Flying Through Turbulent Skies: Joel Thomas, CEO of Stratos Jets (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: As long as it works, it’s great. When it doesn’t work, it’s problematic. 

Joel Thomas: It did work till 2014. Everybody was doing really well. We were leaders in our industry. Because of the volume of business that we were doing, I was invited to join this organization called Air Charter Association of North America, which is an invite-only organization.

At some point, I was nominated and elected to serve as President. I was very proud of the company we’d built. My friends were making really good money. We were doing our best to honor the client and help them make an informed buying decision and reduce the cost of flying charter. It was great up to 2014.

Sramana Mitra: What happened? It sounds like there’s a twist to the story.

Joel Thomas: There is. As I continued to grow, I had a friend who lived in Fort Lauderdale who did what we do. He did it for a bigger company. He just didn’t like the environment. They were just growing really fast. He didn’t really like the culture there. He ended up joining my team.

Because he had knowledge and experience, I took him on as our Director of Sales. He joined our team in 2011. He sold some trips. He helped other sales agents, but he wasn’t technically a Director of Sales. He wasn’t really helping me to transform our sales processes. He wasn’t helping me to bring on new sales people and train them. There was a little bit of tension between him and me.

During this road up to success, we were at $15 million. We were growing. The platform was really good for what it did. It duplicated my effort. That platform allowed anybody to do their full job.

What a sales person does in charter, at least at that time, is five things. They found the client, they found the airplane, they organized the flight. On the day of flight, they made sure that all the details went as expected. Then they did the accounting.

With 12 salespeople, the customer experience was varied from salesperson to salesperson. In the fall of 2012, I wanted to protect our reputation. I wanted to make sure that I protect Stratos. I started looking at what I needed to do to standardize our customer experience. We got all these leads coming in. How can I make sure that all these opportunities aren’t falling through the cracks?

I invested in Salesforce and began to move away from StratosFMS. I needed to departmentalize my business. In late 2012, I was thinking about what to do to fix this company. We had more business than we could handle.

I was praying about it. I woke up in the middle of the night and grabbed my laptop. I just downloaded this idea of Stratos organizational structure. I just pulled this Word document up the other day and shared it with a friend. I reflected back on it.

It’s absolutely amazing what we came up with. The idea was to departmentalize the processes and to create a technology platform that fully automates everything we do. This is ambitious – to go from a quoting tool to a system that would allow the entire customer journey and air carrier journey to be integrated. We now call it Stratos Marketplace.

We worked towards moving from StratosFMS to building our workflows in Salesforce. That was what really created some challenges. One was I was spending $40,000 a month on tech development. Simultaneously, Google changed their algorithm. They had this Penguin and Panda algorithm which crippled us. In 2012, we were getting 60 to 80 inbound leads every day. By 2013, we weren’t getting any.

I was spending all this money on the tech development. You’ve got 12 sales people all making $90,000 up to $200,000. You’ve got all these people and you’re changing the way they work and simultaneously not getting inbound leads from Google. It became really stressful. The Director of Sales got the idea that I was going to negotiate a deal with the competitor and take my sales staff over there. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : Flying Through Turbulent Skies: Joel Thomas, CEO of Stratos Jets
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