Navigating Turbulence: The Evolution of Leadership with Blair LaCorte

Hey there, folks. Welcome to this episode of the Strategy and Leadership Podcast.

My guest today, Blair LaCourte. One of the cool things that I saw when looking at the opportunity to interview Blair is his history, his experience in the market. He has CEOs that come from around the world to support him and to work with each other in masterminds. But he's walked the walk. He's talked the talk. He's been the CEO of many large businesses and operator within private equity.

And Blair, correct me if I got that wrong. just for organizations to help them grow and scale, living life, loving life, and just really making a difference and an impact with human beings at the end of the day. So Blair, I'm so excited and grateful that you joined us on the podcast today.

Hey, Anthony, thanks. You know, I was excited. You know, when I had read about what you do and your emphasis, I thought, you know, I love the fact that you're involved with, you know, smaller businesses that are, you know, driving innovation, driving growth. But I also love the fact that you're talking about people because at the end of the day, All we do in business is play a sport, and sports are all about people. So I'm excited to talk to you today.

Excellent. So we can talk about your entire journey as a CEO, the work fields that you've worked in. One of the most interesting ones that I saw, so big work with TPG, and then work with the airplane, the ExoJet Aviation.

Drop me into ExoJet Aviation. I think that's just a fun story that's cool, that's unique. Tell me about what it was like running that organization, leading it to where it got to, and then we'll kind of diverge from there. Sure. Well, I mean, I would start with the fact that be careful to say never, because when I was growing up, my family had a ragtag airline. We, you know, ate what we killed every month. It was brutal. You know, aviation businesses are tough, especially subscale.

And I said, I would never, ever, ever go into aviation. And so, you know, at TPG, for those of you who don't know, TPG is, we pay a branding firm a lot of money to change our name from Texas Pacific Group to TPG. But TPG is a big private equity firm. But we went from small venture investments, we had $93 billion, all the way up to we bought IBM. That's how we created Lenovo. We bought IBM and merged it to create Lenovo.

That's why when you look at the Lenovo laptop, it still says ThinkPad on the side. That was because we merged the two companies together. all the way down to startup companies where if any of you have gone and taken the grail test, the new test to test for cancer, that was something we funded when it was literally just started. So when I looked at what I was doing at TPG.

I actually loved looking at different businesses and I asked to be able to be put across multiple sectors, whereas most people focus on one. Well, the challenge in that was when 2008 hit, We all had to actually look at what we could do to help our companies. And, you know, aviation was really in trouble and especially private aviation. So I turned around to talk to someone and someone in the meeting said, I think Blair's got aviation history.

And as I turned back around, the founder of the firm who unfortunately just passed away, David Bonderman, a legend, turned around and said, Blair, how'd you like to run an airline? And at that point in front of 25 people, it's really, really, really difficult to say I'm not a team player. But just as I said, I'd never run another aviation company or be part of it. I was thrown in. But it wasn't exactly the sexiest way to get thrown in. As you guys remember, in 2008, everything stopped.

And everything stopped with private aviation. So ExoJet at the time, we owned our planes, which was very unique. Usually it's just airlines who own their planes. Private airlines use other people's jets so they don't pay for the assets. We owned our airplanes, and none of them were flying.

So when I took over, it was actually in what I would say functional bankruptcy, maybe not official bankruptcy, but when your planes are only flying 10 hours a month and you're still paying on the debt for them, it was a pretty brutal thing. So although the story turned out to be a great story about innovation, I will tell you, for those of you who've been there before, it was rooted in desperation. When you are about to go bankrupt, you get very, very smart about what decisions

you make. And we made three or four decisions that I think you'll see today. We changed aviation because chartering way back when was kind of a random kind of thing. It was not considered, you know, the high class thing to do. You either owned your plane or you bought a share of a plane with someone like NetJets. So chartering was kind of the back alley way to get on a plane. So I would definitely want to ask you about that. Yeah, and I think the timing is important, right?

You think of 2025, you think of the changes in the economic landscape globally. There are organizations over the past couple of months that may be teetering, have teetered, and you look at the necessity as the mother of invention. And so now in 2025, what do you as a CEO, what do you as a leader, what do you do as a team player in an organization?

What ideas can you come to the table to support the evolution of your organization to keep it moving forward? And in this case, you know, where you were at as the CEO put in front by TPG as a team player. And he said, OK, great. Like, how do we move this thing forward from functional bankruptcy to, you know, now an innovative, a new innovation in aviation at the time? So tell me about that journey.

Of course, you've got millions of other stories, I'm sure, but I'm grateful that we're going down this path. You are. Hey, and look, I think you made a really interesting point. And I know this will sound like a cliche in some way, but there's a reason why cliches last. Look, when things are going well. Big companies have an advantage, okay, because they're just making investments. They have cash on the balance sheet.

They can do acquisitions. They make incremental changes, and their innovations don't have to be big. When there's volatility or there's fear in the market, that's when smaller players can make big moves. Now, if you get to the final edge of that, which is you're in big trouble, it even puts an extra turbocharger on your ability to make change. But, you know, every time that there's a negative, there's a positive.

And the negative today is that there's a lot of volatility in the markets, there's a lot of uncertainty in the markets, but it also is giving an opportunity for people to do things differently than they would have been able to do it before. So what we did way back when was we sat down and said, well, this seems like a very straightforward problem. Our planes aren't flying enough. And what can we do to actually get our planes up in the air?

So the straightforward problem, very, very difficult solution because, you know, when you actually break down who buys private jets, the number one person was businesses and they were not going to spend any money. So what we did is we dropped down to the second tier and we kind of dug in on the psychology of who else would fly. And it turns out that the second most likely private jet user was someone who was afraid of flying.

And so we worked very, very hard to actually cultivate people who didn't fly very much because they didn't like to fly, but had the wealth to do it. The third was people who wanted to fly with their pets. So we changed everything we did. We put callers on the plane. We put water bottles. We put them on the manifest so that they were actually called out when the planes take off.

And so immediately, those two categories of people who still had the wealth to fly, but weren't flying because they were afraid of flying or weren't flying because they didn't want to take their pets, gave us this little turbo boost of 10%. And that got our little momentum going, our little wheels spinning. And it got people to believe that maybe we could look at aviation a different way. And so we went through all of these different little things until they added up into big things.

And once you had momentum going, we got our planes up from 10 hours a month to 120 hours a month, which people said was impossible. It's impossible to fly a plane 120 hours a month. Again, we've just looked at it as how many hours are there in the week.

Right for four or five weeks a month and we're going to try to fill up every single hour and i i'll stop there but we you know a lot of little innovations led up to changing the way that we delivered charter so it wasn't that we invented something new that changed aviation as we did a lot of little things and we tested little things and then as they started to excuse the pun take off. We parlayed that momentum.

Yeah, I love that. Well, I think so for us as strategic planning facilitators, we often have private equity companies that are like ultimately the client that have put someone in there.

And what's great about, you know, operator CEOs or folks that are like industry agnostic is that a you go to fundamentals, but B, you can take stuff that worked in other industries and put it here. So, for example, if you're like a brick and mortar business and you say, well, I've got a washing machine, a laundromat. I want to make sure that people are in here nine to five. Kind of the same idea. We want to make sure that the plane is up in the air.

So taking the same principles that apply in different businesses, applying it into there, and then not getting lost in the, you know, folks saying, you know, whatever they might say about it and really putting in those incremental innovations that over weeks, months, years, create transformation and then lead the business to another place.

How did that feel after the couple of years, looking back at what you built, did you have any other ahas for yourself other than, you know, a well-deserved pat on the back for what you did for the company? Sure. Look, one of them was exactly what you said, looking at funnel vision versus tunnel vision. Everyone in aviation did what everyone in aviation did and tried to get incrementally better with their best practices.

We actually looked at things from every industry and tried to figure out whether we could change it up, right? We started looking at things that aviation companies would never look at. Like, let's look at the total value chain, which may sound simplistic, but when you look at one of the biggest issues people had in aviation, it wasn't, you know, biggest issue would be you got maintenance on a plane and I can't get to my meeting after I paid you all this money because the plane can't fly.

You know, you can solve that by trying to have more planes available. But it turned out that other things that were friction were things like catering, which every FBO owned. And we really decided that, you know, we would actually integrate ourselves into catering.

In the old days, you'd pay $100,000 for a flight, and someone's cousin at the FBO would be going to Walmart to get you some bagels, which would drive people insane that they paid $400 for bagels, or that you didn't have a limo when your plane landed. Now, they would all blame the company that rented the plane. We vertically integrated in and standardized contracts with vendors like you had done in other industries.

And it completely, it gave us more money out of the value chain and it completely increased the quality of the chain. But that's something that many guys out there would say, that's not an innovation. Well, it was to us. Because when you're in aviation, you fly the plane. That's it. I don't care about the value chain. Right. What I think is just important for our listeners, like we're listening to this in 2015.

This is, you know, 2010. You know, so if you're following, you know, what's his face calling on an Instagram or any other like private jet company or ones that you could like Uber eyes on your phone or whatever, like that shit didn't exist. You couldn't, you didn't have all of those things. So really thinking about it at the time and the foresight and the intelligence and the understanding of like, what are the pain points of the customer and addressing those?

And you wouldn't think that bagels make a difference, but you know, as you add up all of those things together, that's great. It's little things. It's, you know, the atomic habits, 1% change every day leads to 37% change cumulatively over the year. It changes the way things work. Another thing that, you know, that I took away from that experience was, you know, you can't, people always say to me, look, you've been in turnarounds and you've been in growth companies.

Wow, that's amazing that you've done both ends of the spectrum. And in reality, what I say is that they're the exact same thing.

Because what's happening in a turnaround is something's not working and you need change. And I'm going to have to go back and look at every fundamental to your point of the business. And then I'm going to have to get rid of 60% of my team over the next two years, right? Well, guess what happens in a growth company? I come in, they're not growing the way they should. I'm going to look at every single fundamental process and see whether we went

too fast. And then I'm going to get rid of 60% of my management team. Why? Why does that happen? Because it's about change. And when you change, the number one thing that you have to understand how to change is people. So one of the things I always do, whether I'm coming into a turnaround or a growth company, is I never assume someone's an idiot, right? It's a tendency that we say, oh, they brought me in, or I'm the CEO and my team's not doing it, and I have to do it.

So I'd spend time listening, doing listening sessions and asking people about their entire career, how long have they been there, why do they do what they do today? and I would find the patterns. And once you find the patterns inside a company, of course, you're going to find 10% of the people in the world are not great people. And, you know, it's just, that's the way it is. Another 20% of the people out there probably don't have the skills that they need to go where you're going, right?

But then you look at the other 60% of these people and probably half of them have the capability, but don't know how to actually make the change happen because they are doing what they think they're told to do. And then you have another group of people at the top that are change leaders. And so understanding both the patterns and who the people are allow you over time to transition the team.

And it's not personal. One of the things I did in all of my companies from the time I became a senior executive was when I let anyone go or anyone on my team, a direct report of me let anyone go, I would offer to spend an hour with that person. Now you say, wow, that's extremely inefficient. Maybe for your direct reports, but even your direct reports, if you're going to let them go, you're going to let them go.

What do you let HR talk to them? So it turns out that when you spend the time talking to people, you learn a little bit, but you also fulfill your obligation to them as human beings to say, here's why I did it. Now, sometimes they are still not going to believe you and they're going to yell and swear and get pissed at you.

But you know who benefits as well is everyone else on your team and everyone else in the company because they see the way you're treating other people, even other people that they may not have treated that well because they've been the brunt of maybe some bad decision making. So one of the things is, you know, you said earlier is looking at patterns outside your industry. The second thing is understanding that this is just a sport. Business is just a sport. And sports are played by people.

And therefore, how you actually manage and learn from people not only impacts what you're doing today, but I've gotten more leads for deals. And I've gotten more recommendations for people when I was hiring from those same people we let go because we treated them like human beings. And that's not just being nice. That's being right. that's the right thing to do.

The problem is we all feel pressured and I get it and therefore we're looking for things to actually cut out and I would argue to you that doing the right thing there are a lot of other things to cut out. I'll guarantee you I used to do this audit thing with people when I was coaching say show me where you're spending your time every month. 20 to 30 percent of their time would be spent with people that they didn't want to spend time with that they didn't like, and it didn't add any value.

But those people were extremely aggressive and sucking up and pushing the boundary and trying to get you to do it so you felt guilty. So I'm telling you, Go find the low value people and very nicely just don't spend time with them and then focus yourself on the things that make a difference for you long term. Excellent. Well, one of the quotes that will be said in my head is don't assume people are idiots. And then in parentheses, let them prove it for themselves.

I think it's really great that you go in, you know, recognizing the importance of supporting people, not only through their transitions, but, you know, that's what a good leader does and being able to focus on it. You know, not forgetting that in some cases, there are CEOs that have been in this job 10, 15, 20 years, and sometimes they lose the zeal for it, like the real, like most important part. So reassessing that. I'll take the opportunity to share that Blair runs a mastermind for CEOs.

So he said, I don't care, you know, but if you want to go check it out, it's great. So I will plug it because he even said, you don't need to plug it, but I will. And I appreciate the only good part about it is I also post all of the videos from all of the conferences we do for millions of dollars worth of speakers.

So if you do want to go to our homepage at PPE, Mastermind, or at my LinkedIn, go check out some of these videos because the good thing about being old is I ask my friends to come speak and they don't charge me. And you get to see, I think I had six keynotes over a two-day period that there'd be one keynote, right? And they do it because they want to help and you'll, you get great, great information.

So that's a freebie for you. Awesome. Check that out. So before we finish, I have one more question, question for you. And this is, you know, looking back at your, at your career, your experience as a CEO, what is one like lesson you learned the hard way? What is something you're like, man, I wish I could have done this better. And what did you take away from that? Assuming there's at least one.

Oh, there's many, many. I think the most important to anyone on this call is I would have done more self-care. You know, we take on the mantle of leadership and sacrifice, and it's a very lonely job sometimes because you can't tell everybody everything that's going through your head. And we try to do the best we can to compartmentalize. But the reality is if you were the coach of yourself or you were a coach of a great athlete, you would make sure that athletes recovered.

You'd make sure when they got injured that they went and got treated. you'd make sure that you brought in you know coaches for them to make them better and i look back and i think to myself i did a lot of things for other people and i didn't because i felt like it was selfish but the most selfish thing to do is to actually not be performing at your optimum and letting everybody down so you know i'm the vice chair of the buck institute which is the number one

institute in the world on longevity and i can tell you there's i you know i at some point, I'm going to write a book, The CEO's Survival Guide. There's a lot of things that you should be doing for yourself if you really believe you're a great leader. Because at the end of the day, waiting until you break is not an excellent strategy. Well, true words. So thank you, Blair. I appreciate it.

I think it's just good reflections for everybody, but especially CEOs, you know, in arguably the most toughest position in an organization.

You know, how can you look at ways to innovate? How can you support your people even on the way out? And then how can you make sure you support yourself, arguably the most important person, so that you can be a leader of leaders and pour back into folks. So Blair, thanks for joining us on the podcast today. I had a blast. I appreciate you. And I look forward to whatever's next, including your barbecue. you. Hey, thanks, Anthony. Take care. And happy Memorial Day.

And to those out there, thank you for your service. That's why we're here talking about being able to play sports like business. Absolutely. Thank you, everybody, for what you do. Thank you, Blair, for joining us on the podcast. Thank you, the listener, for being here, liking, sharing, getting this into the hands of people that'll benefit from it. My name's Anthony Taylor. This has been the Strategy and Leadership Podcast. Thanks for being here. I'll see you next time. Bye, everyone.