CALLSIGN is the fortnightly (fun word) playbook for the people of private aviation: aircraft brokers, sales reps, VPs of Sales, the owners who employ them, and the analysts and pilots supporting them. Every two weeks, one installable system that turns what you already know into deal flow. Someone forwarded this? Subscribe and you’ll get the next one before they do.
Search your sent folder for two words: great question
Every result is a client who asked you something and got a real answer. From you, in your words, on a day you had no time to overthink it. Paste ten of those answers into Claude and you’ll have ten LinkedIn posts drafted in thirty minutes. They’ll sound like you because you already wrote them.
(Yes, I promised you the 45-Minute Extraction this issue. It’s coming before Christmas, on camera. This one goes first because it takes half the time and the writing’s already done.)
This one’s for the aircraft sales rep who says “I don’t know what to post.” You do. It’s in your sent folder, filed under every first-time seller who asked why the pre-buy takes three weeks. Charter desk, broker, or the person who runs the numbers: your search terms are in the card below.
A great question gets asked twice
The question a client emailed you last spring, and another client asked when the leaves turned, is the same one the next client will ask Google tonight. You already wrote the answer. It’s sitting in the one place no search engine can read.
AirOps, the study I walked through in Issue 1, tracks which sources AI engines cite. When they cite LinkedIn, 89% of the time it’s a post. Profiles and company pages combined get 7%. Your follower count barely registers. What gets cited is the post that answers the question somebody typed.
And your answer already worked once. It earned one client’s trust, in private, by email. Posted, it can do the same job for the forty owners in your patch who haven’t called you yet.
Yulia Olennikova at N.Rich published the firm-scale version of this in Maja Voje’s GTM Strategist this week: twelve months of closed-won call recordings, mined for what wins deals. You don’t need the recordings. The client asked you by email, and you answered.
The thirty minutes
Search. Ten minutes. In Gmail, type
in:sent "great question"into the search bar. In Outlook, open Sent Items and search the phrase. Open anything where you explained something in more than a paragraph. If the search runs dry, the card below has more terms for your seat. Stop at ten. Start with the clients who said yes. The answer that came before a signed listing agreement is worth more than the one that came before silence.Copy the paragraph, not the email. Five minutes. Only the part where you explained the thing. Names, tail numbers, prices, dates, and your signature block stay in your inbox. Check your firm’s AI policy before you paste anything from work.
Paste it with the prompt. Five minutes. The Sent-Folder Prompt is below. For each paragraph, Claude writes the question behind it, drafts a post that opens with that question, and flags anything that could still point to a client.
Keep your sentences. Ten minutes. Claude will try to improve you. It’ll sand down the line you’d say at the FBO and add a tidy lesson at the end you never wrote. Change it back. Edit for accuracy, not polish. The rough line is the one that sounds like you.
Post one, schedule two, save seven. Two minutes. One goes up this week. Two get scheduled for the next two. The other seven go in a file for the weeks you’d otherwise skip.
Load the ten into a Project. Five minutes. Open a new Claude Project, or try Dots (ironically I called my dot Throng from the timely Black Mirror episode, see below), call it Great Questions or something witty, paste the same ten paragraphs into its knowledge, and give it one instruction: “When I paste a client’s question, draft my reply from my own past answers in this Project, in my voice, and tell me if it’s a question I haven’t answered before.” The next time a client asks, the reply is drafted from something you already wrote. Two minutes to check it instead of twenty to rewrite it.
Search card and the prompt
Start with the first row. Stop when you have ten emails where you explained something in more than a paragraph.
Everyone: “great question” · “good question” · “short answer” · “the way it works” · “what that means” · “to clarify”
Aircraft broker: “pre-buy” · “escrow” · “delivery condition” · “LOI” · “engine program” · “damage history” · “days on market”
Charter rep: “Part 135” · “FET” · “repositioning” · “one-way” · “duty time” · “de-icing” · “ARGUS” · “Wyvern”
VP of Sales: search the emails you sent your own reps. “here’s how I’d” · “next time” · “the reason we”
Analyst: “comps” · “inventory” · “year over year” · “the data shows.” Post the insight, never the export. Paid databases have license terms.
Student pilot or first year: skip email (does Gen Z know what email is or is it all FaceTime now?). Search your texts and notes for anywhere you explained something you’d just learned to someone a step behind you.
Paste everything between the lines into Claude or ChatGPT, then paste your ten paragraphs under it. Make sure it sounds like you and not AI, an immediate credibility killer.
Below are paragraphs I wrote to clients, each one explaining something about my work as an aircraft broker [swap in your seat]. I’ve removed names, tail numbers, prices, and dates. For each paragraph:
Write the question behind the paragraph, in the words a client would use, not an insider’s.
Draft a LinkedIn post of 120 to 200 words. First line: the question. Then my answer. Keep my sentences wherever they work, including the plain ones. Don’t add phrases I didn’t use, and don’t add a lesson at the end that I didn’t write. No hashtags, no emojis, and use the Voice File from Issue 2 if you built one.
Flag anything that could still identify a client, including any combination of aircraft type, year, region, and timing that narrows it to one aircraft or one person. Be paranoid. Expertise is public, clients are private.
Rank them by which question a first-time buyer or seller most needs answered.
Then pause for review. I’ll pick which ones to post.
“I can’t post what a client told me”
You’re right, and you won’t. The client asked the question. You wrote the answer. The question belongs to every first-time seller in the country, and the answer belongs to you.
Same rule as always: expertise is public, clients are private. A post can say “a seller asked me why the pre-buy took three weeks.” It can’t say whose airplane or which shop. If the combination of type, region, and timing points to one aircraft, cut it until it doesn’t. Step 3 of the prompt checks for that. Check it again yourself anyway.
What happened when I ran it
I ran this on my own sent folder before writing it. House rule.
“Great question” came back with zero results. My V1 Creative inbox only goes back to May, and in most of my threads I’m the photographer and a broker friend is asking me, “can you do this for free?”
So I used the card. “AI search” pulled five threads: three forwards, one proposal to a company outside aviation, and one email to a prospective aviation client from a couple of weeks ago, explaining why their blog wasn’t getting cited. Here’s the paragraph, exactly as I sent it. Names removed, nothing else touched:
The good news is you already have schema on the home page and the blog articles. More than most aviation sites have done. But it stops short of what matters for AI search. Right now, I could only find the publish date of a blog post by running it through a schema validator. If I can’t see it, Google and the LLMs treat it as unverified. Every article needs a visible author page and a visible publish date. That is how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews decide an article is credible enough to cite.
I typed that on a Wednesday for one reader. Here’s what the prompt gave back, question on top:
Why isn’t our blog showing up in AI answers?
You may already have schema on the home page and the blog articles. More than most aviation sites have done. But it stops short of what matters for AI search.
On a site I reviewed this month, I could only find the publish date of a blog post by running it through a schema validator. If I can’t see it, Google and the LLMs treat it as unverified.
Every article needs a visible author page and a visible publish date. That is how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews decide an article is credible enough to cite.
Then publish more often than feels comfortable. Once or twice a week is a good target. The site answering real questions consistently and frequently is the one getting cited.
Every sentence in that post is mine. It changed a few words and added the question. It also flagged the next paragraph of the email, which named the client’s blog and their niche, and pointed out that the niche plus the word aviation narrows to a very short list of companies. So that paragraph stayed private. Paranoid, like I asked.
The second one came from “hangar.” Nine threads. One was me explaining to a client why the proofs from a shoot would look unfinished, and the explanation had this line in it: “They have not been retouched, color corrected, blended, or have had any distractions removed (or hangar doors added back in).” The hangar doors are the post. I’d never have written that line on purpose for LinkedIn. I wrote it for one person on a Monday evening, and it’s the most specific thing in the whole email.
What came back unusable: most of the folder. Invoices, scheduling, and a pile of “sounds good.”
Both paragraphs go into a Project called Great Questions. The next client who asks why their blog isn’t getting cited gets a reply drafted from my own answer.
This week’s assignment
Search “great question” tonight. Ten seconds. If it comes back empty like mine did, run “pre-buy” or “Part 135” or whatever word you explain most. Reply and tell me what you found. I read every reply.
Next issue, the week before NBAA-BACE: The Show Is the Content. One minute after every conversation on the floor turns three days in Las Vegas into a month of follow-ups and posts.
You’ve been publishing for years. One client at a time.
MSC
CALLSIGN is written by Matt St Clair, founder of V1 Creative, the marketing shop for private aviation. If you run a firm and want the company-level version of this playbook, that newsletter is ROTATE.