Chris
or there is not really a market that can sustain your personal expectations................
There may not even be a market if the operator for whom we aspire to work for, was to price it according to the real costs. Think about it.
We are actually in violent agreement.
There are/were too many GA operations started by pilots who couldn't get into airlines or into an existing GA operation wanting to build hours, stay in the business blah, blah, blah fluffing up or servicing markets that didn't really exist or predating those that did.
Rarely were they started with a business plan or any idea where they were going beyond the first months lease payments and fuel and a "contract" client they had stolen from their previous employer offering cheaper rates.
Of course where do you think the "contract" went when someone else offered them even cheaper rates.
We even had a Govt contract that had to be relet because even the financiers couldn't see how they were going to get paid.
So you spend several years training them up from somewhere near useless but have a CPL to a GA professional to have them poached, leave to airlines or start their own show with one of your clients. Forgive me if employers get a bit jaundiced and go for the lowest common denominator on pay.
But thats a story for another day.
I've had a desk full of applicants who wanted to pay for their job, who went straight into the circular filing cabinet.
I should not have drawn the African "red herring" across the trail, and they certainly were not "Air America Wannabe" they were a major Catholic aid org having the devil
of a trouble getting their aid into the Congo and people out, it was a bloody bloody mess and real desperado stuff for the pilots, I take my hat off to them. I was really trying to illustrate that setting the bar, sometimes means you have to pay heaps to get people to do things nobody else wants to.
I suspect if you were to ask some of your corporate clients, you might find that they would agree that they became succesful or made lots of money, because they were willing to do things that others wouldn't and I don't mean illegal. Your Chicago domestic disposal engineers come to mind.