Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Ep051: Exploring Innovation and Aerospace with Jim Perschbach
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Ep051: Exploring Innovation and Aerospace with Jim Perschbach
Jim Perschbach, President and CEO of Port San Antonio, joins the podcast to share his insights on leading an organization that has transformed an old Air Force Base into an innovative aerospace and national defense park.
Jim discusses the challenges of working remotely and the importance of providing flexibility to maintain a collaborative and productive work environment.
Dive into the fascinating world of Port San Antonio and discover the innovative solutions transforming the aerospace and national defense industries.
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS
LINKS
Show Notes
Previous Episodes
About BoyarMiller
GUESTS
Jim Perschbach
About Jim
About Jim
TRANSCRIPT
Chris Hanslik
In this episode, you will meet Jim Pershbach, President and CEO of Port San Antonio. Jim shares his views on why he believes the key to making great hires is to find people who are focused on value and long-term relationships. Okay, Jim, I want to thank you for being a guest on Building Texas Business. I want to welcome you to the show. Let's start by just telling the listeners what it is you do and where you do it.
Jim Pershcbach
Sure Well, thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute thrill to be here. We operate what's called Port San Antonio and people always say what on earth are you doing with the port in San Antonio? you're hundreds of miles away from the sea. What it is? an old Air Force Base, one of the most important Air Force Spaces in our country, that was bracked in the 1990s, and what we do is we operate it today as a research park, as an aerospace national defense park. It's got 18,000 people working on this campus. This year we're adding over 2,000 jobs. We've been averaging about 1,200 jobs a year for the past couple of years And we focus on everything from traditional aviation. We've got Boeing's largest global technical operations on the planet here. Standard Aero builds and overhauls jet engines here. We've got military cybersecurity operations. We've got private sector cybersecurity operations and then an awful lot of startup activity focused on automation, robotics, artificial intelligence and all kinds of cool stuff that's being incorporated in.
Chris Hanslik
Well, that's amazing. You're right. I'd never heard of the port of San Antonio and thought the same thing. I'm pretty sure they didn't dredge something all the way up a waterway, although that you do have the Riverwalk.
Jim Perschbach
We do have the Riverwalk. In theory. you can get to it from Leon Creek over here Just be a long walk up a rattlesnake alley.
Chris Hanslik
Well, it sounds, you know, expansive in scope of what's going on there. Let's just maybe start by telling the listeners how did you come about becoming the CEO of the port?
Jim Perschbach
Well, that's my story is quite uninteresting. I'm a lowly airplane guy. I'm a lawyer. I spent about 18 years doing aviation and defense work. I guess the firm called it white collar because it touched on federal fraud cases and had a lot of clients. I was moved here to San Antonio because of our client base that we had some of the operations And I looked at this and two things really struck us, jumped out at me. The first one was we were doing some of the most amazing work, and I say we. It's this collective aerospace and industrial world, but nobody knew about it And that's the fault of the aerospace and defense world is we try and keep everything a secret. The second part was that we have an installation that is sitting in a wonderful part of the San Antonio community.
But it's also one of the more challenged parts of the San Antonio community. It's a part of the city that has traditionally been somewhat forgotten about, and I the law had been so good to me, aviation been so good to me I wanted to jump out and do something different, not so much because I'm a savior for this, but because it was an exciting opportunity to come in and literally and figuratively knock down some of the walls between our installation and the community that surrounds us Right.
Chris Hanslik
Clearly you have a passion for it. I don't know if I ask this how long has the port been around and how did it come into existence?
Jim Perschbach
Well, it depends on when you say. The port Kelly Air Force Base was opened in 1917 as Camp Kelly. It's one of the oldest aviation installations on the planet. It was bracked in 1995. It was transitioned over to our predecessor in 2001. They came up with the idea of calling it Port San Antonio, i think in the somewhere between 2006 and 2010,. Let's say, 2007, 2008, because inland ports were all the rage. And then the focus that we have now. We kind of call it tech port informally. This focus on connecting industries and connecting people started in late 2017, early 2018 as a strategy. So we stand on the shoulders of everybody that came before us, but we're building on a heritage that goes back over 100 years.
Chris Hanslik
So what type of I guess team do you supervise and manage in your role as a CEO?
Jim Perschbach
Yeah, we've got about a hundred I think it's 103 now people that work directly in our organization, and then we've got another 100 and some odd folks that work with some contractors for us, particularly with the Boeing Center at Techport, which is this massive entertainment arena that we have built here on the campus. So there's about 200 some odd people direct and contract that work with us on any given day, and then there are 18,000 people that work on this campus with massive employers like Boeing and Northrop Grumman, down to some really exciting start ups, some of which are growing like weeds, some of which are still one or two people.
Chris Hanslik
That's a lot to keep your hands around. That sounds like.
Jim Perschbach
Well it is, but I'm just a pretty face for a lot of good people And I can say pretty face because nobody can see me and I'm trusting you're not going to put my picture.
Chris Hanslik
That I promise you know, but so I guess you've been there now almost 10 years. Thank you, tell us. let's talk a little bit about how you've gone about building your team specifically to 100 and out three plus, you know, almost 100 contractors. What are some of the things that you have found to be successful in hiring the right people?
Jim Perschbach
It's looking at people who look at what they do on a day-to-day basis as a long-term relationship building not as short-term. At our core, we're just a real estate development company. We're a real estate development company that functions as a political subdivision of the state of Texas because it's a publicly owned asset, but we don't get any tax revenue. We don't get any direct support from the government. What we have is a public asset that we have to manage and maintain.
So we have to go out and we have to generate revenue. And what we have found is that if your focus is solely on revenue, which is what so many real estate companies are, you are really at the mercy of just location and big picture demand. If you find people who recognize much like in the legal business, that it's about relationships and it's long-term relationships, it's about providing a value, then you start to build that culture amongst your customers. We don't call them tenants, we call them customers. You start to build that with the community that surrounds you And that is what I think has been the secret of our success. It is tough to find people who really do have that relationship minded core to them, but when you find them, we hold on to them quick.
Chris Hanslik
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. That mindset of a relationship and relationship building is such a more positive mindset to have than just trying to punch a clock and do a task. So what are you going to talk about? How it could be difficult to find those relationships oriented people. Let's talk about the last few years, I mean, with all the challenges employers face. What are some of the challenges that you face there at Fort San Antonio as you try to fill positions or grow the team?
Jim Perschbach
Yeah. So we had two teams that we were trying to grow at the same time. The first was our internal operation, and right during the pandemic we had our customers seeing massive growth. We've got companies that are doing some really groundbreaking work with not healthcare in terms of the actual biomedical delivery, but the systems that go around healthcare. Everything from the information technology of that to building these medical modules are going to be put in the back of cargo airplanes, and so one challenge was not only bringing people back into an office, because it is really hard to collaborate across systems and across teams when everybody is remote.
I hear a lot of people saying well, my team functions really well remotely And that's easy to do.
You can build very functional teams with trust where they're all working remotely. But when you have to work hand in hand with a different team in the organization or, in our case, different teams from different organizations, there has to be that level of collaboration, and so what we did is two things One focus on giving people flexibility and treating them like adults Those who can work remotely from time to time. We let work remotely For those folks who can't if you're working on mechanical systems for our landscapers and that type of stuff we can't say work from home, but we want to provide them the same level of flexibility and the same level of treating them like adults, treating them like colleagues that we do And that worked With respect to building those relationships with the customers that never ended During the height of the pandemic. I am very proud to say that we had people both on our team and on our customer teams that were not shy about finding ways to get together, to work together, while still making sure that they were being safe. That's great.
Chris Hanslik
Yeah, to me this issue of work remote and now people are kind of migrating back to a hybrid. At the core, there's kind of two fundamental things If you're having an issue with someone, it's probably more performance issue you would have had even if they were in time. And the second is it goes back to what you said a minute ago with my view, and that is, if you're really hiring those people with a relationship mindset, you're not going to have to tell them that they should be in person, because they're going to naturally want to be more than not but enjoy the flexibility to work remote from time to time.
Jim Perschbach
I think that's right. And one thing I found because you're in the law business in law firms we're a unique set of creatures. We've got people who whether it's a personality defect or whether it gets trained to you, but there's a certain lifestyle that we have and teams become very fluid within law firms. The role of a lawyer you may be the lead on one project, you may be support on another project, you may be doing sales and customer capture, you may be doing back office stuff, but it flows And the hierarchies are less important than just getting the job done. And what I have found the most interesting thing for me jumping from that law firm world into this world. Most human beings don't operate like that And trying to bring somewhat of the law firm culture is difficult.
You've got to find people and start to treat them as colleagues, which we do in law firms. The other thing I've noticed is and I think it's just who goes into law firms we tend to be thicker skin. So many people dislike us every day. The business is so nasty. You get your feelings hurt, but you get over it quick. People in the real world are. They're more sensitive and it takes a different level of dealing with them. But what that has led me to believe is the importance of people being physically together. It is really hard to miscommunicate and to misread cues when you're doing it over text messages or even zooms that, people being social creatures. When you bring them together and they can read those cues, they can intersect with people. It is so much easier. My mind always goes back to that key and peel skit of them sending text messages and Keith thinking he's just being a nice guy and peel getting that. Excuse me, peel being a nice guy and key just getting angry, or an angry, or how he's reading those texts, right.
Chris Hanslik
It's so true. So what? I guess, how would you describe the culture that you feel you built there at poor San Antonio?
Jim Perschbach
I think it is constantly in flux.
What we try and do is let everybody know, regardless of their position in the organization, that we really do value them as colleagues.
The challenge, i think, is the challenge that every organization has is you at some point have to find who has the stick to make the decision And then, once the decision is being made, make sure that gets communicated and spoken at one voice. And that's something that we candidly, even with 200, some odd people working in our couple buildings here, we're starting to struggle with. It makes me feel a little better because I know it's the same issue that our defense departments having, that major corporations are having. But I think this is the next level of what's going to happen with. The challenge and organizations is, as the automation comes in, as people spend less time doing physical work, as they move away from being just functionaries and the human intelligence becomes more and more important, it becomes more difficult to work that collaborative systems engineering when you build an organization, and that's going to be really interesting to watch, especially with things like artificial intelligence and automation coming into a lot of tasks that traditionally were done by people.
Chris Hanslik
Yeah, i mean certainly that's the hot topic now and it's rapidly developing, which means it's rapidly changing things. What are you mentioned? the kind of experiences and challenges in communicating across your 200 folks in a few buildings. Can you be a little more specific? What are some of the challenges you've seen recently And what are you doing to try to overcome this?
Jim Perschbach
Yeah. So it's a challenge and I put this situation solely on me. For the past couple of years, i've been trying to squash down and flatten out the organization as much as possible and empower people to get things done. We have many people whose jobs keep them really out in the field. They're working either directly with our customers across this campus, which is 1900 acres, or in some cases they're around the country and they're around the world scouting for new talent, scouting for new technology, scouting for new customers, and in doing that, communication and what we call a national defense, the command and control infrastructure starts to get tricky.
There is a line that I think is really difficult to manage between wanting to empower people and get people doing things proactively but not finding yourself committed to something, or having to walk back an effort, or having efforts that are being duplicated. As a candid example and I'm going to be very open on this stuff we had two different groups in our organization launching engineering studies for parking lots for a customer expansion, and what that means is even our customer had two different people launching their project. So it makes me feel better that it's a challenge that everybody faces, but it is something that I don't think organizations are putting enough time into. As you get bigger, as you get faster, as you get more complex, you've got to make sure that these systems coordinate back with each other, share information in real time and then build a culture of people collaborating. Again, i think it's something lawyers and law firms have been handling for centuries. It's just more difficult to do in larger organizations with people who are used to different styles of project management.
Chris Hanslik
I think learning there is. Lots of things change over time, but some of the fundamentals don't. Communication is key. The way you communicate may be a little different, but the fact that you need to communicate clearly and the importance of that is a fundamental. That should not change Right. Let's talk a little bit about your leadership style. How would you describe your style and how you try to show up as a leader in the organization?
Jim Perschbach
Oh, that's a good question. That requires me to be more reflective, and you should probably ask other people. In my mind, i am a charming, sophisticated, easygoing, empowering person that everybody loves, and I'm sure that-.
Chris Hanslik
And really good looking.
Jim Perschbach
And really good looking. And then I've seen pictures. I'm looking at myself on this Zoom and I own a mirror, so I know none of that is true. Like everybody else, i'd say that I'm trying to figure this out as you go through it.
It is difficult for every human being. Everybody says we want to have collaboration, we want people coming in. Everybody says listen to other people. Everybody says don't be arrogant. But I will tell you whether it's speaking to my board of directors or it's talking to stakeholders or it's even internal conversations. If somebody says something to you that kind of prickles you because it's a different way of looking at it, your initial reaction is to be dismissive. This person doesn't know what they're talking about. How dare they? And so what I am trying to do more and more is be more self-aware and more understanding of when other folks have those same challenges. You can't ask somebody to collaborate, to communicate, to be open to new suggestions and new ideas if you aren't yourself, and I am hoping that comes across. I can tell you that organizationally we have almost no turnover here, which is a nice thing to see.
So either people just really like being around me or we pay really well or I don't know, But at least that comforts me When I walk around. I think all these people can't stand me in my arrogant walk and my obnoxious voice.
Chris Hanslik
Yeah Well, no, it's not like you're doing something right, because turnover is a good indicator of that Any lessons you've learned as a leader and I'm going to go a little deeper We tend to learn the lessons the hard way, right, where we make a mistake or a decision that we looked at It was oh, that wasn't the right way, but we learned from it and improved. Anything that comes to mind for you or you felt like, man, that was a learning, a lesson a hard way, but I am better for it.
Jim Perschbach
Yeah, i think there are several of those. The hardest one, i think, was learning how to really let go What. I have a real passion for this campus. I knew what Kelly Air Force Base was before I could find San Antonio on a map. I'm not from San Antonio, but I knew the work that was being done here. I remember being in DC and talking about Kelly Air Force Base years before anybody thought about closing it, and talking about what the workloads would be here and what the future would be for this installation. But in doing that, what I've realized is I can become very closed off to other good ideas, and so these are situations of lessons learned, not where anything has gone wrong, but there have been times that folks in this organization have brought forward some ideas And my initial reaction was to say that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of.
You're not listening to me, you're not listening to what we're trying to do. And there's one it's a guy on our team named Ray Flores, and Ray is a fantastic, fantastic mind And he's got a real passion for historic properties. We've got a whole neighborhood here of houses that were built in the 1920s out of the shipping crates that the airplanes were sent down in And they've been rotting in place because nobody took care of them for decades. It was the old commander's headquarters And Ray came up with a plan to not only get those reactivated but to partner with the city and the city's historic preservation district to do it in a way that is allowing it to be a research laboratory and a training laboratory for people who want to work on historic preservation, to bring people in who are working on fixing up these homes, because they're training and apprenticing in that type of work, and it's going to create a little community where you can put in things. Ray's got some ideas for bee gardens and flower gardens and everything else.
My initial reaction when he came up with that was what are you talking about? I don't want housing. I don't want those architecture people. I want airplanes, i want cool stuff. I want all of this. But watching how he managed that, how he took the initial rejection he took the frankly nonsensical I don't want to change mindset, put it together, put it in context and explained how it was going to add value to everything else that we're doing. And when I go over there and I see what's being built up and it's really just started. It's an absolutely amazing process And it's something it's not just the idea, but it's the recognition that it's an idea worth having and the coming forward with it to explain how it adds value to the system. I think was tremendously impressive the way that he did it And for me the lesson was don't be arrogant.
And I'm the most arrogant human being on earth, but hypocrisy is a human tradition, so I get so frustrated when people don't listen to my brilliant ideas, and the lesson I took from how Ray did it was he did it in a charming way, without getting angry and pounding on tables and saying, no, nobody's as smart as me. Watch, you know, hold my beer.
Chris Hanslik
Right, well, i mean, yeah, go ahead. You may not think this, but definitely a demonstration by you of some humility to allow that project to go forward. recognize that Ray had a great idea And I would think that meant a lot to him. and others see that in the organization that you know to kind of make you push where they think you need to listen again.
Jim Perschbach
Yep. Making me listen is a good thing, because, man, i'm unpleasant to be around some days.
Chris Hanslik
So you've kind of talked around this and I'd like to hear more. This may not be directed, maybe, at the port, but I think so because it feels like what St Antonio is doing there is innovative. So I'm going to talk a little bit about innovation, not just in your organization specifically, but in the customers that you talked about. What kind of innovation are you trying to implement and that you see being implemented that maybe you're maybe borrowing from?
Jim Perschbach
Yeah. So that's a great question. What the innovation that we are focused on is finding stuff that makes our core industries better Aviation, national defense, critical infrastructure And it is really tough to do, because you need to find people who look at a problem from a different perspective, which means they come from a completely different mindset, a completely different culture, a completely different viewpoint. But you can't have just tinfoil-hatted crazy people coming in and running the asylum, because things will go nuts, right Right. What we have built is a system It's really a machine that is designed to attract as many different people and as many different ideas as we possibly can, with no front-end gatekeeper. We don't question whether anything makes sense or not at the front-end.
There are ways that you can do that as you test it up, and then we bring together different entities, different people, different organizations to sanity check and prototype things, and there's a couple of examples that I'm real proud of that show this and work.
One is we have a 72-foot tall robot sitting at the end of the runway as a 20 kilowatt laser attached to its arm. It's a directed energy weapon. We could cut a building with it, but we're not going to do that. It takes the paint off of an airplane in 60% less time than human beings do. It eliminates all the danger and the toxicity of doing that and takes what would normally be chemicals that would kill you and turns it into two and a half pounds of dust that you could toss in your kitchen garbage without a problem. And it takes the cost of building the stripping hanger from astronomical to very doable.
And in doing that it addresses two challenges that we've had in aviation, on the military side and on the commercial side, that's sustainment, cost and the peaks and valleys of it meant we have commoditized the work, we have offshored the work, we've had a lot of platforms just sitting fallow, and this allows them all to go back to work and allows us to upscale the human beings. The guy who came up with that idea was a computer software salesman And the point is now he didn't develop any of it but he had the idea and he ran it and he put it together.
He just needed to be connected with the people who have the different skills the robotics, the lasers, the optics, the HEPAVAC, which is the scariest thing on earth I feel like a puppy dog next to that thing because a 72 foot tall vacuum is loud The airplane people who can work on it and the facilities in which to work it. There's another one I'm real proud of met this guy in the back of somebody else's laboratory And he was developing a LiDAR system, putting it on the back of a robot, because he had a friend in real estate And that friend said it's really hard to go out and measure these buildings. It's expensive, You have to bring a lot of people in, You have to upload the CAD. It takes a lot of time. This system measures and uploads a space to within a centimeter or two of accuracy and does it almost instantaneously. We took him to Atlanta to an aviation show and we put him in our little museum down here And the next thing you know he's being named by Aviation Week, is one of eight startups in the world changing aerospace, And the reason is unbeknownst to him.
When other people looked at that solution. They saw it as having potential to do everything from optimizing the way that you utilize a hangar space to being able to scout out a lunar cave that we can use for a lunar manufacturing facility, And the example is a bound. There's a gentleman on our campus named Sam Jimenez. We just put him into the San Antonio Aerospace Hall of Fame, But Sam is one of the few space architects in the world right now And he is developing systems with NASA and a couple of private sector companies to melt lunar regolith to build a landing surface for usable rockets and then to grind lunar regolith and turn it into a filament that can be used to 3D print a habitation cap on top of a lunar cave. It's just amazing work. That's crazy. But Sam also runs a foundation called the Wex Foundation And he brings in eighth to 12th grade students who work with him and work with the NASA scientists, the research scientists, Southwest Research Institute, on the same work. So if you walk into our museum space, you're going to see a 1-7 scale version of this hang printer. It's still about 15 feet tall and it works, But it was put together by a bunch of students working with those scientists. So at the same time, what we're doing is showing these people these kids and not kids that you can really do anything you put your mind to, as long as you do it.
Last thing I'll say all of this sits in our Boeing Center at Techport, which if you go, look at it, looks like any other arena and entertainment facility on the planet. But to show you how bad a businessman I am, we're never going to make a profit off of that building. That building which is hosted Smashing Pumpkins and Judas Priest and Parkway Drive and Paw Patrol is going to come in there and do some shows. All of the profits out of that building go toward our Kelly Heritage Foundation and that supports these educational opportunities.
So we had a couple of weeks ago, 100 kids from the school districts around us come in. They did the largest computer build of all time and they all walked out of there with their own $3,000 gaming machine. But, more important, they did that hand in hand with both folks from Air Force Cyber, with the companies. The gaming folks flew in. These kids knew that people were there to help them and we hope that those kids come back and they start to continue, whether it's coding, cybersecurity, robotics, that's what we're trying to do. I can't even remember what you asked me, but when you talk about We started with innovation.
Chris Hanslik
What I love hearing is that, from somewhat of a novel concept to bring the defense and security companies together in one place to create and collaborate. And you're doing two other things by extension bringing in the kids to encourage them that there are careers and things to do in the science, math, etc. Of which we know is an issue in our country, to help promote that and get them excited about it And, at the same time, preserve the heritage which is, as you said, over 100 years old. I think all of that's really neat and necessary. It is That's really interesting stuff that I think most people that are going to listen to this had no idea was going on in San Antonio, and hopefully we can spread what you're doing to other places. So let's turn to a little personal. I'd like to know what was your first job?
Jim Perschbach
Oh, that is a good question. I think my first job that I actually got paid for was working for one of my mom's friends. She had a big old house and she ran a kennel on it, so I'd wander around that place cleaning out dog stalls. and I worked at Red Lobster and a grocery store. I worked injection molding machines on a factory line all kinds of glamour stuff.
Chris Hanslik
Right. All kinds of things that made you determine that you wanted an office job.
Jim Perschbach
Yeah, work in 12 hours a day on injection molding machines. Ever seen these things? One of the things we made were plastic forks and knives and everything else for fast food restaurants around the world And it's a I don't know six and a half, seven and a half foot plate that slams together and fills up with molten plastic And then all these things are supposed to fall out And your job is to build boxes and fill them with plastic bags and just catch all this stuff. But every now and then something would get stuck in there, so you'd have to crawl in and knock it out with a broom handle. All right, and this was a long time ago. They would get really mad at you if you'd stopped the machine for doing that. So it was terrifying thinking that thing is going to slam back on you. You learned to move quick. You learned to move quick. Some folks were smart enough to actually hit the emergency stop button but you'd get yourself in trouble doing that.
So native Texan? No, my father was Army for the first couple of years of my life And then he went into doing. I still don't know what he did. born in North Carolina, Southern California, Utah, Tel Aviv, London, Suburban, Philadelphia.
Chris Hanslik
All around.
Jim Perschbach
I've been in Texas since 1993. They sent me down here and then they bounced me around to the glamor places that had military commercial derivative programs. That's how I got to San Antonio.
Chris Hanslik
Gotcha. Well, the question I like to ask all my guests is what do you prefer, Tex-Mex or barbecue?
Jim Perschbach
I don't know, i eat like a toddler, so I'll go get fried chicken strips and macaroni and cheese.
Chris Hanslik
Okay, well, that's it first. So let's ask this If you could take a 30-day sabbatical, where would you go and what would you do?
Jim Perschbach
I would spend those entire 30 days at Walt Disney World, and not just because I think it's the coolest place on earth, but what they have put together in terms of how they use the real estate, how they use the operations, how they incorporate technology and how they do it all by putting on a show, i think is unmatched anywhere on the planet. Yeah, that Guardians of the Galaxy cosmic rewind. If you haven't read it, it's like roller skating through the universe. It's the most amazing thing I've ever written. All right.
Chris Hanslik
Well, jim, i want to thank you for taking the time and sharing the story of the poor San Antonio, as well as your own as a leader. It's been fascinating to hear what's going on there, and keep up the great work.
Jim Perschbach
Well, thank you so much. Thanks for having me, and you all, take care, come see us sometime, we'll do it.
Chris Hanslik
Thanks for tuning in to Building Texas Business For more information, episodes and summaries head over to boyarmiller.com forward slash podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and found it informative. Please take a moment to rate, review and share it with friends and colleagues. It really helps others find our podcast. As always, we appreciate the support and feedback of our podcast community. More episodes are coming soon, so be sure to check back.
Special Guest: Jim Perschbach.
View all episodes
By BoyarMiller
5
3131 ratings
Jim Perschbach, President and CEO of Port San Antonio, joins the podcast to share his insights on leading an organization that has transformed an old Air Force Base into an innovative aerospace and national defense park.
Jim discusses the challenges of working remotely and the importance of providing flexibility to maintain a collaborative and productive work environment.
Dive into the fascinating world of Port San Antonio and discover the innovative solutions transforming the aerospace and national defense industries.
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS
LINKS
Show Notes
Previous Episodes
About BoyarMiller
GUESTS
Jim Perschbach
About Jim
About Jim
TRANSCRIPT
Chris Hanslik
In this episode, you will meet Jim Pershbach, President and CEO of Port San Antonio. Jim shares his views on why he believes the key to making great hires is to find people who are focused on value and long-term relationships. Okay, Jim, I want to thank you for being a guest on Building Texas Business. I want to welcome you to the show. Let's start by just telling the listeners what it is you do and where you do it.
Jim Pershcbach
Sure Well, thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute thrill to be here. We operate what's called Port San Antonio and people always say what on earth are you doing with the port in San Antonio? you're hundreds of miles away from the sea. What it is? an old Air Force Base, one of the most important Air Force Spaces in our country, that was bracked in the 1990s, and what we do is we operate it today as a research park, as an aerospace national defense park. It's got 18,000 people working on this campus. This year we're adding over 2,000 jobs. We've been averaging about 1,200 jobs a year for the past couple of years And we focus on everything from traditional aviation. We've got Boeing's largest global technical operations on the planet here. Standard Aero builds and overhauls jet engines here. We've got military cybersecurity operations. We've got private sector cybersecurity operations and then an awful lot of startup activity focused on automation, robotics, artificial intelligence and all kinds of cool stuff that's being incorporated in.
Chris Hanslik
Well, that's amazing. You're right. I'd never heard of the port of San Antonio and thought the same thing. I'm pretty sure they didn't dredge something all the way up a waterway, although that you do have the Riverwalk.
Jim Perschbach
We do have the Riverwalk. In theory. you can get to it from Leon Creek over here Just be a long walk up a rattlesnake alley.
Chris Hanslik
Well, it sounds, you know, expansive in scope of what's going on there. Let's just maybe start by telling the listeners how did you come about becoming the CEO of the port?
Jim Perschbach
Well, that's my story is quite uninteresting. I'm a lowly airplane guy. I'm a lawyer. I spent about 18 years doing aviation and defense work. I guess the firm called it white collar because it touched on federal fraud cases and had a lot of clients. I was moved here to San Antonio because of our client base that we had some of the operations And I looked at this and two things really struck us, jumped out at me. The first one was we were doing some of the most amazing work, and I say we. It's this collective aerospace and industrial world, but nobody knew about it And that's the fault of the aerospace and defense world is we try and keep everything a secret. The second part was that we have an installation that is sitting in a wonderful part of the San Antonio community.
But it's also one of the more challenged parts of the San Antonio community. It's a part of the city that has traditionally been somewhat forgotten about, and I the law had been so good to me, aviation been so good to me I wanted to jump out and do something different, not so much because I'm a savior for this, but because it was an exciting opportunity to come in and literally and figuratively knock down some of the walls between our installation and the community that surrounds us Right.
Chris Hanslik
Clearly you have a passion for it. I don't know if I ask this how long has the port been around and how did it come into existence?
Jim Perschbach
Well, it depends on when you say. The port Kelly Air Force Base was opened in 1917 as Camp Kelly. It's one of the oldest aviation installations on the planet. It was bracked in 1995. It was transitioned over to our predecessor in 2001. They came up with the idea of calling it Port San Antonio, i think in the somewhere between 2006 and 2010,. Let's say, 2007, 2008, because inland ports were all the rage. And then the focus that we have now. We kind of call it tech port informally. This focus on connecting industries and connecting people started in late 2017, early 2018 as a strategy. So we stand on the shoulders of everybody that came before us, but we're building on a heritage that goes back over 100 years.
Chris Hanslik
So what type of I guess team do you supervise and manage in your role as a CEO?
Jim Perschbach
Yeah, we've got about a hundred I think it's 103 now people that work directly in our organization, and then we've got another 100 and some odd folks that work with some contractors for us, particularly with the Boeing Center at Techport, which is this massive entertainment arena that we have built here on the campus. So there's about 200 some odd people direct and contract that work with us on any given day, and then there are 18,000 people that work on this campus with massive employers like Boeing and Northrop Grumman, down to some really exciting start ups, some of which are growing like weeds, some of which are still one or two people.
Chris Hanslik
That's a lot to keep your hands around. That sounds like.
Jim Perschbach
Well it is, but I'm just a pretty face for a lot of good people And I can say pretty face because nobody can see me and I'm trusting you're not going to put my picture.
Chris Hanslik
That I promise you know, but so I guess you've been there now almost 10 years. Thank you, tell us. let's talk a little bit about how you've gone about building your team specifically to 100 and out three plus, you know, almost 100 contractors. What are some of the things that you have found to be successful in hiring the right people?
Jim Perschbach
It's looking at people who look at what they do on a day-to-day basis as a long-term relationship building not as short-term. At our core, we're just a real estate development company. We're a real estate development company that functions as a political subdivision of the state of Texas because it's a publicly owned asset, but we don't get any tax revenue. We don't get any direct support from the government. What we have is a public asset that we have to manage and maintain.
So we have to go out and we have to generate revenue. And what we have found is that if your focus is solely on revenue, which is what so many real estate companies are, you are really at the mercy of just location and big picture demand. If you find people who recognize much like in the legal business, that it's about relationships and it's long-term relationships, it's about providing a value, then you start to build that culture amongst your customers. We don't call them tenants, we call them customers. You start to build that with the community that surrounds you And that is what I think has been the secret of our success. It is tough to find people who really do have that relationship minded core to them, but when you find them, we hold on to them quick.
Chris Hanslik
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. That mindset of a relationship and relationship building is such a more positive mindset to have than just trying to punch a clock and do a task. So what are you going to talk about? How it could be difficult to find those relationships oriented people. Let's talk about the last few years, I mean, with all the challenges employers face. What are some of the challenges that you face there at Fort San Antonio as you try to fill positions or grow the team?
Jim Perschbach
Yeah. So we had two teams that we were trying to grow at the same time. The first was our internal operation, and right during the pandemic we had our customers seeing massive growth. We've got companies that are doing some really groundbreaking work with not healthcare in terms of the actual biomedical delivery, but the systems that go around healthcare. Everything from the information technology of that to building these medical modules are going to be put in the back of cargo airplanes, and so one challenge was not only bringing people back into an office, because it is really hard to collaborate across systems and across teams when everybody is remote.
I hear a lot of people saying well, my team functions really well remotely And that's easy to do.
You can build very functional teams with trust where they're all working remotely. But when you have to work hand in hand with a different team in the organization or, in our case, different teams from different organizations, there has to be that level of collaboration, and so what we did is two things One focus on giving people flexibility and treating them like adults Those who can work remotely from time to time. We let work remotely For those folks who can't if you're working on mechanical systems for our landscapers and that type of stuff we can't say work from home, but we want to provide them the same level of flexibility and the same level of treating them like adults, treating them like colleagues that we do And that worked With respect to building those relationships with the customers that never ended During the height of the pandemic. I am very proud to say that we had people both on our team and on our customer teams that were not shy about finding ways to get together, to work together, while still making sure that they were being safe. That's great.
Chris Hanslik
Yeah, to me this issue of work remote and now people are kind of migrating back to a hybrid. At the core, there's kind of two fundamental things If you're having an issue with someone, it's probably more performance issue you would have had even if they were in time. And the second is it goes back to what you said a minute ago with my view, and that is, if you're really hiring those people with a relationship mindset, you're not going to have to tell them that they should be in person, because they're going to naturally want to be more than not but enjoy the flexibility to work remote from time to time.
Jim Perschbach
I think that's right. And one thing I found because you're in the law business in law firms we're a unique set of creatures. We've got people who whether it's a personality defect or whether it gets trained to you, but there's a certain lifestyle that we have and teams become very fluid within law firms. The role of a lawyer you may be the lead on one project, you may be support on another project, you may be doing sales and customer capture, you may be doing back office stuff, but it flows And the hierarchies are less important than just getting the job done. And what I have found the most interesting thing for me jumping from that law firm world into this world. Most human beings don't operate like that And trying to bring somewhat of the law firm culture is difficult.
You've got to find people and start to treat them as colleagues, which we do in law firms. The other thing I've noticed is and I think it's just who goes into law firms we tend to be thicker skin. So many people dislike us every day. The business is so nasty. You get your feelings hurt, but you get over it quick. People in the real world are. They're more sensitive and it takes a different level of dealing with them. But what that has led me to believe is the importance of people being physically together. It is really hard to miscommunicate and to misread cues when you're doing it over text messages or even zooms that, people being social creatures. When you bring them together and they can read those cues, they can intersect with people. It is so much easier. My mind always goes back to that key and peel skit of them sending text messages and Keith thinking he's just being a nice guy and peel getting that. Excuse me, peel being a nice guy and key just getting angry, or an angry, or how he's reading those texts, right.
Chris Hanslik
It's so true. So what? I guess, how would you describe the culture that you feel you built there at poor San Antonio?
Jim Perschbach
I think it is constantly in flux.
What we try and do is let everybody know, regardless of their position in the organization, that we really do value them as colleagues.
The challenge, i think, is the challenge that every organization has is you at some point have to find who has the stick to make the decision And then, once the decision is being made, make sure that gets communicated and spoken at one voice. And that's something that we candidly, even with 200, some odd people working in our couple buildings here, we're starting to struggle with. It makes me feel a little better because I know it's the same issue that our defense departments having, that major corporations are having. But I think this is the next level of what's going to happen with. The challenge and organizations is, as the automation comes in, as people spend less time doing physical work, as they move away from being just functionaries and the human intelligence becomes more and more important, it becomes more difficult to work that collaborative systems engineering when you build an organization, and that's going to be really interesting to watch, especially with things like artificial intelligence and automation coming into a lot of tasks that traditionally were done by people.
Chris Hanslik
Yeah, i mean certainly that's the hot topic now and it's rapidly developing, which means it's rapidly changing things. What are you mentioned? the kind of experiences and challenges in communicating across your 200 folks in a few buildings. Can you be a little more specific? What are some of the challenges you've seen recently And what are you doing to try to overcome this?
Jim Perschbach
Yeah. So it's a challenge and I put this situation solely on me. For the past couple of years, i've been trying to squash down and flatten out the organization as much as possible and empower people to get things done. We have many people whose jobs keep them really out in the field. They're working either directly with our customers across this campus, which is 1900 acres, or in some cases they're around the country and they're around the world scouting for new talent, scouting for new technology, scouting for new customers, and in doing that, communication and what we call a national defense, the command and control infrastructure starts to get tricky.
There is a line that I think is really difficult to manage between wanting to empower people and get people doing things proactively but not finding yourself committed to something, or having to walk back an effort, or having efforts that are being duplicated. As a candid example and I'm going to be very open on this stuff we had two different groups in our organization launching engineering studies for parking lots for a customer expansion, and what that means is even our customer had two different people launching their project. So it makes me feel better that it's a challenge that everybody faces, but it is something that I don't think organizations are putting enough time into. As you get bigger, as you get faster, as you get more complex, you've got to make sure that these systems coordinate back with each other, share information in real time and then build a culture of people collaborating. Again, i think it's something lawyers and law firms have been handling for centuries. It's just more difficult to do in larger organizations with people who are used to different styles of project management.
Chris Hanslik
I think learning there is. Lots of things change over time, but some of the fundamentals don't. Communication is key. The way you communicate may be a little different, but the fact that you need to communicate clearly and the importance of that is a fundamental. That should not change Right. Let's talk a little bit about your leadership style. How would you describe your style and how you try to show up as a leader in the organization?
Jim Perschbach
Oh, that's a good question. That requires me to be more reflective, and you should probably ask other people. In my mind, i am a charming, sophisticated, easygoing, empowering person that everybody loves, and I'm sure that-.
Chris Hanslik
And really good looking.
Jim Perschbach
And really good looking. And then I've seen pictures. I'm looking at myself on this Zoom and I own a mirror, so I know none of that is true. Like everybody else, i'd say that I'm trying to figure this out as you go through it.
It is difficult for every human being. Everybody says we want to have collaboration, we want people coming in. Everybody says listen to other people. Everybody says don't be arrogant. But I will tell you whether it's speaking to my board of directors or it's talking to stakeholders or it's even internal conversations. If somebody says something to you that kind of prickles you because it's a different way of looking at it, your initial reaction is to be dismissive. This person doesn't know what they're talking about. How dare they? And so what I am trying to do more and more is be more self-aware and more understanding of when other folks have those same challenges. You can't ask somebody to collaborate, to communicate, to be open to new suggestions and new ideas if you aren't yourself, and I am hoping that comes across. I can tell you that organizationally we have almost no turnover here, which is a nice thing to see.
So either people just really like being around me or we pay really well or I don't know, But at least that comforts me When I walk around. I think all these people can't stand me in my arrogant walk and my obnoxious voice.
Chris Hanslik
Yeah Well, no, it's not like you're doing something right, because turnover is a good indicator of that Any lessons you've learned as a leader and I'm going to go a little deeper We tend to learn the lessons the hard way, right, where we make a mistake or a decision that we looked at It was oh, that wasn't the right way, but we learned from it and improved. Anything that comes to mind for you or you felt like, man, that was a learning, a lesson a hard way, but I am better for it.
Jim Perschbach
Yeah, i think there are several of those. The hardest one, i think, was learning how to really let go What. I have a real passion for this campus. I knew what Kelly Air Force Base was before I could find San Antonio on a map. I'm not from San Antonio, but I knew the work that was being done here. I remember being in DC and talking about Kelly Air Force Base years before anybody thought about closing it, and talking about what the workloads would be here and what the future would be for this installation. But in doing that, what I've realized is I can become very closed off to other good ideas, and so these are situations of lessons learned, not where anything has gone wrong, but there have been times that folks in this organization have brought forward some ideas And my initial reaction was to say that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of.
You're not listening to me, you're not listening to what we're trying to do. And there's one it's a guy on our team named Ray Flores, and Ray is a fantastic, fantastic mind And he's got a real passion for historic properties. We've got a whole neighborhood here of houses that were built in the 1920s out of the shipping crates that the airplanes were sent down in And they've been rotting in place because nobody took care of them for decades. It was the old commander's headquarters And Ray came up with a plan to not only get those reactivated but to partner with the city and the city's historic preservation district to do it in a way that is allowing it to be a research laboratory and a training laboratory for people who want to work on historic preservation, to bring people in who are working on fixing up these homes, because they're training and apprenticing in that type of work, and it's going to create a little community where you can put in things. Ray's got some ideas for bee gardens and flower gardens and everything else.
My initial reaction when he came up with that was what are you talking about? I don't want housing. I don't want those architecture people. I want airplanes, i want cool stuff. I want all of this. But watching how he managed that, how he took the initial rejection he took the frankly nonsensical I don't want to change mindset, put it together, put it in context and explained how it was going to add value to everything else that we're doing. And when I go over there and I see what's being built up and it's really just started. It's an absolutely amazing process And it's something it's not just the idea, but it's the recognition that it's an idea worth having and the coming forward with it to explain how it adds value to the system. I think was tremendously impressive the way that he did it And for me the lesson was don't be arrogant.
And I'm the most arrogant human being on earth, but hypocrisy is a human tradition, so I get so frustrated when people don't listen to my brilliant ideas, and the lesson I took from how Ray did it was he did it in a charming way, without getting angry and pounding on tables and saying, no, nobody's as smart as me. Watch, you know, hold my beer.
Chris Hanslik
Right, well, i mean, yeah, go ahead. You may not think this, but definitely a demonstration by you of some humility to allow that project to go forward. recognize that Ray had a great idea And I would think that meant a lot to him. and others see that in the organization that you know to kind of make you push where they think you need to listen again.
Jim Perschbach
Yep. Making me listen is a good thing, because, man, i'm unpleasant to be around some days.
Chris Hanslik
So you've kind of talked around this and I'd like to hear more. This may not be directed, maybe, at the port, but I think so because it feels like what St Antonio is doing there is innovative. So I'm going to talk a little bit about innovation, not just in your organization specifically, but in the customers that you talked about. What kind of innovation are you trying to implement and that you see being implemented that maybe you're maybe borrowing from?
Jim Perschbach
Yeah. So that's a great question. What the innovation that we are focused on is finding stuff that makes our core industries better Aviation, national defense, critical infrastructure And it is really tough to do, because you need to find people who look at a problem from a different perspective, which means they come from a completely different mindset, a completely different culture, a completely different viewpoint. But you can't have just tinfoil-hatted crazy people coming in and running the asylum, because things will go nuts, right Right. What we have built is a system It's really a machine that is designed to attract as many different people and as many different ideas as we possibly can, with no front-end gatekeeper. We don't question whether anything makes sense or not at the front-end.
There are ways that you can do that as you test it up, and then we bring together different entities, different people, different organizations to sanity check and prototype things, and there's a couple of examples that I'm real proud of that show this and work.
One is we have a 72-foot tall robot sitting at the end of the runway as a 20 kilowatt laser attached to its arm. It's a directed energy weapon. We could cut a building with it, but we're not going to do that. It takes the paint off of an airplane in 60% less time than human beings do. It eliminates all the danger and the toxicity of doing that and takes what would normally be chemicals that would kill you and turns it into two and a half pounds of dust that you could toss in your kitchen garbage without a problem. And it takes the cost of building the stripping hanger from astronomical to very doable.
And in doing that it addresses two challenges that we've had in aviation, on the military side and on the commercial side, that's sustainment, cost and the peaks and valleys of it meant we have commoditized the work, we have offshored the work, we've had a lot of platforms just sitting fallow, and this allows them all to go back to work and allows us to upscale the human beings. The guy who came up with that idea was a computer software salesman And the point is now he didn't develop any of it but he had the idea and he ran it and he put it together.
He just needed to be connected with the people who have the different skills the robotics, the lasers, the optics, the HEPAVAC, which is the scariest thing on earth I feel like a puppy dog next to that thing because a 72 foot tall vacuum is loud The airplane people who can work on it and the facilities in which to work it. There's another one I'm real proud of met this guy in the back of somebody else's laboratory And he was developing a LiDAR system, putting it on the back of a robot, because he had a friend in real estate And that friend said it's really hard to go out and measure these buildings. It's expensive, You have to bring a lot of people in, You have to upload the CAD. It takes a lot of time. This system measures and uploads a space to within a centimeter or two of accuracy and does it almost instantaneously. We took him to Atlanta to an aviation show and we put him in our little museum down here And the next thing you know he's being named by Aviation Week, is one of eight startups in the world changing aerospace, And the reason is unbeknownst to him.
When other people looked at that solution. They saw it as having potential to do everything from optimizing the way that you utilize a hangar space to being able to scout out a lunar cave that we can use for a lunar manufacturing facility, And the example is a bound. There's a gentleman on our campus named Sam Jimenez. We just put him into the San Antonio Aerospace Hall of Fame, But Sam is one of the few space architects in the world right now And he is developing systems with NASA and a couple of private sector companies to melt lunar regolith to build a landing surface for usable rockets and then to grind lunar regolith and turn it into a filament that can be used to 3D print a habitation cap on top of a lunar cave. It's just amazing work. That's crazy. But Sam also runs a foundation called the Wex Foundation And he brings in eighth to 12th grade students who work with him and work with the NASA scientists, the research scientists, Southwest Research Institute, on the same work. So if you walk into our museum space, you're going to see a 1-7 scale version of this hang printer. It's still about 15 feet tall and it works, But it was put together by a bunch of students working with those scientists. So at the same time, what we're doing is showing these people these kids and not kids that you can really do anything you put your mind to, as long as you do it.
Last thing I'll say all of this sits in our Boeing Center at Techport, which if you go, look at it, looks like any other arena and entertainment facility on the planet. But to show you how bad a businessman I am, we're never going to make a profit off of that building. That building which is hosted Smashing Pumpkins and Judas Priest and Parkway Drive and Paw Patrol is going to come in there and do some shows. All of the profits out of that building go toward our Kelly Heritage Foundation and that supports these educational opportunities.
So we had a couple of weeks ago, 100 kids from the school districts around us come in. They did the largest computer build of all time and they all walked out of there with their own $3,000 gaming machine. But, more important, they did that hand in hand with both folks from Air Force Cyber, with the companies. The gaming folks flew in. These kids knew that people were there to help them and we hope that those kids come back and they start to continue, whether it's coding, cybersecurity, robotics, that's what we're trying to do. I can't even remember what you asked me, but when you talk about We started with innovation.
Chris Hanslik
What I love hearing is that, from somewhat of a novel concept to bring the defense and security companies together in one place to create and collaborate. And you're doing two other things by extension bringing in the kids to encourage them that there are careers and things to do in the science, math, etc. Of which we know is an issue in our country, to help promote that and get them excited about it And, at the same time, preserve the heritage which is, as you said, over 100 years old. I think all of that's really neat and necessary. It is That's really interesting stuff that I think most people that are going to listen to this had no idea was going on in San Antonio, and hopefully we can spread what you're doing to other places. So let's turn to a little personal. I'd like to know what was your first job?
Jim Perschbach
Oh, that is a good question. I think my first job that I actually got paid for was working for one of my mom's friends. She had a big old house and she ran a kennel on it, so I'd wander around that place cleaning out dog stalls. and I worked at Red Lobster and a grocery store. I worked injection molding machines on a factory line all kinds of glamour stuff.
Chris Hanslik
Right. All kinds of things that made you determine that you wanted an office job.
Jim Perschbach
Yeah, work in 12 hours a day on injection molding machines. Ever seen these things? One of the things we made were plastic forks and knives and everything else for fast food restaurants around the world And it's a I don't know six and a half, seven and a half foot plate that slams together and fills up with molten plastic And then all these things are supposed to fall out And your job is to build boxes and fill them with plastic bags and just catch all this stuff. But every now and then something would get stuck in there, so you'd have to crawl in and knock it out with a broom handle. All right, and this was a long time ago. They would get really mad at you if you'd stopped the machine for doing that. So it was terrifying thinking that thing is going to slam back on you. You learned to move quick. You learned to move quick. Some folks were smart enough to actually hit the emergency stop button but you'd get yourself in trouble doing that.
So native Texan? No, my father was Army for the first couple of years of my life And then he went into doing. I still don't know what he did. born in North Carolina, Southern California, Utah, Tel Aviv, London, Suburban, Philadelphia.
Chris Hanslik
All around.
Jim Perschbach
I've been in Texas since 1993. They sent me down here and then they bounced me around to the glamor places that had military commercial derivative programs. That's how I got to San Antonio.
Chris Hanslik
Gotcha. Well, the question I like to ask all my guests is what do you prefer, Tex-Mex or barbecue?
Jim Perschbach
I don't know, i eat like a toddler, so I'll go get fried chicken strips and macaroni and cheese.
Chris Hanslik
Okay, well, that's it first. So let's ask this If you could take a 30-day sabbatical, where would you go and what would you do?
Jim Perschbach
I would spend those entire 30 days at Walt Disney World, and not just because I think it's the coolest place on earth, but what they have put together in terms of how they use the real estate, how they use the operations, how they incorporate technology and how they do it all by putting on a show, i think is unmatched anywhere on the planet. Yeah, that Guardians of the Galaxy cosmic rewind. If you haven't read it, it's like roller skating through the universe. It's the most amazing thing I've ever written. All right.
Chris Hanslik
Well, jim, i want to thank you for taking the time and sharing the story of the poor San Antonio, as well as your own as a leader. It's been fascinating to hear what's going on there, and keep up the great work.
Jim Perschbach
Well, thank you so much. Thanks for having me, and you all, take care, come see us sometime, we'll do it.
Chris Hanslik
Thanks for tuning in to Building Texas Business For more information, episodes and summaries head over to boyarmiller.com forward slash podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and found it informative. Please take a moment to rate, review and share it with friends and colleagues. It really helps others find our podcast. As always, we appreciate the support and feedback of our podcast community. More episodes are coming soon, so be sure to check back.
Special Guest: Jim Perschbach.
More shows like Building Texas Business
View all
Founders
1,877 Listeners
THE ED MYLETT SHOW
14,052 Listeners
Texas Business Minds
19 Listeners