Gray Stone Advisors, a consulting company for business aviation with offices in Knoxville, Tenn., and Columbus, Ohio, is offering two new products aimed at helping flight departments make the business of running a flight operation less onerous.
Company executives Jim Lara and Steve Brechter have been working together for almost 20 years. “We’ve seen shifts in the corporate business aviation market over the last number of years,” Brechter explained. “First, the corporate environment has become much leaner than we’ve ever seen before, so there are fewer corporate resources available to the flight department, such as accounting. Second, whereas previously flight departments often reported directly to the CEO, now many are reporting to people lower down the corporate ladder, for example to HR, legal, communication and finance. Some of their reporting points are not even authorized users of the flight department. So now many flight department directors find they must vie for resources without having the skill sets they need to do this effectively.”
To help flight departments deal with crew staffing and budgeting, Gray Stone Advisors has developed two tools: CrewCount and BudgetBuilder. CrewCount helps take out the guesswork involved in determining how many people are needed in the flight department by accurately quantifying the specific requirements of the operation’s goals.
BudgetBuilder, basically a sophisticated spreadsheet of customized data in a format that can easily be presented to senior management and other corporate executives, asks users to evaluate 270 specific elements relating to a flight department’s budget.
Then Gray Stone Advisors helps flight department directors through the budget process and crew staffing models and remains available for additional consulting. “Our goal is to help the flight department become self-sufficient, but we’re available whenever needed,” said Brechter.
One flight department director, commenting on CrewCount, said, “The crew staffing model was great. Although my boss had another headcount in mind, this gave me confidence to justify ‘my gut’ with analytics. A huge thanks!”
