After Jet Support Services Inc. (JSSI) acquired two maintenance tracking companies nearly six months apart last year, CEO Neil Book doesn’t envision additional acquisitions ahead in the near term. Instead, his focus is on seamlessly combining SierraTrax and Traxxall into JSSI’s operations. The acquisitions are a step toward not only growing a robust maintenance tracking business but using them to further the growth of its other businesses: hourly cost maintenance; JSSI Advisory Services and Conklin & de Decker; and JSSI Parts & Leasing.

“The goal with any acquisition we’ve done or with any new business line that we’ve started, the idea has been to focus on maintenance, something where we have our historical roots,” Book told AIN. “We wanted to do something that was always going to be accretive to that core business that leverages our knowledge and expertise, and so we saw maintenance tracking as probably the most accretive opportunity in the marketplace for JSSI given our existing suite of services, products, and expertise.” With the acquisitions, Book estimates JSSI’s businesses are serving as many as 6,000 to 7,000 aircraft.

Acquired last June, SierraTrax is a Textron Aviation-recommended maintenance tracking provider based in Wichita that supports about 1,000 mainly owner-operators of light and midsize business jets. Montreal-based Traxxall is a larger maintenance tracking provider supporting 2,000 jets, turboprops, and helicopters offering a broader array of services to Part 91 and Part 135 customers including inventory management and MRO workflow software capabilities. “What we found was Traxxall and SierraTrax were not competing head-to-head very often, and they were not losing customers to one another very often,” Book explained. “We also didn’t see a lot of overlap with their platforms and technology. The two were very complementary, which is one of the things that excited us and attracted us to both.”

Those two companies are complementary to JSSI’s other maintenance-related businesses in other ways. Following integration, Book expects to find cross-selling opportunities between customers of its maintenance tracking and those utilizing JSSI’s other services.

“Having the platform that allows you to track [maintenance] for operators to me is critical and serves as sort of a front door for us to begin finding new ways to create value for these customers,” he added. “It could be through bringing an hourly cost maintenance program. It could be through supplying parts at a discount to help reduce their overall cost of maintenance. Really the whole idea is for us to create this front end that now allows us to make aircraft ownership more efficient and easier, regardless of make or model.”

Moreover, Book said the combination of maintenance-related businesses creates “a value proposition for operators, for the manufacturers, and for the maintenance facilities, the MROs, that will be very hard to compete with. [The year] 2022 is going to be an exciting year focused on integration and introducing some of these new bundling opportunities to the market.”