Earlier this year, Air Charter Service passed a significant landmark, when its 100th employee celebrated 10 years' service with the company.
Chris Leach, ACS chairman and founder, comments: “We started out as a small family business with me working out of my basement. It wasn't until the late '90s that we had more than a handful of employees. We then grew at a steady pace in the 2000s, but in 2009 we had 100 employees in total for the first time, which puts this latest milestone into perspective. In 2010 we made staff retention a core metric for the group, which we believe is key to the sustainable growth of our business.” Ten years ago, in 2015, ACS had a little over 200 people in the company; it has grown significantly over the past 10 years, but half of those that were with the company then are still here.
“In any organisation with such a large sales team you expect a high turnover of staff, but we pride ourselves on the longevity of our team, not only here in our London headquarters, but across the globe; we have staff in our North American, South American, mainland European, African, Middle Eastern, Asian and Australasian offices, who have been with us for more than 10 years; some for much longer,” Leach goes on. “The longevity of the team also hugely benefits our customers, providing consistency of the people they deal with and the ever-increasing pool of knowledge within the company.
“In July Justin Bowman, our CEO, celebrated 30 years with the company, having started off helping me out in my basement on a work placement, before joining full time in July 1995. In fact, the average length of tenure of our board members is 19 years and five months. So much of charter aviation is knowledge-based, and we now have such a strong core of experience, which we have long-believed is essential to growth and has been pivotal over these past 10 years.
“By the end of this year the number of employees to have been with us more than 10 years should have reached 114.”