About
I am a CPA who spent the first half of my career inside finance organizations and the second half fixing the systems that run them.
I started in audit at Ernst & Young. For part of that time I also co-owned an event planning business, which taught me something I have never stopped using: no matter how carefully you plan, something always goes wrong on the day, and your job is to have already decided who makes the call when it does.
In 2011 I was hired as Controller at Fleetmatics, a SaaS company preparing for an IPO. We were cranking out more than 20,000 invoices a month in QuickBooks and the system was breaking under the weight. Nobody was coming to save us. So I raised my hand and said we needed to implement NetSuite, and then I led it.
That is an unusual way to learn systems work. You do not get to hand the hard parts to someone else and go back to your day job, because the hard parts are your day job. The revenue recognition has to be right because you are the one signing off on it. The close has to shorten because you are the one closing.
Fleetmatics went public and was later acquired by Verizon. Inside Verizon I helped lead an SAP S/4HANA Cloud implementation — a very large program, with very large invoices. We were paying premium hourly rates for consultants from a Big Four firm, most of them fresh out of college with no real-world experience in complex business operations. They were bright. They had simply never done the job they were advising us on.
I kept thinking: there has got to be a better way.
The honest answer is that I broke my leg.
I tore my ACL and fractured my tibial plateau skiing, which put me on the couch for two months before surgery, non-weight-bearing, with nothing to do but think. I lasted about six movies before I lost my mind. What I kept coming back to was that enterprise project and the gap between what those firms charged and what they actually knew.
So in 2019 I started Rapid Cloud Partners on a simple principle: deliver solutions without the unnecessary complexity that bogs down too many consulting firms, and staff projects with people who have done the work rather than people who have read about it. Our motto is scale without the swivel chair — because the whole point of a well-designed system is that nobody has to turn from one screen to another retyping the same thing.
Design backwards from the general ledger. Decide what has to hit the GL, when, and at what level of detail. Then architect everything upstream to deliver exactly that. You cannot derive at close a dimension nobody captured at order entry.
Process and data come before platform. Technology amplifies whatever process you already have. Automate an undocumented process running on dirty data and you get a faster mess at a higher price.
Experience beats certification. Platform knowledge is table stakes now. The question worth asking is whether the person designing your revenue recognition has ever personally survived a month-end close.
Most damage happens after go-live. Over-provisioned access, ungoverned configuration changes, procedures nobody updated. Systems do not decay because the software got worse.
I am not everyone’s cup of tea, and I am more than okay with that.
I am outspoken and direct. I ask uncomfortable questions and I say the quiet part out loud. Someone once compared my requirements-gathering to a Barbara Walters interview, and I took it as a compliment. The uncomfortable question in week two is the cheapest thing in the entire project.
You do not need to be liked by everyone to build something meaningful. You just need to be trusted by the right people.
I split my time between Florida, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. I have run the Chicago Marathon. My golf handicap is not a number I am prepared to discuss in writing.
The best place to reach me is LinkedIn, or through Rapid Cloud Partners.