The sheepskin flight jacket hangs on a brass hook behind the door of the pilot lounge. It is heavy, smelling of old leather and 100LL aviation fuel. The cuffs are frayed from years of gripping the throttles of a King Air.

For forty years, that jacket was the uniform of the man who built this FBO from a single fuel truck and a corrugated metal shed into a three-hangar operation with a steady flow of corporate jets. Now, the jacket hangs as a silent witness to a meeting that should have happened five years ago.

The Table of Unspoken Debts

Michael sits at the end of the long conference table. He is the one who stayed. He is the one who knows the names of every tenant and the specific quirks of the fuel farm’s pumping system. He wears a polo shirt with the company logo.

Across from him is Teresa, who moved to Denver two decades ago and became a successful litigation consultant. She has her phone face down on the table, and next to it is a slip of paper with her attorney’s direct line.

Between them sits their mother, who looks at the flight jacket more than she looks at her children. She wants to keep the business because as long as the trucks are moving, her husband isn’t truly gone.

Michael has printouts spread across the table. They show fuel volumes and hangar occupancy rates. He has been running the line service for fifteen years, assuming that his sweat equity was a form of payment toward his eventual ownership.

Teresa has a different set of numbers in her head. She sees the FBO as an asset that represents her father’s life work, and she believes that asset is worth a specific, high number-one that would allow her to pay off her mortgage and secure her children’s tuition.

The meeting stalls because nobody will say a number out loud. If the number is too low, it feels like an insult to the forty years he spent working on Saturdays. If the number is too high, it feels like a betrayal of the brother who stayed behind to keep the lights on.

The Danger of Family Kindness

Families often believe that by keeping the transition of an FBO “in the family,” they are protecting themselves from the cold, clinical nature of the open market. They believe that a private negotiation is a kindness.

In reality, it is a delay tactic that increases the eventual cost. Without an objective, buyer-based view of value, every sibling negotiates from a private, internal baseline they never disclose. The unspoken gap between those numbers creates more friction than any market-based price ever could.

A Fixed Base Operation is a complex financial organism. It is not valued like a retail store or a software company. It is a marriage of real estate, service margins, and government-granted leaseholds.

Beyond Cash Flow

Most independent owners understand their business through the lens of cash flow-how much is left in the bank at the end of the month after the fuel bill and the payroll are paid. But a sophisticated buyer looks at the economics of each revenue line individually.

They look at the Jet-A margin versus the Avgas volume. They look at the “reversionary” clauses in the airport ground lease, which dictate when the hangars built with family money actually become the property of the airport sponsor.

The Castellanos are stuck because they are arguing about “value” without defining what that word means in a transactional sense. Michael says, “Dad always said it was worth more than people think.” When he says that, the meeting is effectively over.

Lessons from the Brick Wall

I learned this lesson the hard way in my own life, though in a very different industry. As a graffiti removal specialist, I spent years thinking that the value of my work was the cost of the chemicals and the hours spent on a ladder.

I once quoted a job for a man who owned a historic brick building that had been in his family for three generations. I gave him a price based on my standard square-footage rate. I was wrong.

I didn’t realize that to him, those bricks weren’t just masonry; they were a physical manifestation of his heritage. By treating the job as a commodity transaction, I offended him. I realized then that when you fail to acknowledge the emotional weight of an asset, the numbers you propose will always feel like an attack. I had to learn to separate the utility of the service from the sentiment of the owner.

In the world of general aviation, this separation is even more critical. An FBO owner who has spent thirty years on the ramp has a different relationship with the fuel farm than an M&A analyst does.

The owner sees the winter nights he spent thawing out a tug. The analyst sees a depreciating asset with a specific replacement cost. To bridge this gap, a family needs more than a CPA’s report or a “rule of thumb” multiple.

They need a defensible analysis that explains why the business is worth a certain amount to a third party. This is where the work of

Griffin Towers

becomes essential for second-generation owners.

The Clarity of Market Evidence

Griffin Towers provides a transaction-oriented market valuation that doesn’t rely on generic EBITDA multiples. They break down the revenue lines-fuel, hangar, occupancy-and reconcile them against current market evidence and relevant transactions.

This kind of clarity is the only thing that can break the stalemate in a room like the Castellanos’ pilot lounge. It moves the conversation away from “what Dad said” and toward what the market will actually support.

The tension in the room remains thick. Teresa wants her share in cash. Michael wants to keep his job and his legacy. Their mother wants peace. Without a professional valuation, Michael assumes he should get a discount for his years of service, and Teresa assumes there is a hidden mountain of cash.

The Decaying Clock of the Ground Lease

The technical reality of an FBO valuation often surprises families. For example, if the ground lease at the airport only has 12 years remaining, the value of the hangars is decaying every single day.

A buyer will not pay for 30 years of income if the airport can take the land back in a decade. Conversely, if the FBO has a dominant market share at a growing regional airport, the fuel flowage might be worth significantly more than the family realizes.

When a family refuses to put a number on a shared asset, they aren’t being polite. They are being dangerous. They are allowing resentment to grow in the dark.

Michael looks at the printouts again. He knows that if he has to buy Teresa out at her “dream number,” the debt service will kill the company. If Teresa accepts Michael’s “sweat equity” number, she will feel cheated for the rest of her life.

Succession turns financial questions into moral ones. It forces children to decide what their father’s hard work was actually worth in dollars and cents. This is a brutal process, but it is a necessary one. It reflects the reality of the business as it exists today, stripped of the memories and the sheepskin jackets.

The Castellanos eventually had to face this. They brought in an outside advisor to conduct a full valuation. The report didn’t make everyone happy-valuations rarely do-but it gave them a common language.

It showed them that the business was worth $4,240,000 based on current fuel margins and the remaining lease term. It wasn’t the $6 million Teresa had hoped for, but it was more than the $2 million Michael thought he could afford.

With a defensible number on the table, they could finally stop arguing about their father’s legacy and start talking about their own future. Michael found a partner to help with the buyout. Teresa got a check that was fair, if not transformative. Their mother kept her office in the back, and the jacket stayed on the hook.

I have come to believe that professional valuation ensures that when a family sits down for Thanksgiving dinner, they aren’t mentally calculating the cost of the turkey against the value of a fuel truck.

The sheepskin jacket weighs more when the price is too light for a son’s memory.

Business owners often wait until they are ready to sell to ask what their company is worth. For a family-owned FBO, that is usually too late. The valuation should be the foundation of the succession plan, not the final chapter.

It provides the boundary lines for the negotiation. It allows the brother on the line service to understand the reality of the debt he is taking on, and it allows the sister in Denver to see the business as a professional entity rather than a childhood memory.

In the end, the number doesn’t just represent the cash flow. It represents the freedom to move forward. The Castellanos still meet in that pilot lounge, but the slips of paper with attorneys’ phone numbers are gone.

They have a shared understanding of what the family built, and more importantly, they have a shared understanding of what it is worth today. That clarity is worth more than any fuel margin. It is the only thing that can keep a family whole when the person who built the business is no longer there to hold the pieces together.