Good News - January 2019

LIFEWORK LEADERSHIP 16 JANUARY 2019 Good News • South Florida Edition Corporate Planes flying into Fort Lauderdale ExecutiveAirport are welcomed to the beau- tiful Key West style Banyan Air Terminal where friendliness is the norm and pilots can expect top-notch service. Behind it all is Don Campion, a South Floridian who was raised in Nigeria by missionary parents. A family man with a heart for community, Campion has built a company culture second to none. He recently completed a lofty effort to restore the missionary hospital in theAfrican bush of Egbe, Nigeria, where his parents once served. Don Campion is a Lifework Leadership alum and a major sponsor of the leadership class that is dedicated to transforming leaders by clarifying their calling, challenging their minds and engaging their hearts for service. He sat down with me at the Bayan Air Terminal to share his Lifework Leadership experience. Good News (GN) - Tell me a little about BanyanAir and the services you provide. Don Campion (DC) – I started BanyanAir Service in 1979 as a 24-year-old kid, really as a littlemaintenance shop looking after private aircraft, just small little 4-6 seaters. Our company has grown over the years... Being a very team driven company that was connected serving our customers, those teammates that were part of our company would come up with different ideas as to which departments we should pursue other than just airplane maintenance. So nowwe are kind of a marina for corporate aircraft. They fly into executive if they have business in South Florida or a home or perhaps they’re coming for an event, and we can store their air- plane. We refuel their airplane, offer catering, offer rental cars and so forth. We have another division that does full maintenance on the aircraft and inspections. We’re an FAAcertified repair station, and we do modifications and repairs. We then upgrade the airplane’s electronics and avionics and, of course, everybody wantsWIFI in their airplane and televisions and telephones. There are packages called office in the sky packages that are quite extensive, taking the air- plane all apart and installing a lot of new electronics. And then we also have a pilot shop, and we sell aircraft parts and all kinds of pilot supplies. We are also in aircraft sales. A lot of people don’t know that Honda, the car company, has an aviation department now, andwe’re theHonda Jet Dealer for the Southeast. We’re also a Kodiak dealer for the Southeast, so we sell and service those airplanes in seven southern states and broker aircraft. What we’ve tried to create here at Banyan is an experience for the customer where they come to a KeyWest Tommy Ba- hama feeling kind of terminal and on one side of the terminal we’ve go a pilot shop, which has a bit of a Disney flair with airplanes hanging from the roof and runway markings on the floor, and on the other side of the terminal is the Jet Café, which is open six days a week and caters to those in the surrounding areas, pilots flying in and people in the airport. GN - Haven’t you even used your hanger for events recently? DC - We really feel that one of the ways to help Christian organizations in the South Florida area is to allow them to use our hanger as a venue for their events. So whether it be the Fel- lowship of ChristianAthletes or 4KIDS or First Priority or Calvary Chapel, Christ Church – a lot of different organizations like to have an annual banquet or gala, and when we are able to take the hanger, leave several airplanes in the hanger, have some up lighting, set up tables and so forth, it ends up being a fabulous venue. Our team gets very involved in that too as far as set up, clean up, helping with parking, in order to try and make that event as successful as it can be for that Christian nonprofit…A lot of them have their most successful galas here at Banyan. As it gets dark out, you see all the blue runway lights out there. And the door’s wide open, so it’s kind of like you are in a completely different setting. GN –I know that you have a strong company culture and that you were involved in Life- work. What is the corporate culture you are trying to create? DC –Well, the corporate culture is really a desire to do everything with excellence. And to do it where a teammate comes – we call our employees teammates – where they join Banyan for a career as opposed to a job, and Banyan then invests in those teammates. Our corporate culture has six different pillars. The first one is we honor God in all we do. We inspire trust by being trustworthy. We help our teammates grow and develop. We serve our customers in re- markable ways. We strive for continuous improvements.And we contribute to the communities we serve and beyond. So, really it’s amatter of caring for each other as we serve the customer in remarkable ways, but doing it with excellence as we stand out in the industry as a different kind of company. GN- Where did Lifework come into that picture? DC - Where Lifework came into the picture in my own personal life was, as you pursue excellence and you try to build an organization that’s unique, that’s actually honoring God as a form of worship. As you come and serve, when you serve with all your heart, you’re honoring God in that He gave you those talents. He gave you that new day and how you use that day and how you use those talents is in effect a form of worship. For us to try and set that bar high in the industry, high within our own internal interaction, has been a huge desire that I’ve had. And it’s been, I feel, a huge attraction to many of our teammates. A lot of teammates love it when they know what the company stands for. They love it when there’s clarity in what the ob- jectives are. They love it when you don’t accept mediocracy… Where Lifework really did help me the most was realizing how the business could fit into Kingdom work, and how I look at Banyan now as a ministry. Then I felt that God had prepared me for the ministry of the revitalization of Egbe Hospital, which I never dreamed of in a millions years that somehow I would have influence in the rebuilding of a ministry that would then look after tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of sick in the bush.As a result of that, many of themwould come to know the Lord. And that’s where Lifework kind of connected those dots. GN - How did Lifework help you make that connection with Egbe? DC – Well, it’s part of moving fromsuccess to significance. We were being successful and buildingwithin that great culture at Banyan and having a lot of super teammates that are growing in their career and many of us, including myself, saying, “Oh wow, I never thought life had this in store for us. Nor did I think we would ever become of the capability of being able to work on some of themost advanced aircraft on the planet, flown or owned by themost influential people on the planet. So, here we are a little company, now serving that kind of clientele. So that, I felt, was my privilege and success, and let’s do that honoring God. But I felt Lifework then said, “Oh no, Don, there’s more for you.” It was the stories and the accomplishments and the networking of other Christian CEOs that really broadened my scope of, “Well, Lord, if you have something more in mind, reveal it.” GN - Was there anything in particular that stood out in your mind that made you think, “Wow, If I could do it like that”? DC - No… Well, DeBartolo, they fly in here sometimes in their jet. So, I kind of knew of them, but I didn’t know they were Christians and were going to give a case study.And, well, we all knowApple. And the leader of Apple Canada, he was one of the speakers. And we all know Walmart’s fame, and one of their top execs was a speaker. I really love to learnmyself, so when those guys were speaking, it was like, wow, how could God use us further? We’re using our business as a ministry. We are supporting missionaries. We’re supporting some of the non- profits, but then the Egbe story came about. At the same time I was doing Lifework, I wanted to take Sueanne to show her where I grew up. The hospital was about to be closed. There had been no missionaries there for about 10 years, and everything was run down. It was in a very, very poor state. Most people here would have just demolished it because none of the hospital equipment worked, so it was hardly even a clinic. It was really, really a mess… There were a lot of Africans that came up to me and said, “I would be dead if it wasn’t for your parents here at this hospital,” and “I worked at the hospital and this served this whole re- gion,” and “I became a Christian at the hospital, and now I have a church.” And I just heard story after story. But I was busy working here at Banyan and then one night Sueanne and I were praying, and we asked, “Is there anything we should be doing as it relates to Egbe or has it had its day?” And I just felt this tug in conjunction with as I’m doing Lifework and I said, I’m going to go to SIM, who was the owner of that station, and ask what are you guys thinking of doing there? …And they just basically said we don’t really have that in our plans. So then, the Lord working in my heart, I went back to them and said, “What if I were to put together a plan and start looking to revitalize that hospital.” They said, “That’s not our model for you to not even be living in Nigeria…” But they had a board meeting and said, “We would like to give you permission to do this and we’ve never done this before. You live here and Egbe is in the bush thousands of miles away and there are no missionaries there. So, Don, I have no idea how, but we all do know that God is bigger than any of us.” I said, “OK, that’s really what I needed to know. Thanks a million.” Then… I didn’t really know Stephan[Tichvidjian] other than I knew he talked at Lifework, but a fewweeks later I went to the men’s Bible and he said, “Don, tell the group a little bit about yourself.” And I said, “Well let me just start out with, the passage that we are speaking about tonight at my very first Bible study is what my Dad wrote in the front of my Bible.” It was the proverb about the Lord directing your paths. And I said, “And the only white preacher I ever really knew by name was a man by the name of Billy Graham. And as missionary kids we all had to gather around the shortwave radio to listen to the Hour of Decision with this guy with a Banyan Air’s Don Campion Defined His Mission at Lifework Leadership Shelly Pond, Editor Good News Don and Sueanne Campion at Banyan Air, Fort Lauderdale