Interview with VP Sales HYDRO USA Philip Weber
A conversation with Philip Weber
Phil Weber was born in Seattle, Washington and grew up on the east side of the state on a cattle ranch with his parents. For a long time he thought he would become a farmer, doing the family business. But after high school he started to go to pilot school, to become a pilot. After having his first pilot ratings he changed his plans and he went to the University of Washington in Settle, to get his degree in aerospace engineering.
After his graduation in 2006 he started to work for Boeing on the B787 program in the flight test team. After a few years he went to Southwest Airlines and moved to Dallas, to get to know the airline side of the aviation business as an engineer. Phil describes the culture of Southwest Airlines as intoxicating and genuine. Then in 2012 he went back to Seattle to work for Boeing the second time in his career. For 5 years he again worked on the B787 program, but at this time the aircraft was already in service and no longer a prototype. In this period he experienced the transition from an engineering expert to a sales expert. He became the mission director of a team that was running an operation center to monitor the B787 program. The team was responsible to respond in real time when issues or emergencies came up. After another year at Alaska Airlines in Seattle he came to Aviall in Dallas, the provider of aircraft parts which is a 100% subsidiary of Boeing, being responsible for business development.
Finally, in 2019, he became VP Sales at HYDRO USA, and has been with us since.
Phil Weber is 40 years old, has three children, all boys ages 6, 4 and 3, and lives with his wife in Dallas, Texas.
What is your role at HYDRO?
As VP Sales I functionally lead the US sales team. In fact I have kind of a split role. On the one hand I help my team selling our products in their territories. And on the other hand I help the rest of the world sell the products that we manufacture in our facility in Seattle.
The US entity of HYDRO is an extended piece of the for more than 50 years highly successful business model from Germany. I see it also as my task to define and shape our mission in the US compared to the mission that the HYDRO mother company has. If you want “our unique identity”.
Our role in Seattle is also to help to “americanize” the HYDRO business, when talking about culture, quality and product scope for instance. It is my task to make sure the HYDRO products are positioned properly to the US market. This means catering the traditional HYDRO products to the needs of the US consumers and the unique way US customers use products.
What are the specialties of the US market?
The US market wants much more robust, much less complex products. In the US it is pretty common that much snow, rain and dirt gets on the products. And then they have to work properly – from one moment to the other. Robustness in the Americas often stands, much more than in other countries, before user-friendliness or the complexity of a product.
So in the end there is a mixture that you have to be able to create. A mixture of the complexity and what makes the HYDRO product valuable and at the same time of what makes the product appealing to the US market.
Does the label “Made in the US” still have a big impact?
Having the ability to claim something is made in the US is a huge selling feature to the US business, especially for Ground Support Equipment. All the nuts, bolts, castor wheels and everything that exists on the products are able to be sourced in the American region. They are standardized. There is kind of a pride of the people that comes along with being able to purchase bolts from Granger for example.
„Robustness in the Americas often stands, much more than in other countries, before user-friendliness or the complexity of a product.“
VP Sales HYDRO USA
Do robustness and simplicity go along with being cheap?
This is not a question about being cheap. It is a question about how the US market values features and quality relative to the rest of the world. The US market is willing to pay for good quality. And sometimes in the US market robustness is, as I said already, more important than user friendliness.
On some airports a tripod-jack might be pulled for miles over the dirt and grass on the airport to get from one end to the other end. For that reason you have to have equipment that is able to survive those conditions. Products that can be left in the Dallas sun or the Chicago snow for three weeks before being used. They want something that is strong, and capable and able of being abused and it has to stand for years.
How do you see the competitor situation in the US?
I think HYDRO is the number one brand in quality, durability, technical attitude, and customer service. The only thing in the US that HYDRO is not the number one in is awareness. We are only recognized by the big customers in the market and not every airline knows us well. That’s probably the biggest challenge, that HYDRO is not a brand that people know about. I haven’t heard a single person tell me “I don’t want to buy your products, because they are not good enough”. Everybody wants to have our products, and they are willing to pay the price difference, but we have to do the work to gain brand awareness and sell our availability. In the US market, as we do everywhere in the world, we are talking about selling on value instead of price.
And to be honest: I don’t want to be the cheapest product. Because cheap in the US market is synonymous with poor quality. When someone buys a cheap product in the US they know it won’t last and they aren’t surprised when it doesn’t. We don’t want to be thought of as a “throw-away” brand like some of our competitors.
When talking about GSE it is clear that our competitors can’t compete with our product quality. They are more focused on doing mass produced products. What they do differently is they manufacture locally and therefore can sell cheap, because they have not transport costs on top.
"I haven’t heard a single person tell me »I don’t want to buy your products, because they are not good enough«."
VP Sales HYDRO USA
What major changes do you see to the aviation market in the next years?
I think consolidation of maintenance that has already started and will happen even more in the next years. Airlines know their core competency and they are willing to offset costs by becoming an MRO. This trend has is just now happening in the US even though it has been in-place for years on the world market. What that means for us is a change of our customer landscape, away from thinking of airlines as only airlines and selling to them as if they are an MRO.
What I also see is a big shift right now in aerospace analytics. If you think about the B747, B737 Classic, or A300 – there is not a lot of data that comes from those airplanes. Compared to that the B777, the B787, or the A350XWB which produce terabytes of data on every flight. The airlines will become the ability to be much more predictive and proactive around their maintenance. This will effect a change in mentality. They no longer have to store spare parts because they are no longer afraid of an unpredictable implication. Our customers will therefore move towards an amazon model: When I need it I buy it. We can participate by being more of a distributor in the US market: Leasing, rental programs, trading programs will become a strong option to grow our customer base.
CLOSE-UP WITH PHILIP WEBER
A good day at work starts with…
people.
I earned my first money…
as a farmer.
If I could chose my seat neighbor on an aircraft…
it’d be Larry Bird, a famous basketball player in the US.
I lose track of time…
when I’m working on MS Excel.
The so far most expensive purchase in my life…
my motorhome.
I have always…
tried to emulate the Southwest culture.
I have never…
done bungee jumping.
Those aiming for a career at HYDRO…
you need to do your job well.
When I was 18, I wanted to…
do absolutely nothing.
Home for me means…
anywhere where my family is.