Zach Varwig
Project Manager
Faith Group LLC
AGE: 27
- Alma Mater: Miami University
- What is your dream job? Spaceship Captain
- Who has impacted your career the most? My mother
- If I could go anywhere, it would be: Another planet that is habitable to human life
- If I could have dinner with anyone living or dead: Barack Obama
- Favorite airport restaurant/eatery: Market Street Grill - SLC
For Zach Varwig, aviation isn’t so much of a career as it is a family affair.
As the son of the owners of Faith Group LLC, Varwig said he remembers attending industry shows as a child, where they would mix work trips with vacation.
“I always joke that I’ve been doing this a really long time,” he said. “I Can remember going to shows like ACI when I was 10 years old.”
Varwig started as an intern with Faith Group in 2011, but he didn’t initially want to get into the aviation industry. He studied finance at Miami University and looked at a career in business consulting or finance.
However, seeing the opportunity the job presented, Varwig decided to stay on after attending a conference.
“One of the things that’s interesting in the aviation space is how visible some of the changes and updates that we do can be,” he said. “Not only can you use the impact when designing a new system or working on a new terminal project…but you can see the impact for airports all over the U.S.
Varwig is noted in his nomination for Top 40 Under 40 for his ability to go beyond “the bits and bytes of technology” and into the pragmatic application of technology architecture into the business process. He’s noted as someone who looks beyond the novel approaches to technology and engages with clients in a manner to provide the correct solution that fits an airport’s needs.
Varwig said he would like to see airports take more risks in the technology and innovation standpoint in the future, with rapid adoption and trying new things within the airport industry. Very few industry leaders come from the technology or IT space, he said, which might cause issues attracting customers to air travel.
“There are very few industry leaders, very few CEOs of airports who actually came out of the technology or IT space. Many are either Ops focused or finance focused or airline relations,” he said. “I fear one of the biggest things happening is you’re seeing a lot of industries kind of outpace aviation from a technology advancement standpoint. That can lead to small changes like people not necessarily wanting to fly or fearing to fly because of the long wait times or lack of passenger processing services or customer services.”
