Successful FBOs Coalesce Around a Shared Passion
/
Building long-term and profitable FBO customer relationships is fundamental to the success of the enterprise. Yet few FBOs invest the time, or the resources to ensure their service team coalesces around a shared passion for serving up an exemplary customer experience.
For the FBO service team, including line service and CSR staff, a shared passion is a mutual understanding marked by a deep enthusiasm for delivering professional services that delight and bond the customer to the brand.
However, a shared passion is something that can’t be taught. Rather it has to incubate in an organic way.
Excellent sports teams that achieve lofty goals will often find a shared passion through making a connection with teammates during the course of a lengthy season. A good coach or manager knows how to inspire and lead, build connections and provide common ground through shared experiences.
And so it is with a good FBO manager who sets the tone and leads by example. Bringing the best out of a service team is both an art and a science.
The process involves five key elements:
1. Meaning in the Workplace.
This involves connecting employee roles to a larger purpose by clearly communicating how routine tasks, such as towing an aircraft, impact both customer’s expectations of precision handling and a company goal of reducing accidents.
2. Synergy Creation
Initiating synergy in the workplace promotes an employee environment where diverse individuals collaborate effectively. Keys to success include: establishing clear roles, open and transparent communication, encouraging trust and setting attainable goals that can be collectively celebrated.
3. Communication Enhancement
In an FBO environment, employees work best when their thoughts, ideas and concerns are heard and valued. Retaining good employees is always a challenge for FBOs and opening up channels of communications with employees is a tool that can help. Successful strategies may include actively listening to employees through individual and group discussions, celebrating peer birthdays and achievements or individual milestones such as time with the company.
4. Relationship Strengthening
Healthy interpersonal relationships among team members strengthens the bond and turns casual acquaintances into durable friendships. This process promotes teamwork and gets positive notices by customers.
5. Connection Building
Creating individual connections with work team members is one of the best ways to build an internal foundation for a shared passion. In our NATA Certified CSR Courses we developed, we often used icebreakers and team activities to help build connections among attendees. Here are some ideas for FBOs to help with building employee connections:
Shared birthdays and birth months. In a room, line everyone up according to their birthdates, starting with January on one end and finishing with December on the other (hint: avoiding birth years). Employees will quickly recognize that they have something in common with a team member that they didn’t realize. Break out into small groups and have each team member share where they were born and how they made their way to work at the FBO.
Paper airplane contest. Since employees are already in the aviation service business, who doesn’t like to make and fly paper airplanes? Have each member create their own paper airplane and then have a contest to see which airplane flies the farthest, the shortest, makes the most loops and even celebrate the ones that just don’t fly. Everyone’s a winner with a pizza party.
Build the best hangar contest. Break out into small groups and provide materials to build the best aircraft hangar. We have used materials like playing cards, Lego sets and even spaghetti noodles connected by marshmallows. Time the event then judge each completing group. Again, celebrate everyone’s achievement in some way with a taco party.
These are just a few of the ideas to help build a stronger shared passion within your service organization. We invite you to share your experience by making a comment below.
A shared passion is one of four traits successful FBOs have in common and is part of our series on A well balanced FBO management approach.
The four traits that seem to standout and have shared threads that connect the organization from top to bottom include:
4. A shared passion
© 2026 ABSG/TJG
Please leave any comments you have about this blog post below. If you have any questions, please send us an email: John Enticknap, jenticknap@bellsouth.net, Ron Jackson, ronjacksongroup@gmail.com,
ABOUT THE BLOGGERS: John Enticknap is the founder of Aviation Business Strategies Group (ABSG). He has more than 35 years of aviation fueling and FBO services industry experience and is an IS-BAH Accredited auditor. Ron Jackson is co-founder of ABSG and president of The Jackson Group (TJG), a PR agency specializing in FBO marketing and customer service training. Visit the biography page or absggroup.com for more background.
© 2026 ABSG/TJG
SUBSCRIBE: Subscribe to the AC-U-KWIK FBO Connection Newsletter
