I once sat across from a man who had built a three-generation legacy in general aviation, and I told him his tax returns were “the source of truth.” I was twenty-four, my suit felt like it belonged to an older, more successful version of myself, and I genuinely believed that because a document was filed with the federal government, it represented the objective reality of a business.

I was wrong. I was dangerously, expensively wrong. I didn’t realize back then that a tax return isn’t a biography; it’s a defense. It is a carefully constructed narrative designed to make a thriving, profitable Fixed Base Operation (FBO) look like a humble, barely-breathing entity that the IRS should probably just leave alone.

By telling that owner his tax returns were the “truth,” I inadvertently validated a fiction that would eventually cost him nearly $900,000 in his final sale price. I didn’t know then how to look past the camouflage. I didn’t understand that for thirty years, his accountant hadn’t been building a business-he had been building a bunker.

Ray Delacourt’s Legacy Bunker

Ray Delacourt is currently sitting in a similar bunker. He’s 67, and the back office of his FBO still smells like a mix of Jet-A, old upholstery, and the metallic tang of the shop floor. Under the glass top of his desk, there is a Phillips 66 calendar from 1994, preserved like a relic.

But on top of that glass sits a very modern problem: a printed spreadsheet titled “Adjustments Request v2.” It was sent by a buyer’s analyst-a kid who probably wasn’t alive when Ray first broke ground on Hangar 4-and it contains forty-one rows of questions that Ray cannot answer.

Row 9 is the one currently making Ray’s eye twitch. It asks why the FBO pays $6,000 a month to an entity called “DLC Holdings.” Ray knows DLC Holdings. He is DLC Holdings. He set it up in 2003 because his accountant, a man named Miller who retired to Scottsdale five years ago, said it was a “smart way to move money.”

Ray hasn’t thought about it since. It was just a line item, a way to shift rent from his left pocket to his right pocket while lowering the FBO’s taxable income.

But to the buyer, that $6,000 is a red flag. Is it market rent? Is it a hidden profit center? Is it an obligation the buyer has to assume? Ray’s books were built to please a tax auditor, not to entice a buyer. And now, the “cheap” accounting he relied on for decades has become the most expensive debt on his balance sheet.

The central tragedy of the private FBO world is that owners often run two parallel realities: the business as lived and the business as filed. For years, the gap between these two realities is invisible. It’s a series of small, justifiable choices.

You buy the GMC Sierra through the company because you “might” use it to haul a parts crate once a quarter. You put your spouse on the payroll for $54,000 a year to handle “administrative consulting,” which mostly involves her organizing the holiday party and occasionally telling you to clean your desk. You expense a $120,000 roof repair in a single year rather than capitalizing it over fifteen because you had a high-profit year and you wanted to “wipe it out” before the IRS saw it.

Every one of these moves is a tactical victory in the war against taxes. But in the theater of a sale, they are tactical blunders.

The Erosion of Trust

When a sophisticated buyer looks at an FBO, they aren’t looking at what you paid in taxes. They are looking for “Normalized EBITDA”-a version of your earnings that has been stripped of your personal life, your one-time mistakes, and your creative accounting.

The problem is that most owners can’t define their normalized EBITDA without calling the CPA who built the maze. And if that CPA is focused on compliance rather than transaction-readiness, the owner is going to be negotiating against his own paperwork.

I just accidentally closed eighteen browser tabs while trying to find the specific fuel flowage fee benchmarks for Ray’s region, and that sudden, jarring loss of a coherent narrative is exactly what a buyer feels when they look at a messy P&L.

When the data disappears or doesn’t make sense, the “trust” in the deal evaporates. If a buyer has to spend forty hours trying to figure out why the “Miscellaneous Maintenance” line spiked by $18,420 in 2022, they aren’t going to give you the benefit of the doubt. They are going to assume the worst. They are going to assume that the spike is a recurring cost you’re trying to hide, or a symptom of a deeper, systemic failure in the facility.

This is where the expertise of firms like Griffin Towers becomes critical. They don’t just look at the bottom line of a tax return and apply a “rule of thumb” multiple.

They value an FBO the way a buyer underwrites it. They look at each revenue stream individually-fuel volume, hangar occupancy, leasehold terms-and they normalize the expenses to show what the business actually earns. They find the $9,840 “one-time” environmental repair buried in the “Fuel Farm Expense” line and move it back to the profit column where it belongs.

They reconcile the related-party rents to market rates so the owner knows exactly where they stand before the “Adjustments Request” arrives from a stranger. Ray is struggling because he treats his books like a private diary. But once you decide to sell, your books are a public prospectus.

The Cost of Flexibility

The analyst’s spreadsheet is currently sitting at Row 22: “Staff Training – $4,200.” Ray knows that was actually the private pilot ground school he paid for his grandson. It was a nice thing to do. He expensed it as staff training because, well, the grandson helped out on the ramp during the summer.

To Ray, it’s a $4,200 gesture of love. To the analyst, it’s a lack of financial discipline that suggests the rest of the numbers might be equally “flexible.”

Most owners assume their accountant is “handling it.” And they are-they are handling the IRS. But they aren’t handling the exit. They aren’t thinking about how a remaining ground-lease term of eighteen years affects the risk profile of the cash flow.

I remember talking to Antonio H., a guy who has tasted enough “quality” data to know when something is sour. He’s the kind of guy who can smell a manipulated margin from three hangars away.

“

Every time they save you a nickel on taxes, they’re stealing a dollar from your retirement.

– Antonio H.

The pickup truck parked in the tax return is a roadblock on the runway to a valuation.

If you’re looking at your financial statements and you can’t immediately see the “normalized” version of your business, you aren’t ready to sell. You’re ready to defend an audit, perhaps, but you aren’t ready to capture the true value of what you’ve built.

The bridge between those two worlds is built on data, not stories. Ray can tell the analyst all day long that the FBO “really” makes half a million more than the taxes show, but without a clear trail of adjustments, that half-million is just a ghost.

The irony is that Ray has a great business. His fuel margins have been steady at 31% for five years. His hangar occupancy is at 98%. He has a loyal staff and a prime location. But all of that is being overshadowed by forty-one rows of accounting “strategies” that have outlived their usefulness.

The bill for the cheap accounting has finally arrived. It didn’t come in an envelope from the CPA; it came as a lower offer from the buyer. It came as a “haircut” on the multiple. It came as a three-month delay in due diligence while Ray tries to find receipts from 2021 to prove that a specific expense was a one-time event.

Who are your books actually for? If the answer is “the government,” you are effectively giving the IRS a vote in your eventual sale price. You are letting a compliance mindset dictate your enterprise value.

Transitioning from “tax-first” to “value-first” isn’t just about changing how you categorize a pickup truck or a spouse’s salary. It’s about recognizing that your financial statements are a product. And like any product, they need to be designed for the person who is eventually going to buy them.

Ray Delacourt might still get his deal. But he’s going to have to work twice as hard to prove he’s worth what he thinks he’s worth. He’s going to have to dismantle the bunker he spent thirty years building, brick by brick, while a buyer watches and wonders what else is hidden in the walls.

Clean books were never about the IRS. They were about the day you decided to stop being an operator and start being a seller. Don’t wait until the analyst is sitting in your office to realize that the “truth” you’ve been filing every April is the very thing standing in your way.