High Fliers

"Did you see American Idol last night?" asks Ken Austin. Beaming like a proud parent, he pops a tape into the conference-room VCR. "You've got to see this."

He fast-forwards through the two-hour finale of Fox's season-long talent show until the anxious moments before the big announcement: Bo Bice or Carrie Underwood, the long-haired southern rocker or the long-haired country ingenue. Host Ryan Seacrest reminds the fidgety crowd what's at stake--a $1 million recording contract and a new bonus prize: use of a private jet. The live audience emits can-you-believe-it squeals. Seacrest holds up what looks like a black credit card. The camera zooms in, and the words "Marquis Jet" fill the screen.

Austin gets chills all over again. "I don't know how many times I've watched this, and I still can't believe it," he says. He's executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Marquis Jet, and this morning the man looks like a freaking genius.

Underwood may have been the official winner of the competition, but Marquis, which sells pricey flight time on luxurious private planes, was the unexpected corporate winner. Marquis came out of nowhere. The producers asked the company to fly the final three performers home for a prime-time family reunion, and Marquis agreed.

And so just like that, in exchange for $175,000 in complimentary flights, Marquis finagled a priceless cameo. The season's top-rated show. An edge-of-your-seat moment. Thirty million viewers. It was an audacious move, to be sure, but not uncharacteristic of Marquis, which just might be the savviest piggybacker in business. It was a new reality show called The Apprentice that introduced the brand to a mainstream audience in 2002. The episode, which revolved around teams creating an ad campaign for Marquis, was essentially an hour-long infomercial for Marquis hosted by huckster extraordinaire Donald Trump. Thanks to reruns and DVDs, Marquis still gets 5 to 10 sales leads a week from the show.

At Marquis, though, making the most of bigger and stronger friends and partners is more than a brand-building strategy. It's the business model. The company doesn't own or operate planes. NetJets, the private-aviation giant owned by Warren Buffett, does. What Marquis does is lease flight time on those planes.

NetJets, founded in 1986, pioneered fractional jet ownership as a less-expensive alternative to buying a multimillion-dollar plane. It works much as a time-share condo does. Typically, owners sign a three- to five-year contract and buy a fraction of the aircraft, starting at $397,000 (plus monthly management fees and hourly operating costs). Because they own part of a plane, if they leave the program, they have to sell their share.

Marquis pioneered the jet card to offer an even lower entry point to private aviation. The service works the same way as a prepaid calling card. Marquis buys fractional shares on NetJets. It then sells flight time to customers in 25-hour chunks, starting at $109,900 for a Citation V Ultra, which comes with seven leather swivel seats and catered meals. Customers have a year to use the hours, but the average burn rate is eight months, at which point most buy another card--and some graduate to buying shares at NetJets.

Since selling the first card in 2001, Marquis has added more than 2,000 owners. The privately held company is profitable, and annual revenue, growing at 55%, is more than $300 million. As for NetJets, the arrangement boosts business; the number of U.S. owners increased 28% last year, thanks in part to Marquis, its largest customer. And Marquis brings NetJets a new customer base: The typical Marquis Jet user pulls down about $2 million a year (some notable exceptions: Jennifer Lopez, LeBron James, and Derek Jeter); the typical NetJets owner at least $10 million a year.

The phrase "Fleet by NetJets" appears in every ad and on every card, right below "Marquis Jet." The two brands are inextricably bound, an association that evokes instant trust and respect for the young luxury brand. That kind of reputation usually takes years, but NetJets provides Marquis with a shortcut. And, of course, an endorsement from the Sage of Omaha himself, whose Berkshire Hathaway company purchased NetJets in 1998. "We were a new brand with an existing product," says Marquis cofounder Jesse Itzler. "We were starting the game on second base."

The NetJets fleet consists of more than 570 planes, by far the most in private aviation and second overall when compared with commercial airlines. Last year, it flew more than 275,000 flights to more than 140 countries and employed 2,800 pilots. At the operations base in Columbus, Ohio, the air-traffic controllers, meteorologists, and customer-service agents manage the logistics. When a Marquis Jet owner requests a plane, a dedicated group at NetJets' call center--team 36--makes the arrangements. "If we didn't have the infrastructure that NetJets provides, we wouldn't have a business," says Marquis chairman Bill Allard.