$600K EBITDA? Try $200K. Here's how they hid it.
May 08, 2026
by a professional from Harvard University - Harvard Business School in Atlanta, GA, USA
$600K EBITDA. Clean QuickBooks. Everything matched.
Then I opened the balance sheet.
Capital expenditures were growing year over year. Strange for a marketing company that wasn't buying equipment or building anything.
So I pulled the general ledger.
The seller had been quietly moving regular business expenses — lights, phones, computers, travel, cost of goods sold — off the income statement and burying them in CapEx.
$400,000 of real operating expenses. Hidden in plain sight.
That $600K SDE? Actually $200K.
The income statement told a story. The balance sheet told the truth.
I break the whole story down in my new video. Watch now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsQjtfSMBoQ