When we sent this out in January 2009, we had already laid much of the ground work for www.jetowner.com.
The trick with marketing in the private aviation space is knowing a couple of things:
- The Internet is big - Too big.Think of it like the ocean and of the 34 billion herring in the sea. There are 34,000 that might need your aviation service. Hunting them via pay per click campaigns, etc., is almost guaranteeing you to spend more on each client than they generate for you.
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While many FBO and air charter folk may defend the alphabet groups for all the “good work” they do in Washington on our collective behalf, I have to admit the evidence is weak - especially when it comes to the world that I work in: People who charter airplanes, buy fuel and aircraft. That’s who feeds me.
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As autumn fades and the first flurries have begun to descend on New England, I’ve taken time to reflect on the behavior of honey bees.
Since early spring they have been racing around my yard, buzzing from flower to flower in an orgiastic frenzy of pollination. In fact, they would regularly glut themselves to drunkenness. It was as if they had no idea that fall would come, flowers would shrivel and die, and that nothing would remain to sustain them through the coming winter.
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Nothing makes one as smug as seeing news that you were right.
One of the benefits of aging is gaining that increased confidence of being able to smell trouble, point it out and know you’re right. When you make the right decisions, you get to avoid all the pain, headache and cost of those grander blunders you might have made in the past.
While mistakes cost us a lot, the key is surviving and learning from them. This is what makes the subject of Sentient facing liquidity problems so interesting. How could you be slow paying your vendors when you’ve already collected the money up front?
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It always amuses me when I approach new clients and am told, “Our marketing strategy is great, we don’t need you”. I always have to bite my tongue and come up short of saying, “Yeah, well prove it”.
It is a tired cliche, but still a truism: The proof is in the pudding. Any restaurant owner will tell you their pudding is the best, but if they never see it leave the kitchen and never chat with the customers, how do they know?
All too often folks assume that because they have a marketing strategy or have hired someone to do it for them they are covered, the job is done. However, without any form of tracking you never really know.
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Being a German workaholic, my father came to America in the late 60’s with a few hundred bucks (most of which disappeared into the pockets of his fellow immigrant taxi driver upon arrival in New York). Nevertheless, he retired a successful business man with a multi-million dollar company. As I was reminded daily as a child, he worked his butt off doing everything he could to succeed, and built a plastics company from the ground up. Nothing was given- everything was earned. It was this obsession with perpetual labor that convinced me that this was a man who would never retire. Nothing shy of death would stop the man who was impervious to the concept of “time off” from not clocking in 6 to 7 days a week. Needless to say, it came as a surprise when I got that late summer phone call telling me he was selling the company and calling it quits.
Dad was quick to allay my fears of terminal illness or dementia. Ultimately, it was marketing that got him in the end. Dad always took care of everything for himself, trusting none but his two giant, calloused hands to cover ever detail from turning the heat on in the morning to firing up the machinery, then into the front office donning a suit and tie to shake hands, wheel and deal, and watch the business boom. Then the playing field changed.
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Realistically, there are few similarities between these institutions.
Eclipse Aviation is a privately funded aircraft manufacturer. The British Empire is… well, we assume you all know who “they” are. The common thread, that binds them, however, is our good friend Mahatma Ghandi who famously offered:
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Recently, I was reading up on some amphibious / float aircraft I was interested in operating on the river near Montreal. (I suffer from SAFWL - Seasonally Affective Floatplane Wanderlust.)
Naturally this is all fantasy talk, since f*&$%ing Google has not yet acquired our company. Until that time, I’ll spend a little bit of time talking with Jim …
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Normally my blog is reserved for marketing rants and raves, but being one that must (from time to time) actually fly airplanes and safely get people from “a to b,” I couldn’t help not writing a quick homage to Dean Andrew and what he did off the threshold of a runway in Kodiak, AK after a plane crashed into the cold Pacific on Saturday Jan. 5th, 2008.
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We used to joke about this. We still do actually, but we’re fixing that last part. We might be right and frequently ignored, but we’ll get paid to stay in the corner with the geeky kids that quietly build a future that affords better sleep.
Why this post today? Maybe it was the news that Eclipse is laying off folks which reminded me of the Flighttime debacle of 2002. You have to love an industry that is driven by emotions, financial obscurity and whipped into a frenzy by magicians who bring you great flying things & programs. When Flighttime went bust in 2002 it was a classic case of the “double trouble bubble” kafuffle.
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