I spent a large portion of my career at Workiva (formerly Webfilings) from 2011 through 2022, the majority of time doing implementation services. My work primarily focused on process improvement, understanding pain points, and asking what-if questions to find ways to solve problems. My expertise was in remedying issues not with people or brute force, but through simple improvements and automation. After developing and perfecting my skills, building my implementation and reporting experience with Workiva, I made the decision to continue my career in consulting through Workiva partners Citrin Cooperman (formerly Clearview Group) and Alpha FMC (formerly Lionpoint) for three years. I gained major exposure to various firms to analyze and improve upon a range of reporting structures, where I repeatedly discovered the same problems tend to show up in all industries despite their core differences by trade.

I am a CPA by training, but the part of the job I actually care about is different: taking a process that cuts into someone's productivity — compiling numbers from various places, reconciling by hand, rebuilding the same deck every period — and making it extraordinarily efficient; something that originally took teams of people months to complete can take an afternoon, or run itself, after my analysis and re-configuration.

A few years ago I started noticing the same pattern in almost every implementation: the technology wasn't the hard part. Getting a team to trust a new process, lean into efficiencies, and actually use it after I left, was. So I've focused on that — not just building the solution, but teaching the team behind it so it sticks.