📬 Bootstrapping: Grow fast, pay yourself, or sleep well?

How PerkinElmer funded two acquisitions with AR

The cheapest M&A financing is the cash you've already earned. Most companies leave 30–40% of it trapped in AR. 

PerkinElmer had 50% of its receivables overdue. After deploying Stuut’s AI agent for AR, that dropped to 15%—and $300m in collections freed up enough cash to fund two acquisitions in just one year. 

Stuut handles the entire AI stack: collections, cash application, disputes, deductions, payments, and credit. So, if you haven’t come across us before, we’re worth knowing about.

See how AR funded PerkinElmer’s M&A →

🚨 Remember you can send me your questions anonymously, and I will help you solve your most difficult CFO problems. Just click the button below to submit a question and you could me featured in next week’s Mailbag:

We’ve got some great topics this week. Here’s what’s on tap:

Now, let’s get into it.

Family Backed COO from the US asked:

We're a $30m bootstrapped, founder-owned business growing at 40%+ CAGR with strong retail partnerships and brand momentum. The founders have never needed outside capital and are philosophically resistant to it. Their default response to working capital discussions is "we'll just earn more money."

The business is deeply seasonal, which means growth spending has to happen before the cash arrives. We're also EBITDA healthy but after-tax there is very little left for growth investment, and the founders are eager to start taking distributions.

Two questions: how do you convince founders who have never needed outside capital to be open to modest debt? And will a growth-stage business like this ever generate distributable cash, or does reinvestment just keep absorbing everything until you decide to stop growing?

This is fundamentally a capital allocation question, and the way to unlock it is to present the choices clearly with numbers. You can have anything, but you cannot have everything.

Let me play back how I would frame it.

You have a profitable, growing business. Great starting point.

First, get clear on your Maintainable Free Cash Flow.

On $30m of sales, what MFCF does the business actually generate after sustaining itself? That number is the pie. Everything else is a conversation about how to slice it.

Then figure out what growth actually costs. What does $1m of incremental sales require in capital, whether that is working capital, CapEx, or marketing investment? And what additional MFCF does that $1m generate? Once you have that, you can calculate how much growth the business can self-fund.

Simple example. If your MFCF rate is 10%, you are generating $3m today. If each $1m of growth costs $250k of investment, you can self-fund $12m of growth, which at your current scale is roughly 40% CAGR. But that means no distributions.

So the choices are:

The viability of option three depends on what you are funding. Working capital and CapEx are balance sheet items and relatively straightforward to debt-finance. Marketing spend and operating losses are harder to get debt funding for.

But before reaching for debt, also ask whether there is anything left to squeeze out of the working capital cycle. The more cash-efficiently you can grow, the more room you create without needing outside capital at all. My recent series on working capital might help.

But to answer your question directly: lay out what is possible with the resources they have and what is not. Put numbers on every scenario. And frame the whole conversation around helping them optimize their distributions, not convincing them to take on debt.

Thanks for the question.

TLDR: Build the MFCF model, show the growth cost per dollar of sales, then present the three choices clearly with numbers. Show them the math and let them choose.

The Restless FD from The Netherlands asked: 

Hello from Europe, Secret CFO. Long-time reader, love the real and unvarnished advice.

I'm 35, Senior Finance Director at a large multi-billion euro corporate, and at a crossroads. My ultimate goal has always been a Group CFO seat, but the things that excite me most (M&A and true entrepreneurship) get harder to find the higher you climb in a large corporate machine.

I've been seriously looking at search funds, effectively micro-private equity where you raise capital to acquire a single business and step in as CEO. It feels like the perfect intersection of my finance background, deal-making, and wanting to run the show.

What is your advice for a corporate FD looking to make this jump? And is the search fund route a brilliant way to skip ahead to running a business, or am I romanticizing a massive gamble?

Restless FD, I have some direct experience here, which I will get to at the end.

Search funds and micro-PE have become a real career path in the US over the last five years, increasingly common even as an MBA exit route from top business schools.

The ecosystem in Europe is less developed, which does not kill the opportunity, but it does mean you will have to work harder to find capital and deal flow than your US counterparts.

The basic model: you raise enough to cover your costs for eighteen months or so, then hunt for a business to buy. Typically something too small for institutional PE but big enough to be worth the effort (say $1-5m EBIT), usually in an unsexy mature industry; metal bashing, cleaning companies, HVAC servicing, etc.

The theory is that aging owner-operators with no succession plan create downward pressure on multiples. Buy right, stabilize, maybe bolt on an acquisition or two, get to institutional PE scale, and pick up some multiple arbitrage on the way out.

Sounds nice.

But now let me slap you with the reality check, because you are definitely romanticizing it.

Searching is a sales job, not a buying job. This is not corporate M&A where people come to you with a deck. You are doing outbound prospecting. Contacting thousands of businesses, hearing back from a few dozen, converting a handful into LOIs, and maybe closing one deal. You have to genuinely enjoy kissing frogs. It’s a sales job.

Capital is harder in Europe. The US model is turbocharged by the SBA loan guarantee scheme, which lets you lever a deal significantly with government-backed debt. I do not know the funding environment in your specific market, but you need to understand roughly how you would fund a deal before you start, not after. Come to the table with those relationships already mapped.

Deal structuring is where the real alpha lives. Earn-outs, asset deals, PropCo/OpCo splits, sale and leasebacks, deferred consideration. Done well, these can dramatically reduce the cash you need to put in and transform the risk/reward profile. This is where my finance background genuinely helped. The counterbalance is keeping it simple enough that an owner who wants a clean check on day one will still do the deal.

Shit gets real with personal guarantees. Assume you will be asked to provide a PG. Depending on deal size and your personal situation, getting it wrong could bankrupt you. I have always treated personal guarantees as a hard ‘no’, which has meant walking away from deals. Be clear on your position before you start, not when you are in the heat of a negotiation.

Operating is spectacularly unglamorous. You will inherit a business full of un-delegatable, unglamorous problems. Fire alarms at midnight. A key person leaving and taking institutional knowledge with them. Kevin in the warehouse retiring and being utterly irreplaceable. Your corporate ego will tell you that you will figure it out. You will, but it will be harder without a big institution behind you, and you’ll just have to hustle your way out of it. This is what your days will look like, so make sure it is actually what you want.

This is the best interview I’ve seen on the reality of a search when it goes well. There is plenty of content around on what happens when it goes badly too.

My personal experience: I ran a small search fund with a partner for a while as a part time thing. We bought a couple of small businesses together, not to run ourselves but to install and incentivize a CEO. My partner was strong on people and sales. I handled ops, deal structuring, and finance. I wrote about one of those deals here; it was actually one of my most read pieces. 

Three years on, we have paid down the seller note, own the business outright with no debt, and it throws off a nice dividend. Every now and then it gives us an operational headache.

Would I do it again? Yes. But I would do a much bigger deal and put in more capital to improve the quality of businesses I could pursue. There’s kind of a fixed cost of hassle and bullshit that comes with owning any business that I’d prefer to amortize over a larger top line.

So, is it a brilliant shortcut or a massive gamble? It is both, depending entirely on how well you execute. Your finance and M&A background is genuinely useful here, more than most people walking into it. You will likely be a lot worse at operating on day one than you think, but…you’ll figure it out.

TLDR: You are romanticizing it, but that does not mean it is wrong for you. The model works. The execution is harder and less glamorous than it looks. 

Bill Haigh from the UK asked: 

One thing that has stood out to me from reading your newsletter, regardless of the topic, is the clarity of thought and written communication. How have you developed this muscle over your career? Any top tips? A Finance Director I once worked with remarked that her career had been built on the ability to construct a well-written email!

Hi Bill, thanks for the question.

I would put a significant amount of my career success, both the CFO career and now the media adventure, down to my ability to communicate clearly. It helped me climb faster, connect confidently with grey hair in boardrooms when I was twenty years younger than everyone else, and in my media business it is not just a useful skill… it is the product.

So where does it come from?

Clear communication comes from clear thinking.

I am constantly testing what I believe, questioning what would need to be true for me to change my mind, refusing to accept anything I cannot explain from first principles.

Being like that is quite exhausting, honestly. It’s not for everyone.

But done relentlessly, it builds a set of robust mental building blocks that you can construct and explain things around. If you look hard enough, almost everything I write is built around ten to twelve core beliefs about finance and life.

And the most powerful tool for developing that? For me, it’s been writing. There is something about the two-dimensional constraint of the written word that forces genuine clarity.

The moment you introduce slides, or even verbal explanation, the constraints disappear and lazy thinking gets a free pass. The burden shifts from the writer to the recipient. And AI is making this worse, not better.

A few things that have helped me specifically:

And the Finance Director you mentioned is right. A well-constructed email is one of the most underrated career assets in finance. It signals how you think, not just what you know.

TLDR: Clear communication comes from clear thinking. Write like you talk, delete ruthlessly, and never try to sound clever.

A few of the biggest stories that every CFO is paying close attention to. This is the section you might not want to see your name in.

Companies are struggling to track AI spend

Cost control for AI spend is a genuinely difficult financial controlling problem. Best case you can track who is spending, and which models, but what they are using those models for? It’s a blackbox and its growing. The challenge is separating good spend from bad spend when the visibility is so poor. This is going to be a hot topic over the next couple of years.

Mastercard names new CFO in reshuffle

Mastercard have appointed a new CFO, stablecoins present an interesting new challenge for one of the most defendable moats there is…

Coca Cola CFO warns on struggling consumers 

Coca Cola’s CFO just said he's spending time figuring out how to stay on the shopping list of people who can't afford their shopping list. Will mean for some interesting PVM variance bridges for Coke in the coming quarter…

ICYMI, here are some of my favorite finance/business social media posts from this week.

Some nice media-craft here from long time SpaceX CFO. He has his work cut-out justifying that reported IPO valuation…

A nice little ‘lead left’ joke here for those that enjoy the genre… (just me then):

Let me know what you thought of today’s Mailbag. Just hit reply… I read every message.

Last weekend’s Playbook is the first installment in a new series on what it means to be a Growth CFO.

In last week’s Boardroom Brief we look at the rise of the industrial-tech CFO.

Disclaimer: I am not your accountant, tax advisor, lawyer, CFO, director, or friend. Well, maybe I’m your friend, but I am not any of those other things. Everything I publish represents my opinions only, not advice. Running the finances for a company is serious business, and you should take the proper advice you need