For Directors of Maintenance

MRO Marketing, Built by People Who Know Aircraft Maintenance Isn't a Marketing Afterthought

Search for a marketing agency that actually understands airframe and engine work, AOG response, and what a director of maintenance gets measured on — and what comes up mostly isn't a marketing agency at all. It's parts suppliers, industry forums, and Wikipedia. That's not us being clever. That's the actual search results, checked directly, not assumed.

Ten business days. Presented to you live on a call — never just emailed and forgotten.

Why This Page Exists

The leftover template doesn't work here

Most aviation marketing gets built for flight schools first — the market's bigger, the sales cycle is shorter, and "get more students" is an easy story to tell. MRO gets the leftover template: swap "student" for "customer," add a stock hangar photo, call it done.

That doesn't work here. A director of maintenance isn't shopping on price-per-lead. You're managing shop capacity, approvals, turnaround commitments, and a customer base that talks to each other constantly about which shops keep their word. A marketing partner that doesn't already know the difference between routine and AOG work is going to write copy that reads exactly like what it is — generic.

What Your Customers Already See

What shows up when your customers go looking

Spend an evening in the forums where aircraft owners talk about their shops — type-club boards, owner communities — and two complaints outnumber everything else: shops that go quiet mid-job, and promised return dates that slide by months, sometimes by a year or more.

This isn't a claim about your shop. It's the reputation environment every MRO competes in, fair or not, because it's what a prospective customer reads before they ever call you. A shop with a strong digital presence gets to shape that conversation — set expectations, show its process, answer the turnaround question before it's asked. A shop with no presence just inherits whatever the forums are saying that week.

The Preflight

$2,497. Ten business days. Presented to you live.

Not emailed as a PDF and left for you to interpret.

It's a 12-section, 12-month digital plan built around your shop specifically: your service lines, your certifications, your service area, your capacity. It's built to be detailed enough that you could hand it to someone in-house and run it yourself. Most people don't. But you could — that's the point of charging for it instead of giving away a generic "free audit."

Built By Aviation People

Not aviation-flavored marketers

Aviation Creative works exclusively in aviation. Ken Starnes, founding partner, is a commercial pilot with 40 years in aviation, ~10,000 hours in corporate jets, and CEO & Founder of GlobalJet — ARGUS International Platinum and WYVERN Wingman rated. Tom Moore runs the Preflight and the day-to-day work — 20 years in IT infrastructure and a law-enforcement background before this, which is a better match for a safety-and-documentation-minded industry than a typical marketing résumé.

If You Decide To Keep Going

The Preflight stands on its own

Nothing about it locks you into anything. If it makes sense to keep working together afterward, ongoing support runs on three tiers, six-month minimum term.

RWY
Runway
$1,750
per month
$3,000 setup
CLB
Climb Out
$3,500
per month
$5,000 setup
CRZ
Cruise Altitude
$6,500
per month
$6,500 setup

The Preflight is never bundled into a tier as "included." Full tier detail lives on the Flight Path page — this page doesn't duplicate it, to avoid a second, driftable pricing surface.

FAQ

Questions directors of maintenance ask

Why does the Preflight cost money instead of a free audit?
Because a free audit is generic — it has to be, to be cheap to produce at scale. Ours is ten business days of dedicated work on your specific shop, delivered to you live so you can ask questions in real time, not a template with your shop's name dropped in.
How do I know you actually understand MRO operations, not just "aviation" in general?
Read the page. If it reads like a flight-school page with the nouns swapped, that's a fair reason to walk away. This one's built around Part 145 operations specifically, and the Preflight goes deeper than the page does.
Are you going to fix my actual turnaround times?
No — that's shop operations, not marketing. What we can do is make sure your digital presence isn't working against you while you fix it: clear communication about process, realistic expectations set up front, and visibility to the customers who are trying to find a shop that will actually pick up the phone.
What happens after the Preflight call?
Nothing, unless you want something to happen. If you want to continue, we talk tiers. If you don't, you keep the plan.

Book the $2,497 Preflight Diagnostic

Business name, city, and business type are required so we can tell you're a real shop, not a bot. Home airport, name, phone, and email help us reach you for the live walkthrough call.

Ten business days. Presented to you live on a call — never just emailed and forgotten.