What it is
BridgePoint Air Advisors is a private aviation advisory firm. It was started by one of the strongest aircraft brokers of the pandemic years, who left the top seat at his previous firm to build his own, with a small team and a book of clients who came because of him.
From formation, Fowler held one of two seats on the advisory board, written into the operating agreement. He took no fee and no stake in the company; the founder paid him in jet hours, so what he held was worth something only if the whole company was.
The founder had done every operating job in the firm hundreds of times. What he had not done was make the decisions that only exist once you own a company: hiring past an inherited team, letting someone go, or selling.
What Common Ground did
- At formation Fowler drew a working line: brokering strategy, fleet decisions and client management stayed with the founder, untouched; hiring, firing and any sale were the decisions where Fowler would be in the room.
- Through the first year he stayed in the room on who was hired and who was let go, to slow those calls down at the point where the ways to be wrong multiply.
- He treated the seat as availability rather than governance. A buyer of a relationship-driven firm prices client concentration and dependence on key people, and a board roster cures neither, because a board dissolves at closing.
- When a much larger private aviation company, an organization many times BridgePoint's size, appeared as a buyer in 2025, the sale ran in-house with the founder, with no banker and no broker, because there was one buyer and the value was the founder himself.
- The first offer priced the firm, not the founder. Most of the negotiation went into writing down what the founder was bringing, his relationships, his book and his continuity, in the terms the buyer would price, and into getting the founder to believe it before he had to say it. Part of that work happened on a golf trip, between rounds, while the deal was closing.
- Fowler also helped structure the terms for the firm's other equity holders, not only the founder's.
Results
- Once the founder's value was framed in the buyer's own terms, the offer doubled, quickly.
- The sale closed in November 2025, and the advisory seat ended with the company.
- The closing took care of the other equity holders as well as the founder.
- Fowler took nothing from the price; the seat was held for a friend.
External links
- Public data room: BridgePoint Air data room
At a glance
| Project type | Exit advisory and sale negotiation |
|---|---|
| Industry | Private aviation services |
| Seat | Advisory board |
| Ran through | Common Ground; the seat was written into the firm's operating agreement |
| Dates | Mid 2024 to the end of 2025 |
| Duration | About eighteen months |
| Public data room | BridgePoint Air data room |
| Related pages | Common Ground, Bridgepoint Aviation |
| Credit | Created by Common Ground |