Scroggs - entirely spot-on with your analysis!
Everyone has made some good points. However in defence of my ‘inversely proportional' statement re: marketing how about these criteria?
1) A company that doesn’t advertise much an relies on referrals and word of mouth
2) A company that gets good results
3) A competitive, but not cut-price, scheme of charges
4) A friendly, customer orientated company
Just a few that I could think of. To meet these criteria the organisation needs to be relatively small to provide a customer-orientated service and because they are small they need to rely on referrals rather than marketing extremes. They have relatively low overheads too, so they can afford to ride out the lean-cycles too,
Now there are more than a few of these around. I like to think I am associated with a company along similar values. However, rather than mention the organisation I work for let me mention a company that has these values that I have absolutely no association with at all and have never met anyone involved with the said company and that is Professional Air Training at Hurn. But needless-to-say there others like them out there – wannabees need to look at FTO’s like these rather than the over hyped big pilot-factories to enjoy their training experience and get value for money.
Happy hunting everyone!
Last edited by porridge; 7th Dec 2005 at 21:13.