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He points to companies like CMS Hospitality and Crews , which passed to Nick Crews, now CEO and managing partner, as examples of successful operators who exemplify the success of the program and who have started creating generational wealth. “I would say the headline is, it has worked,” Session says. “The objective was to be able to bring minorities and women into the airport concessions economy - food and beverage, retail, advertising - and to that extent it has worked.” The ACDBE program also has evolved considerably over the years, say observers, including Michael Freilich, who spent 17 years with the Federal Aviation Administration before retiring in 2019 and starting Michael Freilich Consulting . Freilich, along with his counterpart Bob Ashby with the U.S. Department of Transportation , helped write the rule that split concessions under a separate regulation. They worked in tandem throughout the years to strengthen the program’s compliance oversight.

“There had always been a strong [compliance program] in place, but we really ramped it up dramatically,” he says. The FAA, he says, recognized it could not monitor each airport every year. So, it focused on the 30 or 40 airports with the vast majority of traffic. With learnings from those airports, FAA created online assessment programs, and it created ways to share guidance on commonly misunderstood aspects of the program and to highlight best practices among airports. “We found people are doing good things, why should only that airport benefit,” he says. “Let’s tell everybody about that.” Freilich and Session also pointed to joint venture guidance, developed in tandem with the DOT, that helped clear up confusion on how those partnerships could be counted toward the meeting of goals. Published in 2008, the more-than 40-page document has been tweaked and revised in the years since. “It’s really helped strengthen the program, helped people know what they need to do, helped improve focus on making sure that the people that are supposed to benefit from the program are benefiting,” Freilich says. That was vital, in that as the ACDBE program evolved, more of the deals were being done as joint ventures between certified companies and prime operators rather than as subcontracting operations.

Above: Michael Freilich, founder of Michael Freilich Consulting, spent 17 years at the Federal Aviation Administration helping improve and update the ACDBE program.

“In the early days of the program, whether intentional or unintentional, there was really sort of disproportionate allocation of the benefits of the bargain,” Session says. “The DOT has been helpful in that regard because they’ve given guidance,” he says. “You can go to their website and see specific guidance on what a good joint venture should look like.” A few years later, as part of a mandate from the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 that reauthorized funding of the agency, the FAA developed mandatory certification training to educate certifiers on common rules and regulations governing

Below: Concord Collective Partners, an ACDBE-certified firm, operates several restaurants at LAX. Greg Plummer, CEO, is one of hundreds who have benefited from the federal program.

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AX NEWS JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2024