David Colindres is the President of the San Marino Aircraft Registry “SMAR” an organization that has been remarkably successful over the past decade. David runs a tight ship in all aspects of operations, boasting excellence in product and service quality and a finely tuned organization. The registry capitalizes on its skilled human resources department and enjoys having the finest service and end-to-end customer experience in its industry.
David believes that if the registry wants to be fast on its feet, transform customer experiences, and continuously outpace competitors, it needs to create a truly agile enterprise.
Thus, building an agile enterprise means finding the right balance between standardizing operations and pursuing (sometimes risky) innovations. We are running an aircraft registry; you would want to make sure that safety and service were of consistently high quality and that our team approach was always appealing. At the same time, we need to innovate, adapt to new international standards and industry best practices. If you pay insufficient attention to operations, quality slides and costs rise, harming our operators and the business.
SMAR Angels – The Agile Leadership Team
The agile leadership team consists of the Operations, Legal, Finance, and the State Safety programme departments, —the individuals most critical to the components of our operating system. They are called the SMAR Angels and have a combination of four traits and competencies that emerged as key to their success: courage, resilience, lateral thinking and managing ambiguity.
Mr. Colindres has always given the opportunity to women to take leadership, since he believes that women have a myriad of polished abilities to be successful and contribute to the aviation sector. He says, “It has always been a matter of great pride to me that my female colleagues in the Registry rise to any challenge, learning and improving through times of uncertainty. These women are the vital element of the Registry model and the basis of our customer service approach. I am very pleased that there are some senior women in the Registry, and I hope this trend continues. Equally, our duty is to help the next generation of women succeed and this is an area where we are making particularly good progress.”
These women are highly professional and have the ability to draw together all the strands in the Registry that make a great experience to their clients. They are frontrunners in the management and operation, who define success as meeting a combination of the CAA obligations and the Registry goals. Committed to working with the team in developing, maintaining, and continuously improving strategies and processes to ensure civil aviation activities achieve the highest level of performance, whilst meeting both national and international standards. Helping to turn the vision of the leaders into working reality.
The Operations Department
Fostering strong relationships with clients is not a new trend; it’s a vital component of business success. But in the last few years, we’ve seen a heightened need to connect more closely with both existing and potential clients. Consequently, at the heart of the aircraft registry operations is a large group of women highly skilled and knowledgeable on client needs and regulatory requirements.
They strive to be at the forefront of aviation safety regulation whilst delivering excellent customer service. They constantly seek out new opportunities for improvement and continually enhance our services to satisfy the needs of the aviation community. They are vested with the responsibility of ensuring a memorable experience from day of engagement.
These women have the ability to listen with attention, patiently gather all the facts to understand the issue or concern and position themselves to resolve situations quickly, by delivering solutions perfectly suited to each client. They maintain a professional but friendly attitude in every dialogue, making the interactions non-conventional.
The customer service and support they provide excels during initial registration and most importantly while the aircraft remain on the registry. On a daily or weekly basis operators and aircraft owners must be served with professionalism and diligently. Part of these women’s tasks is to ensure that ongoing surveillance is carried out by the technical personnel responsible, as appropriate, in all facets after certification within the established deadlines. They are responsible for the regular planning and coordination of all ongoing safety oversight. The Registry must be satisfied that: aircraft are compliant the rules and policies; their commercial operators are competent and compliant; flight crews and aircraft maintenance engineers are fit and competent; and that general aviation activities meet required international safety standards. To achieve these essential aspects of the mandate, they have gained the technical knowledge, experience, and competence to implement and run an effective data base and filing system, which monitors and records that aircraft operation-related activities are performed in a timely efficient and safety compliant manner.
The SMAR Angels have been playing a significant role in the Registry, looking at aviation with a different set of eyes and a different mindset for innovation, improving profitability and performance. They possess a high degree of integrity, are tactful, have a good understanding of human nature, and possess the ability to solve problems in due time.
The Legal Department
In some circumstances lawyers are required to go beyond simply providing expert legal analysis or even wise counseling about what is right. In-house legal departments, who are often charged with making decisions on a range of issues from strategic decisions about how to deal with wide spectrum of international clients that the registry host.
The Head of Legal role inside the Registry has significantly grown in importance because the health of the registry requires that it navigate complex and fast-changing international and national law, regulation, litigation, public policy, and politics.
The role has broad scope—beyond law—that includes ethics, risk, governance, and compliance. The Head of Legal is a core member of top management, participating in decisions and actions about not just risks but also innovation and opportunities, not just law but also business, not just public policy but also geopolitics.
The Financial Department
David’s financial officers quickly became one of the most active members of the agile leadership team. They worked closely with David to focus on working-session to create profitable business, devise a better business process that were inconsistent with the leadership manifesto.
They began revamping the planning, budgeting, and reviewing process—first for registry and then for other parts of the business that were tackling innovation programs. They reset corporate objectives to reflect the new priorities. Created new financial reports for the strategic agile initiative. They also commissioned agile teams to develop planning and budgeting processes similar to those used by venture capital firms with start-ups.
Today, The San Marino CAA and its Aircraft Registry are a self-financed and sustained organizations. The Board sets its terms of reference for financial policy. The aim of its funding policy is to ensure they are not constrained by lack of funds, allowing them to meet operational requirements, and are not unreasonably or imprudently bound by restrictive covenants or liquidity risks. Working within the constraints of the public sector, they aim to ensure that such financial resources are used to fund aviation safety oversight functions, meet its national and international obligations, re-invest in the aviation sector and infrastructure to ensure better implementation of ICAO Standards, as well as contributing to their country’s economic development.
Is fundamentally important that through our client feedback loops the scheme of fees are always finely tuned, since we are funded by those we regulate.
The State Safety Programme Department
Implementing and monitoring a proper management of civil aviation safety is one of the major responsibilities and commitments of San Marino. At the top of the management is a highly experienced aviation woman, specialized in areas that include safety at State level, safety management systems, safety improvement, human factors, and safety planning. She has established mechanisms necessary for aviation safety, ranging from the foundation of a State Safety Program to the effective monitoring of its oversight functions, together with promoting safety with operators and service providers thereby managing their safety risks. In April 2021, she organised the first online San Marino Safety Conference, to promote the understanding of safety priorities and to open discussions among the Operators.
The Registry has tailored its strategies to meet the safety requirements and shape its services to offer the right support to their customers. This has been achieved by enabling a large pool of qualified inspectors composed of both men and women, who possess high safety standards to perform inspections in convenient, flexible locations world-wide, benefiting from internationally endorsed approaches to safety tools and promoting a strong safety culture of professional accountability.
As part of the same strategy to expand world-wide presence, from the Northeast coast of Sardegna, extended support is also provided to clients at our office located in Eccelsa Aviation, a dedicated private and business aviation terminal at Olbia Airport. The Registry and its women are always determined to enhance client relations and provide support to its clients.
The Registry is passionate about turning customers into advocates. It strongly believes when customer service is excellent, your clientele can become your biggest supporters. It operates in a business-like style, where clients always come first and these women are blazing a trail for others to follow, with innovative solutions for customer service.
SMAR continues to take the lead in increasing women’s presence in their organisation by offering barrierless career opportunities to women with interest in aviation and to contribute to continued growth in success.
Reach out to this team of women to experience their passion for excellence.