This year is a special one for Avfuel: the company is celebrating its 50th anniversary at NBAA-BACE. While Avfuel is now a leading independent global supplier of aviation fuel and services, it has been a long transformation from its start as a regional fuel provider, according to founder, president, and CEO Craig Sincock.
“We were young and we didn’t really know we couldn’t compete with major multinational oil companies,” he told AIN. He recalled flying across the country in his airplane in the early days, visiting several FBOs a day to tell them about his plans to establish a fueling network.
“Then I would ask them what their business needed, so it was really all of our customers who started to write the business plan for Avfuel Corporation—and that’s how we got to where we are today. The Ann Arbor, Michigan-based company is now a global distribution network consisting of more than 3,500 worldwide fueling locations and nearly 700 FBOs with Avfuel-branded fuel throughout North America and Europe.
While Sincock has been a fixture in the aviation fueling industry for decades, his son C.R. has been taking an increasingly larger role in the family-owned company, following his immersion in the industry from a young age. “I think literally since I was 10 years old, I was attending NBAA-BACE, I was going to Oshkosh, and I was going to all these aviation events,” the younger Sincock explained.
“I’ve been sitting, listening, absorbing. Every time we would go on a family vacation, we were stopping at an Avfuel FBO or a prospective FBO,” he added. After completing his business degree, C.R. joined the company full time, working his way up over the past decade and a half to his present role of Avfuel executive v-p and president and CEO of sister company Avflight.
“When I joined the business on a full-time basis, it was great to be able to finally start having a bigger role in shaping things and putting to use some of what I had learned from all those years growing up,” C.R. noted. “I oversee a lot of our supply chain logistics and trading operation, which has obviously been a wild ride the last couple of years with oil prices, as it has been for the entire industry.
“I look over some of our finance and strategy, IT, and of course the Avflight chain of FBOs, but sustainability is probably the one I spend the single most time on lately.”
The sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) industry has evolved considerably over the past decade and a half, but Avfuel is no newcomer to the field. Sincock credits his company structure for allowing it the flexibility to invest in new technologies from an early stage.
“We’ve always tried to marry the benefits of the scope, scale, and resources of a public company with the stewardship of a family business, and that has allowed us to think long-term,” he explained. “When you think about a public company, they are very driven quarterly. When you look at private equity, that’s kind of a three-year thing and then they flip or sell it. In the family business, you are looking at a 20- to 30-year horizon.”
As a result of this ability to look ahead, the company has formed partnerships with SAF producers, including Neste, to obtain product and expand its distribution system. “It’s one thing to just put [SAF] into SFO or LAX, but it’s another thing to figure out how to move it across the rest of the country,” Sincock told AIN. “That’s allowing us to get out and really develop the supply chain, the infrastructure across the country.”
In 2012, the company founded Avfuel Technologies, which Sincock describes as “our own captive venture capital arm” to make investments in promising SAF production processors. “Those investments, you make them for multiple reasons, to understand what is going on, to be the first to have a seat at the table, to actually create offtakes or agreements,” he explained.
Among those are next-generation producers such as Alder Fuels, which is looking at converting waste biomass into fuel, and Air Company, which is refining a process to derive SAF from hydrogen and carbon dioxide.
But whatever form the fuel takes, Sincock said the company will remain ready to serve its customers and distributors. It also was one of the pioneers of a customer loyalty program to foster fuel brand dedication.
“We have hundreds of based jets…at our nearly 700 Avfuel-branded dealers,” said C.R. “They’re obviously going to benefit from that kind of relationship as we try to push and encourage the traffic to use our branded network.”