Winter Garden will soon have another new business headquarters. TAG Aero, a company that repairs and refurbishes parts for Airbus and Boeing airplanes, is building a new 12,000-square-foot headquarters building at 660 Garden Commerce Pkwy.
“This time next year we will be in our facility,” said Myles Thomas, the company’s managing director and founder. “Winter Garden is just fantastic.”
The parcel was purchased for $215,000 in September.
Until the new headquarters opens, Tag Aero will continue operating at 1226 Winter Garden Vineland Road in Winter Garden. At 5,000 square feet the space is tight for the company that was number 126 on Inc. magazine’s “Fastest Growing Companies in America 2015” list.
Tag Aero has seven employees, not including Thomas, and it expects to double its employee count in the next few years.
Thomas moved to the U.S. in 2007 from the United Kingdom and began working in aviation repair, specifically the repair of auxiliary power units (APUs), small engines usually located in the tails of airplanes that supply power for everything except the main engines themselves.
Over time, Thomas decided he could create a business repairing and reconditioning the APUs for airplanes under the name of The Auxiliary Group. The name has changed to Tag Aero.
The company grew more than 4,000 percent from its first year in 2012 to 2014, spurring the company to expand its offerings and services to include other parts for planes. But the company’s bread and butter is still the APUs, which make up about 80 percent of its revenue, with other parts making up the rest, said Thomas.
When airplane APUs fail Tag Aero can provide another unit for rental that can be installed right away so the plane won’t lose flight hours while the APU is repaired.
Often, rather than going to the trouble of taking the borrowed unit out and installing another one later, companies tend to just buy the “loaner,” Thomas said. Then Tag Aero repairs the broken unit and resells it if it is salvagable. If it isn’t, the parts that are good are sold separately.
Thomas said he chose Winter Garden because he lives in the community and because it has excellent access to the entire Orlando area.
The Winter Garden Commerce Center has become home to a handful of other companies in the past year, including Therom King, Barrier One and LVS.
Teresa Burney can be reached at Teresaburney4@gmail.com or at 352 455 1955.
