If you ask Bill Visage about his business, he’ll tell you how proud he is of his team. They are a lively group of engineers, production assembly specialists, thinkers, testers and doers. His business, Top Flight Aerostructures, is an aerospace manufacturing and repair company. They primarily produce components for military aircraft, helping the men and women of the U.S. military safely and securely carry out their missions.
Jobs can take years to fully engineer, develop, manufacture and test. Bill knew that for large, long-term projects, he needed a bank that could see his vision and scale with them.
Seeing the Big Picture, A Bird’s Eye View
Top Flight Aerostructures became a United Community customer in 2011, 6 years after opening their doors in 2005. Since then, we have had the pleasure of getting to know Bill and his goals and working with him to develop the financial plans to get him there. “We chose United Community Bank because their banker engaged with us,” Bill says, “he came in and understood our financial situation and he didn’t just propose a solution, he proposed a go-forward plan.”
At United, we like when good things happen for your business. To accomplish that mission, we have a variety of products and offerings that fit various stages of a business lifecycle (big and small). Our job is to tailor our services to meet your business needs so that we can help you move the needle on your goals.
Bill is a great example of that. As the owner of a growing company, Bill thinks about the future in terms of growth and opportunity asking, “How can we position ourselves to succeed? How can we get bigger, better? What’s next?” The company wanted larger projects but didn’t have the equipment to produce physically larger components. A piece of equipment essential to Top Flight’s business is an autoclave. It is like a huge pressure cooker that cures the exotic adhesive resins on their manufactured aircraft parts. Top Flight Aerostructures had an autoclave at their facility, but it was not big enough to accommodate many of their larger projects, forcing Top Flight to send these jobs elsewhere. We had an idea.
Reaching for the Stars
Part of our job is to be Bill’s binoculars—helping him to see ahead. Bill, in one of his many check-ins with his dedicated United banker, was surprised by what we had to suggest. “Our banker asked us, ‘Why don’t we buy the facility, and get a bigger autoclave?’ and that blew us away,” Bill says. “We didn’t think we could afford it at the time, but he ran the numbers and it was actually cheaper for us to buy the facility than it was for us to continue renting.”
Enter Sally, Top Flight Aerostructure’s new autoclave. Named after Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, because the autoclave originally belonged to NASA. Now it lives in Dallas, Georgia, helping Bill’s team achieve their goals. They can now work more efficiently and produce larger pieces—allowing them to take on jobs they couldn’t before.
We are proud to stand with Bill and the Top Flight Aerostructures team as they grow, and we’ve got a plan to get them do just that.
