Thursday, May 8, 2008

Flight and the compression of time

You may think that I'm about to delve into quantum physics, but no, this is more about using an airplane to make more efficient use of your time. First let me get one worry and concern out of the way. Many business managers and owners think that aviation is so expensive that it's only for the ultra large companies to use. That's a fallacy and I'm writing this post to dispel that myth.

Just think for a moment about how much more Superman gets done because he can fly at supersonic speeds. If you can reach more clients, or establish and manage more business locations and still be home for dinner, it makes a lot more sense. I spent a day with a construction supervisor who was manager over several projects (the project managers reported directly to him) in northern and central California. We drove to every one of his job sites from Yuba City to Los Banos. Imagine if this development company had the foresight to put a dirt strip next to each development and the supervisor was able to fly to each location. He would be able to visit his sites more often, get more done in between trips, spend more time at each site to teach, train, and resolve problems. Fuel would have cost less per mile, and overall he would have been more productive if he flew instead of driving.

In a previous post I've already discussed how you can use aviation to grow your business by citing several real life examples. Here's a hypothetical one for you that may resonate with many of you. Let's say you have a coffee stand in one town that's doing really well because you've got your system down pat. The town has room for three more coffee stands so you expand into those locations. Now what? Your business can only grow to a certain level in one town and in order to continue to grow you have to expand into other towns. So you decide to rent an airplane and scout out locations in a town 25 miles away. From the air you can see quite a bit about the town's demographics and you can see what the morning traffic patterns are since that's when you sell most of your coffee. You pick out an ideal spot and establish your coffee stand there and now you're back on the growth track. You correctly calculate that the cost of renting an airplane to fly there twice a week are easily covered by a single morning's net profits at your new location.

A small plane works fine as long as you are expanding into small towns in a 250 mile radius from your home site, but eventually you'll want to expand into other states, and now you need a bigger, faster airplane. Eventually you go national and you find that your 250 plus locations can easily pay for the acquisition and operational costs of a new Lear Jet. It's all about economies of scale. Now take that hypothetical example and apply it to whatever business you want. An advertising agency, a music school, a landscaping business and so on and so forth. Flying makes expansion make more sense than driving does. In the end you'll find that flying is not as expensive as you thought--especially when you weigh it against the additional revenues it can bring in.