The metal teeth of the zipper on the flight bag snagged a loose thread from an old shop rag and Bob Lindqvist pulled too hard and the whole thing jammed. He stood there in the dim light of the T-hangar and he felt that familiar spike of heat in his neck because he liked things to work and this bag was thirty years old and it was finally quitting on him.

He could have spent ten minutes with a pair of needle-nose pliers and a bit of wax to fix it but he just shoved the open end of the bag into the backseat of the Bonanza and he let it sit there like a wide mouth and he went to work on the preflight. It was 5:53 in the morning and the air was still and it smelled like cut grass and low-lead fuel and the cold damp of the tarmac.

The Discipline of the Preflight

Bob did not just look at his airplane but he touched it and he felt the machine through his fingertips. He pulled the laminated checklist from the side pocket and he started at the top like he had done eight thousand times before. He sumped the fuel tanks and he held the clear vial up to the light to look for the tiny beads of water that could stop an engine at three thousand feet and he saw only the clean blue tint of 100LL.

He checked the oil level and he ran his hand along the leading edge of the wing to feel for any nicks or dents and he wiggled the ailerons to make sure they moved without a sound. He did not skip the step about the pitot tube and he did not assume the tires were fine just because they looked round. He lived by the book and he believed that the book was the only thing that kept a man from falling out of the sky and he was right.

An hour later he was back in his office at the FBO and he sat at a desk that was cluttered with stack of fuel invoices and lease agreements and a half-eaten doughnut from the day before. He opened his laptop and he saw an email from a man he had never met and the subject line said Letter of Intent.

Bob looked at that number and he felt a rush of pride that started in his chest and went all the way to his toes. He had built this business from two rusty fuel trucks and a leaky hangar back in 1988 and now someone wanted to give him nearly ten million dollars for it. He did not look at the attachment titled Exhibit B and he did not call his lawyer and he did not wonder how the buyer had come up with that specific figure. He just typed a short reply that said the price looked reasonable and they should talk more.

This is the great mystery of the man who flies. He will not start a Continental engine without checking the oil pressure but he will risk thirty years of equity on a gut feeling and a stranger’s promise. He thinks that because he can navigate a storm or land a heavy plane on a short strip in a crosswind he is also a master of the deal and he is usually wrong.

He is a professional operator but he is an amateur seller and the people on the other side of the screen are professional buyers who do this every single day of the year. They have the charts and the instruments and the radar and Bob is flying into the soup with a broken zipper and a half-open bag and he does not even know the weather is changing.

The Weight of Command

The business of aviation is built on the idea of the PIC which means the Pilot In Command and it is a title that carries a lot of weight. It means the buck stops with you and you are the final authority and you have to make the hard calls when the engine coughs or the ice starts to build. It creates a certain kind of man who is very self-reliant and very proud of his own judgment and that is a good thing when you are at ten thousand feet.

But that same pride becomes a blind spot when it comes to selling a company because the owner thinks he knows what his business is worth just because he knows how much fuel he sold last July. He thinks he can figure out the valuation on the back of an envelope and he assumes the buyer is being honest when they talk about multiples and adjustments.

The Valuation Perspective Gap

The reality of an FBO sale is a lot more like an engine overhaul than a simple hand-shake. You have to take the whole thing apart and you have to look at the cylinders and the valves and the crankcase to see what is actually there. A buyer looks at a business and they do not see the history or the late nights or the way Bob treated his pilots like family.

They see a series of cash flows and they see risks and they see a leasehold position that might expire in 11 years. They use terms like net working capital and they talk about trailing twelve months and they find ways to chip away at that $9.4 million figure until it looks more like $7.2 million by the time the closing date arrives.

If Bob was flying into an unfamiliar airport in the mountains at night he would never try to do it without a current chart and a working GPS and maybe a local pilot in the right seat to help him find the lights. But in the sale of his business he is trying to land in the dark with no lights at all and he thinks he can feel his way down.

He ignores the fact that a proper

Griffin Towers

analysis would tell him exactly where the rocks are and how much fuel he really has in the tanks. He does not want to pay for an advisor because he thinks he can do it himself and he thinks he is saving money but he is actually leaving a fortune on the table.

Levers of Devaluation

The gap between what an owner thinks his business is worth and what a sophisticated buyer will pay is often a wide and jagged canyon. An owner-operator looks at his gross revenue and he thinks about the time he replaced the roof on Hangar 4 and he adds it all up in his head.

But a buyer looks at the fuel margins and they see that the flowage fee to the airport is going up next year and they see that the hangar occupancy is high but the rents are 20% below the market rate. They see the liability of the old fuel farm and they see the cost of the environmental insurance and they use all of these things as levers to move the price down.

Bob spent thirty-three years making sure his pilots were safe and his fuel was clean and his books were mostly straight and he deserved to walk away with every cent of value he had created. But the habits of the stickpit were working against him in the office because he was too used to being the smartest guy in the room and he was too used to trusting his own eyes.

He did not realize that the letter of intent was just a starting point and it was designed to get him to stop talking to other people and it was full of traps that he could not see. He was like a student pilot who thinks he is straight and level because he is looking at the horizon but the horizon is slanted and he is actually in a graveyard spiral.

A lot of these guys think that an advisor is just a middleman who takes a cut and they hate the idea of giving away a percentage of their hard work. They do not see that a good advisor is more like a flight instructor who grabs the yoke before you stall the plane.

They provide the evidence and the data that a buyer cannot argue with and they show exactly why the fuel margins are sustainable and why the leasehold is valuable. They take the emotion out of the room and they replace it with a spreadsheet that has been vetted and checked and double-checked just like a preflight list.

When Bob finally got to the meeting three weeks later he was surprised to find four people sitting across from him in dark suits and they had three binders full of data about his own company. They started asking him about the fuel flow by category and they wanted to know about the amortization of the hangar improvements and Bob felt his face get hot again.

He realized then that he did not have the answers and he realized that the $9.4 million number was already starting to melt away. They were talking about a $410,000 adjustment for the parking lot and a $290,000 credit for the unpaid vacation time of his mechanics. Bob felt like he was in a spin and he did not know which way to kick the rudder.

He thought back to the flight bag with the broken zipper and he realized that he had been lazy because he was tired and he was overconfident. He had assumed that because he knew how to fly he knew how to navigate the world and he was learning a very expensive lesson. The sale of a business is not a victory lap and it is not a reward for years of service but it is a transaction between two parties with very different goals.

The man who built the business is an expert in his field and he knows how to manage a ramp and how to handle a fuel spill and how to keep the city council happy. But those skills are not the same as the skills needed to defend a valuation against a team of analysts who do nothing but buy FBOs. You would not ask a lawyer to fly your plane through a thunderstorm and you should not expect a pilot to handle a multi-million dollar sale without a map. It is about knowing the limits of your own airframe and knowing when you need to call for a tow.

Bob eventually walked out of that meeting and he did not sign the final papers because he finally realized he was out of his depth. He went back to his hangar and he took the flight bag out of the backseat and he sat on a plastic crate and he took out the needle-nose pliers. He worked the thread out of the zipper and he put a little bit of wax on the teeth and he pulled the slider back and forth until it moved as smooth as silk.

He zipped it up and he felt a small sense of relief because he had fixed one thing the right way. Then he picked up the phone and he called a professional to help him fix the other thing. He was still the Pilot In Command but he finally understood that even a captain needs a crew when the weather gets this bad.

He looked out at the runway and he watched a Gulfstream take off into the gray morning and he knew that the next time he sat at his desk he would have a checklist for the business just like he had for the Bonanza. It was the only way to make sure that thirty years of work did not end up as a pile of scrap at the end of the runway.