Engagement playbooks across margin expansion, working capital release, valuation defense, lender restructuring, M&A diligence, and purchase price allocation — drawn from 13+ years of work at PwC, BDO, and a leading global accounting advisory firm. Anonymized by design.
B2B services firm in the mid-single-digit-millions revenue range. Blended P&L showed a respectable margin headline, but management couldn't answer which clients or service lines were actually profitable.
Built true client-level P&Ls with proper indirect cost allocation — partner time, overhead, infrastructure. The bottom 30% of accounts were unprofitable at the contribution-margin level once costs were honestly assigned. Repriced or exited those clients on a structured timeline.
Net margin expanded ~9 percentage points in under a year. Zero revenue attrition from the repricing wave.
Mid-market PE-backed services platform. DSO running at more than twice net terms — a meaningful share of revenue trapped in receivables and constraining the platform's M&A capacity.
Built collections discipline: aging cadence, automated reminders, escalation path for disputes, terms enforcement tied to sales comp. Re-papered the top client contracts to align commercial terms with the working capital reality.
DSO compressed by roughly half in two quarters. Mid-seven-figures of working capital released — funded the next bolt-on without drawing on the revolver.
Mid-market ARR SaaS platform preparing for a transaction. Existing financials reported ARR on a contract-signed basis, commingled services revenue, and had no cohort retention data — the metric stack a sophisticated buyer would tear apart.
Rebuilt the metric stack — true GAAP-aligned ARR, recurring vs. services revenue separated, net retention documented by cohort. Produced the audit-ready data room before the buy-side QoE firm arrived.
Buyer's QoE returned an ARR figure low-single-digit-percent higher than the seller had been internally reporting. Documented net retention defended a multiple expansion the seller couldn't have argued for without the data.
When a PE-backed portfolio company is in soft default on a leverage covenant, the wrong move is to scramble into the lender meeting empty-handed. The right move is to walk in with the documentation already done.
Rebuild the trailing-twelve EBITDA with rigorous, documented normalizations — one-time legal costs, transition expenses, deferred revenue impact, anything else defensible. Categorize add-backs by type and contestability. Produce a forward 12- to 18-month covenant compliance forecast. Lead the lender conversation directly with the numbers, not the narrative.
Covenant holidays. Leverage covenant resets. Refinance avoided entirely. The relationship-damaging conversation prevented.
When a lead investor pushes back on quality of recurring revenue, churn methodology, or gross margin classification, the founder's leverage depends entirely on how fast and how cleanly the rebuild happens. The investor is comparing your numbers to portfolio benchmarks; the question is whether your data can withstand the comparison.
Rebuild the ARR walk with full cohort detail. Defend churn methodology against the alternative methodologies the investor is calibrating against. Reclassify COGS to reveal the true gross margin profile. Bring documentation, not argument.
Founder closes at target valuation. Meaningful dilution from the lead's counter avoided. Cap-table room preserved for the next round.
Post-acquisition accountants frequently book the entire excess of consideration over net assets as goodwill — a placeholder that creates downstream impairment risk, audit scrutiny, and complications for the next transaction. The PPA you have to rework two years later.
Properly identify separately identifiable intangibles — customer relationships (income approach), developed technology (relief from royalty), trade names (relief from royalty), non-compete agreements (with-and-without). Assign defensible finite useful lives. Document the valuation methodology for each, audit-ready.
Goodwill correctly stated, typically materially lower than the placeholder. Identifiable intangibles amortizing over their useful lives. Financial statements that survive the next audit and the next transaction.
Every case study on this page is anonymized by design. Revenue figures appear as ranges, not points. Outcomes are stated as percentages, not specific dollar amounts. Industry profiles are generalized. Timing is described in duration, not by year.
Cases marked Methodology describe the playbook itself — the disciplined approach to a recurring deal-side problem — rather than the mechanics of any single engagement. This is intentional. The most identifiable cases (specific PPA deal values, named valuation rounds, lender restructures with public covenant filings) are described as approaches, not transactions.
StackedCFO LLC is an independent consulting practice and is not a CPA firm. Nothing on this page constitutes legal or tax advice. The case studies do not constitute work product of any current or former employer.
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