I started in finance. But I never really saw numbers as numbers.
I saw mechanisms. Cause and effect. Inputs producing outputs. Systems behaving exactly as they were designed to behave — even when nobody remembered designing them that way.
Eventually I realised that is how I see businesses too.
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. 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.
Nobody would call me an engineer. But I think like one.