How Private Plane Gave Entrepreneur Time With Kids

Growing up on her family’s farm in Nebraska, even from a young age Loral Langemeier was never happy sitting back, becoming part of the small-town status quo. At age 19, while paying her own way through college, she created a business specializing in corporate wellness and human performance.

As a personal trainer and aerobics instructor, she taught between 16 and 18 hours per week, while earning a double degree and playing basketball for her college team.

Loral (pictured left) graduated from the Wesleyan University of Nebraska with bachelor’s degrees in Business Administration and Finance, followed by a master’s degree in Exercise Physiology.

Following graduation, Loral contracted with Fortune 500 company Chevron to teach health, fitness, and nutrition to workers on oil rigs off the coast of New Orleans – and at the age of 24 she entered a new contract with Chevron to build over 200 fitness centers on offshore rigs, partnering with a Professor of Engineering and a team of students at Louisiana State University.

Loral rose to a senior-level with Chevron in San Francisco, spending a total five years in corporate America. While continuing her own businesses on the side, she developed her ‘secret formula of the wealthy’: To manage and build a portfolio to create even greater wealth.

After meeting Robert Kiyosaki in San Francisco (before his Rich Dad, Poor Dad series), Loral created the distribution system of his financial board game Cashflow as a teaching tool for those who want to go back into entrepreneurialism.

She approached Kiyosaki about helping expand his cash-flow game, working with him as a Master Distributor until 2001.

Loral has been a partner or sole owner in well over one hundred for-profit and non-profit businesses since she started her first business while still in high school. And she has operated successful businesses in a wide variety of sectors, including real estate, gas and oil, restaurants, marketing, sales, insurance, publishing, car dealerships, entity formation, and recently NFTs.

She has learned many valuable, first-hand business lessons during her more than 30 years of business ownership.

Loral is author of a number of New York Times bestsellers, including, ‘The Millionaire Maker, Guide to Wealth Cycle Investing’, and ‘Yes! Energy’. Her latest book, being launched in May 2022 is called ‘Make Your Kids Millionaires: The Step-by-Step Guide to Lead Children to Financial Freedom’ (see sidebar overleaf for more information).

Loral sat down with me recently to discuss the role private aviation has played in allowing her to grow her businesses exponentially.

The Minivan in the Sky

Loral owned a Beechcraft King Air for over thirteen years, basing it near to her ranch at Minden-Tahoe Airport in Nevada.

Unsurprisingly, her seminar business was hit by Covid lockdowns, but she quickly pivoted and moved her events online. While she took a break from traveling during 2020, Loral resumed some of her travel during 2021 and now, in 2022, is already picking up her travel schedule, regionalizing the focus more on her various business ventures in Nevada, Idaho and Texas.

Over the years, the King Air served as her “minivan in the sky”, allowing her to take her kids on many trips with her. Being able to live where she does, and get up and go and produce, using her King Air as a business tool has been key to her.

In fact, Loral’s son Logan has taken a keen interest in flying, and once he completes college will fly his mother’s next aircraft.

Loral expresses surprise that relatively few women entrepreneurs are business jet owners, given that it allows you to work and spend more time with your kids – and is therefore a great balancing tool for the “mompreneur”.

Don’t Judge a BizJet by its Balance Sheet 

According to Loral, too many business owners and entrepreneurs still look at private jet ownership as a ‘no-no’ after merely looking at the balance sheet. What they don’t realise from that narrow focus is that the benefits outweigh the cost.

Loral simply could not live where she does and travel as much as she needs flying on scheduled airlines. It would take her 2-3 times longer and be more stressful. She also points to the tax incentives of private jet ownership.

In fact, she reckons more people are going to be buying smaller, shorter-range jets and turboprops, capable of optimizing 1.5-to-two-hour flights. Smaller business aircraft will enable their owners to fly out for a meeting in the morning, returning that evening – or perhaps visit 2-3 locations in a single day.

Many of these potential buyers Loral believes will step into the Business Aviation arena were flying with the airlines before, and are now finding the destinations and/or frequency on the routes they require are no longer there.

Though Loral sold her King Air just as the Covid lockdowns came into effect, and has been chartering private jets since, with business travel now picking-up, she’s getting ready to jump back into the ownership game, but this time with a private jet.

But she’s clear that she will do so not only as an investment in a business tool, but also to create more time with the family.

More information from www.orvilleaviation.com and www.bizjettv.com