ORLANDO — A visit to www.bbaaviation.com reveals that BBA Aviation, headquartered in London, is a diversified aviation company. Included in its portfolio are the Signature Flight Support chain; ASIG, a global airline refueling and support company; Dallas Airmotive, a major repair and overhaul company; and, APPH Group, which specializes in landing gear and hydraulics. For Bruce Van Allen, group marketing director, the task at hand is to tie the businesses together, globally. At a time when companies are looking to streamline, cross utilize, find efficiencies ... there’s a reason for building on a customer base that has a need for the products and services of a conglomerate like BBA. The question is, how does the company add value to the customers while being able to tap into all potential service opportunities for which they can pay? And there’s the challenge of expansion into new markets, which may bring the opportunity for new alliances.
Van Allen is the former president of Signature Flight Support, based in Orlando, and has some 35 years in the industry. During the recent National Business Aviation Association convention, he sat with AIRPORT BUSINESS to discuss business strategies in today’s marketplace. Following are edited excerpts ...
AIRPORT BUSINESS: Is it safe to say that in your new role, your challenge is to cross-strategize between the different companies under the BBA Aviation umbrella?
Van Allen: That’s exactly what I do. At the end of the day, in the operating businesses you have sales and marketing people working for Signature and Dallas Airmotive and the other businesses, and they linearly attack the market to sell their products.
We can identify — which is not difficult to do — when we have a customer that’s shared between one or more of the companies. Do some internal research, and essentially just ask all the businesses to give me, by order of revenue if you choose, your top 100 customers. Lay those things together and, lo and behold, you can have quite a crossover. Sometimes two, three, or four of our businesses touch these customers; maybe not at the same frequency or the same level.
You then begin to ask yourself two questions. One, from the standpoint of how you appear as BBA Aviation, does the left hand know what the right hand is doing? Plus, the idea that anything that’s in between that could be perceived as a cross-sales, we want to maximize the benefit from a net gain. If there’s an in between area of helping set the value, I can facilitate it and help.
AB: It’s a matter of building on synergies?
Van Allen: The goal is, is there somebody out there watching those opportunities, or trying to do a better job of watching those opportunities? And then, perhaps brokering them or suggesting them … that we leverage our activities between these companies for the net gain of both the customer and us.
Can we leverage or stimulate more sales by becoming more creative in how we interact with those customers? A natural one would be, can you use your fuel to energize or promote more engine activity?
It’s the same end-user customer base; certainly not on the same frequency of activity.
With our Signature brand we see many of these customers daily; many are based tenants. So they buy fuel, hangarage, and a variety of other things. If you cross over to our engine overhaul business, essentially 80 percent of all the engines hanging on these business aircraft flying today we are authorized to work on and it stands to reason that through some kind of loyalty program or incentive program that we can drive work into the engine business, or vice versa.
The same thing happens between our engine overhaul business and our aftermarket business — parts, components, things that have a commonality with customers and engines we work on. We can develop those as well.
It even works, believe it or not, between something like our commercial business, ASIG, and Signature. Those may be more operational kinds of synergies, but even though Signature is the general aviation brand they do some commercial activity. And ASIG, our commercial brand, in certain markets they actually are the general aviation end of it.
AB: How does the new Signature competitive pricing strategy affect what you’re trying to do?
Van Allen: I think it potentially enhances it because of the ability to advance the BBA Aviation brand. So by virtue of Signature taking a position that they’re going to be more price competitive, it should make us all the more attractive to have added services. They are in fact capturing market share and new customers.
Perhaps there’s an opportunity to work out a longer term deal with a fleet operator, for instance. Signature could target a fleet operator; Dallas Airmotive could target a fleet operator.
I think Signature being more price competitive is just better all the way around for perception, image of what we’re trying to do, and making anything else we’re trying to sell easier.
AB: Looking globally, how do you see expanding into new markets?
Van Allen: We service the imbedded fleet, the aircraft that are out there flying today. We watch the OEMs very closely; they are going through the same things that we are but we’re apt to come out of it first. When the planes begin to fly more, we should see it.
What we were seeing before this recession and expect to see after it subsides is a continuation of further delivery of business aviation as it propagates throughout the rest of the world. As those planes go out to the various countries, Signature and the other operating businesses will be looking for those opportunities to be in the right place at the right time.
So we can capture that through either direct action or by partnering with others, which might make sense.
The reality is, to say I’m going to drop an FBO in some country that has deliveries of business jets isn’t going to happen. That’s not going to drive an FBO, or the engine business, or an MRO shop, in and of itself. However, the model becomes more of cross-symmetry; perhaps we need to do other things or perhaps we need to work with others and share in more of a mall-type concept. You’ve actually seen us do this in a smaller version with our relationship with General Dynamics and Hawker Beechcraft, where you see a location with a Signature branded FBO and a Hawker Beechcraft service center.
Likewise, those types of relationships or alliances can work internationally. We want to be a Signature global FBO network, and the service elements can follow that as well.
Where will these aircraft be based and how do we get there? Now, there are a number of international operators who are there; do we do it through association, direct acquisition, maybe a franchising scheme? There may be another way to do it, but we want to get our brand out there and to be open-minded to a variety of approaches.
AB: So, we don’t have to own it all, do it all?
Van Allen: No. Look at us at Hong Kong where we’re a minority partner. We’re a minority partner in Brazil. I think the general sense of it is, on the surface side of it an alliance with a quality operator that may exist in the country is probably the smartest way to go.
Also, there are certain countries where there are regulations that dictate the amount of ownership.
AB: The first step, then, is to grow the business with the customers that we know?
Van Allen: Exactly; grow and improve our relationship with our existing customer base. Value add and try to put more through the same distribution network. Improve that; fortify it; try and get as much as you can through it; and be flexible.
