IE Business Daily Business news for the Inland Empire.
CieloBlu has officially been in business for just more than a year and what a year it has been for owner Kayla DiLullo and the rest of the family involved in the aviation business. CieloBlu is located at the Chino Airport in Southern California and is affiliated with the larger business Threshold Aviation Group, which has more than one-hundred employees and has been in business for more than two decades.
“The past year has been a learning experience for me and for Mark, (her father is Mark DiLullo, owner of Threshold Aviation) in selling factory direct airplanes,” said Kayla.
Threshold has sold planes for years but mostly those that the company has repaired or brokered for clients. Selling factory direct airplanes is not the only new challenge the company, or for that matter, Kayla has faced.
“This is my first job out of college and law school,” said DiLullo. “It has been quite a learning experience for me in the best way possible. I was kind of thrown in the deep end, and I’m learning all the ins and outs of how to run a business mostly by myself but with the support of my father, Mark and the rest of the team at Threshold.”
The company spent the past year setting up systems and making connections in the industry and facing the challenge of a new kind of marketing and sales. CieloBlu got off to a fast start selling an airplane literally in their first few days in business.
Representatives from CieloBlu attended the 2022 EAA Airventure Oshkosh, (one of the largest aviation events in the world annually) and while taking receipt of an airplane from the manufacturer, Tecnam (an aviation company with a lengthy track-record of success from Italy) found a buyer that same day.
“An attendee at the show who had previously purchased an airplane from another Tecnam dealer in Tennessee saw this sporty P92 airplane with a really great color scheme and wanted to buy it from us right then,” DiLullo said. “It was a really great way to start out, because this other dealer who was there helped walk me through the whole process of selling the airplane, (which is a lengthy one) and I left the show with my first sale done.”
The next several sales would not come for almost a year. The company’s initial order for twelve airplanes was slowly being filled and it took some time to get enough inventory on the floor, (at the Chino airport), to entice customers to come in, browse and look for an airplane to purchase.
“It was difficult in the beginning because potential buyers would come in and look and we didn’t have many planes for them to choose from and they mostly left without making a purchase,” DiLullo said.
But that began to change in the second and third quarters of 2023 as more inventory arrived and things really started to takeoff. “I went all last year without selling anything else except for one more on pretty much the last day,” said DiLullo. “On the last month of my first year in business, I sold my first airplane by myself to a buyer. It was a Tecnam P2010 TDI. It’s a turbo diesel airplane, and I did the delivery in Florida. After that I sold another airplane to a flight school. And that same flight school now is buying two more.”
The company has now sold 10 aircraft in the last few months and Kayla assisted in the sale of an L-39 fighter jet and Gulfstreamas well. The company has now amassed nearly six-million dollars in sales to date.
Having some positive cash flow has allowed CieloBlu to hire its first employee outside of Kayla which she says will be a great relief. “Finally, I won’t be doing everything myself and can concentrate on working on the business, not in the business.”
