jrh
Well-Known Member
A couple days ago I was presented with a unique opportunity, but I'd like to get some ideas on how to proceed...
The owner of the flight school I work for talked to me and basically said he'd like to see me get more involved with the management of the school. We're a small operation (two 172s, two full time instructors, myself being one of them) but have been steadily growing and he thinks the next logical step in continuing our growth is to get a dedicated manager/head instructor of some sort.
There's a million things that need to get done so he said I could basically write my own job description if I want to. Duties could include anything and everything such as organizing files, doing prog checks with students, standardizing instructors, managing maintenance on the aircraft, recruiting students, meeting with prospective students, flying discovery flights, teaching ground schools, organizing promotional seminars/open houses, developing marketing material, etc.
As it stands now, I'm a full time instructor, simple as that. I help out in other areas when I can, but I have a fairly high student load, so I don't have much time to do anything outside of flying.
The owner would like me to cut back on teaching in order to shift in to more of a managerial role. However, he's also a fair guy and knows that I'm making close to $30k/year as nothing more than an instructor making an hourly wage, so he wants to find a way to compensate me equally or better than what I currently have.
Being the entrepreneur that he is, he isn't a big fan of paying somebody an hourly rate to sit in the office. He wants to keep pay tied more closely to performance. He'd rather pay a modest base salary with some sort of commission structure on top. For instance, when I taught a ground school for him earlier in the year, I had a $200 base pay plus $25/student for every student I enrolled in it. That's the type of structure he likes using.
As an idea, he threw out that I could get something like X dollars base pay, Y dollars flight pay for the few students I continue flying with, and Z dollars for every hour the other instructors bill out, as an incentive to be a good manager and keep the other instructors busy. It might be like $1000/month base pay, $20/hour flight pay, and $2/hour for every hour the other instructors bill out. We didn't talk about those numbers specifically, but that's the concept.
Of course in talking about it we both admitted it's new territory and neither of us knows exactly how to proceed. He's open to any reasonable suggestion I give him, so that's why I'm here, finally asking my question...
Considering the position is a mix of flight instruction, management, and sales work, what do you think would be a fair form of compensation that's both sustainable for a small business's budget, yet lucrative enough that I could make a fair living off of it?
The owner of the flight school I work for talked to me and basically said he'd like to see me get more involved with the management of the school. We're a small operation (two 172s, two full time instructors, myself being one of them) but have been steadily growing and he thinks the next logical step in continuing our growth is to get a dedicated manager/head instructor of some sort.
There's a million things that need to get done so he said I could basically write my own job description if I want to. Duties could include anything and everything such as organizing files, doing prog checks with students, standardizing instructors, managing maintenance on the aircraft, recruiting students, meeting with prospective students, flying discovery flights, teaching ground schools, organizing promotional seminars/open houses, developing marketing material, etc.
As it stands now, I'm a full time instructor, simple as that. I help out in other areas when I can, but I have a fairly high student load, so I don't have much time to do anything outside of flying.
The owner would like me to cut back on teaching in order to shift in to more of a managerial role. However, he's also a fair guy and knows that I'm making close to $30k/year as nothing more than an instructor making an hourly wage, so he wants to find a way to compensate me equally or better than what I currently have.
Being the entrepreneur that he is, he isn't a big fan of paying somebody an hourly rate to sit in the office. He wants to keep pay tied more closely to performance. He'd rather pay a modest base salary with some sort of commission structure on top. For instance, when I taught a ground school for him earlier in the year, I had a $200 base pay plus $25/student for every student I enrolled in it. That's the type of structure he likes using.
As an idea, he threw out that I could get something like X dollars base pay, Y dollars flight pay for the few students I continue flying with, and Z dollars for every hour the other instructors bill out, as an incentive to be a good manager and keep the other instructors busy. It might be like $1000/month base pay, $20/hour flight pay, and $2/hour for every hour the other instructors bill out. We didn't talk about those numbers specifically, but that's the concept.
Of course in talking about it we both admitted it's new territory and neither of us knows exactly how to proceed. He's open to any reasonable suggestion I give him, so that's why I'm here, finally asking my question...
Considering the position is a mix of flight instruction, management, and sales work, what do you think would be a fair form of compensation that's both sustainable for a small business's budget, yet lucrative enough that I could make a fair living off of it?