A Look at VFS Finances
By Angelo Collins
VFS Executive Director
From Vertiflite, January/February 2025
It is a new year with renewed hope for continued growth and recognition of the vertical flight community. As we look forward to the great opportunities in 2025, I’d like to take you back to 2024. I understand many of us are waist deep in studies, modeling and simulation, flight testing and research, but I’d like to expose you to the financial side of our community. Although I have hung my Aerospace Engineering hat to don a new one as your Executive Director (a job more and more being changed to “CEO” for non-profits), I think it’s important that our engineers understand the basics of finances and running a business, and what better than VFS as the subject? Here’s where our resources go.
VFS is a technical professional society — a 501(c)(3) charitable organization in IRS parlance — that exists to educate our members (and the public) and work towards advancing vertical flight. Our expenses are tightly focused on providing resources to advance our mission.
Events
This expense includes costs to run the Forum and several symposiums throughout the year, such as Transformative Vertical Flight (TVF), the Electric Aircraft Symposium (EAS) and our H2-Aero Symposium. Our dedicated chapters also host educational lunches, dinners, events and technical conferences, with most of these funds expended directly from the chapter’s finances; however, VFS does incur costs to support some of these events, which are included here. The VFS Director of Meetings and Advertising, David Renzi, oversees all the logistics and planning for our Annual Forum, and supports our other large events. Julie M. Gibbs, our Director of Technical Programs, leads the technical content for the Forum and other technical meetings.
General and Administrative
General and administrative (G&A) refers to the costs a business requires to run its day-to-day operations. Our staff’s base wages are not included in this total, but rather distributed in other categories that reflect their support. The G&A category includes employee benefits, such as 401(k) retirement contributions and healthcare, as well as legal fees, insurance and payroll taxes to the state and federal governments (yes, non-profits are still responsible for paying certain taxes). The total also includes roughly $80,000 lost through credit card processing fees, the payment method in which we receive roughly half of all revenue. Note: VFS saves money if you opt to make a payment using a check, debit card, bank transfer or wire, as opposed to using a credit card!
Vertiflite
Vertiflite is a large and complex effort with various expenses, including staff labor, writers, editors, graphics design, printing and postage costs. Roughly 20% of Mike Hirschberg’s time goes towards Vertiflite in his various roles as a writer and editor-inchief. Tom Risen from the staff also supports with roughly half of his time, in addition to anywhere from four to seven freelance authors and editors.
Executive
Although I am involved and support all other categories, I have included executive compensation as a separate category to provide full clarity and transparency in our operations. My base salary was $194,000 in 2024 and I received a bonus of $15,000, equaling roughly 0.5% of the Society’s revenue, as an annual growth incentive. Comparing compensations of related non-profits is difficult due to differing revenue and expenses, but the VFS Executive Director’s total compensation is roughly one-third that of AIAA, AUVSI and VAI’s chief executive salaries ($500,000–$600,000).
Information Technology
One of VFS’s many efficiencies is its ability to manage its tremendous information technology (IT) at a low cost. This category includes not only the labor of our IT Director Randy Johnson, but also our numerous software subscriptions, telephone, internet, audio-visual equipment, website hosting and all of our online content, IT security, computers, hardware and equipment, including our internal servers.
Accounting
Another one of VFS’s efficiencies is its low accounting overhead. Your Executive Director also serves jointly as the CFO along with our Membership Director, Valerie Sheehan, who also takes the lead in bookkeeping responsibilities along with a part-time bookkeeping firm. As a non-profit, we are required to pay for an annual audit, which involves hundreds of hours of our time and roughly $20,000 a year of our funds. In my role as joint CFO, I take the lead in managing our finances, including bank accounts, investments, accounts payable and payroll, and I help develop the budget.
As a tax-exempt organization, we are required to file Form 990 annually and provide the IRS with the information about our expenses, revenue and other related information. We are not only required to submit this information for the Society, but also the Vertical Flight Foundation (VFF) and a group filing for all of our US chapters. The 990 is a comprehensive document, and I encourage you to review ours, as well as other non-profits you may be members of, at https://apps.irs.gov/app/eos. Our employer identification numbers are 13-1953506 for VFS and 23-6428319 for VFF (and 52-1164466 for our chapters’ group return).
Advocacy and Outreach
Another key role for VFS is its responsibility to advocate for the Vertical Flight community. In addition to the work that goes into creating our newsletters, the educational information on our VTOL.org and eVTOL.news websites and advisors (for infrastructure and eVTOL), VFS also pays half of the bill for a lobbying firm (shared with the Vertical Lift Consortium). VFS has tasked this firm over the past two years to increase the government funding dedicated to the Vertical Lift Research Centers of Excellence (VLRCOEs). Previously we advocated for additional research and development funding for the Pentagon’s Joint Multi-Role (JMR) and Future Vertical Lift (FVL) programs, as well as support for NASA’s vertical lift technology and university research efforts.
STEM
VFS is proud of its science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) portfolio, which includes the Student Design Competition, Design-Build-Vertical Flight (DBVF) Competition, our Student Council and the support that we provide for events run by the chapters or student chapters. Betty Chen dedicates much of her time towards STEM activities, with DBVF being our most costly due to the expenses of running a fly-off. We are looking for a more stable battle rhythm of sponsors to support DBVF in the future.
Journal
The Journal of the AHS, like Vertiflite, includes graphic design, printing and postage costs. We use two services to help us produce the Journal, including Aptara, which is a service the authors, reviewers and associate editors use to review and edit the technical article submissions, as well as Ingenta, which serves as the interface for our readers and libraries to read the Journal online. Julie Gibbs is responsible for guiding the technical content for the Journal, in addition to the conferences, Student Design Competition, VFF scholarship applications and many other aspects of the Society.
Membership
Managing our hundreds of corporate and educational members and thousands of individual members is a difficult task, and most of Membership Director Valerie Sheehan’s time goes towards this category. She is also responsible for invoicing and collecting payments, as well as managing our large and complex membership database. Costs related to purchasing “swag” and VFS merchandise fall under this category.
This commentary is also available as a pdf.
What do you think? Let us know!
If you have any questions about our expenditures, prospects for improved revenue or other general inquiries about our finances, please feel free to contact me directly at director@vtol.org.
We look forward to another prosperous year with great fulfillment to our members and to the vertical flight community as a whole. Here’s to 2025!
Posted: 2024-12-17