Navigating the World of Private Charter Jets With Corey Head

In this episode of the podcast "Struggles," hosted by Chris Inman, guest Corey Head from SkyQuest discusses the unique aspects and benefits of private charter services offered by his company. Corey explains how SkyQuest provides efficient and personalized travel solutions for corporate clients and others with specific needs, such as time constraints and difficult-to-reach destinations. He highlights the safety and convenience of using private charters, emphasizing their ability to access a vast number of airports beyond those serviced by commercial airlines. Corey also talks about SkyQuest's supplementary services for companies with their own fleets and the role of private charters in medical transport, including organ transportation. The episode underscores the value of private charters in saving time and enhancing work-life balance, making them appealing to high-end clients who value efficiency and productivity.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

0:00

I had a great story one time with one of the guys that bought an airplane, and he said, I'm having a little deja vu. And I said, yeah, what's that? And he said, I remember when I joined my first country club, and I walked through the doors, and I thought, this is amazing. I've made it. You know, and then flying private with us, it's like, this is my first private charter. And he walks through our lobby and walks out to the airplane, and it's waiting out there, and the pilot standing at attention, and he goes, this is cool. You know, this is amazing. So it really is. It's expensive, but it's. We call it the Skyquest experience for a reason. It really is. We want it to be an amazing experience. Welcome to another episode of Struggles, presented by ncbi, the podcast where we navigate challenges together. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Struggles presented by ncbi. And I am Chris Inman with Idea Cleveland. And joining me today is. I'm Corey Hudd with SkyQuest. All right, Corey, so thank you so much, first of all, for sponsoring our last luncheon. That was great. I actually got to be one of the speakers. It was me, Brian and Phil. And we will release that as another episode as well. But we wanted to get you here in the studio to talk about SkyQuest. I appreciate it. It's a very unique business. And why don't you tell us a little bit, like, how did it come about? Right, well, yeah, so we provide private charter and aircraft management to pretty much Northern Ohio, at least for right now. You know, there's maybe some dreams of expanding that. That reach, but just kind of focusing on what we do. Well, now it's. It's easier here with all of our team here, so. But yeah, that's. You know, people need to get from A to B, and they want an alternative other than the airlines or potentially driving their car or they have time constraints or health constraints or pet constraints or a lot of these other things that they might want. Want to utilize a private travel. You know, that's. That's where we come in. Absolutely. And I've heard you do a lot of, like, corporate travels for people, right? Yeah, corporate's probably one of our favorite, really. You know, there's out of the Cleveland market. There's not a lot of competition for us, because if you think about it, you know, they might tell you that you're only paying for occupied time, but quite frankly, they're bringing the plane in from somewhere else to come fly you to your corporate meeting or Whatever. If you're not using SkyQuest and somebody's paying for that time, you know, so there's artificially high rates on the time when you're on the airplane. So. So what we do is we can give you some substantial discounts if we start in Cleveland and we go to Meadville, Pennsylvania or Jacksonville, Florida or wherever to your meeting and bring you back later that day or tomorrow. One of the things that we're great at is we'll leave the airplane and the crew there to really try to drive down that cost. And instead of paying for reposition for the plane everywhere, you might pay for an overnight or two for the crew and for the airplane to wait for you. But it's far more efficient and there's. Probably places that you can go that are way more efficient than you fly commercial as well. Very true. Yeah. I think the standard answ to that is about 350 airports in the United States that are serviced by the airlines and about 5,000 that we can get into. So it's a great point. If you have a business meeting that's in rural Kentucky, you know, and you got to fly to Chicago and then in order to get out of there to get to Louisville and then you have an hour and a half drive, we can probably fly you to an airport that's about 10 miles from literally your meeting. So it's, it's a big deal. Yeah. And let's be honest, this is not cheap. But your ideal clients, I said, hey, you're gonna solve a, you solve a pain. And you're like, I wonder what the pain is. I said, I got the pain. And the pain is opportunity cost for your, your clients are high end, high money people. Right. They, their time is worth money. Right. They also would rather be home with their family. Sure. But the company and their job pulls them away to these, these locations and everything. And you give them this opportunity that they can fly into any place, any airport at their time on their like, schedule. Correct. And they could take off at their schedule. Correct. There's no, like, when Southwest, when's this airline leaving? When's that? Oh, man. And God forbid my meeting runs late and I miss it, when's my next opportunity to get home? Right. Yeah. And I think we do say that. I mean, it seems cliche or whatever, but like we say sell time, you know, and when you get to this point in your life or your business or whatever, where you have the means, you know, what is the most valuable commodity that you now have? You know, some of These if you're 60 years old or you're the CEO of XYZ Company and you're trying to buy 15 more companies this year, whatever it is, we can create a lot of efficiency for you. Absolutely. And, and help you retain some of your top guys too. Think about that, right. You're taking two or three guys with you and it's like, hey, this is going to be a three day trip. We're going to drive for five hours and take four different airline flights. I don't really want to go on that trip, but if we're gonna fly private, we can go down and back in the same day and I can get to my daughter's basketball game at 8pm I'm totally in. Not only am I in, but I want to continue to work for this company because they value their employees and their time and their time with their family 100%. I have no clue if you ever work with this company, but you think of it like a corporation, like Smuckers in Dallas and like the ability to take a team and go someplace because their factories are all over the place. Correct. Go in, drop in, have a meeting, see their people and fly out and be home for dinner with their family. How valuable is that? Every day. That's what we do every single day. Seriously. And for companies just like that, Smuckers happens to have their own aircraft, you know, but we'll do some backup flying for companies. Oh, I didn't even know. Yeah, yeah. So maybe it's down for maintenance or maybe they have two trips in the same day. That's a big part of what we provide, you know, is for corporations here that do have their own fleet, you know, it's not logical for them maybe to have two airplanes, but because only six times a year they need two airplanes on that day. So what they do is we provide supplemental lift for corporations like that. So even people that have their own planes reach out to us to help them. Absolutely. And there's a whole medical side of it too, that a lot of people don't know. Like, because we have the Cleveland Clinic, there's doctors that fly in with their patients here for some of the care and everything that we have. Sure. And to take it to the next level, we've flown hundreds of times out with doctors to harvest organs and we fly the organ back to meet the patient in Cleveland. So that's a really, really rewarding flight too. It's sort of difficult flying sometimes, but it's, it's because there's a lot of pressure. You Know what I mean? But it's, it's a really neat. You feel really good when you're done doing that. That's awesome. Because I think a lot of people think about like, what's he do? How's it. Everyone's thinking about like, their, their own life and like flying, like, oh, I'm gonna go on to Vegas, like, right. That's not what this is about. Yeah, Quite frankly, we do very little of that. Cause it's all about flight time and it's so expensive per hour. So, you know, if three people going to Vegas for some trade show and the airlines are doing it for 1500 bucks, like, we do do it, you know, but that's a very rare flight for us. My favorite are the justifiable ones that like, okay, they're still not as cheap as the airlines, but, you know, by the time you factor in time, you know, and having this person productive at the office the next day, or maybe me being productive in the office the next day, you start factoring in that, you can really actually justify it. You know what I mean? If we do a trip for six people to New York City or whatever for 10 grand, you know, let's say you're like, oh my gosh, that's crazy money. But when you look at the tickets or 600 a person, we got to do hotel rooms, we're doing meals now, and now we're not in the office. Tomorrow you go, wait a minute, this. Actually makes sense 100%. A lot of people are, you know, they're nervous just flying and now they're getting in a plane with you guys. What's the safety? And like, how often are these planes inspected and all that? Right. It's honestly, we're basically under the same inspection requirements as like the airlines are. When you have your plane on a charter, the FAA oversees it to make sure that there's minimum level of safety, you know, and that's vetting the crew and that's vetting the airplane and vetting the operator and all that stuff. And the hours you work and the amount of time you can be in the air, the amount of time you can work in a year. All of these things are things that are tracked by the FAA and by our company too. And quite frankly, our company's usually more strict than even what they allow, you know, because we find that if theoretically we could work three 14 hour days in a row with only 10 hours off, our company would never allow that, you know, but the FAA says, well, as long as you have 10 hours off, you're okay. So there's even things that SkyQuest will go above and beyond to create that safety. But yes, it's been a crappy month, I think, for aviation in general, you know, quite frankly. And there's been a couple high profile incidents and, and, but it's still, it's by far the, the safest way to travel. Way safer than driving from here to Columbus, for sure. Safer than you driving to the airport. You know what I mean? Really, it is. You have a better chance of getting hurt on that drive than you do on, on the airliner. And if you really don't believe it, just go sit at the end of Cleveland Hopkins and every like 60 seconds, another 150 people are launched into the air and another 150 people land on the ground. So yes, I realize once a year there's some high profile situation, you know, but you know, when you look at it and there's hundreds of arrivals and departures every day just in Cleveland, you know, you start going, okay, this is a, this is a very small percentage. You're multiplying that and you're like, holy cow, the percentages. Yeah. And we at SkyQuest, just to toot our own horn, I mean, we win awards from the NBAA on safety and 20 years of safe flying. You know, we're very fortunate, but we work super, super hard to make sure, you know, that, that we're, that we're sort of crossing all of our T's and dotting all of our I's. And let's face it, safety is the most important thing. I don't care if we make tons of money. We make no money. We sell to the best new client in town. Whatever it is, if you're not safe, if you have an accident or an incident or whatever that's going to be, you're going to be judged by that. For our NCBI community, what are some ideal clients that be like, hey, that's a great person for me to refer SkyQuest to. Yeah. Well, I think what you hit in the first section was really the rural, the rural spots, the tough to get to if you're ever looking at it going like, I just do not want to go do this trip. And it's within. Maybe you got to go in the middle of Altoona, Pennsylvania. Yes, exactly. We can fly into Altoona Airport and you're literally there in 45 minutes. It's like amazing. That's a big draw. Safety, security, you know, those kind of things. If you're, you know, you want to really, you know, you want to have a business meeting on the way out. You don't want people listening to you, hearing you. That's kind of cool. We can set the airplanes up. They have conference groups in them and stuff. You can lay out architecture drawings in the airplane, you know, that kind of stuff. If you have just a tight time schedule, you know, it's like, I got to be at this

meeting until, you know, 4: 10:17

00 and I have to be at this dinner, you know, I'm hosting that night back in Cleveland. So things like that are really important. Charter, private. Flying private can get really justifiable. You know, the thing to me is, you know, four, five, six people going to the same business meeting. You need to take your attorney, I need to take my cfo, I want to take my HR person, whatever the heck it is, because we're looking at buying this business. We want to ask the right questions about culture and integration and things like that. So if you got quite a few people going to a destination, that's a really good one too, because a lot of people always try to look at the per ticket cost. Well, how can people learn more information? Well, obviously our website, you know, flyskyquest.com you know, and you know, the phone numbers and email addresses and everything are on there. We pride ourselves on just the service, you know, level of it. You know, somebody's going to respond to you in just a couple of minutes. They're going to answer the phones 24, 7. If you have some sort of emergency at 10 o'clock at night and you need to get somewhere by six in the morning, you know, we're the type of people that you call and we can make it happen. Well, thank you for joining me. I appreciate you having me. Thank you all for listening and we'll catch you on the next episode of Struggles presented by ncbi. Thanks for tuning in to this episode episode of Struggles presented by NCBI where we navigate challenges together. Don't forget to subscribe, listen and share this podcast with others who might benefit. We'd love to hear about the struggles you're facing or have overcome and we'd be thrilled to have you as a guest on a future episode. Let's continue this journey together.