2 days ago
- Business
- Business Journals
New COO brings 30 years of leadership to growing private aviation firm
Story Highlights Fast-growing Airshare hires a COO.
Suzanne Williams spent the past 10 years at BarkleyOKRP, most recently as COO and CFO.
Airshare is a 2025 Champions of Business honoree.
From the Kansas City Business Journal.
Airshare has hired Suzanne Williams as its new COO.
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Airshare is one of the largest private aviation companies in the U.S., operating a fleet of more than 100 aircraft from coast to coast. Founded in 2000, the company offers aircraft management, fractional ownership, EMBARK jet cards and charter services. Airshare saw revenue growth of 26.9% from 2021 to 2023, reaching $210.15 million in revenue for 2023. Last year, it reported $371.8 million in revenue.
Williams brings more than 30 years of experience to Airshare, where she started last month. She spent the past 10 years at BarkleyOKRP, most recently as COO and CFO. Before that, she spent 21 years in a wide variety of leadership positions at Sprint, mainly in auditing, but last worked as the vice president of planning and analysis. For the past year and a half, Williams has been a board member for Kansas City-based Centric Construction Inc.
'We are thrilled to hire someone as talented as Suzanne and anticipate her making an immediate impact in many areas of our business,' Airshare CEO John Owen said. 'This is a vital role within our growth plans; therefore, we spent considerable time making sure we found the right person. I'm confident she will be a tremendous asset for us.'
At Airshare, Williams will lead the finance, legal, human resources and IT departments. She also will be a member of the executive leadership team, reporting to Owen, and joined Airshare's board. Airshare is a 2025 Champions of Business honoree.
Although she doesn't have any experience in the aviation industry, Williams said said her role shares a lot of similarities to work she has done in the past. Both Airshare and BarkleyOKRP are people businesses, and that will translate pretty quickly.
'I was looking for a new challenge, and it just worked out this way,' she said. 'Airshare has a great reputation. They've done a lot of M&A on both the buy and sell side the last couple of years, so all that definitely gets me excited to be a part of the very experienced team Airshare has developed.'
Williams said she spent her first week on a plane, visiting all of the Airshare hangars and facilities nationwide with the executive team and asking a million questions.
'I learned quite a bit, just being basically locked in a plane with them for three days,' Williams said. 'We had a one-day, off-site executive meeting to really talk about the company's priorities. Just getting to know John (Owen) and the lead team, and building those relationships, made a fantastic first week. That really carried into the next few weeks to help me get up the learning curve quicker. So it was a great way to start.'
