How much is your relationship with your brother actually worth in cold, hard cash, and at what specific dollar amount do you decide you would rather be a stranger than a business partner?
This is the question that sits under the table at every second-generation family business meeting, but it is the one no one wants to ask out loud because the answer is usually terrifying. In the world of aviation, where the margins are measured in pennies and the capital equipment is measured in millions, this question doesn’t just sit there-it vibrates like a turbine at full throttle.
“
The Thanksgiving Theater
Thanksgiving is often the theater where these tensions finally find a script. Imagine the scene: the pecan pie is half-gone, the coffee is cooling, and Laura, who lives in Denver and works in digital marketing, looks across the table at her brother, Tom.
Tom has spent the last at the airport because a Gulfstream blew a tire on Runway 14 and the line crew is short-handed. Tom smells faintly of Jet-A and cold sweat. Laura, who owns forty percent of the FBO their father built from a single hangar and a dream, puts her fork down and asks why the business that sells fuel for eight dollars a gallon only sent her a check for $11,000 last year.
Tom feels a vein in his neck start to throb. He thinks about the $42,000 tug he had to buy in July because the old one finally gave up the ghost. He thinks about the hangar insurance premiums that jumped twenty-one percent because of the hurricane season down south, even though they are three states away.
The disconnect between top-line fuel prices and the complex ledger of wholesale costs, taxes, and flowage fees.
He thinks about the fact that he hasn’t taken a Saturday off since . He tries to explain that the “eight dollars a gallon” she sees on the sign isn’t profit, but a complex ledger of wholesale costs, taxes, flowage fees, and labor. He tries to tell her about the new fuel farm requirements. Their mother, sensing the atmospheric pressure drop, begins clearing the plates very slowly. Silence follows.
The Structural Prison
The core frustration here isn’t that Laura is greedy or that Tom is a martyr. The problem is structural. A minority stake in a private, family-owned aviation business is a peculiar kind of prison. It has value on a balance sheet, but it has no liquidity in the real world.
Laura cannot take her forty percent to a bank and sell it to a stranger. No sane investor wants to buy a minority position in a small-town FBO where the majority owner is the brother who also happens to be the guy driving the fuel truck and making all the spending decisions. Because there is no external market for her shares, Laura has no exit.
In the tight-knit world of independent FBOs, three out of every four sibling-led boards are currently one bad quarter away from a lawsuit they can’t afford to win. We often frame these disputes as a battle between greed and sentiment, or between the “hard-working operator” and the “spoiled passenger.” But that is a lazy categorization.
The passenger is often just a person who has been handed a pile of chips they aren’t allowed to cash in. They are watching their net worth be reinvested into asphalt and hangars while they struggle to pay a mortgage in a city where the cost of living doesn’t care about their brother’s new tug. The operator, meanwhile, feels like they are being audited by a ghost who doesn’t understand that the business is a living, breathing entity that requires constant feeding. They wait.
The disconnect between the “ramp sibling” and the “dividend sibling” is almost always a failure of valuation and a misunderstanding of what ownership actually means in a private company. To Tom, the FBO is a legacy, a job, and a lifestyle. To Laura, it is an underperforming asset. Neither of them is wrong, but they are speaking two different languages.
When Tom buys a new piece of ground equipment, he sees it as a necessary investment in safety and efficiency. When Laura sees that same line item on the year-end report, she sees a family vacation that just vanished into a set of hydraulic cylinders. A rusted fuel nozzle represents the decay of familial trust.
Most people try to solve this with better communication or more frequent family meetings. They hire “family business consultants” who talk about boundaries and mission statements. But you cannot communicate your way out of a liquidity trap. If Laura wants to buy a house or put her kids through college, a mission statement isn’t going to help her.
She needs the cash that is currently tied up in the FBO’s underground storage tanks. If the business doesn’t have the cash to buy her out, and she can’t sell her shares to a third party, the resentment will continue to grow until it poisons the Sunday dinners. This is the tax of the “inherited business.”
The Binary Choice
We often see owners try to bridge this gap by increasing the dividend beyond what the business can comfortably afford. This is like trying to fix a plane’s weight-and-balance issue by throwing the flight manual out the window. It works for a little while, but eventually, the lack of capital reinvestment catches up.
The hangars start to leak. The fuel trucks start to fail. The FBO’s reputation slips, and the value of the business-the very thing they are fighting over-begins to crater. In an attempt to keep the peace, they destroy the prize.
The reality of the aviation M&A market is that consolidators and private equity groups are not looking for 40% stakes. They want the whole thing. They want the lease, the fuel flowage rights, and the control. This creates a binary choice for the siblings: either they stay in the trap together, or they find a way to bring the entire entity to market.
Many families resist this because they feel like they are “selling out” their father’s legacy. But legacy is a heavy thing to carry when you’re already struggling to stay airborne. Sometimes, the most respectful thing you can do for a legacy is to realize its value and allow the next generation to pursue their own paths.
When a family reaches this crossroads, the complexity of the sale process becomes the new battlefield. Tom might think the business is worth $10 million because he knows every crack in the apron. Laura might think it’s worth $20 million because she read an article about FBO multiples in a trade magazine.
This is where professional intervention becomes a necessity rather than a luxury. You need a process that strips away the emotion and replaces it with data. A firm like
provides the bridge between the sibling who is counting the fuel gallons and the one who is counting the days until they can retire.
Status Masquerading as Finance
I once watched a man lose his temper in a parking lot because someone “stole” his spot, even though there were twenty other spots available further down the row. It wasn’t about the walking distance; it was about the perceived disrespect. Family business arguments are exactly like that.
Laura doesn’t actually care about the cost of the tug. She cares that she wasn’t consulted, or she cares that her brother’s title comes with a salary she’ll never see. Tom doesn’t care about the $11,000 dividend; he cares that he’s doing all the work while Laura reaps the benefit of their father’s sweat. It’s a game of status masquerading as a game of finance.
The competitive sale process changes this dynamic entirely. When you bring six to eight qualified buyers to the table under NDA, you aren’t just looking for a check; you are looking for a baseline. Suddenly, the siblings aren’t arguing with each other; they are looking at real offers from the outside world.
This often has a clarifying effect. Sometimes, seeing the actual market value of the FBO makes the “operator” realize that they could have a much easier life as a consultant or a retiree. Sometimes, it makes the “passenger” realize that the business isn’t the gold mine they thought it was. In either case, the mystery is gone.
The transition from a family-run operation to a professionally managed one is often painful, but it is rarely as painful as a decade of litigation or thirty years of silent Thanksgivings. The aviation industry is changing rapidly.
The days of the “mom and pop” FBO surviving on handshake deals and a single hangar are dwindling. Compliance costs are rising, and the infrastructure requirements of the next generation of aircraft-electric propulsion, sustainable aviation fuel-are going to require capital that most family businesses simply don’t have sitting in a savings account.
The Bunk Bed Ledger
If you are the sibling on the ramp, you have to ask yourself if you want to spend the next being an owner or being an employee of your sister’s resentment. If you are the sibling in Denver, you have to ask if you want to be a partner or a creditor. Neither role is particularly fun when the person on the other side of the ledger is someone you used to share a bunk bed with.
🚜
A $42,000 tug moves a jet across the asphalt, but it cannot move the heavy weight of a sibling’s resentment.
This isn’t just about aviation; it’s about the nature of illiquid assets and the human heart. We like to think we are rational actors, but we are mostly just children in larger suits, still fighting over who got the bigger piece of pie. In an FBO, the pie is just more expensive. The only way to ensure everyone gets their fair share is to put the pie on the scale and let the world tell you what it’s worth.
The exit isn’t just a financial transaction. It is a release valve. It allows Tom to stop being a “manager” and start being a brother again. It allows Laura to stop being a “shareholder” and start being a sister. The business served the first generation by building wealth; it serves the second generation by providing the freedom to go their separate ways. To hold on past the point of utility is not an act of loyalty; it is an act of stubbornness that eventually leads to a crash.
When the sale finally closes, and the funds are wired, and the keys are handed over to the new corporate owner, something strange happens. The tension that has existed for years usually evaporates in a matter of days. The arguments about fuel margins and tugs and hangar roofs become irrelevant.
The siblings find they have nothing left to fight about, which means they finally have the space to talk about something else. Like their kids. Or the weather. Or the memory of their father, who probably would have wanted them to be friends more than he wanted them to own a fuel farm. The price of peace is often the sale of the asset, and in the end, it is usually a bargain.