Work record / Capital / BridgePoint Air
BridgePoint Air: the owner held more cards than he knew
I held an advisory board seat at BridgePoint Air from mid 2024 until a much larger private aviation company bought it in November 2025. The offer doubled once the owner could say what he was really bringing to the table.
The seat
When the firm was set up, I took one of two advisory board seats, and the operating agreement wrote it in. I took no fee and no equity. The owner paid me in jet hours, which meant my payment was only worth something if the company as a whole was. The work ran from mid 2024 through the end of 2025, as part of my Common Ground advisory work.
| Sector | Private aviation services |
|---|---|
| Type of work | Exit advisory and sale negotiation |
| Years | Mid 2024 to the end of 2025 |
| How long | About eighteen months |
| Through | Common Ground, with the seat written into the firm's operating agreement. |
| Credits | Common Ground Jesse Fowler, Advisory board seat |
What I was brought in to decide
BridgePoint Air Advisors is a private aviation advisory firm. Its owner was one of the strongest aircraft brokers of the pandemic years. He left the top job at his old firm and started his own with a handful of people. The clients who came with him were there because of him.
He had done every operating job in the business hundreds of times. The decisions he had never made were the ones that only show up once you own the company: hiring beyond an inherited team, letting someone go, and selling.
What we did
- On day one I drew a line for us. Brokering strategy, fleet decisions and client management stayed with him, and I left them alone. Hiring, firing and any sale were the calls where I would be in the room.
- For the whole first year I sat in on who got hired and who got let go. My job was to slow those decisions down at the exact point where the ways to be wrong multiply.
- I treated the seat as being available to him, not as governance. A buyer of a relationship-driven firm prices two things, how concentrated the clients are and how much hangs on a few people. A board roster fixes neither, because a board disappears at closing.
- In 2025 a private aviation company many times BridgePoint's size showed up as a buyer. We ran the sale ourselves with the owner, with no banker and no broker. There was one buyer, and the thing of value was the owner himself.
- The first offer priced the firm and ignored the man. Most of the negotiation went into writing out what he was bringing, his relationships, his book and his staying on, in terms the buyer would actually price. The harder part was getting him to believe it before he had to say it out loud. Part of it got done on a golf trip, in the gaps between rounds, as the deal was closing.
- I also helped shape the terms for the company's other equity holders, not just the owner's.
Results
- Once his value was put in the buyer's own terms, the offer doubled, and it happened fast.
- The sale closed in November 2025, and the advisory seat ended along with the company.
- The other equity holders were taken care of at closing, along with the owner.
- I took nothing out of the price. I held the seat for a friend.
The lesson
Before you argue about the number, spend your effort on what the other side is really buying.
Questions about BridgePoint Air, answered
Firm record
Common Ground keeps its own account of this engagement: BridgePoint Air on the Common Ground wiki.