Chris once said (and I’m paraphrasing) that one of the great things about this business is that you can have an idea, and in two months it’s real. And while that statement precludes mention of the two months of blood, sweat, and tears that it takes to bring any idea to fruition, it rings true nonetheless. It’s also one of the reasons so many of us continue to work in this industry.

We understand that ultimately we’re in the idea business here at Holland-Mark. Whether it’s honing others’ ideas, pushing the limits of existing ideas, adding our own ideas to the pot, or crafting strategies to support those ideas, we have a singular, unifying focus: whatever we do for our clients, and whatever they in turn do for their customer, must be imperative. In this idea age, good isn’t good enough and interesting is just that. In order to make an impact on the market, you must build relationships to a brand or a product. From there it’s about using these relationships to gain insights that you can leverage to gain a better understanding of who your client is and what it takes to keep them engaged.

It sounds complicated, and it is, but here’s what it means in practical terms:

We’ve recently begun working with Streamline, an on-demand charter airline that services sales executives and entrepreneurs. We first engaged with Mark Cestari, Managing Director of Streamline, in January of this year. What he had was an idea and some raw resources to make it happen. What he didn’t have was a brand. He needed everything from logo and tagline work to developing the brand through the entire flight experience. He had planes, a name, and an idea: simplify business travel by using satellite airports to create convenient routes between business hubs. As the name suggests, the lynchpin for success was somewhere in the simplification of business travel. There was a story there, but someone needed to tell it. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re crafting a brand around this story, and we’re meeting our client’s needs.

The inaugural plane landed at Hanscom airfield Tuesday morning, one of the two satellite airports it will fly to on its initial flight April 4 (Bedford, MA, to Trenton, NJ). Initial success will be constituted by identifying our core audience and creating relationships that bear fruit, specifically insights on how Streamline can, well, streamline the business travel experience.

It’s not everyday you work on an airline. Even more rare is the opportunity to see it develop from soup to nuts. So what do you think? What is it about business travel that needs to be revisited and what makes this opportunity intriguing to you?