Austin Gray: He went up and bought us coffee and gave me the last dollar and said, “Keep this so that if you go broke, which you probably will, you'll at least have $1 to your name.” And so I've still got that on my shelf just over here. That was the first business. I sold that back in 2014. We grew that to servicing about 1,800 retail stores and about eight brands were sort of under our umbrella.

[Applause]

Austin Gray: Hey, welcome back to another episode of the OWNR OPS podcast, where we talk all about starting and growing local service businesses. We're on a mission to help 10,000 people start and grow local service businesses by 2030 to the seven-figure mark. If this is your first time listening to the show, normally I bring on owners and operators of other unsexy service or trade-based businesses like roofing, excavation, tree service, snow removal, things like that. But today I have a special guest named Simon Turner, who is a very seasoned and savvy entrepreneur. He has built and sold two companies over the last two decades, and he's the type of person that whenever he commits to something, he sees it through and does it. I've always respected Simon; he's become a great friend at this point, and he's coached me along the way in my businesses. He's one of the most humble people you would ever meet, and you would never know that he's built and sold companies. He is confident, though, and he's confident enough to take a third run at building his last business venture, which he is going to do in the aviation industry. He also just started a podcast called Chief Executive Aviator, where he brings on other people who leverage aviation to get more business done.

I’m really excited to share this episode with you all because Simon is an expert at finding the right people for his organizations.

Austin Gray: Well, it's good to see you, Simon, and welcome onto the OWNR OPS podcast.

Simon Turner: Thanks for having me, Austin. I'm excited to have a chat this morning and see where this goes.

Austin Gray: Yeah, super fun! For listeners: ever since I started this podcast, you've been one of the people in my mind. I'm like, at the right time, we'll bring Simon on. But, like, you’ve built two businesses and exited two businesses. At this point, now you're building your third. Simon is building Turner Aircraft. When I started this podcast, I was like, man, we want to focus on interviewing guests who are building service and trade businesses. So, that's what we did all season one. But I think right now it's such an ideal time to have you on for our listeners because we've got people listening who are working on building these businesses. I just want to say thanks for... I guess we've known each other for about five years now—four or five years maybe—and I want to say thanks for all the advice you've given me along the way.

Simon Turner: No, absolutely! It's been fun getting to know you and spending some time. Most enjoyable definitely being out in the river up around your place last year or the year before last; I can't remember exactly when that was. But, it's been awesome getting to know you, spending some time, and watching all your business endeavors. It's really cool! I love seeing people grow and do cool things and build awesome businesses. So it's been awesome to kind of have a front-row seat to your stuff, and yeah, I'm always happy to help out. Probably not always helpful—some of my advice is probably pretty, pretty crappy—but it's always good.

Austin Gray: I have to say it's always helpful, and I think this is just proof that this is one of the great things that can come from social media. I mean, we met on X; we were both in Denver, met up, grabbed coffee, and then from there we've just stayed in touch for four years. And then, like you mentioned, got to do some fly fishing last year, and that was incredible. And I consider you a great friend at this point, and I hope it's mutual.

Simon Turner: Yeah, absolutely! But to answer your question, yes, it's always been helpful, the advice that you've given. I love just learning about how you navigated building those last two businesses. I've been really excited about bringing you on this podcast, and I'd love for you to sort of give a background so that listeners have an idea of what businesses you've built. Then we'll start with the first, go to the second, and then kind of transition into what you're working on now.

Simon Turner: Yeah, absolutely! So, I mean, first and foremost, I know that your audience primarily is in service-based businesses, probably local businesses, that sort of thing. But really, the formula and the bits that make the business work are relatively similar. There are certain elements that may be a little bit different within the niches and different technical knowledge, but the core principles around running a business are pretty similar. Certainly, the core principles around the people within the business are very much the same, no matter whether it's a dumpster business or whether it's a software company or whether it's an aircraft refurbishment company. The core of it all is still relatively the same.

This episode was brought to you by Jobber. Jobber is an all-in-one software management solution for home service and trade businesses. I've been using Jobber since day one when I started Bearclaw. We use it for things like quoting, scheduling, invoicing, and most recently, I've been using it for our snow-plowing services. I love it for snowplowing because we're able to create a job specific to the client's profile, and we're able to track visits each time we go out and plow. This is important because each visit is logged in the system, and it's ready to send invoices at the end of the month. So, I never have to worry about how many times did we plow a specific customer's account because Jobber takes care of all of that for us.

If you are interested in an all-in-one solution for managing your home service or trade business, look no further than Jobber. They’re offering six months at a 20% discount if you use the link in the description below.

Simon Turner: My journey through high school—I grew up on a farm in Australia, which is why I got a silly voice, a silly accent—but I really loved skiing, and my family didn't have enough money to go skiing. We'd always worked hard on the farm, so kind of working hard was never a major issue for me. But, I went and got a job in a ski store because that way you got cheap ski tickets and cheap gear. That really kind of kicked off my, I guess, my business career to some degree because I had an amazing first boss, Monica Bellan. She pulled back the kimono on all of the business stuff; she taught me how to read a P&L, how to do ordering, about stock turns and merchandising, and detail and all that sort of stuff. And that kind of hooked me from a really, really early on. I mean, I was only like 14 or 15 when I first had that job.

After that, I got offered a job in Whistler Blackcomb, which at that point was owned by a big resort group like Vail Resorts. The opportunity that that gave me was I got exposed to all of these brands that weren't available in Australia but were available over there in Canada and in the U.S. One of them was this silly little insole thing called Superfeet. Now I think they're the world's biggest-selling insole brand. But they were based just over the border in Ferndale, in the Bellingham, Washington area. It was like a five-hour bus ride for me down because I was too young to rent a car. So, I got my mom to send my prom suit over in the mail, suited up, I got on the bus, and I went down there. I said, “Hey, I want to distribute your product.”

At first, they stuck me in the meeting room. All the C-suite came in, and they thought I was from the bank because they were kind of redoing a whole bunch of bank stuff. That kind of broke the ice really well, and the CFO actually helped me write the first business plan for it. He helped me build the first financial model. Even if I could reach it, I've got the remainder of the first dollar from the night we sat in Starbucks in Bellingham, Washington until like 2:00 in the morning doing the financial model. He went up and bought us coffee and gave me the last dollar and said, “Keep this so that if you go broke, which you probably will, you'll at least have $1 to your name.”

And so I've still got that on my shelf just over here. But yeah, that sort of kicked off that business, and that was distributing Superfeet in Australia. Then we ended up building our own brands in Australia and distributing about half a dozen other brands, mostly in the sporting goods world—skiing, outdoors, sporting goods—but also general merchandise and grocery. We did a sports nutrition brand called Noon and that sort of thing. So that was the first business sold back in 2014. We grew that to servicing about 1,800 retail stores, and about eight brands were sort of under our umbrella.

We actually sold that company, and I started another company called Miyagi. It was a sales enablement platform for retailers and brands. It was really kind of like solving my own problem, which has somewhat been a theme in my business building life. We built that company over a period of about eight or nine years, and then we sold that in 2022 to a group called Rallyware and Peakspan, a private equity group. I finished up with them at the end of last year and tried to take some time off, and that didn't really... I can't really sit still. I don't know about you, but after two weeks of doing nothing, my wife was like, “I can see that you're stirring. What have you got planned?”

Thankfully, right at the time, a great friend of mine, Bill Tindle, called and said, “Hey, I need some help. We're acquiring a bunch of companies in the IT managed service provider space.” So, I joined Bill and helped him with that process. We're just about to close our second acquisition in that company. I do that sort of as a consulting basis and then a few other boards and that sort of thing. But in the meantime, I've been also building a new company, Turner Aircraft.

There's a very common saying: if you want to make a million bucks in aviation, you start with ten. So, yeah, I'm just getting excited to lose all my money in aviation. But I am a pilot. I've always been a massive plane geek. My grandfather was in the Air Force; my dad was in the Air Force in Australia before he became a veterinary surgeon. That theme's always been in my family, and I always wanted to do something in business in aviation, but never really found the niche.

Where I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma, it's a really, really big maintenance, repair, and overhaul hub. In fact, it’s sort of the biggest in the world for commercial aviation, and that's based here in Tulsa. Oklahoma, more widely, is the biggest military maintenance, repair, and overhaul workforce. So this new company, Turner Aircraft, is really an opportunity for us to acquire and refurbish high-quality what we call cabin-class owner-flying aircraft.

So this isn't a business jet; it is not a what we call a little bug smasher you fly occasionally on the weekend. We are basically buying and refurbishing to the absolute premium sort of standard essentially planes for entrepreneurs. So one day, Austin, when you've got your business empire spanning 15 states and 95 offices or sites, you may need an aircraft to be able to get around quickly. A lot of entrepreneurs do that already, but the process of buying and refurbishing an aircraft to the standard of today is very challenging. It’s also very challenging to buy a brand new aircraft, and so we are basically taking all of the pain out of that process and helping manage the aircraft for the owner and trying to build a brand in that sector.

We're just getting going. It’s a lot of fun; it’s a lot of learning, a lot of regulation—way more regulation than I'm used to—because the FAA is a crazy bureaucratic nightmare. But all for good reason; safety is very important in our industry. So yeah, I'm getting started on that. Other than that, I do some startup investing and help a lot of startups and that sort of thing too. So that's really what I'm doing.

Austin Gray: It’s so awesome! One thing I've always respected about you is your humility. You're so humble in your approach. Secondly, the aspect whenever you start a business, you go all in and you give or take a decade run at it, which is a conversation you and I have had in the past. Because, as you know about me, I just love the zero to one phase. I've always respected people who can look at things from a decade play or look at it from a perspective of like, I’m not just going zero to one; I’m going zero to... I don’t know. We've never even talked numbers about your software company or about your other business, but you went past zero to one.

Simon Turner: Yeah, I mean that was...we had 50 employees, about 70 customers, and hundreds of thousands of retail stores that used the platform. That was a substantial company. I think one thing that I've sort of learned over the years is it used to always be: when can I build this to a point where I can sell it and just get out of it and move on? Then I realized first that it’s really hard to go from zero to one. It’s kind of a bit of a disappointment when you sell it, and you don’t get to see all of the fruits of all your hard work getting it from zero to one. We probably sold that software company too early; we probably could have kept going for another few years and got it even further, but just the opportunity came up, and myself and the shareholders agreed it was the time to do it.

Selling a company is really, really hard as well. In fact, selling that software company is probably the hardest thing I've ever done in my career. So, I definitely try to build and hold for a long period of time and kind of look at it across a long-term perspective rather than short-term. I think short term, sometimes you can get really caught by making challenged decisions because you are thinking really short-term.

But yeah, I'm just sort of more of a long-term thinker to some degree. But also, to probably not harp on the humility bit too much, I’m also not the sharpest tool in the shed always, so it takes me a little bit of time to sort things out and figure things out. It does take me longer perhaps than some other people would. But, I also tend to kind of look at things across a long-term perspective and just get to enjoy the journey.

As soon as you make peace with the fact that you're going to wake up most mornings and there will be some absolute show happening in your email or there's some huge disaster or fire, and that's just half of the course, you get more comfortable with that. There are definitely really stressful times. Cash flow is always very stressful; personnel issues— that sort of thing. But those kind of bitter times make the sweet just so much sweeter. All of us entrepreneurs have probably some sort of mental disorder, and it's just part of doing it. But yeah, I’ve definitely come to enjoy the journey a lot more rather than just getting to the destination.

This episode is brought to you by Bearclaw Media. Bearclaw Media is a growth agency for service and trade-based business owners. If you want to grow your business and you offer a high ticket service in local service or trades, there's a really good chance that we can help you grow with Facebook, Google ads, and content creation for platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. If you're interested in growing your business, check out GoBearclawMedia.com.

Simon Turner: We are definitely the weird ones. I had that realization the other day talking with my dad. He was talking about how a lot of other people who he hires just don’t think. And I realized, yeah, we're the weird ones.

Austin Gray: Yeah, I realized that a long time ago, Austin! I feel like some of the best sort of perspective on that comes when someone has been an employee for a long period of time, say, in a big corporate or even an SMB. They've been an employee; maybe they've even been in management, and then they step into ownership and become an entrepreneur themselves. They’re like, “Oh, now this makes sense! This is not as easy as I thought."

You do have to be a different breed of person to make it work and be able to kind of deal with it. My father-in-law is a phenomenal entrepreneur; he runs 40-plus very high-end hotels and owns a lot of those hotels around the United States. The amount of stuff in the hospitality world is like you could throw anything at that guy, and he just brushes it off. It's a bit of an inspiration to see people like that, and you realize, oh yeah, you have to be really different to be able to put up with what happens in the world of running your own company to make it here.

So, that's one thing I've noticed about you: every time that we would meet up to grab coffee— we had our favorite spot in Denver back when you lived there, and I miss that place every day.

Simon Turner: I know; that was a good little spot!

Austin Gray: One thing I've always noticed about you is you're just calm. You show up with a smile on your face, and you're able to completely focus on the conversation at hand. It seems like when I sit down with you, every time, you're just... that's why I was so excited to be able to interview you and ask you questions. You're always asking me questions about my business and making me think about things in a different way or just asking the right questions. But to be able to bring that kind of energy to those conversations, you have to be able to compartmentalize in some way, shape, or form.

Is that something you’ve always been naturally good at, or is that just something that you've learned over time, or is it just a repetition thing?

Simon Turner: I think it’s probably a repetition thing. I remember in my very first early years of business, disaster would strike, and I would be stressed. I would probably show it in some ways, but in general, I've probably been relatively calm over the years. We grew up on a farm, so stuff went wrong all the time—animals dying, fences breaking, storms, all that sort of stuff. So, I kind of probably had some element of it intrinsically.

But I think you just, as you get reps and more and more reps, realize that stressing about stuff too much and taking it over into your family life doesn’t help the situation at all. My wife always says when I finally tell her what actually happened in the business or something like that, she’s like, “How are you still holding it together?” Because you know, it’s business; there's always some kind of major disaster or problem.

The way I've sort of figured that out is basically if you just think of it in the respect that it just won’t help coming home being grumpy and angry and short with your kids or whatever. It just doesn’t help the situation whatsoever. You’re better off maybe staying at work later and just kind of grinding out the problem and attacking the problem harder, or realizing if there are a ton of problems coming down the pipe at you—they're going to be there tomorrow morning. Like, it doesn’t matter if you stress about them all night; it’s just not going to matter.

It doesn’t mean that that is not going to affect you all the time. There are still times where I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about something; it’s just being human. But most of the time, if you can push it to the side, it will make your life a lot less stressful.

My first ever business partner, you know, we had a huge brand that we represented, and we had six retail stores under that brand. One night, during the global financial crisis, this was sort of during the global financial crisis, one of the franchise owners that we had the stores with had just taken delivery of like a quarter million dollars worth of stock. He found out hours before we did and put his company into bankruptcy basically.

We were basically about to go broke too, and he said to me, “What’s the worst that happens? The company fails; it doesn’t work out and you have to go and find a job somewhere and pay back some money. So what? It's not the end of the world. You're not going to die.” That’s something else I’ve always kept in my head: what is the worst that can happen?

Sure, it might end in a massive disaster, and it might seem like crazy, but you know what? My seven-year-old daughter and my five-year-old daughter, they're not going to care. My wife’s probably not going to care either. She might be annoyed that we can't afford this or that, but in the end, it’s not as big of a deal as you always think it is. Over the years, you just get more and more reps at that. You’re like, “Oh, you know, we’ll wake up tomorrow and we'll figure it out. It’ll happen.”

So I think that’s probably it—a mix of that aspect, and then on the questions side of things, over the years, what I've discovered is just asking good questions and being genuinely curious. I think, naturally, I'm kind of like that; but being genuinely curious—not just asking questions to try and get what you want—you can learn so much. People are so fascinating in how they do things or different things. It blows me away every time I talk to someone, and I get to ask a lot of questions, and I learn stuff from them about how they’re doing business, what they’re doing in business, or different categories of business that I’ve never thought of. It's amazing!

So just asking really good questions and going deep with people is far better than sitting there talking about yourself. Plus, I'm a pretty boring person, so I’d rather listen than talk about my own stuff for hours.

Austin Gray: You're not boring, and that’s why I’m once again excited to have you on and be able to ask the questions to you to get you to share here. As humble as you are, I know deep down you have to have this unwavering confidence. I mean, you're going to build an aircraft company right now; it's incredible! It's incredible what you've done. You built a distribution business, built a software business—both decade plays—and exited both of them. What is that superpower you have deep down that you know, “You can put me up against the wall, and I'm going to figure this out and execute because of X, Y, or Z.” What is that?

Simon Turner: I would say it's like a healthy mix of being naive enough to dive into these sectors. When I started a distribution company and a manufacturing company, I was 18, and I had absolutely no idea how business worked—all that sort of stuff. So, not knowing probably helped.

When I started a software company, I think I knew nothing about software. I had never written a line of code; I had played with some apps on an iPhone; that was about my software experience. I had never raised money or anything like that.

In terms of software, I had a small investor who was my business mentor in my first business, but then in this business, it was the same. I don’t know everything about the aviation world, but I’m a pilot, and I love it, and I’m learning. I would say it’s mostly just never being so sure about, “This is going to work.”

Like, this aviation business may not work. I'm fairly good at understanding people's motivations, and that includes customers and team members. When I go into a company like this, I know that when I do customer discovery and when I read the tea leaves from the community of buyers for the product that I'm selling, I can kind of understand what motivates them to actually make a decision.

What the ICP of the buyer is, that's going to be their motivations to make a decision. We are selling, like, with this aircraft company—a premium product at a premium price with high-quality support and service. You can find a cheaper plane elsewhere, but every aircraft owner knows that buying cheap just costs you a fortune in the long run, and it’s a pain to manage and all of that sort of stuff. I know that the motivators are there to drive the business basically.

Then on the employee side, I know, I'm good at understanding what motivates employees to really take ownership and accountability and hold each other accountable and do great things. Basically, go on a crazy journey. You know, often you're asking people to do something that is crazy—they’re taking a pay cut, or whatever. So, understanding those sorts of motivations helps in figuring it out.

I don't have a superpower, and I don’t have supreme confidence. I’m just a human. I wake up some days thinking, “Am I doing the right thing? Is this going to work?” But what I do have is an understanding of those motivations, and I also have just endless curiosity.

I was having coffee with someone yesterday, and he was asking me why my opinions are so all-in on things, but then my opinions can be very loosely held. That’s just because I don’t know what I don’t know, and I don’t know a lot of stuff. There’s so much out in the world, and the more information I get, I’m happy to change my mind.

I would be a bad politician, let’s put it that way, because I could never just go all-in on a decision. If I made a decision or I’ve made up my mind about something that I need to change, I would very quickly pivot if I get new information that disproves my theory or the experiment I was running. So, I would say rather than a superpower, it’s more just keeping a super open mind, being ultra-curious, and then, yeah, just being willing to get absolutely hammered day in and day out until you figure it out.

Austin Gray: Striker Digital specializes in SEO services specifically for local service businesses. Bud and Andy, the two co-founders, have helped me get Bearclaw Land Services to the number one search result on Google inside my state for my specific search term. If you want to learn more, visit stryker-digital.com. That's S-T-R-Y-K-R-Digital.com.

Taking you back to your first business, I'm sure there have been learning lessons that you learned from Business One and took into Business Two—likely learning lessons that you learned in Business Two and are taking into Business Three. If I come to you and I'm telling you, “Simon, I'm starting a new business,” we've already talked about that there are principles, playbooks that kind of correlate no matter what business you're in. If I'm asking you for coaching to coach me on entrepreneurship, what do you tell me?

Simon Turner: I'm probably not going to tell you anything. I'm probably going to ask a lot of questions. Because I can tell you stuff, but until I truly, truly know you as a person and, like, what your motivators are, and I know what drives you deep down, it's sort of hard to really just fire out advice.

I hate a lot of the little advice bites you see on X and a ton of blogs. You see these VCs spouting a whole bunch of crap. Until you really apply that to a specific situation and you truly understand the person, it's hard sometimes to sort of translate that. So, I would probably just go into any coaching situation. I coach a lot of team members and work with a bunch of other entrepreneurs. I spend most of my time just asking questions because a lot of the time the entrepreneur knows the answer or knows so much about the industry that you can sort of ask enough questions where they get to the answer themselves.

I would say that's probably most of the angle that I would take. There are definitely some key principles—some are things you just sort of naturally need to be as a human. An amazing amount of resilience, I would say, is almost like the number one thing for any entrepreneur and anyone who's joining a startup or small team. You just have to have a lot of resilience and be willing to kind of put up with pivots and changes. Most of the hiring decisions that I've made over the years are typically people who came from a bigger company; it was cushy, it was easy.

Then they get into the startup world and it's trench warfare every day kind of thing. So I would say, yeah, probably just more questions than advice would be how I would speak to entrepreneurs in a coaching-type situation.

Yeah, and again, there are definitely some principles around people and culture that are very, very important—being very purposeful about building the culture in your company and your team and that sort of thing. But most of that sort of information is available; you can find that online.

I would say, you know, a lot of the value that I typically would bring to other people is just trying to ask good questions.

Austin Gray: So, questions and culture. This comes back to the people equation, and this was a question I wanted to ask you as well. When you’re trying to hire and recruit those people to come join you in building an early-stage startup, what are some of those questions you ask to find out if that person has cut out to be a part of a startup?

Simon Turner: Probably the most effective that I've found over the years really have been less questions than you would typically see in an interview, which is like, how did you grow the lead velocity by X or whatever. Where I found a lot more value is going really, really deep into understanding their personal history.

I want to know what life was like as a kid. Like, what was your life like as a kid, Austin? You know, you grew up; your dad was in the construction world. Tell me about going to work with him. I would ask you questions like that, and then I would ask, you know, what was school life for you like? Tell me about your friends. I would try to understand deeply the building blocks of the person so that I can understand their motivations and the things that make them who they are.

Because that is going to be the most vital information for me to understand whether they're going to fit into the culture of the business or the future culture that I want to build. I spend a fair bit of time on personal histories and then just understanding how they've reacted to challenging situations or triumphant situations. You can learn a lot about someone when they tell you about the wins they've had.

If they spend half their time talking about themselves and how glorious they were and how great they were in making that decision, depending on the culture that you want to build, that might not be a really good fit. But if they talk about how their people put it all together and they did great, that sort of thing, that might be a better fit.

So, I just try to understand those sorts of things. But also, how have they reacted to a really challenging situation? What would people say that they did when they lost the biggest customer the company had? If they lash out at their people, that sort of thing—that probably tells you a lot.

So, I would say that's generally the things that you look for. Again, try to really understand who they are. This might sound crazy, but in doing a deep interview, I really try to encourage people to get to a point where the interviewee is crying— not because you've done something bad to them, but because you’ve been able to unearth something that’s been an important building block for their life. A scar, a celebration, something like that that has made them who they are.

That’s probably bad advice to make someone cry, but that’s sort of not what I'm trying to get at. What I’m trying to get at is that you're getting deep enough to really truly know a person.

That is, you know, if that person’s going to be riding through the night with you, you’ve got to know them like that. It’s very hard to do that in a short little interview where you’re asking them, “What are your five best qualities?” and those kind of basic questions.

Austin Gray: Do you conduct your interviews over just one session, or do you have multiple sessions personally with them?

Simon Turner: Multiple sessions, for sure! I'm not a good person to be a fast hire. I'll push people through a process really, really quickly, but that process will typically be like multiple hours' worth of interviewing. If they don’t want to do that, that’s also probably a good filter for me; that’s fine. But yeah, I would typically be doing long interviews. In fact, we run at my last company and at some of the companies that I've been involved with on the board and stuff like that— we run hour-and-a-half to three-hour culture interviews depending on the type of person and the role and that sort of thing.

One of those things— the culture interview is really about understanding the building blocks of who they are and going deep. You can’t hide in that sort of thing; you can hide in a quick little interview, you can hide in a skills and capabilities type interview. But you cannot hide when you're digging into the personal history that made you who you are. Some people are uncomfortable with that, and that's totally fine. If people are too uncomfortable and don’t want to be part of a company that asks those questions, that’s fine. But when you’re at a startup, it’s... you know, it’s nothing like the pain, the anguish, and the fear of going to war, but to some degree, it’s like being in a small battalion. You know intricately everything about people, how they work, and how they operate because you need to have an amazing level of trust with those people.

The things that build trust are understanding personal histories and the building blocks of what makes people who they are. The way you do that is through lengthy interviews and spending time with people. Some of the best finance firms used to take you out and get you drunk. You would kind of tell all, and your true person would come out then. You can’t do that anymore, so we typically spend more time getting deeper with people before we get into a long-term relationship with them.

Austin Gray: To recap some of those questions to conduct that interview: “What did school life look like?”

Simon Turner: What did, yeah, tell me about a time where things were really hard at home. They might say, “Well, my parents went through this period where money was really tight, and they really struggled.”

And then I’d ask, “Tell me more about that.” How did you feel during that time? You know, they might say, “I was 12 years old, and I was trying to figure out my own life and figure out who I was, and then this all happened, and I lost stability.” You know, straight away, you can learn a lot about them. You understand like how did you get through that?

It might be, “I was trying to figure it out, and my best friend was going through the same thing, so I hung out with him for a long time, and we talked about this sort of stuff, and we figured it out.” And then I would say, “Tell me about what the feeling was like when your parents came back together.”

It's more like a couch session with a psychologist to some degree. People are probably going to flame me for interviewing like this, but I find going deeper than that surface question is just critical.

That’s the sort of line of questioning you can go to truly understand, and some people will be like, “How does this relate to the marketing role you’re hiring me for?” I would say, “I’m not just hiring you to do the marketing role. I’m hiring you to be part of a very great team, and I want to understand what makes you who you are and motivates you. I really want to know you.” People don’t really care until you truly care enough to know them.

Once you get to that level with a person, you can share things that happen to you. The best interviewers in the world share a ton about what happened to them to relate to the person they're interviewing. You hear it on things like Dax Shepard's podcast. A lot of people hate that he shares a lot about his own life and tries to relate to the person, but he builds this amazing level of trust with the person on the other end of the podcast mic very quickly, and that person spills the beans on a bunch of stuff and doesn’t just talk about the latest movie they’re promoting and that sort of thing.

In business, if you do that, you build a deeper relationship and a deeper level of trust. So, yeah, that’s how I would typically start those questions and go deeper because, again, you can’t hide with that stuff.

Austin Gray: If you haven’t signed up for the weekly newsletter yet, go to ownrops.com/newsletter. That's ow N R ops.com/newsletter. We summarize all the learning lessons from the interviews with the guests on the podcast and distill those into short, actionable tips, tricks, tactics, and strategies that you can use to grow your own local service business. Sign up for the newsletter at ownrops.com.

So, what is the “aha” moment when you’re like, “Yeah, this person is someone I want on my team?”

Simon Turner: Well, in another interview, you typically would have done like a skills and capabilities interview. So, you know, they’ve got it from a skills and capabilities point of view or at least they’ve got some of it.

But it all depends on the culture and the type of company that you’re building. If you’re building a culture like Uber had, where it was pretty vicious and you know, fight your way to the top and all that sort of stuff, then you’re going to be looking for different things.

You’re going to be looking for where you basically knifed someone to get ahead or where you did everything in the world it took, including stepping on someone's throat to get it done. But if you're trying to build a culture of collaboration and humility and experimentation, you're looking for things in their life where their natural inclination is to do those things because you can't constantly tell people to do things a certain way. If they just intrinsically do it and they've got experience doing it outside of work, it'll just be so much easier.

So there’s less of an “aha” moment, and it’s more like the building blocks you're looking for. Then you realize, “Alright, I got enough of those to have a foundation, and I can build with this person.” Now, in certain roles it’s maybe harder to spend this amount of time with, like if it’s a very procedural role, you know, sorting boxes or just picking up bricks or that sort of thing.

But at the same time, if you’re building a company and these are your first five employees, they are going to set the culture for the rest of the life of the business basically. It’s really, really hard to reset a culture. I’ve had to do that once in a business, and it’s gut-wrenching, and it's hard, and it’s expensive.

Those experiences have told me I should be putting everyone—even right down to the janitor—through the paces in this interview and understanding the culture and the motivations of these people down to a very deep level. Particularly in the early stages of the business, a lot of my friends who run hundred-person businesses still do this sort of process when they're hiring.

The 500th employee goes through this, and I think it’s just critical if you want to really purposely build the ship. If you're doing a quick flip type business, maybe it’s way less important. But I don’t want to work with a bunch of [___], basically! Excuse my language.

Austin Gray: Has the culture that you've built, embedded into each business you've built, been centered around the same values?

Simon Turner: I would say no, because I've learned culture better over time. When I started my first business, I thought culture was how we went out and had drinks on a Friday night and how we played ping-pong in the break room and that sort of thing. But it’s far deeper than that. It’s much more tied to performance and accountability.

I don't want to build a business like the Uber finance bro kind of world; that's just not me. Some people that works great for, and that's totally fine, but that's just not my world. There are some themes that run through the whole thing, but I've just sort of learned over the years how to make it better and better.

I still have a ton to learn: I've still got a million things to get better at on that front.

Austin Gray: So how do you consciously define culture as the entrepreneur for yourself first so that you can then go build? I don't know if you do this, but I have a set of values that define me and my family, and they're written out. I have a personal mission statement that I've written out. I have a fairly good understanding of what my kind of proven process is and my niche that I can work with in those sorts of things. It probably helps to govern how I purposely build the culture of the business.

Simon Turner: You kind of can't write core values and stuff before the business is built. But in a lot of cases, you can at least start to form those. With the aircraft business, a core value around safety is mandatory. It is critical to adhering to regulation and is critical to the future and longevity of the brand basically.

Flying is inherently dangerous, and it is highly publicized when there’s an aircraft accident. Straight away, even at the early stages of the business, core values built around safety are absolute. Then there are things like my personal and family mission is not only around building generational prosperity for my family but also inspiring and elevating my community and providing opportunities for my community.

In your core values and the culture that you're building for the business, you can start that right from the get-go in things like employee stock ownership and stuff like that and profit-sharing and those kinds of things. There are elements of the culture that you can build right from the get-go, but there are also elements that you sort of have to, when new people come in and they’re creative to the culture—they bring new things, they bring great things—well then you can add to the culture and you can start to build out more of the core values of the business because that's really then the actions that are happening in the business rather than just the words.

Austin Gray: I love that, and that was going to be my question to wrap this up because I know you've got a podcast interview that you need to prepare for and need a little break for in between. My question was going to be, can you share your personal mission statement and some of those core factors that drive you? Is there anything else that you'd like to add on that?

Simon Turner: I’m another white guy with a podcast; I don't know if you've heard that song before. But in the aviation world, there are a lot of business entrepreneurial aviators, so every week we interview an entrepreneurial aviator to understand how aviation fits in their business and their life. I’m jumping to another one of those here pretty shortly! But you probably can’t— I don’t know if you can see this, but this is a wood block that I got on Etsy about five or six years ago.

It has my family’s personal mission statement, and that is to build generational prosperity through inspiring, elevating, and serving my community. That’s through providing opportunities, public service, and philanthropy. So, I try to look at things through that lens, and that sits on my desk every day. It’s in my weekly review that I do of the things that I’m doing and what’s worked and what hasn’t, and that sort of thing.

Yeah, that helps to kind of point me in the right direction in the things that give me energy. It’s somewhat selfish; I want to build wealth and prosperity for my family, but I also want to build that same generational prosperity for my community and help my community as well. That community is here in Tulsa, and that community is my friends and my family and that sort of thing.

Austin Gray: That’s fantastic. Where can people... well, first off, thank you so much for being on, Simon!

Simon Turner: Thanks for having me; this is incredible! I would love to have you on again, because I feel like we only broke into a small part of the surface here. Once again, I can't thank you enough for the advice and the friendship that you’ve provided me over the years. Like we said in the beginning, we're definitely the weird ones. Whenever you find other people who kind of think the same way and have the desire to build companies and take this challenging career path, it's more fuel for the fire.

Thank you for all that you've done and all the energy you've poured into me just as a human, as a friend, and as a fellow entrepreneur. It truly has shaped the way I think about building businesses. My goal for having you on this podcast is just to share your wealth of knowledge, humility, and genuineness with other people. Thanks again for being on.

Austin Gray: I would love to have you back on in the future. Finally, please tell listeners where they can find Turner Aircraft and the podcast.

Simon Turner: Yeah, absolutely! I mean, right back at you with all of that. I love building our relationship and learning more about you and your family and helping out wherever I can. You help me out too; it goes both ways. I would love to record again—maybe I will come out to Colorado and we’ll either do some fishing or skiing or something like that—or you can teach me how to play that guitar.

In terms of finding me, you can find me at Simon G. Turner. My friends in Australia call me Simong because all my usernames were Simon G. Turner, so it’s Simong Turner, and that’s T-U-R-N-E-R for the Americans, because when I say “Turner” in Australia, no one can understand me. You can also find Turner Aircraft at TurnerAircraft.com. We’re just about to launch a new website, so there’s kind of just more of a holding page there now.

Simon Turner: X is probably the best place to connect with me, and also you can find the Chief Executive Aviator podcast here on all your podcasting platforms in the next couple of weeks.

Austin Gray: Do you have a launch date?

Simon Turner: We’re shooting for the last week of the month, so probably like two weeks from now. We’re just building a bit more of a bank. We’ve got about 10 episodes. We’re building a bit of a bank of episodes because life and things get in the way of recording every week, but we’re getting pretty close to pressing the go button.

Austin Gray: Fantastic! Well, Simon, thanks so much for being on the OWNR OPS podcast, and listeners, thanks again for all the support throughout Season One. This episode is going to be one of the first—I think it's going to be number six—in Season Two. Thanks again for supporting listeners, and we appreciate all the feedback you guys have given on the episodes to wrap up Season One. If you have not done so already, we take all of the learning lessons—we're doing probably something similar to what Simon's doing in his podcast—we're leveraging AI tools to summarize the key learning points so that those of you who are listening to this building a business will take the highlights.

We’ll send those to you in a weekly email on Saturday mornings. Podcast episodes are released every Friday, and if you have not signed up for the newsletter yet, you can do so at ownrops.com/newsletter. That’s spelled ow N R ops.com/newsletter. We are launching a new website, and it should be launched by the end of next week. We’re recording January 17th right now, so it should be up if you’re listening to this episode when it’s published.

Thanks again and don’t forget: work hard, do your best, and never settle for less. We’ll see you guys next week!