By Barbara A. Schmitz
The secret to being successful is showing up 99 percent of the time, said Nicole Battjes, CEO of Rainbow Helicopters and keynote speaker at Wednesday’s WomenVenture’s luncheon.
Battjes founded the Honolulu-based air tour operation in 2011, and admitted she initially had no work-life balance. She worked seven days a week for at least five years, and today her company is the largest air tour operator on the island of Oahu. It has a fleet of eight helicopters and a team of 50, and does more than 7,000 tours and charters a year.
Once Nicole decided to start a helicopter company, she said her life went on super drive. She took a job answering phones at a small helicopter company and used every opportunity to learn how to run the small company. Then one day, she got an email that she had received a $17,000 scholarship for flight lessons. She was shocked as she had applied for 17 other scholarships but had never been selected.
She moved to Hawaii, finished her commercial pilot certificate, and got hired as a temp pilot. A month later, Nicole was named their primary full-time pilot.
“I rented a small office, designed a new logo, and every day I was between flights, [I] would go sit in my little closet and try to figure out how I was going to launch this tour company.”
She figured it out. For two years, she answered her own phone, drove the shuttles, flew the tours, and managed the billing. “At night, I’d go downtown with flyers selling tours on the street,” Nicole said. “Failure was not an option.”
She was rejected by 22 banks when she tried to get her first business loan. But armed with a binder of three years of financial statements that showed she had never missed a payment, she got a loan from the 23rd bank.
“That binder told a story of hard work, late nights, and a lot of tears to get to that place,” Nicole said. “At the end of the day you need to create your own reality, and to move impossible barriers that no one but you can see the solution for.”