How Viral Content Built a $120M Private Aviation Brand

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What does it really take to break into one of the most exclusive industries in the world?

On this episode of Suite Success, Katie sits down with Kolin Jones, Founder and CEO of Amalfi Jets—a $120M private aviation company he started at just 19 years old with no planes, no capital, and no connections.

On the heels of Masters Weekend, now one of the biggest private aviation events in the world, Kolin takes us behind the scenes of what it actually looks like to operate at the highest level of luxury, logistics, and demand.

But this conversation goes far beyond private jets.

From sending 2,500 cold emails a day, to creating a fake persona just to get industry intel, to building the most-followed private aviation brand on social media, Kolin shares how doing things differently became his greatest competitive advantage.

And why in today’s world, attention isn’t optional—it’s everything.

This episode is brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Lodgify and Bilt!⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⁠Connect with Kolin:⁠
• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kolin’s LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kolin-jones/
• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Amalfi Jets’s Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: https://amalfijets.com/

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Watch This Episode

I’m Kolin Jones and you’re listening to Suite Success.

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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Suite Success. I’m your host, Katie Cline, and today we’re going behind the scenes on one of the most exclusive and logistically complex events in hospitality.

On the heels of Masters Weekend, I’m joined by Kolin Jones, founder and CEO of Amalfi Jets, a global leader in private aviation.

Not only is he the founder of the company, but Kolin is also an avid pilot himself and a board member at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Kolin, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you, Katie. It’s great to be here. Happy Monday.

I’m very excited to chat.

Me too. I can’t wait to chat. Obviously, the Masters just happened this last weekend, and thanks to your team, I learned that demand for private jets during the Masters has actually surpassed even the Super Bowl, which completely blew my mind.

Can you break down what’s actually happening behind the scenes for us? Of course.

Yeah. I think the Masters is obviously one of the pinnacle of golf events. I think that private aviation and golf go very, very hand in hand.

I think with the rise of the Super Bowl suites and a lot of the hospitality behind it, some of those suites with Super Bowl were well over a million, $2 million.

We noticed some customers are more shifting that expenditure towards the actual suites and then flying commercially, or even driving up if they’re local in California. Whereas, Masters is still that pinnacle event.

Just looking at the videos, I’m sure you probably saw on social media of all the airplanes parked at Augusta.

To the point where I have a friend who’s a pilot and he was saying that just finding their airplane took an hour because the FBO couldn’t find their airplane and how many airplanes were parked there. It is quite crazy.

I think that obviously, it’s a very high net worth event. I mean, you have a lot of people that are very high in business and in golf that go there.

But it’s really fulfilling for us when we get to take golfers who are bringing all of their buddies to the Masters.

I mean, those that booked well in advance can actually land at Augusta if you got a good slot or you’re landing at surrounding airports, which isn’t as nice, but it’s still awesome to fly private to the Masters, obviously.

Wow. When you say booking far in advance, how far out are people booking a slot at Augusta Airport?

Usually about two months in advance is pretty good, so that’s six to eight week period. I mean, there were some last-minute requests, and we were able to do some quick stuff like two weeks before.

But it really comes down to aircraft availability because there’s fine number, there’s a finite amount of aircraft that are certified for 135 charter, and obviously, the demand is really, really heavy.

As these airplanes get booked up, costs start to rise because all of these airplanes that are actually based in Georgia based on the East Coast are now booked for the Masters.

The aircraft that you’re using are maybe airplanes that are based in Florida and in Texas. You’re actually having to fly these airplanes into your specific trips making that cost a lot more expensive.

But the interesting thing is that sometimes, let’s say airplanes have slots to land at Augusta. Let’s say the airplane breaks and is unable to get in.

If we’re finding a replacement airplane, we’re actually transferring that landing slot to the other operating partner that we’re using.

4:36

Parking Chaos

So you literally have that’s essentially that landing time and parking slot. Normally, that’s pretty common for international flights where you need customs, times and different slots. You have to leave it a certain period.

Domestically, it’s not really a problem, but when these airports get so busy, you have a very simple slot of, hey, you need to land between 111 and 120, and if not, then you can’t land here because you missed that slot, and I need to land somewhere

else. So it’s really important, and we’re getting people to their airplanes 35, 45 minutes, an hour before their trip, which some people are like, hey, flying private, I want to just show up and go, and it’s like, well, you can, but any delay or

anything like that, that is out of our control, crazy weather, ATC delays or something like that, and boom, now you can miss your slot. anything like that, that is out of our control, crazy weather, ATC delays or something like that, and boom, now

5:14

Ways To Fly Private

you can miss your slot. Instead of landing at Augusta, now we’re landing somewhere an hour or two hours away, you’re having to drive.

Wow.

During the Super Bowl, San Francisco Airport got so busy that you could land at San Francisco, but you couldn’t park.

Airplanes were landing at SFO, dropping people off, and then flying to Livermore, flying to Moderator Park, so the customer is paying an additional $6,000, $7,000, $8,000 for that airplane just to drop off and then fly somewhere else and park.

It was quite insane. If you see on social media, a lot of times people are posting videos of, hey, this person’s doing this three-minute flight. They’re obviously not chartering a private jet for a three-minute flight.

That airplane is just flying somewhere else to park. So it’s quite fresh around these very, very major events.

Yeah. So going back to you, you mentioned something about a 135 charter. What is that?

Yeah.

So I guess there’s three main ways to fly private. The first is if you and I would have these on a global 6,000 behind me. To buy these used, it’s about $3 million.

So if we own that airplane, we buy that airplane, we hire our own pilots that operates under part 91 regulations, which is, I don’t want to say the least restrictive, but essentially it’s your airplane, it’s your flight crew.

So there’s not requirements on crew duty hours and things like that. A vast majority of people that buy these private jets don’t want to pay the fixed ownership cost of it.

So if we bought this airplane and if we parked it at Augusta Airport and never flew it, it would still cost us about a million dollars a year just to own because we’re paying insurance on the airplane, parking, pilot salaries, flight attendant

salaries. So it can add up quite quickly. So some customers that are ultra high net worth, buy the airplanes, pay all those fees themselves. But a vast majority of people don’t want to pay those ownership fees.

So they actually lend their airplane to a 135 operator. Essentially, they are a private jet airline.

So they’re certified by the FAA, they hire their own pilots, they sometimes have their own maintenance facilities, and they operate these airplanes for hire to offset those cost of ownership. So those are the airplanes that we use.

Since we’re a charter brokerage, we built our own software that allows us to track these airplanes and we built this AI model to optimize it so we can get better pricing and quote faster than a lot of our competitors.

But we’re trying to make flying private more efficient, more cost effective, and just more awesome across the board. So we work with these 135 operators because their job is to keep the airplane flying to offset that cost of ownership.

But it is a catch 22 because the more you charter out your airplane, all right, you’re offsetting your cost of ownership.

But then the more hours and time on the engines, the more people you have on board, the more opportunities you have for red wine to spill on the carpets, and now you have to clean your airplane. So that’s how it works.

So yeah, these 135 operators are the ones that are actually operating airplanes, and those are our great operating partners that we built into our software that we utilize.

Wow. You had said there’s three ways to fly private, right? So you own the plane, or you do this, and what’s the first?

You can charter the way that I just mentioned, like some companies like Amalfi Jets, buy a jet card or on a man charter, or you could buy fractal ownership, which is you and I going have these on that airplane and we split everything up into

fractions. fractions.

8:30

Augusta Volume Crunch

Sometimes you get three or four people into an airplane, but the hard part with fractal ownership is, what if we both want to use the airplane during Christmas time or during a big holiday?

You’re essentially saying, hey, kind of play rock, give us a who gets to use the airplane.

Fractal ownership is great because there are some great tax advantages of bonus depreciation on the airplane, but realistically, the availability is a big problem when it comes to that.

There’s other companies that sell fractal ownership through part 91K. While we have a fraction on this airplane, you can actually utilize their entire fleet.

That’s pretty good, but if you look at the economics, like the physical amount of money spent, you’ll physically buy more hours and you’ll fly more via a jet card or on-demand charter.

Then you would have fractal ownership because then you’re paying anywhere from $50,000 to a couple hundred thousand dollars a month just in monthly management fees to pay those ownership fees. A better plan.

Yeah. Wow. Fascinating.

Going back to all wanting to use it at the same date and time, Augusta, as you mentioned, this is not a market or an airport that’s used to this level of volume with the exceptional masters weekend every year.

And you said something earlier about looking for your plane for an hour. It just really illustrates that point.

There is so many planes parked.

I mean, it’s funny, I went to school at Embryddle in Daytona Beach, and we have kind of intersecting runways there at Daytona, and they actually close one of the runways just to park airplanes on during the Daytona 500.

9:56

Pilot Origin Story

So they’re literally parking airplanes to shut down the runway just to park people.

On Augusta, they’re shutting down taxiways, and those airplanes are so close together that, again, my friend sent me a video, and he said, we’ve been in this golf cart for 40 minutes trying to find our airplane.

He was like, the owner is going to be here in 20 minutes. He’s like, this is such a random experience, and it was really, really funny to see that. But it shows how many people are there for flying private.

I think that, again, when you think of golf, when you think about these events, a lot of people use it obviously because they are big golf fans, but also the business connections aspect of them.

The people that are at the masters that are in these hospitalities are owners of large companies, venture capital, private equity. So people also use these as this great mixing pot to connect and network and meet other people.

Kind of like go like domestic billionaires calendar per se, like you have same parts for New Year’s, but Masters here in the States is a very, very big one.

Yeah.

Well, it’s funny you mentioned, Embry Riddle, this is going to be a complete tangent, but I’m interested in talking about your experience as a pilot because I started my career working in PR in the fashion industry, and I had what I like to refer to

as a quarter-life crisis, where I realized I didn’t want to work in the fashion industry, and I wanted to work in travel, and I thought the solution to that was to become a pilot for myself. I had seen that there was this cadet pilot program that BA

was having, British Airways, you needed to have the right to live and work in the UK, so that sent me down a separate rabbit hole of getting my Irish citizenship, which I did by the time I got that. The cadet pilot program wasn’t open anymore, but

essentially, it’s very expensive to become a pilot with something that I had learned. Then my other backdoor idea was to actually get a job at Embry Riddle in PR, so that I could take classes for free or so I thought to become a pilot.

I actually did end up going down to Daytona getting offered that job, but I just saw a lot of back-end things that meant I could only take a certain amount of credits per year, it would have taken me a really long time to do it.

So I decided to not go down that route, but I have taken a couple of discovery flights myself, and I’m just in awe of planes and pilots.

So tell me a little bit about you, like how did you become a pilot, how did you start this company, and tell us about Amalfi Jets?

Yeah, I mean, so I have a very interesting and I feel like very typical aviation geek story. Ever since I was a kid, obviously, I loved airplanes.

As a kid, my parents like to travel, so every summer we’re on an airplane somewhere, it was content on airlines we used to fly the most, and pilot walked down the aisle and gave me like those little pilot wings I actually still have in my house.

Ever since I was a kid, like my parents, I was 13 years old. I’m in my first flight lesson at Channel Islands Aviation in Kimra Airport. I took the flight lesson 9-1-8, but you can’t go, and it was the coolest experience ever.

Because I was 13 years old, sitting in the cabin and seeing flying this airplane, I’m like, wow, 13-year-olds can fly airplanes now. Obviously, there was a chugger next to me, and I fell in love with it.

And I took a lesson once a year for the next couple of years until I turned 16 and started taking it more frequently.

And I got my pilot’s license when I was 17 at Van Nuys Airport, which is the number one busiest general aviation airport in the world. Soloed at 16, which is a really, really awesome experience to fly an airplane for the very first time.

My dad was there in the observation deck, standing on the top of our car with a camera, and I had that photo framed in this office of literally my first flight. So Van Nuys Airport, being surrounded by that was such a great experience.

I always knew as a kid, I wanted to go to Ember Riddle, like when you hear aviation, like Ember Real kind of stands out as the number one aviation school. So I always wanted to go there. My goal was to go be an airline pilot.

I wanted to do that. I also explored the whole charter role, the flying for one of our competitors and being a private jet pilot traveling around the world.

13:41

Founding Amalfi Jets

So I was lucky to get accepted to Ember Riddle, and I went there freshman year, and I was taking training, I got my instrument rating, I started working on commercial certificate when COVID happened.

Suddenly, all of my friends that were seniors that were graduating that had all these class dates with the airlines were losing their class dates.

The airlines were saying, hey, we’re not hiring pilots right now, COVID is insane, and most of these guys were driving for DoorDash.

I was looking at the amount of student loans that I was going to rack up, finishing my commercial pilot certificate and everything else, and I was like, well, this doesn’t make sense.

So I remember opening up my app, FlightRadar24, and looking at the map of all the airplanes that were flying. This was during COVID, so there was really not that many commercial airlines flying.

I noticed there was a lot of private jets, and I was like, gosh, I feel like playing privates probably do really, really well right now because there’s so many people that don’t want to wear a mask, that want that kind of safety of being in their own

airplane. So I researched, all right, well, what is the private jet world like? Maybe they’re hiring pilots, and I looked and some of them still weren’t hiring pilots, and I was like, all right, well, what else is there?

Who’s actually selling these trips?

That’s where I learned about the whole private jet charter brokerage, that kind of business model of essentially kind of being like a insurance mortgage broker and actually selling these charter flights and charter products across the board.

But again, I was what, 18 years old, I don’t really know very much.

Fast forward to the beginning of sophomore year, so research is I was 19 years old, and I was back on campus and I was just starting my commercial certificate when I researched the private jet charter brokerage world.

So I was like, you know what, I want to learn as much as I can. So I created a fake rich person email, James Middleton the third. I thought all rich people had the third or the fourth in their name.

I reached out to as many of these companies as I could and said, hi, my name is James Middleton, super rich, need to charter 10 flights, here are the different routes, please tell me about it.

Which shocked me is that being a pilot, I know airplanes, I know what airplanes can fly, what they can’t, and these quotes that I was getting from these companies, I was like, this is wrong.

Like one company said that a Phenom 300 can fly non-stop with 12 people from LA to New York, for contacts that airplane can see up to eight and maybe get to Chicago. Like it really can’t do coast to coast non-stop.

And I was like, huh, that’s interesting. I was like, I know that, but some executive assistant that’s booking this for their boss may not know that. And I was like, well, let’s go.

And then I was learning about the public FAA database of all the legally certified 135 airplanes. I got another appellate and it was really, really cheap. It was like 10 tech.

And I was like, you know, I’m like doing the math on how much the Gulfstream G4 birds per hour. And I’m like, Jeff you alone is like 20k. I was like, how is this person selling this for $10,000?

I Googled the tail number. This tail number is not on a 135 certificate. This tail number belonged to like a cargo plane that was scrapped 10 years ago.

And I was like, who’s airplane is this? And that’s when I was like, wow, there was like a real gap in this market of just like a clear standard of how this should work and safety and being transparent with the customers.

So I started Amalfi and I was like, you know what, I’m going to start this company. The original name for Amalfi Jets was Jones Jets International, which was probably the worst name ever. So I’m very glad that we did not keep that name.

You didn’t want to keep James Middleton the Third’s private jet?

No, that would have been cool too.

But I just don’t think it flows well off the tongue.

No, Amalfi has a nicer ring to it.

So I reached out to one of my old friends from high school, Calvin. He was a big finance guy, and he had to help always slow. So he was like that smart legal finance aspect.

And I was like, hey, I had this idea for a company. And I started it first, like it was Jones Jets. And I was like, I didn’t do anything with it.

And I was like, I really think that there’s an opportunity. So I remember meeting him at the Starbucks right by our old high school. And I explained the entire industry and everything to him.

And I was like, here’s this gap. And he was like, this is amazing. He said, we have to do this.

And I was like, okay, but we need to change the name. So we named it Amalfi Jets, not after the Amalfi Coast. A lot of people think that.

He was actually named after Amalfi Drive, where he grew up in the Palisades in California. So he named it after his street.

And it was funny because I was always afraid that people were going to think we were an Italian company, but the amount of people that spell Amalfi wrong and emails don’t get delivered to us is pretty insane.

17:47

Hustle

So I started Amalfi. This was in 2020, May of 2020. And we did it together and I was like, hey, we’re going to do this.

We made a website, made an email. I was like, boom, we’re Amalfi Jets now. I was like, now we need customers.

So we would meet at that Starbucks every day when I was back from school. And we would not leave until each of us sent 2,500 emails. To who?

I don’t know. I don’t really know any rich people. So what did I do?

I was like, well, I think attorneys are rich, right? So I Googled Los Angeles attorneys. And I swear I’ve pretty much emailed every single attorney in the entire state of California.

And just said, hi, we’re Amalfi Jets. If you need a charter private jet, please reach out to us. We’d love to be of service.

Thank you so much. Because my thing was, is I was like, if I sent 2,500 emails a day for like six months, I think it’d be statistically impossible that I wouldn’t sell one or two things, right?

And six months later, someone responded and said, hi, you need an airplane. And I was like, thank you so much. Provided that flight, it was a big sale, it was like $80,000.

Wait, but how did you provide that flight?

Because that’s a big thing from like, yes, you have a client to like, now you’re like, I need to sell an airplane.

Correct. That is a very good point. So there’s a couple of publicly available databases of these different 135 operators.

So essentially, this client reached out, said, hey, I need a jet. It was from San Francisco to Cabo and back. And I was like, great.

So I emailed all of these companies and I said, hey, who has an airplane that’s available on these dates for this trip? San Francisco to Cabo, right? Pulled all of these different quotes.

And it’s funny, like the average cost back then, this was during a period where FET was in a play code world, Jeffy was a lot less. So I think that round trip price was like maybe 30,000. For context now, that’s about 40 or 50.

Wow.

And I remember looking at it and I was like, you know what?

If this guy is reaching out to other companies, because this guy’s an experienced private jet flyer, this was our first sale. I was like, we need to be aggressive. So I think this trip cost us 30,000.

I think we sold it for 24,500. And I was like, boom, we’re going to lose money because no one can lose money. So Amalfi’s price is cheaper.

So I guess he saw our price and was like, wow, Kolin, this is a really, really great deal or whatever. Sorry, it was 34,500, not 24. And he booked it with us and I was like, great, this is amazing.

And again, we’re a new company. We don’t have any money in the bank. So we needed to pay the operator, I think, because the operator cost is 35,000, we’re losing 500 dollars.

And I was like, all right, we’re going to wait. But I was like, you know what? We need money in the bank.

So I had a American Express that we applied for.

20:09

TikTok Growth Engine

So we put this on a credit card. So we’re literally two 19-year-olds shoving all this on a credit card. And I was like, that allows us 30 days to grow and kind of get some customers.

Because I was like, hey, Jeff Bezos, when he went with Amazon, was really customer focused and he wanted to lose money in the beginning. I said, we’re just going to do the same thing. So the first sale, I was like, we did it.

This is amazing. We lost $500. But I was like, great.

Now we have a customer. And then I remember after the flight, they got everything while I reached out to him and I was like, hey, that was amazing. Please let me know when you have your next trip.

And he’s like, I have two other trips. And I was like, there we go. Here we go.

We’re in business now. And then he’s like, hey, I want to connect you to a friend of mine who had a bad experience with another company. I was like, oh, this is great.

So it slowly kind of spiderweb from that into building up a more stable company. It was just the two of us for the first two years. And then we started to add people.

And it was funny because that was in 2020. So in 2022, that year, I think we did 2.8 million in revenue, which equated to maybe like 150 turn of lights. The next year, we did 3.5.

And then we started posting on TikTok at the end of that year. And it’s funny, like TikTok, I was very against because there’s a lot of companies in the space.

And I was like, when I thought of private jets, I wanted it to be like, I feel like everyone has this view of like the private jets being you have champagne, the red carpet, the caviar. And it just wasn’t that.

So when I started the company, I was like, how can we create this really unparalleled experience, but also like be very transparent about how this industry works, how safety works.

So every time you book with us, we’d have like, here are 10 questions you should ask any company before you book. Here’s all the different safety. And we wanted to be really like pretentiously like Rick’s Carlton branded.

But looking at the industry, look at these companies have grown for 20, 30 years. I was like, we’re not going to outbrand these companies that been doing this for 20 years. But we can maybe be more ridiculous than that.

So we posted our first TikTok. And our first TikTok was me telling a story about a experience that we had where a client was chartering two airplanes, one for his mistress, one for his wife. And that video got a million views.

And it was just fully like sat higher, just kind of a funny, crazy, provocative video. And I was like, you know what? Our competitors would never post this.

Why don’t we lead into that?

Right.

And I was against it because I was like, this is unprofessional. Clients are going to see this, look at our videos and think this is unprofessional. They’re too young.

I’m never flying with Amalfi. However, that one video had a million views, which delivered 100,000 people to our website, led to in a week about 3,000 phone calls and about 10,000 flight requests.

And I like gasped and I was like, oh my gosh, this is it. And I was like, that costs us nothing to do that video.

This amount of engagement, we would need to do a spend probably about a million dollars on ads or, you know, print advertiser or really anything. And I was like, this is it. We’re going to be the freaking loudest person on social media.

And I’m telling people on TikTok or social media before us. And I was like, you know what? Better known beats best.

I would love to be able to combine both, but if we are the most known private aviation company, I mean, we’ll bury everybody because we’ll be so socially relevant. So I started posting TikToks.

And I really like Alex Formozzi, a really good kind of business guru. And one of his things is post so much content that it would be unreasonable that you would be successful. And I was like, none of our competitors are on social media.

I was like, we’re going to post three times a day on the Amalfi account, and we’re going to do that every day. And I was like, because if our competitors post once a week, in one Amalfi month, we will be three months ahead of our competitors.

And I was like, in that consistency, we can win. So, as forward to where we are now, and we have 32 employees, this year we’ll do $120 million revenue.

And we post seven times a day across the Amalfi account, our Amalfi Reserve account, which is our social membership on the Amalfi app, and then my personal Kolin account. And each of them have different goals for Amalfi.

It’s how can we maintain and be provocative, share and spread the word of the industry. I mean, right now, we’re the most followed private aviation company in the world.

Like Gulf Street, who makes jets and is probably one of the greatest airplane manufacturers. We have four times as many followers as them. And I think at that point, I was like, wow, like there’s real potential here.

Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. Obviously, a lot of our competitors, it’s funny, I like to see on LinkedIn, a lot of our competitors are like Amalfi is so unprofessional. They’re just a fake company.

They make silly TikToks all day. But we kind of let our results speak for themselves. But I also think at the end of the day, like, if you’re going to do something, you’re going to want to be passionate about it and you’re going to want to go all in.

And I think our mission has changed over time from how can we build a business to how can we push the industry forward and be socially relevant. Share the world, because you’ve never ever been able to see the inner workings of a private jet company.

Like you have blow deck for the yachting world. You have these different TV shows for the real estate, but there’s never been something around the private jet space. I was like, how can that?

Albeit it’s very provocative and obviously very silly at times, but like that is something that’s never been done before. So it’s like now we have this responsibility both to ourselves, but to the industry to tell the right story.

And that personal account, I mean, I’m 25, six years in, I was like, I’ve always wanted to inspire people in the fact that if you want to build a business, there’s nothing stopping you. So many people say no before it actually begins.

And I think social media has completely leveled the playing field and it been a complete alternative to traditional marketing. I mean, in the past, you would need a lot of capital to start a company. Amalfi is no investors.

We’ve been bootstrapped to this entire point. We’ve no debt, no crazy loans or anything. And our biggest thing there is social media has allowed us to reach literally billions.

Like every 90 days, you get about a billion impressions cross out. And I was like, if you think about the actual dollar amount that that would buy, I was like, we would need millions more dollars to be able to commit to that.

And I think one thing that I talked to Comet about a lot is I was like, we still go back into this frugality mentality. And I think that’s really important when you’re building business to understand the value of the dollar.

So even in our office, we have small fights of if we order too many snacks for the office, we couldn’t go to Costco, we didn’t need to do this individually. We could save money there.

I think if you look at that on every aspect of your business, like with marketing, I was like, why would I spend $1,000 on an ad, where if it doesn’t work, now we’re wasting $1,000.

Or if we get spent $1,000 in videos, that videos will create direct views. We make money through ad revenue engagement. And then if we have clear CTAs, we can gain people.

So we’ve been able to track now literally views leads to revenue, because we can track so much revenue and new customers directly from the videos. That’s the big math problem. And I think we’re doing something that’s never been done.

But I think that mission has been really, really inspiring for myself, for the team. And it’s been a lot of fun and allow me to meet a lot of really cool people. Like you interact right now.

I mean, honestly, this is something I’ve been talking about so much lately.

I used to be very much in the camp of like, I hate social media. I don’t want to do social media, especially by training. I’m a publicist.

I’m someone who’s used to being in the background. But you’re right. When you start to see the power that you can get from social media for whatever it is you’re building or trying to build, it’s undeniable.

I had someone say to me, if someone told you, you could get a million views on whatever it is that you want to talk about for free from the comfort of your own iPhone.

I mean, this is an extreme opportunity that we have in front of us, and your business is proof of that.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s funny. I think it was a stat that most people, like 60 or 70%, find out where they’re going to dinner.

You’re not Googling anymore. You’re going on TikTok. I’m guilty of this.

Anytime I need to find somewhere cool, I’m going on TikTok. I’m like, all right, what’s the buy? And I think if you look at people’s buying personas over time, people are doing that both for hotels and now into that travel world.

So if you Google private jets on TikTok or on Instagram, I mean, we are so loud and we post so much content that we’re owning that hashtag, to the point where some of our competitors that are now posting on TikTok are using hashtag Amalfi Jets buried

in their thing to try to come up and rank on things. Wow. Not my favorite thing, but at the end of the day, I think once you start something like that, it’s important to keep on it.

And I think my biggest thing, both on the Kolin account and the Amalfi account, is social media for any industry, regardless of what you’re in, has leveled the playing field and I think has given so many people opportunities to be successful.

28:10

Brand And Operation

And I think I fully underestimated. I was like, this is unprofessional. I was afraid.

It’s funny that we have a couple of customers that are ultra conservative, ultra high network, very big customers for us.

And I was always afraid that one of them would see these videos and send me a text and be like, Kolin, this unprofessional will fly with you. So one of the guys that was very, very afraid of this sent me a text and he said, hey, is this you?

And I was like, oh, now here it comes. It was a video of like one of our TikToks. And I was like, yeah.

And he’s like, this is hilarious. I love it. It’s like you’re doing a great job.

And I was like, I sent it to the team and I was like, see, there we go. I was like, maybe I was wrong. Maybe people like it.

And I was like, it’s entertaining. Like I don’t ever want to, like we try to not make fun of anyone in our content or just to show it. But it’s like, I think to show these situations, show what we encounter on a daily basis is so important.

But I will say like the social media videos show 2, 3, 4 percent of the business, because a majority of the situations are someone booking a trip to the masters. I’m like, hey, John, price is going to be 80,000. Here’s it is.

And then they’re going to say, great. Sign a contract, wired $80,000, thanks. Have a good day.

Right.

That video doesn’t really do as well in social media because it’s not as crazy and fun, but that’s a vast majority of our day of very simple, easy, quick conversations.

But I think when you look at the crazy stuff, it’s funny because we’ve had so many situations that one of our clients punch piled. Flight ops runs in my office, they’re like, call me punch piled, what do we do? And I was like, I don’t know.

They didn’t teach us at business school. I don’t really know how to handle this situation. Let’s read this out together.

Or, hey Kolin, one of our clients had a accident on board the airplane and it’s an $80,000 cleaning fee to re-carpet this part of the Gulf Strait. What do you want to do? I don’t know.

Let me call the client and let’s figure this out ourselves. So those are funny because every single day is entirely different especially in this industry.

Because again, within our Amalfi network and the software that we built, there’s about 3,500 airplanes that we utilize across 170 countries.

So every single day, there’s multiple flights all around the world on different time zones, with different customs slots and things like that, like during the Middle East situation.

That was interesting because only certain airports were accepting private jets, and then some airplanes were en route to land when then the airports launched a new NOTAM preventing private jets, so then airplanes are circling.

So it was like every single person on our team was becoming an expert in foreign relations and international custom law as we were researching the different places that airplanes can land in.

There’s not a lot of other industries that I think are so different every single day.

I was in Arts during New Year’s, and we were on the last flight back because when the airspace was shut down, the airspace was shut down to American registered airplanes, not Canadian, not German, not Maltese.

A lot of European airplanes that were there were still able to get out.

So the people that I met at dinner needed to get out, and we got so many customers from that of getting people out because we knew certain things ahead of some other competitors, and our software was to track the airplanes and see what was happening.

So that’s been really interesting too, of just every single day is so different, but I think it’s so fulfilling to be able to get people back for these unmissable moments in their lives, which is great.

And what you’re talking about too is really the essence of brand building, right? Like there were a ton of other private aviation companies out there, you weren’t just trying to be a copy paste of everybody else.

So in a way, if your TikTok videos alienate some of your guests, maybe they’re just not the right guess for you going forward.

31:39

Beyond Aviation Influencers

Maybe they can go for one of the staid competitors who have been around for a while.

And what’s interesting too, what you’re talking about with TikTok, I’d love your perspective on it because we are slightly different ages where Instagram is much more my search algorithm of choice, if you will, right?

And I would assume that TikTok is a slightly younger demographic who you would think is not a private aviation customer, but your numbers are proving that it is.

32:05

Platform Strategy and Tracking

So my guess is, are those the assistants of the high net worth individuals who are the ones booking the charters? Or why do you think it is that that really equates to such powerful business for you?

I think that’s a really, really great question. And I think the way that we voted is like we reach different customers where they are. For example, we track like a different qualification rate and like a different ICP per platform.

So TikTok reaches the kids. Most of the time, it’s the younger generation.

So there’s a lot of influencers that we collaborate with that have absolutely nothing to do with aviation, like food influencers, socially relevant, random, like micro-influencers, stuff like that.

Because if we want to be the most well-known private aviation company in the world, but we only engage with aviation influencers, all I’m doing is getting within the aviation community.

So like there’s a lot of silly things that we film that are coming out of me doing completely random that have nothing to do with aviation things, like IE Distrathlon, to get this new audience. But TikTok reaches the kids.

Instagram is a very interesting blend of both, where you have some direct end users, and some kids, and some younger audience, and the assistants.

Facebook is one of the highest quality, because that’s your older generation boomers that are directly watching it, and YouTube, my favorite, because YouTube, we get a lot of people and the general consensus is they’re like, I don’t like social

media, I’m not on social media. Those YouTube shorts are kind of social media now, because they’re almost in the same format as everything else, so they are missed there.

We track a different type of customer that comes per platform, but TikTok, I give 2.9 million followers on TikTok. The views on TikTok outperform the views on Instagram, YouTube and everything else, so that reaches more people.

Instagram is a really good blend of both.

Facebook matches Instagram and YouTube is very independent, which is crazy because back when I was in high school, you would look up to your YouTube vloggers and stuff like that, and having 50 or 100,000 subscribers was crazy.

33:57

Algorithm Hacks

We had 174,000 subscribers on YouTube, which years ago, that was Casey Neistat level, I feel, full crazy stuff, but it’s interesting, and I think what we like to see is, when I go back to TikTok, we get a lot of calls every day and we track

everything, so every single phone call that someone reaches out to us is recorded and we have analyzed this to ensure that all my teams are providing the best self-help service, because we still get a lot of people that call in and say, hey, I want

to speak with Kolin. I handle maybe five customers, maybe five specific customers, the rest is handled by our great team. With that, we get a lot of people that call in and say, hey, I’ve never heard of your company, but my daughter is obsessed with

you guys on TikTok. XYZ Jets for the past 10 years, I’d love to give you a try. They fly with us and they’re like, oh, wow, you guys are a great service. This is fantastic.

I didn’t even know you guys existed. Let me start using you guys more. The kids tell the parents.

It’s like a lot of our social media, there’s different clothing brands that I think reach a younger audience. I’m wearing Nike shoes that are part of the shoe community thing.

I’m not really into that, but we posted this video, all the comments are talking about the shoe, which now is going to change the algorithm.

We kind of coined this term, we call it social seeding, where I will do certain things in videos that will change the algorithm so we can reach certain people. For example, I am absolutely horrible at golf, just terrible.

However, a good majority of our customers golf. So we posted a video of me golfing, we flew to Scottsdale, and it was me getting a golf lesson, and the caption was like, hey, rate my swing. Who’s going to rate my swing and give me feedback?

Golfers. So have a video that is all golfers, what is that going to do to the algorithm? It’s going to show to golfers, golfers fly private.

So we can actually do high net worth, socially relevant things that change the algorithm, actually change the quality of customers that we get. Which is great, but yeah, you have to hang out and do a lot of fun stuff.

Like this, it’s like a really fancy $2,000 bottle of wine from Sasakaya in 1976, I don’t know if it’s drinkable yet. But the people that know what that will be and know what that is, that will put us on a different audience.

So like there’s some wine, it was coming out. I’m in a car, so we’ll go to Ferrari car meets and I’ll talk about Ferraris. And it’s funny because we posted a video about a Ferrari and this car was a twin-turbo like charged Ferrari 488.

I called it naturally aspirated on purpose. I knew it wasn’t naturally aspirated. Who is going to correct me?

The Ferrari enthusiast and the Ferrari enthusiast likely thought private. So we’ve built it down to this certain thing where we can kind of tailor a certain content to that.

And it’s really fun because I think every single day we’re doing something different, which I know is hard for some people on my team who are out there in the bullpen, taking all these calls, dealing with this, and they see Kolin riding around the

office on the hoverboard in a fancy bottle of wine. They’re like, Kolin, how does this make us money? And I’m like, data, all right? So it’s fun for me, like every day is completely different.

But yeah, I mean, the platform is very, very important. I think a lot of people, and I hear this a lot of business owners, they do a lot of private consulting on the sides. And a lot of business owners are like, oh, well, my audience is on TikTok.

And I’m like, I understand that. But if you are posting the same videos across everything, it takes you an extra two minutes. And I was like, why would you shut down this platform and just put a full amount of customers?

Yes.

TikTok and these social media platforms also really help your SEO.

So when I Google Amalfi Jets or Private Jets, you’re going to rank really, really well. So I think that’s a big thing too that we try to show. I think a lot of people look at us and be like, well, Kolin is the TikTok guy.

But everything we do is actually very calculated. We have this full funnel of how things flow within our system. And I think it’s really important to understand what your goals are.

We never just post a video. Everything is very intentional. We’re very careful about it.

What do I want to happen? What is the perfect situation from this video? The golf video.

Maybe I’ll get some really good tips, so I can be a lot better of a golfer. And maybe it will reach different golf people that will start to fly private bus.

Maybe put us on TikTok of people that are about to book a private jet to the Masters, and then now book a trip with us to the Masters. So we see that, but there’s always fun different things that we’re trying to do to remain socially relevant.

And I think a lot of people get it wrong, especially on LinkedIn, like LinkedIn in our industry, and I’m sure for a lot of other industries, is I see so many of our competitors who compete with each other every day.

Someone will leave one company, go work in another company, and all of these people are like, oh my God, congratulations. And I’m like, you guys are competitors. And why everyone in this industry is talking about industry stuff.

I was like, but you’re staying in these circles. So if I only did airplane videos and only talked about jets, I’m never going to branch out from this community.

So if I can be in things that make me uncomfortable, that are completely new that I’ve never heard of, or socially relevant TikTok dances and influencers in different events, we are reaching more people because brand equity is the biggest thing that

we’re trying to build. And the amount of times that I get stopped and people point at me and they’re like, hey, you’re the private jet guy. And I was like, yes, I am the private jet guy. There’s no other private jet people, just me.

That’s what we’re trying to build.

And you’re right, because your clients don’t actually care about the nuts and bolts of the plane. They care about getting where they want to go in the most efficient way possible when they want to be there.

So you’re right, when you’re just talking within that space, sure, it’s important to have a name within your area, but you could argue it’s more important to be known to your clients.

And I liked what you were talking about with working with influencers from outside of aviation.

39:12

Hiring Outside the Industry

When I was transitioning from the fashion industry to travel, I had interviewed with a lot of hotel companies who had been around for a really long time, and they could not understand how a publicist from the fashion industry could be a publicist in

the travel industry. And that is like saying that people are only deciding travel decisions when they’re reading travel magazines. It’s just not how we have ever been as humans.

And going back to that point, what I’m also hearing from you is you really focus on your own authenticity. When you made that golf video, you didn’t posture and pretend to be this perfect golfer.

You showed yourself vulnerably taking a lesson and asked people, how’s my swing, which you know is going to get you criticism because social media can be a tough place.

But it was right. I actually picked up some really, really good tips from that video. But no, I really like what you said and that’s funny.

So we’re hiring for three different positions right now. We’re hiring for a lot of new salespeople and some of the marketing side. And I actually don’t like to hire people from my industry.

So like we get a lot of people that reach out and they’re like, hey, Kolin, I worked at XYZJets for X amount of time. And I’m like, hey, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

But for right now, we’re not looking for that. Because if I want to take on my competitors, if I just hire all of my competitors, I’m just building the same company.

Exactly.

I really like people with completely different experiences. Someone on our marketing team came from a fashion industry. And the way that she shot content was more cinematic.

A lot of the YouTube videos are there. And I actually really like that because I was like, that’s different. You see that with, she was shooting jewelry and these different clothing shoots and videos.

I was like, I like that because if it was just jet videos, I was going to be different.

Right.

40:50

Authenticity

I think that’s where a lot of people are wrong.

And it’s funny, there’s this one quote that I actually have also framed in my office. I have all these things that have annoyed me that are framed in my office that I can go see it.

And we posted this campaign and it was, essentially we declared war on dinosaurs because I’ve decided that a lot of our competitors are dinosaurs. And we posted one of our videos on YouTube or on LinkedIn.

And the CEO of one of my competitors commented, she actually went to Emberiddle too. And she commented and said, this is so unprofessional. This is not the way the industry has always been done.

And I was like, exactly. That is the whole goal. Why would we do everything the same way it was?

We have to do it differently. And it’s funny, I’m speaking at a couple of conventions here in May, and I’m sitting on panels about building a brand with all my competitors.

And my goal here is I don’t want to give everyone advice on how to do what we did, but also how can you be authentic? People buy from people. And I think that connection is really, really important.

I mean, it’s the same reason that people watch TV shows and you watch, like, Hawaii Five-O is one of my favorite TV shows as a kid. So I would literally see Steve McGarrett and I’d be like, oh my God, if I met this guy in person, we’d be besties.

I know him. And you look at social media, people become very connected to people. So it’s like by us showing the different people that you work with.

Our clients are like, hey, I’ve seen Daniel in the videos. Daniel’s handling my trip. This is awesome.

Hey, I’ve seen Will in the videos. Will’s my sales guy. This is so cool.

So it’s like build up that authenticity and just be authentic. We’re not trying to show, like, our content is not crazily edited where I’m like, hey, we’re the best, we’re billionaires, we’re flying on private jets. No, it’s authentic.

Here’s what it’s like to build a company. Here are all the things that I never thought about that we experience every day and here’s how we’ve handled it.

Here’s how we had a situation where this was last week and our client sent us this and said, I hope I end up on TikTok because this was hilarious.

His client brought eight of his friends and they were all over, I think, 250, 300 pounds and they had to upgrade the airplane because they were exceeding the max takeoff weight.

Otto was the funniest thing ever and it was really cool because he was like our sales girl. She was like, how do we do this? We need to put them on a bigger airplane.

How do we tell them? I was like, I mean, I don’t know. I was like, let’s call them and let’s figure this out.

We told them and he thought it was so funny. He was like, I don’t get it. He’s like, I don’t care.

It’s entirely fine.

I think what I’ve learned from that is a lot of times people say no for themselves and for other people, whereas if you ask a question and if you put yourself in the situations, 9.8 times out of 10, I mean, people are good, people are understanding,

so it’s like it always ends up in a really good spot. I think we’ve just been always trying to push the envelope to show that authenticity, to not be fake, to show what it’s like to be in our office, to show the fun drama we have, but then also to be

as literally and as humanely different as our competitors. We actually have every marketing meeting, we have certain actions that we leave with. The first question is, have any of our competitors done this?

If they’ve done it, then I want to do the complete opposite. I don’t want to do anything that any of my competitors have done. If they’ve sponsored this one event, then I’m not sponsoring that one event.

If they sponsored this golf tournament, great. We’re going to host our own golf tournament versus sponsoring this one, so we can have our own entirely branded Amalfi thing. If they’re doing this, we’re going to do that.

I think that is a lot of us to be different, but I think it’s also hard because at the end of the day, there’s a lot of these companies that we go against that I’ve admired ever since I was a kid.

It’s like to see these companies not like us is a little bit sad sometimes, but also at the end of the day, what did I expect? That everyone was going to be like, oh my God, you’re taking on the industry. We love you.

Thank you so much. No, at the end of the day, if you’re not getting heat and if you’re not getting pushback, that’s how you know you’re doing something worthwhile and you’re actually making change.

Nobody hates the person in the company that’s not doing anything.

44:26

Hospitality and Tech

People hate, they’re doing things.

It’s hard though to take it. I’ve been through that myself as well. You’re right.

You know that means you’re hitting a hot button topic, which is a good thing in terms of virality and getting your name out there.

I think going back to what you said earlier about building almost those relationships with yourself and people on your team.

If you think about books, they always say that people don’t read books for the plot, they read it to spend the time with people. You’re creating those authentic relationships.

That really leads me into thinking about hospitality because I imagine particularly at those price points, that has got to be a real focus for you guys.

Like you said earlier, hey, my daughter told me about this company, I’m going to try you, what’s going to make them say, I’ve tried you and now I’m going to continue to go with you and I’m going to tell my friends about you.

So how do you think about that for your clients?

I mean, we look at hospitality and like I’ve written on Amalfi into three different parts of our company. So we have the aviation side, which is the full customer service, the airplane part of JetSight.

We have our media, which is how we tell the story about what we do and how we can be authentic.

Our technology side is how can we bring both of these together into a seamless stream like streamlined way that’s more efficient, more data-driven and creates an entirely different experience.

We’re one of the only companies that actually has our own software development in-house. There’s a couple of pieces of software, and I’m sure it’s the same, especially within the podcast world of this platform right now.

But all of my competitors use one or two different softwares to run their business. So if you reach out to 10 of my competitors, you’re actually getting 10 different quotes that are the same software.

So it looks identical with just your logo in the corner. And I was like, ah, you know, I was like, Amalfi should be different. So everything that you see and touch and feel from Amalfi Jets is entirely different.

Our website is fully custom. Our entire quoting, flight ops, and catering booking system is entirely native to us, and we store stuff. So you fly with Amalfi one time, you put in your catering order.

If you fly again, we auto order the same catering order, we pre-fill it even if you don’t ask for it.

And I think on that hospitality side, when people look at that, it’s like, how can you have a consistent, high-quality and predictable experience every single time?

I think obviously within the world of aviation, if you think about airplanes, airplanes are pressurized metal tubes that have about 30,000 parts that all need to work perfectly at the exact same time every single time. Not always gonna happen.

No pressure.

So you go south and your airplane EOGs and get stuck somewhere and you need to find or replace an airplane. It’s, all right, how do we handle this?

Well, on the one hand, it’s like, it’s a not great situation to be in, but I think that communication and those procedures come through of like, hey, listen, I understand where you’re coming from.

This isn’t great, we don’t want to be here, you don’t want to be here. So, here’s how we’re going to make this right, and here’s how we want to set this up, so you know how we will ensure that this never happens again.

And I think that hospitality side goes there, we kind of call it the Chick-fil-A approach, where when even the minorest of things go wrong, we are just over the top friendly in figuring it out, to the point where airplane has a 10-minute delay.

We are so sorry, we’re going to cover the catering, I’m going to send you a car to your house, I just sent you a Amalfi Mercedry house, this could never happen again.

To the point where it’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, similar to Chick-fil-A, my orders are like Chick-fil-A, they apologize and give you a free order. Amazing, just excellent customer service.

How can we channel that into that consistent predictability experience? I think as the company scales and hire more people, it’s really important, how do we train people on that?

Because we have two people from our flight ups and they’ve come from other companies, and I’m like, listen, everything you’ve done with this company, I want you to just completely take out of your mind. I was like, we are entirely different.

I don’t want anybody defaulting on to, hey, this is what we used to do and I don’t want to do it that way. I want to give them that. But hospitality is a really big thing.

I think when it comes to pricing, I’m someone spending $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 on a private jet, you are going to expect the best.

I think it is important that you’re delivering that, but also that communication comes down with it, that when things don’t go right, it’s really easy to win when things go right, but when things go south, it’s really important how you handle it.

So clear SOPs, better tech, and just being over the top on top of these situations, when they go south, it really breeds good customer loyalty that we’ve noticed.

On the tech side, you mentioned earlier about AI, which of course everyone is talking about. How are you thinking about using AI now, and maybe five, 10 years in the future with your crystal ball of how that’s going to affect the industry?

Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. If you are not utilizing AI in your business, you will lose to somebody that is.

I was in a hospital in London, and three of our co-petitors, Rasput, AI, and all three of them laughed and said, AI will never replace good service. I look at that as that dinosaur approach. I think that AI is always your state.

Now, you’ll never see AI being a chat bot to speak to us, and you’ll never just going to have AI do everything. We use AI internally for one, just optimizing our current system.

I think tech can always get better, can always get faster and be built more around the customer. I think a lot of companies go wrong because the C-suite executives will set the systems.

Our entire flight ops system was built by our flight ops and customer success team, because I was like, I don’t want to build a system telling you how to do your job. I was like, you’re doing it. Build it around your actual workflow.

So we have AI in there to analyze everything, and our AI is telling us how often people fly so we can track seasonality. We’re tracking different pricing across the board.

We’ve been tracking different airplanes within our system so we can get more predictability prices. I mean, on the sales side, AI allows us to quote faster, be cheaper, and be more efficient than any of our competitors.

So if you reach out to Amalfi, you’re getting a quote hours before getting it from another company.

On the flight ops side, how can we analyze our customer flying patterns to actually make decisions, to the point where if we’re more going to teams like saying, hey, we want to launch something in Miami, but we look at our flight ops data and we’re

actually flying to Dallas and Austin more of the time, we should be doing something in Texas. Retract that there. Then I think just on the overall optimization, it’s allowed our tech team to develop faster.

It’s also allowed us just to really understand where we are now and essentially say, if this company keeps growing at this rate, what kind of tech will we need to build? It’s allowing us to predict on that.

We’re slowly bringing it in just to understand, I think, better data from what we have.

50:37

Triathlon Content Flywheel

A lot of companies fail because they just don’t keep track of their data. If they have the data, they just don’t look at it. I think the decision you make needs to be based off of data.

Even our TikTok videos, we built our own native thing there. That data shows that I perform better if I wear a black t-shirt. You’ll notice in most videos, I wear dark colors.

I rarely wear white. Because statistically, for some reason, I just maybe look skinnier or something if I wear black. I have no idea.

That’s awesome. It performs better if we film on my desk because people have that predictability of this is Kolin from Amalfi’s desk. But we’re bringing it slowly in and I think learning it.

I think a lot of companies try just to throw AI in there, but it’s like you need to do it slow. You need to also understand and be intentional with why you’re using this.

But we are not bringing out AI salespeople and chat things because what if something goes wrong and your airplane breaks and you want to speak to someone, you’re talking to an AI chatbot. That is not hospitality nor customer service.

Before we started recording, you mentioned to me that last weekend, not only was it Masters weekend, but you participated in a triathlon that you trained for in seven days. So give us the skinny on that.

Okay. Yes. So we were doing research, going back to social seating, and that triathlons and cycling is a very big, high net worth sport.

I wanted to do things. I was like, one, if we film content around that, that should change the algorithm, get us on a completely different audience. Again, we collab with different micro-influencers.

Now I can be within that whole triathlete community on social media. But the second is, I wanted to relate this to business. There’s really not a lot of people teaching you how to run a business.

You just need to figure it out. I think running a business is a very individualistic sport. As you set yourself, obviously as you build a team, you have your team to count on, but it’s really on you.

I really wanted to push myself and I feel like in business, I push myself to keep growing. But on a personal level, I was like, I feel like I’m not pushing myself physically.

I always was saying, and it’s funny, last year wrote down I wanted to compete and finish a triathlon. I never did. I researched one and there was a triathlon in July and I was like, but I’ll maybe train for a month, so I want to push myself.

So I researched it and I was like, what is the next triathlon? It was April 11th. This was on April 3rd to the 4th.

I was like, you know what, sign me up. They’re like, what? I’m going to do it.

I’m just going to do it and I’m just going to prove for myself because it forces me to do it. So in the past week, I’ve been swimming, but I trained terribly. This triathlon was in the pouring rain in a lake.

It was a 750, so a half-mile swim, a 12.1-mile bike ride, and then a 3.2-mile run, immediately after. I trained in a heated Equinox swimming pool, swimming back and forth.

So when I got in this lake, pouring rain with the waves with 150 people behind me, instant panic, just fully panic. Holding on to a buoy and I was like, oh, this is not great. And in that moment, it was crazy because I fully panic.

My heart rate was up, I was tracking on my whoop, and I like calmed down and I literally was like the one person on his back swimming, screaming out loud, don’t panic, stay calm for the entire swim. And it was super embarrassing.

But in that moment, I was like, that’s kind of like, and this is in the vlog that we’re coming out with, I was like, that’s like being a business owner.

There’s moments when things don’t go right and you freak out, but you need to learn how to control yourself and calm yourself down. So we’re relating this to what it’s like to run a business in a really fun way. And it was really hard and I finished.

Someone else from our team, our head of engineering did it, and he did it in an hour and 45 minutes. I did it in two hours and 45 minutes, so it took me a lot longer than he did.

You did it. Let’s just put the full stop after that, please.

I did it and it was fun and it taught me a lot, but I think relating this back to business, relating this back to our social media, that one 20-minute YouTube video is going to reach new audiences, put us on a different type of algorithm, and that

one video is going to get clipped down in about 40 or 50 short form videos that if you combine the views across everything is going to deliver 20 to 30 million views across the lifetime of this content, which is going to deliver at a minimum probably

Did you say crazy simple thing?

Yes.

The first and only person to call a triathlon simple.

It was simple.

I just had to do these three things and then I finished. It was not easy, not easy at all.

When will that video come out?

Probably two weeks. Our editing team works pretty quick, like our short form videos. So if I film 50 videos today, they’ll be edited and scheduled in 24 hours.

They’re fantastic. We have 12 people on an editing team. But the long form vlogs, we take a little bit longer we schedule them out.

So I think right now the vlogs that’s coming out this week is we were in London and we flew from London to Paris for a croissant, from the croissant from Emily in Paris. We flew right back.

So that’s a fun video that’s coming out I think today or tomorrow.

Okay. Well, once it’s out, we will be sure to link that in the show notes because I personally am very excited to take a look at that. I want to ask you the last three questions that I ask everyone.

The first is, what was the best hospitality experience that you have ever had?

Best hospitality experience? I will have to say Vegas Paddock for F1. I’ve never experienced F1 before.

I’ve never been in Paddock. It was crazy. I mean, it was very, you focused.

There’s a lot of opportunities to meet a lot of cool people. It was really seam-lined. Streamline is very well organized.

I think that left me with a lasting impression of when I think of F1, I go back to that really positive happy moment. Anytime I think about in the future, I’m like, I need to be in Paddock. I need to have that experience.

It was cool. I was in Paddock, and I walked around and I met eight people that we flew there with Amalfi. I got to meet some cool clients, which was great.

Very cool.

On the flip side of that, what was the worst hospitality experience you’ve ever had?

Worst experience? All right. Let’s see.

Probably a commercial airline experience. I remember this.

Coming back from school, Calvi and I had our first big business meeting, and when I was in Daytona, I used to fly back Spirit Airlines to make it there, and the flight was delayed for eight hours. I missed it. I was a college student.

We just started Amalfi. I had no money in my bank account, so there was an American Airlines flight that was leaving from my gate direct to LAX versus the stop, and it was 800 bucks and I couldn’t afford it. I was like, it’s right there.

Oh my gosh. I was stuck at that airport, slept on the ground, and it was terrible. I think the biggest thing that stood out is there was no communication, there was no coordination, there was no solution.

That’s why any time we have a problem with a flight, it’s, I understand where you’re coming from, we recognize it. Here’s the plan. Here’s how this will be fixed.

Here’s how I’m going to get you from where you are now to it being fixed. Here’s in the future, if you continue to fly with us, how I can ensure this will never happen again. Three works very well with hospitality.

Final question for you.

What does hospitality mean to you? Is there anyone, it could be a brand, a person that you feel like has truly mastered it?

I would say hospitality means for me is, I think, being effortless. I think when you show up to the hotel that you’re well taken care of, that everything’s handled for you.

57:39

Suite Summary

I think the predictability of, if this guest is coming here, they’re probably going to want food. The second I arrive, it’s like, hey, here’s how you get food. I think walking people through that kind of proactive thinking is really important.

I am going to say a lot of different hotels and properties, but I think the biggest, most consistent one I’ve seen is the Four Seasons. They are always fantastic.

We were in San Francisco for Fleet Week with my dog, Napoleon, our little dachshund, and I mentioned it briefly at the front desk, and literally by the time I entered our room, there was a whole spread of all of the toys for him, his Four Seasons

toy, and it’s still today his favorite toy. The fact that they checked in, and they clean your room and they make the bed, they made his stuff, they folded his zone, and I thought that was the sweetest thing ever. They do hospitality very, very well.

Kolin, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much for joining us on the post-Triathlon and Masters weekend.

It’s great to be here. Thank you very much, Rob and Katie.

All right, everyone, it’s time for today’s sweet summary, where I break down the key insights and actionable takeaways from today’s conversation. Speaking to Kolin, you quickly get the sense that he is someone who likes to do things his own way.

At age 16, when most kids are getting their driver’s license, he was getting his pilot’s license. When COVID hit during his time at Embry Riddle, and job prospects for his peers started to dwindle, he didn’t wait around. He built his own path.

He started a company in private aviation with no money and no planes. When he realized he needed access and insight into an industry that doesn’t easily open its doors, he created an alter ego, James Middleton III, to get into the room.

What he found on the other side of that? A space that was murky, unreliable, and often just plain wrong. But instead of being discouraged, he saw opportunity.

He saw a gap he could fill, and more importantly, one that he was equipped to fix. One moment that really stuck with me was him sitting in Starbucks giving himself a goal, send 2,500 emails a day.

That’s not just tenacity, that’s discipline paired with clarity. He didn’t set a goal around outcomes that he couldn’t control, like closing deals or hitting a revenue number.

He set a goal around effort, around inputs, and trusted that if he showed up consistently enough, the results would follow. Six months later, when his first real opportunity came through, he was ready because he had already put in the reps.

The same philosophy carries over into how he approaches social media. It’s easy to dismiss it as fluffy or optional. I know I did for a long time, but Kolin treats it like a real growth engine.

It’s strategic, it’s measurable, and most importantly, it works. The revenue it drives makes it clear. This isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a non-negotiable for any business that wants to grow today.

But more than anything, what came through loudest in Kolin’s story is his ability to move fast, to try new things, and to remain authentic to himself along the way.

He’s not posturing or trying to pretend that he or his company are anything that they’re not. What he’s doing is building trust and authority with clients and with those who could become clients. Because, as Kolin said, people buy from people.

And in a world full of noise, the ones who will win are those willing to show up, stand out, and be seen. And that concludes another episode of Suite Success. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, please subscribe, rate, and review the show.

We all know how important those five-star reviews are. I also want to say a massive thank you to each and every one of you for tuning in. It means the absolute world to me.

And I’d love to hear from you. If you have ideas for future guests, new topics to cover, or even just want to say hi, don’t be shy. Message me through our website, suitesuccesspodcast.com, or on social media, at suitesuccesspodcast.

That’s sweet like hotel suite. Once again, I’m your host, Katie Cline, and I’m super excited to see you all next week.