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Jason Zilberbrand is the President of VREF Aircraft Value Reference & Appraisal Services. He is an Accredited Senior Aircraft Appraiser with the American Society of Appraisers (ASA), and an Accredited Member of the Appraisers National Association (ANA), and he is also an Accredited Member of the International Society of Appraisers (ISA), Expert Witness, broker, inventorying dealer, acquisition agent, aircraft owner, aircraft operator, contract negotiator, consultant, teacher, conference speaker, and author.

Jason spent over 15 years as an inventory aircraft dealer with a $300-million-dollar credit facility, and over $4.5 billion in completed aircraft transactions.

Most passionate about

• I help buyers and sellers of airplanes, ranging from small little piston aircraft like Cessnas to commercial aircraft, like you would fly on an airline.
• Most of my clients are either financial institutions that provide loans for this type of equipment or individual buyers of these aircraft who are looking to deal with some sort of estate planning or refinancing.
• My firm is the largest aircraft appraisal firm in the world. We do a couple thousand desktop appraisals a year. If you're familiar with Kelley Blue Book for cars, we manage a similar software platform for aircraft values.

Jason\\u2019s career and story

• I started off in a family business: an aviation insurance company. So, right out of college, I worked for the family business. I did that for a decade. It was all business jets.
• I cut my teeth in the industry, working with what are today considered the classic business jets. These were airplanes that were used by Fortune 500 companies and high-net-worth individuals. They were flying them globally. My father's company provided coverage for maintenance.
• I started getting requests from clients to assist them in buying airplanes. That was really when the light bulb started to go off that there were things that I could do in aviation that weren't necessarily tied to the family's business.
• I left the insurance company and started an inventory dealership\\u2014like a car dealership, except we had planes and cars. I did that full-time through 2013. When the recession hit in 2008, I started to appraise more airplanes. I think it just was a natural progression of my career.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• Some of the tricks that I use are to try and create obtainable goals and set those goals every day so that eventually I hit the big goal, but I\\u2019m not taking on such a massive project.
• One of the ways to do that is to look inward and see what your strengths are, then try and bring in other people who can bridge the gap of your weaknesses.
• You have to trust those whom you delegate work to, which is another big challenge for entrepreneurs. So, you have to trust the people whom you hire; otherwise, don't hire them.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• I think that one of the biggest failures that anybody can have is assuming that the other person or the customer sees things from your perspective.
• When you're young, or at least when I was young, I tended to explode on people who were looking for help and who might not have done it in such a respectful way.
• So, my biggest failure, unfortunately, was burning bridges with some potentially really important customers because I didn't care to engage with them the way that they wanted to engage with me.

Biggest success with customers

• My base success, I think, comes with the new business, and that is trusting the fact that the customer base would be able to adapt to change.
• My biggest success today is asking permission before I go down a path, including when it\\u2019s personal, with my wife. I talk..."