Adam Johnson CEO of NetJets - 2024 Father - Son Mass and Breakfast

Thanks, sir. Appreciate it. All right, good morning everybody. Again, my name is Adam Johnson, and I'm very, very proud to be here with you today. I'm going to test this and make sure this thing works here real quick. All right. Before I get started, I just want to take a moment to talk about you, Jim. And I was talking to Will Grow before I started up here, and those of you that know me, I had the great blessing and privilege of my job to be able to jump into some private jets and fly all over the world. It's my job, right? And in doing that over the last really 14 years, in my roles in the last 14 years of my life, it's an amazing blessing to meet a lot of incredible people, a lot of incredible companies. At NetJets, we fly, as an example, we fly about 500 of the top 1,000 Fortune 10,000 companies of the world, industries that you know, technology and insurance and finance, pretty big industries, names that you would know. And I told Will Grow once a long time ago, and he reminded me this morning, and people that know me know that I believe this: I think Jim Lowe is one of the top five leaders of all the people that I've ever met in my life. I think he's incredible. And I say that knowing that my son's already out of school, I'm not trying to get good grades or anything for him, right? So anyway, Jim, you've been a great friend, and it has been a blessing to know you. Now, I'm not done with you quite yet. I also want to say to other fathers, upcoming fathers in the room, Jim will absolutely, he will grab you at some point, and he'll put his arm around you, and he'll hold your arm, and he'll roll out the charts of this incredible campus that he and his team have built, and he'll say these words to you. He'll say, 'We're glad you're a part of this, and any type of small donations that you could have to help us build it are incredible.' I want to clarify what he really means. In the words of the great Mother Teresa, he wants you to give until it hurts. I promise you that. By the way, we all should. What is happening here is something special. I said to a couple people this morning, you can feel the energy building, and I credited all of you for that. So, all right. They asked me to also speak about my family. Now, I'm going to pause first on this picture. Let me introduce my wife Robin, those that don't know her, my son Evan who graduated last year and he's a freshman in college, and my daughter Aaron who graduated two years ago from the Sales. So, boo, Sales, I know, right? And so a few weeks back, I got a note from Lou and Jim and said, 'Hey, can you be our guest speaker for the Father-Son?' And I said, 'Don't you, didn't you find anyone more qualified, Jim?' Right? And so I called my wife immediately and I said, 'Hey, Jim asked me to do this,' and without another breath, my wife said, 'You're doing it right away,' right? And I said, 'I know I'm doing it, but I need a family photo.' And for the young men in this room that will eventually go up and get married, this is what marriage looks like. My wife sent me the most beautiful picture of her and the most sunburned, fat picture of me that she could find so I can share it with you. So that is my family. So one thing that I learned, many people in this room probably have the same situation that I have, where they have a son that went here and maybe a son that went to a different high school, or a son that went here and a daughter that went to a high school. That was us. And so again, speaking to the young future Cardinals over here, I want to lay some of your concerns on St. Charles. I know you've heard the rumors about how much homework or the infamous Greek or Latin class and how tough it is. First thing I would tell you is: one, do your homework, you're going to do great, I can promise you that. Two, I learned something, this is my gift to you: evidently, according to my son, a 2.0 at St. Charles is the equivalent of a 4.0 at the Sales. Right? So you're good to go. So you're good to go. It's my perfectly imperfect family, and I love them. Okay, so I was asked to talk about my faith, and those that know me well know that I'm actually a very private person, and this is way out of my comfort zone to talk about this. So I also want you to know that I'm not up here to lecture anybody about faith. I was asked to talk about my faith, which I'm willing to do. I also really want you to know, if I asked everybody in this room to make a list of all the stupid things that they've done in their life, I know that my list would be much longer than your list, right? And so I just want you to know that we're all imperfect in what we do. But I've also learned in my 53 years, that's almost 20,000 days on this planet, that there are times in your life when you're doing bad and times of life when you're doing good. And I can tell you what lessons I've learned those 53 years is that when I was doing the best in my life is when I turned towards God, not away from God. So I want to tell you a quick story, hopefully quick, about one of those days in my life that fundamentally changed my life. This is a story that most of the people in my life don't know. My wife knows it, my parents know this, my son Evan knows a little about it, my kids know a little bit about it. This is a big day in my life that I haven't really talked about, so I decided my big party was to tell 400 people one day, right? So this started about 10 years ago, and I was at a point in my life, everybody in this room has good things and bad things, good times, bad times, sad times, happy times, right? I was at a point where I had a lot of pressures that I felt building up into my life, a lot of things going on at work. I was preparing for one of my first Berkshire Hathaway board meetings where I was going to be standing in front of all the board members of Berkshire. There was a lot going on, raising young kids, and I just was at a point where I was just feeling it. I remember that, and I didn't really tell anybody that. I just was internalizing a lot of that. I was feeling that, and that night I went home, and I was upstairs, and no one was upstairs with me, and I literally had one of those moments where I literally prayed out to God. One of these what I refer to as 'Little House on the Prairie' moments where you're sitting in front of your bed and you're praying deeply to God. And I said to God, 'I got a lot on my mind, I got a lot of pressures, guide me.' This is my prayer to myself that I said that day. And I prayed as deep that day that I ever had in my life, and nothing happened, right? I got in my bed, rolled over, I plugged my phone in. I grabbed my phone, actually, set my alarm for the next morning. I started reading one of the 8,000 apps that my wife has put on my phone, the Bible apps and the Hallow apps and all those apps. And I came across, happenstance, I came across an article. It was talking about the life of Jesus, and in this article, it was literally talking about the 33 years. There are a lot of theologians, I know there's debate on this, that they believe Jesus was crucified around the age of 33. And this article was talking about that, and I started, as I fell asleep, just really visualizing that. I was, for the first time probably ever in my life, I was thinking about Jesus as a child, Jesus as a teenager, as a young man, and ultimately the crucifixion at 33. And that's what I fell asleep to that night. Went to bed, and the next morning I had a really unusually, really long day. I had 10 meetings back-to-back over 12 hours, kind of a scheduled day. It was a long day, scheduled, and I got up really early. My alarm went off, and I grabbed my phone, and I looked down on the phone. I realized I hadn't plugged it in. I don't know if you've ever done that, you thought you plugged your phone in, something went wrong. My life is driven by power cords and chargers, I think, sometimes, right? I look down, and my phone didn't charge, and it was on 33% charge. Now, this is not a Lazarus moment. I don't want you to think there was a miracle that was occurring, but it did catch my attention. I smiled, and I went into my bathroom, showered, shaved, got ready, and went on my way to the day. I went to work, and my assistant is amazing, and she had everything laid out. I'm still old school, I have a lot of paper. And the first bucket of, or first meeting I had, I had a stack of paper, and the meeting is a fun meeting for me. We've been hiring a lot of people at NetJets over the last 10 years. We have over 8,500 people today at NetJets. And then my first meeting was to go and greet the new hires. And I always take the time to meet these new hires because it's an amazing time of life where people go to their first internship or their first job or first career change, and I've not forgotten what that feels like. It's a stressful time of life, and I want to get to know them. So I read the resumes, and then the last thing that I get before I walk in is a list of their names and their titles and who they report to and how many people in the room. And I promise you with my heart, there were 33 people in that room that day, right? Again, I don't think there was a parting of the Red Sea. I don't think a miracle was happening. The word 'coincidence' was used in the homily about five times today. I don't know if you heard that or not, but 'coincidence' was used, and it stunned me. I turned to my son and I said, 'He's stealing my speech here, he's stealing coincidence.' So, okay, fine, whatever. I went on my day, meeting, meeting, meeting, and I went for a late lunch. And I went down to the cafeteria. So we have 8,500 people, there's about 2,500 people that work here in Columbus. I went down, I was grabbing a salad that day, and I went into the salad bar, and I was really running behind, so I was trying to grab my salad as quickly as I could. And one of our pilots that I never met, we have about 3,500 pilots, leaned into me, and he had one of our new uniforms on. He looked great, new uniform, fit guy. I never met him before. Clearly, I knew he was a pilot, probably getting ready to go on a flight. And he leaned into me, he said, 'Hi, AJ.' No big deal, I hear that all the time when you're walking through the halls, people often stop and talk about whatever, right? I said, 'Hi,' no big deal, and I was more focused on the dwindling pile of croutons that was going down that I was trying to get to than talking to this gentleman. And he stopped me, and he literally leaned in, and he stopped, and he looked right in my eyes, and he said to me, 'Adam,' he goes, 'Do you believe in God?' This is at work right now. I had a lot of thoughts going through my mind at this point. One, it had officially become a very weird day for me at that point. But I said, 'Yes, I do.' And he said, 'Good. Can I pray for you?' And I said, very sheepishly, I said, 'The answer is yes or no? The answer is yes.' I said, 'Sure,' kind of nervously, right? And he said, 'Great, finish that salad, and I'll be up in your office in 15 minutes, and I'd like to pray for you.' So now my day had really gotten weird, and the thoughts I had going through my mind at that point were: one, how does he know I'm a fast eater? That was my first thought. Two, is this guy going to come up and murder me in my office? That was my second thought. And three, I'm embarrassed to tell you what I really thought was, 'Wow, that was embarrassing, I hope no one heard that.' That's what I thought. So I went up to my office, I told my assistant, 'Hey, there's going to be a pilot comes up, he's going to talk to me.' I didn't tell her anything about anything that happened to me in the previous 10 hours of my life. I just said, 'Hey, he's going to come up, and I got five minutes, we're going to talk.' He came up to my office, and my assistant let him in. He walked in my office, and he closed the door. And I thought, 'This is the point I might be murdered,' at that point, right? And he grabbed my arm, and he said, 'I just want to pray for you.' He said, 'Adam, I know you have a great responsibility, you have a lot of families that are relying on you.' He said, 'I pray for you, you find wisdom in everything you do, in the good or bad in your life, that you always turn to God.' That was the prayer that I had said and I reached out the night prior. And so that was it. We gave each other an awkward man hug, and he left. And I actually saw a few minutes later, I saw his plane taxi off, and he was going on his way to the wild blue. And I sat there, I immediately closed my door, and I sat there, and I put my hands in my head. I remember, and I tell you, that moment changed my life in a small way. Not, I've had many moments like that, frankly, but it changed my life that day. I was embarrassed that somebody was talking to me about God, and I was afraid to do it. I was embarrassed that I'd never met this gentleman before. And so I can tell you, we've become friends. He's not the Reverend Billy Graham, his name is Tom, and we've become very good friends. He doesn't live here, he flies all around. I don't see him often, he comes in for training probably once a year. We have dinner together, we talk about our family. He's got a beautiful wife, he's got a couple kids, and we talk about a relationship with God, and we talk about life. That's what we talk about. And I don't talk to hardly anybody about it because it's a personal thing for me, not that I'm hiding it, because he's been a guiding force in my life. And I actually showed my son for the first time last night, I have years of text messages and emails from him where he inserts himself into my life in an amazing way. So my message to you all, for the young men in the world, is learn a lesson from me: don't take 40 years of your life to turn towards God. I wasted probably a lot of that 40 years afraid to do that in the lowest times of my life, and I can tell you, it changed my life when I did so. Okay, now let me talk to you about something that's a whole lot less important, but a lot easier for me to talk to you about. I was asked to talk about, Jim said, 'Hey, tell the boys like how you became CEO,' right? And so I'll try to give you a very compacted view of my 30-year career in aviation. So first I want to tell you is: one, I always knew I wanted to be in aviation. When I was a very young kid, both of my grandfathers were aircraft mechanics in World War II. They were crew chiefs, both of them. They didn't know each other. My father retired from GE Aircraft Engines, and I always, always wanted to fly. Something in a different way changed my life. I'm going to start some controversy here: in 1986, a movie came out, which is the best of the two Top Gun movies, right? I know we'll fight about that later, I suppose, right? I didn't watch it one time, I watched it 9,000 times, and I knew I was going to be a pilot, Navy pilot, like 100,000 other people I knew at the time, right? But I knew I wanted to do that. I took my first flight lesson that summer at 18, I soloed at 19, I had my private pilot's license and my instrument rating, and I was working on my commercial, my CFI, and I was going to be a pilot. So, and about 20 or 21, something happened. And what happened was I was flying, I rented an airplane. The airplane, by the way, the airplane, I thought about this last night, I was flying down to Morehead City, North Carolina, to meet a friend whose family had a condo down in Morehead City, North Carolina. And I was flying, I stopped there, I spent the night, had fun, came back, and I stopped, I was by myself, I stopped in Roanoke, Virginia, and I was on my way to Columbus, Ohio. And halfway between Roanoke, Virginia, and Columbus, Ohio, a couple things happened. One, this is what I was going to tell you, the plane I was flying on, I don't know how many pilots or aviation buffs in the world are, was a Cessna 177 RG. Does anybody know what that plane is? The plane's called a Cardinal. I just thought that was, I don't know if that's a coincidence or another miracle happened in my life, but that hit me last night. I thought that was kind of crazy, right? Plane is called a Cardinal, look it up, Cessna 177 RG, plane's called a Cardinal. I'm halfway home between Roanoke and Columbus, Ohio, and I had two amazing, deep feelings suddenly. And the first feeling was, 'This is cool, this is fun, this is what I, I'm a pilot, this is neat, I'm able to do this.' And the second feeling was the exact opposite: 'This is cool, this is fun, but I felt, I don't know if I want to do this for my career.' And it was debilitating for me. The feeling that I had was not a good feeling that I had, but it was overwhelming. I didn't tell anybody about that, thought about it that night, the next night, the next night, the next night, two weeks later, I didn't tell anybody, I changed my major to Aeronautical Engineering and started all those classes. I got into the first class of third level of calculus, and I will tell you, I know the fathers in the room have heard this, I'm going to tell you that I had a B minus, which means I definitely had a C, right? And so we'll say B minus, but I likely had a C in this class, and I was struggling with it, but I got through it. I took the next quarter of classes, and I had calculus, physics, and a couple engineering classes. It was kicking my butt, and I walked into a mentor's office at the time. I worked at the Ohio State University airport, the accounting office through college, and I got to know a lot of the professors there. One of them became a mentor. If you don't have a mentor, by the way, for the young men in the room, find one, right? They can shape your life in good ways. Find a good one, it can shape your life in good ways. So I walked into his office, he's since passed, and I said, he was a good friend of mine, and I said, 'Professor, I don't think I'm an engineer.' And he looked at me, and he laughed, right? Great mentor, this guy. I was right. He looked at me and he laughed. He said, 'You're not an engineer, you're a businessman.' I was 20 years old, I was definitely more of a beer drinker at that, I was 21, how about that? I was definitely more of a beer drinker than I was a businessman. I didn't even know what that meant at the time. And he said, his quote to me was, 'You want to walk up the stairs of a private jet, and you want to turn right. You don't want to turn left.' Meaning you don't want to go in that, you want, he was saying you want to be a businessman, is what he was saying to me, right? I must have listened to him, because two weeks later I switched my major into business. I got my business degree, graduated in what I refer to as the most fun five and a half years of my life, gaining a four-year college degree. My parents were not happy with me, by the way, they're good enough, but they weren't happy with me then. Got my degree, I went to a company, my first job was in a company called Southern Air Transport. For those that are old enough in the room to remember the Iran-Contra scandal and the CIA, that's who I worked for, that airline. That's a whole different story. And then I left after three years, and I came to a company called Executive Jet Aviation, based in Columbus, Ohio. Executive Jet is NetJets, they just, we just changed our name in 2001, right? That's where I fell in love with business, and that's where I worked, and I worked, and I worked, and I was definitely not the smartest person in those buildings, but I was going to outwork everybody. I had, and I had the greatest opportunity to travel and learn. They shipped me off to Europe, I went to Portugal, I lived there for a year to build up our operations center, not as much fun for me. They shipped me to China and Hong Kong for a little while, but I learned a lot in that process. Became the executive director of the flight center, I was the president at 39, and I became the COO at 44. So that's 30 years boiled in the run and a short term. So my message again to the young men in the room is, it's a great quote that I love: 'There's two things in your life that you control, it's your attitude and your effort.' On the attitude side, I was eating myself alive with those changes. Those weren't fun changes, I promise you. It's very quickly, I'm breezing over them, but it internalized and it was hard, right? You control your attitude and your effort. Everybody in this room is smart, they're smart because they made a good choice to be in this room, number one. Outwork the people around you, you can do anything you want. The second message I would give you on that is another great quote that I love that says, 'You must follow your own dreams. If you don't, you're going to work a lifetime following somebody else's and working for somebody else.' Those are two great quotes that I like, and that's what I would pass on to you in that framework of those 30 years of my life. So, okay, I'm going to show you, if you allow me now on the marketing side, I mean, I'm going to just indulge me for a minute, it's a one-minute video. When I started, we had 75 aircraft in NetJets, and today I want to show you what is a one-minute snapshot of what kind of we look like today.

I officially feel like an Air Force recruiting video now, right? But I'll tell you a funny story. That guy's name is Jay. I flew in college with that guy, that voice. He's one of our pilots. He's an incredible guy. I knew by the way, when I was 18, he was a way better, I was a good pilot, he was an amazing pilot. He's been flying with us for 18 years. He's a pretty good guy, and he's an incredible captain. So, okay, so where we are today, I'll just briefly tell you is, I'm really proud of this actually. We're all about safety and service. Growth for growth's sake is not what we're looking for, it's safety and service. But I am proud, last week we just broke through 1,000 aircraft. We're officially today the largest airline operator on the planet. It's a pretty cool thing. So, okay, so I get asked often times, so I think many of you may know that Berkshire Hathaway owns NetJets. Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, sometimes regarded as the best investor on the planet, bought our company on August 7th of 1998 for $725 million cash. It's good to be a billionaire, right? Cash bought our company on that day. I had an amazing, I've known Warren for a long time. He was a customer of NetJets in '96 and bought our company in '98. So we've had an affiliation with our company for a long time. I worked directly for Warren for four years. It's an incredible blessing to be able to do that. I've never felt more pressure to know my stuff. Warren is 93 years old today. He works six days a week, and his aptitude on understanding and digesting things, it's something like, and I again get to meet a lot of pretty incredible leaders and people, it's something that's hard to explain and hard to bottle. The company today has about a trillion dollars in assets. NetJets is a piece of that. Names that you probably, I put a few of them up there, they own six companies: Duracell, Dairy Queen, Geico, the commercials, Burlington Northern, and so forth. So these are companies that you probably recognize. About a trillion dollars in assets and a market cap just south of a trillion dollars. It's a big company. There have been a lot of books written about Warren, dozens and dozens. There have been thousands of quotes from Warren. I grabbed three. The first one I would tell you, again for the young men in the room, is that when, this is a quote I actually, is really important, is that when you hire people, or frankly when you surround yourself with people, hire people with intelligence, energy, and integrity. And this quote is, 'If they don't have the last, the other two will kill you.' Sounds a little tough, but it's really, to me, it's been true. I won't read the second one, you can read it, but the third one, 'Only when the tide goes out do you discover when people are swimming naked.' If you think that means swimming naked, you need to go to confession. That's not what that means. It actually means patience and investing, right? Patience and investing. So, an amazing man and an amazing company. I have a bag over all these over here, by the way. Please take them for the young men in the room and the students, please take those. I put together a little kit for you all. In it is a couple of things. There's a NetJets hat, that's the swag, I'm sorry. There's a pair of socks. I have no idea why I decided to put a pair of socks in there. Evan thinks it's weird. If you don't like it, give them to Evan on your way out. The most important thing in that bag is this book. And this book is, we all have mentors, is what I mentioned. Warren Buffett's mentor, he's been, he's 93 years old, his mentor is a guy named Benjamin Graham. Benjamin Graham was born in 1870, right? And he always talks about this book and how it affected his life. It's a complicated book, so for the sixth, seventh, eighth graders in the room, don't feel like you have to understand every word of this, but hang on to this book. It's timeless. When you're ready to read it, read chapters eight and chapters 20, and if you follow the formulas in there, I promise you, you can build wealth in your life, which is an important part of life. So it's my gift to you. Read it when you can, keep it by your bedside when you're ready, but I think you'll find it's a pretty amazing book. Okay, I'm on your last slide here. So I want to leave you with a quote, and the quote is this: it says, 'Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation, for it's better to be alone than in bad company.' It's by George Washington. So I grabbed that quote because it made me think of this room, is that we're all different. Everybody in this room has unique personalities and different. I asked Dan Tarpy before I stepped up here and we were talking about this, the growth and how many people are in this room, and I said, 'What do people want? What are people telling you?' He said, 'Adam, it's pivoted, and it's an amazing thing. People used to say the amazing academics here, and it is incredible, I witnessed it firsthand.' He said, 'But people are now talking about the foundation of faith and how more important that is in their life.' And I think that's exceptional. You will find it here. So, and I also know that you'll never be alone because you're surrounded by men of good faith and good quality. So congratulations to you for that. So thank you, thank you for letting me spend time with you.