Flying Through Turbulent Skies: Joel Thomas, CEO of Stratos Jets (Part 7)

Joel Thomas: The reason I’m willing to share this is I had a choice to make. I could either be a victim in 2014 or I could choose to fight and one day be a victor. I hired Heather, Justin, and Meagan. Sadly Heather got sick. Justin was incredibly good.

To this day, he’s our fastest new hire to take to it. Early on, he had stolen some computers and taken them to a pawnshop. I ended up finding out about it. He confessed, but I couldn’t keep him on my team.

All that hard work to reestablish the company, and two of the three people had gone. Then in December, Meagan had gone to work for another company at our airport. That was hard. I already had a broken heart from having invested in those relationships with my friends in the first round.

Now I’m investing in new people. They either betrayed me or got sick. It was emotionally draining. By 2015, I was miserable. I was in debt big time. I was starting to think that I was going to lose my house.

I didn’t really have clarity on exactly where we were financially. I had an accountant who took advantage of the situation. He had hired his niece to help do the work. I was working 110-hour weeks just to lose $20,000 instead of losing $65,000.

Then by 2016, I had a realization. I hired a few more people. One was someone I spoke with at a conference in Miami. I met this guy, Simon, who’s on my team today. He’s a very smart and hardworking guy. He was new to the industry at that time. He came on board in the summer of 2015.

By the summer of 2016, I didn’t know what to do. I had my stepdad over for dinner. Three months before, I had to borrow money. I borrowed $70,000 to be able to buy and sell a number of flights. After three months, I couldn’t find that money. It was gone. I was at the end of my rope financially. I didn’t have any more money.

I got down on my knees and prayed. Some sense of peace came over me. I was down to the bottom financially. Fortunately, I had just a little bit of gold that I had saved. I sold it and gave it to my stepdad. I still owed him about $15,000.

I went to work and we landed a nice client. No matter how hard things ever got, I never paid a sales person late. I never paid an operator after a flight. I always pre-paid. There was never a time when a client’s money was spent and not applied to their flight. There was never a time where I dishonored anyone.

In October of 2016, we got our first visitor from Google after five years of zero visitors. 

Sramana Mitra: What happened? What was the problem with Google?

Joel Thomas: This is really interesting. I’m sure there’s another million entrepreneurs that have similar stories. Pre-2012, Google used to rank people based on the total number of links that they got. They had a few ranking factors that really mattered. The more links you got, the higher you would rank.

We had a marketing team that was doing exactly what we hired them to do. Google said, “We’re in the business of making sure customers get the best possible result.” While our company did exactly what we were searched for, we might not have been the best company. RC Cola shouldn’t rank ahead of Coke when you type in soda.

Google changed their algorithm to deliver more relevant search results. It was a good business decision for Google, but it was a horrible one for me. By 2018, we started to get some traffic. We didn’t actually get an actual request from Google until the end of 2018. It was the end of November 2018 when we had our first form submission.

In 2019, we got a lot. Now we’re doing really well because we are doing things to reflect the way Google’s algorithm runs. It took us a lot of time to become organically relevant again. We had to start all over. I had continued to believe in this stage three organization structure and invested all of my own money into debt reduction and also tech buildout.

By 2019, I was at a place where we had seven sales people, all doing well again. At the end of 2019, we were $11 million. We also built out the entire stage three organizational structure. We’ve developed the first ever SaaS product for private aviation.

I wouldn’t be in the place that I’m in today if I weren’t set back like that. While it was a difficult time, I look at it as a blessing and opportunity to lay in my infrastructure. I was able to shrink the company, lay in the infrastructure. Now we’re growing. We’re on pace to be about an $18 million company if you look at the last four months of revenue. 

Sramana Mitra: Your story is a rare story. I deeply appreciate your willingness to share your journey. I wish you all the very best. It’s a remarkable journey.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Flying Through Turbulent Skies: Joel Thomas, CEO of Stratos Jets
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