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“Now that is one happy couple”, I thought to myself as I walked to my car after an afternoon visit with Dick and Kathy Hordon. Happy to-gether, happy in their business, happy in their chosen life.

Dick, Kathy and son Rich operate Four Star Aviation in North Andover, MA, a family busi-ness that has prospered for almost four de-cades in the economic rollercoaster of aviation. Weathering the seasonality and cyclicality of the FBO business has called for a smorgasbord of services that has changed over time, mirror-ing the changes in general aviation over that pe-riod. Timing is everything in business as well as in flying and that timing challenge hasn’t es-caped Four Star, which is right now faced with adapting to dramatic changes in order to escape a profit squeeze.

“Now you can’t leave the ground without talking to four people. And finding a grass field is getting harder and harder, particularly one in an area where there are enough people to sup-port the business.”

And this is the heart of the dilemma for Dick and many other business owners: Smallness and autonomy versus size and viability.

Ask him what Four Star does now and he’ll tell you:Aircraft maintenance, storage, sales, fuelingAerial photography, survey and banner towingFinancing and appraisalAccident investigation

But significant changes in the industry are forcing him to adapt. Light aircraft maintenance, flight training, aircraft financing and a success-ful remote sensing business are among the casu-alties, along with moving from the “lovely grass strip” to bustling Lawrence Municipal Airport (LWM), a tower-controlled, municipally-gov-erned jet-capable field 30 miles north of Boston.

Four Star has seen a fall-off in light aircraft maintenance paralleling a decrease in the num-ber of light aircraft. “The industry is destroy-ing more airplanes than we’re producing”, says Dick. Additionally, better parts manufacturing economies are forcing a shift to “remove and replace” rather than “repair” maintenance. This reduces the billable hours for the FBO and shifts more of the maintenance dollar to the replace-ment parts manufacturer. Still, parts garner 30 points, which pays the lights and rent.

Flight training is the “work end of the busi-ness” for Dick. More flight training equals more management workload, finding instructors and then replacing them as they move up the avia-tion food chain, ferrying aircraft and carrying more aircraft inventory. It feeds the rest of the business, but is it essential? Maybe not, as Dick has cut back from fourteen aircraft to a handful, including the Cessna 206 he uses solely as an aerial survey and photography platform.

Making a Flying Business Fly: “Loving Making a Living”

Dick is a traditionalist, upset that so few CFI’s (“one out of a hundred”) have tailwheel expe-rience. “90% of accidents are caused by loss of directional control on takeoff and landing,” which Dick attributes to the sloppy habits toler-ated by tricycle trainers. “Tailwheels teach you what your feet are for!”

How about aircraft financing? “Way too com-petitive”, says Dick. Too many providers of an essentially undifferentiated service equals too little margin.

In contrast, Dick was able to build a unique airborne remote sensing business, creating an innovative marriage of GPS, computer controls and infrared cameras upon which he built an aerial photography service as well as a camera accessory sales business. However, the exten-sive travel conflicted with the core business, big government contractors dominated the market and even law enforcement got nervous when Dick became a witness to things they didn’t want known, so he sold that business after ten years.

Accident investigation is, happily, sporadic, but “sporadic” won’t keep the lights on.

However, every cloud has a silver lining and growth in the light jet market is significant, of-fering a new business opportunity to an FBO at a mid-size, jet- and instrument-capable field. Independent FBO’s are hard-pressed to get big iron contracts, but the smaller corporations and wealthy entrepreneurs are now moving up to jets, and Dick is moving with them.

“Little airplanes are a lot of fun,” says Dick, “but you work for every nickel you make on them. You put seven or eight hundred gallons of fuel into a jet and you’ve just made a week’s pay in three-quarters of an hour.”

“Fuel ‘em and store ‘em” is the new mantra. Bigger hangars are under construction, a ramp expansion project is in the works and a focus on night fueling is fueling a new surge in revenue.

Ironically, “just-in-time” manufacturing in a cost-conscious Detroit is spurring this growth. As car manufacturers trim their inventories, they make themselves more dependent on their sup-pliers, many of whom are in Four Star’s local area. When the call goes out for an ASAP short-order, the planes fly in to LWM at any hour to respond, and when they do, Dick responds with Jet-A and jet catering. “We’ve become a mini freight-center. It’s profitable and it’s fun!”

However, basing is crucial to consistent fuel sales. The good news is that congestion at a ma-jor jet airport nearby is forcing new jet owners to look for a basing alternative, and if Dick has his way, he believes he can lure them as well as some established owners to his LWM facili-ties. He credits AOPA’s FBO Directory, as well as a revamped Four Star web site, with being his best source of corporate transient and basing

business, and points to AvFuel, his fuel supplier, as being a superb marketing partner and respon-sive supplier. “You can’t do it alone”, says Dick, “and AvFuel has been great to us.”

What about the challenges the industry faces?

Dick sees the biggest challenge as the public’s love/hate relationship with aviation. People are “in love with airplanes” conceptually yet they worry about noise, crashes and now terrorism. Insurance post-9/11 has become a big issue, with subrogation against renter pilots arising as a recent phenomenon for FBO’s. In response, Four Star has shifted insurance costs to renters/students by requiring hefty renter pilot insur-ance coverage and to themselves by self-insur-ing higher hull deductibles. Dick thinks that the public relationship can be improved by getting the community involved with the airport and be-ing responsive to complaints.

The good news is that there are “always peo-ple who want to learn to fly”, according to Dick, and this is borne out by a steady diet of walk-in traffic. Converts range from “kids to grandmoth-ers,” with word-of-mouth and the Yellow Pages the best source of this traffic, again along with his website. Radio advertising doesn’t seem to get the draw it used to, for a reason that seems a little ominous. Four Star advertised on an “old-ies station” that reliably yielded new students from a demographic linked to ‘50’s and ‘60’s music. That station is still an “oldies” station, but they shifted the definition of “oldies” to the ‘70’s, and new student traffic fell off. Does that mean that the love of flying is less infectious in more recent generations?

What’s been the value of the business to you, Dick? “It’s allowed us to raise a family, put the kids through college, own a nice house in a nice town, buy properties in other parts of the country and have fun doing it. It’s been a great education. It teaches you about every aspect of life. I’ve had to learn about weather, runways, finance, law, leases, politics, training people, managing people, fixing airplanes, fixing the Coke machine, how you build a building, how you repair the plumbing, the list goes on and on. It’s more than flying. You have to be multi-talented.” An obvious challenge is balancing this diversity with a focus on the essentials. Dick agrees that can be tough, but clearly this family has achieved the American dream.

When asked about the attributes it takes to be successful in this business, Dick and Kathy put at the top of their list the need to be “flexible, com-mitted, tenacious and inventive.” Any advice for people entering such a business? “Go into it with your eyes open, it’s not a 9-to-5 job and remem-ber, you’re in business to be in business!”

Sage advice for making a living in any busi-ness, even one you love.

By Thomas C. Browne