The old adage of "the only way to make a small fortune in aviation is to start with a big one," is perhaps most applicable to running a small 135 company. The amount of personal effort required to make an operation successful will consume you. It's really tough and as fun as it may sound there are so many better ways to enjoy your aviation career.
I'll be honest, I think this is just what owners of 135 operators say to keep the competition at bay. Yeah, it's more work than say, working for Brand X 121 Airline...but almost every owner of a 135 I've known that had his or her niche and was way in debt to buy the business or airplanes was a lot more comfortable than any pilots I've ever seen, and typically seemed very fulfilled. The guys pulling their hair out bought the business on credit and were having to rob Peter to pay Paul. If you go into the business debt free and keep the overhead low, it doesn't seem to bad. Of course, to do this, you have to have a large sum of money sitting around to begin with...
One of the big problems with operating charter is that it is highly cash-flow intensive, and you typically pay for the service well before you get reimbursed for it. For example, I know that doing flying for Uncle Sam (which can a nice bit of money to fall back on) sometimes have as much as a 6 month time period between doing the charter and getting paid for it. So, if you do a bunch of BLM flying you might be super profitable on paper, but have to close the doors because you've hot no money in the bank to pay the pilots and keep the lights on. Similarly, even charter flying for companies might have a 30 day lead time on getting paid. Realistically, while it's harder to do right, scheduled flying is some of the "easiest" from a cashflow standpoint - unfortunately, providing excellent customer service requires massive overhead, substantial work, and sometimes you have to strategically lose money on a flight to not lose customers. You will work your ass off no matter how you do it, but the best advice I can give is to manage your cashflow, treat your customers right, and do things safely. In the long run, you won't have a business if you screw up any of those three.
The other thing to think about is your "return on capital investment." If you're only in it for the "money," you might be better served simply investing the $200k. Still for a lot of people (including myself) the allure of running my own shop is almost overpowering. For awhile, it's all I wanted to do, and one day, I likely will - just got to get out of student loan debt and get an airplane.
. I'm all about big Bushwheels! But running a boat wasn't as hard as I thought it would be...
