Héroux-Devtek’s Gilles Labbé has taken some hard knocks on the road to aerospace greatness

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There comes a time when people know it’s time to take a different path. The crossroads for Gilles Labbé appeared in the corners of Quebec hockey rinks in the mid-1970s, when the rangy, 1.9-metre left winger, with a goal scorer’s touch in junior hockey’s top tier, kept bumping into goons. “Bums,” he recalled, ones with beards and mayhem in mind.

“If you remember, in those days, the Philadelphia Flyers were winning the Stanley Cup,” he said, referring to the notorious squad nicknamed the Broad Street Bullies. “Every team had a goon or two, and these guys will not fight the five-foot-guys, so I was going to the corner, not touching anybody, and then a big guy with a beard and all that would rub his glove in front of me and I’d have to fight him.”

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Labbé played along with hockey’s pugilistic rituals for a few years, but he understood his odds of making the big league were growing increasingly long, while his enthusiasm for getting slugged in the kisser was lacking. In other words, he needed a plan B, and going to university to become an accountant proved to be it.

“At the end of the day, I think it was a good decision,” he said.

Was it ever. Earlier this year, the now 68-year-old was found rubbing shoulders at a gathering of aerospace all-stars at the Living Legends of Aviation awards in Salzburg, Austria. Think of the Oscars, only applied to airplanes and such, and you get the idea. It is in this arena that Labbé would emerge as an elite global player.

The trip to Austria was to collect an “aviation industry leader” award bestowed upon a hockey guy who grew up to be a legend in landing gear manufacturing, a vital piece of technology most travellers never pay much attention to, at least between landing and take-off.

But the technology is at the core of Labbé’s company, Longueuil, Que.-based Héroux-Devtek Inc., which employs about 2,000 people worldwide, has 15 facilities, generated $630 million in revenue in fiscal 2024, and makes and designs landing gear for big-name commercial and military customers.

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“There is not one large OEM in the world that builds airplanes or helicopters that we don’t do business with,” he said.

That business includes working on special projects for the United States Air Force that are so secret that Labbé doesn’t know what planes he is providing the landing gear for look like.

The name Héroux may ring a bell among space exploration history buffs. Héroux built the landing gear for the Apollo 11 lunar mission, but by the early 1980s, it was languishing beneath the corporate ownership of Bombardier Inc.

Labbé was witness to the inertia as the 29-year-old head of the finance department, but he saw potential when he looked around the place. He had no money, and arguably no sense, but he had the idea that he and his manager, Sarto Richer, who likewise had no money, should borrow $10 million from the bank and buy Héroux from Bombardier. The rest, as they say, is landing gear manufacturing history.

Within nine months of closing the deal, the company’s order backlog had grown tenfold to $150 million. Forty years and several acquisitions later, Héroux-Devtek’s customers include Airbus SE, Lockheed-Martin Corp., Boeing Co. and, yes, Bombardier, together with several branches of the American and European militaries.

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Of course, the entrepreneurial road, from two guys getting a bank loan to the international awards circuit, was not straight. At points in between, it was racked by turbulence.

One of the early hiccups, Labbé said, was convincing the big players, such as Lockheed-Martin, to ditch their tried-and-tested landing gear supplier and award a contract to a Quebec-based manufacturer, which led to his No. 1 rule for entrepreneurs: If a potential customer says “no” nine times, go back and pitch them a tenth. If they say no again, call back and try to arrange another meeting.

“The most important thing as an entrepreneur is you need to be resilient, and I don’t give up easy,” he said. “A ‘no’ from a customer is only a delayed ‘yes.’”

But even signing lots of customers initially doesn’t guarantee they will climb aboard the next time. That leads to lesson No. 2 for aspiring entrepreneurs: business can’t always be counted on to be good.

Héroux-Devtek went on a tear for the better part of a decade after Labbé took over. But then the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the company’s military business took a nosedive. The end of the Cold War coincided with the onset of a recession in the early 1990s, and commercial aviation contracts became equally scarce.

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To make a fraught situation even worse, Héroux-Devtek’s employees went on strike. A company that had only known profit under Labbé’s leadership started to lose piles of money.

“I have never met an entrepreneur who hasn’t had to overcome a problem,” he said.

The solutions were neither pretty nor fun. People lost their jobs. The company went into survival mode, but contracts eventually started coming back. Times improved, Héroux made some key acquisitions and rebranded as Héroux-Devtek.

By scaling up, Labbé had more resources at his disposal and a bigger international footprint, leading to another one of his entrepreneurial lessons: To swim with the big fish, you are going to need to grow beyond Canada and establish an international presence.

“Size matters, meaning the more size, when things get tough, the more resources you have to manage through those times,” he said.

Where growth ultimately became tricky for the company was shopping for American aerospace outfits trading on U.S. stock exchanges at a greater multiple than Héroux-Devtek had on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

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The accountant couldn’t buy something he couldn’t afford and that his shareholders wouldn’t agree to anyway.

In order to gain access to the type of capital required to keep growing, Héroux-Devtek in July announced it was being bought by a New York private-equity player, Platinum Equity Advisors LLC. The $1.35-billion deal pays Héroux-Devtek investors $32.50 a share, a 28.4 per cent premium, and is expected to close at the end of March.

Labbé will remain in his current post as executive chairman, as will the rest of the senior management team.

“We want to be able to continue to grow the business, and so I look at the deal as a new beginning,” he said.

The old hockey player hosted a 50th anniversary party for some of his former teammates in Montreal not long ago. The gang, as hockey players do, quickly reverted to their wisecracking, dressing-room ways of yore and pinned their host with a new nickname.

“The guys started calling me ‘The Legend,’” Labbé said and then laughed.

The legend’s parting lesson for budding entrepreneurs is rooted in the game he grew up playing and left after one too many pokes in the nose: Great players can win a game by themselves, but “great teams win championships.”

Put another way: To get ahead in landing gear, or anything else, you need to build a great team.

• Email: joconnor@postmedia.com

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