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The Deal Is Already Wrong: How AI Is Rewriting Due Diligence, QoE Work, and the Economics of Every LBO You Touch
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 21 2026
Pages: 266
Weight: 0.72
Height: 0.66 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
At 11:04 p.m. on a Tuesday, a chief financial officer opened an email she was not ready for.
The attachment was 37 pages. Her buyer's preliminary quality of earnings analysis. Her own sell-side report had taken four people six weeks to produce. This one had taken days, and it had already mapped five years of transaction-level general ledger data against every item on her add-back schedule.
One item was flagged red. A system implementation cost she had characterized as non-recurring. The same vendor had appeared in professional fees every year for four years, under four different names, inside a general ledger of 60,000 lines.
She had not known. Her own team had not known. The buyer's analysis found it in 40 seconds.
She had eleven weeks until close and 49 hours until the management interview.
This is a book about what happens when the cost of financial analysis collapses.
Not artificial intelligence as a concept. The specific mechanics of due diligence, quality of earnings work, and the leveraged buyout, and what happens to the fee structure, the staffing pyramid, and the information asymmetry built on top of them.
The labor cost of financial analysis was the floor underneath the advisory fee. That floor is gone.
What you get that no other book on this subject offers:
The Diligence Stack. Five layers. Ingestion, Pattern, Judgment, Narrative, Defensibility. Every task belongs to exactly one, and knowing which one determines staffing, fee, timeline, and liability.
The prior-period recurrence test, in full. The mechanic that catches a recurring cost dressed as a one-time add-back, including the false positive mode most practitioners learn about too late.
Dirty EBITDA, in three named forms. The aggressive add-back, the manipulated cost base, and the accounting treatment choice, each with the documentation standard that defends it.
The credibility reserve. A finite, non-transferable resource that decides negotiations, tracked and spent on the page rather than described in the abstract.
Anticipatory disclosure. The sell-side protocol that removes the finding before the buyer arrives, and the rule about unsupported add-backs that most sellers learn too late.
The simulated buy-side review. Six preparation steps replacing conventional rehearsal, because machine-generated questions differ in kind from the ones a person would think to ask.
Sector ambush maps. Software, healthcare, industrials, consumer, and financial services. What gets found first in each, and where expert judgment stops the machine cold.
The walk-away protocol. Five documented steps separating a broken investment thesis from a negotiable valuation. The correct refusal is an output of a working process, not a failure of one.
Covenant headroom against real history. Why your credit agreement definition and your management reporting definition disagree, and how to see a breach two months early.
Written for the person in the room. The buy-side associate whose job description is shifting. The sell-side CFO facing a buyer who already knows what the data room says. The advisory firm partner watching a realization rate compress for eight straight quarters. The lender running independent analysis for the first time.
Written by a CPA and fractional CFO with more than a decade on over a hundred transactions and more than two billion dollars in capital markets activity.
The deal table in 2030 will have fewer people at it.
The deal is already wrong if you have not started paying attention. The deal is already right if you have.
Read this book as if your next management interview is in 48 hours. For someone reading this, it probably is.
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