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At what point can you justify buying an airplane for your business?

If you are running a business of some scale, chances are you are traveling for business as well. How is that working for you? The days that business travel was fun are long gone. Welcome to the hassles of security, sold out flights and the inevitable connections and lay overs. The airline "hub and spoke" concept forces us to make endless connections at the hubs to all but the largest cities. This often makes flying to your destination a half day affair or worse. This can be different though. Hello to the business airplane.

I did a little experiment. A friend of mine and I both had to travel from Cincinnati to Miami. He flew Delta and I flew my airplane. We left home at exactly the same time. He went to CVG and I went to Lunken Airport, a municipal airport in Cincinnati. You probably know how his day went so I'll spare you those details. I showed up at the FBO and my plane was topped off and ready to go. I had filed my flight plan that morning and quickly pref-lighted the airplane. I was taxiing out within 15 minutes of arriving at the airport and in another 15 minutes I was airborne and well on my way to Miami. Once at cruising altitude, I had a cup of coffee, I had time to prepare for the meeting ahead. I landed at Opa Locka Airport, just north of Miami and took an UBER to the company on Miami Beach. As I exited the car, my friend pulled up in his taxi. We had arrived within 3 minutes of each other!

So, is private travel faster? No, at least not between Cincinnati and Miami. Is it less expensive? No, definitely not. But besides my flight being much more enjoyable, traveling between major cities is just a part of the advantage of a private plane. The advantage is much more apparent when traveling between multiple cities in one day or traveling to more out of the way places. Flying your own plane also gives you complete flexibility of when you can come or go. The equation also changes when you fly with more people as the cost of the flight can be divided per passenger. If you can fill up all the seats on your plane, the flight costs the same but the cost per person obviously drops and often will approach first class commercial ticket prices. It has also been my experience that many customers and vendors like private aircraft. They like dealing with successful people and owning a plane arguably puts you in that category. So, in the end, how do you justify it? First and foremost; you like it, that's how. You like the convenience and you like the feel. Welcome to the big league.

Look at your business. Would having access to an airplane change the way you do business? Do you often travel with a team or are you traveling alone? Is you business regional, national or international? Having owned different aircraft, I can tell you that owning a plane is like owning a car instead of taking the train. It's more expensive but boy is it fun, convenient and don't underestimate it as a business tool.

Just about every product you see on sale got there by a bunch of clever people designing and building it, but with a project manager behind the scenes making sure it was managed through to delivery.

Everything from the Pyramids to the Taj Mahal went through a project lifecycle of analyse, design, build and test and was run by someone who might not have had the title 'project manager' but employed project management skills that we would recognise today.

Most products and buildings in the modern world and lots in the ancient world are complex constructs. They have been carefully designed and built from large numbers of components, sourced often from different organisations, countries and continents, which have to be integrated together into the whole. Someone has to plan, co-ordinate and manage this.

Many small and medium businesses don't see the value of project management skills or do, but only implement them half-heartedly. They might get some experienced managers in, but still run the organisation more along the lines of 'just get it built' and tolerate overspend and late delivery, because that's their only experience of projects. These organisations often jump at the idea of Agile, because it appears to offer a way of getting things done without much discipline (which is definitely not the way that Agile is meant to work).

Most successful small and medium sized companies don't become successful because of the strength of their project management skills, they get there because of the strength of their product and their technical abilities. However it's at the point of success that becoming more organised becomes vitally important. Without this, the initial success is likely to fade and the company will start to struggle.

Putting rigorous project delivery methods in place and increasing the project management skills of key staff will allow you have a clear idea of how much something is going to cost before you start to develop it. It will also allow you to quantify the benefits of a product development and the profit margin for work being carried out for customers. Once work is underway, you should be able to track budget, timescales and quality, to ensure that you can deliver what is required on time, on budget and fully tested and working. It's also about organising your portfolio of projects, so that you are clear what projects are running to schedule and which ones are in trouble and what your priorities are if you need to borrow resource from one project to bring another back on track.

Project Management skills and Portfolio Management are incredibly important in a business world where change is the norm, not the exception and needs to be managed. The guys who built the pyramids knew how many years the build was going to take, what angle to build the walls, how high the pyramid could be, how much stone was required and how many workers they were going to need, because they did their planning and estimation up front and applied sound management skills.