One of the largest ground service providers in the US has laid the foundations for an ambitious growth journey. Unifi CEO Gautam Thakkar speaks with ARGS Editor Mark Pilling
Gautam Thakkar began our conversation with the stories of Naweed Rahimzada and Olga Borishkevich, both part of Atlanta-based Unifi’s far-sighted refugee hiring programme, launched in 2021 and going from strength to strength.
Earlier this year, Unifi, the former Delta Air Lines ground services unit that went independent in late 2018, made a pledge to hire 500 refugees over the next three years. It already has more than 300 on its books – with its Seattle operation home to one of its largest refugee contingents.
In fact, Thakkar engaged with this part of Unifi’s workforce soon after taking on the role of CEO, while visiting Seattle where he met Naweed. “He is from Afghanistan, came here as a refugee and started working for Unifi on his own, and through his network he has since helped bring in more than 150 Afghani refugees to work for us.”
Not only are refugee hires important to bolster the Unifi ranks, but they also display an added attribute: “The attrition rate in this group is virtually zero,” explained Thakkar.
Seattle is also home to a large group of Ukrainian refugees.
“Olga Borishkevich, who retired last year, was instrumental in hiring over 160 Ukrainian refugees to our company,” said Thakkar. As with the Afghani refugee cadre, the attrition rate and attendance record of this group is exemplary.
“At her retirement party, I asked her, how did you ensure these people turn up for work?” said Thakkar. “She said it’s very simple. I go to church every Sunday and for those people who have not shown up I call them out in front of their parents to come to work.”
This unconventional approach would not work in every environment, but to Thakkar it demonstrates the cultural diversity and business benefits that he is keen to foster.
In fact, Unifi also has a former refugee on its corporate recruiting team in Atlanta, who helps hire and onboard refugee hires at the world’s busiest airport.
“We are actually ahead of the curve,” Thakkar claimed, when it comes to Unifi’s refugee programme. “It was our philosophy that we need to give them an opportunity with a starting job given how their lives were disrupted. As it turns out, they do such a great job that we kept the hiring going.”
Putting employees at the top of his agenda was a constant mantra of Thakkar’s throughout the interview with ARGS.
This experienced CEO, who has led Infosys BPM and SE2 in the technology sphere, joined Unifi in January 2021. His task was to steer the giant aviation services business out of the pandemic and grow the company.
The business was born from the ground services unit of Delta Air Lines. In late 2018, Delta sold a 51% stake in DAL Global Services to the Atlanta-based workforce solutions business Argenbright Holdings. In February 2020, the joint venture company was rebranded as Unifi.
According to Thakkar: “The way I describe the past four years is that 2020 was a year when we had lots of available workers and but very few flights operating; in 2021 we had lots of flights but not very many workers to service those flights; in 2022 we were pumping in a lot of money to get those people to come back to work; and 2023 was the year where we started to figure out how to become more efficient and stabilise our workforce.”
When Thakkar joined Unifi, he found a business that posted revenues of about US$480 million in 2020. As traffic has recovered, so too has Unifi. However, the company has easily outpaced the market’s revival rate, reaching about $1.2 billion in revenue at the end of 2023 and with more to come this year.
“By the end of this year we are going to be roughly a $1.7 billion business,” said Thakkar, buoyed by an acquisition earlier in 2024 but predominantly credited to organic growth.
With its latest acquisition, Unifi has grown to more than 40,000 employees in more than 200 airports across the US, Canada and the UK providing a wide range of aviation services including ground handling, above wing, GSE bussing, unarmed security and facilities maintenance services, and more.
Thakkar breaks down the mission he was given when he joined Unifi into three imperatives: “To make the business scalable; make it predictable; and ensure that our employees and our customers have an exceptional experience of working with us.
“The first thing I had to do was strengthen the foundational infrastructure. We had to build something very strong to grow our business,” he said. “It meant having people with the experience necessary to scale the business, and to have processes that are as standardised as possible so that you don’t see a different version of Unifi at each station.
“These common processes mean people know exactly what they must do when they must do it. And this all must be underpinned with technology, which is my background.”
The data lake
One of the first things Thakkar set about creating when he arrived was a clear understanding of the operational performance of the business, across all stations. “There was a clear need for this. At every station I visited in my first three months I would ask about their attrition number, their overtime number and so on. Many had a hard time coming up with one answer,” he noted.
It wasn’t a criticism of the stations, but it was something he had to fix. “In my view of the world, information is critical. I should not need to ask those questions… I should have access to that information,” he says. “Before going to a station like Des Moines or Minneapolis I need to know how that station is performing.
“We set about building a data lake where we pooled all our information and technology because the one thing missing here was a single source of truth. I think most organisations struggle with that.
“So, through 2021, we invested heavily in building a data lake so that we were able to get information completely visible and transparent to everybody,” said Thakkar.
In addition to information consistency available across the business, Thakkar’s team has instituted an automated Unifi-wide recruitment and onboarding process. “I now have complete visibility of our recruitment pipeline and the on-boarding process at the station and the enterprise level,” he said.
Transparency is not just for the business. Unifi has developed a mobile app that enables employees to obtain information like paid time off or their paycheque at their fingertips. “Getting this information was one of the main questions we received from supervisors and frontline employees,” said Thakkar.
Unifi is enhancing this technology with the ability to automate shift swaps, another employee request, and will add on its reward and recognition scheme this year.
The app has been incredibly popular, said Thakkar, with an adoption rate at Unifi of 85% among employees in less than 12 months.
For someone from the tech world, it is not surprising Thakkar is also keen to talk about a safety dashboard Unifi has developed. “Safety is the one thing that keeps me up at night,” he noted.
Accordingly, once it had its data lake in place Unifi’s tech team, plus external providers and Microsoft, started looking “to see how we could make use of this data to ensure that our employees and the equipment we run for our clients is safe.
“We built a predictive model which takes more than 30 data points and 500 variables that runs on its own twice a week and predicts with a 90 to 95% accuracy as to where there might be a risk of aircraft damage or an employee injury,” he said. The data inputs are variables like weather, age of GSE, tenure of the employees, overtime and aircraft load factor.
“The model takes all these variables and builds a predictive model which tells me ahead of time where we are most likely to have a safety issue such as an injury or aircraft damage,” he said.
“I know airlines have dabbled with it. I know my competitors have dabbled with it,” Thakkar continued. “But this is a capability that is truly unique to Unifi and even if others follow – we were the first.
“Our ability to build something like the safety dashboard is because we’ve got clean, clear data, that supports our view of how to scale an organisation. I don’t want to hire several safety employees who always react to a safety event after it’s happened. I would rather they work proactively in identifying where that problem might be and prevent it altogether. That’s how you become smarter and more efficient.”
This work is part of an evolutionary process that fits with Thakkar’s vision of scaling the business. And it’s something that never really finishes. “There is a lot of headroom for us to continue improving,” he noted.
Focus on training
“A big reason for our growth has been our ability to run operations with predictability by using and leveraging technology. It is also because we invested in strong operational people,” said Thakkar.
Fostering that leadership is also critical. Unifi has a monthly three-day training programme, called Leadership Touchdown Training, where 25-30 leaders from across the network assemble in either Atlanta or Salt Lake City
“My entire team of direct reports and I go in and make presentations to this group, talk about the strategic direction of the company and what we are doing in each of the functional areas, and have a meal with them. It is a very conscious effort on our part to ensure that this team is recognised, and hears from us what is important and what my vision is for the company.
“So far, about 1,150 employees have gone through ‘Leadership Touchdown Training’, as well as our supervisor training programme, ‘Mentor Me’,” said Thakkar, and it is paying off. “Our retention rate in that cohort has been about 85%.
“The intent is to ensure that these messages filter down to frontline employees,” said Thakkar. “And we have succeeded. We have also grown largely because our clients started trusting us a lot because of the work that we do. They tell us that we have ended up outperforming ourselves.”
In addition to this initiative, once the foundations were in place, Thakkar discussed ideas with his management team on how to instil an “elevated service level” across Unifi. The key question was how to differentiate Unifi in a service industry that is heavily dependent on labour and where the ability to stand out from the crowd may have been limited.
The Ritz-Carlton factor
“We wanted to be different and asked ourselves what can set us apart,” said Thakkar. Unifi turned to hotel legend Horst Schulze to bring a service “X factor” to Unifi.
Schulze, who led Ritz-Carlton Hotels for 20 years, has worked with Unifi over the last few months. “He travelled to many of our operations talking to our employees about how to further elevate the service level so they can better serve our customers,” he said.
“The way that Horst describes it is that it’s not about somebody pushing a wheelchair: it’s about ladies and gentlemen taking care of ladies and gentlemen – a sentiment he championed while leading the Ritz Carlton brand.
“It is amazing the difference that it has created because it brings a sense of loyalty, in addition to demonstrating how to provide a great level of service,” said Thakkar.
This work comes under Thakkar’s headline vision of predictability. “I was once told that good work gets more work. We believe that we have reached a place where we are doing a good job. And we are doing a great job in many places, but we want to do an exceptional job for our end customers in every place that we are present.”
Growth platform
Although Delta remains a minority shareholder in Unifi it is “completely hands off” in terms of how Unifi is run, said Thakkar. The rebranding to Unifi was designed to reinforce its separation from the airline, which remains, along with other large US carriers such as United and Alaska Airlines, one of Unifi’s top customers.
Coming up on four years at the helm of Unifi, Thakkar believes that the foundations of the business are now strong enough not only to “ride the wave” of growth being seen in the industry, but also to make bold moves into new geographies and service sectors.
“My job as a CEO is to ensure that we are creating platforms for growth. If you had asked me in 2021 whether I was interested to go to Canada or the UK the answer would have been – absolutely not,” he said. “If I can’t stabilise my home base, I’m not going anywhere.
“My strong belief is that unless I had the foundational pieces in place, even if customers had wanted us to support them, we would not have been able to. I can tell you there would be five other fires burning because we’ve not fixed those problems and for the life of me, I wouldn’t know what was causing a problem in the first place.”
Thakkar is convinced that the time and effort that have gone in to making Unifi a predictable and consistent service provider have been essential and are paying off. “I’m not going to deny that there was some sort of recovery wave that we rode upon, but that wave would have been very short had we not made the necessary investments. Our growth has significantly outpaced the market, and in many cases has been at the expense of some of our competitors.”
This deliberate plan for scaling the organisation enabled Unifi to open its first operation in Canada, kicking off in November of 2023 when it took over ground handling operations for WestJet at Calgary International Airport.
The Canadian carrier chose Unifi to bring in a fresh service provider to Calgary, and Unifi entered its largest deal with WestJet to date.
“We walked into another country and within 70 days stood up an operation of nearly 900 employees,” explained Thakkar. “We would not have been able to do this unless we had the processes, the people and the technology in place.”
Another reason Unifi could move quickly in Canada was its joint venture on ground support equipment (GSE) with Alvest Equipment Services and TLD. “We decided that we did not want to be in the business of maintaining GSE, so we rolled all this equipment into this JV where we’ve got world-class experts.
“We have converted it from what was a pass-through cost-plus model to a revenue-and-profit model. Because of the relationships they [Alvest] have, they were able to get the GSE we needed into Calgary in record time,” said Thakkar.
Just prior to the Canada opportunity, Unifi also made its first move into Europe, acquiring Up & Away – a UK-based private jet detailing and aviation services company – expanding its reach to then 13 (now 14) UK airports.
Up & Away provides services including cabin cleaning, de-icing, private jet detailing, technical cleaning and other adjacent aviation services. Unifi aims to grow its business in the UK to more than $100 million in the region over the next three years.
In April Unifi announced its latest acquisition – Prospect Airport Services, which has operations at airports in more than 30 cities, including Chicago, Dallas, and Charlotte. The company provides a range of services, including baggage handling, lost and found, aircraft cleaning and wheelchair assistance.
The wheelchair service is particularly significant and now makes Unifi the largest provider of this service in the US, and one of the largest in the world, delivering up to 20 million pushes a year.
Thakkar paused when asked if he was surprised at the pace of Unifi’s growth. “I would have been disappointed if we didn’t [grow at this rate]. In the world I come from 10-20% growth is not necessarily scaling the business, that’s business as usual.”
But growth must be managed. “I know there are organisations who want to be the biggest. Our goal and mission is to be the most respected company, by our employees and our customers. Growth and scale will follow if you’re the most respected aviation service provider in the world.”
Faster growth would have been welcomed, but he cautioned: “I want to do it in a stable manner that is predictive and ensures we build a model that essentially grows on top of a very secure infrastructure.
“Then we can essentially take it anywhere else and replicate our success,” he said. “That’s why we believe that we’ve got a nice base to grow from in Canada, in the UK and we believe that it will be the platform for us to grow to the rest of Europe.”
Where next for Unifi?
Unifi is big, developing and clearly has the financial clout of Argenbright behind it to grow more, but it will not seek expansion at any cost.
“There are other markets that we will contemplate,” said Thakkar. “Some of it is deliberate and some opportunistic, but we have a very clear view and a vision of how we want to grow, which is aggressively, but also gaining the respect of our customers and our employees while we are growing.
“I would much rather compromise a little on growth than lose credibility with our employees and customers,” he stressed, adding: “That growth also allows countless opportunities for our employees to not just have a job but build a career with Unifi.”
A pleasing piece of feedback Thakkar receives from customers is that despite Unifi’s growth, the service quality and management response time remain consistent. He puts this down to a structure that has not become siloed or geographic in nature.
“I think the teams that we have built and the processes that I talk about are very integrated. So, if anything happens in the UK today, my team and I know about it instantly, and we react accordingly,” said Thakkar.
“Somebody once told me this that when you’re small, you’re a gladiator, and when you’re big you become a bureaucrat.
“Our intention is to remain a gladiator even when we are twice the size or even if we reach $5 billion in size. I want us to be a gladiator. I want Unifi to be extraordinarily nimble, incredibly agile and ensure that we are taking care of customers and reacting very quickly to the market.”
