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Chapter 6 – Leveraging a Challenge into a Reward
Business is being of service, and sometimes the money comes from an entirely different direction. -Jerry Govan
The Miracle of the Two Airplanes That Dropped From the Sky
A huge energy expansion was beginning in 1980, especially in the West. Entire industries were gearing up to open coal shale mines and drill for oil, and that expansion generated a huge demand for housing. At that time, I lived and worked in Newport Beach, California. My company specialized in manufactured housing. The Southern California market was in a slump, but I recognized that we were in the right place at the right time to address the immediate, booming housing needs in the West. Clients could order a quality home from us, have it delivered from the factory in 30 days, and move into it five days later. My team could deliver all this with a minimum crew, but first we had to find the business and do the deals.
Through research, which is a fancy name for calling people, answering ads and wearing out shoe leather, one of my associates finally had our first bite in Wyoming, and it looked like a good prospect for our westward-expanding project.
My comptroller and good friend Bill Thompson, who was also a retired Air Force pilot, said, “Jerry I’ve been analyzing this thing and the travel time and costs for commercial or chartered planes is going to be a big factor in our budget for this program. We really need our own airplane.”
He’d barely finished that comment when I turned to him and said, “Well, I’ll have one by Friday.” All cocky, I then marched out the door for a lunch appointment to discuss some building opportunities with a landowner.
On the way to my car, I chuckled about this challenge and wondered if I could find an airplane as quickly as I found the two live elephants that I sent to Bill for his wedding reception! I had seen in Neiman Marcus’s Christmas catalog that their Gift of the Year was “his and her” buffalos. This gave me my clever idea, because his new wife collected elephant statues. I called a wild animal reserve and, Shazam! Within two days, I had the elephants! The “his and her” elephants were delivered to the reception right on time with a card as if they were from Neiman Marcus. I will never forget the comment from Bill’s wife: “Where will we put them?” I had to tell her that the elephants were rented!
I started the car to drive to lunch and the next flash hit me. I’d just prophetically announced that I was going to find an airplane by Friday, had actually committed to it, and realized that my lunch appointment that had been scheduled the week before was at the Nieuport 17 in Santa Ana, a restaurant named after a famous World War I squadron. The place was full of airplanes: model airplanes on the ceiling, pictures of classic airplanes, airplane parts here and there. Pilots from all over the country loved to eat there or just hang out. Again I laughed to myself, “It would really be a trip if I found us an airplane at lunch!” (Please take note; I was not thinking at all about money.)
I want to have a little fun here, because this short episode with me and my controller was much like going fishing. The little hints he’d been dropping about the high cost of commercial or chartered planes were like bait. Now that he had decided we really needed to go catch something that cost less, i.e. our own plane, I was “hooked” and made the decision to land a big catch. We had just been fishing for business projects, but now we were changing bait and fishing in a new pond. In fact, I was tossing out our bait to the universe.
I arrived at Nieuport 17 with my fishing pole locked in place. I was “trolling,” and my imagination filled with airplanes that could be waiting for me just beneath the surface.
As I sat chatting with my lunch companion, I noticed one of my father’s old friends sitting about three tables away. He hadn’t seen me for a while, so he waved and shouted over the voices, “Hey Jerry, how are you doin’? Hey, listen, I need to talk to you. I’ve got something for you that you won’t believe!” I hollered back, “John, why don’t you just join me right after lunch?”
About 20 minutes later, John walked over to my table and offered me the airplane package deal of the decade! He said, “I have this feeling that you might need an airplane and I own 1/6 of a plane that nobody flies. It’s a beautiful Cessna 310 in good shape and I’ll sell you my 1/6 interest in it for $2500.” I stuck my hand out and said, “John, you have a deal. All we have to do is ask my pilot to check it out and…”
He interrupted me. “Oh, by the way, it has a beautiful tie-down space at Orange County airport,” to which I said, “That’s even better. That’s within walking distance of my office!”
Three hours after my brash comment, I walked back into the office and announced: “Well, Bill, I got us an airplane!”
He gawked at me. “Really?”
“Yeah,” I said with as much nonchalance as I could muster. “It’s a Cessna 310 and we’re taking it for a check-out tomorrow.”
He looked at me sideways. “How did you snag that? You are amazing!”
“Well, I told you I would do it. What did you expect? You handed me the bait!” Then he got around to the money, as I knew he would.
“What’s the deal?”
“$2500!”
Poor Bill moaned and muttered, “Unreal!” Then we both laughed. I felt like the guy who just pulled in a 300-pound marlin after trolling for only 15 minutes!
We took the test flight the next day. Bill was totally satisfied with my “catch.” He said everything was in order; we just needed the mechanic to check it out. Because we had been chartering planes at the Orange county airport, Bill knew half the pilots and mechanics, so the mechanical check was done right on the spot. The mechanic said, “You need this and this done to the avionics [radio equipment], but everything else checks out beautifully.”
So I signed the deal and wrote the check. By Friday, I had kept my word. We had ourselves a full-blown airplane for our Western building expansion in less than three days, and for a steal! It was a win-win for everyone. We needed the plane and they needed it flown!
Less than two weeks later, with the avionics fixed and the plane ready to soar, we had a call to go to Riverton, Wyoming for a business meeting with our first prospect. Imagine the excellent first impression we made arriving in our own airplane! We landed at 10 o’clock in the morning, had a two-hour breakfast meeting at the airport, and took off again by two o’clock, clutching a handful of signed papers. We had done our first deal in the energy expansion wave of 1980!
That was the first of a series of flights from state to state in that Cessna 310, a magic carpet that flew us above some of the planet’s most spectacular scenery and allowed us to create new projects in a number of western states. That plane and those projects paid off handsomely. We were all full of the energy of energy expansion!
The spiritual world calls this being “in the flow” and I call it being in ‘GO’ power. In the financial world, they call it, “leveraging a challenge into a reward.”
