Welcome to Flightinfo.com

  • Register now and join the discussion
  • Friendliest aviation Ccmmunity on the web
  • Modern site for PC's, Phones, Tablets - no 3rd party apps required
  • Ask questions, help others, promote aviation
  • Share the passion for aviation
  • Invite everyone to Flightinfo.com and let's have fun

Marketing yourself as a CFI

Welcome to Flightinfo.com

  • Register now and join the discussion
  • Modern secure site, no 3rd party apps required
  • Invite your friends
  • Share the passion of aviation
  • Friendliest aviation community on the web

13579ms

Member
Joined
Jul 3, 2002
Posts
20
I'm a rookie CFI looking for a CFI job. Their isn't much out there. I was wondering how to market myself to be a succesful freelance instructor. I was thinking of business cards to begin. I'm just wondering where I would put them? I don't know much about self-employment. I don't have a plane either so I would have to find someone to rent from or find a student with their own plane.
Thanks for the help. Any suggestions on marketing would be appreciated.
 
CONGRATS on the CFI Certificate!

Some ideas:

Hang out at the local flight school to be a substitute CFI. Advertise in the paper for BFRs/IPCs, an hour of free flight instruction, and so on. Find out if the local avionics shop needs someone to train their techs and owners of new avionics. Do some drive-by flight instructing. Wear your NAFI pin and airplane necktie everywhere. Offer to work for free at the local flight school 'til they like you and are willing to pay you (I’ll work here for a week, and if you like me, then we can talk pay).

Or get into your car/airplane and show up on flight school doorsteps a few towns away. www.climbto350.com has some listings.

One of the best ways, although time-consuming at the start, to get students is to teach a ground school. If you want advanced students, teach an instrument ground school. Or commercial. Or multiengine. If you want primary students, teach a private pilot ground school.

Make that ground school a winner with enthusiasm, correct -accurate information, and easy ways to understand some very difficult material and those students will want YOU to be their instructor.

Someone's already doing a ground school at your FBO? Give some WINGS Seminars. Not the old, tired, oh-my-gawd-this-sux topics, but on current information. How to avoid TFRs. How to master a GPS. Give it a catchy title. Tell stories. Use HUMOR.

Specialize. It'll give you a new challenge. You are problem solving, not instructing. Get good and students will start seeking you out.

1. Conquer the GPS, TCAD, Wx RADAR, etc.
2. Go hang out at avionics shops until the techs try to apprentice you.
3. Raise your rates. Now you don't have to work as hard for the same dough.
4. Take a weekend off!

My rate for GPS IFR certification flights runs from $75-150 per hour depending on how many units need to be certified.

Then someone has to train the aircraft pilots on how to use the equipment. It takes 40 hours of use before most folks feel comfortable. Competency is around 5-10 hours on the ground and 5-10 hours in the air, in some very nicely equipped airplanes.

During the Great Depression there was a fellow that couldn't find a job either. He sat down and thought about it for a long time. No one would give him a job.

Give him a job. Why? Why would a business that is doing their best to stay open want to hire another person? Why more overhead when tomorrow looks for them to be laying off already loyal employees?

So he found out what those businesses needed, and marketed himself to fit those needs.

So, what do flight schools need?

Answer: Students

Bring most flight schools even one student that stays beyond lesson one and you'll have a job. Bring five students and you'll be a full-time CFI.

The general consensus for those schools staying in business out here is the marketing efforts are only enough to keep current instructors from starving.

The trick is to be different from the 100 applications sitting on the desk, actually, I have over 200 on mine. How to be different. . .

Bring in a student, you’ll be hired.

Expect to starve for the first three months while working up a student load. Then you will be busy. If you are not, something is wrong and it's time to sit back, think, and figure out why. Hint: The answer usually appears in the mirror.

Those suggestions are tried and true from this time period, and from the 1990's where regional airlines were NOT hiring. Not all suggestions will work together, not all suggestions will work at all.

To offer to work for free means showing up in person, ready to work, ready to call four dozen students whose BFRs are due in order to build up a workload, and to not whine in the owner's presence about having to lift one bloody finger to the telephone and make calls. A standing deal at a few flight schools is the CFI that makes the calls gets the first pick of the students the calls generate. I only know of one school that pays, and can afford to pay, their CFIs to work telephones.

Some schools had large waiting lists last summer, no, not summer 2001, summer 2002, of students that there were not enough CFIs to serve. Find those schools and call up the waiting list. Not everyone on that list still wants to fly, right now, but some might.

It's all about marketing yourself -- marketing to the student, marketing to the flight school owner.

Jay Levinson’s “Guerilla Marketing” is a good start.
Greg Brown’s “The Savvy CFI” is next.
If you want the higher end clients, “Dress for Success” and “Selling to the Affluent” need to be well read.

Look around for Wings Weekends, or the powered flight academies that Civil Air Patrol offers to their cadets. Any Young Eagles need a flight? Or an Angel Flight Chapter that lacks a check/instructor pilot? How about ensuring your credentials are in order for the sport pilot certificates by becoming an ultralight/sport pilot instructor?

For business cards, have you ever seen Rich Stowell’s? It’s a full color shot of an inverted Decathlon. How about a web site? Are you an AOPA Project Pilot Instructor? NAFI Member?

Even if “hired” as an instructor, unless you are at one of the huge flight schools, you will carry some responsibility for marketing and generating students,

Hope this helps.

Anyone else with ideas?

Fly SAFE!
Jedi Nein
 

Latest resources

Back
Top