Jetrader - Summer 2017 - 23

the room with the smart guys, and I listen
a lot. When somebody says something, I
take it in and try to compute what they're
trying to say. If you give me a pedestal, I'll talk more than I listen, but when
I'm not on the pedestal, I'll just sit and
listen and observe. By doing so and surrounding myself with the best and brightest people, we've grown from me coming
up with the idea and working in my master
bedroom to over 600 people.

What were the initial goals
for that company?
It was post-9/11, so there were certain
inefficiencies in the market, and there
were so many companies that had legacy
issues that were accelerated by virtue of
the recession caused by 9/11. My thought
was that nobody would be paying attention to me. That's essentially what happened. The first year there were six of us
and we did $7.5 million (USD) in revenue;
we were really proud of that. The next
year we did $20 million. The next year we
did $50, then $75, then $100 million. It
kept growing, and 2006 is probably when
we came on the radar. We started to get
approached by some of the big leasing
companies about acquiring us and pursuing
the cradle-to-grave strategy. Ultimately,
we chose a transaction that was offered
to us by - at the time, Merrill Lynch -
which allowed me to stay in control of
my company but gave me access to the
capital I needed to grow while they took
a 49-percent position. For the first year, it
was perfect, and then at the end of 2008,
a little over a year after we closed our
transaction, the world imploded.

How did that economic
downturn shape the company?
There are always opportunities to grow
in a financial downturn. For a company
like us, we understand how to turn over
rocks and find good deals, and that's
essentially what we did. If I learned
anything from the downturn of 2009
and the one prior to that in 2002-2005,
it was that the best time to grow and
find value is during a down cycle. You

can achieve acquisitions or grow at a very
low cost, and the market will come back
at some point. If you run a business that
is sound, it will grow. Ultimately, that's
what happened.

Given the depth and breadth of
GA Telesis' current offerings,
do you anticipate expanding
into new service areas in
the near future?
The greatest thing about our industry is
that there are so many facets of services.
We're not looking to be on the airline side
of it, obviously. We don't want to fly the
airplanes, or move the passengers or the
packages; we'll let the experts do that.
But we do want to provide a multitude
of offerings to the same customer. So,
whether that is more services or more
products, we will continue to adapt
and expand.
There are an infinite amount of opportunities out there, and what has been
core to us is being conservative in our
decision making and not taking unnecessary risks; we don't ever bet the company
on any one deal or any one business. We
have certainly made mistakes, and we've
paid dearly, but the greatest thing about
those mistakes is that none of them took
the company down.

It seems like that
conservative approach is
fairly common in aviation.
It is and it isn't. We've lost three competitors this year that perhaps weren't as
conservative as maybe they should have
been. The numbers in our industry are
big. You can get upside down very quickly,
and if you make the wrong decisions it's
hard to recover. We prided ourselves in
always trying to do things just a little
differently and see if the market would
adapt to how we do things as opposed
to just doing what the old school has
always done.
So we changed our motto to "Intelligently
Defining Aviation," because we found
ourselves doing things and others were
following. That change in thinking came

with a tremendous amount of responsibility
because if you're going to lead, you need
to do so carefully.

Five years into the GAIC
[GA Innovation China]
partnership between
GA Telesis and Air China,
which established the first
end-of-life solutions company
in mainland China, how have
you seen that relationship and
project evolve?
Air China has been an unbelievable
partner. They are an incredibly innovative airline, and they had the foresight to
look at the market and say "We like this
aftermarket, and we need to be a part of
it," because China is the biggest market
in the world, or is becoming the biggest
market in the world. If we don't embrace
what's happening in the aftermarket, not
only by virtue of our own fleet and our
own business, but the entire market in
China and in Asia and the rest of the world
for that matter, then we're going to get
left behind."
What we have been doing there is no
different from what we do here, though.
We've been working with the CAAC [Civil
Aviation Administration of China] to
define how the aftermarket should work.
And we knew we wouldn't be the only
ones there, so it's not just about us. We
were the first, but we're not the only ones
in that market anymore. We worked in
the early days with the CAAC and said
"Here's how it should look. We're not telling you how to do things, but this is a
mature business in the U.S. and it's a
mature business in Europe, but it's not
a mature business in China. Here are our
ideas. What can you add to make that
work for China?"
We worked very closely with them and
came up with a way to allow a new sort of
business to operate in a country that has
never operated in that manner before. It
has been incredibly successful, and we're
going to do some pretty exciting things in
the second quarter with that business that
we hope to announce.
Jetrader * Summer 2017 23

Jetrader - Summer 2017

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