Flying Through Turbulent Skies: Joel Thomas, CEO of Stratos Jets (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next major milestone after October 2008?

Joel Thomas: I had invested every dollar back into this marketing idea. There were two strategies. I believe in web-based marketing. That was a good strategy because of my experience of running this political organization at UCF.

I built a website. Through some local marketing, we ended up getting 3,000 visitors a week back in 2002 to 2004. We were getting a lot of local people coming to events that we were hosting. I learned a lot about websites.

I believe that by driving people to my own website, I would be able to generate more activity than by calling alone. Every dollar I made in the first 18 months, I lived off of about $1,800. Every other dollar went to web-based marketing.

We were building quotes on Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. That was working, but it was very slow. If we wanted to serve one client, it would take us four hours to build a full market analysis. We could go out and find the pricing and availability fairly quickly but then to present each quote to the customer took us four hours.

I had a friend in college who was a tech guy. I said, “Is there a possibility where we can use this spreadsheet and make it much faster where I can reference certain fields?” He helped me to build out StratosFMS, which initially was just a quoting platform. It would allow us to create quotes very quickly for the same routing. We could quote 10 different aircrafts in five minutes.

All the money that the company made went back into building out StratosFMS. That quoting system was helpful, but we also realized that we needed an itinerary piece. We needed an invoice piece. We needed a CRM. That platform that we created was the first ever broker-based coding platform created that I could ever find. 

Sramana Mitra: What was different from the IT work you did from scratch that wasn’t available from the market?

Joel Thomas: Back in 2006 to 2008, there was really no market for charter brokerage. There were 20 companies. Maybe there were more. Mostly customers would go directly to an air carrier, which resulted in super inefficient flying. If they wanted to go to Florida, the airplane would fly back from New York empty.

This didn’t really exist. There was no technology company out there that created this. I saw it as an opportunity for me to duplicate what I’m doing and make it faster. I wanted to simplify and also improve customer’s experience. Both of those things would help me enjoy my job more.

Sramana Mitra: Talk about the team strategy as you grew. How did the team expand and where is it now? 

Joel Thomas: My first hire was a good friend from college. He met his wife at my house from where I started Stratos. I was at his wedding telling him what I was doing. He was really intrigued. He didn’t join right away. It was six or seven months later after he saw that I could be successful at it.

He said, “I’m doing something I’m not passionate about, but I could really enjoy that.” I knew I could trust him, so I brought him on. I had already built the quoting portion. It was very easy for me to duplicate what I was doing.

Sramana Mitra: In 2008, you were two or three people.

Joel Thomas: Then in December, I brought on my next hire. He came on in 2008. We had probably done trips for 85 or so clients. We were getting to the point where our web-based marketing was starting to generate leads. Google allowed you to buy ads. We bought ads and drove traffic to our website.

Between some repeat clients that we had and inbound marketing, there was too much inbound stuff for me to do by myself. We hired another guy. That was a friend too. He was in sales. The three of us were really good friends in college. Against any kind of advice, I built my company with friends. The first 13 people I hired were peers.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Flying Through Turbulent Skies: Joel Thomas, CEO of Stratos Jets
1 2 3 4 5 6 7