After a busy day at work, Jim Malone hops onto a jet and

flies home to Naples.

For three years, this 59-year-old executive has commuted to

cities like New York and Houston and even globally to conduct business while

living in Naples because of the lifestyle it affords. As founding partner and

managing director of Bridge Associates, Malone works with billion-dollar public

and privately owned companies in the aerospace, real estate and manufacturing

industries to aid in turnarounds, restructuring and crisis management.

“There is virtually not a week that goes by that I don’t

travel out of Naples,” Malone says. “That’s part of why I love living here. You

work hard, you’re focused, you’re doing the best job possible for your clients

during the week, and part of the drive is to know that 12 months out of the

year you’re going home to be involved with people that are important to you and

activities you enjoy among the most beautiful surroundings anywhere in the

world.”

Long a playground for the wealthy and retired, Southwest

Florida is attracting a new breed of business elite: hardworking pre-retirement

executives and business owners who want the area’s lifestyle now. Just check

out the activity at Naples Municipal Airport every Sunday evening and Monday

morning, as Gulfstream jets with $50-million price tags, smaller planes like

the Cessna 421 owned by local pest control executive Truly Nolen, and other

privately owned and corporate jets depart for New York, Minneapolis,

Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. Business executives are frequent fliers,

whether piloting themselves, chauffeured in the company jet with their company

logo on the tail, chartering or flying commercial.

“A lot of guys come in on Thursday night and leave Sunday or

Monday morning. We have several clients who have offices elsewhere, live here,

and commute back and forth. It’s good for us,” says Scott Phillips, owner and

chief executive officer of Jet1, which is based at Naples Municipal and

provides charter services, jet sales and leasing, hangar space and fuel, and

manages corporations’ planes. The business commuter is becoming less seasonal,

he adds.

At Southwest Florida International Airport, some travelers

admit they often bump into the same people. “My definition of knowing that you

travel too much is when your gate agent says, ‘Heather, you’re not going to

make your connection,’” says attorney Heather Gilchrist, who splits her time

between Naples and Louisville.

An “Opportunity-Driven” Lifestyle

Veteran businessman Nolen is no pest at Naples Municipal

Airport. Nearly every week, he departs on trips to his company’s locations in

Florida, California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas. Although he

occasionally charters a jet for extra-long trips, Nolen pilots his eight-seat

Cessna 421 (the company’s yellow, red and black mouse logo is painted on the

tail) about 90 percent of the time. “It’s got everything as far as the comfort,

but doesn’t have the speed of a jet,” he says.

Relying on assistants—often in two or three cities—Southwest

Florida’s high-flying executives are prepared to get in the air within hours,

if business calls. After years of travel, many have crafted seamless

organizational strategies, aided by technology.

Southwest Florida has become the headquarters for this kind

of lifestyle, says Rick Inatome, who founded two billion-dollar technology

companies, Computer City and Inacomp Computer Centers, and now lives full time

in Naples, where he has started Mentor Capital Partners, a venture capital

fund. “For some of us, fortunately, the work that we do we can do anywhere. If

you’re going to use anywhere as a home base, Naples is probably the most

wonderful place in the world to do it,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what city I

lived in, I’d have to be on a plane three or four days a week.”

Between his venture capital interests, his positions on the

boards of directors for companies such as Motorquest Automotive Group,

automotive consultant R.L. Polk and Co., AAA Michigan and insurance company

AIG, and the car dealerships he owns in Boston and Michigan, Inatome is used to

seeing Naples from the sky. “My primary business is investments. In that

business you’re looking at companies fairly frequently and you don’t have a

schedule or a pattern to it, it’s opportunity-driven,” he says. “It’s a fairly

frequent-changing schedule.”

Most high-fliers seem to enjoy the pace. For eight years,

media executive Brian Cobb has lived permanently in Naples, and for eight

years, he’s traveled at least a day or two every week. His company, Cobb Corp.,

which specializes in mergers and acquisitions of media properties and owns two

TV stations (WTXL in Tallahassee and KADY in Santa Barbara/Los Angeles), is

based in California. Depending on the deal, he could be in any city on any day.

“Most people that do what I do—which is travel a lot—do it by choice,” he says.

“A big group of my friends in Naples do the same thing I do.”

Getting around would be easier if he lived in a larger city,

Cobb admits. He owns part of a jet through one of the many popular fractional

jet ownership programs and uses that plane about 70 percent of the time.

Otherwise, he flies commercial airlines out of Southwest Florida International,

or heads over to Miami for a better selection of nonstop flights. Cobb, 57,

believes the payoff is worth it. “It’s an unbelievable feeling to fly in to

Naples at the end of the day when the sun’s about to come down,” he says. “It’s

a different feeling than people get flying into Pittsburgh.”

Following the Work

Airborne professionals must head out of town because there’s

not enough business for them here. Pest control executive Nolen, for example,

has a friend in the coal-mining business who lives in Naples but is in the same

position.

Mark Youngquist would rather work in Southwest Florida all

the time. But the demand for his expertise—film production—is not that great

here, so Youngquist, 52, ends up frequently flying to Minneapolis for business.

“It hasn’t gotten to be too much of a drag yet. It’s a way

of life. There’s the necessity of maintaining a business in Minneapolis and

trying to build a new company in this area. Hopefully I’ll someday be dependent

enough on business in this area,” says Youngquist, who has produced local

events like the Golden Apple awards (for teachers) for television.

Once a month, accessories buyer Linda Kutzler flies into New

York City for a week of client meetings. The rest of her travel is typically

international, as she heads to Europe, South America and Asia to spot new

trends for her client, a large United States retailer whose name she won’t

disclose. She usually knows two weeks in advance when she’s wanted in New York, but she’s always

prepared to go anywhere. “At the drop of the hat, I may need to fly to Italy

and meet [my clients] in a week,” she says.

When Dan Bevarly and his wife decided to raise their two

young daughters in Naples, he planned to uproot his public relations and

marketing firm from Louisville. But when he and his family moved here late last

year, he realized that while he was trying to build a client base in Southwest

Florida, he couldn’t say no to business in Kentucky. He decided to split his

time between the cities until he generated clients here, or found a full-time

marketing job. With e-mail and two cell phones, one with a Louisville number

and another with a Naples number, he runs his business from both locations. He

flies out of Southwest Florida International, and sometimes drives up to Tampa,

depending on who has the cheapest fare. “There have been some times on the

flight coming back when I’ve said, ‘I hate this,’” he admits. Then he adds:

“The nice thing about it is that you do have time to get your thoughts

together. It hasn’t been as taxing on me as I thought it might be.”

Attorney Gilchrist, who also commutes between Naples and

Louisville, lives in Louisville, where her husband works and her two children

are in school, but conducts her business in Naples, where she has another home

and an office. Gilchrist, who flies out of Southwest Florida International but

wishes she could afford charter services because of long waits to clear airport

security, chose Naples after her parents moved here and she began to meet

people who needed her to do estate work. Most of her clients live here part

time, too. “I get a lot of business from people that are transient as well,”

she says.

Choosing Southwest Florida

Although the lifestyle can be hectic, many executives plant

roots in the community through charitable giving, religious commitments and

involvement in their children’s schools.

That’s the case with Paul Bush, chairman and chief executive

officer of Jamestown, N.Y.-based Bush Industries, one of the country’s largest

furniture companies. Although Bush has a home in Jamestown, he spends most of

the year in Southwest Florida. Since he moved to Fort Myers 15 years ago, Bush

has donated time and financial resources to the YMCA of Lee County (a branch in

Fort Myers bears his name), the Children’s Hospital of Southwest Florida and

other local organizations. He travels every six weeks to New York to meet with

presidents of Bush Furniture, Bush Business Furniture, Bush Furniture Europe

and Bush Technologies divisions, which brought in sales of more than $346

million in 2001. Trade shows, meetings with clients and retailers, and industry

events also take him away from the area. He keeps organized with two

assistants—one in Fort Myers, where Bush Entertainment, a film and television

production company, is based, and another at the New York headquarters.

Armed with a cell phone, fax, e-mail and overnight

deliveries, Bush keeps tabs on the operations of his publicly traded company,

which has more than 2,000 employees worldwide. “Up here, people think [this

lifestyle] is unique, but in Florida they don’t think it’s unique,” he says in

a phone interview from Jamestown. “It’s very good when you’re running a

company, from the sense that you can get away from a lot of the day-to-day

things and think more clearly in a different environment. The sunshine alone is

a factor.”

Turnaround specialist Malone also leads a busy social

schedule in Naples. He and his wife, Linda, are involved in community

organizations and fund-raising events like the Naples Winter Wine Festival. The

festival’s board of directors includes a number of nationally prominent

executives who live in Naples but frequently travel the country. Although

Malone may be away from Naples from Monday through Thursday (he co-owns a plane

and sometimes flies commercially), he rarely misses a weekend in Naples, where

he enjoys outdoor pursuits such as golfing and fishing. “It’s a rare week when

I don’t run into somebody who says, ‘Oh, gosh, you live in Naples, I’ve been

thinking about doing something like that,’” he says. “You want to prepare

yourself for the retirement that will eventually come. Certainly, I’m not

retired. I go full time, but at some point in time that’s not going to be the

case, and I want to already be located where I end up spending my time.”

Accessories buyer Kutzler, on the other hand, says that one

drawback is that it’s tough to meet people with her schedule. “You travel so

much and it’s hard to make a commitment because you’re going to be leaving,”

she says. “Your banker is about the only person you come in contact with. Once

you have DSL, there’s no one else you need to know.”

Eyeing the Business Commuter

Although local airports can’t break passenger traffic

figures into categories for business and leisure travelers, they are beginning

to look more closely at the business commuter. Naples Municipal, founded during

World War II and now managed by the City of Naples Airport Authority, and

Southwest Florida International, which is undergoing a $356 million expansion,

are separately surveying the needs of business travelers.

“We don’t have any good information related to business

travel,” admits Gail Cureton, director of communications for Naples Municipal.

“We want to find out how many people fly, in terms of business travel, and if

people are bypassing us. I suspect many business travelers bypass us to drive

40 minutes” to Southwest Florida International.

Southwest Florida International is in the midst of a

two-year project to determine its ratio of business-to-leisure travelers, an

important statistic for luring additional airlines or flights. More than 10,000

business travelers in Charlotte, Collier and Lee counties recently received a

survey asking questions including how often they fly and whether or not their

company is located here. The second part of the project involves passenger

surveys.

Airport spokeswoman Susan Sanders says she knows of

Southwest Florida-based professionals and semi-retired executives who travel

weekly, and she uses anecdotal evidence in discussions with airlines. “We don’t

have numbers, but we know for a fact that is something that makes this market

different,” she says. “We may not have a typical business market like the

airlines are used to finding in Tampa, Miami or Orlando. We feel we have a

strong atypical business market that could support the business levels that

they need.”

Area private aviation companies say the number of business

travelers is growing, and they have customers whose departure schedules are so

predictable that they know to expect their call. The growth could reflect a

number of factors: more executives moving to Southwest Florida, corporate

fliers choosing general aviation over commercial flights because of post-Sept.

11 concerns, and more opportunities for business in Southwest Florida. Jet 1’s

Phillips, for example, estimates that about 70 percent of his clients are

corporate travelers.

“What makes Naples convenient to a lot of executives [is

they] can be anywhere in the Midwest or Northeast within two-and-a-half hours

maximum from Naples by jet,” says Naples jeweler Bruce Thalheimer, a pilot and

president-elect of Friends of the Municipal Airport.

As a result, some aviation companies are prospering.

PrivateSky Aviation Services, an independent maintenance service center that

specializes in Gulfstream aircraft, is more than doubling the size of its

facility at Southwest Florida International to 30 acres. Founder Vincent M.

Wolanin says clients include chairmen of major corporations (who may have

retired but still are busy with board duties and speaking engagements), current

executives and celebrities who are Southwest Florida residents and use their

jets several times a week.

At Naples Municipal, individual executives and companies

like Collier Enterprises, Health Management Associates, WCI Communities,

Beasley Broadcast Group and Germain Automotive use corporate aircraft daily.

Living in Naples and conducting business elsewhere has become quite simple.

“Between the Internet and computers and that airplane, they

can conduct their business and be the chairman or chief executive officer of

any corporation and be anywhere in the world,” Thalheimer says.