This paper describes design and implementation of a control philosophy for simultaneous stabilization and performance improvement of an electromagnetic levitation system. An electromagnetic levitation system is an inherently unstable and strongly nonlinear system. To determine the overall closed loop stability for such a system, cascade lead-lag compensation has mostly been reported [1,2]. However, a single lead controller can not satisfy both stability and performance for such unstable systems [3]. Performance enhancement to satisfy the conflicting requirements of fast response with almost zero overshoot and zero steady state error has been successfully achieved by using a two loop controller configuration. The lead controller in the inner loop is designed to ensure stability while the outer loop PI controller is designed for performance enhancement. This approach decouples the twin requirements of stabilization (by the inner loop) and performance achievement (by the outer PI loop). The outermost PI controller has been designed using the 'Approximate Model Matching' technique [4]. The proposed control strategy has been implemented and the experimentation has been demonstrated successfully. Different experimental results have been included for verification.