Era of the Seven-League Sell

One of the 20th century's greatest romances is between the businessman and the jet. Of 'the passengers on U.S. domestic flights, a remarkable 86% are businessmen. Their rush to take advantage of the jet's speed and convenience has not only helped to hike airline bookings and earnings (trunkline profits so far in 1964 are up 94% to $158 million), but is also having profound effects on the very methods of doing business. "I can reach our principal distributors in Phoenix, Denver, Salt Lake or Spokane in two hours," says Los Angeles' Thomas A. Welch, western regional sales manager for Carrier Corp. "What's happened is nothing less than a revolution."

Here Comes the Boss. Everyone from chief executive to chief clerk seems to be flying for the company, but no one has felt the revolution's effect quicker than salesmen. Once they plodded from stop to stop with a sample case jammed into a Pullman berth; today they jet across greatly expanded territories while their sample cases ride in the luggage compartment as air freight rather than as expensive excess baggage. In the era of the seven-league sell, salesmen also have to be more alert. Sales managers jet around, too, and more often than not they skim off big and previously inaccessible customers for the home-office account. Then there are the more frequent visits from the top. "Any time the boss is in an area," says Earl C. Janson, manufacturing director of Beckman Instruments, "you're bound to increase the energy level."

With jets, bosses move about more because they can fly out and back fast enough to prevent piled-up paperwork. "We now have a tendency to make a trip for a two-day meeting that we would have put off before," says Lear Siegler Vice President John J. Burke. At Bell & Howell, six ranking officers will use the ordinarily dead week after Christmas for a jet swing to pep meetings in Cleveland, New York and Los Angeles, returning to Chicago in time for New Year's with their families. Many travelers never glimpse the city in which they have been set down, holding their meetings either in airport conference rooms or in the motels that ring every large terminal.

The jet trend brings lower hotel bills as well as higher efficiency. Bankers and buyers travel to New York's money and merchandise markets more often, but for shorter lengths of time. The length of occupancies in Manhattan hotels has dropped from 3 clays to 2.2 clays per guest with the advent of the jets. "We go to New York at the drop of a hat," says Vice President Brown Meggs of Hollywood-based Capitol Records. "The jet has made the whole thing much more casual."

As Easy as Washington. It is also causing significant changes in corporate procedure. Lear Siegler now supervises eleven divisions with four corporate officers, who spend half their time traveling. International Harvester has disposed of five company planes, since commercial jets can do the job just as well. Company travel budgets have risen sharply: the Garrett Corp. of Los Angeles spends $1,500,000 a year v. $500,000 ten years ago.

Many companies now locate their plants as close as possible to airports, and an executive hunting for a home tends to keep in mind how many min utes he will have to allow before flight time. And while some large corporations are closing out now unnecessary branch offices because of the jet's ability to get their men to the territory fast, others are expanding. When small Technical Operations Inc. of Burlington, Mass., acquired a $6,000,000 company in San Carlos, Calif., jet speed was a definite consideration in the deal. "If we couldn't get there readily," says Dr. Marvin G. Schorr, Techops' president, "we wouldn't have got involved. But it's as easy to do business there now as in Washington."

The once heroic 100,000-mile-a-year traveler has been superseded by the 250,000-mile man; both Kaiser Industries President Edgar Kaiser and Loew's Hotel President Preston R. Tisch flew that far last year. Jets also make it possible for prosperous executives to live in one climate and relax in another. Pan Am has a regular clientele of Manhattan businessmen who have bought winter homes in Nassau, jet from snow to sun weekends on an easy 2-hr. 50-min. flight.

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