One Thousand, One Hundred, Ten and One. Organically growing a flight training practice.

When I was a teenager my father would always be hounding me about going to work. He grew up in South Boston during the great depression; quitting high school to drive a truck with a forged Teamsters book at sixteen. He would always prod me whenever he saw me idly hanging around his house. “Get a Job,” he’d say and I’d respond,  “No one is hiring”.  This would infuriate him. He’d yell “ Damn it Sean, it’s the law of averages, one thousand, one hundred, ten and one, knock on a thousand doors, one hundred will open, ten will be serious, one will pay for the effort”.

As I got older I realized it was easier to listen to him and stay out of his way than it was to laze around the house and get screamed at. Fast-forward thirty-five years and even though Dad isn’t with us anymore, I can still hear his words as if it was yesterday. And I think he’d be proud if he knew how much I believe in the law of averages as it relates to marketing and sales.

However,when it comes to flight training,  getting the message out is more difficult than teaching chandelles, lazy eights, or holding pattern entries. Experience is the toughest teacher because you take the test, then learn the lesson. Surviving the test is critical and with a limited marketing budget making mistakes can be costly.

Misspent marketing money is arguably worse than not advertising at all.

We’ve had limited success with print media. Our ads have appeared in the American Bonanza Society, Mooney Aircraft Pilots Association, Aviation Digest, and Atlantic Flyers magazines.   The nice thing about magazines is people can pick them up a various times and see your ad. It’s voluntary, if they don’t like your ad it doesn’t offend them and if it does they simply turn the page. The more popular magazines are very expensive to advertise in which is prohibitive to a business starting up.

Direct mail campaigns can be effective tools. We usually do one a quarter. These are usually oversized postcards. We get the names from the FAA where 14CFR61.60 specifies that pilots must report their address change within thirty days of moving, which keeps the list somewhat current. Each postcard mailing averages around $1.25 per name to send and the best of these yields about a one percent return. Getting a pile of them back as undeliverable or unable to forward is almost as upsetting as realizing that for every one hundred you send ninety nine will find their way into the trash, unread.

Web based advertising is the most cost effective method of delivering the message. A website offers an unlimited palette to hawk one’s wares for a small fixed monthly fee. The challenge with web-based marketing is driving traffic to your site and converting those visitors to customers. I have seen some amazing looking web sites that generate no activity. It’s like having a great billboard on a road that has no traffic.

I’ve kept a blog since I got my flight instructor ticket in 2003, which is a great way to introduce new customers, or prospects to your personality/teaching style without having to meet them in person.  I have had several people tell me that they felt like they already had known Judy and me from reading my blog. Backlinks from the blog to the website help with search engine ranking which is an added benefit. Blog’s like the website, are a low monthly cost (free) and you can place unlimited content on them.

Which brings in direct email. We’ve subscribed to Constant Contact since September 2010 and have found it to be the most cost effective means of distributing our message. I try to send a newsletter and a promotion advertisement out monthly. We started with a four hundred-name database, which has since grown to over twenty six hundred contacts. Email marketing is funny, some people love it and it can enrage many. We limit the amount of mail we send out to satisfy those who like it and to avoid ticking off those who don’t.

This will be sent to 2600 people and of that about two hundred will bounce due to things like mailbox quotas, change of address, people blocking our domain. Of the people who do receive them we average a 39.5% open rate and from that about a 20% click thru rate. One percent opt out using the unsubscribe link on we include to be in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act.

We get a handful of people who report our messages as spam. Many of them will send me a nasty email prior to flagging our mail. Usually the messages are “how dare you” or “Who do you think you are sending me these messages, I’m a former NASA shuttle commander and I could teach you a thing about aviation”.  I respond to each and every one of them. It rarely satisfy's them and we get flagged anyway.

So when we hear about the shrinking pilot population being due to the lack of qualified flight instructors and training centers, remember that there are plenty of good people out there trying to grow their business. Getting their message out to the people who need their services is sometimes a whole lot more difficult to do than providing the instruction itself. Its something I've been learning a whole lot about over the past three years.

To those who've I've flown with thank you for your patronage. For those who I haven't flown with yet, I look forward to the opportunity to do so.