I spent 13 years on the deal side before I started StackedCFO. In that time I saw one pattern more than any other: a recurring cost, labeled one time, year after year, by people who were not lying so much as declining to ask the question that would have made the lie impossible to sustain.

I never saw anyone stopped for it.

EBITDA Theater is the novel I wrote about that pattern. Eight people find the same finding, from different chairs, at different points, and the book does not pretend that finding it and doing something about it are the same accomplishment.

If you have ever sat in a diligence room and felt the deal's own gravity pulling the room toward a number everyone already wanted, this book is for you.

Available now on Kindle and in paperback.

The AI angle

Every finance and diligence tool built on AI right now is being sold as neutral. Objective. The same technology, applied evenly.

It is not, and the reason is not the technology. It is the person holding it.

EBITDA Theater follows 3 characters who each build or use an AI diligence tool inside the same deal. One builds hers to find the truth. One builds his to survive it. One runs his own numbers through the same kind of system, not to be caught, but to anticipate exactly how he might be.

Same technology. Three different intentions. One number that will not stay hidden either way.

This is a novel about what AI actually changes in a room built to want the truth only when it is convenient, and what it does not change at all.

The personal note

I did not write this as another how to book.

I have written plenty of those. This one is fiction because the pattern I wanted to describe is not a checklist problem. It is a human one: a recurring cost, recharacterized as one time, by people who each had a defensible reason not to ask the question that would have ended it.

EBITDA Theater is my first novel. Every character, every firm, every transaction in it is invented. The mechanism is not. If you work in finance and something in this book feels familiar, that is not a coincidence you are imagining.

The reported earnings were $47.8 million. The adjusted number was $69.9 million. The difference was a story, and everyone in the room had a reason to believe it.

When Cabot Beacon closes its acquisition of Meridian Industrial Services, the deal looks clean. The addback bridge, the schedule that explains away $22.1 million in costs a buyer is told will not recur, has been reviewed, negotiated, and signed off by everyone whose job it was to catch a problem. It should have ended there.

It does not, because one vendor relationship, Castellan Technology, has been billed under 4 different descriptions across 4 consecutive fiscal years, and the person paid to notice that kind of pattern has just noticed it.

EBITDA Theater follows 8 people across the same transaction: the managing partner who has made this exact choice 7 times before in a 16 year career and calls it discipline, the independent advisor who built her own methodology specifically to catch what he is counting on nobody catching, the CFO who did not lie so much as frame, and the deal principal who will spend 18 months deciding whether protecting someone is the same thing as lying to them.

At the center of the novel is a question the finance industry is only beginning to face directly: artificial intelligence is incentive neutral. The same class of diligence tool, pointed by 3 different people at the same numbers, produces 3 different answers, not because the technology is biased, but because the people directing it are not. One character builds an AI methodology to find the truth. Another builds a private version of the same approach independently. A third runs an adversarial version of it against his own company's numbers, not to get caught, but to know exactly how.

Written by a former Quality of Earnings analyst who conducted this kind of review across more than 100 real transactions, EBITDA Theater does not soften the mechanics for a general reader. The addback bridges, the QoE conventions, the exact vocabulary of a real diligence room, all of it is drawn from how these deals actually work. The fiction is the characters. The mechanism is not.

Nobody in this book is a villain. Every person in it has a reason for what they do that a reasonable person could understand, which is precisely what makes the pattern so difficult to stop. The novel does not resolve into a courtroom reckoning or a clean moral verdict. It resolves the way these things actually resolve: a price gets adjusted, a career moves on, a methodology gets absorbed into a footnote of the next deal's diligence checklist, and the pattern, somewhere else, continues.

EBITDA Theater is for readers of workplace and finance fiction who want the real vocabulary of the deal room, not a simplified version of it, and for anyone who has ever sat in a room and felt a number get chosen before the meeting that was supposed to determine it.

Includes reader's exhibits: a timeline, a vendor pattern chart, a deal comparison, and a full character relationship map.

Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX32V3LF