Kaikaris, new CEO of CityBee: on the career turns and bankruptcy of Small Planet Airlines

From doctor to businessman and journalist

K. Kaikaris for education – medical. After the ninth grade, he decided to enter the Vilnius School of Medicine, where he received general and special education, specializing in medical brotherhood. At that time, he already had a plan to study medicine at the Vilnius University Faculty of Medicine. After the first year, K. Kaikaris took a break and took an academic leave for one year and went to the United States, where he studied and tried various auxiliary jobs.

“Then I realized that I wanted to go back to independent Lithuania, I didn’t want to work as a laborer somewhere in the factory, repairing houses, which I also like, but I realized that I want to continue my studies in Lithuania,” he said. remember.

In the early 1990s, as a student, he began working as a medical assistant at the recently opened Baltic and American Clinic. After 7 years, he completed his initial residency at Varėna Hospital. The man recalls dreaming of becoming a surgeon, traumatologist, orthopedist or microsurgeon, but then his plans changed drastically.

“I started to think that I had four years of surgery, then another three years of microsurgery. So I thought that Lithuania has been independent for 7 years, there are so many opportunities around it, so I decided to start my own company,” says K. Kaikaris.

Shortly before 2000, K. Kaikaris founded the Mikrotera company, which was engaged in the sale and maintenance of medical and laboratory equipment, and was the authorized representative of the Japanese company Shimadzu in Lithuania.

“It just came to our knowledge then. 1996 I had started commenting on the Formula 1 race, I thought I wanted to publish the magazine as well. So I started another activity as editor, publisher and writer, since I wrote much of the magazine myself. However, later there were some changes: in Lithuania, one of the first European countries, tobacco advertising was banned.

Since the tobacco manufacturers were one of the biggest sponsors of the F-1 teams, I had a plan to have the magazine sponsored by various tobacco companies as well, but my plan collapsed as soon as the magazine was published. I had to look for other alternative plans, they succeeded, but then everything started to go up on the Internet, online media appeared, magazines. Although there were a lot of F-1 fans at the time, I realized that it would be difficult with a niche magazine, I started to think about other activities, ”says K. Kaikaris.

A change of professional course in IT

The man who came to the Rotary Club in Vilnius Old Town to talk about F-1 met with the then club director and the director of the technology company IBM Lietuva Rimantas Vaitkus. So, a few days later, he found himself in a job interview and started working for IBM Lithuania. At that time, he did not forget the work of a journalist: he published a magazine for about a year and hosted the TV show “Keturi ratai”. After 6.5 years with the company, he received an invitation to become the director of another IT company, Oracle Lietuva, where he spent 5 years.

“After these five years, I calculated that I have been working in the information technology field for ten years. I was fascinated by the opportunity to take a break of more than three months or half a year, which my family and I took advantage of to live in Asia. At that time, my wife and I had two young children: one was one and a half years old and my daughter was 6 years old. “We decided to take a creative vacation,” I added a suitcase of books and set out to live for a month on one island in the Gulf of Thailand, the second month on another, and the third month in Vietnam, “says K. Kaikaris.

Returning after a creative vacation in 2011, he started managing Microsoft Lietuva company. As the interviewee recalls, the company strongly drives employee growth: “In the first year, it is necessary to start planning various scenarios of what will work in three years. The culture of the company is like this: people have to constantly improve if they sit in a position for more than three years, the potential of either the employee or the company is not exploited. In the end, customers don’t get what they could get. “

He returned to Asia for a year.

After just over three years leading Microsoft Lithuania, K. Kaikaris received an offer to return to Asia, only this time to headquarters. He became the director of Microsoft’s Kazakhstan division, which works with large clients. He had to face great challenges on his first day of work.

“I remember one of the biggest challenges: when I arrived in Kazakhstan, a big economic crisis started a week ago, then in 5-6 months. The local tenge currency has been cut in half. This has caused great challenges for our partners, our customers, as all budgets have collapsed. In Kazakhstan, everyone pays in local currency and Microsoft operates in US dollars. The currency difference has created scissors, so there have been very interesting challenges, “says K. Kaikaris.

He spent a year in Kazakhstan with his family, then decided that he wanted to return to Lithuania and try another turning point in his career: aviation. Since 2016 three years before his bankruptcy, he was the director of the charter airline Small Planet Airlines Lietuva. This year, according to the interlocutor, was full of challenges and infinitely exciting.

Small Planet Airlines Bankruptcy Has Learned Big Lessons

“It just came to our attention then. What we are seeing now is that in the event of a pandemic, a major crisis, aviation and tourism are one of the sectors most affected, so any crisis and failure is not easy to deal with. Not surprisingly, more than 100 airlines closed each year before the pandemic.

Sometimes, larger companies closed with very unfavorable and serious consequences, with massive repatriations of both passengers and workers from their destinations to the country of departure. In recent years, there have been unsuccessful examples from several major and well-known airlines such as Monarch and Thomas Cook. With the bankruptcy of these companies, the largest repatriations of people occurred after the Second World War, ”says K. Kaikaris.

Exactly two years have passed since the bankruptcy of Small Planet Airlines (SPA). Speaking of the entire difficult period today, the director of the company admits that the bankruptcy was extremely difficult and painful, although important consequences were avoided.

“If we had continued working, our turnover next year would have been 500 million euros, more than 1,000 employees. In fact, it is not easy, no matter how much we looked for solutions, everyone participated. The whole team tried to find solutions to the problems we faced first in Germany, then they spread throughout the whole group.

We’ve completed the Small Planet Airlines story by meeting and talking with employees about how flour work together again. Relations continued to be good, including many partners. It is our great achievement that there were no major crises or problems afterwards, because next season both passengers and our partners continued to fly, taking and bringing tourists, ”says K. Kaikaris.

The interviewee testifies that he has learned many useful lessons from the failure of a large company: “Every business is a risk, you have to manage it. It is not always easy, sometimes all those risks fall into a glass and not everything is solved every time. The lesson is really huge: I look at financial statements and business plans very differently. I see some things and I can ask some questions, maybe take steps ahead of time not to repeat things that could cause problems. “

K. Kaikaris does not hide that there was a great disappointment in the Lithuanian legal system: “When the crisis began in Germany, the company in this country received approval for restructuring in half a day. If in Germany everything possible was done to help companies cope with difficulties, in Lithuania it seemed that the restructuring was aimed at a longer month of agony, which ended in bankruptcy.

In Lithuania, the laws at that time were such that after the announcement of the restructuring in Lithuania, it was necessary to wait a whole month, to inform all existing and future creditors, partners and suppliers that we were restructuring. Ultimately, it causes some fear, a feeling of uncertainty, a feeling of being left alone. There is no other way out than bankruptcy. Our goal was to break the order so that passengers and partners felt as little as possible ”.

Became a writer

The bankruptcy of SPA was not easy for K. Kaikaris personally, so he decided to take a short break from his career. At first, he says he planned to take a three-month break, but suddenly decided to go on the adventure of another life: write a book.

“When I started writing the book, I saw that it was endlessly fun and exciting. Thus was born my first book, the adventure thriller “There is no place for two.” The action of a fictional story with fictional characters takes place in places I know well: the Gulf of Thailand and Kazakhstan. I felt great pleasure writing.

After publishing the first book, I thought that everything was going to work due to lack of people, communication, adrenaline. Writing a book turned out to be an introverted job for me, of course, very interesting, requiring a lot of discipline, planning, because it is written long enough, ”he says.

However, Kaikaris’ roadmaps were shaken by the COVID-19 crisis that hit the world last spring: “My roadmaps have sunk into a vacuum. Then I remembered writing a short story about the virus 20 years ago. Hence my second book, Rosemary, was born.

After a year and a half hiatus, in charge of the CityBee manager

After a hiatus of more than a year and a half, he became the director of smart mobility services company Citybee in November last year. A few months later, he claims to be in his place.

“It seems like I’ve been working for CityBee for half a year, maybe the whole year. There has been a rapid reciprocal merger, perhaps because I come from aviation, where there are a lot of problems and challenges, everything is on a large scale. team and all activities became own and close immediately. I really don’t feel like I have arrived in a new and unknown place where something is uncomfortable and something that I don’t understand and that takes a long time to understand and understand. Maybe because my experience it’s in the transportation, auto and IT industry, and you can say that CityBee brings it all together under one roof, ”he says.

Mr. Kaikaris does not rule out that one day he will write books again, as he says: when life no longer requires challenges, daily work, then he will fly to Asia and sit down to read another book.