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Aero Industries Diversifies Customer Base to Reach into New Markets and Grow Overseas
About Aero Industries Inc.
Originally founded in 1979 to supply metals to the aerospace industry, Aero Industries today sources and distributes specialty metals, raw materials and manufactured parts to a broad array of markets. The company still serves aerospace, as well as medical, energy, military, marine and commercial customers with such marquis names as Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Rockwell and United Space Alliance, to name a few. Aero Industries’ products can end up in such diverse places as part of the landing gear for military aircraft to a new car’s windshield frame to inside the human body as a titanium-based hip replacement.
The small, certified woman-owned business has seven employees at its headquarters in Orlando, Florida. Aero Industries also holds the distinction of being named a “Procurement Center for Excellence” by the U.S. Department of Defense.
Challenge: Finding new sources of business as core customer base shrinks
When Nancy Simmons purchased Aero Industries in 2004, she inherited an enterprise where 85 percent of its customers serviced the US Department of Defense, in particular, the U.S. space program. Ms. Simmons recognized the risk in depending too much on any single industry. That fear quickly became a reality in 2006, when the U.S. announced it would end the space shuttle program. Indeed, one of her biggest customers was NASA and its suppliers, providing specialty materials to manufacture such items as the tiles on the shuttles. Then, the second shoe dropped, when the overall economy entered a recession.
Unfortunately, Aero Industries was not in position to easily replace lost business and had to lay off staff. At the time the company relied purely on word-of-mouth for sales.
Most commonly a buyer would be transferred multiple times in his career, bringing Aero Industries with him from post to post. There was very little effort made in promoting the company that there wasn’t even a sign on the building. “We were the best kept secret,” Ms. Simmons said. “People fell upon us accidently.”
Solution: Tapping the Internet to go global - find new customers overseas and break into new industries
That was the situation when Ms. Simmons fielded a cold call from a Thomas Industrial Network sales rep a couple of years ago. Ms. Simmons welcomed the opportunity to learn how the Internet could enable her diversification strategy and build the business. Aero Industries’ prior owner had maintained only a rudimentary corporate website, fielding a handful of inadvertent hits per month. “He feared the advent of the Internet was going to destroy Aero Industries,” Ms. Simmons said. “He didn’t understand that it is the way of the future, a powerful engine that would help build our business.”
Ms. Simmons began by creating a presence on ThomasNet.com, the Internet’s pre-eminent product sourcing and supplier discovery and selection platform. The engineers and purchasing agents who comprise Aero Industries’ customer base were already frequent users of ThomasNet.com, seeking specific, technical products and capabilities. Suddenly, the volume of visitors to Aero’s website and qualified requests for information skyrocketed. “Technical buyers found us at ThomasNet.com,” she added. “Ninety percent of professionals in our business say to check ThomasNet first for whatever you need.”
With the new traffic, Ms. Simmons quickly recognized it was time to improve the corporate website to meet her prospective customers’ needs. She re-engaged Thomas last year, using their Navigator Platform. Together they rebuilt the Aero Industries’ website from the buyer’s point of view, anticipating what detail would be needed in order to place an RFP or make a purchase.
“It’s not enough to show what materials we can source. We need to provide the specs that a buyer would use to move forward. Engineers search our website with their specifications to see what pops up. Thomas showed us how to embed every spec we could think of to assure that we’ve got whatever our customers need!” Ms. Simmons said.
It also helps that the content for the website contains rich product and service data written for engineers. That helps propel Aero Industries to the top of search engine results. Visitors are greeted with a variety of specialty metals that Aero Industries distributes, from super alloys and stainless steel to titanium and tool metals. The website also highlights that the company can source and distribute components, plastics and rubber items that are just as important for non-aerospace industries, like automotive and medical. That specificity attracts qualified leads from around the world to Aero’s site.
Results: Creating an export business from scratch, and building customer diversity
In the year since upgrading its website and expanding its presence at ThomasNet.com, Aero Industries has created an export business where none had existed before, which now represents 20 percent of its bottom line. Furthermore, the company has added enough new customers from non-aerospace industries that its Defense Department-related business now represents about 65 percent of revenue, easing the risk Ms. Simmons had recognized earlier. She credits the savvy use of the Internet that Thomas provided, delivering an average of eight new customer inquiries a day. Examples of new customers achieved through the website include:
A $200,000 order for aerospace grade aluminum for Finmeccanica, one of Europe’s largest aircraft manufacturers, based in Italy;
A series of new business opportunities supplying many governments as they refurbish used U.S. military aircraft. That business is so lucrative that Ms. Simmons is in the process of opening a new office overseas.
New export customers in emerging markets like Brazil, China and India;
Unique needs, like sourcing hard-to-find parts for a circa 1938 U.S. Forest Service airplane that were no longer manufactured commercially;
A former UK-based customer was searching for a rare metal and found the Aero Industries website, allowing the two to re-engage.
“Thomas helped us to be proactive whereas before we were reactive,” Ms. Simmons said. “They’ve helped us evolve into a new organization with a diversified, global customer base and more growth potential than ever before.”
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