Flightdocs Enterprise: End-to-End Aviation Management Platform
Download PDFOverview
Flightdocs, a maintenance tracking SaaS company headquartered in Fort Myers, FL, faced a pivotal decision. Would the company maintain its direction as a single-operator focused maintenance tracking solution limiting growth opportunities, or, would it make significant investments in re-platforming its product offering to support large fleets? The decision to do so would require building a robust technical architecture and software product as well as adding enterprise functionality to support compliance for inventory management, work order management, purchasing, and a host of third-party integrations. Flightdocs owner Rick Heine has never been one to back down from a challenge. Upon selecting the team at MadeLabs, we architected and built Flightdocs Enterprise, which has grown revenue by 40% year over year for four straight years.
About Flightdocs
Flightdocs, Inc., headquartered in Estero, FL, was a premier Software-as-a-service aircraft maintenance tracking and inventory management platform before being acquired by ATP (now rebranded as Veryon).
Outcomes Snapshot:
- $1M sales in the first 30 days after initial launch
- 40% year-over-year growth for the four straight years
- Eventual outside investment by Argentum Group
- Eventual acquisition by ATP (now Veryon)
- Satisfied customers, owners, and partners involved
The Challenge
Flightdocs needed to service existing customers on the current platform and continue to land new sales while designing and building for the future with a wholly new platform: Flightdocs Enterprise. The new platform needed to provide for the robust needs of enterprise companies with fleets of aircraft, while not alienating existing and future single- operator aircraft owner-operators. Striking this balance between increased business complexity and user-friendliness is key in almost every industry, but especially in aviation. Additionally, Flightdocs Enterprise was built cloud-first within AWS which was both a new approach for Flightdocs and much of the general aviation industry
The Solution
The MadeLabs team, including executive leadership, managed all technical aspects of designing and building a modern, scalable, and marketable aviation platform with the strong collaboration of owner Rick Heine and head of operations Greg Heine.
Flightdocs Enterprise was a multi-year effort, but the initial release including the base features of maintenance tracking, inventory management, purchasing, and work order management was released in only nine months and netted new business of over $1M in the first 30 days of launch. Flightdocs leadership knew their market and the pent up demand for such an all- encompassing solution and simply needed the right partners to guide and build their vision. After the success of an initial launch, existing customers were migrated, new sales were made with fleets of ever-increasing size, and demand for a mobile application was established. Growth continued not only through direct sales but also through partner integrations that MadeLabs helped establish with other significant aviation software companies including Aviall, Bart, PFM, FOSS, and Salesforce.
Conclusion
Hearing that you may need to “re-platform” can be hard advice to swallow. Flightdocs believed strongly in their ability to get ahead of the competition, and then measure their product against what they believed it could be instead of what the competition offered. Their company strategy and conviction to reinvest in their product combined with MadeLabs passion for executing with the business provided a powerful combination to make an amazing product.