If you knew that the $10 million figure you’ve been repeating to your spouse for three years was actually a hallucination you bought to help you sleep, would you really want to see the correction?

Most people say yes. In my experience-which is currently colored by a very short night of sleep and a lingering irritation with the way humans process risk-most people are lying. We don’t want the truth; we want the floor to stop moving. In the world of Fixed Base Operations, where your entire business is essentially a collection of ground leases, fuel margins, and the whims of people who own turbine engines, the floor is never still. Yet, we demand that our advisors tell us exactly where to stand.

I tried to go to bed early last night, but the ghost of a specific conference room kept me awake. Two weeks ago, I watched a principal present a valuation range of $8.4 million to $10.1 million. He was thorough. He had sensitivity tables. He explained how a 5% shift in Jet-A volume or a change in the local hangar occupancy rate would move the needle.

The owner looked at him like he’d just handed over a pile of unwashed laundry. The owner’s only question: “But what is it worth today?”

A week later, a different advisor walked in with a glossy deck, three fewer pages of data, and a single number: $9.64 million. The owner beamed. He finally felt like he knew what he owned. He didn’t realize he’d just purchased a $9.64 million security blanket, and the price of that blanket was his own ability to negotiate.

1. The System of the Fuel Nozzle

Consider the fuel nozzle as a system of economic capture. It is a piece of cast aluminum and stainless steel, designed to move liquid from a truck to a wing under specific pressure. It is built for flow, but it is defined by its seal. If the seal fails, the flow becomes a hazard.

In a valuation, the “single number” is a nozzle with a perfect seal. It suggests that there is no leakage, no evaporation, and no friction. But a business is not a static object. It is a series of flows. When you freeze those flows into one number, you are pretending the nozzle never leaks.

You are ignoring the fact that the fuel margin is a sliding scale based on global oil prices, regional competition, and whether or not the local flight school decides to move its three Cessnas to the airport twenty miles away. To analyze the nozzle as a system is to recognize that its value only exists while the liquid is moving. The moment you stop the flow to “measure” it with absolute precision, you’ve changed the nature of the thing you’re measuring.

2. The Illusion of the Decimal Point

There is a specific kind of professional cowardice that manifests as a decimal point. If I tell you your FBO is worth “about nine million,” you know I’m guessing. If I tell you it’s worth $9,638,400, you assume I have a very powerful calculator.

The decimal point is a marketing feature. It is a product purchased by the seller to justify a lack of preparation. We see this in technical fields all the time.

“If I give a client a delivery window of ‘afternoon,’ they get anxious. If I tell them the subtitles will be synced by 4:14 PM, they leave me alone.”

– Taylor J.P., Subtitle Timing Specialist

The precision is fake-he might finish at 4:02 or 4:30-but the fake precision creates a vacuum where the client’s anxiety used to live.

In M&A, this is a disaster. If you go to market believing in the $9.64 million figure, and the first serious buyer offers $8.8 million, you don’t see an opening for a conversation. You see a personal insult. You see a $840,000 theft. You walk away from a deal that might have been the best exit you’ll ever get because you fell in love with a number that was manufactured for your comfort rather than for the market’s reality.

3. The Weight of Normalized Earnings

How this actually works, when done with integrity, is an exercise in stripping away the ego. To find a real range, you have to “normalize” the earnings. This isn’t just basic accounting; it’s an archaeological dig into the owner’s lifestyle.

We start by looking at the historical EBITDA and then we begin the subtractions. We find the owner’s personal aircraft hangar fees that were never charged. We find the “consulting fees” paid to a brother-in-law who hasn’t been on the airfield since 2019.

We look at the fuel volume and break it down by category-contract fuel, retail, and base tenants. We test the margins. Then, we look at the leasehold position. If the airport authority only gave you a twenty-year lease and you’ve used twelve of them, the “value” of your hangars is evaporating every single day.

When you do this work, you don’t get one number. You get a map of possibilities. You get

FBO Valuations

that show you exactly where a buyer is going to push back. A buyer isn’t going to look at your $9.64 million and say “Okay.” They are going to look at the three years of remaining life on your fuel farm tanks and subtract the replacement cost from your “precise” number.

4. The Range is a Defensive Weapon

The industry often blames “imprecise advice” for deal fatigue. They say that if advisors were better at their jobs, there would be less friction. I think the opposite is true. The friction is where the truth lives.

A range of value-say, $8.5 million to $10 million-is a defensive weapon for the seller. It tells the seller: “In this scenario, where you retain the main turbine tenant, you are worth the top end. In the scenario where the airport increases your ground rent next year, you are worth the bottom end.”

When the owner understands the range, they understand the levers. They don’t just wait for a check; they start working to lock in that turbine tenant for another five years. They realize that the “assumptions” are actually the instructions for the business.

But give that same owner a single number, and the assumptions are forgotten within forty-eight hours. The number becomes a fixed star, and when the star doesn’t match the ground, they blame the map.

5. The Trap of the Confident Answer

Certainty is priced higher than truth because certainty requires no effort from the recipient. To understand a range, the owner has to think. They have to weigh probabilities. They have to sit with the discomfort of the unknown. To accept a single number, the owner only has to believe.

Advisory markets are shaped by this preference. The advisor who provides the single, confident number often wins the engagement over the advisor who provides the nuanced, honest range. We reward the person who lies to us with the most confidence.

This is a recurring theme in my own life-I’ve often been the person providing the range, watching the client’s eyes glaze over as I explain the “why,” only to see them hire the guy who just shouted a bigger number with no “ifs.”

6. The Decay of the Leasehold

Let’s talk about the hangar as a system of decay. An FBO owner often views a hangar as a permanent asset. It’s a building. It’s made of steel. But in the context of an airport lease, a hangar is actually a melting ice cube.

If the ground lease expires in fifteen years, that hangar has exactly 180 months of utility left. Every month that passes, the value of that “asset” drops. If you aren’t factoring the reversionary interest of the airport into your valuation, you aren’t doing math; you’re writing fiction. Precise fiction, maybe, but fiction nonetheless.

The “single number” advisors often use a flat multiple. They say, “FBOs are trading at 7x or 8x.” They apply that multiple to the normalized earnings and call it a day. But a 7x multiple on an FBO with 40 years left on the lease is a completely different animal than a 7x multiple on an FBO with 9 years left. The “range” forces you to confront the expiration date. The “number” hides it in the decimals.

7. The Cost of Being Right Too Early

The ultimate irony of the precise valuation is that it is almost always “right” for exactly one day: the day it was written. By the time the business hits the market, the price of Jet-A has shifted, a pilot has retired, or a global pandemic has grounded the fleet.

If you cling to a number from six months ago, you are anchoring yourself to a ghost. I’ve seen deals fall apart over a 2% difference in price-not because the 2% mattered to the seller’s retirement, but because the 2% represented a “failure” to hit the precise number they were promised by a salesman disguised as an appraiser.

We have to stop treating business valuation like a physics problem where there is one correct answer at the back of the book. It is a negotiation. It is a psychological battle. It is a game of probability.

If you want to sell your FBO, stop looking for the person who will give you the “best” number. Look for the person who will give you the most uncomfortable range and then explain exactly what you have to do to stay at the top of it. Truth is messy, it’s wide, and it rarely ends in .00. But truth is the only thing that actually clears the escrow account.

I’m going to try to go to bed again. Maybe this time, the decimals will stay in the spreadsheet where they belong, and I can just think about the range of hours I might actually sleep. It’s probably somewhere between four and six. I’ll tell my alarm clock it’s exactly 5.23. It’ll feel better that way.