Interview with the CEO of Locatory.com, Zilvinas Sadauskas: ambitious plans and new challenges

Locatory.com is a recently launched highly innovative project. What challenges have you been faced with in the international market?

The competition is stiff, however we have four major projects to compete with. These are the strongest projects that have been known within the market for quite a while now. Although Locatory.com is a completely new venture, we have set ourselves a number of highly ambitious goals. We believe that we are truly competitive, as in a certain way, we do not have to compete at the initial stage at all. Might this sound as a paradox? Well, the thing is that our differential advantage lies in the fact, that we mainly focus on the emerging markets, such as Russia, the CIS, Eastern Europe, Africa, India, Latin America and China, where we have minor, if any, competition. However, we do not ignore the Western markets either. We have a clear vision and we work consistently towards achieving our main goal – to secure the third position in the global market of aicraft parts‘ platforms.

One of the main priorities for Locatory.com is to firmly position itself in the emerging markets. How do you manage to coordinate business with sellers who speak a variety of different languages?

Working within a global marketplace can be indeed challenging. Naturally, we are often faced with a variety of issues, such as time differences, cultural and language barriers. We have representatives in Latin America, Russia and across the entire CIS. In order to avoid time differences, they work from their offices, in their home countries. Needless to say, we have a strong sales team that operate outside of office hours too. Coordinating these processes can be difficult. In order to achieve the most effective communication, managers must adjust according to particular working hours of their employees. Since these processes are no longer an issue, we are capable of working as well-oiled machine.

Locatory.com is part of Avia Solutions Group – a group of aviation companies with a strong background and an extensive experience in the aviation sector. Would launching such a project without the support of Avia Solutions Group be at all possible?

I believe there is no unambiguous answer to such a question. Many companies belong to different aviation groups; however, some of them were established without any external support. Yet, in my opinion, launching a project like ours with relatively small resources would have been much more difficult without the backing from Avia Solutions Group. As a new business we rely on many group resources that cost us practically nothing. It provides us with an additional differential advantage. Moreover, the Avia Solutions Group experience and industry know-how allows us to understand the needs of our clients in the emerging markets a lot better thus enabling us to locate cooperation opportunities with the Russian and CIS-based airlines as well as develop our partnership network a lot easier.

We have noticed a number of your eye-catching and particularly attractive adverts. Who is Captain Locatory featuring in the company’s promotional campaigns?

He is our most loyal customer! Our product is electronic and our video media is exceptionally attractive and dynamic; therefore, most of the information reaches our customers via the Internet. We are constantly working on generating new ideas for our video series promoting Locatory.com services in a fun and entertaining way. Captain Locatory represents the company’s values and our product image. Such a marketing approach is truly unconventional in aviation market, yet we have never regretted our decision – we have generated a real interest in aviation media channels and among potential clients. Needless to say, we have also drawn the attention of course our competitors.

What makes Locatory.com different from its competitors?

One of our greatest advantages lies in the fact that we are not that large to be inflexible or bureaucratic: we have no problem serving a customer at 5 o’clock in the morning. Our key strengths are energy, highly qualified and dedicated professionals, a wide spectrum of services as well as our flexibility and creative potential. The strategic expansion is based on a strong marketing campaign aimed at an objective target audience. Our platform can be used in seven different languages- English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Chinese and Portuguese. Not every platform can boast such an innovative approach. We would like to stress the fact that all our salesmen and service managers are fluent in at least one of these languages. Last year Locatory.com introduced a virtual game entitled ‘Beat My Stock’ and received a lot of interest from aviation enthusiasts all over the world. Company clients, who logged onto Locatory.com via their smartphones (m.locatory.com) can browse through an extensive list of aviation spare parts as well as manage, send, receive and answer RFQs. The success of Locatory.com proves that when you have the right energy and a strong focus you can compete with the largest companies and players within the industry.

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