Stelios Makes Growth Look Easy

The second imperative, which helps Stelios sweat the assets, is sophisticated yield management -- a software-driven pricing system that can set an almost infinite number of fares for a given flight. "There are some very wide fluctuations, based on the demand for the seat," Stelios explains. "There are no pricing rules other than that it's cheaper if you buy early." That $45 London-Nice round-trip, when purchased at the last minute, could cost up to $450. "Who is the more valuable customer for easyJet?" Stelios asks. "You need all of them to fill a plane, from the vacationer who wants the $45 ticket to the businessman willing to pay $450. They're all equally valuable to us."

Beyond Airlines: the Easy Formula
Stelios's formula for growth has been gaining altitude steadily at easyJet. So after assembling an experienced management team at the airline, he has reduced his operational role in order to test his strategies in other industries. (In fact, he recently announced that he would leave easyJet's board on November 26 to focus full-time on his other ventures.)

Working out of a former piano factory in Camden Town, a north London neighborhood, Stelios and 100 employees supervise easyGroup's portfolio of companies and develop new business ideas. Already up and running are easyCar, with 20 locations around Europe, and easyInternetCafé, with 23 Internet cafés, including one in New York's Times Square. (EasyCar marked its first profitable quarter this past summer.) In the works are easyCinema, a chain of movie theaters, and easyDorm, a collection of hostels for budget-conscious travelers.

The strategic logic of easyCar closely resembles that of easyJet. Its vehicles (Mercedes and Fords) cost more as demand increases, and the pricing encourages renters to return the cars early if they only need them for a quick trip rather than keeping them for a full day, so that the cars can be rerented to other people. Customers who want to book by phone instead of via the Internet, pay extra for the privilege. At the Internet cafés, per-hour access prices fluctuate based on how many of the café's computers are occupied. "If you don't like the price, you can come back later, when you'll get a better deal," Stelios explains.

The goal with the cafés, as with easyJet, is to use variable pricing to maximize the number of "bums in seats," making the most of the fixed assets -- in this case, bandwidth and computers. "When you don't sell an hour of computer time, it's like an empty airline seat. You don't get it back," says Paul Currie, the easyInternetCafé executive in charge of franchising the cafés.

The new businesses will follow the Easy formula too. Tickets to a Tuesday-morning show at easyCinema, when booked in advance, could be as cheap as 30 cents. A last-minute seat to the first Friday-night opening of a blockbuster might cost as much as $15 or $20. Stelios, a big fan of using technology to automate routine tasks, sees no reason to employ people to sell or tear tickets. The current plan is to allow moviegoers to print bar-coded tickets at home or to buy them from a machine in the lobby. The bar codes would be scanned by a turnstile, which would provide admittance to the theater.

It's Not Always So Easy
The Easy empire has not been assembled without a few snags, both personal and strategic. Early in his professional life, Stelios learned a hard lesson about safety. In 1991, when he was just 22 and serving as the CEO of his father's shipping business, an aging oil tanker called Haven blew up off the coast of Genoa, Italy. The explosion killed five crew members and dumped nearly 50,000 tons of oil into the Mediterranean. Stelios was accused of poor maintenance and charged with manslaughter (the charges have since been dismissed three times). But the accident "had a tremendous impact on him from a personal point of view," says John Quelch, an easyJet board member who teaches at Harvard Business School.

For example, easyJet has made a point of buying only new Boeings. "What impressed me from the time of the first board meeting," says Quelch, "was that airline safety is always the first item on every board agenda. Every meeting begins with a review of all reportable incidents, even things as small as a light going on in a cockpit that turned out to be a problem with the bulb."

Stelios acknowledges that his formula hasn't worked well with a line of credit cards called (naturally) easyMoney. Free email didn't turn into the advertising windfall he'd hoped for, and customers willing to pay subscription fees for an online comparison-shopping service called easyValue didn't materialize. "They were worth trying," he says. "Rather than shutting them down, we keep them ticking along with very few resources to keep the brand out there."