Creating a sales job in the aviation industry

Starting at the end of my junior year of high school, through the summer in between my freshman year and sophomore year of college, I worked at a company called Sky Quest. Sky Quest is an aircraft charter, maintenance, and management company that takes care of roughly 25 private jets. I worked full time at Sky Quest for the majority of these years, and learned a lot about the aviation industry. I was part of the maintenance department and was first tasked with taking all of the aircraft parts that we owned and sorting and inventorying them. Eventually, I would be involved in the sales end and would end up creating a new end of the company with one of the guys I worked with. We would buy various large aircraft parts inventories and then sort through them and either sell them to our fleet of aircraft or to other aircraft charter companies. I would go through the list of parts and determine the value of each one in it’s current state, and then help compile an offer to the company selling the inventory. Once we reached an agreement, I would go through to ensure everything was properly accounted for. After that, I would look at what parts our fleet was going through the most, and make sure that we held on to those. I would also hear through various calls with overhaul shops what parts were selling quickly and were in the highest demand. I would then list those parts on a platform called partsbase. A company would often reach out to us and ask for a quote on a part, and I would look around at our competitors and create a price based off of that. When we were not flexible on our price, we would tell our customers how we could ensure the parts came with an AE8130, which is a certificate that says a part can be put on a plane legally. So much of this selling process was B2B and taught me so much about B2B sales and how to create a small business with corporate entrepreneurship.