What Airlines Already Know

I was at the airport yesterday. As the flight boarded, I remembered an article about how airlines love business class because many individuals rarely pay for their own tickets. Their companies do. So for the airlines, it’s a very lucrative B2B product segment.

Your Company May Be Your First Intro to Wealth

It made me think of how the first introduction to wealth, lifestyle and structure for many employees will be their companies.

I used to work in consulting. At the time, I was attached to a project in Abuja where the client put my team up at the Hilton. After a while, I accrued so many Hilton Honours points that after the assignment, I got free upgrades any time I stayed at a Hilton around the world.

The first time I traveled abroad, it was my company that paid. I don’t think I could have afforded the ticket or hotel on my own.

Hidden Corporate Logistics

In my consulting days, I worked with almost every front line bank in the country. When we facilitated strategy sessions, I observed the executives coming in. Before they arrived, the venue would have been booked, hotel rooms arranged, travel sorted, estacode prepaid – all by the company’s corporate affairs and protocol teams. The execs would arrive and be taken care of. They didn’t know just how much logistics had been taken off their plates.

It’s like when you see oil & gas workers being escorted by protocol officers at the airport. They rarely go through the normal immigration and customs lines. They are fast-tracked and then whisked away in their police-protected convoys. Some don’t even wait for their luggage. They hand the bag tags to the protocol officers to sort out.

Execs Don’t Realize What They Have

This company-provided structure is why when execs leave their organizations for entrepreneurship, they get flustered by the sheer ambiguity of running a business. Things seem so chaotic. It’s because their companies protected them from all of that. And, their former brands opened unseen doors of access for them.

Prepare For Transition Early

If you currently earn a very high income in a corporate organization, please prepare for your transition to prevent a very rude awakening. Even having access to a team is a blessing. You are probably insulated from mediocrity by three levels of staff who all report to you. The day you have to recruit in the open-market for your own company, you might be surprised.

Treasure The Gift Of Paid Employment

Earning an above-average income that consistently gets paid is a gift. Treasure it and use it to plan for retirement or entrepreneurship. It’s the kind of stability many covet. The access, structure and honour you have should be harnessed way before you leave paid employment.

I wish you all the best.

For more, read Do What Matters