years, recording of dents into the airframe on the aircraft has become a big deal, and to measure those dents and verify that they are or are not in limits, if a dent is in limits on an airplane, then it’s okay. That dent can be there just like a dent on your car. It doesn’t- the integrity of the metal is fine. It doesn’t affect the flight characteristics of the aircraft. But those things have- but at a certain interval, those things have to be checked. And if you think about, and think metal aircraft here, and whether a 3-7 all the way up to any metal aircraft up to a 777, there’s a lot of dents on aircraft. It just happens flying in the air and atmospheric conditions and whatnot. And so, it’s a thing for MROs, for airlines as a whole, and it’s been, it started out as an extremely tedious process, and we just continue to evolve with better technology in relation to skin mapping and this dent evaluation process. So probably a little self-serving that that’s the one that I’m terribly interested in, but it has been so hard to do for so long. We’re excited about those new technologies.

Alex Bridgeman: And how does that work? I’ve seen systems where, especially in making like a video game or something, you can put this sensor in the middle of a room, and it will scan the room and create a perfect, like accurate to within millimeters replica of the room. Is it something like that where you can kind of put it against one section of the plane and then just move it around and do an inspection that way?

Trey Bryson: So, Alex, I’m probably not intelligent enough to go deep on this, just being quite honest. But the technology that we’re working with now is very similar to what you are talking about. We basically use a set up with, there is some infrared, scanning technology that basically scans a section of the aircraft at a time, measures and identifies any deformities ultimately in the skin. But what’s really cool about it is in the background, the pre-existing scan of that same area on that airplane is in a database. And so as the scan is taking place, it’s comparing what it’s seeing now to the last known scan. And then we only have to deal with what’s new.

Alex Bridgeman: That’s pretty- that saves a lot of time.

Trey Bryson: A ton of time. Yes.

Alex Bridgeman: And you said dents come from mostly atmospheric or pressure changes. Obviously, there’s bird strikes, but those are usually giant dents. Like the little ones, how does that happen?

Trey Bryson: Hail.

Alex Bridgeman: Hail?

Trey Bryson: Hail. I mean, whether that’s in the air, on the ground, and there’s other, I mean, ground damage can cause dents to aircraft, small ping or ding here or there, rocks on the runway, fod. It can happen on the ground, in the air. But that hunk of metal takes, it takes some strikes as the airplane continues to operate.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, and it still needs to be able to flex and expand with air pressure too which is… That’s always blown me away that it can, that fuselage, like a submarine, can expand and contract as it goes up and down. That still blows me away. There’s those videos of a submarine going underwater and they hold a taut piece of string across, and it’s pretty slack by the end of that. I don’t know how they engineer that ability.

Trey Bryson: To your point there, in the VIP market, because again, everything we did is custom and one-off, and we’re building modular rooms inside of the aircraft, rooms with walls and doors, and of course, the doors swing and there’s gaps. And all of this is ultimately tied to the structure of the aircraft. And so, one of the first flight checks, outside of the safety flight checks, the first time we go fly the aircraft to measure the interior is called a cold soak. And basically, we get the airplane at altitude and hold the airplane at altitude, so somewhere in the 32,000 to 38,000 feet range, and we hold the airplane there until the metal of the aircraft gets as cold as it’s going to get. Because what we do, then we have a team of people inside of the airplane that are, we’re opening and closing doors and drawers. We’re measuring gaps because that interior that we installed that was perfect on the ground is going to move in flight. And this bulkhead wall structure that’s tied to primary structure that actually contracts and expands based on temperature, it can move that bulkhead enough that that door now sticks. So we do what adjustments we can in flight. That’s very minimum. We mark and gap everything, put the airplane back on the ground, rework it, and then we go back in the air and do the same thing again.

Alex Bridgeman: How much will it move or expand and contract during a flight?

Trey Bryson: Well, a half an inch is a big move. That would be a big move. But when we’re trying to hold a 3/16th tolerance on door gaps and gaps around furniture and walls and things, when you’re trying to maintain 3/16ths and things can move up to a half, again, which that’s a lot of movement in the area of an airplane, then that’s certainly enough to make things stick and not work the way they should.

Alex Bridgeman: Do older planes expand more than newer ones? It’s all the same?

Trey Bryson: No, I mean, the general design, especially, and now composite aircraft move differently than metal aircraft do. That was quite the learning curve on the 787 as we got into that. And we learned that composite aircraft, while they do still contract and expand, do so differently and in different areas of the aircraft than we were used to expecting. But that was just another learning curve as well.

Alex Bridgeman: How so? Where do they, where does the difference come from?

Trey Bryson: You see less contraction and expansion in the fuselage on a composite aircraft, which ultimately makes sense in relation to just the physical characteristics of the composite material versus the metal. But then in the joints of the airplane in a composite aircraft, and again, I’m speaking only to VVIP here because that’s the application of what I’m talking about, where you would see the wing root, things that were tied in around the wing root of the airplane, we would see very little movement in an all-metal airplane. And so, we never worried about that because we just- and the airplane is really, really strong and rigid in the wing root, where the wing and the fuselage mate. And it’s equally strong and rigid in a composite airplane, but we know where we didn’t expect to see movement there, we would see some more than we expected on the composite aircraft.

Alex Bridgeman: Why would there be more where the wing and fuselage connect?

Trey Bryson: I don’t know the answer to that. I mean, that’s the construction of the way the wing and the fuselage come come together is not terribly different in a composite versus a metal airplane. Although, and so my assumption there, and that’s all it is, is that basically the way, the composite has to move as well, and it just moves differently in that area, and again, more so than in the metal airplane.

Alex Bridgeman: Are composite dents less frequent? If it’s all- like composite material is a lot stronger and doesn’t flex nearly as much, are there fewer dents as a result?

Trey Bryson: Yes, and the greater fear in the composite airplane is the metal will dent and give where the composite airplane would dent to a point and then crack. And so, yes, there are fewer dents, but from a composite aircraft standpoint, you’re more concerned because the composite is less forgiving, if you would, from, pliability is not the right word, but I’ll use it here, from that standpoint. So that’s what you’re looking for in a composite aircraft.

Alex Bridgeman: Does that mean the repair is also much more expensive?

Trey Bryson: Much. It’s much more intense. It’s much more expensive. They’re typically bigger because it’s a patch. I mean, so is a- I mean, the metal can be a patch as well. We can remove the damaged area of the aircraft and through doublers and triplers from the backside and basically redo the skin, on a composite aircraft, you’re actually removing a section of the damaged area, which isn’t necessarily seam to seam. Where on a metal airplane, we would certainly prefer to change out seam to seam in a large repair. In a large repair on a composite airplane, the tube is, to some degree, seamless. And when I say seam, that would be where the metal overlaps one piece to another on the aircraft.

Alex Bridgeman: And so, you have to cut out within one big piece. Because looking at manufacturing of the 787, it looks like one giant long piece of fuselage is all one carbon fiber piece that’s superheated and cooled and it’s one intact piece, you have to cut out a piece of it and then replace with a patch or put a patch over the top.

Trey Bryson: Yeah, and it becomes- that’s just a composite repair. That’s extremely common. It’s extremely- composite repairs have been common in our industry for years and years, but we’re typically doing that on ferryings and on flight controls or pieces of the aircraft that were composite, not the fuselage. It just adds a layer of complication to it.

Alex Bridgeman: So, going from Jet Works through Greenpoint to ATS, that was a big shift for you. Have you enjoyed and found that switch to be fairly- I’d be curious what that career adjustment’s been like and what has stood out to you as change management from one role to another.

Trey Bryson: A lot, Alex. So I’m sure I didn’t coin this phrase, but I use it routinely. People will ask me on occasion, what was the best thing about owning your own business? And I always answer it this way, I say, the best thing about owning your own business is you don’t have to ask for permission for anything. And the worst thing about owning your own business is you don’t have to ask for permission for anything. Because I think what you quickly figure out is all your ideas aren’t great. And while certainly I was never a man on an island at Jet Works, I was in charge. And so that was a great learning experience for me. Jet Works was, we had an eight-year run with Jet Works. The first from 2004 to 2008 was awesome. We were growing the business. Things were going well. We acquired a business in the ’07 timeframe to make it part of the organization. And then not only did the economic downturn start in 2008 and 2009, but there were some events in the world that took place that were pretty crushing to the business aviation market in and around that timeframe. And so the second four years of Jet Works is where the real work came in and where we learned, or at least I learned, a lot more than I did in the first four years because keeping that business alive and keeping people employed and taking care of our customers was, it was very- the second four years was a different story than the first four years. So we sold the business and put it in the hands of another investor. Many of us stayed on and continued to work with the business and was appreciative for that. But moving out of that ownership role, I’ve also said, and this is anecdotal, is that until- I don’t know that you really know pressure until you wake up on Monday morning with $85,000 in your operating account and have a $350,000 payroll due on Friday. And you learn how to make that work. But it makes an old man of you very, very quickly when you are attempting to manage a business through a situation like that. As I’ve moved on to Greenpoint and ultimately ATS, I’ve always had P&L responsibilities. So, I’m fiduciarily responsible for either the division that I own or, in some cases, even the company. But it’s very different. It’s very different. And I’ve enjoyed this. I’ve enjoyed the time at Greenpoint was great. The work we did there was fun. Great group of people. The same is true of ATS, just a very different world that I’ve moved over into. And they get to see how many of those skills actually translate versus what do you have to learn anew. And just about every time that I think I have most of it figured out, it’s when I figure out that I really don’t know half of what I need to. And it’s a constant learning curve.

Alex Bridgeman: So that second four years of Jet Works, what kinds of skills did you have to get really good at quickly?

Trey Bryson: Cash management would be number one. The business, the business downturn to a point in ’08 and ’09, some people were, will remember they were close to the business that the big three automakers all flew to, they flew to Washington, DC on their private aircraft to ask for their bailout money. And the political climate at the time really turned dramatically toward the business aviation market. And so, what does that mean? Well, what that means is the value of aircraft, of used private aviation aircraft devalued over the course of six to 12 months like we had never seen before. An aircraft that was older than about 15 years old, you couldn’t even get it financed. If you wanted to purchase the aircraft and you didn’t want to do so with cash, you couldn’t get the aircraft financed. So the value of the assets went down so far because of the political climate. And anyone can go back and Google the private and public companies that just eliminated their corporate aircraft in that period of time. It was quite the time to be in the business. And I always found it interesting, and I used to do a speech on this, so I’ll probably be loose with my numbers, because I see the value of a private aircraft as incredibly high, and here’s the quick example that I use. In the particular year that, I believe it was ’08, that those guys went down to ask for the bailout money, the annual compensation for the CEO of General Motors that year was 23 million dollars. So, he was going, he and the other automakers were going down to testify before Congress. And so, I put it like this, so break the math down, and I used to know the numbers in my head, but break the number down to the hourly income of a guy making 23 million dollars a year. I don’t want that guy sitting in an airport waiting on a commercial flight. I don’t want that guy to have to travel down the night before because you can’t wait to fly the morning of if you’re going to testify before Congress that day. You would have to be there the day before. And what private aviation does, and every fractional ownership company in the world will tell you this, is they sell time. They sell the one commodity that we can’t buy more of. And so, the industry… Anyway, all that’s just totally anecdotal, my old history of living through that. But the industry was hit hard in that period. So, I apologize and get back on track. Cash management was huge, scaling the business to the right size and what the market would do. We also saw that because of the valuation of the aircraft dropping so dramatically, so you take an owner that purchased his aircraft for let’s say he bought a G4 for $24 million. 12 months later, the market value of that aircraft could have been $12 to 13 million. And so whether he owes money or not on the aircraft, he’s upside down in an asset that he owns, and try to convince that person to invest more money into an asset that’s worth 50% of what it was 12 months ago. So, shifting the services that we provided was huge in that as well.

Alex Bridgeman: Boy, no kidding. And the other part about business aviation, too, is the privacy. You can have a meeting with your team on route and speak more openly than you could on a plane where others might be listening, or you’ll probably avoid getting sick nearly as often because you’re not traveling as much, your plane’s probably cleaner. There’s less people around you. So you’re not missing meetings because you have the flu. That’s going to help quite a bit. What were some other elements of that speech?

Trey Bryson: Oh, just really, it was just based around the value of if you- it’s incredibly difficult to justify the cost of owning and operating a private aircraft. So, realistically, it comes down to the value, and I call it value, of the individuals that use the aircraft in the purpose missions, ultimately, of the aircraft, to your point, the places- Jack Welch has written in many of his books that they could not have done with GE what they had done without the use of their private aircraft. That they would hit three or four different sites per day and meet with these teams and make real meaningful, impactful change because they could get to three to four sites a day versus clearly just being one if they were attempting to travel commercially. But again, it’s a tough sell because it is… a lot of money to own and operate these aircraft. But if you ultimately just do the math of the annual value, and I would argue or anyone could argue that $23 million is a great salary in 2008. Well, the shareholders of General Motors decided that’s what this individual was worth. And he wasn’t just the only person on the aircraft at any given time. So there are mathematical equations that make these things real, that make them truly business tools that ultimately make good sense. And are there misuse of corporate aircraft? Well, of course there are. I mean, there’s no doubt that there’s some of that. But I think most people are fiscally responsible and understand the value of the aircraft and use it in that manner.

Alex Bridgeman: Do you think there could be any other events similar to that in the near future that have a similar impact on business aviation?

Trey Bryson: I think that- I feel while I’m largely out of that market now, you never get too terribly far away from it. And I think the business is stabilized to the point. First off, it’s always possible. Public perception can drive a lot of decisions and behaviors in our society which translate into our business market. So I guess it’s always possible. But I think BizAv has reached a level of stabilization that we probably wouldn’t have that kind of an impact from that type of a political view again.

Alex Bridgeman: That makes sense. With any other aviation CEOs that you chat with regularly, is there any pieces of advice you offer, especially if they’re young and ambitious and trying to grow something, is there anything you often recommend CEOs do or don’t do?

Trey Bryson: Have a good finance guy is the number- I guess if that’s your strength, then good for you. But if not, what I have found in the different companies that I’ve led or owned or whatnot, that I’m always- I stay close to the numbers for a lot of different reasons, but really having a partner, having a partner in the, whether it’s, if it’s a small business and it’s controller or it’s a large business and it’s a CFO, then have a true business partner in your financial guy, because you’re out selling and operating and doing and shifting and maneuvering. And again, not all your ideas are great. And a lot of times that finance guy will be the first one to ask you the really hard questions.

Alex Bridgeman: That’s good advice. Trey, thanks for coming on the podcast. It’s been a ton of fun.

Trey Bryson: Alex, thanks for having me today.