Scar tissue over pedigree.

Founded without suits and ties

We are boot-wearing, forklift-certified, red-blooded Americans. The backbone of this economy is people waking up in freezing rain and burning heat to keep the lights on and the country running. Too often those owners get overlooked — in business lending, in diligence, and in the room where their company gets priced.

Things change here. We focus on teaching our clients with full transparency. Our clients get to see what we see, and they understand the why. Most of us still enjoy running equipment on the side and own heavy equipment ourselves. Turn and burn.

Mark Peterson

Mark co-founded Blue Collar CFOs with his wife. He has been on every side of a deal — lending it, funding it, repossessing it, fixing it, and running the company afterward.

He has also built houses — including his own — runs a farm, can operate heavy equipment, and will go to litigation when a deal calls for it. He was quoted in Bloomberg in March 2026, in a piece on small-business owners refusing to sell to private equity, where he was described as a self-described “anti-PE” investor. The line they ran with was the one this firm was built on: boots before spreadsheets.

That background is the whole product. When we sit in a lender meeting we know what the credit committee is actually afraid of. When we value a fleet we value it the way a liquidator would, because that is the number the bank is already using. When a seller's broker explains why an add-back is legitimate, we have been the person on the other end of that call.

How we are built

Deliberately small. You work directly with the principal, supported by an AI-powered underwriting and analysis engine that compresses work that used to take a team a week. We are open about that because it is why a $4M company can afford analysis that used to be reserved for companies ten times the size.

We do not staff your engagement with a junior associate. There isn't one.

Where we work from

Our office is inside a two-bay shop. Behind it is a real yard — six acres of parking for clients, with water, sewer and power hookups, air and welding supplies. An owner hauling through can pull in, plug in and rest.

We are not in some bougie high-rise. We run real equipment out of a real office inside a real shop, with blisters on our hands, smashed fingernails and beat-up boots. It proves what we are: hands-on M&A CFO operators.

What we believe

• Protect the buyer. Every recommendation accounts for what happens if revenue drops 20% the month after close.
• Demand granularity. Summary numbers are a sales document. Revenue by customer, equipment by age and lien, earnings by add-back legitimacy.
• Say the hard thing. If the concentration is too high or the structure cannot survive a soft year, we say walk — in writing.
• Build exit-grade from day one. Owner-dependence is the enemy and the discount.
• Share the watermelon. We would rather own ten percent of ten companies than a hundred percent of one.