Tag Archives: business

Reuse, Recycle

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And I’m not talking trash.

In this day of Internet publishing, quality content is in very high demand. Freelance writers and bloggers who can create good content can often sell it to new markets. But what’s better than writing for hire is republishing the work you have all rights to on sites looking for inexpensive content.

Recently, I was approached by a publisher who was interested in having me write for their online magazine. While many publishers these days try to get something for nothing from writers, this publisher was willing to pay. And when I offered them a choice of existing content refreshed for publication and new content at twice the price, they went for the existing content.

This is great for me. I’ve been blogging for more than six years and have over 1,900 posts on a variety of topics. One topic — “adventure flying” — has interested the publisher quite a bit. They’re paying me a reasonable amount of money for each post I brush the dust off and send to them for republication. I keep copyright; they get one-time publication rights.

So I’ve gone back to the beginning of this blog and have been pulling out old posts to polish up and send out. I call this recycling and I don’t see anything wrong with it at all. After all, I’m not trying to pass it off as new material. And I can even leave it on my blog.

Today, I spent about 45 minutes on a lounge chair with my laptop next to my mom’s pool and earned an easy $300.

I guess the point I’m trying to get across here is that if you’re a writer with some existing content that you own all rights to, you may be able to find a paying market for that material. The Internet is a big place and publishing on it is cheap. With publishers looking for quality content, why not reuse and recycle some of that old material — and make a few bucks in the process?

Marketing Madness

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I design and assemble 24 copies of a 12-page marketing piece for Flying M Air.

Phoenix Tour
River Tours
Moonlight Dinner Tour
Henry Wickenburg's Legacy
Sedona Tour or Day Trip
Grand Canyon Skywalk
Grand Canyon Day Trip
Meteor Crater

The Arizona tourist season is starting and will be in full-swing by mid November. That means it’s time for me to meet with Phoenix and Scottsdale hotel and resort concierges to make sure they’re aware of Flying M Air’s tours and day trips and to make it easy to sell them for me.

With the relocation of my helicopter from Wickenburg to a base much closer to my customers, I was able to cut prices on all of my tours and day trips. That should make them more attractive to customers. They are not, however, cheap. My lowest price tour is a 50-60 minute trip around Phoenix that costs $495 for up to 3 people. My most expensive flight is a day-long trip to Grand Canyon West’s Skywalk that includes at least four hours in the helicopter and all ground fees and costs $2,495 for up to three people. Ouch.

When you’re selling services with big price tags, you can’t expect a flyer printed on your Epson inkjet printer to impress anyone. You need to create marketing materials that will fully explain and illustrate what you’re offering, presented in a professional-looking package.

And that’s what I spent much of the past week doing.

Flying M AirI use plastic portfolio binders with a cover insert to prepare 12-page booklets about my company and its services. The cover has an 8×10 glossy photo of the helicopter with my company marketing design (the blue and red swirls).

Inside, there’s a “Welcome” letter, mostly for the use of hotel/resort guests who might be browsing the book on their own. It provides brief information about the company and urges them to book through a concierge. If a concierge isn’t available, however, they can call us directly for more information and reservations.

Next are full-color information sheets about the tours and day trips we offer. Each tour sheet includes at least two photos of the destination or route, full pricing information, and branding elements such as my logo. You can see thumbnails of these pages here, on the right side of this post. I created each of these sheets in InDesign, using photos from a collection I’ve been building steadily for about six years. When they were finished, I e-mailed them to the local KwikPrint. The folks there printed them out on their color laser printer. Although I have a color laser printer, their’s does a better job and, given the cost of consumables on mine, is actually cheaper. As you might imagine, all of these documents are available as downloadable PDFs from the Flying M Air Web site. I figure I spent about $200 on printing.

August 2009 AZ HighwaysI also included a copy of the front cover of the August 2009 issue of Arizona Highways magazine, which listed my company’s Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure as “The best way to see Arizona in a week.” I clipped out the paragraph about us and pasted it onto the cover image so both the cover and the text are on the same page. The folks at KwikPrint handled the copies of these sheets,too. They look nice.

Then there’s a full page summary of all tours and day trips and their prices, including optional add-ons like Jeep tours or lunch stops.

Finally, there’s a page that provides information about our helicopter, including the make and model, engine specs, and passenger-friendly features.

Putting the books together was rather time consuming and tedious. We did it after dinner last night. Mike helped me. I spread piles of each page out along the table and we walked around the table, inserting pages into the booklet’s plastic sheets. It took about an hour to do 24 of them. I figure that if I would have paid a marketing firm to do the same job, it would have cost me at least $5K for design and document creation and $20 to $50 per booklet.

The resulting booklets are extremely attractive and professional. They present the image I want people to have of my business. The removable pages make it easy for a concierge to pull out a page and make a copy for a guest or co-worker. Frankly, the only way I could make this any better is to print individual booklets using something like iPhoto. But if you make them too nice, people take them as souvenirs — as I discovered the expensive way with a local guest ranch a few years ago.

But what’s most important about the booklets is that they provide all of the information a concierge needs to help a guest make an informed decision about a tour or day trip with Flying M Air. And that, after all, is the purpose of this exercise.

Later this week, I’ll start making the rounds with my husband, Mike, who has become the company’s Marketing Manager. By that time, we’ll have my new business cards back from the printer.

This season, it’s do or die in the Phoenix area. I’m determined to make it work.

How to Start Your Own Helicopter Charter Business

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A guide for the folks who really want to know.

Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of blog comments and e-mail messages from wannabe helicopter pilots. They’re seeing the reality of the current helicopter job market: too many entry-level pilots, too few jobs, low starting pay, and training that’ll cost them $60,000 to $80,000.

On Job Markets & Flight Schools

They might be reading about this in a post that remains the most popular of all time on this blog: “The Helicopter Job Market.” I wrote this piece just over two years ago, in March 2007 at the height of Silver State’s rise to power as a helicopter flight school. I was tired of seeing young guys (mostly) get conned by promises of $80,000/year jobs that just didn’t exist for newly minted commercial helicopter pilots. I wanted to warn them, but without actively speaking out against Silver State and the companies that had adopted their strategy to turn a quick buck. In all honesty, I didn’t want to get sued. I just wanted readers to consider reality before signing on the dotted line.

We all know what happened to Silver State. It was a Ponzi scheme of sorts that built a massive flight school on the money of tomorrow’s students. When students stopped signing up — due to their inability to get financing or a case of the smarts — and bills came due, Silver State collapsed, leaving many students in debt without their certificates and hundreds of low-time pilots looking for work. It’s a tragedy, not only for the people scrambling to pay the cost of the flight training they may or may not have gotten, but the dumping of so many low-time pilots on the job market made it easy for employers to pick and choose and drop pay rates. The best of the desperate got the entry level jobs they wanted. The others were left out in the cold.

And when the economy began to tank, even the employers cut back. Big seasonal employers at the Grand Canyon and Alaska hired fewer pilots than ever this year and even employers in the Gulf of Mexico began laying off pilots.

The Do-It-Yourself Alternative

Some wannabe pilots think there’s another way to build a flying career, a sort of do-it-yourself method.

Maybe they see from this blog that I didn’t go the usual route — that is, private pilot to commercial pilot to certified flight instructor to get that first 1,000 hours to get an entry level job, etc. Instead, I got my commercial ticket and started my own helicopter charter business. Then I got a bigger helicopter and a Part 135 certificate and, for all appearances, seem to be happily raking in the dough while flying around in my own helicopter.

That’s what they see, anyway.

Lately, they’ve begun commenting on this blog and sending me e-mail, asking for advice. While requests for advice from new or wannabe pilots aren’t anything new, what is new is that the advice they want is about how to start their own helicopter charter companies. Apparently, they believe that since they won’t be able to easily get a job, they will be able to start their own business as a kind of “shortcut” to the career they want.

Here’s My Approach

So I’ve written this blog post to answer these questions from my experience. Here’s my step-by-step approach. If you’re looking for the secret of my success, you might want to print this out for future reference:

  1. Spend $50,000 to learn how to fly helicopters and get a commercial helicopter license.
  2. Spend another $30,000 to $50,000 to build time so you can fly safely under most conditions.
  3. Spend $346,000 or more to buy a helicopter, about $10,000 per year to maintain it, and $12,000 to $32,000 a year to insure it.
  4. Spend 4 to 24 months preparing the paperwork and working with the FAA to apply for a Part 135 certificate. Then take and pass a Part 135 check ride. Then repeat the check ride process every year.
  5. Spend another $10,000 to $30,000 on advertising and marketing.
  6. Take lots of calls from people who can’t understand why you can’t fly them around for the cost of fuel or want you to fly them for free or are trying to get you to donate to their charitable cause. Then get the occasional call that leads to real work for someone who appreciates what you do and understand what it costs.
  7. After ten years and close to a million dollars spent building and maintaining your business, sit back and watch your investment in time and money languish in an economy where few people want to or can spend money on your services.

Get the idea?

At the Big Sandy Shoot
My $346,000 investment, parked at an event in the desert.

There’s an old saying: “The best way to make a million dollars in aviation is to start with two million dollars.”

I’m not complaining. It’s nice having a helicopter. It would be even nicer if I could afford to fly it whenever I wanted to.

But the simple reality is that starting a helicopter charter business is a huge money suck. My aviation business spends more money than most pilots earn each year. If I didn’t have another good source of income, I wouldn’t be able to afford having this business at all.

In Conclusion

If you think that starting your own helicopter charter business is a quick and easy, money-saving way to build a career as a helicopter pilot, think again. It’s neither quick nor money-saving.

But sure. It’s easy. Just add time and money.

It’s Worth the Extra $58.80 per Month, Right?

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I bet the driver doesn’t think so.


Take a drive on dirt for the last 1/10th mile to my house.

As I’m typing this, I’m watching the town’s garbage collection truck rumble down the unreasonably steep and rugged road that leads to my home and my two neighbor’s homes. This is the third time the driver has come down the unmaintained road and he hasn’t quite gotten the hang of it yet. The loose rocks slip under his wheels on the way down and move aside to make deep ruts on the way up. His round trip from the last house on his route to our three garbage pails takes him about 15 minutes each day. He does this twice a week.

But that’s what the Town of Wickenburg wanted, I guess.

Four years ago, they annexed our three homes, against our will, into the Town. Apparently shopping and operating businesses in town wasn’t enough for our land-hungry mayor (who has since, thankfully, been defeated by someone who isn’t quite as obsessed with empire building). They wanted our property taxes, too. It didn’t matter that they weren’t interested in providing additional services for those tax dollars. The road to our homes remains unmaintained, there’s still no fire hydrant within at least a half-mile, we can’t get cable or DSL or town water or sewer services. They assure us that the town’s police and ambulance will come to our homes when called, but none of us have tried that yet. I don’t think they’ll find us. They gave us all new addresses, putting us on a street that apparently doesn’t exist — there’s no sign for it anywhere. My neighbors may have taken the hit of a “move” on their credit reports, but we didn’t — we changed our address right back to what it was.

But it’s worse for the rest of the folks annexed with us. They were promised that their road would be paved. That’s why they voted yes for the annexation, dragging us in with them. Their road remains unpaved to this day.

About two weeks ago, the Town added yet another insult. The town lawyer, who really ought to consider going into a different line of business, sent us a letter telling us that we were in violation of some town code because we didn’t have a contract with the Town for garbage pickup. The letter threatened legal action, with a daily fine of $300 or so dollars a day. The letter was nasty and accusing — as if we were purposely denying the town $19.60 per month of revenue.

I don’t take kindly to threatening letters. I got seriously pissed off and started making some angry phone calls.

Turns out that when the Town annexed us, the letter they sent to inform us of all the changes we could expect — like our new address — also told us that garbage service was available from the town. I don’t have the letter anymore — I tossed it long ago — but I don’t recall the letter saying garbage pickup was required. There’s a big difference, especially to a writer, between available and required. We already had garbage pickup from the local sanitation company and it was cheaper, so I didn’t see any reason to make the change.

My call to Town Hall got me many apologies from the person I spoke to. She told me they’d gotten a lot of complaints about the lawyer’s letter. I’m glad. It means that I’m not the only person who gets angry when some idiot backwoods (or back desert, in our case) lawyer flexes her fingers without thinking on a word processor’s keyboard. Apparently, the townspeople aren’t quite as lifeless as I thought they might be.

Since garbage pickup with the town was now roughly the same cost as with the private company and they’d come pick up twice a week rather than just once, we signed up with the town. It’s unfortunate for the other company. If they keep losing business to the town, they’ll soon go out of business. But heck, what does the Town of Wickenburg care about the viability of local businesses?

So now the garbage truck lumbers down our steep, rutty, loose gravel road twice a week to collect garbage from three pails. We make very little garbage because we recycle so much — and no, they won’t pick that up — so they’re not collecting much from us on every visit. The truck crawls back up at 5 to 10 miles per hour, spinning its tires once in a while to dig one or two new ruts that it’ll have to drive back over a few days later.

After the next rain, my neighbor will pull out his Bobcat and scrape down the road surface. My other neighbor will drive up and down with a home-made smoothing bar — think railroad steel and chain link fence dragged behind a pickup truck. We’ll do our part by driving up and down the hill at 15 miles per hour without stopping or with 4WD turned on in our pickup — the only way to avoid making ruts.

And the town will collect an extra $58.80 per month in revenue for the 2 extra hours it takes its truck and driver to include us on the route.

Donating Ideas

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A few thoughts about yet another new “charity” effort.

A fellow twitterer — and I won’t mention names because my purpose is not to embarrass him — has created a Web site designed to gather “idea donations.” That’s right: the goal is to gather business ideas for people who are evidently incapable of coming up with their own ideas. These mentally challenged people can then use the donated ideas to start businesses and improve their villages, towns, or personal lives.

I have a serious problem with this.

It isn’t enough for successful business people to donate money and equipment and finance small business owners who need help. Now we have to think for them, too?

The way I see it, if an “entrepreneur” isn’t bright enough to come up with his own business idea, he’s probably not going to be bright enough to make someone else’s idea work, either. It takes a lot more than a packaged idea to start and build a business. It takes brains, know-how, experience, hard work, funding, imagination, moral support….get the idea?

Am I missing something here? What’s the point of this? To make people who can think feel all warm and cuddly for handing out ideas to people who can’t think?

If someone doesn’t have enough imagination and know-how to come up with his own business idea, he should probably stick to work that doesn’t require so much brain power — and leave the business of starting and running new businesses to those better able to get the job done.