Doug Sutton: Dave, tell us about your experience capturing new business.
David Hopkins: Yes, I've had a lot of experience
capturing new business in the airline business both with airplane
manufacturers, engine manufacturers, lessors and service providers and
there are many aspects and many skills you need to successfully navigate
that process.
One I'd like to highlight in particular is teambuilding skills. With
these large contracts where you're bidding on perhaps hundreds of millions
or even billions of dollars of business you need to put together an
effective team to support you so you'll often need a contracts person,
legal person, engineering people, product support people, sales, finance
and so on. So you might be leasing airplanes or you might be selling
services but that's a constant this teambuilding process, you have to
understand your customer's requirements you have to translate those to
objectives to your team and then translate that to a timeline.
Now all of those may shift in the sales campaign as the customer's
requirements perhaps shift or competition shifts them for you but you have
to stay focused, lead your team and lead them to success. So teambuilding
skills are key and we're fortunate in ATBD that we have a whole team of
people again with sales, marketing, contracts, technical, legal, engineering
expertise that spreads the gamut from selling to the airlines to also people
who've sat on the other side of the table at airlines buying goods and
services. So teambuilding skills are crucial.