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Mar
07
2025
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Posted 6 days ago ago by Admin
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This year DART Aerospace is celebrating 50 years in the rotorcraft industry. Interesting to see how it all started.
The Summer Olympic Games were coming to Montreal in 1976. Jim Bradley and his family created a company to sell souvenirs to the throngs of visitors from around the globe coming to Canada. As they were gearing up in 1975, another opportunity came to Bradley in an industry far from souvenirs—a small helicopter job for the installation of an HF Whip Antenna on a Sikorsky helicopter. Bradley seized on that opportunity, and thus 50 years ago, DART Aerospace was born. The business now sells rotorcraft products and services to customers in almost every nation on Earth. “It’s funny how companies start and how they evolve over time,” says DART’s current president, Ryan Williamson. He speaks from experience, for he came to aerospace from an industry as unrelated to helicopters as Olympic souvenirs—the furniture manufacturing business.
Williamson was working in operations for a small furniture manufacturing company in his native Eugene, Oregon, and was looking for opportunities in aerospace. An executive at DART heard from a company that had interviewed Williamson that a promising young man was looking. “I literally never applied to work at DART, but they called me on that recommendation,” says Williamson. “I’m glad I took that call.” Indeed he is, for answering that bell led to an ongoing 20-year DART career that saw Williamson ascend from operations management to sales to president in an industry he’s come to love. He says, “I go to work every day in an exciting, fast-moving, and challenging sector.”
Williamson did not have a conventional path to the president’s role, such as a prestigious university degree. Most of his experience was due to a ‘real-world’ education by working, mostly in operations. “Everything I learned, I learned by doing.” He kept his nose to the grindstone but also looked to additional opportunities. “I could say something like I just work hard, which I do, but really I capitalized on opportunities as they presented themselves,” he says. “For example, when I was asked if I would be willing to move from Eugene to Ontario Canada to be vice president & general manager of DART’s Canadian operations, it would have been easy to say no. Our son, Derrick, was 16 at the time and our family was happy and comfortable (including wife Angela) but I took the opportunity, with the agreement of my family, to pick up and move 3,000 miles.” That opportunity led to a global operations role that led to a sales and marketing role that all led to the president’s job. Apple cofounder Steve Jobs once said it’s easy to connect the dots looking backwards, but hard to connect them looking forward. “Sometimes, you just have to take the leap and trust that they will align in your future”.
Retreat
One place where Williamson and wife find time to relax is at their cottage in the Laurentian Mountains an hour or so north of their workweek Montreal condo in DART’s headquarter city. “It’s kind of Quebec’s version of the Rocky Mountains. We enjoy going there for some peace and quiet away from all the noise and traffic of Montreal,” says Williamson. With their son now an adult, the couple likes to take a couple special vacation trips a year. “We celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary in the Dominican Republic this year and that was a lot of fun,” Williamson says. “I view every wedding anniversary as a major accomplishment. I don’t take our 25 years together for granted.”
One professional accomplishment that Williamson is proud of is DART’s growth. The company has multiplied its size five times since he first joined in 2005. He says, “Along the way, we’ve grown horizontally by bringing new products to market, and vertically by acquiring other companies. We’ve made multiple acquisitions since I’ve been at DART, but I’m proud that through those acquisitions, and multiple strong leaders, we maintained the core of our business, did not lose our focus on things like delivering value to our customers, all things that have made DART a pillar in the helicopter industry for the last 5o years.”
Lessons Learned
That achievement and Williamson’s success didn’t come without mistakes and lessons learned. “Looking back, my failures had a few things in common: Communication and/or expectations that weren’t clear and decisions that weren’t made as fast and decisively as needed,” he says. “Sometimes, you need to be honest with yourself, and admit that something wasn’t the right decision, regardless of how much you personally wanted it to work.”
Mentors
Williamson has had two strong mentors who guided him throughout most of his career. One was a small business owner, David Weil, who gave him the opportunity to run a manufacturing business. “David used to say, ‘Take care of the dimes and the dollars will take care of themselves.’ That’s true to some degree. When you pay attention to details, the larger things will fall into place. I learned about sales, cash flow, and profitability running that small business,” he says. “Large businesses have a lot of short-term advantages that small businesses don’t have. In a small business, you must master the fundamentals.”
When Williamson first came to Canada, Alain Madore, the man who wound up being Williamson’s presidential predecessor, mentored the newcomer from the small business background. Williamson says, “He helped me transition to a larger company mindset. When you work in a very small business, you’re often working deep in the weeds (or handling all the details yourself), but in a larger environment, you need to rise above that and learn to delegate responsibility. Alain helped me ‘work in the right time zone’ as he used to put it.”
T.A.C.
With those fundamentals learned, Williamson developed his personal leadership philosophy that incorporates transformation, autonomy, and coaching. “I want to transform the company so that it will have a bigger impact on the industry and be more profitable. That’s the goal, and to accomplish that I have to bring people around me— incredibly smart and talented people. Those types of people don’t usually want to come to work and be told what to do. They want autonomy to make decisions, but they want to be coached as needed, not dictated to. I like to give my VPs autonomy and allow them to execute. If I have an opinion as to how they should do something, I’ll work with them one-on-one to make sure we have the same vision. When we have to make a big company-wide decision, I get all the players together and make sure we get all ideas on the table to reach the best decision. My role as president is to make strategic-level decisions for DART’s long-term success. If I’m focusing on daily operational or finance decisions, I’m going to lose focus on the long-term strategy. So, I surround myself with smart and talented people who are more capable than me of making decisions for their areas of responsibility. Fundamentally what I look for in leaders are two things above all else; a bias for action, and people that think and act like owners. Without those two qualities it’s a non-starter.”
Challenges and Opportunities
So, what strategic challenges is Williamson focusing on? A major one is the complexity of our rotorcraft industry ecosystem. He says, “We have thousands of customers. Our biggest challenge is to be everywhere we need to be, and we have to be very strategic in how we schedule and deploy our resources. How we do that can be the difference between success and failure. Although somewhat improved, there are lingering post-COVID supply chain issues, especially when it comes to composites, chemicals, and electronics. Also the looming geopolitical environment is making it more difficult to strategically plan for long-term investments.”
So, are there any good opportunities? Williamson answers, “Getting more products into the hands of our current customers and converting new customers. We feel that DART has better value when compared properly; we often offer lighter weight products, longer lasting products, and longer intervals between maintenance. When the customer is properly informed we always see good results.”
Williamson also likes how the acquisitions of SEI (Bambi Buckets) and Simplex (Fire Attack Systems) have positioned DART with a unique offering to help fight wildfires. “There’s more that could be done to help firefighters and save lives. I think DART can play a role,” he says.
Yet, there is one unique trait of the helicopter industry that awes and encourages Williamson. “I’m always amazed when I walk the Heli-Expo or Verticon show floor at the sheer ingenuity of our industry. You always see something you never saw before. Somebody sees a problem and opens up a little rotorcraft business to solve that problem. Our industry is made up of thousands of those problem solvers.”
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