Part 7: Showing an Airplane
This article is the 7th in a continuing series
A Career Change: Learning the Aircraft Brokerage Business
It’s been a little while since my last writing about the newness of my job and the challenges and successes of learning a new industry, but lately I have been pulled up off the bench quite a bit; asked to perform in the game and make some plays. I wasn’t much of an athlete growing up, so often times the bench was my spot. But in professional settings I have had the fortune to be called up to play in the game with real consequences. A couple of weeks ago I was told that in a matter of hours I would be on a plane to Los Angeles to show a G550! It just so happened that everybody else in the company was working on other deals and in different parts of the country, so it was my moment. I was very familiar with the details of the airplane, I listened to my father and brother tell me what to expect in a showing like this and I packed my bags and got on the plane out to LA. I knew I was ready and they knew I was ready! My brother told me he expected 3 people to come look at the plane. As I stood on the ramp in my suit, with the spec and photo packs in my hand, the people I was meeting with pulled right up in their Global Express and all 7 of them came off the plane right towards me. Not 3. It felt very cool to be in that moment at that time, performing for the team and succeeding. The showing went great and I had that notch in my belt telling me I can do this!
It reminds me of one of my first jobs in Hollywood. I was working on “Something’s Gotta Give” with Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton and Keanu Reeves, as a PA in the post production department. I’d been working on the film for months, at the bottom of the ladder, getting lunch, picking up dailies in the morning from the lab and putting about 20,000 miles on my car in a year driving around Los Angeles. Then one day out of the blue they came in to the office and said, Mesinger, we’re sending you to New York to screen the film at a premiere at a Times Square theater. They were going to get me two first class tickets, one for me and one for the film (about 6 cans of the actual film from our cutting room. No other copy exited at this point), a hotel room and a per diem. I had just lived in New York City while I was in college and had left months before this, so I would be getting to return to my old town and friends on a business trip. A big one! The same goes for my trip to LA for the G550. My wife and I had just moved from LA before starting our new life in Colorado and I would be returning to my old home, friends and family on a business trip. A big one! Life has a funny way of throwing you opportunities at a moment’s notice. The trick is to be prepared, focused, confident in your abilities and appreciative of the experience. The bosses wouldn’t send you if they didn’t believe in you. The job here at J. Mesinger Corporate Jet Sales is filled with new challenges like this every day and I just focus and learn from each of them. Stay tuned for a report from my next mission; a trip to Detroit I went on last week to review an airplane we are listing. It includes late departures, freezing rain, log book reviews and new headshots!