Adam Morgan, Director of Global Communications & Marketing at Bristow Group

Thanks for having me.

It can only go up from here, I guess.

Wow. Okay. No, that's a good question. On the fly, let's see. So, our company, we operate helicopters, so we are already kind of inherently just birdlike, right? But I would say, you know, I had a job in Alaska at Juneau, Alaska, and there were tons of bald eagles, eagles in there, and on my drive home one time, we had to drive by the landfill, and there was always just, I don't know, 30 to 50 bald eagles sitting over by the landfill picking things out to eat and everything. And one day I was driving by and I saw this bald eagle literally pick up an old — and this is probably gonna be a little gross, so, little content warning for our listeners — but pick up a deer carcass and carry it off. Right. Wow. And I'm not saying that Bristow picks up deer carcasses, but we pick up passengers from one location and take them to another location. So, I'm going to say that our spirit animal is the bald eagle.

Great question. Let's see. Where do I start? I guess I was born a baby. Then when I was three — no, I won't take you through all of it. No, actually, it's interesting. I was just having this conversation with somebody the other day and we were talking about how'd you get in your career, blah, blah, blah. And I said, you know, it's interesting. I was in the military. I got out of the military. And actually, at that point, I still had no intention of going to college and working in an office setting. My big master plan in life was to get some blue-collar type job, you know, use my VA loan, buy a house, work some construction site job. Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, whatever, come home, sit in my easy boy recliner, watch SportsCenter, and do it all again the next day. And that's actually what I started to do when I first got out of the military. And then I realized, well, gosh, I just don't want to do this for the next 40 years. And so then I went and signed up at college and used my VA, my GI Bill to pay for college. In college, I actually started as a business major with a focus on HR. And so as part of the business major program at Portland State University, which is where I got my undergrad, you have to take public speaking. All business majors have to take a public speaking class. And I took the public speaking class and uniquely to me, unlike most people, I absolutely loved it. I loved public speaking. I love being up in front of everybody, all eyes on me, give me all the attention, let me talk to people for an hour or whatever. And that's when I realized that there was this whole degree program for communications and marketing at the university and I quickly switched majors, got into communications, and the rest is kind of history. But right out of college, I worked at the USDA Forest Service. I worked in Alaska and Kentucky doing public affairs. For a short bit, I thought I was going to do legislative affairs. I love tracking policy, responding to congressional inquiries, going to Washington DC on bill visits and briefing our congressionals on how we were spending the funding that they were giving us, etc. And thought that was going to be a great career for me. Moved up to Alaska, it's where my daughter was born. And at that point, Alaska just seemed so far away from everybody. So I was looking to get back down into the lower 48. And that's when I got a job at Boeing. I spent about 10 years at the Boeing Company. It was a phenomenal career. I worked on their commercial airplane side, worked on their space side, worked in their international sales communications. So I covered Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean. A lot of great travel opportunities in that job. Back to Houston for their space business. I spent about 10 years there. Then decided, hey, I think it's time for a change. I'm living in Houston. Oil and gas, as we all know, here in the Houston area, is a big industry for Houston. Decided that I was going to focus on that industry and got a job at GE Oil and Gas doing commercial communications for their sales team. So a lot of that's where I learned a little bit about marketing. And then from there I got a job at McDermott as their global head of communications and marketing, reporting right to the CEO, supporting the management team, had a marketing team, had a communications team. Great job there. McDermott went on to buy CB&I, helped them announce the merger, helped them start the integration, and then a recruiter reached out to me for the job I'm in now at Bristow, as the director of global communications and marketing. And interestingly enough, when the recruiter first reached out to me, I turned the job down or turned the opportunity to interview for the job down because I was like, you know, McDermott's a much smaller company than any company I've ever worked for. Wasn't sure how I felt about that. A much smaller team than I have had in the past. Wasn't sure how I felt about that. But then I just started looking at Bristow online and studying the company and what they do and it was just a really interesting company and I just couldn't get it out of my mind. So I reached back out to the recruiter after probably a few weeks actually and said, "Hey, I don't know if you're still looking for somebody for that job, but I'd really like to be considered for this still." And she said, "As a matter of fact, we are still looking." And it was just a really nice combination of both my aviation experience and my oil and gas experience coming together under one roof, which was really appealing and exciting to me and that's kind of how I got to where I am today.

Oh, absolutely. Lots of ex-military folks here. Obviously, there's just a passion in aviation. Whenever you work in an aviation industry, it's one of those industries where, even if you don't work in it, people pay attention to it. They're just fascinated with aviation. I think aviation, space, and cars are probably the things that people — we have a lot of enthusiasts, if you will, that just kind of follow us and track us and they might be accountants in completely different industries, but they're like, "Hey, I like aviation, so I know all the helicopter types and I know all the missions."

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, that is really cool. And helicopters are about as cool as you can get.

Absolutely. Absolutely. That's great.

I always say I never met a mic I didn't like.

Yeah. No, it was — I mean every role I had, I had four different roles in a 10-year span and they were all just phenomenal. I learned so much from each role and I'll say this, Boeing is in my view still a darling brand. They'll get through all of these challenges that they're in and they'll come out the other side a better, stronger company like most companies that go through challenges do. And they had some of the best communicators in the world. And they still do have a phenomenal communications team over there. I stay in touch with a lot of folks over there. My first job at Boeing was on the 787 Dreamliner, which was a fascinating program to work on and an interesting time to work in communications at a company like Boeing that's doing some really big and amazing things because that aircraft — every 15 years or so is when Boeing or Airbus or whomever builds a new aircraft. So it doesn't happen all the time, not every day. And so the 787 Dreamliner was the first aircraft designed and built kind of in this new 24-hour news cycle. It's almost like getting built in a bubble. My first week on the job, so coming from up in Juneau, Alaska in the Forest Service, we're talking about forest management, proactive management and stuff like that. And then I come down to Boeing. My first week on the job, I got a phone rang. I picked it up — "Morgan, Boeing 787 Dreamliner, Boeing." And it was Matt Lauer's producer, right? Oh wow. And so up in Alaska, I was dealing with a local paper, the Juneau Empire, the Anchorage Times or whatever. And here I was, first week on the job picking up the phone. It was Matt Lauer's producer. And they were like, "Hey, this is Matt Lauer's producer, we're really interested in the 787 and we want to come and do some stand-ups and we want to pick the 787 Dreamliner as one of the 'Where in the World is Matt Lauer?' locations." Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, we didn't do it that time because it was just a little too early in the development process. There was no airplane yet. We were still just designing it. But we did work with Matt Lauer and did 'Where in the World is Matt Lauer?' a few years later when they actually had the airplane built and stuff and that was an interesting experience. I actually — my role in that part of the program was I was assigned to Lester Holt. So I did a lot of work with Lester Holt over about a 4-day span. I was driving him all over Seattle. I'd go home and tell my wife, "Yeah, Lester Holt was driving around in my car all day." I spent seven hours with Lester Holt today, taking him here and there and everything. Just an amazing person, great journalist. Really enjoyed that time. But I think my favorite job — well, they were all just super phenomenal. I loved my job when I covered Africa and Latin America. I went to Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, Morocco, been to Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Panama, and you meet some amazing people and you get to do a lot of really, really cool things and you learn a lot along the way. So my international job, I learned a lot about marketing for market entry. So, how do you condition a market before you even go in and sell a product? How do you create a customer preference for your product before you even go there and introduce your product? So a lot of cool things, a lot of things that I learned in that whole 10 years.

Oh nice.

Yeah. Well, from a marketing perspective now, what should have happened is when you got off that flight, you would say, "Man, I just feel better after that flight." You may not know why, but the marketing team had all of the great kind of reasons why, because of the composite material, they were able to increase the humidity because it doesn't corrode. So that dry skin that you get when you fly, it doesn't happen on the 787. They can pressurize the cabin differently. So the pressure and the headaches and the ear pops and everything aren't as frequent. The fatigue that you might get from flying at high altitude — they pressurize it to believe it was like 6,000 feet, which is basically like walking around Denver or something.

Oh, you did. You did. You don't remember? You did.

Yeah, Bristow we're a global company. We're headquartered right here in Houston, Texas. We have anywhere from 3 to 4,000 employees that support the company across the globe. We're in pretty much any location where they have a large oil and gas or offshore energy presence. So basically the main thing that we do and how we kind of got started was we fly oil and gas workers offshore to the energy platforms. Think of it as just kind of like your aviation service for the energy industry. That makes up probably about 60 to 75% of our revenue. And then kind of where we've been growing over the last few years is what we call government services. What that is is mostly what we're doing is search and rescue. So we do search and rescue for private industry as well, but where it's growing the most is with governments across the globe. So we are the Coast Guard for the United Kingdom. All of our aircraft over there is branded like UK Coast Guard. His Majesty's Coast Guard, if you will. We just won the contract to do the aviation for the coast guard for Ireland. We do the aviation coast guard in the Netherlands down in the Dutch Caribbean down in Curaçao. So that's another big piece of what we do. And then I think if you look ahead, the exciting futuristic stuff that we're looking at doing is something called advanced air mobility. So think of the helicopter in itself — the technology behind it really hasn't drastically changed over the years. Advanced air mobility is looking at a new way to power aircraft. So a lot of battery powered aircraft. So that's going to open up a lot of new potential new markets, new ways of thinking about flying. So those are kind of our three main areas.

Yeah, I don't think you would — I mean, because at the end of the day, it's all people, right? So whether it's B2C, B2B, B2B2G, at the end of the day, we're working with people, we're talking to people, we're trying to influence people, if you will. I would say from the government perspective, the thing that you have to think about is these are long-term contracts, right? They're not like two-year contracts. I think most of the government contracts we do are 10 years or more with five-year options and things like that. So once you land one, it's kind of a coveted piece of business to get one of these government contracts because you have that contract secured for the next 10 years. It's stable revenue, so our investors like it. That kind of a thing. But as far as how you market the business and what we do, obviously our experience in search and rescue — we've been doing search and rescue for quite some time. It's just now that some of these smaller countries that don't want to carry a lot of overhead expense to have their own aviation arm, there's a lot of benefits to bringing in a company like Bristow to support those missions.

Well, we're a publicly traded company.

Yeah, specifically. That's an interesting question and I know we talked a bit before this and that was the one question I was like, "Gosh, I'm trying to think of —" I think as you get along in your career, there's not a lot — in my opinion, there's not a lot of surprises left. I think things happen and you're like, "Okay," while at the moment you're like, "Wow, I didn't expect that to happen," but the fact that it happened, you're ready for it because you've experienced it or something similar to it in your career. I think one of the things I would say is one of the things I love about Bristow is the people. I didn't expect to build such close relationships with so many people at the company. We're 4,000 employees, but I feel like there's not a lot of employees that I haven't heard their name or met, whether it be in person or over Teams or with an email or whatever. I wasn't expecting for it to feel like such a close-knit kind of family. Had I known that going into it, I might have — not that I did anything wrong when I first got here, but I think you just would have thought about it differently, treated people differently. I'm not a mean guy or anything like that, so it wasn't like I treated people any certain way, but I think just knowing that it's such a close-knit family, going into it, you just kind of think about things a little bit differently and how things impact other people, etc.

Yes. And I think from a marketing perspective, obviously the more you can learn about a company before you get there is key, but there's certain things that you just can't find out on the internet or whatever. So just knowing how broad our services are, how the system works, what we do, how we engage with our customers, etc., all of that going in on day one would have obviously made day one and day 30 and 45 a lot easier.

Absolutely. And I think you bring up a good point because one of the things I learned quickly at Bristow is the helicopter industry for supporting the energy — the helicopter piece of the energy industry is pretty — we've been around for a while, but it's also like we're still growing up in a way, right? We're still maturing. Because if you think about how this all started, it was a very kind of mom and pop shop type of an industry and it's very early days. From a marketing perspective, there's still a lot of that relationship-based face-to-face type marketing, right? So I don't expect that our customers are really finding us on Instagram or Facebook or whatever. I mean, I think they follow us on LinkedIn and they enjoy the content that we put out, but I don't know that we're necessarily winning new business. Maybe we're satisfying existing business and highlighting our capabilities, etc. But I don't think that that's a marketing tactic per se to get new clients, for instance.

So, yeah, we never — I have a friend here at the office that is constantly joking about, "Hey, when are we getting our TikTok page?" I said, "I don't know. I don't think TikTok's where it's at for us." But, yeah, I don't think your audience is hanging out there. I don't think there's many Scottish Coast Guard people that are going, "Yeah, let's hire our next search and rescue company based off of TikTok." But we could come up with some pretty good TikTok content, but again, it's just content for the sake of content, right?

Yeah, I would say for us, I think that one of our biggest challenges is to avoid being commoditized, right? You have to avoid this whole "it's all about price, it's all about price, it's all about price." When I first started here talking with the sales guys, like, "Hey, what do the customers care about? What makes them tick?" Right? And it was, well, safety is number one, got to be safe. It's price of admission, right? If you're not a safe company, you're not going to do well in this industry. But then after that, it's cost. But we have to avoid going into this low-cost, race to the bottom, if you will. Win at any means — there's a value that gets placed there. There should be a value placed on what we do and how we do it. And so those are a lot of the conversations I have now with our BD folks and our country heads and that is what is the value that we bring to our customers? It can't be just about cost. It has to be a way for us to showcase our value that we bring — our assured service, our safety record. It's great if you're a low cost, but if you're not getting somebody from point A to point B regularly on time, what's the cost of those delays? And is it worth the low cost at the onset just to have to go back and spend more later to remedy it? So for me, it's avoiding being commoditized and changing the conversation to value.

Oh my gosh. I haven't heard that one. I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is terrible."

Well, you know, and you brought up the procurement side of the business as well. What we do — the logistics, the people logistics of it — it's an extremely important piece of the value chain, right? You have to get your people offshore, but at the same token, it's a fairly small piece for the large oil and gas companies, right? I mean, they're spending billions on this, that, and the other thing. We're a small kind of contract for them to sign. So I think it's easy for a procurement person to be like, "Oh, we're just signing this small contract with some logistics company." I think we have to make sure that we're more than that to them. That we are a trusted partner. We are a solutions provider more than a service provider. So come to us with your transportation needs and we'll come up with the solution that best meets those needs based off of our breadth and depth of experience in this business.

Yeah. And obviously there's other ways to get out there. They can take boats and there's a whole business and industry trying to come up with faster boats and stuff, but those things can be limited on weather, high seas, etc. And they'll never be as fast as helicopter transport.

Yeah. Again, I think it's just highlighting the value that we bring, talking about — we at Bristow, I've worked in the military, I've worked at Boeing, I've worked at a lot of other companies. And I think Bristow is of all the companies, the one that truly has this kind of safety first mindset. I mean, we talk about that's the price of admission because it is, but I think there's companies and people here that just kind of take it to the next level. From the very first day I stepped in the office, I mean, safety was — I think I got a safety brief from the receptionist that welcomed me on my first day, and then one of the first meetings I had was with the safety officer and they gave me a safety brief. So we do talk about it because we do place an extreme importance. We say it's our highest operational priority is safety. And we have a whole thing we call our Target Zero safety culture. We're in the midst of a video campaign right now where we talk about how it's one thing for a company to say that safety is first, but if people don't believe in it or if they don't have a reason to want to be safe, it doesn't matter how many posters we put on the wall or how many messages we send out. If they don't have their own personal reason of why they want to be safe and look out for their co-workers or themselves even, then it's not going to be taken as seriously. So right now, we're highlighting the personal side of safety. So, what is your why? What's the reason for you to come in to work today and work as safe as you can? And we're finding out a lot of people share the same reason why. I want to go home and see my family at the end of the day. I want to make sure that my co-workers can go home and see their families at the end of the day. And so we're tapping into that why for safety. And I'm really impressed with this whole video campaign. You can go to our website or our LinkedIn page and see a lot of those — we call them video vignettes. So those are some of the things on how we talk about that safety culture that we've built over time. So that's kind of our intellectual property of our people and the culture that we're building here. And so I think those are some of the ways that you prevent from being commoditized.

Yeah, that's an interesting question. I would say I don't have a great answer for this because I like to think that we're pretty measured in our approach to things. We don't just jump into things without a lot of thought. But what I will say — it's not necessarily a tactic, but one marketing misstep, if you will, was more about strategy. And so I'll use this example. When we were when the Irish Coast Guard contract was being bid, right? So the tender's out, etc. There was an opportunity for us to really build a brand in country, right? And let the people of Ireland get to know who Bristow is, our values, the history of the company, how we became, that kind of a thing. And we missed it. I'll admit it. We missed it. We just didn't — and that's maybe that's my fault. As the head of communications and marketing, I didn't push hard enough to really get us in there early to talk about it. There's lots of reasons, right? I think maybe there was some superstition like, "Hey, if we go in there and make a big deal about this, we're superstitious and we may not get the contract or whatever." But the reason why I think it was a miss is what it did to us is after we won the contract, some of our competitors in country used that vacuum as an opportunity to kind of undermine the decision to go with us. And I mean, we got through it and everything, but it caused us — we had to spend some time on a brand building exercise in country to introduce ourselves to the communities in which we're going to because we're saving lives offshore. Or these are just community people that are having their holiday on the coast or whatever and maybe they fell while they're rock climbing or maybe they got lost in a forest or the dinghy that they were on got pulled out to sea a little bit farther, and now they're kind of lost at sea or whatever. So these are the community people that need to trust in who's coming to rescue them. And they didn't know us. They didn't know who Bristow was and they didn't know our legacy in search and rescue and our history. So it was just a missed opportunity and that's a big lesson learned for me and for us, I think, is that there's an opportunity to really go in and build a brand and build some brand recognition well before you even have work in country.

Well, I'm not going to get into competitor bashing or anything like that. But what I'll say is we had a different approach, a different solution than what the competitor was offering or what had been used in the past. And so they were calling into question whether or not that was the right solution. And so that was just a challenge. I mean, we have some of the most technologically advanced aircraft, some of the best pilots. So I feel like we've since then gone out and addressed and built that trust amongst the community. The customer, I think, is extremely happy with our solution. So that's cool.