Just a few pointers if you do decide to start a school.
I have managed a school while the boss was away so there is proberly more to it than I saw.
The first 2 questions
You have to decide what your primary role actually is.
Are you going to be the person on the ground and examiner and the relief instructor when required. Or are you going to instruct and examine and only do minimal book work.
If you are on the ground there is about an hour of paper work to do per day. It includes filling fuel reciepts, updating the engine log books, updating the accounts from the previous days activitys, sorting out when and were planes are getting serviced, ordering stock and other faff. This lends itself to minimal paper work and zero job creation.
After that you only really do the odd check flight and test and answer questions on the telephone, meet trial flights and generally sell your school and supervise the restricted instructors. This generally works quite well. You don't need to employ someone for the phone which saves 15k per year and everything gets done the way you want it to. Also as well you can spend some quality time selling the product than getting a FI to phone someone back in between debriefing someone and briefing the next one.
If you decide you are going to fly you have to employ someone who is a bit of a sales person and also knows what they are talking about in regard to flight training (not cheap). A hour builder works quite well (you can pay them in flying and min wage) and some one reading ATPL notes and is keen on flying looks alot better than someone doing thier nails and reading OK. Alot of schools are let down by employing someone on minimal wage and then doesn't have a clue when someone asks a none standard question which really needs a pilots answer.
The next stage up is to have a phone answerer to sell trial flights etc and run the booking system/shop and you available to sell the product.
There is nothing worse than a keen TF being fobbed off by a FI because they have 15mins to have a dump and a bite to eat before they go again. The customer needs pampered for 30 mins over a cup of coffee. Parents need to have the commercial pilots training system explained to them and told how crap going to the US is
.
The second 2 questions are part and parcel on how you run your team.
FI's are generally not thick and without stimulus will go bad very quickly if forced to hang around doing pointless "jobs" or even just sitting there doing nothing. A day of nothing is way more sapping than flying 8 hours. And several days of it will not put them in a good selling mode.
There are alot of bosses who take the view that they are the boss so if its quiet they get the time off. They then leave the FI who is bored !!!!less and not getting payed sat in the school. If you want FI's to send out CV's and not tell you this is the way to go about it.
Most FI's get fed up instructing after about 700-800 hours sep the trick is to have a mixture of new instructors and old ones who are in various stages of being pissed off with the whole thing. Personaly I would never employ a FI who had worked at another school unless they were restricted and hadn't worked full time somewhere else or were coming back to instructing in thier spare time. They have the potential to bring way to much baggage with them and poison the rest of the FI's and the customers.
The moaning stereo type flying school owner is nearly always the type who dissappears at a drop of a hat and/or who delegates everything and then always slips in and out of the job without ever taking the job back. Thier apperances is nearly always announced by turning up and then bollocking everyone and anyone that comes close to them because all the stuff they delegated hasn't been done the way they wanted it done or they had fogot that they had told you to do it that way. They then make you redo the job and then usually change thier minds when it doesn't work so you have to redo it again. After a couple of hour's moaning they decide its time to go again and then the CV's start going out again.
If you don't bully and enslave the FI's they will be quite open when they apply for a job. They won't then go sick for interviews and sim checks at short notice. But you have to bite the bullet and give them the time off if they require it. Even if you are a top boss you will still get the occassional phone call on Monday, Interview on wednesday, and start type rating on the next Monday. Shouldn't be a problem though due to the fact that your seen as a good employer, phone up a local FIC school and next day a couple of fresh instructors will be round for interview.
The customers become very loyal to thier Instructors, if you loose an Instructor on bad terms especially one who is percieved as good. It will hit your sales big time. The ppl hires won't fly as much because they don't like to hear all the bull!!!!. Some of the instructors students will loose interest, because if its been building over a couple of months you can bet every student in the school knows about who said what and to who and it will be very one sided in the Instructors favour.