WULF AVIATION INTERVIEW
‘Black magic’ AI casts its sales spell
Business aircraft sales firm Wulf Aviation, based in Mexico City, is using artificial intelligence to drive jet sales. Words: Rob Hodgetts
Adolfo Nieto (left), Franco Curiel (centre) and Jorge Ramirez (right) set up Wulf Aviation in September 2023 in Mexico City.
WULF AVIATION INTERVIEW
‘Black magic’ AI casts its sales spell
Business aircraft sales firm Wulf Aviation, based in Mexico City, is using artificial intelligence to drive jet sales. Words: Rob Hodgetts
Adolfo Nieto (left), Franco Curiel (centre) and Jorge Ramirez (right) set up Wulf Aviation in September 2023 in Mexico City.
CJI REPORT
HE DESCRIBES IT as “black magic” but Wulf Aviation co-founder Franco Curiel is sold on the sorcery of artificial intelligence (AI).
His partner Adolfo Nieto is more analytical. “AI is not a magic solution,” he says. “It only spits back at you what you put into it.” Nieto, though, says the potential is “mind blowing” and has put data and AI at the centre of Wulf’s strategy.
The different perspectives are what give Wulf its spirit. Nieto is the “brains”, says Curiel. Co-founder Jorge Ramirez is the “whip lasher” and “amazing at personal relationships”, says Nieto. Curiel “knows how to do a transaction from A to Z flawlessly”, he adds.
The trio set up Wulf Aviation in Mexico City in September 2023, after leaving lengthy careers in aircraft sales with Aerolineas Ejecutivas (ALE).
“It's the adventure of a lifetime,” says Curiel, who joined ALE in 2012 and rose to become new and used aircraft sales director, working alongside partners such as Bombardier, Hawker Beechcraft, Textron Aviation and Jetcraft.
“For about two months my head was spinning. Am I ready to do this? Do I really want to leave this comfort zone?” he says. “At some point you just need to trust yourself, have confidence in yourself and the people you're partnering with and realise that you're minimising your chances of failure. Adolfo, being the analytical person he is, said it's a mathematical process. We're going to sell. We can do this.”
The team is focusing on jets, turboprops and helicopter sales in Mexico and Central America initially, drawing on their specialist skills, experience and local expertise.
“One of the rich things about our company is how different Jorge, Franco and myself are in terms of our own expertise and the different ingredients that make a good sales team, not only in skills but in ambiance,” said Nieto. He is Wulf’s rotary specialist with four years’ standalone helicopter sales experience during a 15-year career in aircraft sales at Aerolineas Ejecutivas.
He suggests that operating in Mexico is more difficult than in a “well-organised authority” like the US but says in Curiel Wulf has an expert in every aspect of transactions in the region, including tax, legal and regulatory, as well as being an authority on the technical aspects of “every aircraft in every segment”.
“So when we go to a meeting, we don't just expect for someone to regard us as good sales guys because of our smile,” he says. “We've done military aircraft sales, we've done utility and special mission aircraft sales. Overall, we've sold over 170 aircraft in our careers.”
Partnership with JetHQ
They have been busy since setting up Wulf, signing a partnership with JetHQ to represent its fixed-wing sales in Mexico and Central America (“They have the global footprint, but they lack the local expertise,” says Nieto), linking up with Blueberry Aviation to drive helicopter sales, and taking on a fourth team member to look after a new account to manage Pipistrel sales in Mexico.
“We did not want to be a hillbilly company, we really wanted to create a company that had the gravitas of a professional broker,” says Nieto who, like his Wulf partners, also serves as sales vice president for JetHQ.
On the fixed-wing side, the Wulf team “dissect the market for aircraft 25 years or newer, because usually we don't like messing with 1978 Lear 35s or old Citations. This will be aircraft that sell for half a million US dollars. It’s too puny in value,” says Nieto.
Nieto would not be drawn on exact numbers of sales since they began. But he claims to have a 50% market share of aircraft transactions in Mexico and predicts by the time of their one-year anniversary on September 1st, they will have reached 25 aircraft sales.
“To put that into perspective, the top year with our former company, like the best year in our history, was 50 transactions. And that was with a sales team of 30,” says Nieto.
Curiel added: “We all say why didn't we do this before? And we still cheer each other for having the courage to take this step. We've created what we dreamed of and thought at some point would be extremely hard to get. This is not a job. I would do this for fun.”
The Wulf team’s approach is highly strategic, and they analyse segments intensively, using data to help predict which sectors and individuals are being successful, whether that’s booming fruit producers or the next battery producer for the electric car industry. This guides them towards targeted sales opportunities.
Nieto is the “brain of this whole operation”, according to Curiel, who says his colleague is acutely focused on the strategy behind selling various business aircraft.
The Wulf founders left long careers in aviation sales with Aerolineas Ejecutivas (ALE).
The Wulf founders left long careers in aviation sales with Aerolineas Ejecutivas (ALE).
“Adolfo said there has to be a system to selling an airplane,” said Curiel, who is an accredited aircraft appraiser and member of the Royal Aeronautical Society. “It can’t only be a thing of luck. There have to be trends, tendencies, market data that tells you when and where to be when you’re selling an airplane.
“That has turned into sales, and that's how we operate, and that's how we sell airplanes, with data and with a strategy.”
Nieto says their gameplan is “totally different from any broker”.
“We focus on knowing the crystal ball as much as we can, meaning predicting the future as far as aircraft sales and knowing who's going to be successful,” says Nieto.
The “holy grail” is to use AI to “crunch the data and read the trigger events”.
“Private aviation really is one industry that rewards the successful segments and the successful businessmen. And it is our job to pursue those segments,” adds Nieto.
“All of this data changes day-to-day, whether it’s family trigger events, company sales, IPOs, people selling stock. So, we need to constantly keep up with that and it's not humanly possible to do it all.”
“We want to grow into becoming the number one broker in all Latin America.”
The team recently closed its first deal using a pitch developed by AI tool ChatGPT, explaining to a client – with the help of four years’ worth of flights in one image – why his aircraft was not fit for his purposes.
“We just put that mirror in front of him,” says Nieto. “There are things in that proposal that we couldn’t have thought of. And the speed at which we could do it with AI was just amazing. And of course, now it's part of our day-to-day work using AI.”
While the strategy is based around data and AI, the human connection remains the underlying source code for sales at Wulf.
“Adolfo speaks of AI naturally. I have no idea about 50% of the things he said,” says Curiel, who has a private pilot’s licence and still flies regularly.
“But just put me in front of an owner or a prospect to buy an airplane and let me talk to him about airplanes. I'll be happy to do that for three hours.
“Once you get that information from AI, our business is to make it personal, with face-to-face meetings, demo flights, showing an airplane at a location. That's never going to change in our industry.” He uses the analogy of pilots staring at the screens in the cockpit without lifting their eyes to look out of the window at the sky. “AI is a tool, but we cannot rely 100% on that,” he adds.
Curiel says the team remain “humble” with their “feet on the floor”, grateful for what they learned at their former employer, but they are equally hungry for success and vying to become apex predators in their territory.
“We want to grow into becoming the number one broker in all Latin America, not only in Mexico, but including Brazil and Central America,” says Curiel.
“That's the objective in five years.”
After selling a range of aircraft, including those above, Adolfo Nieto expects to reach 25 aircraft sales by Wulf’s first anniversary.
