Bill Stone, Founder and CEO of SS&C Technologies (NASDAQ: SSNC)

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Acquisition-led growth gets harder as the deals get bigger. Every acquisition changes what you can afford to do next. Use too much equity, and you dilute ownership. Carry too much debt, and you lose flexibility. Pay too much for a company, and the next acquisition is harder to justify. For a serial acquirer, financing one deal is the easy part. The real challenge is building a system that can finance the next one.

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That is how Bill Stone has run SS&C Technologies for four decades. Capital, control, and execution are treated as parts of one system: protect a meaningful ownership stake, borrow when the economics support it, pay down debt quickly, and only stretch on price when SS&C can create value that someone else cannot. What happens after close matters just as much. Cost decisions, management incentives, and operational changes determine how quickly the business generates the cash and capacity needed to do another deal.

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Across acquisitions including FMC, GlobeOp, and Blue Prism, as well as SS&C's take-private with Carlyle, Bill walks through the decisions behind that system and the trade-offs that came with them. What emerges is a case study in building an acquisition engine: one where every deal has to leave the company strong enough to make the next.

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What You'll Learn‍

• How Bill Stone kept 15% of SS&C through 100 acquisitions
• The exact revenue-per-head and EBITDA thresholds SS&C screens for
• Why strategic buyers almost always outbid private equity
• How to tell a motivated seller from one just fishing for a premium
• When rollover equity can help retain the management team
• How Carlyle overruled Stone's own unanimous board vote
• The one rule that makes Stone walk from a deal every time

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Every financing decision changes what you can do on the next deal. If you're financing an acquisition and don't have a hard leverage ceiling you stick to, DealPilot, powered by M&A Science, has the deal guidance layer to help you set one before you're over-levered on the next deal.