High Fliers

How corporate wings can give your marketing a lift.

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The time: 8:00 a.m. on any weekday. The place: the general-aviation ramp of La Guardia or Love Field, Logan or O'Hare, Westchester or Orange County Airport. Dark-windowed limousines slide alongside anonymous Gulfstreams and Lears, six-packs of gray-suiters stride toward Citations and Westwinds, executive jets line up like baby Boeings on the taxiway. It is enough to make anybody think that company airplanes are the privilege of only the largest corporations.

Many of the industrial giants do operate corporate flagships. Business and Commercial Aviation magazine recently reported that some have entire fleets -- Standard Oil Co. of California has 45 company airplanes, Rockwell International, 42, and Tenneco, 37 -- and some operate their planes much like scheduled airlines, with regular routes and timetables. But look a bit farther down the same ramp: There, compact jets and small turboprops, piston twins and even single-engine machines complete with pressurization, radar, and de-icing gear are also on the move -- airplanes owned predominantly by smaller companies.

Although the fortune 1,000 companies operate about 37% of the country's business jets, smaller companies fly 85% of the turboprops, 97% of the helicopters, and 99% of the piston-engine aircraft operated for business. While a plane may be expensive (see sidebar, page 187), the benefits in face-to-face service for customers and mobility for company executives may well outweigh the costs, particularly for growing companies.

In fact, if you had been at a hayfield outside Dowagiac, Mich., one weekday morning in 1920, you would have seen an entrepreneurial company invent corporate aviation. While the conservative captains of industry relied on Pullmans and Packards, the executives of James Heddon Co., developers of the wooden fishing lure, were using three single-engine, open-cockpit de Havilland biplanes for deliveries throughout the upper Midwest. Before Lindbergh named his Spirit, a St. Louis company was sending its Keen-Kutter tools to hardware stores aboard its own Curtiss Oriole biplane.

Then, as now, aviation was an entrepreneurial tradition. With corporate wings, a small company can extend its market reach and increase the productivity of its managers, as these four 1982 INC. 500 companies demonstrate.

SLICK MACHINE

Most executives can do without the prospect who wants to get together just one more time, the importuning client who demands a meeting immediately, or the major customer who needs personal service -- and right now! But not David T. Slick. "If somebody calls and says, 'Hey, I gotta see you,' it's as though I've been given a gift," Slick claims. Slick is not only the president of Command Plastic Inc., a rapidly growing vinyl-packaging manufacturer in Akron, he is also a pilot. "I don't like to talk about it," he says, "but to me, flying is absolutely the ultimate perk."

For Slick, flying makes good business sense, too. The core of Command's strategy is personal-contact marketing. But the company's customers -- banks that buy its check folders and traveler's-check wallets, guitar-string manufacturers, cosmetics makers, and medical suppliers -- stretch across the country. Face-to-face service wouldn't be possible without a Beech Baron 58, a sturdy light-twin, with Slick himself most often the one in the pilot's seat.

"We did what most people say you're supposed to do -- analyze where the markets are and just go get the business," Slick explains. "But when we began to grow, I found that a one-hour, face-to-face meeting would eat up an entire two-day trip."

"By the time you drive to Cleveland, park the car and get on an airliner, we can almost be in New York City in our own plane," says Command vice-president Jeff Zolot, Slick's most frequent passenger. "We can set our own timetable and save 50% of our time."

"We're a fairly small company [1983 sales of about $4 million]. The ability to get our relatively limited manpower where it's needed at the drop of a hat and back the same day is priceless," Slick adds. "I used to hear people talk about how a plane can be one of the best pieces of capital equipment you'll ever buy, and I always figured they were trying to justify a hobby. But having done it, I know it's true.

"I'm sure there are days when people figure I'm just up there goofing off," he says. "But I can justify the airplane solely in terms of business we've gotten simply by being able to get to the right people in place at the proper time."

THE COMPETITIVE EDGE

"There are many ways to get a message across, but there's nothing like sitting across the table from somebody, demonstrating your sincerity in solving a problem" says Richard Bernstein, president of K&L Microwave Inc., a Salisbury, Md., high-technology company with sales expected to reach $14 million this year. "You get that little competitive edge of walking away having given and gotten more information than you would any other way. And in a close-raced contest, you come out ahead if you're there."

K&L, a manufacturer of microwave filters for telemetry, communications, radar, and electronic-warfare equipment, counts on the military for 60% of its business. The rest is commercial, with clients often located far from major airports. "The demand for our engineering and sales time is extremely high," Bernstein says. "It's important that both our engineering and sales staffs maintain a high degree of visibility at both our factory and at customer plants."

K&L's two planes, a single-engine Piper Lance for short trips and a twin-engine, pressurized Piper Aerostar 601P for longer journeys, are used primarily for staff or material transport, not to impress customers or pamper the execs. They shuttle back and forth between Salisbury and the major Washington-area airports cart engineers to North Philadelphia or Boston carry electronics rush-orders to Atlanta or Chicago, frequently flying two or more trips a day.

Bernstein himself is a pilot. Convinced of the business potential of aviation in 1976, he learned how to fly. But today he leaves the company flying to K&L's professional. "Before we had a staff pilot," Bernstein says, "we'd use contract pilots from the local airport, and they were not always available when we needed them. We began working their schedules rather than ours, and you have to make it quite clear when you develop an aviation department that it serves the pleasure of the company. If it's the other way around, you might as well go commercial.

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