Starting a flight school.

[nosehair]

Take a look at Starbucks, Norstrum's, Amazon.com, Best Buy, and McDonald's. Try and figure out how to make your customers feel just as good as your school as they do about those businesses.

The level of non-customer service at 99.9% of all flight schools in the world just staggers the mind.

While I agree that customer service should be a much higher priority at most FBO/Schools, these businesses are not good models to study. We are not selling burgers and coffee.

We are selling a very high level of personal competency and proficiency, which is very different in each person/customer that walks/calls in to your business.

Much like a Doctor/Lawyer business. And how is the customer service at those places?...eeexpensive!

 

[Amish RakeFight]

oh and uhh,....if you don't want some student publishing his online journal about your shady maintenance practices, make sure your maintence is at least acceptable.

 

[JimNtexas]

...
Much like a Doctor/Lawyer business. And how is the customer service at those places?...eeexpensive!

I respectfully disagree. People have to put up with poor customer service and insanely high prices from their lawyers and doctors because doctors and lawyers benefit from being members of goverment enforced monopoloy guilds.

A flight school is far more like a retail establishment than a law or medical practice. Sometimes you have to deal with lawyers and doctors, regardless of your liking it or not.

Nobody has to take flying lessons. They have to want to take flying lessons. And they have to want flying lessons more than they want a boat, motorcycle, HDTV, or vacation to Europe.

A flight school is a retail business, not a professional practice.

ETA: "Retail" doesn't have anything to do with product price. Lexis dealers are great retailers.

 

[AC560]

Nobody has to take flying lessons.

You just have to trick them into buying $10000 of block time after their first ride.

Good flight schools where you care about your students don't make money (or very, very, very rarely do). ********************ty flight schools that screw the students, the instructors, and use crappy equipment make money. At least that has been my perception.

 

[Andrew_VT]

You just have to trick them into buying $10000 of block time after their first ride.

Good flight schools where you care about your students don't make money (or very, very, very rarely do). ********************ty flight schools that screw the students, the instructors, and use crappy equipment make money. At least that has been my perception.

Hmm, this got me thinking. Dont call yourself a "school", but "Rally's flight ACADEMY"

Look at DCA and all those other academy programs, they know how to milk the parents of little rich rich kids out of 50-100 grand easy!!!

Find lazy high school seniors with less than great grades who are already primed for spending $50k+. Convince them that you are a viable alternative to 4 years of college. While their peers are taking exams, they'll be flying high!

 

[nosehair]

Lexis dealers are great retailers.

I'm 'with you' 100%. We should operate like Lexi$ dealer$. All it takes is money. That is the bottom line reason (except for the unscrupulous) FBO/Schools cannot provide the customer service most people would expect from a flying school business.

Did you notice how many posters said "fuel and insurance will eat you alive"?

It takes big money to hire quality personnel to spend hours and hours talking to "interested people" who never buy a service or who quit after 1 or 2 lessons. People don't just flock in "wanting' to fly. Some do. I did. Probably you did. But, I am personally very surprised at the number of people who 'start' because of surface reasons (money, babes, social status, purely transportation convenience, etc.) who quit or require so much personal attention, like baby sitting, that they are not profitable.

Unless we could operate it like a Lexis dealer.

There are no Lexis dealers across the street who will give you a "Special Deal" and undercut another dealer by thousands of dollars.

That is our problem in this business: FBO/Schools who have no customer service, and no profesional instructors, and poor maintainance, who advertise "Airline Pilot Jobs Guaranteed for $19, 995".

However. There is a light at the end of this tunnel. The Information Age.
Online reports of these type of operators hopefully will bring them to their knees, and we will be able to provide good qualty training with good customer servive at the rightful price that it costs with a reasonable profit.

To the Original Poser: Are you getting a feel for the problems that go with the 'normal' school that sells 'normal' training for certificates and ratings?
That's why I made the original suggestion about 'tailwheel' training. The sharks don't live in that pond. That's not an Airline Mill.

That's a nich waiting to be filled, ie, Sport Pilot.

Insurance will still eat you up, but fuel won't be as bad.

 

[gsrcrsx68]

Creating a market as opposed to serving a market is an almost insurmountable task. The tailwheel idea would be the hardest way to go, in my opinion.

 

[FlyingToIST]

Tailwheel will not do anything. The market is not large enough to justify that unless you are a very famous tailwheel instructor that can take students from all over the place. The insurance in this case will increase more than 5 times.
On top of this, if people are not able to rent it, what's the point?

This business is becoming harder and harder to make money unless you are promising the world, delivering a zip code and getting $50K + prepaid customers.

 

[flyin'gator]

i just spent a bunch of money on my private and instrument ratings over the past year in florida as well. i am also a small business owner. when searching for a flight school i was shocked to see the way these operations were generally run. it takes a lot of time and cash to learn to fly proficiently and safely. most flight schools that i looked at were unprofessional at best, with customer service that would put most small firms out of business very quickly. also not one marketed itself effectively. To attract the type of people who can afford training, you need to go out and target your market. I have been extremely happy with the fbo i trained with, my only comment is it seems insane that cfi's are not paid enough to attract and retain talent. i would have gladly paid a living wage to a cfi with an atp rating instead of someone with a paper commercial certificate. soon it will cost so much to train that only those with extreme wealth will be able to do it. these guys should not balk at higher instruction rates if you can show them that an experienced cfi will be able to transfer more knoweledge that may save their ass one day. just my 02.

 

[AC560]

I have been extremely happy with the fbo i trained with, my only comment is it seems insane that cfi's are not paid enough to attract and retain talent.

CFI's get paid a low wage in part to make them run up the hours to make a living wage (which benefits the school because they take 50%+ of the CFI's fee). The central business plan of any flight school I have seen is get a person in, get him to drop as much as you can in block time, and bleed him dry. The business model is hey you have spent $4k already trying to get your license if you quit now you lose all the time/money you have invested. I always equate running a flight school to selling used cars.

Just to add if you are going to start a flight school, simulator time and ground instruction is were the $$$ is at.