An high-flying aviation school entrepreneur has soared into Australia’s Young Rich List for the first time.
As an ambitious and smart-thinking young flying instructor, Neel Khokhani, then 22, was sacked for telling his boss that his aircraft fleet could be better. With just $5000 in savings, he crowdfunded the purchase of his first plane by selling highly discounted lessons on group buying site Scoopon. He sold $180,000 of vouchers within a day, enough to buy his first plane and start up his own flying school in Melbourne.
Neel Khokhani has made his Australia’s Young Rich List debut. He came to Australia with my parents to study aviation at 16 and had my pilot licence by the age of 18. Neel founded Soar Aviation as a 22-year-old, which is now Australia’s biggest flying school With in four years, the young instructor was questioning his boss about the planes he had after hearing about smaller, cheaper and more efficient aircraft being built in Europe. He told Smart Company earlier this year: ‘Going from $3 million to $12 million — 300 per cent growth — that’s nearly a per cent a day.
If you go for a three week holiday, you come back and the business has completely changed. Coming to Australia as an immigrant and building a something from nothing in such a short space of time has been a huge accomplishment,’ he said. But what I’m most proud of is that in the last two years, the majority of our 65 graduates are now working as pilots for commercial charters or an airline.’ Aviation school entrepreneur Neel Khokhani, 30, has built a $66million fortune. He sold 50 per cent of the company to private equity investor The Growth Fund last year and remains heavily involved as chief executive.
Neel Khokhani has seen his company Soar Aviation grow by almost 600 per cent in the last three years as it nears a turnover of $20 million.