I’ve spent my life in sales, from working as a sales engineer out of college to leading sales organizations for Global 500 companies like Hitachi Ventara and Hewlett-Packard.

But never before has a role lined up so well with my professional experience, my formal education as an aeronautical engineer, and my personal interest in aviation.

That’s why I am so pleased to be joining the team at FLYR Labs and leading the company’s growth as we offer the Commercial Operating System for Travel to airlines and other transportation companies.

I love working with people to make sure our customers and our employees do well. It’s a passion as a hardcore sales revenue leader, and I’ve been doing it for a very long time. I look forward to using everything I know to get FLYR to the next level, and I plan to learn a lot here as well.

I’ve always had a personal interest in the aviation industry. I used to fly helicopters as a hobby, and I studied a lot of rotary-wing flight. But more exciting to me is our potential for growth as we enter this era of Artificial Intelligence.

AI has taken the world by storm. It’s a trend that’s happening faster than anything I’ve seen in the past 25 years. And while we are seeing an explosion of generative AI with things like ChatGPT, I’m excited to be part of a company that is applying AI in a practical way to solve business challenges.

FLYR is taking AI and machine learning and applying them to an amazing industry, travel and transportation, that is coming back and accelerating its growth worldwide. Being able to apply that to solve problems and create value requires us to align with our customers’ needs like never before. That’s going to be very important to our growth.

In my first 30 days, I plan to just learn and observe and meet people. FLYR is doing everything really well, and I want to get up to speed on how we do business, to understand our people and our customers. So I will be traveling like crazy to meet people. Then, over the next 30 days, I will formulate some required changes – I’m not looking to make massive organizational moves, but some tweaks here and there and maybe some additional resources. The company has amazing technology and people, so the big thing for me in my first 60-90 days is executing and making sure that our model is working. Then it’s all about growth.

I learned very early on that success really comes from a great team. Having really good people at the right places at the right time is the answer; it’s been the answer for me all these years, everywhere that I’ve had the privilege to work. You can have the best products or solutions or marketing, but it’s really the people that execute on all of that and make things happen, and I think FLYR has that.

I had the opportunity as a young man to work for Cray Research, which built one of the first supercomputers, and the CEO, Seymour Cray, said something that stuck with me all these years.

“People buy from people they like. People like people they can trust and who have follow-through and have knowledge, and ultimately people who treat them fairly.”

I know that sounds simple, but I’ve found that the best sales teams in the world kind of do that naturally. They get trusted by their customers because they always follow through, they deliver knowledge and solutions and ultimately they’re loved by their customers.

FLYR has that, and I’m really excited to be here. We’re super well funded, we’re in an amazing vertical for AI that is just going to continue to grow, and we’re aligned with an industry recovering from a downturn and exploding in recovery. When you add that up with what we can offer, it’s a unique place to be. We have an opportunity to do something really special here, and I’m looking forward to being a part of it.