Read “Meet John King, Part 1” here.
Hi, everyone, John King here, President of Solairus Aviation. I recently shared how my aviation career began and I would now like to tell you about how I came to be at Solairus.
For years I kept my airplane at a small airport in Sonoma CA. I met a bright young man who pumped gas and washed airplanes there decades ago. That young man was Dan Drohan, the eventual founder of Solairus Aviation. Fast forward several years to 2005, Dan was thinking of selling his first company, Sunset Aviation, and I began to work with him in a consultant capacity. After about three weeks Dan asked me to join Sunset as his CFO and I agreed to help out for three months. Three months somehow turned into ten years of hard work, challenge and fun! I’m fortunate to still be working side-by-side with Dan.
I have been in a lot of businesses over the last 30 years, and I have come to learn that achieving success is a balancing act. The interests of stakeholders, employees and clients’ interests must always be in balance with one another. If stakeholders aren’t realizing a reasonable return on their investment, they are going to question their involvement. If employees are not being treated fairly, they will look for work elsewhere. And if you are ignoring the needs of your clients, sooner or later, they are going to go away. At Solairus we take this balancing act very much to heart. We have structured our core values around achieving customer satisfaction, attracting and retaining the best employees and earning a fair profit.
Our vision for Solairus moving forward could be summed up as “the same but better.” As an organization we are close to our customers and hopefully skilled at listening to their needs. Our “secret sauce” (to the extent that we have one) is to give each client the personalized service they want. Our ability to do so gets better the more we listen to what our customers are saying. That means all of our team members have to be good listeners!
It’s been a long, interesting and satisfying journey with Solairus and I’m thrilled at the thought that we still have so much more to build together.
This is me flying my “one of a kind,” homebuilt airplane called The Phoenix. It was designed by Dan Rihn and built in 1988 by Mike Andersen. The plane has been flown twice in the World Aerobatic Championships. I am the third owner and it is seriously fun to fly!