About

My career started, as many an IT worker does, with a combination plate of duties: Helpdesk tickets. Graphic design requests. Good old basic HTML development (remember those days?). Printers that - wait, printers are still that way, today. If you know, you know.

Over twenty years, I worked my way through most of what any technology organization actually does: frontend and backend development, systems and network administration, software QA, cybersecurity incident response, project management, vendor management, digital marketing (and more). Not as a dilettante passing through, but carefully, methodically, and then moved on when the next layer needed covering. Always, always learning.

The second decade looked different. I stepped into senior leadership — that uniquely particular small-business version of it where "senior leadership" and "senior individual contributor" are the same person depending on the time of day. I built teams, made architectural decisions, managed budgets, and learned what it actually costs when technology strategy and business strategy aren't speaking the same language.

That last part is what eventually changed my focus and interests.

The more time I spent at the intersection of technology and business decisions, the more I found myself less interested in the technology side of the equation and genuinely fascinated by the financial side. Why do companies make the decisions they make? What does the money actually say about what an organization values, versus what it claims to value? How do you find the real story in a set of numbers? Those questions started pulling harder than the technical ones.

I'm currently an MBA candidate at Louisiana State University Shreveport — AACSB-accredited — with a concentration in accounting and a parallel focus on financial planning and analysis through CFI coursework. I started the program already doing the work: building financial models and tools to understand concepts before my coursework formally covers them, because that's apparently just how I'm built. The LBO value creation bridge I built in Python before my finance module started is probably evidence of a problem, or a feature, depending on how you look at it.

What I'm bringing into this field that most people in it don't have: twenty years of understanding how technology organizations actually function at every layer, current hands-on experience directing AI-augmented development, and a genuine belief that the most interesting problems in accounting and finance right now sit exactly at the intersection of systems thinking and financial analysis. Always in search of a new challenge, I came here because it's where the interesting problems are.

When I'm not studying or building something to help me study, I'm probably reading about a financial scandal, which I now realize sounds worse than it is.