[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to Fernway Insights, where prominent leaders and influencers shaping the industrial and industrial tech sector discuss topics that are critical for executives, boards and investors. Fernway Insights is brought to you by Fernway Group, a firm focused on working with industrial companies to make them unrivaled. Segment of one leaders to learn more about Fernway Group, please visit our
[email protected] dot.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Hi, welcome to another episode of Fernway Insights. This is Nidhi Arora, vice president at Fernway Group. Today we are going to talk about value creation and transformation in industrial sector with Victor Mendelsohnde. Mister Mendelsohn is co president of Heico Corporation, a role that he has played since 2009. He is also the president and chief executive officer of Heico Electronic Technologies Corporation, which is one of the two principal operating subsidiaries of Hico Corporation. Together with his brother and father, Mister Mendelsohn took over the management trains at HiCo in 1990.
Since then, Heico Corporation has been one of the best performing stocks with over 20% plus compounded returns annually. The company has also grown its operating cash flow at 20% plus every year since 1990. Due to its successes over the past decade, Forbes magazine has ranked Heico as one of the hundred world's most innovative growth companies, 100 best small companies, 200 hotshot stocks and 100 most trustworthy companies in America. Mister Mendelsohn received his AB degree from Columbia College of Columbia University, New York and his JD degree from the University of Miami School of Law. And with that, I welcome Victor to our podcast.
Victor, welcome. Delighted to have you here today and looking forward to our conversation about Heico and your journey.
[00:02:20] Speaker C: Well, thank you very much and I am delighted to be here today with you and I thank you for your interest in our company.
[00:02:28] Speaker B: Awesome. So Victor, I have already mentioned about Hico successes and we would go there. But before that, tell us a bit about the company and what it does.
[00:02:38] Speaker C: Heico is essentially a growing aerospace, defense and electronics company focused on producing niche products in niche segments of the markets as well as performing a limited amount of services like repair and overhaul of very specific components within aircraft and distribution for a variety of aircraft and defense platforms.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: And like I mentioned about Heico's turnaround story, it has made headlines for a couple of decades now. When you joined the management team at Heico, it was a $25 million company and today it has grown to roughly $2 billion at 25% plus EBITDA. Tell us how Heico was able to position itself for success across the aviation, aerospace and electronic technologies industries all at.
[00:03:34] Speaker C: The same time, I think, a result of a flexible mindset. We took over the company after becoming its largest shareholders in 1990, and we made a pledge to our fellow shareholders that we would be focused on creating shareholder value, which is essentially increasing our share price. And that meant we had to be flexible. We couldn't be become wedded to any single strategy or dogma other than producing excellent products, investing in the products and people, and emphasizing cash flow. So we always had a very open mindset as to how we were going to do that. We knew our general direction, but we knew that along the way, we would have to adjust course. And that's essentially what's allowed us and allowed our people to succeed. A very important part of it, though, is, and we'll talk about it a little bit later, is empowering people to make decisions and having an ownership culture. And I think that's the common thread that's worked regardless of the industry or the market segment we're in.
[00:04:46] Speaker B: Indeed, we will talk about that a bit later. And, Victor, how has Covid impacted your business? I mean, from both opportunities and challenges perspective, what are you doing or have done to address the challenges?
[00:05:01] Speaker C: So the challenges were severe because over half of our revenue is derived from commercial aviation. And as you know, planes weren't flying in the initial, really at much of a rate in the initial six months and really first year of the pandemic. I mean, things were bad. They were hard. I mean, our commercial aviation business was down almost immediately, roughly 80%. And that's because we, we serve mostly the aftermarket planes that are already flying, and we provide parts which we engineer ourselves, along with accessory component, repair and overhaul services and distributions. The planes aren't flying. They don't need the parts. They don't need the things we're repairing and overhaul or servicing. So we had that challenge. At the same time, of course, we had the challenge that we were still producing and that the other half of our company, which is defense space and other electronics markets, that was functioning close to normal and, in fact, growing. And so we needed to keep our people safe. We needed to run our facilities. Every one of our facilities, with the exception of one, was and is considered an essential business, if you remember those terms from the early days of the pandemic. That was who could operate and who couldn't. And so every one of our businesses stayed open. I continued, by the way, coming to the office the entire time myself, because I felt that if our people were at work, I needed to be at work. And at best, I think we had about 15% of our people working from home. So 85% were reporting to work every day. And that challenge was, how do you run the business? How do you keep your people safe?
How do you stagger work shifts and set up barriers and ensure enough hand sanitizer and wipes, which were in short supply. We were able to get them, but it was quite a struggle and all of that. So those were the challenges from it. And then, by the way, we knew we wanted to hold on to our people. We didn't want to engage in the mass layoffs that other companies did and were pounding their chests over. But at the same time, we knew that we would have many team members who didn't have anything to do, and that is as demoralizing as anything in a business. So how could we balance that without mass layoffs? There were, unfortunately, some layoffs because we had some product lines that we felt were not going to be recovering even in a recovery, that there were some shifts in products and aircraft and so on. And so we were able to accomplish that by letting our businesses do what they do, which is make their own decisions. And generally, our subsidiaries decided to do temporary furloughs or work hour reductions. They'd go to, let's say, a four day work week or a three week work month. We let it make their own decisions as to that. At the corporate level, the corporate staff. At our level, of course, we immediately took a 20% pay reduction, which was not restored until nearly a year later, because we felt that as long as we had any people who were out, if you will, or working reduced hours, we should be the last to come back. And so the opportunities from all of those challenges, by the way, were that we kept our people and we didn't face the struggles many have faced in what they call the supply chain. And we continue producing. We're developing new products at the same pace we were developing before. And in fact, in some cases, we accelerated that development because we knew we'd be coming out the other side and we wanted to have a bigger product offering than where we went in. That's an area of opportunity for us, certainly on our medical components, products that are used, components that are used in medical systems, that is, that business, I think, will grow and is growing as a result of the pandemic that initially suffered, of course, by the way, because procedures were reduced, right? You may remember that. And along with that, hospitals and our patients weren't going to the hospital for other procedures and they weren't going to the doctor. So we suffered initially, but then we saw very strong recovery. And the outlook remains good.
[00:09:26] Speaker B: Right? It seems quite a lot to deal with in that timeframe.
[00:09:30] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:09:31] Speaker B: Okay. And Victor, before COVID hit, the aviation industry was also impacted by the 737 Max incident. How did that impact the different players in your industry, including Heico? And what changes did you have to make at Heico to adapt?
[00:09:50] Speaker C: So for us, I'll start with Heico first. For us, it really had the minimus impact. We have a little bit of new product that goes on 737 maxes. There was no design change for those products are completely unrelated to what caused the two unfortunate crashes, two horrible crashes. And we are resumed, or have resumed long ago, production on those products and those programs. And we're proud to be part of that. Of course, for Boeing and a number of other producers, some very well regarded companies like Spirit Aero and others, they had a different situation. And in some cases, Boeing instructed vendors to continue building product, although at a lower rate, and then eventually cut it off. We actually did have some of that. We continued where we have some new Oem product going on, the Macs. We continued to deliver, and then it stopped and then resumed. And I think the ones who really had to deal with it, most are those who were in the stream, if you will, of the cause of the crash, which essentially was boeing itself.
[00:11:05] Speaker B: Got it. And with the now with businesses and especially air travel slowly coming back to normal or pre Covid levels, what is your expectation on outlook for aviation, aerospace and electronic technologies industry?
[00:11:22] Speaker C: Starting with aviation, particularly commercial aviation, extremely strong people want to travel. If you see in this country that we're now hitting the 19 levels and surpassing 19 levels at various times. People want to be out and about. They want to connect. And we're hitting those levels, by the way, on reduced business travel, but just on leisure travel alone. And business travel is inevitable. There really is no replacement for seeing people, whether they're customers, suppliers, partners, potential hires, face to face. And you've got to get out on the road and make that happen. And people are chomping at the bit to do it. You can really see that. So I'm very optimistic about the future of aviation. Some people say, well, won't there be reduced business travel because we'll be doing things like this. We won't do these in person. We'll do them on Zoom. And there will be certain meetings that will be on Zoom. I think that's right. Be a certain percent of meetings that will now be held on a computer screen like we're doing now. But the level of overall, business activity will increase, will continue to increase and grow dramatically. And that means more people traveling, number one, and I believe ultimately more per capita travel, because although people may drop off a couple Zoom meetings here and there, a couple telephone calls here and there, with the increased level of business travel, they're going to have to travel more and individually, and we see it now, I can tell you that when we have certain people who call on us, when they hear their competitor has called on us, they're on the next flight down. And that's how business works. So very optimistic about that, about defense. I'm also optimistic about our defense businesses. Long term, the world is not going to be a safer place, unfortunately, and that's just a sad reality. Free people like we are in this country need to defend ourselves, and we need to help our allies defend themselves. The things that we do at HEico generally focus on higher technology, defense products and systems, things like electronic warfare detection, threat detection, reconnaissance, surveillance and standoff warfare, as opposed to, let's say, the operations tempo, the proverbial boots on the ground. And we think that that will continue to be important as we see some of these major nation state threats in addition to the terrorist threats that we were dealing with not long ago.
And then in space, space is a growing market, growing business. You see it all the time. New products, launches, satellites, earth sensing spacecraft as well. So that's a nice growing business for us. And electronics, of course, there's just more of this that we need. And when I say we, the society needs broadly. And the pandemic showed that. So very optimistic for our underlying markets individually.
[00:14:40] Speaker B: That's great to hear, Victor. All right, so now let's switch gears to talk about your journey. Let us go back to the early 1990s.
At that time, you were at law school juggling assignments and getting ready for a major role at Hico. What was your mindset back then? How were you thinking about what was next in store for you in your career?
[00:15:05] Speaker C: Yeah, I'd love to go back to 1990. I'd be much younger if I did that in the early nineties.
Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be doing that.
So we had just been through a very difficult battle to get control or start running the company, and we'd actually had a proxy fight my senior year in college, which we lost, and we had to sue the company. And so my first year in law school, we had a trial and company settled, and we took over managing the business.
The mindset at that point was one, a war footing, if you will. We had just been through a long battle, and then a major company, United Technologies, sued Heico for an injunction to stop it from making what was its only part at the time, and $100 million, which was four times our market capitalization. We were focused on fighting that and then figuring out how do we grow this business, because we knew we had an interesting company, but it had really been, let's say, under managed or poorly managed. And that was the mindset was, let's just get to the next day, let's fight on and do something good with this business. We weren't sure exactly how it would pan out, to be honest with you, but we knew it would be something good.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: Awesome. And you and your family had this dream of taking over a troubled public company and turning it around. The level of successes you've achieved at Heico. It's a case study for a lot of entrepreneurs and investors.
What attracted you towards Heico and making it the company you wanted to transform?
[00:16:51] Speaker C: Yeah, our goal was really to get control of an industrial company and build it. It wasn't, I'll be honest, necessarily to get a troubled one. And Heico was more troubled than we realized or knew from the outside.
What attracted us to the business in the first place was that there were a couple of things, actually. I was the one who actually found it as an investment for us. And ill be honest with you, for a while I wasnt feeling too good about it because by the time we got control of the company, we had a 30% or so loss on that investment, which stayed in the loss column for a few years until things started to go our way. But what was attractive was a few things. One, it had a unique product in a niche segment of a market and they really essentially only had one of these products. And it was a very important jet engine part, in the most prolific jet engine in service at the time. And we thought, well, gee, if they have this one part, why can't they make more? So there was an optimism, to be honest with you, and I known how difficult it was. It took us years to make that next part, the next part approved. We might have been scared off, but that was very important to us. We thought that there was a nice horizon for the business and it was a high margin business. So we felt that provided or indicated some unique characteristics. And of course, the financial characteristics of high margins are really very helpful to any business. Second, they had no debt, and that was very important because it would allow us to do what we needed to do without this overhang of debt. And third, they had a decent cash position, which was helpful. And fourth, they had a line of business making laboratory products and lab equipment that we felt should and could be sold, which we did immediately after taking over the company. So it was all these things, you put them together, it just seemed like an interesting business. And then there was another factor that I think, although we've never focused on it ourselves, another factor that was important was it was local, it was here we lived in South Florida, and the company was, let's say about 45 minutes, 50 minutes from our house. And so it was something that we could dive into fairly easily.
I don't know if we've ever acknowledged that to ourselves, but I think it did play a role, and it played a role in what we were able to get done.
[00:19:29] Speaker B: Right. Sounds fascinating. And at Heico, you have closed about 88 acquisitions since you joined the company, and I believe you've been very closely involved in all of those deals while also leveraging your legal background. Talk us through some of the main challenges you faced while navigating those deals.
[00:19:51] Speaker C: Yeah, in fact, I was the company's general counsel for the first 18 years or so that we took over, that we were running the company well, after I got all those, I guess it was more like 16 years or 15 years. But in any event, it was my responsibility to get the deals closed. That didn't mean I found the acquisitions, and it didn't mean I even had negotiated them, although there were a number that I did. But I had that responsibility, and it was the first 38 acquisitions, less so, by the way, today, I mean, we have an excellent legal staff here that gets the deals, the acquisitions closed. And I'm more like a bystander these days when it comes to actually getting the deals done. And it's better because they understand the law and the mechanics much better than I do. I can only ruin it. But in any event, the challenges were many. One challenge, of course, is convincing a seller to sell their company. In the early days, we were this small business that I mentioned. We had this lawsuit that was outstanding. We had a great balance sheet, but we were in the early days of our growth story.
And so if you're an owner of a business, why pick Heico? I mean, a lot of other buyers are out there knocking on your door.
And so that was a challenge to convince people we were the right buyer. That ceased to be the case after a few years because people saw we are a great home for an entrepreneur, founder, manager to provide for his or her business, because we respect that legacy. We have this independent model where we allow our businesses to operate and we don't force changes like the name on the building or in payroll or health benefits or things like that. We realize that that's unorthodox. Some people feel that that's leaving money behind, but as far as we're concerned, that is, those are bedrock stakes for us.
[00:22:10] Speaker B: And Victor, you've been back at your school several times for guest lectures on your experiences at high cope. What advice do you typically give to the young minds out there, especially to the ones who are aspiring to take on leadership roles at leading companies?
[00:22:28] Speaker C: Well, first I have to be very honest with them and I am. And that luck, I think, plays a major role in the good fortune that we've experienced. But one can help one's luck and hard work. I mean these things sound sort of trite, but it really is true hard work, treating people fairly and honestly, putting the customers first so that we have a long customer relationship. You know, it's very expensive to develop that customer relations, very expensive to win the customer both emotionally and financially. So once we do that, we want to keep them forever. And that requires very often sublimating our interests to those of the, the customer. It may be on pricing, it may be on design, it may be on delivery or something like that. Another is an absolute commitment to quality. And in our industry, by the way, you're probably going to be out of business if you don't have complete quality because this is either a high reliability, a harsh environment business in everything that we make. So ensuring that there are no poor quality mindset people in the business has been an important part of what we do. So I would always advise people to do that and then patience. We're all in a rush. We all want success overnight, but it takes time and one has to plant the seeds and one has to invest. And it can take years and years, as it did for us actually initially plowing those fields before we start to see the shoots. And if you believe in what you're doing and you're treating people fairly and taking care of your customers and you have a reasonable business plan, then continue doing it. The other thing that I always advise students is focus on cash flow. We really get caught up these days in accounting rules here in the US GAAP and then internationally ifrs. But those are really fake regimes. I like to say gap is crap and it really is because you fake the numbers. I mean that's what the rules say. Make up numbers, pretend you spent money you didn't spend pretend you didn't spend money you spent. And you do that. And we do that meticulously, by the way, and we follow the law. We're a public company. We're going to do that. We're going to do it right, but we're going to do the wrong thing. Right is essentially what all public companies have to do. And if you focus on cash flow internally and say, I don't really care what I have to report publicly, I'm going to do that public reporting properly, but I am going to be absolutely certain that we are generating cash in our business, regardless of what the financial statements say, we're going to generate cash. And if you do that, I think you develop this mindset of frugality and correctness. So that would be general advice that, I mean, there's a lot more, frankly, we give to students. Those are kind of the big ones.
[00:25:45] Speaker B: Sounds great, Victor. All right, so let's shift gears again here, Victor. So at Fernway, we continue to see that a lot of small to mid cap companies struggle with driving growth and profitability in a sustainable way. What would be your advice to such companies based on your experience at HEiCo? I mean, what works and what does not?
[00:26:09] Speaker C: Well, and I can only speak for our experience, and again, saying that we've been very fortunate. We really have. I don't underestimate the role good fortune plays in our lives. I don't think it's because of us, frankly. I'm overhead, and my brother and my father, we're really very much overhead.
The team members who are designing our products, building them, shipping them, accounting for them, selling them, et cetera, who make it happen every day, and not us. With that in mind, I think the one key thing for sustainable growth is new product or new service development, and that's not cheap. It's very easy on a spreadsheet or a piece of paper or computer screen to cut out.
But in our business, where there are some pretty long lead times before we start to see a return on these investments, they are absolutely critical because again, like I said, plowing the field and planting the seeds and so on, that's a difficult process, but very well worth it. And that's probably been the biggest success at Heica. Whether it's in the companies we've acquired or the business that we started with in the beginning, we've invested in new product development. Just as important, by the way, is people treating people properly and respectfully in the business. That doesn't mean being, as we'd say, pushovers or timid but it does mean that we have to treat people as we want to be treated ourselves. One of the things, for example, we look at when we look for acquisitions is when we walk through the facilities, how does the owner interact with his or her people? And are they looking to take care of their people, or are they looking to make money by slicing out a layer each time on their people? We like companies that look to make money by adding products and market share, as opposed to just squeezing the people.
[00:28:10] Speaker B: Got it? Got it. So, Viktor, let's not now talk about the ownership mindset that you brought up earlier by holding a considerable stake in Heico, the management team. You, your brother and fourth father, you embody the owner operator culture, right? And this is something we also subscribe to at Fernway and adapt and engaged investor operator model ourselves. When we partner with companies, tell us, how do you trickle that culture down into the organization?
[00:28:41] Speaker C: It's really somewhat easy for us. I mean, there are some things that we do that are important in the ownership culture. We have an excellent 401K plan that basically matches team members contributions and then puts a bonus on top of that. And we've created a number, literally hundreds of millionaires through our 401K plan. And those matching amounts and the contributions that the company make are in company stock. So almost every HeICO team member, or at least in the US, is an owner of the company. So that's out there as part of it. But the key to it, and the reason I say it's fairly easy, is we've acquired smaller entrepreneurial businesses from those founder owner managers, and we've allowed them to continue what they were doing before. So as opposed to being an employee number 5722 at some big company, the team members are one of typically, on average, about 75 or 80 people at a subsidiary and facility, that team member is valued and known. Their opinions are important, they are close to the product, they're close to the customer. The president of the business who sold us the company and in many instances still owns 20% or even more, is watching everything. They still have that ownership mentality. It's that small business ownership mentality that's shared across the enterprise, and they feel it. If a shipment is late, if it doesn't go out, if there's an issue of any sort, everybody feels badly because they're letting someone else down in a small organization and there's nowhere to hide. There aren't many people. President comes in in the morning, and if he or she doesn't see you name it working, they're going to ask why, right? You bump into each other in the break room, the parking lot. And so that's why it's been fairly easy for us, because we are a conglomeration of these companies with that mentality. And we have the same mentality ourselves. When we took over the company, as you know, it was a very small business. And our family, we came out of small business ourselves. So in a sense, we were the proverbial chief cooks and bottle washers. We knew what it was, and we know what it is to be frugal and to answer the telephone, to take an order. And we relate very well to businesses like that. So it's just a very organic process for us.
[00:31:23] Speaker B: Us now, a lot of learnings there. And Victor, one of the key drivers of value creation at Hico has been m and A, right? And we talked about it. You've successfully acquired 88 acquisitions over a span of almost two decades. Driving programmatic m and A is something that a lot of industrial companies aim to do. Tell us how HeicO has been able to do it so successfully.
[00:31:54] Speaker C: I think the key to it has been an open mindedness that we have. It goes back to, as I said to you, committing to enhance shareholder value and to doing it sensibly. So in the early days, we started making acquisitions. We would have a roadmap we'd lay out, but we couldn't get the acquisitions in that roadmap, any one of a number of reasons. It could have been price, it could have been the seller wouldn't sell, etcetera. So we had to look elsewhere and we look at adjacencies, and if the business met certain characteristics, we would acquire it. And I think that's really been the key for us, has been the characteristics of the business. And that's, again, high margins, as I mentioned to you before, because that indicates we're doing something special for the customers. How they treat people, how they treat customers were very, very important characteristics for us. But also, by the way, being disciplined, not overpaying for acquisitions, not going after moonshots, not doing things that were just totally unrelated and we had no knowledge on, and we were just sort of rolling the dice. The other thing we don't do, and a lot of companies do. And my father is very fond of pointing this out, and I think he really turned both Eric and me onto it at an early age. And of course, as an aside, we're very fortunate to have a father who gave us a great deal of responsibility and has always been an incredible leader and role model and teacher. And very patient with us.
We've been disciplined to not, as we say, overpay for a business, to not get out of our lanes and to make sure that whatever we buy, we're ready to own forever. We don't have an exit strategy and we don't have an exit strategy for our businesses, unlike a lot of private equity firms do. We are owners to own. We buy to own.
[00:33:59] Speaker B: Shout out to Larry.
[00:34:01] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:34:02] Speaker B: All right, to close here, Victor, I would like to talk a bit about what next for Heico. So the company is on an upwards trajectory for over two decades now. What is the plan to ensure continued success?
[00:34:17] Speaker C: Well, first, let me say a couple things on that. One, it isn't easy. It's never been easy. And just because we've had past success, we know that that's not necessarily indicative of future success. And we keep that in mind every day here. And for us, we have to treat it as though today is the day we took over the company and we're looking at a clean slate. And what happened and what we were successful with is not going to repeat itself. And that's an important mindset for us to have. And we've got to be as hungry today. We always were. And I don't believe for a moment that just because we've been fortunate so far, that we'll automatically be fortunate. We have to make it each day and prove it each day. That's number one, keep that mindset. Don't become arrogant. Don't think we've cracked the code. Number two, our plan is to continue to do what's worked and to focus on cash flow, focus on our people, new product development, we think those are tried and true strategies. Make acquisitions of like companies. Now, that probably does mean, though, that well make acquisitions of some larger companies. 20% of our acquisitions, by the way, have been consolidations, where they're sort of the textbook consolidation, where we're buying a product line or a troubled business. And the understanding is going in that we are going to consolidate it with one of our other businesses.
And so we have good, very good, excellent success with that. We have some subsidiary presidents who have done that serially. And so we'll look to do more of those. And we may look to make some larger acquisitions as we go, but really trying to keep the culture that keeps everybody close to each other and I to the customer.
[00:36:16] Speaker B: Sounds perfect. So on that note, Victor, thank you very much for coming, coming here to our podcast today and sharing your perspective. Thank you.
[00:36:25] Speaker C: Thank you very much. And again, it's my pleasure. And I do want to make sure that they emphasize this journey that we've been on with Heico. It's a lot of people who make it happen, and I'm just very proud of the people at Heico for everything they do every day.
[00:36:48] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to Fernway insights. Please visit fernway.com for more podcasts, publications, and events on developments shaping the industrial and industrial tech sector.
