18. Exercise Your Middle Brain

—Randy Brandoff (Marquis Jet)

Randy Brandoff is ambidextrous—he can comfortably perform most tasks with either his right or left hand. Pretty wild. I'm not suggesting that you need to be able to do this in order to be successful in business because if that's the case, I'm doomed. But Randy's story shows the strength of being adaptable rather than laser-focused. He calls it being middle-brained. Whatever you call it, Randy's ability to wear many hats launched him into a fantastic career as vice president of marketing at Marquis Jet, the industry leader in private jet cards.

Randy got started at Marquis Jet before it even had a name; in fact, he helped pick the name. He was the first employee, and his first few years on the job meant doing everything from figuring out financial models to buying media ads. "It's been all about wearing as many hats as you can try on," Randy says.

This is a refreshing point of view because so many people say you have to figure out what you're best at and pursue that. What if you don't have a laser focus? What if you're multitalented and pretty good at a wide range of things? There are people who can't figure out what they're best at, people who have a more broad level of competency. Randy calls it being "pretty good—to very good—at many things." He found a position and a company where that could be brought to its fullest value.

All along, even in college and his early working years, Randy had this adaptable quality. First, he got a well-rounded business education at Cornell University with a general business degree instead of specializing in a small field. At the same time, he did a couple of internships that seem to be from different sides of the planet: One summer he played a young version of Charlie Sheen on Wall Street and the next, Jerry Maguire's assistant at a talent agency. Then in his post-college years, Randy worked first as a business analyst at Deloitte Consulting and then as an associate for a venture capital firm. He was immersed in analyzing business processes, but he wasn't tied to one industry. When he talked with the founders of Marquis Jet, his adaptability impressed them as just what they needed.

That's because when Marquis Jet got started, there was no established path to follow. It was a totally new way of selling private air travel. The way the Marquis Jet Card program works is customers buy a jet card that's worth 25 hours of private flight time on the Net-Jets fleet, sort of like a prepaid phone card, which can then be redeemed over the following year.

When Randy met the Marquis Jet founders, they were hiring a team that could get the business model off the ground. His wide-ranging business experience made him just the right person for the opportunity. "I've always said I'm not great at anything," says Randy, who's being more than a little modest. "I have an understanding of a wide gamut of things. I can be creative with advertising, print collateral, or designing a website, as well as analytical, crunching numbers and building financial models. I have competency in a range of areas."

Randy calls it being middle-brained. You know the theory: the right and left hemispheres of our brains process information differently, and people tend to process information using their dominant side. The left side of the brain is the calculating, analyzing, and mathematical side, whereas the right side is about creativity and flexibility. In general, left-brained people are better at math and reading, whereas right-brained people are more artistic. Some people even think that because each hemisphere controls the opposite side of the body, being right-handed means you're left brain is dominant; left-handed means your right brain is dominant. When Randy says he's middle-brained, he means neither side is dominant—he's neither right- nor left-handed.

We don't have to change our brains to be successful—but we can make ourselves more flexible and adaptable. In fact, Randy tried on a couple of careers before he decided on marketing, and both times he was told he wasn't cut out for those jobs. So Randy adapted and tried something new.

Starting from Scratch

Majoring in business at Cornell University, Randy was on the freshman crew team, where he learned the importance of pulling his own weight. "You absolutely function and succeed as a team, and if one guy is messing up, you bring the entire boat down," Randy explains. "More than in any sport. Four guys can carry a bad basketball player, but when one guy's not in sync in your boat, the boat's going nowhere fast."

He also learned how to juggle diverging interests: he worked as a bartender for all 4 years of college, joined a fraternity, did some volunteering at a YMCA after-school program, and made good grades. Cornell's business program was very general; he focused on finance and marketing but also took classes in economics and other business disciplines.

His internships were a mixed bag as well—what I like to call an intern mogul of sorts. The first, the summer after freshman year, was with a family friend who was a trader on Wall Street. "I enjoyed it," Randy says, "but it wasn't my passion." Then, impressed with the movie Jerry Maguire, which featured a hyper sports agent, Randy spent two summers interning at talent agencies. While he was chatting with an up-and-coming actress one day, she looked at him and asked, "What are you doing here? You're too smart for this place. Why don't you try something more challenging?" Truthfully, Randy saw that and agreed he needed a career that was less about "who you know" and more about strategy and intellect.

Why not entertainment law? Again, he was discouraged. As he was deciding between the law schools to which he'd been accepted, his undergraduate law professor told him point blank: "Randy, I've been doing this for 10 years, and I haven't seen many students that sound less inclined to be a lawyer than you are. Take a year or two off, get a job."

So Randy looked for a job and found an entry-level position as a business analyst at Deloitte Consulting. There he found good executive training: the fundamentals of business, how to overcome barriers, and how to motivate people. His first big project for Deloitte was at Prudential Healthcare; the company was purchased by Aetna while he was there. Randy recalls being fascinated to see how different people at Prudential handled the news. He watched as certain people viewed it as an opportunity, and others viewed it as the end of the world. His next big project was for Lucent Technologies, where he worked at the headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey. He was working on the company's global Y2K compliance, but what he remembers most was at age 23 he had the opportunity to lead workshops for middle- and upper-level executives in Paris and Beijing.

After 2 years at Deloitte, Randy used a search firm to look around for a job at a venture capital firm. He found one at the Argentum Group in Manhattan, a small firm with five full-time investment professionals working around the clock. They hired him to assist with the excess deal flow. This was in the first half of 2000, when the stock market was still hot and before the dot-com crash. Within a couple months of his hiring, however, the rapid market descent had begun; in the year he was there, not a single new deal was done.

At Argentum, a number of times Randy researched and made an investment recommendation in support of a company, and the partners would say, "'Good work, but we're not going to do the deal,'" Randy says. "It almost always came down to valuations, and they were too high. A good investment is largely defined by what price you ultimately pay for the company. And back then if someone basically had a dollar and a dream, they were asking for millions of dollars in valuation." After a year of no deals, Randy saw the writing on the wall and started speaking with search firms to look for something else. That's when a search consultant introduced him to the founders of Marquis Jet, who at the time were described as "a bunch of smart, already successful entrepreneurs I want you to meet."

Randy was curious and went to the meeting.

Underestimating Obstacles

Just the week before he met the Marquis Jet folks, Randy had read an article about NetJets, a Berkshire Hathaway company that sells shares of private jets to corporations and individuals who want the convenience and myriad of benefits of a private jet but don't want to buy and maintain the entire aircraft. Randy didn't realize it ahead of time, but the Marquis Jet founders had already negotiated an exclusive agreement with NetJets and were building a business around it.

So he sat down with the Marquis Jet founders, who were calling the company Superstar Jet at the time, and they unveiled their plan in a 10-page PowerPoint presentation. "I thought the opportunity was enormous," Randy recalls. "I also saw the obvious risk of a startup, but I was 25 years old, and I always had in the back of my head the likelihood I would go back to school. So I said to myself, 'Let's do this for a year or two, and if it's unsuccessful it would make a great essay to get into business school.'"

The Marquis Jet founders saw that NetJets, the founder of fractional jet ownership and worldwide leader in private aviation, served corporations and individuals who required at least 50 hours per year of flight time—and fractional jet ownership required a multiyear contract. Marquis Jet would partner with NetJets to buy shares on an assortment of aircraft types and resell those commitments in single year, 25-hour blocks of time, expanding the potential market for world-class private aviation.

The way the business works is, Marquis Jet Card owners can book flights 24/7, with as little as 10 hours advanced notice, on the NetJets fleet of over 670 jet aircraft. Marquis Jet Cards start at $119,900 for 25 hours of flight time and are good for 1 year. That's about $5,000 per hour, and if that sounds steep to you, that's because there are only about 400,000 people in the whole country who have a high enough net worth to afford it. But for those folks, time is money, and a private jet saves lots of time in addition to maximizing productivity and relieving the stresses of commercial travel. And, unless you fly an awful lot, buying a fractional share or a fractional jet card, depending on your need, is much less expensive than buying and maintaining your own jet.

When Randy began at Marquis Jet, the founders were looking to build the right team to take the winning concept off the page and make it a reality. Randy initially focused on crunching forecasts and developing the original financial model. Simultaneously, the team was deciding on the right look and tone of the brand and devising initial strategies to identify and market to a very niche audience. These were big jobs requiring diverse skills—just the thing for a middle-brained guy like Randy to make important contributions.

Especially appealing to Randy were the founders themselves. Founders Kenny Dichter and Jesse Itzler, who were less than 10 years older than Randy, had most recently co-founded Alphabet City, a production and distribution company that sold sports CDs combining music and play-by-play voiceovers. When they sold their company to SFX Entertainment, the pair ended up taking a few private jet flights with SFX clients and realized that the market for leasing private jets was wide open and full of opportunity.

Another member of the founding team whom Randy had immediate respect for was Henry Schachar, an attorney and seasoned executive. Earlier in his career, Schachar had been president of Philipp Brothers Inc., the leading global trader of non-ferrous and precious metals, as well as agricultural and energy-related products. While Dichter and Itzler were trying to convince NetJets to give them the green light to begin the business, they brought Schachar on board to be their "gray hair" and steadying influence.

Randy admired all of the founders' exuberance and sense of fun in business—and their accomplishments. Plus, it didn't hurt that they had an alliance with NetJets, which was owned by Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway. He figured at the very least, this would be the learning opportunity of a lifetime!

Building Momentum—Flexibly

When they talk about it today, no one is exactly sure who first suggested the name Marquis Jet, but the process was unforgettable. Randy, the company's first employee, spent 5 days straight brainstorming in a room with the four founders and a naming consultant. Halfway through the week, every inch of the conference room had pages tacked up with names they had brainstormed. They started to vote down some of the names and pull down some of the pages until only a handful were left. Then they decided among those.

"It was a great process," says Randy, who recalls being the one who threw out the name Marquis Jet, but others in the room remember suggesting it also. "Probably more than one of us called out the name and didn't hear the others say it." Marquis Jet, with its connotation of European nobility, gave an elegant touch to the brand.

Randy spent much of that whole first year in 2001/2002 working on branding the startup—attempting to execute the vision of the founders and the newest addition to the company's founding team and leadership, Ken Austin. Prior to joining Marquis Jet, Austin was senior vice president at the Seagram Beverage Company, responsible for U.S. sales, regional marketing, finance, and operations. As Marquis Jet entered its second year of operations, the headcount had grown large enough to support breaking into departments, and Randy joined Ken in building the marketing and business development team.

His middle-brained flexibility came into play as the business grew. Randy worked hard to learn and successfully perform the functions that fell under his watch. He made it a point of pride that they were able to keep the team very lean and did not have to hire additional staff or outside agencies just because he didn't initially know how to do a particular job. They expanded the team only when they needed more manpower, or bandwidth. He learned a range of new tasks, including how to write press releases, draft new print ads, and lay out the content on the company's website.

One measure of Marquis Jet's initial marketing success that first year was when the Neiman Marcus winter catalog featured the Marquis Jet Card in its top five Christmas gifts for the season. That visibility helped lead to two other big early partners: the American Express Centurion Card and the Ritz Carlton Residence Club. As a startup, getting partnerships with well-known brands is an important way of gaining credibility. Thanks to its marketing techniques, Marquis Jet quickly gained that credibility.

A lot of people have trouble adapting to a chaotic environment, with so many hats to wear each day. For instance, in a job like Randy's, you might start out the day negotiating ad prices with a magazine, then finish the day designing a webpage promoting a new alliance partnership. But if you can be adaptable, you increase your value to the company.

No one on the founding Marquis Jet team had an aviation background. From day one they sought to create a world-class luxury brand that happened to sell an aviation product, rather than your typical jet company. Austin and Randy noticed that aviation marketing and advertising was previously all about the airplanes. They knew the primary driver to buying the Marquis Jet Card is that it enables busy people to get more time for their top priorities and to spend less time in airports. A Boston-based advertising agency gave them initial ad concepts for a groundbreaking lifestyle campaign, and the team has run with it. "Our current lifestyle campaign looks to touch an emotional trigger. Instead of talking solely about the product, we focus on the benefits," he says. Recent Marquis Jet ads use the tagline "It's not just a card, it's a choice." A choice, for example, to visit three cities each day and get home in time to celebrate your daughter's birthday. These ads have been successful.

"We definitely moved the ball," Randy says. "Now a lot of aviation ads are lifestyle-oriented. Our advertising changed the private aviation advertising landscape."

He knows the ads were successful because of the tracking engine they put into place from day one. "If you're going to have finite dollars for marketing and advertising, you're going to have to be as smart as possible," Randy says. At Marquis Jet, every different lead source—print ad, mailing, alliance partnership—has its own phone number. "Whenever a lead comes in, we know where they came from," Randy says, "so we know what's working up to the minute."

Taking the Next Leap

When people visit Marquis Jet's offices, the first thing they notice is the small staff. "We often hear people tell us, 'I see you guys everywhere, everyone knows you! You must have dozens of people working on it.'" And then they learn it's primarily Austin and Randy's marketing team. Then they look at the size of the team, which also manages the company's public relations and maintains the look and feel of the website, the print collateral, and the branding activity. "We have only a handful of people working on it," Randy says. Randy is quick to stress that the marketing team is able to accomplish what it does because every colleague, or teammate, is exceptionally talented and extremely hard-working. And Austin taught Randy how important it is to stretch a dollar intelligently, how to make a young business look bigger than it is. Looking big early on helped them form great alliances with big names, but staying small continues to help them keep a healthy bottom line.

But Marquis Jet isn't just about doing more with less—they want to do things in marketing that haven't been done before. For instance, Marquis Jet was the first corporate sponsor of The Apprentice. Back in 2004, for the show's first season, Marquis Jet was featured in The Apprentice's second episode when the competing teams of contestants had to develop new promotional campaigns for the company. Marquis Jet provided flights from New York to Boston for the winning contestants. The show got the Marquis Jet name out there on national television, but it was a risk because at the time they agreed to participate, no one knew what the show would be like, and sponsors don't want to be associated with flops. What were people going to think of Donald Trump? Because the show was unproven, the price of Marquis Jet's participation was reasonable. However, it wasn't long before the show became a mega, international hit and began commanding millions for its advertising partnerships. So needless to say, the risk for Marquis Jet paid off in an enormous way. To this day, years later, not a week goes by that Randy doesn't hear, weren't you the company on The Apprentice?

Marquis Jet has also tried to be unique with its targeted advertising. Austin and Randy came up with the idea of running a targeted newspaper insert campaign. "We really got out there and did the research," Randy says. "We spent a number of months picking out the top 40 markets, then the top newspapers in each market, and the top 10 to 15 zip codes each selected newspaper reached." Armed with a list of the best newspapers and best zip codes, Randy's marketing team designed an eight-page insert, and Marquis Jet paid to have the inserts folded into those targeted newspapers. "Over 4 months we put 1.9 million inserts into the hands of potential high-net-worth consumers throughout the country," he says. It cost only a fraction of what it would have been to print brochures and mail them out to the same audience—less than 24 cents per piece instead of $15!

The brochure effort was something that had never been done before in aviation, Randy says, and it resulted in hundreds of quality leads and many sales.

After 6 years at Marquis Jet, Randy still loves it. "From day one through today, it's been amazing," he says. Even though he has thought of going out on his own and doing something entrepreneurial, now isn't the time. "As long as I can continue to be personally challenged and find myself growing and learning from the best, I'm staying," he says. "This is not a ride to jump off of anytime soon."

For more information on Wes speaking at your company, visit www.wesmoss.com.