GEOFF CHICK


EYES GLOBAL POTENTIAL AS SENIOR VP OF WORLDWIDE SERVICE NETWORK


BY JESSICA BUEL PERSPECTIVES


Don’t let the British accent fool you. Geoff Chick is a hellion at heart. Riding his Suzuki GSXR 1000 through the backroads of New Jersey and New York, the senior vice president of worldwide service network for Dassault Falcon Jet reclaims a bit of the inner bloke from Hastings, England and remembers the original attraction to speed that stirred his young soul.


Chick, 52, was literally raised in aviation and around planes. His father was a glider pilot and eventually became a commercial pilot, working as a crop duster. His brother became a private pilot and also worked in aviation maintenance. Flying was a way of life in the Chick family, he said.


“As long as I can remember, I was fascinated and fanatical about anything that flew,” Chick said. “We lived under the flight pattern for Gatwick Airport, and I would identify planes at seven or eight years old. I can’t imagine myself doing the hours for this job if I wasn’t passionate about it.”


Eventually, the model airplanes and overhead air traffic gave way to a technical diploma in aircraft maintenance and a Master’s Degree in Business Administration. Chick moved to British Columbia, Canada with his family in 1991 to expand the family’s crop dusting business. He obtained his commercial maintenance and engineering license and his instrument rated private pilot’s license and took a position with Air


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Canada, moving to Montreal to oversee the company’s aircraft reliability program.


In 2006, Chick signed on as Dassault’s Director of Service Engineering in Teterboro, New Jersey and became Senior Director of Customer Service in 2010. Chick was promoted to his current position as Senior Vice President of Worldwide service in 2019. In some ways, joining Dassault was like rejoining the family business, Chick explained.


“Dassault was founded by a family, and it behaves like a family company in many ways,” Chick said. “You feel like you are a part of that family. You are not a number; you are a name. This feeling permeates the entire organization, and I felt that when I walked in, in 2006.”


However, aviation is a constantly changing market, and an employee base that runs as a family cannot stop for change. Chick said this made the Coronavirus pandemic new territory. Most knew there would be a lull in aviation, but no one knew how long that lull might take. Chick describes this time as “wait and see followed by action, followed by more wait and see.”


But as countries lost commercial airlines and customers lost the ability to fly through traditional means, business aviation saw an increase, specifically in North America, where it has boomed in the past year. “People flocked to the safe environment of chartering a plane,” Chick said. “We have seen an increase in the business and aircraft traffic. It was a struggle, and we were under strain and uncertainty in the past year, but the industry is coming back.”


Chick said the greatest demand of his job is the need for adaptability. Maintaining constant contact with nearly 50 service centers in various time zones means he must know the needs of the customers, the region, the aircraft and the company at any moment.


Yet this expanded territory has not displaced “old school” habits like picking up the telephone to speak instead of relying on constant streams of text messaging. Making time to pick up the phone is critical to productive communication and is integral to his role, even if that role no longer includes management of the day-to-day, Chick said.


MASTERING SALES FORCE AND G-FORCE


“Worldwide is a big territory, but it is primarily a strategic kind of role,” Chick explained. “The objective is to balance the needs of the customer and the company, to finance and shape the medium- and long-term plans.” Indeed, the strategic nature of the role is critical enough that Chick reports directly to Jean Kayanakis, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Falcon Customer Service & Service Center Network.


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