HIDDEN CASH How to Find and Free $500K-$5M+ in Trapped Liquidity

Profitable companies run out of cash every day.

The earnings look fine, the income statement tells a good story - and yet there's never enough money in the bank, the line of credit is always stretched, and growth feels like it's strangling the business rather than funding it. The reason is almost always the same: the cash is there, but it's trapped - locked up in receivables collected too slowly, inventory bought too early, terms negotiated too poorly, and a balance sheet nobody is actively managing. In a typical mid-market company that trapped cash runs to millions. The question isn't "Are we profitable?" It's "Where is our cash, and how do we get it back?"

In Hidden Cash, veteran CFO and turnaround executive David H. Tolly shows owners, CEOs, and finance leaders exactly how to find it. Built over thirty years and more than forty engagements, the book lays out seven specific levers - receivables and collections, inventory, payables and vendor terms, billing and margin leakage, cash consumed by growth, capital projects, and lender availability and the borrowing base - and shows how to pull each one to free cash without new sales, new financing, or new risk.

Tolly writes the way he works: direct, numbers-first, and honest about the mistakes that drain a company's cash. Drawing on real turnarounds - including a $105 million restructuring executed without additional lending through a period of negative cash flow - he turns hard-won experience into a working playbook. Each chapter includes diagnostic tools, worked examples, a "do this next" action plan, and the cash-forecasting rhythm that keeps lenders confident and owners in control - a discipline expanded into its own companion volume, The 13-Week Cash Forecast.

Because freed cash is money you've already earned - no customer to win, no price to raise - it's the fastest, cheapest capital a business will ever find. Written for business owners, CEOs, CFOs, private-equity sponsors, lenders, and the advisors who serve them, Hidden Cash is a clear, no-nonsense guide to freeing the cash you already have - and putting it to work.