In a recent exclusive interview with Sean Bradford, Capilaux explores Sean’s recent successes and reveals his exciting plans for 2020.
Sean Bradford is the Commercial Director at Specialist Aviation Spares and over the last four years has seen a huge transformation in the businesses spares and distribution offering.
Interviewer: Sean, tell us exactly what Specialist Aviation Spares does?
Sean: We are a major stockist and distributor rotable, consumable and GSE parts throughout EMEA, Russia, CIS and the USA and we can carry 100,000 line items in stock at any time.
Interviewer: That’s a lot more than we expected! What makes you stand out from the other businesses doing the same thing?
Sean: Good point, It is a competitive market. We can make our products available to dispatch within ten minutes of an order being raised: With an expert team, we have the knowledge to offer not only the most common parts but ones that are more difficult to locate.
Interviewer: What aircraft types do you tend to get involved in?
Sean: Traditionally, the business was one of the largest parts suppliers (outside the OEM’s) for the BAE146/RJ offering parts support for spares and PBH agree-ments. For the last couple of years, we have also been building a strong stock for the Airbus A320, the B737 and Embraer 170/190 with some great success.
Interviewer: Since your promotion to Commercial Director in 2018 you’ve recently been recruiting in the business development team and you had some very specific require-ments, making it harder for the high-street recruiter to help. Why was that?
Sean: With the team we’re building here, we really value aviation parts expertise along with ambition and tenacity as we know this will, in-turn, deliver the right service to our customers. Recently when adding to the team, we wanted to make sure we hired those who brought that experience to the table. We decided once the solid foundations and the expertise is in place at ground level, the next step will be bringing the next generation of talent up through the business and training them from our local community.
Interviewer: Who did you select as your new Business Development Managers?
Sean: Oliver Ree’s and Issaden Gafoor, both of them from aviation backgrounds and have made some very positive progress in their first couple of months. We are very excited to have such a robust team. Capilaux helped find one of the team and there was another agency that also assisted us in our recruitment drive.
Interviewer: 2019 was a very busy year for you then! What’s next in 2020?
Sean: We want to continue enhancing our capabilities for the A320 and The Embraer 170/190. We want to be the one that people think of when it comes to not only their eve-ryday spares, but the unusual ones too. We can already deliver quickly, we’ve been at this a long time but we want to further improve our lead times and build on our reputation, offering a market-leading service.
Interviewer: Do you think Brexit will have an impact on your future plans?
Sean: We have sites in Europe too, so we’ve got that covered and we expect to still be able to deliver the current service levels after the 31st January (or when we do exit from the EU).
Interviewer: Thanks Sean for this interview – It seems like since your promotion last year you’ve really have been busy and have the makings of a superb team at Specialist Aviation Spares! We hope that you’ll consider using Capilaux again when you, no doubt, expand the team again.
Sean has had a tremendous year and is very well known, with a positive reputation in the MRO market. As recruiting firm we were so excited to have been given access to speak with him. If you would like to learn more about how Specialist Aviation Spares can help you source parts, please email sales@sagroup.aero .
If you would like to know more about how you can use Capilaux to help you source some great candidates please email info@capilaux.com or call 02039301650.
