From Sicily to private jets: Matteo Stefano Ragusa on a business built on time

In Europe, between £12 million and £20 million is spent every single day on flying privately. Not on buying aircraft, not on moving freight: on simply getting from one place to another. Add the villas rented by the week, the hire cars that cost as much as an apartment, the private drivers waiting for hours in the sun and the services that remove every point of friction from a wealthy person's day, and the total describes a market almost nobody watches and which is worth far more than most people imagine.

Matteo Stefano Ragusa is 38. He was born in Catania, Sicily, and at 26 he left Italy to build his career abroad. Today he runs a group of companies that span technology and luxury, with businesses such as Altinium, and every day he speaks to people for whom dinner in Miami, having left Paris in the early afternoon, is an ordinary working day. We met him to understand how that world operates from the inside, and what you learn standing on the side of the person who has to deliver.

Q. How do you get from Catania to a group of companies working with international luxury?

A. I left at 26 with a suitcase, very few contacts and no network at all. Sicily gave me two things money cannot buy: a sense of proportion and the ability to improvise. Abroad I understood something simple that became the centre of everything. The value is not in what you sell, it is in how much you simplify the life of the person buying. Luxury is really that. It removes problems rather than adding objects. I started in technology, which is by definition the business of solving problems. Everything else followed.

Q. The figure that surprises people most is the daily spend on private flights.

A. Between £12 million and £20 million a day, in Europe alone, on flying. That number does not include anything else: villas, cars, drivers, catering, security, concierge staff. The flight is the ticket, not the event. The interesting part is everything that surrounds it. When a client lands, somebody has already thought about what he will find at home, who will drive him, what he will eat, who will look after his dog for the three days he is unreachable. None of those things is difficult on its own. They become difficult when they have to happen together, in the same hour, four thousand kilometres away.

Q. What is the most unusual request you have handled?

A. A Paris to Miami flight, sent to us by email. In the same email the client asked for a McChicken, a fruit ice cream for his wife and some toys for his pet. With one detail that remains my favourite: the toys, once used, would be given away, because at home they already had far too many. None of those items has any real value. The value was somewhere else. He wanted to land and find exactly what he had imagined, including the possibility of being generous with someone without having to organise anything.

Q. Doesn't a request like that irritate you?

A. For ordinary people these requests are unacceptable, and that is exactly why they are the best part of my job and of the work my colleagues do. They look like whims; in reality they are information. They tell you who is in front of you, what he is missing, what makes him feel at home. A fruit ice cream delivered at dawn tells you more about a family than ten pages of a questionnaire. Treat those requests as a nuisance and you lose the client, along with the only genuinely interesting part of the business.

Q. The moment you enjoy most, though, is not the order itself.

A. It is what comes after. Once the request has been delivered properly and the person starts to trust you, he stops being a client and becomes someone who tells you about his life. These are people who are sometimes cryptic, saying almost nothing and letting you understand everything, and sometimes so full of life that they have stories for hours. You learn something from each of them: the one who built everything quickly, the one who lost a great deal and started again, the one who works so as never to ask anyone for permission again. Loyalty is not a sales technique. It is the result of having been reliable when nobody was watching.

Q. What role does technology play in a group built around luxury?

A. It is what makes luxury invisible. The client should never know how many calls it took, how many people woke up at five in the morning, which supplier reopened for him. He should simply find the car waiting outside the terminal and the right person there to meet him. That is what technology is for: to make the complexity disappear and leave intact the feeling that everything was easy. When it works, nobody notices it. And that is the highest compliment it can receive.

There are industries where money is measured in revenue and others where it is measured in time. Luxury belongs to the second. A jet that leaves when you need it, a driver who waits without asking, a fruit ice cream delivered overnight change the value of an hour. And nobody pays for the hour: they pay so as never to have to think about it.

"The luxury that matters is not the part you can see," Ragusa says, before picking up his phone for another request that will arrive, as always, by email. "It is the feeling of having been understood without having to explain too much. In the end, that is the only thing you cannot hire."