Cast your mind back to 2020. What were you doing to break up the monotony of lockdown?

Binging Tiger King on Netflix? 

Baking questionable banana bread? 

Pretending Zoom quizzes counted as a social life?

Whatever your lockdown coping mechanism was, we all had one thing in common: we weren’t boarding planes - and for airlines, that was a huge problem.

The impact was immediate… Flight schedules vanished overnight. Entire fleets sat motionless on the tarmac, depreciating by the day.

The knee-jerk reaction for most airlines was to shrink: fewer flights, fewer staff, fewer commitments. Everything that could be paused, postponed or cancelled… was.

easyJet made a different call, however. 

It strengthened its balance sheet with new funding and used that stability to map out growth opportunities for the recovery, rather than retreating like many of its rivals.

If you’re an SME founder considering a raise in turbulent times (or even in favourable market conditions, for that matter), this is the model worth paying attention to.

Skimming this while pretending to work? Here’s the short version:

1/ easyJet raised £1B early in COVID, before panic pricing set in and before funding became expensive or unavailable.

2/ They used that capital to lie low operationally but plan aggressively, lining up routes, slots and deals while competitors were frozen.

3/ When travel returned, they launched at exactly the right moment - opening new bases, adding 200+ routes and capturing market share others had abandoned.

4/ For SMEs, the lesson isn’t “raise in a crisis”. It’s raise before you start to look desperate, use quiet periods to prepare and time your move so you’re ready when demand comes back.

Before we get into the funding, it’s worth setting the scene.

When COVID hit, the aviation industry didn’t so much slow down as face-plant. Borders closed, demand collapsed by up to 90% and airlines found themselves burning through millions per day just to exist. 

The majority of carriers responded in the most predictable way possible: emergency layoffs, grounded aircraft, scrapped routes, funding pleas and frantic calls to anyone with a government email address.

The strategy was basically to sit tight and hope this whole thing blew over - fast. 

easyJet, on the other hand, spotted something the rest missed.

Instead of treating the crisis as something to simply endure, they focused on stabilising the business first, then positioning it for whatever came next. 

The funding strategy reflected that thinking, and they raised capital in two deliberate phases.

Put simply:

Debt kept the operation intact.

Equity created forward momentum.

And that sequencing turned out to matter far more than most airlines realised at the time.

It’s worth noting that easyJet’s balance sheet wasn’t flawless, but it was strong enough to act. And in a market crash, that’s all you need. 

With over £1B raised and locked in early, easyJet could act on openings that competitors simply couldn’t touch:

Between 2020 and 2025, they expanded:

easyJet was building for the rebound all the while other carriers were making cuts. The payoff shows up clearly:

Yes, it’s impressive what easyJet pulled off (and absolutely worth studying). 

But with travel booming again, Ryanair isn’t exactly limping either, especially when they can turn a £19 fare into a £68 experience using nothing but add-ons and audacity.

Raising money to “survive” (PHASE 1) and then using it to expand (PHASE 2) looks suspicious. Whether it actually is depends entirely on what investors were told upfront.

If a company promises the money will only be used for survival, then spends it on growth - that can be classed as misleading. It can slip into fraudulent misrepresentation, and courts don’t like that. Investors like it even less.

But there’s a real grey area.

Once capital is inside the business, directors don’t serve individual shareholders. They serve the company, and the law expects them to act in its long-term best interests. 

If circumstances change - which it did every five minutes during COVID - directors are allowed to change how funds are used, as long as they weren’t dishonest during the raise.

That’s why intent is key here:

“We’re raising to survive, and if something interesting comes up, we’ll be sensible about it” - perfectly fine. 

“We will only use this money for survival” followed by a hidden expansion plan - not fine.

 In easyJet’s case, the shift from survival to strategy happened quickly, across two raises (as a commenter points out on my LinkedIn post below), and the messaging evolved with the situation. 

Hard to call that deceptive.

Another key point here is that investors only get angry when the outcome is bad. If a pivot works, no one sues. Given easyJet is now profitable and expanding faster than rivals, it’s safe to say nobody feels misled.

So yes - using crisis capital for growth can raise eyebrows. Whether it raises lawyers depends almost entirely on how honestly the original story was told and whether the results justify the pivot.

You don’t need a billion quid, a fleet of planes or a CEO title to learn from what easyJet just pulled off.

When an industry collapses - like aviation did in 2020 - it’s easy to assume the opportunity has disappeared.

That’s the wrong lens.

Crashes don’t close opportunity windows. 

They reprice them.

COVID was a global macro crash. Travel, in particular, was hit hard. But that didn’t mean growth was suddenly impossible - it meant the cost of growth changed.

Hiring gets cheaper.

Competitors retreat from key markets.

Suppliers become flexible.

Assets that were previously locked up suddenly come loose.

The mistake most businesses make is treating a downturn as a signal to stop moving.

The better question is: what is the pricing of opportunity now, compared to before?

easyJet understood this.

As the market froze, conditions shifted in their favour. Pilots were suddenly available. Airport slots opened up. Suppliers who once held all the leverage were open to better terms.

The opportunity never vanished. It just got cheaper.

For SMEs, the same dynamic plays out at a smaller scale:

A downturn doesn’t remove your ability to grow - it changes the trade-off.

If your strategy is clear and your funding gives you breathing room, these moments can be the most attractive time to move, not the worst.

I bring up this point in nearly every Bankrolling Tomorrow newsletter, which shows how important it is. 

easyJet didn’t raise money because they were already in trouble. They raised before things looked desperate - while the balance sheet still looked solid and the business was defensible on paper.

That timing changed everything.

Because they raised early, the money wasn’t just a life raft to stop the business sinking. It became dry powder - capital they could actually use, not just cling to.

It bought them breathing room. 

Time to think. 
Time to plan. 
Time to make calm decisions instead of reactive ones.

If they’d waited a few more months, that same raise would have looked very different. The risk would have been higher, the leverage would have shifted and the cost of capital would have jumped - assuming funding was available at all.

The same rule applies to SMEs. When you raise early, you negotiate from strength and you get better terms and you give yourself enough breathing room to make decisions calmly. 

So, my advice would be to not hang around…

When a crisis hits, most CEOs panic and try to pivot into something "disruptive" like selling sourdough starter or NFTs. 

easyJet had the discipline to realise that their original plan - flying people around Europe for cheap - was still a perfectly good idea. Demand had paused, not disappeared. 

So instead of changing the destination (of their business plan, I mean), they focused on the execution. They protected their core business, prepared for the moment travel returned and had the patience to wait it out. 

Your takeaway → a downturn doesn’t automatically mean your strategy is wrong. Sometimes it just means the timeline has shifted. The challenge is knowing what not to change when everything else feels unstable.

Founders often ask whether investors care more about the numbers or the story.

The answer is both, but in a very specific order.

The numbers come first because numbers don’t lie. Mathematics itself can’t lie. People can manipulate or omit things, but the maths tells you one thing very clearly: can this business survive?

That’s the first filter.

From an investor’s point of view, if you bring me a pitch deck and ask for £5-10 million, I want to see three things, in sequence.

First, technical validation. The product works. It exists. You can actually deliver it and bring it to market.

Second, economic validation. People will buy it, and long term, you can sell it for more than it costs you to produce. You might lose money early on, but the underlying equation has to work.

Only then does the third piece matter: story validation. Why should this business exist at all?

Because you’re not pitching in a vacuum. You’re competing against every other use of that investor’s capital - including doing nothing exciting at all. They could put the same money into a government-backed bond and earn 6-8% a year with a much lower risk profile.

So the story has to justify why this opportunity is worth choosing instead.

That story won’t land unless the numbers already say the business is safe. Once survival is proven, investors are far more open to backing a bigger vision - whether that’s patient capital in deep-tech or a long-term brand play in hospitality, property or consumer.

This is exactly what easyJet did.

They proved they could survive the shutdown first. That gave them the credibility - and the permission - to tell a much bigger story about growth and market share once travel returned.

You have to be a safe bet before you can be a big winner.

For SMEs, the takeaway is: lead with proof, then explain why your business deserves to exist on the other side of the crisis.

I’ve started leaving my phone at home when I go for a run. It made me realise how quickly we try to fill any quiet moment with something - music, podcasts, notifications. 

Our attention spans are so shot that silence now feels uncomfortable.

It feels odd at first, but you adjust. You notice your breathing, your pace and what’s around you instead of whatever distraction you’d usually switch on. 

And without constant messages coming in, your brain stops jumping between tasks - it gets a proper reset instead of another form of multitasking.

If you’re a runner, try it. 

Half an hour of silence is not as alarming as we make it.

The easyJet story is a simple reminder: the businesses that act early, raise before they look desperate and keep their long-term plan intact tend to come out of a crisis in a far stronger position than the ones that freeze. 

Downturns don’t delete opportunity; 

they just make it available to fewer people.

If you’re thinking about raising for your own business, this is exactly the moment to understand your options. FundOnion helps you compare lenders quickly so you can secure the right funding before you need to.

Till next time,

James