Onshore Outsourcing relies on King Air B200 to bringing IT jobs back onshore
The King Air, our King Air, is essential to revitalizing rural America,” said Shane Mayes, founder and CEO of Onshore Outsourcing.
That might sound like a brazen statement but Onshore Outsourcing has the business model and results to back it up: “Our mission is squarely focused on the development of our employees. It’s our aim to help people see beyond their current situation toward a better way of life, to give them hope and the kind of dignity that comes from having an honorable profession. This all translates into value for our customer because they get a fiercely dedicated and loyal workforce,” Mayes said.
The customer is corporate America, companies that outsource work like business analysis and architecture, data and infrastructure management, software development, business process outsourcing and help desk administration. Instead of going offshore for those services, Onshore Outsourcing wants those companies to hire rural Americans, or what it calls the “most cost-effective and innovative workforce available in the world.”
The King Air’s role in this rural revitalization – for the past 15 months or so – has been to connect Onshore Outsourcing’s information technology workers, who all work in rural communities, with the Fortune 500 businesses based in large metro areas.
The Perfect Example
It’s a three-hour drive to St. Louis from tiny Macon, Mo., population 5,500 and home to one of Onshore’s main campuses, which it calls a rural delivery center. A project with a large client based in St. Louis wasn’t going well; communication had broken down between the company and the IT team. A team of six IT professionals made the quick flight on the King Air to work at the customer’s site and save the project.
“We did that in a matter of hours. If you think about whom our competitors are – offshore software developers from India – they just can’t do that,” Mayes said. “Remember, all of our customers are in metropolitan areas and we are in rural areas. I literally don’t think we could run this model without the airplane.”
The Business Model
Mayes, who grew up in St. Louis, found himself in the north-central Missouri town of Kirksville when his wife was going through medical school. An IT project manager without a college degree, Mayes couldn’t find that type of job in rural America. He started building websites for local businesses and when he needed more employees, he realized he would have to train them himself.
“I found these communities were full of underemployed and dislocated workers,” Mayes said. “As I worked with them and taught them IT skills, I saw the challenges they were going through. We were a small team and you see what poverty does to people, and you see them overcoming life situations and chasing their dreams. I fell in love with that. That’s my life’s work.”
In following this calling, Mayes said he accidentally created the domestic rural outsourcing industry. Onshore’s own rural delivery and organic workforce development models offer a low-cost, domestic alternative to offshore outsourcing. These models allow individuals in rural areas to learn skills, obtain great jobs and continue learning and growing throughout their career. The models come together to form a service that provides IT workers customized specifically to a customer’s needs, yet remaining incredibly flexible and ready to adopt new technologies.
“We’re the only company in the rural outsourcing space that has both a build and a run side,” he said. “We’re able to deliver solutions and build them, and we’re also able to support them with IT help desks and a pretty incredible business services offering.
Walking through the delivery center in Macon, you’ll see team-based pod structures, many with the logo of their customer overhead. For example, Schneider – the national trucking and logistics company.
“These awesome people in this pod are working to support Schneider Trucking,” Mayes said during a tour of the Macon campus. “Schneider has thousands of employees, thousands of truckers all with electronic devices inside the cab of the truck that keep track of virtually everything the driver needs to be doing and is doing. The guys and gals might have a problem with the device, so they call in and we help them get back on the road.”
Another pod is working on taking client data that one of their biggest customers – real estate conglomerate Jones Lang Lasalle – has had for a long time and standardizing it so JLL can put it in a new, standard database for easier access for all users.
Pods working on software development sit on another floor of the building. One team is just finishing up a huge project creating software for Hudson’s Bay Company and its Saks Fifth Avenue stores that will derive commissions for sales associates.
Other well-known clients include Panera, Domino’s, Boeing, Enterprise Rent-a-Car and Commerce Bank.
Educating the Rural Workforce
Some of the world’s biggest brands hand off their IT needs to employees sitting in rural America thanks to Mayes starting the company in February 2005. In addition to the 180 employees at the Macon Rural Delivery Center, Onshore has about 80 employees at a campus is Glenville, Ga., which is about a four-hour drive from Atlanta and has a population of roughly 5,000. There are smaller offices in Chesterfield, Mo., right outside St. Louis; and Roswell, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta. Several company sales members have offices near large metropolitan areas where some of their largest clients are located: Arizona, Minnesota, Illinois and California.
About 95 percent come to Onshore with no IT training. They start with an eight-week boot camp, during which Onshore tries to remove as many barriers as possible, providing daycare and meals to families.
“The boot camps are all pre-employment training, and we’re really strong at that,” Mayes said. “People come out of the boot camp and we give them jobs. To continue their education, we have Hannibal-LaGrange University here at night. We pay for all of our employees to go to college for free.”
They emerge data analysts, software testers, software developers and call center professionals. While employees don’t sign contracts, there is little turnover. “They stay because they want to. We try to keep them happy,” Mayes stated.
He said he expects to hire around 100 people overall this year, with a big focus on the Georgia Rural Delivery Center that opened in 2013. A third center is being considered, possibly in Texas.
The King Air
“Hey, if anyone wants to go to Chicago, I’m going there the Thursday after next,” Shane called out as he walked through one of the floors. “You’ll get there and back same day.”
Mayes leased a Cessna 414 for several years and when he reached the point of flying 200 hours a year he knew it was time to own. The company purchased a 1978 Beechcraft Duke twin-engine piston in 2012. Onshore outgrew it, but kept it in its fleet, when it opened the second Rural Delivery Center in Georgia.
In January 2014, Onshore pur-chased a 1981 King Air B200, singer George Strait being one of the aircraft’s past five owners.
“More people were going on the flights with us as the business grew, and we needed more speed and more range,” Mayes said. “I just love the King Air. I love how it sits on the ramp, and it’s just a safe, reliable airplane. The cabin size is awesome; it’s just right for our needs.”
Mayes also loves the payload and storage capacity, especially on personal trips. “My wife can basically get a minivan-load of stuff in there, we’ve got our three daughters and grandma, and we just get in and go. I don’t know if there’s another airplane with the luggage capacity of a King Air,” he said.
The Duke operates mostly from Georgia, between Dekalb-Peachtree Airport (KPDK) and MidCoast Regional Airport (KLHW), shuttling employees between Onshore’s locations and to meet with clients. The King Air is based at Kirksville Regional Airport (KIRK) because Macon-
Fowler Memorial Airport (K89) doesn’t have a hangar large enough.
The week we visited Mayes said was a typical week of flying. He was flying on Friday to Atlanta to meet with his advisory board. On Saturday he would fly to Kansas City for a Young Presidents’ Organization with his wife and two of his daughters. He would be back in Atlanta on Monday to speak at a Chief Information Officer event and on Thursday he had a prospective client meeting in Chicago.
Future Plans
Through its first 14 months, Onshore flew the King Air B200 300 hours according to chief pilot Thomas Goad, who majored in flight operations at the University of Dubuque, then spent time as a flight trainer in his native California, a bush pilot in Alaska and flying freight based out of St. Louis until joining Onshore Outsourcing when the company acquired the King Air. “It’s been rock-solid for us. We’ve been able to get 281 knots true airspeed out of it consistently, and the reliability has been huge.”
During the first year, a typical mission for the company included three or four passengers with a 600-mile range. This year, Goad’s goal is to increase the passenger load to six or seven on average by communicating the aircraft’s schedule with more notice.
“As a business, we want to manage this asset efficiently, so we’re tracking by seat mile cost,” Mayes said. “Thomas came to me and said if we really want the most use out of this airplane, the sweet spot is full seats and up to 600 miles so that’s what we’re doing.”
The aircraft has Garmin 530 avionics and RAM air modification that were installed prior to purchase, and the interior was reupholstered when Onshore took delivery. Mayes said future modifications could include new paint, as well as Blackhawk and G1000 upgrades. And while George Strait had a pretty nice stereo system installed, Mayes expects to upgrade the entertainment system also.
“The King Air will be around at Onshore for a long time; it’s the perfect airplane for us,” he said. “It allows me to live in a rural area, right in the middle of all the challenges rural America faces in a rural employment ecosystem while still running a business. I wouldn’t be able to recruit to Macon, Mo., the executive team I have dispersed across the country and we wouldn’t be able to get out there and sell to Fortune 500 companies or have face-to-face meetings with our customers without the King Air.”
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