With everything in our world that points to higher, faster, farther, and more as being superior, when is smaller, simpler, and downsized actually better?
As a flight school operator, you're in the service business. Or put another way, you're in the peoplebusiness. While you may spend a lot of time keeping your airplanes safe and legal, making sure your books balance each month, and figuring out new ways to get students in the door, you may be losing more than you think through lackluster customer service.
Just because your school may not be university-affiliated or a large Part 141 outfit, doesn't mean that you shouldn't be very thorough about setting expectations about what's to come. Your school should have its process for setting expectations for a new flight student.
If we can look beyond some of what we prefer not to emulate from heavy-duty sales organizations (e.g. used car dealerships and time share properties), there is still a lot to learn from them.
It's a great time of year to take stock in what your school has in the way of basic sales skills and review the least common denominators for effectively selling any service, widget, or product.
A Cessna 182RG owner once dubbed aviation "the last bastion of coolness in the business world." If we're going to believe and uphold that kind of legacy, we've got fully realize what it is we're actually selling.
In the last segment, we took a closer look at how some customers new to the aviation training environment may see the larger commitment of a private pilot certificate daunting, and how offering a solo-only program or a Gemini-based training program could help to mitigate some concerns about the range of commitments required to start flight training.
Newcomers to your school (and aviation) are often compelled to set foot into a big commitment in order to play in the flight training sandbox. For some newcomers, this big-ticket commitment is a barrier to starting with you.
