Marquis Jet’s Kenny Dichter
Interview by Marion Flanagan - February 1, 2009
In 1999, when Kenny Dichter took his first private jet ride on a friend’s Hawker 800XP from New York to Boston, the airplane wasn’t all that took wing. Dichter spotted an untapped market. Less than a decade later, he helms a jet-card subsidiary to industry giant NetJets that had sales of approximately $800 million to $900 million last year.
The company’s jet cards–good for 25 hours of flight time and starting at close to $130,000–give purchasers access to the Berkshire Hathaway-owned NetJets fleet
and operations infrastructure without the commitment and higher upfront cost of fractional jet ownership. The cards are popular with those who need airlift efficiency and prefer a no-strings-attached, short-term deal.
A self-described “team organizer,” Dichter partly credits his entrepreneurial acumen to lessons learned on the baseball field and basketball court while growing up in Merrick, N.Y. (Neither he nor Marquis Jet cofounder Jesse Itzler has an MBA.) He runs the company with a scant 120 employees, an owner base of nearly 4,000 people–about 3 percent of whom are flying on any given day–and a 10- to 15-percent markup on NetJets’ fleet.
With 20-percent growth in the past year alone, the still-nascent, Manhattan-based company is poised for expansion. “We are in the first or second inning of this whole game,” Dichter said.
You have some major competitors. How do you differentiate yourself?
I’ll give you two words: Berkshire Hathaway. And NetJets. We have the best partner we could ever have as it relates to the delivery of a product. Our business is not a commodity business. If you boil down Marquis Jet to its essence, it’s NetJets 25 hours at a time. It’s a totally different product when we sell against competition. It’s not Coke and Pepsi.
How many people who start flying with Marquis Jet move on to NetJets?
I would say on an annual basis, between 5 and 10 percent of our owner base is graduating up to NetJets. On the other side of the coin, the NetJets sales force actively sells Marquis cards to prospects that aren’t quite ready for the fractional commitment.
One thing that strikes me when I look at the inception of Marquis Jet is that you had everything to gain from a partnership with NetJets–you weren’t really risking anything. But NetJets CEO Richard Santulli had a lot at stake.
I give Richard all the credit in the world. He had more risk in the beginning than we did. He had brand risk and he had operational risk by putting a new product in. We didn’t have aviation experience. We were young guys. Richard says he saw a young Richard Santulli and [NetJets vice chairman] Jim Jacobs in me and [cofounder] Jesse [Itzler]. I think he gave us the opportunity because to develop something from scratch, he needed a different DNA than a company that had 20 years under its belt.
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