I moved to NYC fresh out of college with starry-eyed ambitions of writing and directing. Two months into my first PA gig, they moved me into the accounting office to help out — and a week later, the CFO quit, leaving me holding the keys to a multi-million dollar account and a crew of over a hundred people waiting to get paid.

I figured it out. That became the pattern for the next decade — whatever room I was in — working on VH1's Love and Hip Hop, Bravo's Southern Charm, a brief side quest serving the country's most demanding clients at a luxury concierge firm, or helping grassroots organizations spread their message through commercial video storytelling — I ended up being the one who partnered with busy executives to find the mess and build the system to fix it.

At my first corporate accounting role, millions in receivables were running weeks behind; I built a system to track milestones and follow up automatically, and turned a chronic 15-day lag into on-time, every time. At the production company behind Southern Charm, I ran payroll and reconciliations for two full production crews — 300+ people — a crash course in high-volume, high-pressure financial operations on a schedule that never slowed down. At the concierge firm, I helped build their first custom ERP system — giving leadership real-time visibility into revenue, client retention, and vendor spend for the first time — and learned how to run a retainer-based service business without ever losing track of where the money actually was. Then I brought all of it to a commercial production firm, joining as a part-time bookkeeper and building, over the years that followed, the company's entire in-house finance function and a custom CRM — the kind of infrastructure companies usually pay outside firms a fortune for. That work became a promotion to Director of Strategic Finance, a title I built my way into.

Every stop had a different mess. The fix was always the same: clear away the messy data and build the infrastructure that gets leadership the numbers they need to make a call.

Why production and sales teams specifically? Because I understand them. I know what a producer needs to greenlight a decision fast, what a sales team needs to set a price that preserves margin, and how to translate "the finances" into something a creative team can actually act on — without slowing them down or talking over their heads. My job isn't just clean books. It's making everyone on the team confident enough to move independently, because they know and trust the numbers underneath them.

I fell into accounting by accident — but somewhere along the way, it stopped being an accident and started being the thing I'm actually good at.

When I'm not deep in a client's books, I'm probably traveling — I've been slowly making my way around the country, chasing good food and scenic views along the way. I have a degree in percussion performance, toured in a steel drum band, and performed with a Bollywood dance troupe. None of that has much to do with financial clarity. All of it means I've spent my life around creative people, and I like it that way.