✈️ Special Edition: Guest Nick Fazioli breaks it down for BizAv

Your business aviation hot takes, served fresh.

March 12th, 2026 | Season 3 Episode 11 Companion

If you want to understand where business aviation is headed, you need to understand where the money is pointed. This week, we sat down with Nick Fazioli, Global Head of Aerospace and Aviation Investment Banking at Jefferies, for one of the most candid conversations we've had about what institutional capital actually thinks about our industry.

Nick has been at the center of some of the biggest transactions in BizAv over the past 16 years, from the Marquis Jet sale to NetJets to Weststar's exit to Greenbrier Equity Group. Nick is the king of the M&A gong.

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📈 BizAv Has Finally Grown Up on Wall Street

When Nick started covering aerospace and aviation at Jefferies in 2010, business aviation was barely a footnote in the institutional investment world. Aerospace meant commercial, and commercial meant Boeing, Airbus, and everything that feeds them.

That has fundamentally changed.

Today, BizAv has a few household name companies, institutional investors, public market activity, and genuine Wall Street attention. Nick credits a steady buildup of capital into alternative access models (charter, fractional, jet cards) leading into COVID, and then the massive demand surge that followed.

COVID didn't just spike demand. It created a permanent step change in the customer base. Corporates and high-net-worth individuals who tried private aviation out of necessity in 2020 and 2021 largely didn't go back. That expanded the total addressable market in a way that Wall Street now recognizes and prices in.

🛠️ Picks and Shovels Win (Again)

If you've followed private equity's playbook across other industries, you know the pattern. Infrastructure beats operators. The companies that serve the whole ecosystem tend to attract more investor interest than those betting on one operating model winning. These are referred to as picks and shovels businesses, in reference to the gold rush days where the companies that made the picks and shovels made a fortune supplying prospectors with tools to hit it big. They don’t have to pick a winning prospector to make money, they can sell to all.

Nick confirmed that in BizAv, MRO, FBO, software, and supply chain businesses continue to be the darlings of Private Equity. The logic is straightforward: if you control the FBO at a key airport, it doesn't matter whether the next ramp arrival is a NetJets owner, a FlexJet fractional owner, or a Part 91 operator. You win regardless.

Charter and fractional operators, on the other hand, require investors to make a judgment call on which brand, which model, and which management team wins. That's a harder bet to make, and it comes with more operational complexity, certificate risk, pilot supply exposure, and margin pressure.

The MRO angle also benefits from something Nick highlighted that applies specifically to BizAv: regulatory predictability. Engine programs, mandatory inspections, and airworthiness directives create a calendar-driven revenue model that investors can underwrite with confidence. Standard Aero's public market debut is probably the clearest recent example of institutional appetite for that type of business.

🏢 Scale Is Not Optional If You Want Institutional Capital

For founders and operators thinking about raising capital or eventually selling, Nick was direct: scale matters, and it matters differently depending on what kind of business you're building.

For traditional private equity, you generally need to be above $10 million in EBITDA to get meaningful attention, and even then, for charter operators, the bar is higher because the sector has been through enough consolidation that investors are gravitating toward the bigger, more established platforms.

For the picks-and-shovels businesses, such as MRO, software, or services, smaller scale can still attract investment because the business model is more defensible and easier to underwrite.

For anyone thinking about a roll-up play, Nick pushed back on the idea of a grassroots consolidation of small charter operators being the path to institutional capital. The real opportunity, in his view, is the B2B supplemental lift space. The big branded operators (NetJets, FlexJet, Vista, Wheels Up) all still need off-fleet lift. That segment got hollowed out during the COVID acquisition frenzy, and it hasn't fully rebuilt. A well-capitalized platform built around serving those operators at scale, with fleet commonality and a clear integration thesis, is a story private equity could get behind.

📊 A Plain-English EBITDA Lesson

We asked Nick to break down EBITDA and EBITDAR for an audience that hears these terms constantly but may not fully understand why they matter for BizAv specifically.

The short version: EBITDA is a shorthand for operational cash flow that strips out depreciation, amortization, interest, and taxes. It was designed to allow comparison across companies with different capital structures. In BizAv, it gets complicated quickly because two operators doing similar revenue might look completely different on EBITDA depending on whether they own their fleet outright or operate under leases.

If you own your fleet, depreciation and interest expense from financing those assets are excluded from EBITDA but are very real costs. If you lease your fleet, rent flows through the income statement as an operating expense and does get captured in EBITDA. Comparing those two businesses on EBITDA alone is comparing apples to oranges.

EBITDAR (adding back rent) is an attempt to normalize for that, but Nick's bigger point was that sophisticated investors look below the headline number. They want to understand what cash actually needs to go back into the business just to keep it running (capitalized maintenance, engine programs, cabin refurbishments) and what is needed for growth. That analysis tells a very different story than the multiple you see advertised when a deal gets announced.

The practical takeaway for operators: If you're ever thinking about raising capital or running a sale process, understand what your true maintenance-adjusted cash flow looks like. The multiple is just the output. Investors are doing their own math underneath it.

✈️ eVTOL: Interesting, But Revenue Not There Yet

Nick was measured but honest about where institutional sentiment sits on eVTOL.

During the SPAC era, a number of eVTOL companies accessed public markets, including EVE (the Embraer spinout, which Jefferies worked on). Most of those companies still have no meaningful revenue. Their quarterly updates are essentially certification progress reports and cash burn disclosures.

Private capital has largely moved to the sidelines. The use cases are real and the long-term potential is significant, but picking winners in a sector this early, with interest rates no longer at zero and plenty of other investable opportunities, is not where most PE funds want to be. Most of the capital flowing into eVTOL right now is coming from existing investors doing follow-on rounds or strategics with a specific angle (think engine manufacturers taking a stake in a potential customer).

Nick's view: consolidation is coming, and the sector will eventually shake out to a few credible operators. When that happens, the capital will follow. Until then, most institutional investors are watching from the sideline.

🤝 Bond + KKR: Room for Another Premium Fractional?

We asked Nick directly about Bond Air's raise from KKR and whether the fractional market has room for another premium player.

His answer was a clear yes, for a few reasons.

First, the principal behind Bond (Bill Papariella) have prior track records with KKR, specifically through the JetEdge story. When you've already made money together, the bar for doing it again is lower. Trust and demonstrated execution matter enormously in private capital.

Second, the fractional model continues to be where the growth puck is heading. Tax advantages, service consistency, and the structural shift away from whole aircraft ownership all point in that direction.

Third, and this is the part that stuck with us, Nick doesn't see this as a zero-sum game. NetJets still casts an enormous shadow over the entire industry. The pie is large enough, and growing fast enough, that a truly premium, ultra-luxury fractional offering is not necessarily taking share from existing players. It may be unlocking demand that wasn't being served.

🧠 What Founders Need to Hear

If you're building a company in this space with any intention of eventually raising capital, bringing in a partner, or selling, Nick had three pieces of advice that we think every operator should internalize.

Reduce key-person dependency. The most common thing that kills otherwise attractive deals is an investor looking at a founder-led business and concluding that the company effectively is the founder. That's a risk they can't price. Build a bench. Document your processes. Make sure the business can run without you, even if you have no intention of leaving anytime soon.

Engage advisors before you're ready to transact. Investment banks like Jefferies work for free until a deal closes. Nick's message was that waiting until you've decided to run a process is too late. Getting people in the room early, even informally, lets you identify financial issues, positioning problems, and structural things that could undermine a deal before they become deal killers.

Let investors solve your problem their way. Rather than going to market with a predetermined structure (we want a minority investment at this valuation on these terms), describe the business and your objectives and let capital providers propose solutions. The market for creative structures has expanded significantly post-COVID, including minority stakes, structured equity, convertibles, preferred instruments, and hybrid vehicles. Flexibility on structure often unlocks better outcomes than optimizing for a specific term sheet.

Thanks to Nick Fazioli and the team at Jefferies for joining us this week. If you found this conversation valuable, share it with anyone in your network who is building a company in business aviation and thinking about what comes next. Be sure to leave us a review!

🎧 This Week's Episode

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Jessie’s Links:
Private Aviation Safety Alliance
FlyVizor
LinkedIn

Preston’s Links:
Prestige Aircraft Finance
Private Jet Insider (Newsletter)
LinkedIn
X (Formerly Known as Twitter)
FastJets