When a big outfit like Echo Bay's Springer Aerospace Holdings Ltd. rolls off the runway, it can take a lot of high-priced help to move it back onto the fiscal straight and narrow.
A SooToday review of invoices submitted so far in Springer's insolvency proceedings shows professional fees from the court-appointed turnaround team and its lawyers are expected to approach half a million dollars for half a year's work.
Earning as much as $750 an hour, team members scoured the planet, searching for anyone willing and able to save the troubled aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul business.
Even law clerk/students working on the Springer file have been billing between $255 and $425 an hour.
This high-priced global search didn’t find a single credible buyer.
Just as it was starting to look like the half-century-old business would have to close, with its airport, hangars and other assets liquidated at a fraction of their collective worth, a mud-dripping Laird Township farmer walked in the front door.
Vic Fremlin wasn't one of the 350 potential investors approached by the turnaround experts.
He was just Springer's next-door neighbour.
Fremlin had been clearing some land he owns next to the Springer Aerospace location.
He'd heard about the problems there, and decided to check up on his long-time friend Dan Springer, who founded the aerospace company in 1972 at the site of the now-defunct Sault Flying Club.
Fremlin tells SooToday he was so covered in mud as he walked through the building to his friend's office, that he looked for all the world like he was there to pick up the garbage.
But after his old friend told him he was about to lose the business, it was Fremlin and his brother Tom who put together the $5.5 million deal that saved Springer Aerospace.
It took a couple of Laird Township farm-boys, Springer's next-door neighbours, to do what some of the nation's finest restructuring wizards had failed to accomplish.
Both men are known from their Northshore Tractor Ltd. dealership nearby.
Vic also owns Lock City Dairies in Sault Ste. Marie.
"Everything seems to be panning out [at Springer Aerospace] pretty good right now. It's kind of early to get too cocky," Fremlin told SooToday on Monday, phoning from the cab of his tractor with agribusiness on his mind.
His tractor was stopped to ensure he wasn't guilty of distracted farming.
"We're planting corn and we're planting soy beans. We're going to be planting barley and stuff like that. We've got lots of stuff going on."
"We're combining here today. We've got about four things going on. We opened up our [Lock City Dairies ice cream] scoop shop there in town and it's been crazy busy."
"I've got a big set of high-speed discs on right now. They come from Turkey. They run around nine miles an hour. They do a really nice job of making a seed bed and packing it. It's the first year I've got this machine. It's all new technology now."
Switching to his new role as an aerospace executive, Fremlin concedes there was mismanagement at Springer.
"Now, that's all behind us," he says.
"Dan Springer's back there. He's the original owner. He's the guy who started it. His wife's there helping him too."
"Dan's the key guy. Fifty years of experience. Where do you buy that?"
Christopher Grant, who was Springer's chief executive officer at the time of its failure, now has a different role in the company.
"He's more in sales now. He's out of day-to-day management. He's working out of Sudbury," Fremlin says.
"He's a tremendous salesperson. He does sales around the world. We rely on him for that."
Right now, Springer has 67 employees, down from 100 previously.
"I usually go there every day, just to see what's going on. I don't have any decisions to make on the day-to-day stuff, just the business stuff," Fremlin says.
"That's what I do. Make sure it's done the way I think is appropriate in business. My brother Tom and I talk about it quite a bit during the day at Northshore [Tractors]."
Springer's accounting is now done by Suzanne Luck of Priddle-Luck Professional Corp., which handles Fremlin's other businesses: Northshore Tractors, Lock City Dairies and Diamond J. Farms.
"This is a new experience for me," Fremlin says.
"I'm used to new things. I started the dairy. I started Northshore. It's not my first trip around. I usually listen lots. Try not to talk too much. Gather the facts and then process."
"I go once a day. I talk to Dan. We make a few decisions."
"When you're in a new business, you make more right decisions by listening than by talking."
"We have the employees that have stuck by the business, who are still there. They're quite happy that the business got saved. And the community's happy, so the whole thing turned out to be a win-win situation for everybody."