Another "New" idea that didn't sell...even for free

"We've been doing it this way for 40 years and it works just fine...thanks anyway". That's about the nicest response I had ever gotten to the "new" idea.

It wasn't really new at all. It was just a rearrangement, a change here, a tweek there, and the willingness to prove that it would work. We had to create our own company to prove it...and even then nobody would believe it or begin to accept it.

Following is an excerpt from the introduction to my book "The Ag Pilot's Survival Manual", that describes what we did.

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The aerial application industry was about 40 years old when Stan and I decided that things could be a whole lot better. We proved our point so astoundingly that when it happened right in front of them, people didn’t believe it was real.

When we finally got a shot to prove ourselves, and our secret business system, we had been ready for weeks and had been practicing and training for all those weeks.

The caller said we were to spray 1,100 acres of cotton at 10 gallons per acre and he needed it done NOW, TONIGHT. So we saddled up and were ready to start the job at 10 o’clock that night. Southern California has a lot of night work due to the heat of the day and the fact that the moth is out flying at night and is more likely to be killed. In the daytime the moth hides under the leaves.

We did the job, finishing up about 4:30 the next morning. By 5am we were just walking into the office when the phone rang. Of course it was our guy who needed his work done. “I’m out here at your airstrip and I don’t see anybody. WHERE ARE YOU I NEED THIS WORK DONE NOW” and on and on raving about the work. Stan told him we had already finished the work and were going to have our naps.

Well, the guy went ballistic yelling at Stan. He swore there was no way we could have done all that work with one airplane, and he was going to check every field before he paid us, and on and on he raged.

There were two other operators in the valley, one had 10 airplanes, and the other had 7. Both of them were swamped with work and weeks behind schedule in spite of their numbers. The 1,100 acres could be sprayed by the 10 airplane operator in 12 hours. Start at 10pm and finish around 10am, having sprayed half of the job in the daylight hours.

We had just done the work of 10 airplanes with one airplane and did it in just over half of the time. When the fields were checked, and he did check every one of them, and there was no question but that we had actually done it, a big light went on in the guy’s head. From that moment on, we had all the work we could handle, which was a bunch.

There is currently a buzz about a process known as SCAMPER, which describes how to take a business process or product and improve it markedly. We weren’t aware of the scamper system, but we invented our own. It boiled down to a statement one afternoon when somebody remarked “It’s all here, we just need to rearrange it”. And that’s what we did.

We modified the tools of aerial application and combined the methods of race car pit crews, to come up with a system for turning around on the ground in less than one minute. When the airplane came in for a load, we started timing when the tail wheel stopped rolling and stopped timing when the tail wheel started again. Where the accepted loading time was 10 – 20 minutes in any other company, we were saving 9 to 19 minutes per load. When you have a 34 load job to complete before the sun comes up, those 9 to 19 minutes per load come in real handy. Where the normal practice was to spend 5 of the working hours putting a load in the plane, we would only spend 34 minutes loading.

Over the years I’ve showed a few operators how to do that, but not a one of them thought enough of the idea to implement it. It’s different here, they’d say, we don’t need to save all that time.
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Photos here for those interested in airplanes.