Aviation of Business

posted by Andrew Hartley - Business Consultant & Entrepreneur on Oct 19

Everyone has heard the importance of business planning. Creating a business plan before you start your business is very nearly a universal starting point for all successful businesses. In fact, Chris Corrigan, an Australian businessman who grew logistics company Patrick Corporation into one of Australia’s most successful companies and owns part of Richard Branson’s Virgin Blue airline, said, “You can’t overestimate the need to plan and prepare. In most of the mistakes I’ve made, there has been this common theme of inadequate planning beforehand. You really can’t over-prepare in business!”

Once again, we find that business and aviation are quite similar! Let’s walk through the business planning process and take a look at the similarities:

The first step in any plan is to know where you are… determine where you stand in your business knowledge and preparation. Are you ready to start a business? Do you really want to? This is analagous to a pilot’s home airport and “I’M SAFE” checklist:

• I: Illness - It is best not to fly while suffering from any illness.
• M: Medication - Pilot performance may be adversely affected by the taking of certain medications.
• S: Stress - Stress from work or from home may distract pilots during important segments of a flight.
• A: Alcohol - As little as one ounce of liquor, one bottle of beer or four ounces of wine can affect a pilot’s skills negatively.
• F: Fatigue - Fatigue affects a pilot’s coordination and alertness.
• E: Emotion - Emotions of anger & depression decrease alertness & may lead to taking higher risks than necessary

If any one of these things is affecting you as a pilot, it’s best to postpone your flight for another time. In business, a lack of knowledge of the industry, a poor work ethic, a bad reason for starting a business, other important obligations, etc. are all good reasons to delay the start of the business until your situation changes. I have come up with the following acronym, similar to the “I’M SAFE” checklist to help you determine if you are ready to start a business (NEW BIZ):

• N - Network: Do you have both a business network and a personal network of people who will support you?
• E - Emotion: Is your desire to start a busines free from emotion (e.g. anger or frustration at your current job)?
• W - Work Ethic: are you willing & able to work the hours necessary to start a new business?
• B - Business Acumen: Do you have experience in the industry you would like to enter?
• I - Investment: Do you have the capital (or can you get the capital) necessary to launch & sustain the business until it is profitable?
• Z - Zealous: Are you passionate about this business idea and industry?

If you cannot answer yes to all of the above questions in the “NEW BIZ” checklist, it might be better to wait to start your business until you can. Answering “no” to any one of them will only cause you frustration and pain in the long run of starting and running your own business.

Can you answer the “NEW BIZ” checklist questions in the affirmative? What other considerations might you want to consider before jumping into the entrepreneurship world? Tell us by leaving a comment!

Fair Winds,
Andrew

P.S. Stay tuned for part two of this six-part series: Where do you want to go?

posted by Andrew Hartley - Business Consultant & Entrepreneur on Sep 17

The following is a paid review, but is completely my own opinion and is not at all influenced by being paid.

I recently signed up for Pay Per Post, a blog marketing site which has been gaining and gaining in popularity with bloggers as a way to use a blog to make a little (or a lot) of money. It’s also very popular with internet marketers as a way to drive traffic to their sites! If you’re already writing, and you already use products and surf the web, why not make a little money while doing so, right? I’ve been experimenting and learning about online business for a little while now, and have not had much success. To be fair, I’ve also had a lack of focus and not spent my time where it might make the most impact. I’m trying to change that, because - as you see from my last post - I am edging my way back to my original career goal (since high school or college) of becoming a professional pilot.

Since flying isn’t cheap (my first flight in nearly four years lasted nine-tenths of an hour - that’s .9 hours or 54 minutes - and cost $115.64!), I’ve newly refocused my online ambitions to help me pay for the cost of flight training. I figure that if I can make $30 per day, every day, from my online businesses, my flight training will be nearly paid for! With that in mind, I am refreshing my interest in Pay Per Post, starting with this post. I hope to be able to use it to get a good start on my goal of $30 per day. If I am able to make more than that through Pay Per Post (and/or other advertising, donations, etc.), I will increase my flight time commensurately.

Up to now, I have found Pay Per Post to be pretty easy to use. It was very easy to add this blog to my account and get started. I actually got an offer for $30 to review a site - which I was pretty excited about, but then I got distracted and forgot to actually post about the site. The offer was susequently rescinded - unfortunately it happened on the day I remembered and was going to post about it! I ultimately would like to add some of my other blogs to my account at Pay Per Post (blogs like environmentastic! and Teacher’s Forum, but Pay Per Post requires that you have 10 approved posts before you can add any more blogs to your account. I wasn’t aware of this (or I had forgotten), and I was a little frustrated trying to find out how to add another blog to my account… you actually have to do that under the “my posts” tab. That was a little confusing to me, and then frustrating that once I found out where and how to add another blog, I wasn’t able to until I did more posts.

Other than that I think Pay Per Post is a really nice site to work with. It’s easy to learn, use, and navigate, and it has already given lots of people another stream of income! I know Tyler Cruz (visit his blog) has had some success with it… I hope I can make enough to start subsidizing my flight training soon! If you’re interested in making some money with your blog (even if only a little), check out Pay Per Post.

Have you used Pay Per Post? What did you think about it? Let us know - leave a comment!

Fair Winds,
Andrew

posted by Andrew Hartley - Business Consultant & Entrepreneur on Aug 12

I’ve been kicking around some business ideas for quite awhile now. Third Floor Cards is a site that I started and then put off for a long time… and it’s one that I would still like to see up and running with a decent site and some good business running through it.

But the most recent one that I have started is The Teacher’s Forum. Currently, it is a dull yaBB forum with a generic look, but it is functional and up and running. So far the only registered members are me (administrator) and my wife, Jill. There are three posts. Two are introductions in the “Break the Ice” section.

We’ll be continuing the design of the site to make it look less generic and more eye-catching when people first come to the forum, but this brings up two questions:
1) Is yaBB (a freeware forum software) the right software to use for this forum, or should I use something more “well-known” throughout the forum world like vBulletin? I’d have to buy a license for the vBulletin software.
2) What is the best way to encourage people to be the first ones to post on a new forum? I’ve thought about using a service like ForumShock to jump start it, but is there a better way?

In beginning to answer number 2, I will be offering free “upperclassman” membership to the first 50 people to register and introduce themselves (in the “Break the Ice” section) on the site. However, I don’t have any kind of paid membership level (yet), so they’ll be taking it on my word that the site will, in the future, have that capability. Which begs the quetion laid in 1, above again - is yaBB the right forum software for the site?

I also spent some time yesterday listing The Teacher’s Forum on search engines and free site-listing web-pages to help bring up the site’s “link love,” as so many search engine optimization (SEO) gurus (like Rae Hoffman and Jeremy Schoemaker) call it.

Any other suggestions and help would be appreciated! Leave a comment if you have any ideas…

And if you want to register and be among the first 50 people to get your free lifetime “Upperclassman” membership, I certainly won’t shed any tears over you posting and helping to get the site active!

Fair Winds,
Andrew

posted by Andrew Hartley - Business Consultant & Entrepreneur on May 29

I haven’t done this in several months (though I did post on the first one ever - in the comments sections of the post itself), but I think it’s a good idea and a great way to reflect on what one has learned in the past month (and if you can’t say that you’ve learned at least five things in a month, no matter how trivial it seems to you, there’s something wrong with you!).

 So, in the manner laid out by the Joyful, Jubilant Learning Blog, here are my top five “learnings” for the month of May:

1. No matter where you are, no matter what you think, you have friends near you.  My wife and I were at a beautiful wedding over Memorial Day weekend in Clearwater (Dunedin), Florida.  It was the wedding of a very good friend of ours who Jill met while working in Theatre in Columbus, Ohio (and who now lives in New York City, NY, but whose family is still in Florida).  We didn’t expect to know anyone at the wedding or the reception except the bride and groom themselves (whom we expected to be rather busy, for some reason); however, once we got to the reception, we were almost immediately approached by two other couples who knew us (though we didn’t know them immediately).  It turned out that Jill had met the women while they were the bride’s roomates in college!  And at the end of the reception, one of the bridesmaids was another friend of the bride’s whom Jill had met previously!  Another of the joys of networking… in Florida, we ran into people who we knew from Columbus, Cincinnati, and Kentucky!
2. A business can survive through almost any length of “down season” if the “busy season” is busy enough!  A small shop in Clearwater, FL makes 1/2-pound cookies and homemade ice-cream - and was pretty much empty except for while we were in it (eating a chocolate-chip cookie with two scoops of vanilla ice-cream and hot-fudge on top… whoa!).  The man behind the counter said that spring break is always his best time.  Planning ahead for the rest of the year is of utmost importance!
3. Related to the above, a business can survive without a business plan or without good leadership if it’s in the right location.  If you serve alcohol and pizza, and are located on a beach where college students frolic during spring, you could leave your business i the hands of a monkey and still survive.
4. Love bug season in Florida SUCKS.  Those damn bugs were EVERYWHERE and they were ANNOYING!  Jill and I took to calling them “Fuck Bugs” for two reasons - 1) they were fucking, and 2) we were constantly saying “Fuck, bugs! Get away from me!” I buried as many as possible in the sand, alive. 
5. Business is just breaking down a large “problem” into small, actionable parts.  The “problem” is your business and the small, actionable parts are your goals and plans to reach where you want the business to go.  This is basic - but I constantly need a reminder of it.  I’m reading Robert Allen’s Multiple Streams of Internet Income, which breaks down internet business quite well.  I’ve already taken 13 pages of notes and I’m not even halfway through it.  I’ll buy a copy for myself (I’m reading a library copy) so I can highlight and underline and take notes in the margins…

Hope you enjoyed this, and I encourage you to do the same thing on your own blog… (what?  You don’t have a blog?  Leave a comment on this one or on JJL’s!)  or at least in your own head so you reap the benefit of reflecting on the month behind you!

Next post will be back to our regularly scheduled programming (the sacred six flight instruments & how they relate to business)!

Fair Winds,
Andrew

posted by Andrew Hartley - Business Consultant & Entrepreneur on May 5

An airplane is an amazing piece of machinery.  During some portions of a flight, it is required that the pilot make large changes and major corrections to the path of the aircraft.  Takeoff and landing are obvious places where this comes to mind.  This is called “hand flying” the airplane.

At other times, however, it is unnecessary to “hand fly” the plane - during straight and level “cruise” flight for instance.  During this phase of a flight, the pilot will use what’s called “trim” to make very slight corrections to the flight path of the airplane.  If the plane is descending slightly, the pilot will use “nose up trim” to stop the descent.  If climbing slightly, “nose down trim” may be used.  Some aircraft have trim for rolling (aileron trim) and turning (rudder trim) as well.  Keep in mind here that I am not talking about any kind of “auto-pilot;” this is just a way to more carefully and precisely control the plane once it is in “cruise” flight and flying at a single altitude and in one direction for a length of time.

This can be likened to a business (as always!).  At some points in the life of a business, like during the startup and initial growth, it is necessary to “hand fly” the business - you as an entrepreneur (pilot) must “control” the business more directly and make larger changes to its direction.  In an airplane this is during takeoff and climbout and only lasts a few minutes.  In business, it may last a few years. 

Additionally, if you plan on selling or in some other way “exiting” the business, you will, again, need to “hand fly” for awhile.  You may not be “hand flying” the business directly, but you will be directly and significantly involved in the process of finding a buyer and negotiating a fair price for both of you.  This roughly coincides with the approach and landing of an airplane - again a time when the pilot must be significantly involved in the aircraft’s control. 

Most other times during a business’s “flight,” small corrections and tweaks are all that is necessary to keep the company moving in the direction you want it to go.  This is, of course, assuming you have a good business plan (flight plan) and a good team (crew).  You also must be in a well-designed company (stable aircraft).  See my post on Tradeoffs for more on business design and aircraft design.

There ARE times during cruise flight when a business (or an airplane) DOES need to be hand flown - any time a change of direction is necessary.  In aviation, it is all about navigation or avoidance of other aircraft (which are subjects for other posts), and in business it is during times of change, when a new direction is needed to grow to the next level or to outmaneuver competition.

Times to hand fly an airplane / business:

• Takeoff / Startup
• Climbout / Initial growth phase (combination of trim and hand flying)
• Change in direction / New business opportunity
• Traffic avoidance / Response to competition (can be proactive or reactive)
• Initial descent / Considering exiting (combination of trim and hand flying)
• Approach to landing / Decision to exit made (combination of trim and hand flying)
• Landing / Exit of business (sale or other exit strategy)

The reason it is important to understand this is that is is possible to “hand fly” an aircraft (and a business) when it should be “trimmed.”  It is very easy to “overcorrect” when you hand fly an aircraft during cruise flight… this will cause large changes in altitude and direction because the pilot feels the need to directly control everything the aircraft does with relatively large control movements.  But in a stable aircraft, small adjustments with trim allow the plane to “fly itself” - and that is exactly what aircraft (and businesses) should be designed to do.

posted by Andrew Hartley - Business Consultant & Entrepreneur on Mar 17

My wife and her father often play Dr. Mario, an old eight-bit Nintendo game.  In this game, each player starts with a number of “germs,” each one of three colors: blue, red, or yellow.  The goal of the game is to eliminate all of the germs from the screen.  To do so, you must either stack up (vertically) or line up (horizontally) four blocks of the same color.  The blocks are actually pills; some are all one color - most are half one color and half another.  They come in any combination of two of the colors above.  Players can move and flip the “pills” to get them lined up or stacked properly to eliminate the colored germs with same color pill (or half-pill).  The pill’s and germs disappear when four or more of one color are lined (or stacked) up.

What is interesting about this is that when playing in competition, it is possible to “plop” on the other player by arranging your pills so as to make more than one line disappear with one move.  The other player will have two (or three, or four!) “half-pills” drop down at random on his/her side of the screen.  These plops generally land in inconvenient places and are inconvenient colors.

Why the hell am I giving you a crash course in Dr. Mario, you ask?  For this reason:  The competitive style of playing the game is uncanny in its parallel to entrepreneurship and business.  Stay with me here…

 Business is competitive by its very nature.  So the competition aspect of Dr. Mario draws an obvious similarity; however, there is much more!  Due to competition in business, there are constant “plops” in your business from your competitors… these “plops” are neither convenient nor avoidable - they happen no matter what you do.  They are totally in the control of your competition.

Now it gets truly interesting.  What you do and how you react to these “plops” often determins your success in the game… just like in business and entrepreneurship.  If the “plops” distract you from your ultimate goal of eliminating germs, your competition will beat you in short order.  On the same token, if you ignore the plops and play as if they aren’t happening, you’ll also get beaten.  To win the game, you have to change your actions to take the plops into account while always keeping the germs in mind.  If you can eliminate the germs while dealing with the plops, you have a good chance of winning.  By the way - sometimes the plops are actually beneficial.  Just like in life, luck plays a role.

My wife consistently wins at the game… often she wins three rounds straight - “skunking” her opponent.  She also regularly comes from behind after being ruthlessly “plopped” upon.  She is a master of adjusting her actions and strategy based on the reality of the game - always focusing on the end goal of eliminating the germs.

We need to do the same in business - focus on our goal, but always see the reality of our situation.  Only a combination of the two will lead us to success so we can “skunk” our competition.

Fair Winds,
Andrew

posted by Andrew Hartley - Business Consultant & Entrepreneur on Mar 11

Let’s start the aviation/business metaphor at the beginning - design.

I was recently in Memphis to facilitate some software training, and my flights back home were VERY delayed due to weather.  I was supposed to depart Memphis at 3:50 in the afternoon, but didn’t actually depart until about 7:30 in the evening.  That’s nothing compared to the JetBlue delays several weeks ago (and I was, fortunately, in the terminal and not on the plane for those few hours!), but it is still draining to sit around in uncomfortable airport seats while waiting for your aircraft to arrive. 

Luckily for me, my crew (two pilots and a flight attendant) were ALSO waiting for the plane to arrive, so I used the time to speak with them about flight schools (I’m considering going back to school and flying professionally while I build my businesses) and aviation in general.  See my Intro to Networking post for my take on meeting new people and networking in general.  I was also quite fortunate that my crew from Memphis to Chicago was ALSO the crew flying me from Chicago home - as long as I didn’t let them out of my sight, there was no way for me to miss my connection!  Mada, my flight attendant, also moved me from my cramped little seat to a leg-roomy exit row seat (another example of why you should network every chance you get)!

Once on the ground in Chicago, there were more than 60 people waiting to get on a 40-seat airplane (an Embraer Regional Jet, if you’re interested).  The weather was still ugly, but we boarded the airplane and pushed back with several empty seats.  A few of the other passengers grumbled in anger about leaving people behind when there was obviously room on the airplane - so I tried to explain to those in earshot about how aircraft are not designed to carry both full passengers AND full fuel… every kind of aircraft has weight limitations - and passengers add weight.  Fuel adds weight, too.  And if the plane is too heavy, it won’t fly.  So when you’re flying through (or into, or around) bad weather, it is necessary to carry more fuel (not only for safety but also to meet certain regulatory requirements) in case Air Traffic Control makes you hold or if you have to go to an alternate airport because of the conditions at the planned destination.  To carry this fuel, the airline may have to leave some seats empty. 

Now, it is possible (theoretically) to design an airplane that creates enough lift at a slow enough speed to fly with full fuel and full passengers - but it would most likely burn fuel at a faster rate and/or have to fly at a slower speed, meaning its range would be unacceptable for use as an airliner or the flight would take longer than acceptable to us as passengers.  So the designers of the plane have to trade utility for efficiency and efficacy. 

All of the above leads me to what really struck me about the similarities of tradeoffs between the design of an airplane and the design of a new business:  in both airplane design and business design, you can’t be everything to everyone… you need to find a niche.  Many, many business and entrepreneurial bloggers have already spoken about this from a business perspective, including (but obviously not limited to) Derek Gehl, of The Candid Internet Marketer; Sterling and Jay of Internet Business Mastery; and Tyler Cruz, of An Internet Entrepreneur’s Journey, who doesn’t actually say anything at all about how to find one or really even what one is, but waxes eloquently about how, exactly, one pronounces it. 

In business, because an entrepreneur wants a business to be low-cost and bring in enough money to make a profit, s/he cannot make everyone happy.  Choices have to be made about what products to sell and at what price, and where to locate.  An entrepreneur who designs a business so they can “fill all the seats and still put in full fuel” to try to please everyone will find themselves not pleasing anyone. 

So in business, you must find a niche, then create a product around it - even though there are many stories of entrepreneurs creating a product, then creating a niche for it after the fact (this is lovingly known as “an answer in search of a problem”), this is by far the exception rather than the rule.  The airplane, actually, is a good example of this; Orville and Wilbur Wright designed the first airplane - The Wright Flyer - for the sheer challenge, not because there was demand for flying machines.  They then set out to build demand for the product.

An airplane’s design allows its pilots to understand what they can make it safely do.  In a similar manner, every successful business is designed with a focus, allowing its “pilots” to sacrifice less important things (according to the business’s design) to meet the goals that it has set for itself.  A business’s mission, vision, and values state its purpose - as well as what it is willing to “trade” to achieve its goals.

posted by Andrew Hartley - Business Consultant & Entrepreneur on Feb 3

One of the most important things to do when considering becoming an entrepreneur is to know your “whys.”  Why do you want to own your own business?

This seems like the most obvious thing that anyone could say - that it would be easy to explain why someone would want to become an entrepreneur.  Some common answers to “why” include:

• Be my own boss
• Set my own schedule
• Make more money
• Enjoy my work
• Etc. etc.

Having said that, I feel that most of the above reasons are cop-outs.  Everyone wants to set their own schedule, make more money, and enjoy his/her work.  But why do only a few decide to become entrepreneurs?  It’s possible to make more money and enjoy your work in a “traditional” career-path… so what’s the REAL reason you want to start a business?

This takes some more thinking and soul-searching, because in reality starting your own business takes time and commitment - so “making your own schedule,” at least at first, means scheduling yourself 12-16 hour days and “burning the midnight oil” more often than you have since undergraduate school (only then it was more fun and you didn’t remember it the next day!).

So I have come to the conclusion that to make the decision to become an entrepreneur, you must be a very self-aware person; often you know, deep-down, that you want to start and run your own business, but you don’t truly know why.  So you fall back to one or more of the cop-out answers above.  And then, if you’re lucky, you have an epiphany as to REALLY why you want to be an entrepreneur.

I had that epiphany just the other day, and I think it will help me get off my ass and actually start moving more quickly to the goals I’ve set for my businesses and my life.

So here it is:

My father died when I was about twelve or thirteen years old.  I take a lot of his traits and interests - in fact, I’m sure the main reason I went into aviation is because of Dad.  He was a private pilot and a mechanic for a major airline, and I thought he was the coolest person in the world.  Thinking back, I may be kind of lucky - in a way - that he died while I was so young, because now he will always be coolest person in the world to me.

But this isn’t specifically about Dad - it’s actually about Mom.  After Dad died, it was just Mom, my brother, and me.  Mom had been working part-time for the county.  Though we’ve never really talked about it, I’m sure the plan was ultimately to retire on Dad’s pension and some savings - a good plan, had it worked out.  But it didn’t.  Dad died, and Mom and we two kids had to make do.  And we did - well.  My brother and I wanted for just about nothing, and mom worked very hard and long hours to provide everything that we needed - all of us.

But now, Mom is still working long hours and is “buying back” retirement years (she works in public education) so she can actually retire at a reasonable age.  Fortunately, Mom works in a field that she is passionate about, and she makes it about the kids, not just about making a living - so it is bearable for her.

I, however, have not found a job that makes me want to put in twelve-hour days (or more) - not one where I am making someone else rich.  My time is my time, and if I’m getting paid for eight hours, I’m rarely going to work beyond that if I can help it.  But if I start and run my own business - if I become an entrepreneur - each and every hour I work directly benefits me.  My pay does not become diluted if I spend more time working. 

Most importantly, if something were to happen to me, my wife wouldn’t be left holding the bags, so to speak!  My mom had to sacrifice too much to ensure that my brother and I had everything we needed because the plans that she and Dad made were dashed when he died unexpectedly.  I don’t want that to happen to my wife should I go down in flames someday.