Quickly making its way to the head of the pack in its industry through excellent customer service and internal ambition, SHY Aviation is shaping the future of jet charter. Serving a myriad of market segments and planning to break into more in the future, co-founder Giles Vickers-Jones reflects on the company’s past year and future goals.
SHY Aviation is a global charter aviation company, working hard to take the next steps to become a worldwide leader in its field. With exemplary processes and award-winning attitudes shared throughout its team, it has access to all available aircraft on the market, putting them to good use for personal and private services. Its services strive to ensure that jet and aircraft hire is effortless and streamlined. For its clientele, there is no job too big or too small, and no challenge it can’t rise to, with an enviable attention to detail that has been lauded as exemplary by a growing pool of customers. The core philosophy behind everything it does is the simple notion of truly caring. Therefore, every member of its team is serious about customer focused business action, and the processes that make its work possible reflect this, keeping the client and their needs at its heart throughout.
When a client is working with SHY Aviation, they are connected and in control; whether they wish for a private jet for one high net worth individual, a group charter, or a cargo charter, they will have all the information they need at their fingertips. This ensures that a customer knows everything about their charter. Keeping a client in the loop like this gives the client peace of mind, showing them just how on the ball SHY Aviation really is, to have such an in-depth overview available always. A cut above the others in its industry, this company strives to offer services that clients cannot find through commercial air travel.
Such solutions encompass business and personal travel, such as CEO’s who need to get from city to city quickly and efficiently, and don’t have time to wrangle commercial airport queues. It also offers the use of helicopters, which has become a highly popular offering, transporting its clients all over the world and even to events or getaways, such as the Grand Prix or to ski slopes in the Alps. Its group charter has ferried all manner of groups from sports teams to companies to their destinations, and herein we see how truly tailored SHY Aviation’s services are. No matter the destination or person, SHY Aviation is dedicated to creating an itinerary and having the aircraft that will truly suit their purposes.
Having been developing and changing dramatically every day for the past 9 years since its founding, on an exponential path to further growth that certainly shows no signs of slowing, it has learned a lot. The SHY team very much match the tenacity and work ethic of the founders, and so this growth through learning on the go has always been a priority. During the past year, this diligence has been crucial to survival. Pivoting to helping Governments with repatriation and PPE cargo transport during the pandemic, it found itself serving more of these types of roles than ever before. It was this flexibility and adaptability that allowed it to survive, and eventually thrive, being able to encourage dramatic yet sensibly scaled growth.
Its 24/7 on demand offering, outstanding customer service, and staunch resolution to going above and beyond the call of duty have all been tested by the last 12 months, and it has responded in kind by rising to the challenge. The workload having almost doubled due to the need to adapt to paradigms that changed on the daily, the team showed tremendous effort and dedication. This is something that has been evident to the clients and to the founders. Giles Vickers-Jones, the company’s Founder and Chairman, is incredibly proud of his staff and the herculean efforts they put in. In this way, the pivot was made far easier than it perhaps could have been; the entrepreneurial spirit of the owners and their colleagues proved SHY Aviation’s processes to be made of incredibly strong stuff.
Its growth and upscaling meant for the hiring of more staff. This is something Giles mentioned to us as being a new frontier for the company, as previously, himself and his business partner personally handled all departments. This was something he enjoyed immensely, and caring so much about SHY Aviation’s future made it hard to switch to delegating these things, but he found that in doing so it relieved some pressure from his shoulders and has benefitted the company overall. The hires included senior management staff, including 2 highly paid experts in their field, a new FD, and a new strategic officer, amongst others. All of these people have proved their worth over and over again since the choice was made to hire them, and the owners could focus more on running the business overall rather than having to split their time between getting into the nitty gritty of multiple departments.
The immediate benefit to this was further growth opportunity. SHY Aviation was able to move towards an improved structure which keeps specific tasks within specific teams, leaving things that require expert attention in the hands of the newly hired experts. Whilst Giles described this initially as a leap of faith when passing these over, SHY Aviation has consequentially flourished, and propelled it further along the path to becoming a world leader in jet charter. To Giles and the team, every problem is an opportunity in disguise for further learning and bettering SHY Aviation. This is an attitude he himself learned from many of his previous roles, which has included TV presenting and hosting, book writing, column writing, and the owning of several other businesses that he has grown with his business partner.
Giles is used to seeing businesses flourish, but every single one of them has taught him new lessons, lessons that he takes onto the next one. He also was the head of a production company, a testament to his ability to project manage effectively, and was dabbling in other areas when SHY Aviation was being set up. It eventually became the priority as its expansion took off, presenting Giles with a daily, dynamic learning curve like no other before it. This has very much informed himself and his current staff, as well as the belief he has in them that was proven over the course of the last 12 months. SHY Aviation’s tenacity, dedication, skills, and capabilities have pulled them through, and will continue to do so. Moving forward into the future for Giles and SHY Aviation, the immediate future will see a continued focus on expansion with a number of mergers and acquisitions in the pipeline, and developments into EU market segment, and focusing that on the US in year 3. Giles expects further growth in the next 3 to 4 years of over 25%, taking SHY Aviation up to an £120 million company, and cementing its place as the world leader for jet charter. It intends to do this by not only being the best, but the easiest to use; backed up by its already stunning customer service. Needless to say, the future forecasts clear skies for SKY Aviation.
For business enquiries contact Giles Vickers-Jones at SHY Aviation via www.shyaviation.com
