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Cory Bengtzen – The Economics of Flying Private – Ep.256

We dive into the unique challenges and opportunities in private aviation, from running Fixed Base Operators (FBOs) to launching fractional ownership and charter services.
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Episode Description

Ep.256: Alex (@aebridgeman) is joined by Cory Bengtzen (@Cory-Bengtzen).

In this episode, I sit down with Cory Bengtzen, founder and CEO of SkyShare, to explore his entrepreneurial journey from the auto industry to building a vertically integrated private aviation business. Cory shares how his passion for aviation inspired him to leave the car business and start an airplane brokerage with no prior industry experience. He recounts his early days of cold-calling aircraft owners, developing a fractional ownership program, and growing SkyShare into a successful operation serving the Western U.S.

We dive into the unique challenges and opportunities in private aviation, from running Fixed Base Operators (FBOs) to launching fractional ownership and charter services. Cory explains how vertical integration—owning maintenance operations, FBOs, and a charter fleet—has been key to SkyShare’s resilience and growth. He also breaks down the economics of private aviation, describing how his team balances efficiency and service to deliver value for clients.

Cory also shares fascinating stories from his career, including ferrying aircraft across continents for the Discovery Channel’s Dangerous Flights and his insights into why so many aviation ventures fail. Whether you’re an aviation enthusiast or a business owner considering private aviation, this episode is full of practical advice and compelling stories from one of the industry’s most innovative leaders.

Listen weekly and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Breaker, and TuneIn.

Learn more about Alex and Think Like an Owner at https://tlaopodcast.com/

Clips From This Episode

Economics of an FBO

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Rationales for Flying Private

  • ThePlus Audio

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(00:00:00) – Intro

(00:01:10) – Building SkyShare

(00:12:35) – The economics of an FBO

(00:15:25) – The rationale for flying private

(00:23:50) – Customer journeys

(00:30:00) – Aircraft management from a customer standpoint

(00:32:04) – How are owners implementing modifications to jets?

(00:36:45) – Changes in ICP across programs

(00:38:58) – What goes wrong the most in private aviation?

Alex Bridgeman: Cory, thanks for joining Think Like an Owner. This podcast is all about ambitious CEOs growing great companies. And as an aviation geek, I’m excited to learn about SkyShare but also some of the thinking you’ve done on how business owners, entrepreneurs, and executives can fly private in different ways. And SkyShare offers kind of a mix of all the main ways or most of the main ways. So, it’d be fun to dive into that. But talk about SkyShare and why you built the company and what the vision was and some of the early ideas you had because I find a lot of companies are kind of a reflection of their founder or CEO, and so getting a sense of that reflection on you would be a fun place to start, I think.

Cory Bengtzen: Sure, Alex, first, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. So, I started the company 15 years ago now, and that was after about a 15 year run in the auto industry. I started when I was really young selling cars and was promoted and ran through the car business where I ultimately owned a Ford store and then I had a couple of used car dealerships with some partners, and I enjoyed the car business, but I didn’t have a passion for it like I do airplanes. Originally, when I was in high school, I wanted to be an airline pilot, and then I was just going to sell cars for one year because I was racing motorcycles and that was going to support my racing habit. And then I was going to go get my pilot’s license to do that. And the car business kind of sucked me. I started making a lot of money and had a pretty fun career there. But I got my pilot’s license when I was 21 years old. So, while I was in the car business, I just took a private pilot license at a small airport here in Utah. I bought my first airplane when I was 22, which was a little Cessna Turbo 210, which was a lot of fun and kept flying for fun. And then after 2008, 2009, the economy was changing, and it was much more difficult in the car world to make money. My partners and I weren’t getting along like we had in the past, so I was like, you know what, I’m just going to sell the car dealership back to them, and I’m going to follow my passion, and I’m going to start an aviation company. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but I understood sales and I understood marketing, and I knew that even if I didn’t make as much money as I did in the car business, if I was dealing with airplanes and dealing with people that were passionate about airplanes, that’s what I wanted to do. So started the company and it was called CB Aviation back then, Alex, and I was just an airplane broker. And again, I had no idea what I was doing. So I was cold calling aircraft owners and trying to convince them to let me list their aircraft for sale. And the business started to get traction and started selling more and more airplanes. I ultimately bought my first FBO to kind of house the brokerage and the maintenance and everything about 10 years ago up in Ogden. And again, didn’t have any FBO knowledge before, but just learned and hired some good people that knew what they were doing. And as the FBO grew and the brokerage started selling more and more aircraft, I had an opportunity to do a Dangerous Flights, which was a TV show with the Discovery Channel, which is really fun. So the TV show was all about following me flying small airplanes that I’d sold or just paid to ferry all over the world. So I flew like a little Cessna 206 all the way to Poland, which entailed taking out the back seats, putting in a big fuel tank, wearing your survival suit, going up through Greenland and Iceland and into Scotland and then into the UK. So there was some really fun flights that I did. I was able to touch 32 countries in three years of filming that, flying across the Pacific a couple times, the Atlantic a few times, small bonanzas down through the jungles and in Brazil and whatnot. And then I saw an opportunity. I had sold a Phenom 100 from one of my clients that lives in Ukraine. We sold it back into the States. And the pilot that I hired to help me move it around worked for another fractional company, and I didn’t really even know what fractional was back then. So, I started picking his brain, like how does it work and why did people prefer that over owning their own airplane or chartering and whatnot. So I started doing a ton of research and realized that there was an incredible opportunity in the Western US for a mid-tier fractional program. There’s the big ones, the NetJets and the Flexjets and everything that are nationwide and even worldwide, some of them, but for more of a regional on smaller airplanes. I studied it, like I said, studied all the different fractional companies, what clients like the best about each one. I interviewed multiple clients as well as recruited some of the other people that work for the other fractional companies, so I could try and figure out what’s the best way to put this together. And that’s when we came up with, we rebranded the company to CB SkyShare. Now, it’s rebranded again just to SkyShare. But we started this fractional program about seven years ago, and you basically buy a portion of one aircraft, and then you have the ability to fly our fleet of airplanes which makes this really unique. So, we can get into a little bit more about the fractional side, but that’s how the company started. It was just me and one office at an airport, cold calling aircraft owners and started selling airplanes, and gosh, we probably sold 300 airplanes over the years. Now still have a very successful brokerage department. We sell, I mean, just in December, we closed nine different airplanes, everything from a G550 down to Pilatuses and CJ2s and whatnot. That’s how it kind of all started, Alex.

Alex Bridgeman: The Dangerous Flights is pretty interesting too. I read a book in middle school of someone who did that, that ferry flight across Canada, Greenland and into Scotland and England on a 210. So, like nice choice on a first plane, like 210 Turbo, that’s a very solid entry point to your own plane. Was there a flight in the show that was most memorable for you or most dangerous?

Cory Bengtzen: We had some really fun flights. The one that was probably the most dangerous and the most technical is, it wasn’t an aircraft that I sold, I was just hired to move the airplane down to the Philippines, and it was an old Cheyenne II. And the airplane was just- we had issues with it nonstop. At one point in time, we’re going through Russia, and this is in the middle of November, so it’s freezing cold, and the heater broke on the airplane. And we’re like, we’re heading south now. We just left Vladivostok, Russia, and we’re going south. And it’s like, what do we do? Because if we turn around and go back, it’s a Russian military base. There’s no mechanics that are going to be able to help us out. And so we knew we were going south, ultimately going to end up in the Philippines. So, we got as low as we could after we figured the fuel burn, do we have- we can maximize the endurance of the aircraft at a lower altitude. But oh my gosh, it got so cold in that cockpit. It’s like we’re using a credit card to scrape the windshield because it was frosting on the inside. We took all of our charts out, and like hobos, we used them as newspapers to put around, like to try to keep us warm with this newspaper. And it was a very cold flight. I don’t know. We didn’t have a thermometer inside. The outside air temperature gauge was pegged at negative 50, and it was cold. So, that was probably the scariest and like uncomfortable flight that I’ve ever been on. We really didn’t have a choice. Like we just had to keep going to get it down there. There was myself, the other pilot, and the director in the back. Most of our clothes were up in the nose of the airplane. So, we did have some clothing, like one jacket each, but it was freaking cold. And then to top it off, we get that plane down to the Philippines. We go from negative 50 degrees, now it’s a 102 degrees and the freaking air conditioning broke. Like that plane was a challenge. But it was a fun flight when it was all done.

Alex Bridgeman: Was the buyer intending on fixing it? Like I’m sure they knew it’s like not doing well.

Cory Bengtzen: Yeah, the buyer was very frustrated with how long it took us to get the airplane down there, but we kept having maintenance issues. Like it was stuck in Alaska for two weeks. And he did do a pre-buy inspection when he bought it, but it was just not a great airplane. It had multiple problems. We had a list of squawks by the time we got it down to him and handed over the keys. So, he wasn’t the most happy, but it was his decision to buy that airplane, I guess.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, that’s quite a decision. I didn’t realize also that you bought the FBO so early on and started the maintenance so early on. I kind of assumed you added maintenance or bought a maintenance shop at some point and included that in SkyShare. I didn’t realize that that was super early on that you had that service integrated with SkyShare or CB Aviation at the time. Was there thoughts around like we should buy this FBO because one day we’re going to be pretty happy that we have it or long-term this is a pretty good asset? What was the thinking around doing that at such an early stage?

Cory Bengtzen: Yeah, good question, Alex. Back then, I was leasing space from the other FBO that’s on the field. And I needed more space and they kept raising the price, the rent price on me. And I finally just was like, guys, you’re going to ultimately push me out if you keep raising the price on me. It’s like every six months they’re giving me a rent increase. So then I went to their competing FBO. The owner was an older gentleman. I knew that he was thinking of retiring, and we just sat down and basically made a deal on the back of a napkin. And then all of a sudden, I was a competitor to the other FBO. And it was really cool, Alex, because it gave us a house for everything else we were doing. So, we had offices now for the brokerage. Now we have another revenue stream of the FBO selling fuel, hangering. It gave us big hangers for our maintenance department. At that point in time, we were more of a smaller maintenance, just a couple of mechanics that were helping on the airplanes that we were flipping or brokering. But it gave me a new insight to all the different opportunities within the private aviation. So we have a second FBO as well. I have one in Marin County in the Bay Area, and we’re looking into acquiring a third one this year actually. So the FBO is a integral part and it really fits in well with what we’re doing. There’s been lots of fractional companies and charter companies that have gone out of business over the years. I can list five very easily. And with us…

Alex Bridgeman: One was on our podcast, by the way.

Cory Bengtzen: I heard that.

Alex Bridgeman: Which we talked about, yeah.

Cory Bengtzen: Yeah. And I think that’s one thing that’s made us successful is because we’re vertically integrated. So from the FBO, now we can buy fuel wholesale. So we have a revenue stream there. It gives us a house to be able to do our mechanics and whatnot so we have our own maintenance that we’re maintaining our own airplanes. And so it all really works well together from the charter and the fractional, from the FBO maintenance, all of it comes together nicely.

Alex Bridgeman: So, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at different maintenance businesses, but I’ve spent very little, if any, around the FBO side. Can you talk through the business of an FBO? Obviously, when you include a service or a fractional charter like SkyShare does, it changes things a little bit, but what are the core economics of an FBO like, and what’s been your experience running them?

Cory Bengtzen: Yeah. So, Alex, every situation can be a little bit different, but in most FBOs, you’re going to have two main revenue streams. The first is just selling the fuel, the markup, the margin on selling the Jet A or the Avgas. And then the second is hangering aircraft, either transient aircraft that are just staying there for a couple of days or long-term tenants that you take care of the airplanes. So you’ll see a lot of these big FBO chains like Atlantic and Signature, that’s really all they focus on. They don’t want to get into the maintenance side and the aircraft sales side so much as they want to provide a nice facility, take really good care of the transient aircraft and sell as much fuel as they can and fill the hangars as much as they can with either short-term or long-term tenants.

Alex Bridgeman: I hear planes in the background. You’re at the airport, right?

Cory Bengtzen: Yeah, my office is here at the Salt Lake International. So sorry about that. It was a big…

Alex Bridgeman: Oh, you’re at Salt Lake. Yeah, I was going to say it’s quite loud for Ogden or something, or Provo. So, you’ve got something going there for sure.

Cory Bengtzen: We moved our headquarters down to the Salt Lake Airport about two years ago. We just ran out of space at the FBO up in Ogden. And so, we still have our maintenance and accounting up at the Ogden FBO. But now down here at the Salt Lake, we rent a bunch of space from both FBOs actually. Our sales and marketing is over at Atlantic and then our executive team and flight operations and chief pilot’s office and everything is here at Signature.

Alex Bridgeman: Love it. Love it. Also, you’ve got a red background, I’ve got a green shirt. We talked the first time around Christmas, so this feels very on-brand. For those listening, we’re on YouTube now, which is a new plus for 2025. Combining FBO with charter fractional is pretty interesting. It’s a good segue into talking about kind of the- before we get into the different ways that you might fly private, which SkyShare offers a couple of the main ways, what are some of the core rationales and reasons that folks tend to fly private? If there’s like a top two or three, what do those tend to be most often?

Cory Bengtzen: I’ve thought about this a lot, and it’s involved in how we market our company, and I’ve sold, again, hundreds of airplanes over the years, and so I’ve got to know a lot of really, really neat aircraft owners. Most of them are entrepreneurs and CEOs. And what I’ve realized, Alex, is there’s really three different reasons people fly private. And sometimes they’ll do all three. But the first one is just strict business efficiency. These aircraft can be used as time machines and help people grow their business and be in multiple cities in one day. We have multiple clients that will start here, like in Salt Lake with their executive team at seven in the morning. We’ll hit one meeting in Denver an hour and a half later, there are at a couple hours of the meeting, and first, let’s back up a little bit. Remember, flying private, you’re going to drive right up to the airplane, the door is down, there’s no security, no TSA, you’re not waiting in these long lines, you’re going to maximize your time, you’re going to get on board the aircraft, within 10 minutes you’re in the air, and then that airplane turns into a conference room for your executive team. You’ve got the privacy and you can be planning for that upcoming meeting. And so, again, the first reason I believe is business efficiencies, where they can take executive teams or sales teams or operation teams and they can maximize their time, not wasting it in the airports, waiting in lines, and then stuck in a big airplane and they’re spread out. They’re confined in a very comfortable private space where they can be planning for that meeting they’re going to, debriefing from the one they just left, and we can hit three or four cities in one day and have them home by dinner. Where if you try to do that on the airlines, it’s going to take a week or more if you’re to try and drive it. So the efficiencies that it can give fast-growing companies is amazing. So that’s number one. Number two is also business related, but it’s more creating experiences. One of my clients, also a very close friend of mine, owns a wealth management firm, and he uses his jet to take prospective clients or current clients, and he takes them on incredible adventures, whether it be scuba diving or spear fishing down in Mexico or he loads it up and he’s got a high fence Texas ranch and they do exotic hunting or going to Pebble Beach and golfing. And what he’s told me is the aircraft has paid for itself many times over because not many people are going to say no to a private jet ride to go do something cool. So he gets an opportunity to have this one-on-one, face-to-face experience with something they’re going to remember forever and to build that common bond with that person throughout that experience, that then ultimately a lot of his clients have moved money into his firm just because they got to know him and got to know that he’s a really good guy and runs a great business, but he wouldn’t have had that opportunity to be in front of a really busy CEO without having to be able to provide that experience, and the private jet is just part of that tool. And then the third category I’d say that people fly is for convenience and experiences. So, there’s some people, a couple of my clients that are retired now that have had a successful career, and they use it strictly as an experience or time machine. So, if they want to, if they’re trying to get to their different house, they can avoid all of the commercial, going to TSA, all the stuff that we just talked about, no connecting flights, they’re able to fly into the airport that is right next to their house. So there’s over 5,000 airports in the U.S. that we can fly into in the private airplanes, where the airlines only service about 500 airports. So we can get people so close to their destination, saving them so much time. And so that’s really the three. It’s making your business more efficient, creating an experience with potential clients, or just using it as a time machine to be able to get people around and take the family to Disneyland, take your buddies on a ski trip or whatever you want to do.

Alex Bridgeman: The private discussion after meetings within a private plane makes a lot of sense too. I feel like I’ve heard like 10 different stories of bankers or investors trying to do it, like put a deck together on a flight and someone sees it and they’re at that firm and they get to scoop on a deal or something. But otherwise, that time just becomes dead for that executive team if they’re on United or Southwest flying back from Denver. You can’t talk as openly and it’s going to be louder, there’s more people around, more stuff going on. But that time is now useful because you can talk through the previous discussion and get ready for the next one and have that time together without anyone eavesdropping. That seems like it would be, especially for high stakes deals or new customers, partnerships, any M&A activity, that seems like it would pay for itself pretty quickly.

Cory Bengtzen: Yeah, you’re spot on. And if you just compare the pricing, like you can never pencil it out of what a first class ticket is going to cost you. Flying private is a lot more expensive. It always will be. But when you take into account how much time you’re going to save all of your executive team, for example, that one day trip where you went to four or five different cities versus a week of them out of the office, going through airports and whatnot, and just how much more pleasure it gives your team that knowing that they’re going to be back home in their bed that night, it’s going to be better for their relationships. It’s better, more time with their kids. When you’ve put all that into the consideration, then it’s like, you know what, it does make more sense for some companies to start flying private.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. And I always get a little suspicious when you see advertising for flying private that’s supposedly cheaper or we’re the cheapest way to fly private. Or we’re on par with like buying ten first class seats for your executive team. Some of that stuff starts to get a little iffy, a little suspicious. It’d be like if the Ritz-Carlton was like, we’re the cheapest five-star hotel that you can get. It’s like, I don’t know if that’s good. I don’t know if you want that, yeah.

Cory Bengtzen: Alex, I’ve also seen on the entrepreneur’s journey, one of the most difficult things that these business leaders, I believe, have to deal with, and I’ve dealt with it my whole life, is it feels like you’re constantly letting somebody down. What do I mean by that? It’s like you have to choose where, am I going to be able to make it to my son’s ski race, or am I going to go to this business meeting that’s in Denver? And so you have to make these really tough decisions. Am I going to miss a date night with my significant other, or am I going to go to this business meeting in wherever that meeting is? And so, you’re constantly weighing this, and as the business grows, watching a lot of these CEOs, these meetings become more important and also higher stakes, like you mentioned. And now, so they’re constantly at a crossroad. Who am I going to disappoint? Am I going to disappoint my business or my opportunity and the growth here? Or am I going to disappoint my loved ones and my family at home? Finally, when the business scales enough, they’ll get to a crossroad where there’s like, there’s gotta be a better way where I can do it all. I can make it to the soccer game on Saturday and be in California the night before for this business meeting. And that’s when I see a lot of business owners and business leaders start looking at flying private. They’ll talk to a buddy, and they’re like, this is why we do it. The time is the one thing that we all have 24 hours in a day, you can’t buy more, other than buying a private jet or flying privately. This really is a time machine that enables you to maximize your time.

Alex Bridgeman: And since you offer charter, fractional, and fleet management, you see a lot of different customer journeys between each of those. Do you find folks most often kind of dip their toe in with charter and then advance to fractional and then to management once they decide it’s worth buying their whole plane themselves? Like what are the different journeys that you see play out between all of those options?

Cory Bengtzen: You’re spot on. The majority of time, that’s what happens. And when we sit down with someone that is first looking to fly private, we ask a bunch of different questions, but the main one is, how many times do you really think you’re going to be using the aircraft if it was as easy as a text away. And depending on the volume of how much they’re going to be using the aircraft, where they’re flying to and how many people are on it will really determine the best way to fly private. Most people, they’re going to try it, like you said, they’re going to charter a couple airplanes for a cool football game or experience or to get to a business meeting. But what we find is, if you’re going to fly less than eight or nine times a year, then just charter. You don’t have the upfront cost of either a full aircraft or a fractional. You don’t have the ongoing costs, the fixed costs of pilots or a monthly management fee and hanger and all the other stuff that goes along with it. And you’re only paying when you fly. Now you’re paying the highest amount per trip, like when you charter, that is the most expensive way per trip, but you don’t have, again, that upfront cost of the asset and then the ongoing fixed cost. So when someone starts flying more than eight, nine, ten, like depending on those trips, eight or nine trips a year, then it’s the economics of the fractional program really kick in and make sense. Because the big benefit of fractional versus charter is it’s guaranteed availability. You’re not at if the plane is available. You’re not paying for repositioning, and charter, you’re paying for all the repositioning. And it has really low hourly rates. So typically for our clients that are in our charter program, when they do a single trip, it’s about 50% what they would pay if they were to just go charter that airplane. So, if you’re doing enough of those trips, that’s when the economics really make sense that those trips are half what it is on the charter that then it makes sense to have the buy-in and the monthly management fee when you take everything in consideration. And then full aircraft ownership, that’s generally we see a lot of our owners after being in the fractional program, about half the people will renew for- a little bit more, 60% will renew into the fractional program, and then the others will look at full aircraft ownership. Full aircraft ownership, if you’re flying a ton, 300 hours a year or more or you need a plane at a moment’s notice, there’s some definite benefits to full aircraft ownership and also some big tax benefits as well that you have both in the fractional and in the full aircraft ownership to bonus depreciation that you don’t have on charter. But it really comes down to like how much you get to fly. If it’s not that often, charter. If you’re flying a significant amount like the fractional ownership where you’re just sharing the expenses of that airplane is a really good way to go. Or if you want to own your own airplane and you’re going to be flying it a bunch, we help lots of people buy airplanes. That’s what makes us very unique is we can help in all three categories. We can help charter on our fleet and on our partner fleets. Our fractional program is designed for people in the Western US. We have some visions of taking it nationwide in the next couple of years, but right now we service people that live in the western 11 states, Colorado West, and we operate three different fractional programs. One is a PC-12 only program, which we just came out with this year. We call it SFX-12. It is the most cost-effective way, and you have guaranteed availability on the PC-12s. And then we have SFX-JET, which is our super mid of a Gulfstream G200, Citation, Excel, CJ2, and the Pilatus, which is really cool because you can pick which aircraft is best for each specific mission. You can take that G200 if you’re going all the way across country, or you can take the Pilatus the next day if you want to go into a really small airport. And then we have SFX+, which is a- it’s also a new development this year, and that’s on a G450. So, you have fractional ownership on a heavy jet with a G450, and what makes this incredibly unique is you also have guaranteed availability all the way down. So, you could buy into the G450 fractional program and fly the CJ2, Pilatus, Excel, and whatnot. And then back to the aircraft ownership side, if you decide you do want to own your own airplane, we’ve helped many companies and different individuals go buy the asset, do the due diligence, oversee the pre-purchase inspection. It’s a very technical process to do it right on buying an asset. And then setting up their flight department with all the hiring the pilots, fuel contracts, hangar contracts, maintenance contracts, and then they have that option after they own the asset, do they want to keep it private, just for them and their family and their business, or would they like to offset some of the expense and we can put it on our charter certificate and we can charter it out when they’re not using the aircraft and really reduce the overall expense. So, everything from just charter all the way up to full aircraft ownership is what we specialize in, and our goal is just to find what’s very best for each individual client we work with.

Alex Bridgeman: That was the- that fractional to ownership was always one that I wanted to understand a little bit better because I guess if you own your own plane, you can use a management service that’ll help manage your plane and run it for you. But in my head, I don’t own a plane, but if I did, I wouldn’t want to do any of the hassle with taking care of it or paperwork. I just want to be able to swipe a card at the end of the month for whatever it costs to run the plane or maintain it. And it seems like fractional did that really well. Is the experience as a customer for the aircraft management, so if you have your own plane and it’s managed as an aircraft, is that a very similar experience between the two, like in terms of workload as an owner and what I’m required to do or fill out and sign, whatever? Are the workloads fairly similar?

Cory Bengtzen: That is our goal as the management company is to make it as easy for our aircraft owners as possible. We want to do all the heavy lifting behind the scenes. But there is more involvement as an aircraft owner versus a fractional program. For example, you’re going to be involved in the maintenance decisions. You’re going to be involved in which MRO we take the aircraft for. Us, as the management company, we’ll get a couple of bids. We’re going to provide our suggestion, but ultimately, it’s the aircraft owner’s call of how we’re going to do that. The refurbishment on the airplane, all that stuff. So it is a lot more in depth when you own your airplane. The fractional program, one thing that the people love the most is it’s just easy. You just send a text, an email, a phone call. I want to fly on Friday. Here’s the people that are going, here’s where we want to go. And you don’t worry about maintenance. You don’t worry about engine overhauls. You don’t worry about anything behind the scenes, the pilot, the pilot training, ensuring the asset, everything is just done. It makes it super simple.

Alex Bridgeman: That sounds really great.

Cory Bengtzen: And owning your own airplane, you got to plan at least a month a year, it’s going to be down for maintenance. There’s so much maintenance that is done on these aircraft to keep them safe, that owning your own airplane, there’s many times that you want to go somewhere and you’re not able to because the plane’s in for maintenance, your pilot’s at training, or what the case. And fractional, you’re guaranteed availability 365 days a year. So there’s pros and cons to each one. There’s not one way that is the very best. And so that is our goal at SkyShare is to sit down and really understand our clients’ goals, what they’re wanting to achieve, and then help guide them to, is a charter fractional, buying your own airplane, what type of airplane and whatnot.

Alex Bridgeman: Are there any particular, like specific things with client experience that you’re looking to add or like equipment you’re looking to add to your fleet, certain type of seats, or I’m thinking sort of like a heated floor bathroom type features, like what are people excited to or more interested in seeing in aircraft? And maybe you’d see more of like the early signs of that on the ownership side, where if you own your own plane, you can do whatever you want to the interior. What are some of the more like cutting edge things people are trying to do with their planes?

Cory Bengtzen: Good question. I think the number one thing is Wi-Fi is a really big deal, especially in the larger jets. Starlink is now an option. And so that is one question we get all the time. Do your jets have Wi-Fi, both from the charter and the fractional?

Alex Bridgeman: Do they ask for Wi-Fi or do they have Starlink?

Cory Bengtzen: They’ll ask for Wi-Fi. Yeah, I haven’t had anybody ask for anything brand specific, but I think you might see that as it grows. But definitely Wi-Fi is something that is important to them so they can stay connected and stay productive while they’re on the airplanes. Other than that, people really, I believe, just want a good experience. They’re paying a lot of money to fly private. And so, those kind of table stakes are what’s expected. They expect the airplane to be clean. They expect the airplane to be safe and on time. And our goal at SkyShare is, one of our core values is deliver the wow. So, we know what’s expected. Now, we’re always trying to think of what can we do on top of what’s already expected to make it- So, from the booking process, to the way the pilots greet them, to the way the airplane looks, to anything we can do to really create an awesome experience. So when the business partners get off the jet or the husband and wife get off the jet at the end, they look at each other and they go, wow, that was an incredible experience. We’ve been very fortunate. We’re definitely not perfect. We make mistakes and we try and learn from them and make sure to not make the same mistake twice. But we’ve been able to grow this company to a pretty decent size with minimal advertising. Most of our growth has been through referrals and repeat. So we’re really lucky. I became great friends with most of our clients. I hang out with a lot of them, and it’s fun to see how private aviation has changed their life and the different experiences they do in the different airplanes, or I love hearing the stories that, hey, Cory, the plane paid for itself yesterday. I just closed this half billion dollar deal on this big real estate development. That was a call I had a little bit ago, which was fun. So, it’s a really fun business. I feel grateful. We’ve got an awesome team here at SkyShare. We’ve got about 120 employees right now, 50 plus pilots, full-time pilots. And myself, obviously I’m a pilot, been flying for 20 plus years and get to fly the Pilatus a bunch and the Citations. And now dipping my toe in the helicopter world. So I’ve been flying the helicopters a bunch, but that’s more for fun. So, I get to do two things that I love the most. I love and am very passionate about growing business. And so, I’ve been lucky to be able to combine that into SkyShare.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, I was just thinking like having the PC-12 option also means you can start that fractional customer journey earlier on in a client’s life. So if a client has a business that has multiple locations, thinking like if they own like eight or ten vets around Utah, Colorado, Idaho, or something, it’s probably not a big enough business for a Gulfstream or Excel or Hawker or what have you, but maybe a PC-12, that could make those numbers work. Each business, each location doesn’t have enough dollars to justify a Gulfstream, but you can have a PC-12 fly in. So now you, as the fractional business, can have a customer start that journey with you earlier on in their business growth story, and then eventually they’ll hopefully be at a hundred vets or something, and then you can do whatever you want. But that starts earlier.

Cory Bengtzen: You’re spot on. That was the whole idea, and it was my business partner’s idea to come up with the SFX 12 program. And we’ve had incredible success. We announced it just in October at MBAA. We’ve sold a bunch of shares with that because it is significantly less expensive than operating the jets. And so, to your point, they can get around and still have all the efficiencies and all the benefits of it at a fraction of the cost of what it is to run those jets.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, no kidding. Have you noticed any difference in terms of like the ICP, the ideal customer for the 12 program versus the more mainline jet programs you have? Is there like a revenue difference or usage difference? Like how do the two customer groups break out?

Cory Bengtzen: Yeah, it’s exactly like you said. I believe that they can start having the benefits of flying private a couple years earlier as they’re growing their business, where if we didn’t have that option. The other thing that we have created is we have a finance package for the fractional. And I don’t know of any other fractional company that does that. So now you can take the hardworking CEO or business owner that is just getting that business going and needs the efficiencies of it. They can finance the fractional piece, so they don’t have to come up with a ton of cash up front, small monthly payment. And the financing terms are pretty cool where it’s over a 12-year period, but there’s a balloon payment when we sell the aircraft in three years. The monthly payment’s really low, low money out of pocket. And so we’ve seen a lot of people take advantage of that. And then also with the bonus depreciation, these business owners can take advantage of, instead of writing a check to the IRS, they can use that money as the down payment and basically start flying for the same amount they would have just written a check to the IRS.

Alex Bridgeman: That’s not a bad option. You mentioned near the start of the episode that there was a handful off the top of your head of operators who have gone under that you can think of. What do you find are- It feels like aviation generally has a massive graveyard of failed ventures and bankruptcies and airlines that don’t exist anymore. Flying Magazine, that I have a sweater for now, they have a section on their shop where you can buy like airlines gone by t-shirts, or gone but not forgotten, like Eastern Airlines or Avelo Airlines or something like that. TWA would be a fun one. But they’ll need a little longer for the rights to expire. But it seems like there’s just a massive graveyard. Why do you think that exists so prevalently, especially in like these smaller, sometimes subscale like charter or fractional operators? It seems we’ve both seen this happen a bunch. What do you think goes wrong the most? What breaks, what generates the most kind of gray hair that makes these fall apart?

Cory Bengtzen: Private aviation is a sexy business. Like it’s a fun business to be in, but it’s also a very difficult business to make money in. There’s a lot of money that runs through the bank account, but to actually pull out a profit is difficult. We’ve been able to kind of make, because we do all of it, it all works hand in hand. Our charter helps the fractional, the management helps the fractional. So a couple of things that have made us unique where we have been very successful and I haven’t had to take any private equity money. We haven’t had any VC money. We bootstrapped this company from the very beginning. But we were very specific on, A, geographically where we’re going to fly, at least where our clients are based. I’ve seen a lot of fractional companies that try to be everything to everybody right off the bat. They try and go worldwide, correction, across the nation, right at the beginning. And then they’re deadheading these airplanes, like from the East coast all the way to the West coast, which the company has to pay for, and then they’re doing a one hour revenue flight, and so they lose thousands of dollars in repositioning. Where with our company, and that’s why we’ve been very intentional about just dealing with clients that live in the Western 11 states to reduce our repositioning. So we will go nationwide but only at the right time when we have enough aircraft to still keep that repositioning low. So I think that is one big thing is that we’re focused on the Western 11 states. The second thing is we’ve been growing our management side of the business as fast as we’ve been growing the fractional side. So 98% of the flights that we do are on our fleet, where a lot of the other fractional companies don’t have that managed side to be able to charter in to use those airplanes for those fractional clients. And so, then they’re chartering from another third operator and they’re paying full retail rates plus all the repositioning, and it just eats your lunch. And so, we’ve been very strategic where we need to have a strong focus on growing that managed side that are on our charter certificate that we can use to charter into our fractional program to keep our costs down, and so we’re still in full control of that flight. So those are the two big areas for us. And it’s also we didn’t take a bunch of money and just try to blow it in marketing and trying to see if it’s going to work. This has been 15 years in the making, starting from just selling airplanes to then FBOs and now into the fractional side and the charter side. We also have about 25 people on our maintenance department. We don’t work on outside aircraft. We only work on our fleet or our managed fleet. So we’ve got awesome technicians, but their whole goal is to keep these airplanes safe and to keep them flying. So, with us being vertically integrated where we’re buying the fuel wholesale, we have the fractional airplanes that we can charter out when they’re not using, we have the managed aircraft that helps support the charter, correction, the fractional clients when need be, it just all works really well together, that we’ve been fortunate. We’ve seen a lot of success over the last few years.

Alex Bridgeman: So, to get nationwide, what needs to go right for that to happen? You have a pretty strong base in the Ogden-Salt Lake area. Do you need to build an equivalent size operation for it to make sense to invest more in kind of an East Coast or even just Midwest operation?

Cory Bengtzen: Yeah, great question. And Alex, I think that how we’ll do it is through acquisition. We would like, we’re starting to look at a couple of different operators right now. And if we can acquire the right size, either a fractional company or a charter operator that would fold nicely in so we have enough airplanes. That’s really the most important thing is having the airplanes and having them spread out to keep that repositioning at a minimum. And I believe we’ll do that through acquisition.

Alex Bridgeman: That makes a lot of sense. Well, Corey, I wish you luck. Thank you for coming on the podcast. It’s been super, super fun. I always love getting to chat aviation with someone who’s built a business in it. So, thanks for sharing a little bit of your time.

Cory Bengtzen: Hey, thank you. Thanks for having me on. It’s great talking with you.

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