ELEVATE AVIATION PROFILE
‘The largest private aviation firm no one has heard of’
Greg Raiff wants to grow Elevate Aviation Group without losing focus on its customers. It’s a different approach compared with his first aviation business. Words: Alasdair Whyte
Greg Raiff’s business dream was born after a travel agent told him: “That’s it. You’ve filled the largest airplane known to man.”
ELEVATE AVIATION PROFILE
‘The largest private aviation firm no one has heard of’
Greg Raiff wants to grow Elevate Aviation Group without losing focus on its customers. It’s a different approach compared with his first aviation business. Words: Alasdair Whyte
Greg Raiff’s business dream was born after a travel agent told him: “That’s it. You’ve filled the largest airplane known to man.”
GREG RAIFF, CEO Elevate Aviation Group, can remember exactly when he realised his future career was in aviation. It was 1989 and he was sitting in first class on the top deck of a Boeing 747 heading to the Bahamas – having personally sold every ticket on the flight. He was 18 years old.
“When it's you and your best friend and 10 people you've invited to sit with you as a senior in high school in the bubble of your own 747, it is pretty special,” he says. “The next chance you're going to have to do that is probably when you get elected president of the United States.”
The senior year students at his High School had a tradition of going to the Bahamas for Spring break. Raiff did not know how to pay for the trip so went to the Bahamas tourist office in New York to find out how he could get a discount. The solution was selling tickets to his friends. “And 472 students later, the travel agent I used to help book the trip called me and said: ‘No more. That's it. You've filled the largest airplane known to man.’”
He kept his business going when he moved to Middlebury College in Vermont. Running it from his dorm room, Raiff expanded it to other schools and colleges. He sought out popular students to be campus representatives who then sold trips to their friends.
With sales coming in fast, he incorporated the company and hired part time workers who lived on Vermont dairy farms. They were less busy in the winter and experienced at clerical work. “It was a very manual business,” he says. “This was back in the day of thermal fax machines, answering machines, people mailing checks around the world and carbonless reservation forms.”
He attended all his classes but an eight-week working holiday in Cancun, Mexico meant that he was late submitting his final thesis. He offered to submit the paper the next year, but the college required him to be on campus. And, by that time, the business was growing too fast to miss a year.
In his final year at university his business was flying 4,000 students a year. Six years and several mergers with competitors later, they had 35,000 students flying each season. “In a six-week period we ran more origin destination flights to Mexico than any other airline, but we only did it for six weeks,” he says. “Our route system was one flight a year from South Bend, Indiana, to Mazatlán and then take that same airplane and ferry to Chicago, run to Montego Bay, Jamaica. It was a complex business.”
The company went online in 1999 as StudentCity.Com allowing connected students to book directly. The same year it was sold to a fund, keen to own one of of the internet’s first profitable businesses. Raiff stayed for a year but moved on.
“It seemed like a great work life balance career to be running what turned into MTV's Spring Break. But by the time I was 24, I'd met the future mother of my children and I’d grown tired of cheap beer and foam parties,” says Raiff.
Raiff also wanted to build relationships with his customers – his real passion. “People were only going to be your customers once for the graduation trip or whatever it might be. That didn't speak to the sort of service I enjoy providing.”
When he was looking around for a new business, he saw Boeing Business Jets (BBJ) had launched an advert campaign in The Wall Street Journal. Raiff was intrigued by this as a product. When a friend running a freight airline said they had some spare Boeing 727s, Raiff had an idea and they formed a joint venture.
“We could put $1m into each of these jets and completely redesign the interior along the lines of the BBJs. For $7m, we deployed an asset that could compete with a $50m airplane on short routes,” says Raiff. “We could fly sports teams, rock bands and many others.”
Early customers included baseball teams like the Cincinnati Reds, the Toronto Blue Jays, The Rolling Stones and U2’s Elevation tour.
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“Keystone is a wonderful platform,” says Greg Raiff after buying the business last year.
In 2001 they split the business. The aircraft owner kept the sports teams and Raiff kept the corporate, music and government contracts.
A few years later Raiff’s business moved into private jet charter.
“We were running a band tour – moving the full entourage of 50 people and one of the band members approached our concierge and asks for a Learjet to take him to a doctor’s appointment,” says Raiff. “The concierge correctly responded: ‘Of course we can.’ He calls the office and says we need a Learjet. Back in the office we were busy trying to work out how to do this – Boeings were easy, but we did not know anything about an executive jet. But we did it and learnt how to manage business jet charters. It is a large part of our business now. But I think in the industry everyone sees us as the VIP airliner shop, as very few people have the expertise or appetite to do these charters.”
“We are focused on our clients, rather than servicing an untenable debt load.”
Private Jet Services now books more than $200m in charter each year and is the company’s best known brand. But that is about to change. After 20 years, Raiff is keen for more people to know Elevate Aviation Group. “We are the largest private aviation services firm that no one's ever heard of. I kind of like that but I am very excited for this next chapter,” says Raiff. “We see a lot of opportunity to grow.”
In 2022, Raiff acquired Keystone Aviation which had maintenance and aircraft management bases in in Salt Lake City and Scottsdale. “I wish that our industry had more people in it like the leadership and employees at Keystone. They are all A+,” says Raiff. “Keystone is a wonderful platform. It overnight transforms our boutique Elevate Jet management business into a business that's over 30 years old, with employee tenure that is at least 10, 15 years on average for all the employees.”
He already had an aircraft management company – Elevate. Keystone is staying as the main aircraft management brand, with Elevate becoming the holding company.
U2’s 2001 Elevation Tour inspired the company’s name.
Elevating business aviation
Elevate Aviation Group consists of five businesses: Private Jet Services (the original charter business); Keystone Aviation, aircraft management; Keystone, MRO; broker, Elevate Jet; and Contract Jet Crew a staffing business.
It now employs more than 200 full time employees and is looking to add more. The company has been profitable since launch and is debt free. Raiff believes that this simplicity is a huge advantage as it allows staff to focus on the customer. “We are focused on our clients, rather than servicing an untenable debt load’ he says.
Raiff says that Elevate’s acquisition of Keystone sped up his five-year plan by two years. Keystone has given the business a strong West-Coast base and he is keen to look at further geographic expansion.
Elevate is keen to add more MRO businesses. Raiff also thinks that there are good charter brokerages that could fit. He notes that apart from Wheels Up buying Air Partner, the most recent acquisitions have been on the supply, rather than demand side. Although the US is the key focus, he is also looking at international opportunities. Private Jet Services opened an Australian office in 2022 and is about to open in Canada.
He is not expecting a crash in demand for charter, but he is expecting things to slow down. “It feels like we're at this inflection point, where the trading is slowing. Interest rates are going up,” says Raiff. “This will give manufacturers the chance to catch up and end nightmare stories about how people can't find a plane on a given day if something happens. Service levels across our industry will also improve.”
Elevate Aviation was keen to keep acquiring, but Raiff is holding back because he thinks the market is turning. He plans to watch it closely. He also wants his team to be ready to act quickly. “I want us to be in the position where we can be ready to start working on the integration before we even close, where we have processes ready.”
In the middle of 2022, Raiff came close to selling a stake in Elevate Aviation to a private equity firm. But in the end he decided to keep control of the company. “I may look back on this and regret it,” he acknowledges. Raiff says that he has debt ready for acquisitions if needed and also has cash from the business.
Elevate Aviation Group’s clients have won:
American Music Awards
Billboard Music Awards
Grammy Awards
Country Music Awards
MTV Video Music Awards
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Stanley Cup Championships
World Series Championships
NCAA Baseball, Basketball & Football Championships
MLS Cup Championships
Focus on MROs: Elevate Aviation Group is keen to add more MRO businesses to the portfolio.
Raiff is not looking to grow Elevate into the market’s biggest business. In fact, he is keen for it to stay midsize. “There is room in the market for a different sort of business aviation company. There are customers who are looking to be treated with the same care and attention to detail and personalisation that there was 10 to 15 years ago. A lot of that has been lost. There has been a move to replace one on one communication to customers – aircraft owners, charter customers and maintenance customers – with an app rather than a person. You cannot deliver the same service through an app.”
He accepts that this makes the business harder to scale, but he is happy with this. “Today one of our bands sent me a note and asked me to schedule a call so I could give him a quote for a tour and I love that,” says Raiff. “I can sit in the front row of the sports team I grew up following and I have been to presidential inaugurations for clients that we flew through a campaign season. I love my job, love our clients. I really do. I wouldn't schedule a surgical procedure around a client's critical deadline.”
He wants all of Elevate Aviation’s team to share that dedication. “We're looking to be the best version of ourselves that we can be, entirely focused on the customer,” says Raiff. “And that’s 180 degrees from the student travel business I first entered 35 years ago.”
