I learned how to be a CFO the hard way.

Years ago, I was driving to an appointment listening to a radio show that investigated scams when the host said 'If you're a client of [my accountant], today is going to be a bad day for you.' I nearly drove off the road. I went straight to his office and found it wrapped in crime scene tape.

Over the next few weeks, the story came out: he had embezzled every dollar of our payroll taxes, our personal taxes, everything we thought we'd been paying to the IRS. The money was gone. And the IRS, being the IRS, still wanted it.

That moment changed everything for me. Not just because of what it cost us, but because I realized I had let it happen. I didn't know how to check his work. I didn't know what questions to ask. I didn't even know I should be asking. I trusted my accountant, and "trust your accountant" was the only system I had.

So I gave myself an MBA in finance. I dug into every report, every line item, every metric I'd ignored for years. I learned to read a P&L like a story. I learned which numbers actually drive a business and which are just noise. And I took my own business from 4% profit to 24% profit in a single year.

That's when friends in the industry started calling. "Last year you couldn't buy food. Now you're going to the Bahamas. What changed?" I started showing them. One by one, I helped contractor friends fix their finances, find their margins, and build the kind of businesses that actually make their owners wealthy, not just busy.

Three years ago, I went full-time into fractional CFO work, and Your Pocket CFO was born, named by a client who texted me one night to say "you are my pocket CFO and I couldn't do this without you." The name stuck because it captured something true: most small business owners don't need a $200K full-time CFO. They need someone in their pocket. Someone who gets it. Someone who's been there.