Gord Peariso may be in the aviation business, but the 54-year-old Calgarian seems to have his feet firmly planted on the ground.

Peariso is certainly not a president who manages from a pedestal.

At his family-owned Corporate Express Business and Charter Airline, you might find Peariso checking in passengers, chatting with the maintenance crew or flying on his own airline.

Or you might even find the Ontario-born aircraft maintenance engineer-turned-entrepreneur wielding a wrench, which is how he got his start in the business. 1. What was your first job in aviation?

Larry MacDougal photos, Business Edge
Former engineer Gord Peariso built Corporate Express from the ground up.

“I served my apprenticeship as an aircraft maintenance engineer (AME) with the Ministry of Natural Resources in Ontario. Once I received my licence, there was no budget in the government to pay for a licensed guy. So I had to stay at apprentice wages even though I was licensed – and somebody said: ‘Move West, young man.’ And that’s what I did.”

2. What motivated you to start your own business when you arrived in Calgary in 1974?

“I went to work with Field Aviation, but I stayed there less than a year. I realized while working there that there was a market for maintenance in corporate-style airplanes. So, I left Field and started to freelance in the corner of the hangar out of my toolbox. And the business kept growin’ and growin’ and growin’. Now we have 48 people and a whole bunch of airplanes. Life has changed a lot since then.”

3. What was your initial investment?

“A tool box and a pickup truck. My wife (Marilyn) and I had no kids then. My wife was a legal secretary so she was doing OK. In 1982, I bought a company called Corpac Canada (now the official name of his company), which was a distributor for the Piper Cheyenne, a little twin-engine turboprop business airplane. Through the ’80s, we bought and sold those airplanes.”

4. How did the corporate airline business get started?

“In 1991, I bought TransAlta’s corporate airplane. It was a plane they flew back and forth between Calgary and their power plant up near Edmonton. They didn’t want to keep the airplane on the books. They needed the service, but they didn’t want to answer to everybody as to whether the president had this airplane for fishing trips or what it was for. They truly were using it for the engineering people to go to the power plant. We just saw it as another maintenance customer disappearing, so we decided to buy the aircraft and operate the service for them. I’ll betcha most of the employees didn’t even know the plane had switched hands, because it was the same pilot and the same phone number. Then, in 1993, I signed up with Telus (then AGT) to fly scheduled service between Calgary and Edmonton. When the Telus contract ended in 1999, we started to open up the service to scheduled service for the general public.”

5. What’s your vision for Corporate Express?

“We look to do more regional work in Western Canada and provide feeder systems for the major carriers. That’s where most of the growth potential is. The economy being poor, people are not buying corporate airplanes like they once did. Now, they’re tending to charter more frequently than they ever did before. So our charter business is pretty busy all the time. After Sept. 11 (the 2001 terrorist attack), a lot of people then started looking back and saying: ‘Maybe owning my own plane is a good idea.’ So, I would expect that the market will turn around for corporate airplanes for the next 10 years.”



6. Has your airline had to endure many of the same issues around escalating costs that have hit the big airlines?

“Oh, certainly. We’ve had the big insurance increases and fuel costs. When it comes to that, we’re no different from the big airlines.”

7. What’s your company’s major challenge?

“The biggest challenge we have in front of us right now is with regulatory issues. The Nav Canada fees (Nav Canada is the private corporation that operates Canada’s civil air navigation services) are really hurting business. When you’re buying a ticket these days, it feels like half the cost is in surcharges, whether it’s Nav Canada fees or landing fees or fuel surcharges or insurance surcharges. We used to pay a certain amount on an airline ticket, but now with Nav Canada being separated from the government, I don’t have any competitor to go to. I just have to swallow whatever price Nav Canada wants to shove down our throats for air-space controls. Nav Canada just had a seven-per-cent increase on Aug. 1 and I don’t know for what reason. With the service from Nav Canada, I must have to go 20 miles out of my way every day on probably every leg that I fly and I figure that costs us $20,000 to $25,000 every year in extra costs to fly around just to make them happy. They work to rule, it’s all union. We’re all low-cost (airlines) trying to make ends meet and they (Nav Canada) have gone in the opposite direction. I also don’t understand why we have to have a security charge of $7 (per flight) here.”

8. What irks you about the Air Travellers Security Tax?

“We don’t know if those fees are going up, down or if they’re going into general revenue or if they’re helping us at all in any security issues. We don’t know what happens to the money. It’s just a big black hole in Ottawa where the money disappears into that security network and there are no specifics as to whether the money is going to be spent in security for aircraft. And I’m paying for services which I don’t receive. I have to charge my customers the security charge, but I leave from a private hangar, not the main (airport) terminal. There is no security at my hangar at all. Why am I paying for security when I don’t get any?”

9. Have you considered taking your company public?

“We are considering it. There are some exciting things going on with the company that I can’t share with you because of confidentiality agreements. There are some exciting things that will come along in the next month or two. We’re going to create some mergers amongst some of us smaller players to try and create a bigger player that may result in the company being public in the long term. You have to get bigger to survive and you have to go to the public to find equity funding because it’s not coming from the bankers, that’s for sure. As soon as the word airplane comes out of your mouth when you’re talking to a banker, you hear a click at the other end of the phone. They just don’t like airplanes!”

10. What’s it like having your wife and three sons working in your business?

“I’ve heard of other people having grief over having family in their business, but I haven’t had any trouble with it. I’ve also got a couple of brothers-in-law working for me and they have their position but nobody’s trying to work up the ladder to take my job away from me (laughter).”

11. What’s been the foundation of your success in the aviation business?

“It’s 99 per cent people. I’m not the smartest person. I’ve got a hell of a staff and a good third of them have been with me for 20 years or longer. That really accounts for a lot of our success.”

12. How would you describe your leadership style? “MBWA (laughter). And that comes out of a book (In Search of Excellence) by (management guru) Tom Peters. MBWA was what he called ‘management by walking around.’ He thought it was a style that worked really well, and I must admit it’s a style that has worked well for me. You know, you’ve kind of got your finger on the pulse of things, but you’re visible, people can communicate with you, they can bring their ideas to you, you can have a two-way conversation with the flight attendant or the director of maintenance. You put your pants on one leg at a time like everyone else. The hardest thing for me to deal with is when somebody sticks you on a pedestal and thinks that everything you say is gospel, when you know it’s 90-per-cent crap. I just like to be like everybody else.”

13. What are the most difficult decisions you’ve had to make in your job?

“It would have to do with either shrinkage or expansion. Letting somebody go that has been with you for a while is a heartbreaker to you and to the staff and it feels like a big shrinkage. So you’d better have thought your way all the way through it. I remember I had to do that in the mid-1980s when times got tough for us. The other tough one is expansion – making a decision to go into a new market and deciding whether you’ve done all your homework, understand the demographics and have enough money in the pot to stick with it for a while. It takes a while to get these routes opened and successful.”

14. How do you reflect on your nearly three decades in the aviation business?

“You know, from a toolbox in the corner, I guess I have to be pretty satisfied. If you stand back and look at it, yeah, I’m pretty satisfied with what I’ve accomplished as an individual. I think the time I’m the proudest is when I fly on my own airplane. When you get depressed and get down about something and you’re just not feeling good about yourself, I go for a ride in my airplane.”

15. What does that do for you?

“I see the professionalism from the front end to the back end, whether it’s watching the flight attendant serving breakfast or lunch or the pilots making the approach or the way the staff is dressed or the professionalism they have, that just cheers me up. Then, I can say: ‘Wait a minute, I’ve done a pretty good job of bringing this thing together.’ So when I feel down about business, I just gotta go out and experience it. They always make you proud when you see them first-hand. I also love greeting the passengers at the check-in. I often do the check-in and they don’t know it’s the president. I think Howard Hughes did something like that when he bought PWA, flying with them as a first officer.”

16. Who’s the business leader you most admire?

“I had a co-founder (Garth Morrison) of the company, who died in 1999. We painted the spirit of his name on the side of the airplane. He was a mentor from the time I was a kid in high school. I really held him in high regard.”

17. What’s the best advice you’d offer someone starting a business as you did 28 years ago?

“Be prepared to put in the long hours. There are no shortcuts. Be prepared to put your shoulder to the wheel and your nose to the grindstone, or whatever that saying is. When you run your own business, it isn’t between eight and five, that’s for sure. And don’t hesitate to invest in your own plans. If you believe in your project, you’ll make it happen.”

18. Do you do much investing outside your own business?

“We try to focus all our energies here. I asked my accountant one year, I said: ‘Hey, I’ve got all this money here so should I go and buy an extra house or something?’ He said: ‘Whaddaya know about houses?’ I said: ‘You live in ’em.’ He said: ‘You know a lot more about airplanes, why don’t you invest in them, at least you can do something with that.’ That’s kind of when we started buying aircraft, fixing them up and reselling them.”

19. Ideally, how long would you want to run your company?

“I guess till I collapse. That’s not really true. I’m considering slowing down a little bit. We’re considering employee buyouts, we’re looking at mergers and different kinds of ways to find an exit strategy. But, as I keep tellin’ everybody, I’ve got at least another five years in me. I’m 54, so if I hit 60, I’d likely be finished by 60.”

20. What would you do then?

“Oh, I’ll probably have my fingers in it because, by the time I get the house painted, the fence done and all the work around the house done, that’ll take about three weeks and then I’ll be bored to tears again. I’d like to travel while I’m still young enough to enjoy it, not when somebody is pushing me around in a wheelchair.”


THE COMPANY: Corporate Express
* Brass: Gord Peariso, president; John Mulder,
vice-president of operations; Craig Mattson, director of flight operations; Tim Scur, chief pilot.
* Profile: Corporate Express provides scheduled flights between Calgary and Edmonton and Calgary and Fort McMurray, catering mainly to the corporate travel market. The company also provides charter flight services in North America and is involved in aircraft maintenance and aircraft sales. The aircraft are 33-seat Saab 340A and 16- to 18-seat Bae Jetstream 31 models.
* Projected 2003 Revenue: $8-$9 million.
* Website: www.corpxair.com
* Head Office: Calgary Esso Avitat, 575 Palmer Road N.E., Calgary, T2E 7G4.
* Phone: 403-216-4050, 800-661-8151.

IN PROFILE: Gord Peariso
* Born/raised/age: Grand Bend, Ont.; 54.
* Title: President/founder/ owner, Corporate Express Business & Charter Airline (parent company is Corpac Canada).
* Education: Grade 12, aircraft maintenance engineer certificate.
* Family: Wife Marilyn, sons Adam, Christopher and Michael (all work in the company full time or part time).
* Career: Peariso has spent his entire career in the
aviation industry, starting as a maintenance engineer in Ontario before launching an aircraft service and parts
business, Peariso Aviation, in Calgary in 1974. That
business eventually evolved into Corporate Express.
* Passion: Travel, flying in his own airplane.