Ohio University Leader Lounge

From Ohio University to Aviation Executive and Novelist René Banglesdorf

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In this episode of the Leader Lounge podcast, hosts Nick Winnenberg and Dr. Amy Taylor-Bianco sit down with leadership expert and author René Banglesdorf store to discuss her inspiring leadership journey. Rene shares how her leadership potential was first recognized during her time as a student at Ohio University, and how that led her to take on roles in aviation sales, management, and workplace culture consulting. She also discusses overcoming obstacles, training the next generation of leaders, and her passion for personal growth through challenges like earning her pilot's license. Rene provides valuable lessons on delegation, focus, and removing distractions to make space for impact. Listeners will enjoy René's engaging stories and insights as she discusses her past experiences and future goals, including the release of her upcoming novel "Battleground."


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OnBrand Podcast Studios produced this episode. Special thanks to Audio Engineer Alex Winnenberg, Producer Nick Winnenberg, and Marketing Specialist Cori Stokes.

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Leader Lounge podcast here at Ohio University's College of Business. We're here today with Renee Bengelsdorf. It's exciting for both Nick Wittenberg and I to have Renee on the podcast. We get to work with her fairly often in creating culture for our students here at Ohio University in one of our programs. And we want to hear a bit, Renee, about your background, your stories, the background aviation workplace culture organization you have now. get into a few things of your prior book on crushing mediocrity and then kind of what you're looking to in the future. But first of all, can we get to what started you out as a leader? Did you know you were a leader? Is that something you thought about or is that something you later said, oh, I'm a leader? How did it work for you?

SPEAKER_01:

You know, that story actually starts right here at Ohio University. I don't think that I realized that I had leadership potential. but I became an RA and that was to pay for room and board at the university, right? Because I was a student paying my own way here. So I stepped into that role. And then when I decided to join a sorority, I became a Delta Zeta in the very first year that they were on campus. So of course they were appointing people to be in roles that were leadership roles in that organization. And I was asked to become the vice president. So the founding vice president of Delta Zeta sorority here on campus. And this is so often the case in our journey In life, other people see potential in you that you don't see in yourself because they know what they're looking for. And so that journey of leadership for me started here with other people identifying leadership qualities in me and putting me in positions to be able to develop those qualities over time.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow. And you've certainly gone on to do that for many other people, to see them as leaders and tell them what they can do. And then how did you get into the aviation side of things? Because I don't think I can think of you without thinking of planes and just the whole aviation side of your life. There's not an aviation track in the journalism

SPEAKER_01:

school? No,

SPEAKER_02:

there isn't. I always think of Top Gun. Whenever you talk about planes, I just imagine you and Tom Cruise and Goose all sitting together having a beer at a dive bar.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh my gosh, that That would be so fun. I certainly learned how to drink well here. So that could carry

SPEAKER_03:

over.

SPEAKER_01:

No, I went from being a journalism student here to going into marketing and then going from marketing into marketing in aviation. And then ended up running a company with my husband at the time for 15 years that was in the aviation space and just fell in love with the industry. And it is, I'm sure most of you who are listening to this know, it's a very male dominated industry. All you need to do is look left when you walk into an airplane, most likely 95% chance that you're going to see two men in the cockpit of the plane. So very male dominated industry, but it is so much fun. And I've been able to see the world and meet people from so many different places with different backgrounds. It's been an amazing journey for me. In the early 2000s, starting in 2002, I started in aviation, bought and sold private jets. Which is crazy. I

SPEAKER_02:

want stories on that one.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, yes. So I was the CEO of the company that I co-owned with my now ex-husband. And during that tenure, Learned a lot about leadership.

SPEAKER_02:

I am sure.

SPEAKER_01:

And company management. We did almost a billion dollars in private aircraft sales in 44 countries in that 13 years.

SPEAKER_02:

Were you serious?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. 44.

SPEAKER_02:

So do you think that's when you grew as a leadership the most? When was the biggest stint of growth for you as a leader?

SPEAKER_01:

Every time I failed, I grew.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So I did a lot of failing

SPEAKER_02:

All right, so I have to ask what's the craziest plane that you've ever sold into who was it I

SPEAKER_01:

Was there NDAs

SPEAKER_02:

with that? Are you allowed to talk about

SPEAKER_01:

that? There are some NDAs with that, but I'll talk a little bit about my very first deal that I was handling the sale of. So it was a Gulfstream 450, which is a really nice airplane, and this was in 2010. And I was representing the seller. And he was a self-made billionaire, had made all of his money in like assisted living and life, you know, end of life kind of care. But he had started out selling Electrolux vacuum cleaners door to door.

SPEAKER_02:

Are you

SPEAKER_01:

serious? So he was just gritty and determined. And he owned this plane. And I was selling it to Time Warner Cable at the time. So a Fortune 50 company or whatever it was with their lawyers and there's lawyers, lawyers and their inside counsel and their outside counsel. So they had like eight or 10 illegal personnel working on this transaction. And they really wanted this particular plane because of... a lot of complicated tax reasons. It was this deal that was really beneficial to them. And he didn't like them because he had had an interaction with them, probably like a bad cable bill, like 20 years before. And he was like, I'm not, I don't, if they want my airplane, they can bring$30 million in cash and just drop it off at the hangar and I'll give them the keys. And I'm like, there might be some compliance issues. Imagine we got to have some armed guards and a lot of answers for the IRS. I'm pretty sure I

SPEAKER_02:

watched this Mission Impossible movie. Like, this doesn't end well for you.

SPEAKER_01:

So that one was really challenging for me. I got it across the finish line.

SPEAKER_02:

But not$30 million in a suitcase.

SPEAKER_01:

It was not$30 million in a suitcase. We wired the money. He did sign the document. It was more than one page, which is what he wanted at one point. But it It taught me a lot of lessons in personality management or ego management, whichever way you want to do it. But it really helped. I mean, both of those were Americans, right? It was an American company and an American businessman. But I began learning there. You really have to listen to the objections and the objectives of both parties, which served me well as I moved into international sales, which... You have some language barriers, you have lots of additional cultural, both business cultural and geographical cultural challenges there, but then also a lot of legal differences. So lots of different entities, lots of import export implications there. And it made for a lot of ulcer inducing moments. I can't imagine. And a lot of good stories. Oh, I'm sure. So it's been, it was an adventure doing that. I really loved selling airplanes.

SPEAKER_02:

And it's crazy because like for me, sales was my passion. I did sales for five or six years before getting into where I'm at now. So for me though, like, A good invoice was like$5,000. I'm like, wow,$5,000 for you. It's$30 million. I can't imagine the pressure that's in those deals and those boardrooms and more power to you. That's insane.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02:

Cool. So you did that and then you started getting the books. What's next for you? What's the next venture or what's, where's your brain currently at?

SPEAKER_01:

So there's, there's a little bit of a step from that. So I stepped down as CEO of Charlie Bravo in 2021 because I really wanted to pursue professional coaching. So I had been a professional coach as a side hustle. And I also served on a board for the FAA and Congress looking at why there's so few women in aviation and aerospace and what we can do about that. And the two kind of lined up. And it's that we need to do business development and we need to do soft skills education. I guess. So what aviation is incredibly good at is technical training. What they have neglected for the entirety of this industry is professional development and professional training. And I was like, I know that this is the biggest deterrent to attracting, retaining and promoting talent. And I actually know how to coach in this because I've been doing it outside of the industry for five years. So I started the Aviation Collective to help specifically aviation companies who have very high stakes, need for international negotiations and diplomacy, like all the different things that you have that are a little bit unique to aviation with very mobile assets. And so I wanted to apply what I had learned in coaching to aviation. So the company that I'm most passionate about right now is the Aviation Collective, which is a workplace culture consulting company specifically for aviation.

SPEAKER_02:

Now, are you focusing on women's skill training as well, or are you doing across the board? Across

SPEAKER_01:

the board. I think the answer... to having a more inclusive workplace is to include women and men in the training and to have them learn how to collaborate with each other, not having women's groups that are just talking about breaking into a good old boys club. That doesn't work. Let's all be at the table and come up with solutions together. It's much more productive.

SPEAKER_00:

So how does the Aviation Collective do that? Or what is your vision? Tell us a little bit about it.

SPEAKER_01:

So I do workshops. I do go in to companies and talk about productivity and safety and how we can develop the soft skills to listen a little bit better and that all ends up coming together very nicely when we learn how to listen better, we end up being more safe and more profitable, which is excellent. So I do that in workshops. I also have a group coaching program that I'm doing right now. And then I do a very small amount of one-on-one coaching, so pretty selective with my clients for that. But that's really rewarding. Because when you're doing one-on-one coaching, you get to share in the victories without doing most of the work, which is amazing. That's my favorite. It's amazing. And you are a pilot yourself. I am a pilot. So a couple of years ago, I got challenged or maybe double dog dared by a couple of friends to get my pilot's license. And I was like, I don't think I really need it. I'm happy to let other people fly planes. I don't know that I'd be good at it. I'll be a

SPEAKER_02:

good passenger.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I don't think I'd have good situational awareness. And my friend looked at me and she goes, you need to stretch your brain. You need to challenge yourself in a way that you've never challenged yourself before. Otherwise, you're going to get old.

SPEAKER_03:

Wow.

SPEAKER_01:

That was motivation. Like, okay, brain elasticity, here I come. I am going to get my pilot's license. And it was a really great leadership lesson for me because the way that I decided to do this was putting myself into a sabbatical for a month to go get my pilot's license with a dedicated instructor, a dedicated airplane, and all of my brainpower moving in the direction of getting my pilot's license. So back up six months later, I needed to put myself in a position where my company that I was the CEO of and I wore all of the hats could survive with me being completely gone for a month. So looking at all of that was really interesting.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow. So that leadership, we talk about planning, talent management and leadership succession planning. So you're planning for that whole time for people to be able to make decisions to know what to do and how to do it.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow. me so it helped them to grow and then it helped me to expand my leadership in different areas when I came back so always be growing a

SPEAKER_02:

lot of people would feel nervous about training yourself out of a job right but what you just said was really interesting because it gave you space to go through and be a leader elsewhere did you have fear at all that you wouldn't be needed or required when you were training people to kind of do the role that you were doing and you disappeared for a

SPEAKER_01:

month I didn't because I had practiced that one time before

SPEAKER_02:

so

SPEAKER_01:

Sometimes when we think about doing something very dramatic, if we do a smaller scale of that beforehand, it's really good. So I had gone through some leadership training probably three or four years before that. And really gone through and investigated what I could change in my job. And I went from working 60 hours a week to working about 30 hours a week, which was significant. I was actually doing the things that I loved and I delegated the things that I wasn't great at or really didn't love. Because I was really procrastinating. I was spending more time procrastinating those things than doing those things. So when I removed them from my plate, it gave me the ability to do some really unique things. Being on this board, serving on a committee where we were helping hurricane victims get the relief that they needed when the roads were all flooded, but we could fly airplanes in.

SPEAKER_02:

Wow.

SPEAKER_01:

So Hurricane Harvey was pretty devastating in eastern Texas. And we flew probably 200,000 pounds of supplies in on 80 donated airplanes in five days.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, my gosh. When you say we, who's we?

SPEAKER_01:

So the collective general aviation community. Wow. We sent out Facebook posts like, hey, anyone have a plane? Anyone want to? fly stuff in and then we sent out other facebook posts hey do you have relief supplies can you bring diapers mosquito spray and first aid kits and all these supplies were just showing up in our hangar and we were weighing them and putting them on airplanes and flying them from austin to Houston and so we had planes from all over the country come in to help us with that and I had the space to be able to do that because I had removed things from my plate that shouldn't be on there I had been replacing myself in my job and I The best thing about that is that when we were recognized, a few of us who had organized that were recognized at the state legislature the next year, the congressman who was in the part of Texas that we were helping the most said we had unused body bags in Orange County because of the work that this team of people did. Wow. So when we make space, when we begin to replace ourselves, we make space for our own growth and other people's growth.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so I see that in your coaching because we have the benefit of having you as an executive coach for the Masters of Science and Management and the work you do with students. So I see that in helping students. You're very quick to key in on and helping me really to key in on like what's getting in the way, what's the extra stuff that you can get rid of to get down to it. So that must have helped you. I'm curious how it helped you in your writing because I know you're also a writer and I know a lot of writers go through just a lot of, I don't know if it's procrastination, but just a lot of different, you know, it's a head game, right? You're writing, but it's also a head game of how do you actually get that down on paper? How do you actually get your story? So can you tell us a little bit about your earlier book? And then we want to hear a little bit about what you're working on now as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, and those are two very different projects. The book that I wrote, the first book that I wrote that I published that was nonfiction was called Crushing Mediocrity. And where that came from was getting really clear about what I believed in. And so we've done this exercise or at least given this assignment in MSM, which is writing down what you believe in. And you sit with a pencil and a piece of paper and a timer for 30 minutes.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01:

Not five. Not five. 30 minutes. And the reason that you do that is because one, you start seeing themes and the second thing is that you really get several layers deep in what you believe. So you're just writing out core beliefs. You might write, I believe that Ohio University is the best university. I believe that green is the best color. I believe that bobcats are the best mascot. And then you get down into some deeper stuff I believe that the connections that I made at Ohio University were some of the most important of my life so you start getting layers deeper when you have to really think about it and then when you go back and look through it you'll begin to see what your core beliefs and your core values are and where the name of that book came from was that exercise. And then when you write a nonfiction book, you're telling your own stories instead of other people's stories. Well, I decided that I wanted to write a novel. So I needed to have worked with a writing coach for a number of years now to learn how to show stories instead of just telling stories, because that's what you do when you're writing a novel. And so I have been writing a novel over a period of time. I published an early edition of it. it got... rejected pretty hard by some critics because I was point of view hopping and I was telling that showing because I had this amazing journalism background from OU. But I have been working very seriously on that. I'm hoping by the end of Q2 in 2024, it will be out. So whenever you're listening to this, if it's after the end of June, hopefully you'll be able to take a look at Battleground. It's a supernatural thriller for young adults.

SPEAKER_02:

It makes me so happy for that. different it makes me so happy

SPEAKER_01:

it has a private jet in it though I just want you to know I've incorporated some of my professional experience

SPEAKER_02:

no that's amazing I will definitely be asking for a signed autograph of your book I am a massive young adult fiction fan myself so that's a part of it I love it it's totally fantastic

SPEAKER_01:

yeah and you know that's one it's one of those things where if you're not constantly doing something new and risky and hard you're not growing

SPEAKER_02:

yeah

SPEAKER_01:

and so I like doing things that are hard because they make me grow and hopefully have a little bit broader net to inspire or encourage other young leaders.

SPEAKER_00:

It's been so much fun to be here with Renee Bengelsdorf and I hope you'll be looking for her upcoming book, Battleground. Thanks, Renee, for sharing with us today about your leadership journey that started possibly at Ohio University and it's exciting to have you here today to join us in the podcast. So it's great to be here with Nick and Renee. Thanks so much and we'll see you all next time.