Dive into serial entrepreneur Matt Liotta’s experience navigating mergers, acquisitions and public offerings with multiple companies. Liotta, the co-founder of Volato, a fractional jet company he took public through a SPAC, chats with Tom Singh of Merrill Lynch about the strategic decisions behind scaling Volato, as well as the lesson’s he’s learned about structuring deals, adapting business models, and maintaining innovation in a competitive market. Here’s an excerpt:
“What I learned in that process was that if I was going to start another business, which I did, I was going to be ready from day one, knowing everything I knew about going public, so that my business was ready to go public whenever we wanted. And so, for example, when I started volatile, my co-founder and I, we said, ‘We're going to immediately establish a board with an independent member. We're going to do audited financials. We're going to maintain an up to date data room all the time, just constantly be ready to go.’ And that served us really well. So, the last company, it took us about two years, and we were able to, in the case of Volato, announce the deal and be trading on New York Stock Exchange in six months.”
