The office smells of stale coffee and the sharp, metallic tang of an old industrial stapler. I can feel the small, hollow ache in my right thumb where I finally dug out a mahogany splinter an hour ago. The wood was dry and brittle, a reminder that the handrails in this building have seen better decades.

I look at the red mark it left and think about how the smallest intrusion can change the way you hold a pen, or a steering wheel, or a conversation. It’s often the things we barely notice that dictate the pressure we apply to everything else.

The Monument on the Wall

Ken sits across from me, surrounded by the silence of a Sunday afternoon at the airport. On the wall behind him is a twelve-month bar chart, printed on glossy paper and taped up with a slight tilt. Eleven of the bars are relatively uniform, like a suburban fence line.

But the eighth bar, labeled August 2022, is a skyscraper. It sits a full thirty percent higher than its neighbors. It is a monument to a moment in time when the world was perfectly aligned for Ken’s FBO.

August 2022 was the month of the $740,000 top line. Fuel prices were on a vertical climb, and because Ken had bought his inventory well, his margins were wider than the wingspan of a Gulfstream. On top of the organic traffic, a major university football team’s charter came through twice-once for a pre-season camp and once for an away game. Each turn was massive, thousands of gallons of Jet-A pumped in a matter of hours, with landing fees and ramp fees stacked on top.

Ken has looked at that bar every week for three years. In his mind, that isn’t an anomaly. It is the proof of what the business is capable of. When he talks to his wife about retirement, or when he talks to his lead mechanic about shop upgrades, he isn’t looking at the average of the other eleven months.

He is looking at August. He has convinced himself that August is the true North, and every month that has followed is simply a temporary deviation from that excellence.

This is the psychological anchor that sinks more deals than almost any other factor in the aviation world. We are wired to remember the peaks. We tell ourselves stories where the most extreme success is the baseline, and anything less is just bad luck or a “down year.”

Lessons from the Test Track

In my years coordinating car crash tests, I saw this same phenomenon play out in a different theater. Miles Z., a veteran of the test tracks, used to talk about the “Hero Run.”

Every once in a while, you’d launch a sedan into a concrete barrier at 35 miles per hour, and for reasons no one could quite explain-a slight variation in the weld, a specific temperature in the laboratory, a freak alignment of the crumple zones-the dummy would come out with “Perfect” scores. The data would suggest that the car was the safest vehicle ever built.

“The Hero Run is a lie. If you build your safety system for the one-in-a-thousand event, you’re going to kill people in the other nine hundred and ninety-nine.”

– Miles Z., Test Track Veteran

The engineers would want to use that data for the marketing brochures. They’d want to calibrate all future safety systems based on that one Hero Run. But Miles would shake his head, pull the splintered plastic out of his glove, and point to the forty-nine other tests where the dummy’s head hit the B-pillar with enough force to liquefy a watermelon.

Managing a business against your best month is the economic equivalent of calibrating for the Hero Run. You begin to staff for the peak. You price your services based on the margin you once held during a global fuel crisis. You make promises to your bank based on a football charter that may never return to your zip code.

When a broker or an advisor eventually walks into the office, the friction begins. Ken tells the broker that the business is “doing about eight or nine million a year” because he’s mentally annualizing that August. The broker looks at the trailing twelve months, sees the reality of the median, and writes down a much lower number. Ken sees this as an insult. He feels like the broker is telling him his best work didn’t happen.

The Institutional Lens

But a buyer-especially the institutional ones, the private equity platforms, and the strategic consolidators-doesn’t buy your memories. They buy your recurring cash flow. They look at August 2022, and within sixty minutes of opening the books, they have highlighted it in red.

They call it “non-recurring.” They strip it out. To them, those football charters are “lumpy” revenue, and that fuel margin spike is a “windfall.”

This is why specialized FBO Valuations are so jarring for owners who have lived through a peak. A true valuation isn’t just a multiple of whatever number you’re proudest of; it’s a process of normalization.

It’s about taking the emotion out of that August bar and asking: “If we sold this business to a stranger tomorrow, what could they bank on next year?”

I watched Ken’s face as the broker explained this. It was like watching someone find out their favorite childhood story was actually a myth. Ken pointed at the chart. “But we did the work,” he said. “The fuel went through the hoses. The checks cleared. How can you say it doesn’t count?”

It’s not that it doesn’t count for the past; it’s that it doesn’t count for the future. The buyer is looking for a predictable stream of income. They are looking at the leasehold position, the hangar occupancy rates that stay steady whether or not a football team shows up, and the base of tenant aircraft that provides the bread and butter of the operation.

They want to see the “boring” months because the boring months are the ones they can rely on to pay the debt service on the acquisition. When you manage toward the anomaly, you also tend to ignore the “tax” that the anomaly hides.

The Price of the Peak

During that $740,000 month, Ken’s crew worked eighty hours of overtime. The fuel truck blew a seal because it was being run harder than it had been in five years. The stress in the office was so high that his best customer service rep nearly quit.

When you normalize the earnings, you have to account for those costs, too. The Hero Run has a price. The danger of the extraordinary month is that it creates a structural optimism that you don’t even realize you have. It’s a self-portrait assembled only from your best angles.

You stop looking for ways to improve the median because you’re too busy waiting for the next peak to arrive. You start thinking, “If we just get one more charter like that, we’ll be back on track,” rather than asking why the base volume has stagnated by 18 months of 4% stagnation.

I remember Miles Z. standing over a wrecked test chassis, looking at a set of sensors that had just recorded a miraculous result. He didn’t celebrate. He started checking the calibration of the equipment. He assumed the “perfect” result was a mistake in the measurement.

That’s a cynical way to live, perhaps, but it’s a very safe way to build a car. And it’s a very smart way to prepare a business for sale. If you want to know what your FBO is really worth, you have to be willing to take a Sharpie to that tall bar on the wall.

You have to be willing to draw a line across the middle of the chart and admit that the space between that line and the peak was a gift, not a guarantee. They walk into the room and say, “Look, August was a freak occurrence. Here is why it happened, here is why it won’t happen next year, and here is why the rest of the business is still a rock-solid investment.”

That kind of honesty builds immediate trust with a buyer. It shows that you aren’t just an operator who got lucky once; you are a manager who understands the mechanics of your own engine.

The Value in the Quiet

It’s hard to let go of the peak. We want our best moments to be our definitions. But in the world of M&A, your definition is your average.

It’s the $400,000 month in the dead of winter when nothing went wrong and the margins were thin but steady. It’s the long-term hangar lease that pays every month like clockwork.

Ken eventually took the chart down. Not because he was ashamed of August, but because he realized he was tired of feeling like every month since then was a failure. He started looking at the hangar occupancy instead. He started looking at his contract fuel agreements.

He started looking at the business the way a buyer would-not as a collection of highlights, but as a system designed to produce a result.

The splinter in my thumb is gone now, but the spot is still tender. It’s a small reminder that things that don’t belong in the body-even small things-eventually have to come out if you want to heal.

The same is true for your P&L. Those one-time wins, those “Hero Runs,” they feel great when they happen. But if you let them stay in the data too long, they start to fester. They distort your reality.

They make you think you’re worth more than the market is willing to pay, and they keep you from seeing the real value you’ve built in the quiet, steady months between the peaks.