Context
AeroSolution sold light aircraft and aviation parts. The model was sourcing: find a plane somewhere in the world, broker the sale, do it again.
Deals closed. But every deal cost a lot of work and returned very little, and most of the effort was going into small private suppliers and one-off transactions that never justified themselves.
Diagnosis
The audit answered one question, where does the money actually come from?
Small private suppliers produced most of the work and least of the profit. The real value sat in the technical and compliance work around an aircraft, not in the transaction. They were doing the hard part and charging for the easy part.
That changed who the customer was. A private buyer wants a plane. A conglomerate that acquires aircraft regularly wants somebody who can take that aircraft, restore it, run the heavy maintenance, produce the documentation, get it compliant, prepare it for sale, and find technicians for it afterwards.
The second customer is harder to win and worth an order of magnitude more.
Decisions
- Repositioned from dealer to full-cycle provider: restoration, heavy maintenance, documentation, compliance, sale prep, post-sale support
- Walked away from small private suppliers toward conglomerates, accepting a slower cycle for much better economics
- Built the product line out of capability they already had, not services they would have to learn
- Stayed out of routine ongoing maintenance and scoped the offer to major work
Results
Three global partnerships: Czech conglomerate Omnipol, a Jordanian group, and a Chinese partner. All three were on a horizon of up to ten years.
Omnipol shows how the model works. When they acquire an aircraft or aviation equipment, they can route it to AeroSolution for repair, preparation, and compliance. That’s a flow, not a sale. The client’s own conservative, forward-looking estimate put one partnership like that at a minimum of around $1 million a year; it was potential, not realised revenue.
The company kept going that way afterwards. AeroSolution now sits inside the Aviation Technologies Holding group alongside Technometra Český Brod and Blanik Aircraft CZ: about $6.9 million of revenue in 2019, more than $23 million invested in equipment, around 160 staff.
It stopped sourcing other people’s aircraft. It now designs and builds its own unmanned systems across production sites in Prague and Ústí nad Orlicí, and sells them into civil and defence markets alike: long-endurance surveillance platforms, a mission computer that lets one operator run a fleet, and mine detection systems for finding buried explosives.
The argument was that the value sat in the technical work rather than in the transaction. That became the whole business, and the business is a good deal larger than the one that used to broker aeroplanes.