GBR helicopters: Surviving the downdraft of COVID-19

This chapter examines some of the strategic management principles that are available to entrepreneurial businesses to build operational resilience in advance of market disruptions. The field of corporate strategy is replete with frameworks that can help discern where competitive strategy can be shaped and leveraged. The value of planning is not the plan itself but the development of scenarios that consider key operational disruptions. Operating in tropical North Queensland, Experience Co grew quickly on the back of experiential tourism. Growth through a strategy of acquisition saw it purchase Great Barrier Reef (GBR) Helicopters for $20 million in December 2017. Two years later and coinciding with the cessation of Chinese inbound tourism in December 2019, Experience Co sold the GBR Helicopter fleet to Chris Morris of Morris Aviation for $17 million. This was a talisman of what was to follow with COVID-19 just four months later. The tourism sector in Far North Queensland has also been significantly impacted by COVID-19. For many private businesses, growth occurred through backward and forward integration in the supply chain. When key markets were lost, as experienced with Chinese inbound tourism and COVID-19, the doubling-down effect magnified those losses. The surge in Merger & Acquisition (M&A) activity across Australia since COVID-19 reflects the attraction of buying distressed assets. Due diligence related to the underlying value of assets and whether they strategically suit the ‘new normal’ post COVID-19 must be considered.