When I work on a clock from the late seventeen hundreds I often find things that should not be there and I find little strips of thin leather tucked into the brass teeth or I find a piece of lead weight that was clearly hacked off with a dull knife and a modern repair man might want to pull those out and throw them away because he thinks he is cleaning the machine but if he does that the clock will stop and it will stay stopped.

Those bits of trash are shims and they are the only reason the gears still catch and they tell the story of a cold winter in a drafty house where a man with a steady hand had to fix a wobble and the clock grew around that fix for two hundred years and now the shim is the soul of the movement.

I was thinking about this yesterday when my camera turned on by mistake during a video call and I was hunched over a gear with a magnifying glass and I looked like a man from another century and the people on the call just stared at me until I saw the little red light and I felt a bit naked but it made me realize that we are all just trying to keep the gears turning with whatever we have on hand.

The Anatomy of an “Easy Win”

An airport business is a lot like an old clock and it is full of shims that look like mistakes to someone who only looks at a screen and those shims are usually found in the rent roll. I have seen it happen a dozen times where a buyer hires an associate and the associate stays up late on a Thursday and he scrolls through the data room and he finds what he calls an easy win.

He sees that Hangar 4 and Hangar 5 and all the way through Hangar 11 are leased for four hundred dollars a month while the hangar down the street goes for twelve hundred and he sends a message to his boss and he says we have a massive upside here and we can triple the rent on day one and we will pay for the new fuel truck before the end of the year. He thinks he has found a gold mine but he has actually found the leather strip in the gear teeth and he is about to pull it out.

The Debt Paid in Mud

The next morning the buyer gets on a call with the owner and the owner is a man who has run the FBO for forty years and he has dirt under his fingernails and he knows the name of every dog that has ever walked onto his ramp. The buyer asks about those hangars and he tries to sound smart and he says the rates are way under market and he asks why they have not been raised since the George Bush era.

“Those are the guys who stayed out all night with me in the storm of ninety eight and the wind had ripped the taxiway lights out of the ground and no one could land and we did not have the money for a crew so we just went out there with shovels and we rebuilt the whole line ourselves.”

– The Seller

Nobody charged anybody and I told them their rent would stay where it was as long as I owned the place and that was the deal we made in the mud and it has been the deal ever since.

To the associate this sounds like bad business and he thinks the owner is just soft or he thinks the owner does not understand how money works but the associate is wrong because the owner was not just being nice and he was buying a kind of insurance that you cannot get from a broker.

He was paying a private subsidy to a group of men who became his wall of defense and they are the ones who show up to the airport board meetings and they are the ones who tell the city council that the FBO is the heart of the town and they are the ones who make sure no one else gets a permit to build a competing fuel farm across the field. That low rent was a gift from the seller to his friends and now it is a political problem for the buyer because the buyer wants the cash but he does not want the fight.

Where the Math Hits the Ground

This is where the math of a deal hits the reality of the ground and it is the moment where many acquisitions start to bleed out before they even close. When you buy an aviation business you are not just buying the tanks and the trucks and the leasehold and you are buying a relationship with an airport sponsor and that sponsor has to give consent to the assignment of the lease.

This is the part of the process that kills more deals than price ever will and it is the part that people talk about the least because it is messy and it is human. The airport commission is usually made up of five or seven people who live in the town and they are not looking at your internal rate of return and they do not care about your debt to equity ratio and they care about whether the local pilots are happy and whether the airport stays quiet on Sunday mornings.

If you walk into that meeting and you have already sent out letters telling Bob and his friends that their rent is going up by eight hundred dollars you have just turned your best allies into your loudest enemies. Bob will stand up at the podium and he will tell the commission that the new owners are city slickers who do not care about the history of the field and he will remind them of the storm of ninety eight and he will say that the spirit of the airport is being sold for a buck.

Then the commission will start to ask questions about your balance sheet and they will wonder if you are the right fit for the community. They might not say no to the deal but they can make it so hard that you wish they had said no and they can delay the vote and they can ask for more environmental studies and they can demand a higher percentage of your fuel flowage fees until the profit you thought you found in the rent roll is eaten alive by the friction.

I have learned to look at those low rents as a debt that the buyer has to decide if he wants to pay or if he wants to refinance. You can raise the rent but you have to know what you are giving up when you do it and you are giving up the peace of mind that comes with having a ramp full of people who want you to succeed.

The seller gave these pilots a gift and the buyer is the one who has to take it away and that makes the buyer the villain in a story he did not even write. It is why we spend so much time vetting the people on both sides of the table because a buyer who only sees the math will never survive the first public hearing and a seller who has too many secret deals will never be able to hand over the keys without the whole thing falling apart.

The Hallway Timeline

You have to understand the process of how a lease actually moves from one hand to another to see why this matters so much. Usually there is a clause in the master lease that says the city or the county must approve any new owner and they have thirty or sixty or ninety days to do it and they will ask for a history of your past operations and they will want to see your bank statements.

But the real work happens in the hallways before the meeting and it happens at the diner where the commission members eat lunch. If the word on the field is that the new guy is going to squeeze the locals the commission will hear it before you even sit down and they will treat you like an intruder instead of a partner.

I have seen deals where the buyer was so sure of himself that he did not even talk to the tenants until the week before closing and he thought he was being efficient by keeping things quiet but he was actually building a bomb. The pilots found out through the grapevine and they showed up to the meeting with signs and they brought the local news and the airport manager got scared and he pulled the item from the agenda.

The deal sat in limbo for six months and the buyer lost his interest rate lock and the seller got tired of the drama and the whole thing ended in a lawsuit that nobody won. All of that happened because someone wanted to capture five thousand dollars a month in upside without realizing that the five thousand dollars was the only thing holding the gears together.

The Custodians of the Clock

This is why the work we do is about more than just finding a price and it is about finding the right hands for the clock. We represent sellers who have spent their lives building these social shims and we have to find buyers who understand that you cannot just rip them out and expect the clock to keep ticking.

It is a quiet kind of work and it requires a lot of listening and it requires us to tell buyers the truth even when the truth makes the deal look less shiny on paper. If you are looking for an FBO or an aviation business you have to be ready to deal with the Bobs of the world and you have to be ready to respect the slab that was poured in the rain.

The best buyers are the ones who walk the ramp and they talk to the guys in the hangars and they ask about the storm of ninety eight before they ask about the rent roll. They know that they can raise the rates eventually but they do not do it on day one and they do not do it with a form letter and they do it by building their own history and their own goodwill until they have earned the right to change the deal.

They understand that the social cost of a price hike is often higher than the economic gain and they are willing to wait for the right moment to move the gears.

I still think about that video call and how I looked with my magnifying glass and my old brass gears. It is easy to feel like the world has moved past the era of handshakes and mud and shovels but the aviation world is still tied to the ground in a very literal way.

The hangars are not just buildings and they are the places where people store their dreams and their history and if you try to treat them like just another line on a spreadsheet you will find that the numbers have a way of biting back.

You have to be willing to look at the trash in the gears and realize that it might just be the shim that is keeping the whole world from shaking itself apart and once you see that you can start to build something that lasts.