How to Become a Successful Independent CFI

hello my fellow aviators welcome back to the channel in today's video we're going to talk about my life as an independent CFI hint it's far better than I would have ever expected and at the end of the video I'm going to share with you exactly how much I am earning along this path so over the last couple of months I've received I I don't even know how many requests but enough that I finally decided to relent and make a video for you guys on what's involved in being a successful independent CFI and for some of you you may want to take this path on your journey to the 1500 hours to get your ATP and then maybe you'll be done for others of you you may want to do this especially when you see how much money you can make doing it for a longer period of time maybe you're at the tail end of your career or maybe you have no desire to get to the airlines but you would like to get paid to fly and so in this video I hope to inspire some of you to uh take a similar path to what I have done as well as to share with you what I have learned along the way way in order to be able to be successful doing what I am doing so the big thing here was we're going to compare being an employee CFI to being an independent CFI so if that sounds good to you get ready because we're going to dive right into it all right the very first thing I want to do before we dive into the meat of this video is I really want to thank you all for uh supporting the channel in the way that you have this channel has grown Crazy Fast far faster than I ever would have expected and in talking to other YouTubers my the amount of views that this channel gets relative to the number of subscribers that it gets is kind of off the charts so it's really quite a thrill for me to be able to do this to be in this position so thank you very much for continuing to watch the videos if you would like to help me to continue to have the channel to grow please do like this video uh and leave a comment whether it be a question or just an ad upware or whatever because that is by far the number one way to tell the YouTube algorithm to show it to more people all right let's dive into this so we're going to talk about controlling your schedule choosing your students Insurance finding aircraft to fly how to organize how I organize my schedule there's some work I got to do in the evening your website and social media presence the importance of NK working compensation AKA how much money I make and then life after, 1500 hours so we got a lot of cool stuff to get into so let's Dive Right into this so number one when you are comparing being an employee CFI to an independent CFI is I have total and complete control of my schedule because it's my own business and I cannot understate how uh or overstate rather how incredibly valuable that is to me because if you want a day off or you want to do whatever there's nobody that you need to check in with that's number one so you get to decide what days off you're going to take or maybe even more importantly is that you get to decide how each and every day is organized whereas if you're an employee CFI you might end up hanging around the flight school and maybe you get a flight eight and that one's done by 10 because they typically train in twoh hour blocks I don't do that I'll explain what I do in a bit um and then maybe from 10: to noon you're 10: to 11: you don't really have anything so you're just kind of sitting around and you're making no money and then you got one in the afternoon and maybe you have another one in the evening and like that does not sound any fun to me at all whereas as a independent CFI I am able to stack my lessons back to back and I actually organized my schedule as of this film I have flights scheduled till June and this filming is uh happening on March 26 so for perspective if you get good at distribution which is attracting students which we'll talk about later in this video uh you can really stack your schedule to optimize your income to make a better experience for your students and to ultimately have a much better life than being an employee of a flight school now let's talk about choosing your students so again when you're an employeee at to flight school that you kind of get what you get and not always do you get along with your students and not always do you enjoy enjoy teaching a given student for whatever reason and as an independent CFI you get to say no and sometimes that's incredibly Val I I have done that in the past I've had students get in touch with me or prospective students get in touch with me and we do that first call and I don't really feel like the chemistry is there um or maybe they didn't feel the chemistry was there and that made me feel like the chemistry wasn't there but in either case in those cases rather I was able to say you know hey I don't think that we're going to be the best fit for each other you should go find somebody else and if you're going to spend as much time with another human being in the cockpit as is required to do to teach somebody to fly I think it's pretty darn important that you enjoy the company that is in the cockpit so that is Advantage number two of being an independent CFI now let's talk about insurance this is going to be a very short section of this video because what I did was very very simple I went to safe pilot. org and I got there CFI Insurance boom that's the whole section I am not an insurance insance experts so I don't want to dive deep into insurance if you want to really go deep into Insurance go talk to an insurance expert but that's where I got my CFI insurance it was very affordable I think it was like a couple hundred bucks and I chose actually no it wasn't it was I chose the maximum coverage for everything and for the year I believe it was $2,700 but when you get to the when you we get to the compensation portion of this video you'll see how that was actually very very worth it for me to do so that's insurance now let's talk about getting aircraft to fly so obviously when you're at a flight school it's pretty darn easy to find aircraft because the flight school owns a bunch of planes and they just put you in those planes with the students and off you go into the friendly Skies as an independent CFI it's a little bit trickier so in my case what I did was I did a lot of local networking to find uh either schools initially it was a school that wasn't very busy um or independent aircraft owners that have aircraft that they treat as an investment as opposed to their shiny baby that they don't want anybody to touch and the folks who have the business mindset are going to be very happy to have you fly their aircraft now typically they're going to carry Insurance you're going to carry insurance and they may even ask your students to get renters insurance which they can get from aopa um and it's not very expensive and when you have those three levels of insurance there's really no uh risk to the owner of the aircraft to let you go and train in it and it can be very lucrative for them um so it's uh if you're willing to put in the leg work and build that network of of folks that have those aircraft or maybe you buy an aircraft of your own because that makes being a CFI even more profitable than I'm going to explain at the end of this video so if you're thinking of doing this you know maybe as an ongoing career I would strongly encourage you to consider buying your own aircraft and with respect to the type of aircraft probably a topic for whole another video definitely give light Sports a look uh they are a wonderful aircraft training they're less expensive to buy they're newer they're more modern and they sip fuel so uh I'm a big fan of training in light Sports all right so now let's talk about how I or organize my schedule when I first started um as a see if I really didn't have a clue what I was doing so I was was using aircraft from a school and so I just did what they did I chose the typical 2hour training block which by the time you pre-flight an airplane and fuel it up either before or after the flight is going to leave your student with about 1.4 to 1.5 hours in the log book and that can be okay but I eventually figured out a much better way and let me explain you know kind of what the problems were with the scheduling of the 2hour blocks so first off in the initial phase of training and I and I've altered my style of how I train and that has also affected the way I schedule things so in the beginning I used to really focus heavily on the Maneuvers and we didn't really go to airports or anything like that and so those two-hour blocks were kind of sufficient because if you go out and train for an hour and a half of doing know slowlight installs your student gets mentally fatigued pretty quickly but then when they get to the point in their training when they're ready for CrossCountry flights now those 2hour blocks aren't long enough then you have to start really tweaking your schedule so early on you got a bunch of two-hour blocks and then you need three-hour blocks and it becomes a bit of a mess to be honest with you to schedule so the that that's downside number one and then the second downside is and I found this particularly applied to me you know I thanks to having a lot of students to train with I had the opportunity to pretty much max out my time every day and so if you're doing 2our blocks that means four blocks of two hours is eight hours and that's going to give you about 1 and a half hours Time 4 which is only 6 hours in your log book so if you're trying to get eight hours as the CFI if you're trying to get eight hours in your log book every day that means you need to do five flights which is just like unbelievably exhausting even four flights the mental fatigue of coming in after flight number three and realizing oh man I got to go do this yet again it was absolutely exhausting so then one day out of the blue it dawned on me hey why don't I just do thre hour lessons for everybody from day one and when I started doing three-hour lessons my students were getting two and a half hours in the log book so two and if I do three of those a day now that's seven and a half hours in my log book every day but more importantly it allowed me to incorporate um more of a scenari Based training approach so instead of going out and for the first you know 10 or 12 lessons just pounding out Maneuvers now what we do is we always go to an airport and then we do Maneuvers as we're going to that airport and coming back from the airport so it's very very easy to use up the 2 and 1/2 hours and it makes the training far more realistic to your students because most let's face it in real world flying usually you're going somewhere you're approaching an airport and if it's a non-towered airport there's all these things that a student has to get really good at When approaching a non-towered airport and so if you're sort of saving all that to like later in there flying and you're only working on the Maneuvers I feel as though you're robbing your student of the scenario Based training and all the scenarios that you can come up with so now when I train students we're going to airports on every flight and we're doing Maneuvers on virtually every flight until they get really proficient at those Maneuvers and then we stop doing them because by then we're probably in the cross country phase of training anyway so having that schedule divided into three three-hour blocks equates to in my case about a 9 and 1 half hour day at least till I get home and do the office work which we'll talk about here in just a minute and then I'm logging 7 and a half hours or so in my in my log book every single day so I'm really maximizing the pace at w with which I can get uh to build my to the 1500 that I need to get an ATP uh and it doesn't ever put me in that box where I'm like okay so are they at the cross country phase oh they are maybe I start start making these lessons three hours instead of two hours it just made my life a whole lot easier and finally maybe most importantly when I get out of the cockpit for lesson three for student number three I'm done and that mental fatigue of oh I got to do this a fourth time or a fifth time today I pretty much disappeared and so that I think made me be a better instructor and then that would have a better experience for my students because let's face it nobody wants to fly with a burnt out grumpy flight instructor because they're just exhausted because they've spent all day you know doing Maneuvers and not going to airports and there was no rest time there was no straight and level flight or anything like that so I don't really think that that's good for anybody so now let's talk about what happened the other thing um when you are an independent flight instructor is you're going to if you do a good job with the next two things I'm going to talk about you're going to have a steady flow of student inquiries and you have to deal with those inquiries and if you're in the cockpit all day long that doesn't leave you any room to deal with those inquiries so guess what that's what you're going to be doing in the evening so there it is to uh have this great life because I'm keeping myself very very full-time which you don't NE necessarily have to do and I'll revisit that idea after we talk about compensation but it makes for a pretty long day so usually my days are somewhere in the order of about 12 hours now like I mentioned to you about eight hours of that is actual in the cockpit time and then some of it is still on the ramp time and then the other time is driving and some is eating and then some is sitting at my desk and doing the work so it makes for a fairly long day but I don't mind working hard U because as you'll see here when we get to compensation I'm being rewarded very very well for all of that hard work so now let's talk about the elephant in the room the biggest reason why most people don't go and become an independent CFI and that is distribution in other words where do you get the students from so you can get them in a couple of ways number one you could have a YouTube channel or basically a social media presence and there are lots of flight instructors that do that I have been incredibly blessed by My Success on YouTube again I have all of you guys to thank for that so thank you very much and so I have uh never wanted for students I have basically been full uh and booked months out simply because of the success of this channel now you anyone could do what I'm doing now some people may not want to do what I doing well if if you don't want to be on social media but you do want to be an independent flight instructor it's still possible to do and I know that because my mentor Dave had no social media at all but yet he was flying 120 hours a month as an independent flight instructor so what did Dave do Dave was a networker rather than being a content creator he's just a super friendly guy so he would go to the airport he would hang out there all the time he'd walk around hangers and if a hanger door was open he'd walk over and he'd introduce himself and ask about the person and strike up a conversation and build rapport and at the end of all of that he'd say you know I'm also a flight instructor if you know anybody that needs a you know a biannual flight review or an an IPC or they want to work on their private license or what have you you know here's my card or here's here's my website or what have you and so he was very successful with the networking approach and obviously over time the longer that you are a flight instructor the more networking you do the more reputation you'll build and the more word of mouth referrals that you are going to get I would say in my case probably 80 20 80% from social media and 20% referrals just from folks that I've come to know here in my local market the other way that you can network uh is Facebook groups uh here in boisey we have this thing called the Treasure Valley Pilots group and so you can make posts in there uh as long as you're not too spammy or too commercial I think most local Facebook groups that are devoted to Pilots are probably going to be okay with you um sort of soft selling or soft advertising your services so there's that opportunity for you as well now if you are regardless of whether you're going to focus on social media or if you're on networking make sure that you have a really professional looking website I suspect many of you have been to mine if you have not it's flywi trend.com it's a site that I built myself uh using Wordpress if you don't have to build a website you can go on to Fiverr fiverr.com or you can go to upwork.com and you can find people to build your website you should not have to spend thousands of dollars on a website it's more like hundreds of dollars and you would end up with a very good-look website um most of the current website Builders are so darn easy that if you know how to point and click a mouse and type you can probably build a pretty decent website but if you don't have the skills to make it get good-look or you don't know what goodlooking is then you should seek the uh guidance or help from a trained professional because if you have a ugly looking website it is going to actually be detrimental to your cause it's going to make you look unprofessional versus professional and once you do have a website uh I would strongly encourage that you make sure that you've got good content on it that explains your programs explains your pricing shows the aircraft maybe talks about your style as an instructor maybe have some blog posts ideally you'll want to film some footage of you in the cockpit so that people can see you teaching another human being so they can kind of decide is this person style something that would work for me or not um and if you do that like I have done you will be uh you'll be well rewarded with a steady stream of students so I guess the big thing here and I'll call this the I'm probably going to offend some people when I say this but the lazy tax if you decide to go the flight school route you're going to take a huge pay cut versus the independent route where you get to keep all the money so um that choice is yours and I would encourage you to make the decision that is best for you so hint here we go it's now time to talk about compensation so I make far more money I actually make more money now than I will than I will make as an airline pilot probably almost uh twice as much but I also work probably twice as much so on a per hour basis maybe I'm making the same about it actually am I'm making almost identical to what a first officer makes per hour but I work a lot more hours so how does all that work well the going rate in my market for instructors is somewhere between 50 and $70 an hour I'm at the high end because my students are coming to me so I'm not chasing them and I've never had anyone at all I charge $70 per hour at the time of this filming I could probably charge 80 if I wanted to to be honest with you I don't think that that would uh hurt my business at all but I don't feel the need to charge anymore I feel 70 is a very fair rate for the instruction and obviously the biggest difference between working for a school and working for myself is that I get to keep the entire $70 per hour but that's not all the money that I make as an independent instructor um because of the deals that I've made with certain aircraft owners because I bring customers to fly their air craft I also get uh a slice of the aircraft profit which puts my hourly rate uh closer to about $95 per hour and then I also make money in other ways such as the income from YouTube which is actually a meaningful amount of income and it keeps getting better every month which is nobody's more surprised at that than me so again thank you all very much for watching my videos you can have your Amazon store um in my case I I I get income from gold seal because people I recommend gold seal to my students um I get more demand for students than I can satisfy so I have Partnerships with a flight school and I probably will have Partnerships with more flight schools over time and so you can send students to other flight schools if they don't want to come to your town um so there's all sorts of ways that you can really really jack up your income um and it all adds up so um here comes the big number as a flight instructor at this point in time I'm making about $20,000 a month which is absolutely mind-blowing to me because I didn't never think that that was going to be possible but if you do the math on I'm flying pretty much 40 hours a week um and so at you know 95 or 100 bucks an hour that's almost four grand a week right there and then all the other stuff I explained uh adds up to be the difference so uh it's it's pretty darn good now I do want to say that the amount that I work I don't think is sustainable for like years I am on a particular mission to get to, 1500 hours as quickly as I can so I fly the maximum that the FAA allows uh every day now if I was doing this as if I wasn't trying to get to the airlines so this is I guess really the the the title of this section is life after 1500 hours not everybody wants to go and fly for the airlines um and maybe you want to go maybe you'll do part 91 uh maybe you'll do part 135 maybe you'll do it part-time maybe you'll be a contract pilot but if you have done a good job of your social media presence and your networking you're always going to have a steady flow of students and you know if you can make a 100 bucks an hour um for teaching a student especially if you own your own aircraft you're probably going to make even more than that it'll be more like 130ish depending on what plane you buy 130ish an hour 140 an hour um you only need to then maybe teach two students day and so in my typical day I make like 800 bucks maybe you'd make $550 well still $550 a day for only working what would then be about 6 hours a day or maybe seven hours it's not bad so overall you can do extremely well as an independent CFI and I highly recommend that regardless of what their your goal is to be an airline pilot or a contract pilot or maybe you just want to be a CFI for you know as a career that you give a very very serious look to becoming an independent CFI because it has been very very good for me I hope in this video I have shared enough details with you all to uh illuminate a path for you to get there as well as to inspire some of you to do it and if that has been the case for you please do give this video a like and leave me a comment down below if you have questions obviously you can put those down below as well and finally if this is your first time watching one of my videos love it if you would become a part of the fly withth Trent Community by subscribing here on YouTube and you may even want to go over to flywi tr.com and get yourself on the email list because when I do live streams um I announce that via email if I've got new videos that are coming out I announce that via email and uh if I have anything else special I might announce that over email as well I don't send a bunch of emails but nonetheless if you would like to be uh a part of that you can do that at flywi tr.com so thank you very very much to you for watching this video and if you're someone who watches all of my videos again thank you so very much for supporting the channel has been my pleasure and it will continue to be my pleasure to produce more content for you in the future take care bye-bye

Channel: Fly with Trent (Trent Dyrsmid)

Views: 24,336

Keywords:

Id: Uqxg4JL0Tf0

Length: 25min 49sec (1549 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 30 2024