Both of you guys have good arguments. I think, though, they need to be fused. Jhugz is right that the STARTING wages a cfi earns need to be better. At least livable. The way it is now is very much a joke. A new CFI may very well start out all motivated and ass busting. But give it a couple months of 400 dollar pay checks and I can see how resignation sets in.
Good point. And this is where flight school owners have the responsibility to recognize good employees early on. Some do, some don't.
I do think raises and promotions should be performance based. You make me more money, you get a bigger slice of it. What I am talking about is not a raise though but a overhaul of how instructors are treated. Give me a guarantee 18k a year with bonuses and that would make instructing leaps and bounds better, and more peeps might consider instructing long term.
I still go back to the question of, "Where does the money come from?" though. When a person is writing a business plan, to be able to guarantee $25k/year pay to an employee, they also have to be certain they'll be able to generate $X/year revenue. There are a lot of uncertainties from the business owner's perspective. What if the economy heads south? What if there is unexpectedly poor weather for long periods of time? Most importantly, what if the instructor doesn't do a good job? It doesn't take long for an instructor who is overly conservative about weather, isn't flexible on the schedule, doesn't have good customer service skills, etc. to REALLY drag a business down. Reference my earlier post on the instructor who got paid $3000 for doing practically nothing. It takes a long time for a flight school to recover a $3000 loss.
This is why so many flight schools pay an hourly wage. It minimizes risk. If the flight school is only obligated to pay a percentage of revenue generated, it places the burden of responsibility on the instructor. When the school pays a salary, they take on the majority of the risk if things don't work out well. If the school is a large operation with 20 instructors, they have a little more flexibility to take the risk of paying salaries because the business is more stable and predictable as a whole. Smaller operations with only a few instructors can't afford this risk. One bad apple can spoil the whole operation.
I think the main reason I've been successful working my way up the system as an instructor is because I have a ton of little tricks that add up to billing a lot more time per month than other instructors.
I take the time to do thorough ground briefings, and I bill for all my ground time. I'm comfortable teaching on really windy days (especially important in Nebraska!). If a plane goes down for maintenance, I make a useful lesson in another plane, even if the backup plane is different from the first, rather than cancel the flight. I always schedule customers for their next flight before they leave, rather than take the "I'll call you later" answer from them and don't hear from them for two weeks. If the weather is IFR, I check the cloud tops and try to teach VFR maneuvers on top. I talk about what we'll do on the next lesson, to keep them excited about flying and anxious to come out to the airport again. Etc., etc. A lot of "Savvy Flight Instructor" book stuff.
The thing is, tricks like these can make the difference between an instructor pulling their weight for the company or not. Those extra few hours billed make a huge difference in the bottom line.
Think of running a vending machine. You might buy packs of gum for $0.50 and sell them for $0.55. If you raise your rates to $0.60, you only increased your price 10%, yet you doubled your profits.
The same thing happens in flight schools. The school has to cover fixed costs, then skim some off the top for profit. An instructor might only bill out an extra 10 hours/month compared to the other instructors, but that instructor might be doubling the company's profits. Point that out to your boss, then ask for a raise.
