Transportation and Logistics
Flying high
How to get employees excited about your business
By Brian Horn
Smart Business Tampa Bay | August 2008
Page 1 of 2
Steven Santo
President and CEO, Avantair Inc.
Easter is one of the busiest
times of the year for Avantair Inc., and that means everyone —
from the janitors to the managers
— needs to pitch in.
For example, this past Easter,
managers jumped in to help
with cleaning the aircraft. And
when a janitor saw that happening, he approached founder,
president and CEO Steven
Santo to express his excitement
that all the planes were going
out on time, which prompted
Santo to get excited, too.
“This is not just a guy who is
just happy to do his job and
basically clean the hangar and
get rid of the leaves and the
garbage and stuff; this is a guy
who is excited by the prospect
of what was going on at the
company,” says Santo of
Avantair, which posted fiscal
2007 revenue of $76.4 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Santo about how to create an
environment that gets everyone
excited about your business.
Leave your door open. Every
time I’m visiting a company
and there is a bunch of
closed doors, I say to myself,
‘That’s a problem,’ because
everybody is wondering
what’s going on behind those
doors and what are they talking about? ‘Are we OK as a
company? Are they making
plans to do something?’ So,
we don’t do that. My door is
open right now while I’m
talking to you.
It’s the simple things. It’s
about showing your face, it’s
about talking to people, and
it’s about being truthful. If
you’re truthful about where
the company is, where you
expect it to go and you come
out and say where you are
at those different points,
good or bad, everybody
knows what to expect.
Lead by example. It’s not a
hard thing for me to do.
There’s so many examples
of it. It’s the person who
stays at five-star hotels as
the CEO of the company
and then tells everybody
else in the organization, ‘We
need to save money, and
you all should stay at a two-star hotel.’
That happens time and
time again. It’s hard for people to believe in you and follow you when you’re not
doing the same things that
everybody else is doing.
There are other examples.
[You say,] ‘I need you to work
late and give 100 percent,’ and
you leave at 5 o’clock; they
feel the wind of you running
by to leave.
In order to be a good
leader, people have to
believe you are the hardest
worker at the company, and
everybody wants to give that
extra effort for you and the
company because they
believe in what you are
doing.
