The world of private aviation marketing savants may not be accustomed to reaching into the well of 1980’s cult television, but . . . . sometimes we must. Not only that, smart people who study strategy and management have shown that Faceman, Hannibal, B.A. and Murdock have something larger than themselves to share with us.
If the management of any company were to define risk as the integration of different business units and how well they perform together, the A-Team is one of the best examples of the typical integration of those units. To use the “your business as an engine” analogy…. any contemporary engine, be it a diesel or turbine engine, has a lot of moving parts. As long as they all do their job (to the tolerances the engineer specified) then the goal of power output is achieved. The failure or degradation of one part, however, especially at 4,000 or 40,000 RPM, can lead to disaster or in a best case scenario, tremendous inefficiency.
That is what makes the A-Team such an interesting case study: Knowingly putting themselves into high risk (a/k/a 40,000 RPM situations) time and again, they always come out unscathed in their wonderfully scripted cartoon explosion and action fueled episodes. In fact the recipe for their rising action, confrontation and solution is also classically defined and continued. (There are websites that allow you to build your own episode.) A local tech pundit even quipped, “The casting for the show was seemingly done out of some MIT Sloan School of Management playbook.”
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Popularity: 7%
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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Popularity: 9%
Sifting through my inbox lately leads to a lot of despair. Fuel & Jet-A malaise, the economy, the climate, the dwindling US Dollar, the tragedies never stop. News and media folks (myself included I suppose) are more drawn to dark stuff. Frankly, it sells better. Because of this trend, there is a whole new generation of millennials who were born into an era where the news is always bad and everything is shocking so that at the end of the day, nothing is really that shocking.
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Popularity: 16%
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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Popularity: 22%
The biggest farce floating around the industry, be it airline, air charter or air taxi, is the moaning and wailing regarding Jet-A. Yes, it is expensive. Yes, it has gone up…. ok, it has gone up A LOT.
I hate to say it, but the Jet-A price increase isn’t the reason people are going out of business, or a reason to lay people off. It is an opportunity for the truly transparent to shine.
Fuel (or any cost you have) is not a reason for customers who need you, value you, etc. to ditch you. If you opt for the car instead of the plane, guess what? You’ll still get clobbered on price. Fuel is a very integral part of our lives. It is even raising the cost of my beloved avocados. But I’ll still buy them and look to cut somewhere else, like the avocados draped across the sushi I spend money on like an idiot.
(Hard times tend to be harder on the idiots.)
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Popularity: 39%
I don’t know why Andy Rooney bugs me so much, but a recent airline bashing piece finally brought my Rooney focus into better and more obvious light.
Andy is upset about the airlines - so are we, we get that. The problem of running an efficient, profitable, and “expectation exceeding” airline is not an easy one to solve. The problem with rants of this sort is that as old as Andy is, he is beginning to suffer from simple amnesia.
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Popularity: 32%
The problem with hype is that it can really get away from you. Salespeople often require lots of fantastic premises and a careful architecture of quasi logic and emotional zingers to keep the potential customers slack jawed and credulous. Dayjet (of all air taxi schemes) was actually the one that had the best hope of “working.” Nonetheless, Dayjet’s most recent big news has reminded us of one critical thing: True “Air Taxi” is a tough sell - not so much to future passengers, but the darn investors you need to fuel up the venture in the first place.
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Popularity: 49%
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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Popularity: 46%
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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Popularity: 43%
The Survival of Part 135 Companies in a Fractional Market
Adam was helping me understand a client file the other day, when something odd struck me:
Fractional ownership of jets has eclipsed private air charter.
The funny thing about this trend is that despite the lack of scalability or profitability within many fractional firms, the reality is that many customers seem to prefer to consume their private aircraft experience one of three ways:
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Popularity: 56%