5 Tips for Maximizing Revenue
Understand your market position. This often starts with research at a local and regional level. Key factors include:
The number of FBOs at your airport
Hangar availability at your airport & neighboring airports
Pricing at your airport and neighboring airports
Quality of service offered by your personnel
Condition of your facilities & amenities
Flight activity and reasons for clients using your airport (business segmentation)
Decision makers also need to review current marketing efforts, business strategies, and customer perceptions of your FBO. Engaging someone with an unbiased opinion helps in this process.
Once these are fully understood, we encourage owners and managers to develop a simple business strategy with clear and concise goals. Make adjustments as necessary, monitor KPIs, and most importantly, refine your enhancements.
Develop a robust pricing strategy! We see too many FBOs with misaligned pricing strategies. This includes hangar rates, fuel prices, facility fees, and minimum fuel requirements. All rates impact your business, and we need to ensure that they are fine-tuned. Further, how do your fuel rates compare to your hangar rates? And what does your competition charge for similar services? Do your prices align with service levels and facilities or is there room for improvement? When clients make recommended improvements to their operations and pricing strategies, we have seen six-figure increases in revenue within 6-12 months.
Dissolve aircraft categories! Utilizing groups like small, medium, and large-cabin jets for facility fees and minimum uplifts is obsolete. You are often missing thousands of dollars each month. There are many tools such as X1FBO that allow CSRs to quickly provide fuel prices, minimum uplifts, and other fees within seconds based on aircraft type.
Empower your employees! Some locations require a manager’s approval for discounts. Try empowering your employees to offer on-the-spot discounts, especially with phone calls. You need to establish parameters and ensure your team is properly trained. Once implemented, you will be surprised at the pride team members take in preserving margins and securing new business!
Use a solid dashboard! They provide valuable insight and enable your organization to remain nimble. You can adjust volume discounts based on average uplift, identify missed opportunities, and track trends. Many tools exist such as Power BI, but dashboards can also start with a simple Excel document.
Bonus Tip - ensure that your service standards are top-notch. This enables you to charge higher margins and often solicit more business.