Starting a business after cabin crew: the ex crew who opened cafes, agencies and studios, what transferred, what did not, the capital and the failure rate
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#1 Ex LATAM crew, eight years, now in hotel operations in São Paulo, and the business question comes from the crew in year six who want out and do not want an office: the cafe, the travel agency, the grooming studio, the interview coaching that half the forum's recruiters do. I did not start a business and I know a dozen ex crew who did, and I asked them for this thread. Here is what they said.
The businesses the ex crew start
The cafe or the small restaurant (the service skill, the layover cafe knowledge, the dream), the travel agency or the travel consultancy (the destination knowledge, the industry contacts), the grooming and image studio (the grooming standard as a product for the applicants and for professionals), the interview and assessment coaching (the recruiters and the ex crew who know the sheet), the airbnb and the hospitality rentals (the hotel knowledge), the fitness and wellness studio (the layover training crew), the aviation recruitment agency (Charlotte's path), and the online content and the courses about the job (this forum's whole genre). The pattern: the business uses the one thing the cabin taught deeply and sells it to the people who want it.
What the cabin taught that transferred
The service under pressure, which is the whole of the cafe and the hospitality businesses. The calm with difficult people, which is every customer facing business. The reading of a room, which is sales. The discipline and the punctuality, which the ex crew have and the small business owners they compete with often do not. The languages and the destination knowledge, which are the travel businesses. The grooming and the presentation, which are the image businesses. The network of crew around the world, which is the first hundred customers for almost all of them.
What did not transfer
The money management: the crew who never had to run a budget beyond their own found the cash flow of a business the hardest thing, and the ones who failed mostly failed on the cash flow and not on the product. The marketing: the cabin does not teach you to find customers, it brings them to you in rows. The paperwork and the compliance: the licences, the taxes, the employment law, which the airline's departments did and the owner must now do. And the solitude: the cabin is a crew and the small business owner is often alone, which the ex crew who loved the crew room find hardest.
The capital they started with
The Gulf crew: the savings from the tax free years, which funded the cafe and the studio and the agency outright for the ones who saved (Steve's pension thread has the other side of that money). The European crew: the smaller savings plus a loan or a partner. The US crew: the 401k not touched and a loan, or a partner's income. The ones who started with the Gulf savings and no debt had the longest runway and the highest survival; the ones who started with the loan and no runway were the ones under pressure in month six. The honest number the dozen gave: a year of personal living costs plus the business's start up costs, before the first customer.
The honest failure rate
Of the dozen: four are running the business profitably after three or more years (two cafes, a coaching business, a travel consultancy), three are running it and not yet profitable or running it as a side income alongside a job, three closed it and went into employment (two cafes, one studio), two sold or merged it. That is roughly the small business survival rate everywhere and the cabin does not improve it; it improves the service and does nothing for the cash flow. The ones who closed the cafes say the same thing: the product was good and the numbers were not.
For the crew in year six with the dream
Save the runway first, a year of living plus the start up, and the Gulf crew are the ones positioned to. Learn the cash flow before the opening, not after. Use the crew network as the first customers and the marketing you do not know how to do. Choose the business that sells the one thing the cabin taught deeply. And know that the failure rate is the ordinary one and the cabin's gift is the service, which is the half of a business that is hardest to teach and the half the ex crew already have.
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#2 Recruitment consultant, ex BA, and the aviation recruitment agency path is mine and Lucas has the transfer and the non transfer right: the reading of the room transferred, the cash flow did not, and the first year was the runway I had saved. The crew network as the first hundred customers is exactly how the consultancy started. Honest thread.
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#3 Ex Norwegian, nurse, and I chose retraining over the business for the reasons in the 'what did not transfer' paragraph: the solitude and the cash flow. The ex crew who opened the Oslo cafe are in Lucas's four and the ones who closed one are in his three. The ordinary rate. Good to read it stated.
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#4 Ex Emirates, corporate jet crew, and the Gulf savings funding the business outright with the longest runway is the Gulf crew's advantage and the thread I would send to the Dubai crew with the cafe dream: save the year of living plus the start up first. The cash flow is the thing the cabin does not teach, truly.
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#5 Ex Thomas Cook, ex TUI, now ground ops, been through a collapse, and the crew who started the travel consultancies after the collapse used the industry contacts exactly as Lucas describes and the ones who survived had the runway. The product was good and the numbers were not is the sentence I heard from the ones who closed. Pin this with the retraining threads.
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#6 Emirates, grooming standard, and the grooming and image studio is the business half my crew friends talk about and the thing the thread says about the marketing (the cabin brings the customers in rows, the business does not) is the thing none of them have thought about. The service transfers; the finding of customers does not. Thank you Lucas.
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#7 Trainer in Brisbane, and the training route was my version of the business decision: the regular salary over the cafe dream, for the cash flow reasons in this thread. Both are life after the cabin and Lucas has described the business one honestly, failure rate included, which the Instagram version never does.
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#8 @redlipstickclub the grooming studio with a plan for finding the customers (the applicant groups, the forum, the professionals) is in my four, and the one without a plan is in my three. @charlottecpt the reading of the room transferring and the cash flow not is the thread's whole finding and you lived it.