This company is building a national luxury travel brand in a small NC town

When you own one of the country’s largest fleets of private jets, shuttling well-heeled customers wherever they want to go, you can base your company just about anywhere.

Jim Segrave chose Kinston, the struggling Eastern North Carolina city racked by flooding and the decline of the state’s tobacco and textile industries.

This week, Segrave’s company, flyExclusive, celebrated the opening of its fourth hangar at the Global TransPark, the state-owned business park that surrounds Kinston’s airport. The company has become the largest employer in the TransPark, where about 500 of its nearly 800 employees work.

FlyExclusive expects to hire another 200 in the coming months and start work soon on a fifth hangar and a company headquarters building with a training center for its 350 pilots. The company’s revenue climbed 72% over the last year, Segrave told a gathering in the new hangar Wednesday, and is expected to double again in the coming year.

There are 1,929 private jet charter operators in the United States, Segrave told the crowd, which included hundreds of flyExclusive employees. Seven years ago, flyExclusive was the smallest; now it’s the second largest, he said.

“Can we grow stronger based here in Kinston?” he asked. “Absolutely. We have already proven that.”

Segrave, 51, didn’t come to Kinston by chance. He was born in the city and has roots that go back generations. His great uncle was C. Felix Harvey, who led a family enterprise that included insurance, banking and John Deere dealerships. Harvey helped start the Global TransPark Foundation, which promotes the park and its mission to bring companies to Eastern North Carolina.

Segrave had already founded and built a charter jet company, which he sold to Delta Air Lines in 2010. He took the proceeds from that sale to start flyExclusive in 2015. With its close ties to the TransPark, his family urged him to base his new company in Kinston.

The city, about 80 miles southeast of Raleigh, is an unlikely spot to build a national luxury brand. Kinston’s population has shrunk 23% since 1990, on declines in traditional manufacturing and repeated flooding by the Neuse River and its tributaries after hurricanes in 1996, 1999, 2016 and 2018.

The novelty of flyExclusive making a home in an underdog town came up repeatedly at Wednesday’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, including in videos produced by the company. Jim Perry, the Republican state senator who represents the area, said the company’s growth means much more than jobs.

“Today is about something bigger for Eastern North Carolina,” Perry told the crowd. “It’s about a fighting spirit, and it’s about hope. It gives us all hope in our community to see something like this, to see someone take these risks on our people, on our community, to see this type of growth and success.”

Global TransPark has plenty of space

FlyExclusive’s expansion is also encouraging for the TransPark. Created by the General Assembly in the early 1990s, the park was envisioned as a place where companies would set up manufacturing plants around a runway, shuttling components in and completed products out.

But it has struggled to attract tenants, and most of its 2,500 acres remain empty. The next largest employer is Spirit Aerosystems, which produces fuselage sections for Airbus passenger jets and ships them to France, through the port at Morehead City, for final assembly.

Mark Pope, the TransPark’s economic development director, said the park has been hurt by a lack of access to rail and an interstate highway. The N.C. Department of Transportation recently built a six-mile rail spur to connect the park to the Norfolk Southern system and plans to eventually convert U.S. 70 through Kinston into Interstate 42.

In the meantime, the TransPark has begun to draw flight schools and other aviation-related businesses that want to be close to its 11,500-foot runway, Pope said. That includes military contractors and programs, such as the Navy’s Fleet Readiness Center East, which opened a satellite helicopter maintenance and repair facility at the TransPark last year.

Pope acknowledges that attracting and keeping workers in Eastern North Carolina is challenging, as it is in many rural areas.

“Our saving grace is the military,” Pope said in an interview. “We’re surrounded by five military bases; 15,000 plus are coming out of the military every year. We don’t retain all of those. But if we have opportunities for jobs like this, it’s a whole lot easier to retain them, to keep them living here in Eastern North Carolina.”

‘We can control our destiny’

FlyExclusive intends to have more than 2,500 employees by the end of the decade, and Segrave says most of them will be in Kinston. The company opened a technology hub in Durham last year for computer programmers, to tap into the Triangle’s talent pool, but only about 15 people work there, he said.

Segrave says a large majority of the 250 technicians who work on planes in Kinston were recruited from outside the area and that “it’s not been terribly difficult” to persuade them to come. He credits a company culture that stresses humility and teamwork and the fact that outside investors aren’t making decisions or demanding short-term returns.

“It’s a big benefit that we can control our destiny,” said Segrave, who said his children own small pieces of LGM Enterprises, flyExclusive’s parent company, but that the vast majority is his. “We run it the way we want to run it. We’re not trying to crush our people and squeeze every drop out of a turnip that we can so we can make an extra dollar to meet some private equity’s return criteria and exit plan for three or four year from now.”

Segraves said he thought he would lose the business when COVID-19 brought the economy to a standstill in the spring of 2020. For several weeks, he had 50 Cessna Citation and Gulfstream jets parked at the TransPark instead of carrying paying customers.

Demand has rebounded strongly since then, Segrave says.

“The demand at the moment is nearly elastic,” he said in an interview. “There’s more than any of us can handle.”

About 600 people have joined flyExclusive’s Jet Club, which for a deposit of $75,000 to $250,000 and a $1,000 a month membership fee gives them access to the company’s fleet of jets. (Daily and hourly rates apply when they actually fly.) Occasional flyers can charter planes, while frequent flyers can become “fractional owners” of the company’s new Cessna Citation CJ3+ jets, buying shares in a plane.

After the initial shutdowns ended, the pandemic has been good for the private jet business. As airlines struggle with cancellations and labor shortages, people with the means are booking private jets.

Business travel, which accounted for up to 40% of trips before the pandemic, hasn’t come back, Segrave said. More than 90% of flyExlusive’s customers now are jetting off to vacation spots, second homes or to visit family.

Lingering health concerns about crowds and cramming into airports and planes has also helped, Segrave said.

“It drives business to us,” he said. “People who could have always otherwise afforded it would say, ‘I’ll just fly the airlines to save money.’ Now they’re saying, ‘I don’t want to risk my health.’ And the really nice thing about that is once you fly on these, it’s very difficult to go back.”