I have worked in accounting and finance since 2010 and have been a licensed CPA since 2013.

I began my career while still in school, working in small tax firms before apprenticing at a CPA firm to gain the experience required for licensure. From there, I moved into corporate accounting and finance at Netsmart, a technology company, where much of my work was project-based.

I then spent more than a decade in entertainment finance across both corporate and production environments, including work with Sony Pictures Entertainment and Anonymous Content, before serving as Controller at Black Label Media.

That progression gave me experience across several sides of accounting and finance: tax and public accounting, corporate finance, production finance, management reporting, systems, and complex operating environments.

My work has included:

• Multi-entity financial structures

• Corporate and production finance

• Project and production budgets

• Management reporting

• Financial modeling and forecasting

• Accounting-system transitions

• Sage Intacct and QuickBooks

• Process and internal-control design

• Cross-functional work with financial and non-financial leaders

Much of my career has involved translating operational complexity into financial information that leadership can actually use.

The common thread has been learning how an organization really works and then making sure its financial structure reflects that reality.

Good accounting matters, but accurate transactions alone are not enough. Leadership also needs a system that organizes information in a useful way, makes responsibility clear, and helps people understand the organization they are responsible for leading.

My career has taken me through tax and public accounting, corporate finance in technology, and more than a decade of entertainment finance across both corporate and production environments. Those settings are very different from one another, but they share an important challenge: complex organizations do not always fit neatly into simple financial structures.

Does the financial structure reflect how the organization actually operates?

That question matters in growing churches too.

As churches add locations, ministries, staff, funds, programs, and new layers of leadership, the accounting structure can gradually become disconnected from the organization it is meant to describe. Reporting becomes harder to interpret, workarounds multiply, and responsibilities become less clear.

The work I do through Strong Bear applies the same discipline I have used throughout my career: understand the organization first, then design financial structures, reporting, and processes that support the way leadership actually needs to operate.

Strong Bear grew out of a practical problem.

My wife, Laura, worked at Vintage Church LA. As the church prepared to change bookkeeping providers, Vintage’s finance director asked if I could help with the transition.

What began as a relatively narrow project quickly exposed a larger issue. Vintage had grown rapidly, added a second location, and become substantially more complex, but its financial structure had evolved through years of incremental changes and workarounds.

I worked with the finance director and ministry leaders to understand how the church actually operated, redesigned its chart of accounts and reporting dimensions, and helped transition the new structure into Sage Intacct.

The project reinforced something I had seen throughout my career: capable organizations can outgrow their financial systems without anyone doing anything obviously wrong. The bookkeeping may be getting done, the staff may be competent, and leadership may be attentive—but the underlying structure can still stop reflecting the organization it is meant to support.

That experience became the foundation for the Financial Visibility & Stewardship Plan and for Strong Bear’s initial focus on growing churches.

I try to keep consulting practical.

That means understanding the organization before recommending changes, listening to the people who actually use the financial system, and designing structures that are useful in real operating conditions—not just theoretically clean.

A few principles guide the way I work:

• Understand before redesigning.
  I want to know how the organization actually functions before deciding what the financial system should look like.

• Listen to the people using the system.
  Finance leaders, operators, ministry leaders, and budget owners often experience different parts of the same problem. Their perspective matters.

• Prefer practical over elegant.
  A sophisticated design is not useful if the people responsible for maintaining it cannot understand or use it consistently.

• Build for the organization you are becoming.
  The goal is not simply to fix today’s reporting problem, but to create a structure that can accommodate reasonable growth and change.

• Leave something maintainable.
  A consulting engagement should reduce dependence, not create it. The organization should understand the recommendations and be able to carry them forward.

• Say when Strong Bear is not the right fit.
  Not every financial problem requires strategic consulting. If the need is better served by a bookkeeper, CPA firm, software implementer, or another resource, I would rather say that clearly.

• dia

• Early-career tax and public accounting experience

• Corporate accounting and finance experience at Netsmart

• Corporate accounting and finance experience

• More than 10 years in entertainment finance

• Corporate and production finance

• Experience with Sony Pictures Entertainment, Anonymous Content, Black Label Media, and Netsmart

• Sage Intacct

• QuickBooks

• Multi-entity financial structures

• Multi-location reporting

• Project and production budgets

• Management reporting

• Financial modeling and forecasting

• Accounting-system transitions

• Process and internal-control design