I started in finance. Which means I started with the truth.
Numbers don’t perform. They don’t protect anyone’s feelings, and they don’t repeat the story the leadership team has agreed to tell itself. Years of reading them — across industries, across sizes, across every kind of trouble — taught me something more useful than accounting: the numbers always describe a structure. Learn to read them properly and they tell you how the business is actually built.
But the numbers were only ever half the story.
The other half was sitting in the room: the people. How decisions really get made. What everyone knows but nobody says. Where the founder ends and the business is supposed to begin — and doesn’t.
Read the two together and something happens. The symptoms stop being separate problems. They resolve into one pattern — the way a diagnosis resolves a list of complaints.
I didn’t learn that as a technique. It’s how my mind works. Systems first. Connections before categories. The answer arriving before the full explanation does.