Weather the storms
When Flexjet lost $90 million in 2003, McQuay was faced with a
major challenge.
“When you first start out, there are little things that if you don’t
watch them closely, you will dismiss as being minor things, and
you’re looking at bigger things to focus on and to fix,” McQuay
says. “The reality is those little things, those little issues become
real big issues as time goes on, and we had to go back and focus
on a lot of little things and institute a lot of checks and balances
that had been overlooked in the past.”
Learning how to weather the storms is another aspect of leadership that has proven to help McQuay succeed for the long term.
“As you get into your business, you find certain things that are literally your regular signals as to whether you’re tracking or not
tracking,” he says.
For Flexjet, those things center around how the company moves
its planes around and how often it needs to hire charter companies
to help fulfill needs. To make sure those numbers aren’t getting the
best of them, they now track those and other key indicators on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to keep everyone focused.
“Analyze the business and industry they’re in, and break it down
to the basics of the key impactors to their business,” McQuay says.
“Once you do that, and you’ve got to put a dollar value on those
particular impacts, and if you can break that down and draw your
metrics around those key drivers, you’ve got a fighting chance with
the business.”
It’s also important to not let everyone think it’s a doomsday situation. Instead, build hope in your employees so they can help you
through the turbulent skies.
“It’s something where when people can see through their history
of things that weren’t going very well and how they all came
together to apply a certain level of focus, that you are able to overcome that and be successful,” he says.”
Once you’ve buckled down and gotten back on track, the troubled times actually will help strengthen your employees and business. Now that Flexjet is growing again, he can look back on that
period for inspiration and guidance.
“You use historical references to draw parallels to where the business is and where the business has come from, and when you have
built the business back that way, people that have been with you
through those experiences, it’s like being with an old friend when
you start to describe things that you went through when you were
younger,” McQuay says. “They can immediately draw reference to
it without you even totally describing what the issue is. They’ll go,
‘Oh yeah — I remember that — when we went and did this.’”