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My Journey Chapter Two
One of my favorite meetings eventually became the finance meetings.
Not because I understood finance.
Because I didn't.
Early in my career
I could build almost anything.
ServersNetworksApplicationsInfrastructure
But I quickly realized none of those things mattered if the business couldn't trust its own numbers.
The conference table
Everyone was looking at the same business.
Yet nobody completely agreed.
Project management
PipelineOperations
ActualsI remember walking into meetings where incredibly intelligent people would spread printed spreadsheets across a conference table.
One version came from finance. Another came from project management. Someone else had exported data from another system.
The meeting would pause
A conversation about conflicting forecast versions
“Which forecast is this?”
“I thought we were using RF2.”
“Those numbers came from last Friday.”
Nobody in the room was wrong.
They were simply working from different assumptions.
I remember sitting there thinking
There has to be a better way.
Why are some of the smartest people in this company spending their time debating which spreadsheet is correct?
The drive home
That drive home stayed with me.
Executives shouldn't spend meetings figuring out whose numbers to trust.
They should spend meetings deciding what to do next.
That changed the way I approached software
The question I began asking
I stopped asking
“What report should we build?”
I started asking
“How do we make everyone trust the same answer?”
I went deeper than I expected
I became a student of the business.
I spent countless hours with finance leadership. I asked questions. Lots of questions.
At first I probably asked questions that sounded obvious to finance professionals. But they were patient.
BudgetingForecastsActualsRevenue recognitionLabor costsProfitabilityEBITDAForecast versionsCurrenciesGeneral ledger structures
Little by little
I stopped seeing finance as spreadsheets.
I started seeing it as the language executives use to understand the health of a business.
The systems changed with me
I stopped building dashboards. I started building trust.
Working alongside finance leadership, we designed enterprise financial models that connected multiple operational systems into one trusted source of truth.
I wanted one governed financial foundation that everyone believed.
What I finally understood
The dashboards were almost the least interesting part.
The real achievement was helping leadership walk into meetings knowing everyone was finally looking at the same business through the same lens.