College can be more than one thing.
It’s a place where you go to class and learn from professors and textbooks, of course.
It’s a gathering spot, too, a place to make friends and have a good time.
It’s also something else, a lot of the time. Something we rarely take notice of. College is this weird blend of academia and reality, the kind of place where you might just happen to run into a guy who’s spent the past decade building up what’s been called the most successful airline in America.
Allegiant Airlines CEO Maurice Gallagher, right, talks with Chris Elkins, president of the CSN chapter of the Future Business Leaders of America.
“Forty years ago,” Maurice Gallagher, the CEO of Allegiant Airlines, told a group of CSN faculty and students on Tuesday, “I was sitting right where you are.”
Gallagher, who came to campus as part of the College of Southern Nevada’s Elite Business Series, may be an airline industry veteran now, heading a company with near a billion dollars in revenue annually, but he didn’t get there overnight.
Few successes happen overnight, as the college’s previous EBS speakers have attested to. They each stressed hard work, as Gallagher did, and being passionate about what you do.
Lessons like those, from real people in the business world, was why the series was created. It is a partnership between the college and Arista Wealth Management President & Managing Member Paul L. Moffat, a local advocate of higher education.
Gallagher told the students that he finished college in 1974, smack dab in the middle of a terrible recession.
But that was no excuse. He found a low-level job, and he made some friends. By 1979, he found the recently deregulated airline industry calling his name, despite the fact that he knew very little about it.
“I couldn’t spell airplane at the time,” he joked.
He went on to become a founder of ValuJet Airlines, and later joined Allegiant, where he is now CEO, chairman and majority owner.
He said Allegiant, which is based in Las Vegas, became successful because it did what other airlines did not, and it did those things very efficiently. The airline started serving small cities from Las Vegas that no one else did, and that’s what it kept doing. Today, Allegiant connects more than 200 cities around the country to Las Vegas.
The trick, if there is one, is doing everything as efficiently as possible, he said. Use technology, as Allegiant has to create its own reservation system. Embrace the internet, embrace automation, embrace technology.
That’s what Allegiant has done.
“I like to think about us being a technology company,” he said, “that flies airplanes.”