Learning
+Applying
Knowing
It's not about how much you earn.
It's about how you take care of what you have.
More than just an accountant.
For more than two decades I've sat in rooms where the decisions get made. Building and reshaping finance departments for large corporations that could afford to pull in a full team behind me.
In those rooms, what got me excited was never the numbers. Numbers are numbers, some just have more zeros than others. It was the process. How the work moves, how it jams, and how to unclog it. What a clean system does to an ugly month, and what an ugly system does to a clean month. That curiosity took hold of me until I wanted to know how the data inside of those systems gets protected, so I went ahead and learned that too.
The driving force beneath it all, bringing back the knowledge to the people who never got a chance to enter the room.
Money is designed to circulate. Knowledge is too.
That is how a traditional savings circle works. Everyone pays in, everyone takes the pot, and the turn keeps moving. Nothing piles up in one place. Knowledge behaves the same way once the gatekeeping stops.
My challenge was figuring out how to open the gates. Create a place where people can talk about their money, openly and honestly, without all the baggage. A place to discuss their business and their family budget without feeling less than, and to walk away with a real answer, not one that needs a glossary. An answer from somebody who has been where they are, has handled their own version of it, and is here to share that experience so the next person can do the same, repeating the circle.
Look at the world we live in, and what people are being asked to deal with.
Prices are moving up while wages are going down. Jobs disappearing, and work that used to be a career coming back as a string of small subcontracts. Land, water, and power sold off to the highest bidder, with nobody asking what it does to the air and the ground where people actually live. And the countries and institutions sitting on trillions in debt are the ones we are supposed to trust for advice about our household budgets.
Knowing all that, financial literacy from those same places is a strange thing to be sold. Learn the terms. Read the reports. Know an income statement from a balance sheet. But nobody's life ever changed because they learned a definition.
It used to be that not knowing cost you efficiency. Now it can cost you everything.
People get pushed closer to the edge every day, and a single decision can make or break you, your family, your business. All of it without a place to learn, to share, to commiserate with people going through the exact same thing.
The fault was never yours.
Tap the card and turn the circle.
Every one of those cards is mine.
Despite my profession, I was never taught any of this either. I've been the one nodding through meetings at words I didn't know rather than asking what they meant. I've most surely run the business too small for anybody to bother picking up the phone for. Some of that while sitting in the other rooms watching it happen for everyone but me.
One of those cards in particular was my family growing up. A savings circle running three generations, a tin, a notebook with names in it, and a circle of women who knew each other well enough that nobody ever needed a credit check or loan application. Nobody ever called it finance.
Before there were advisors there were porches. Elders sat out front, people came to them about money, and nobody called it planning. It was just what you did.
That is called a sou-sou, or an osusu, or an esusu, depending on where your people are from. Some version of it exists in nearly every community that ever got locked out of a bank. It ran on trust instead of collateral. It predates the entire Western advisory industry by centuries. And it worked, and it still works to this day, which is the part that always gets left out of the telling.
It didn't disappear. It got quieter.
So when I sat down to build these companies, I didn't start from what the industry taught me. I started from what my mother already instilled in me.
A common question is always what CABLE is. That one is easy. I've built an AI-assisted Client Accounting and Bookkeeping Ledger Engine to process and report on financial data.
But almost nobody asks why CABLE is. Here is what I believe.
Caring About Books
Liberates Everyone.
It's not a slogan. It's the reason both Osusu and Porch & Main exist today.
Books are where all of us tell the truth about ourselves. What we like, what we don't, what we do over and over without noticing. That is as true at a kitchen table as it is at a company, which is why the Wealth Wellness Plan came before CABLE did. Same method, worked by hand, for a household instead of a business. Same rules, same arithmetic. The math does not get simpler because the numbers are smaller.
Most people have never been given a clean look at their own. They gather up every document that gets asked for, hand it to somebody who reads the numbers back to them, nod, and leave knowing exactly as much as they walked in with.
Now imagine an engine that hands you your own numbers in a form you can actually read. It does something no report has ever done. It ends the dependency. That was the foundation of the design the whole time.
Knowledge can't be obtained by learning alone. To truly know something, you have to apply what you've learned.
I did not come up with that. Every trade on earth already knew it. Nobody was ever called a carpenter for reading about joinery. Apprenticeship ran on it for centuries, and so did every tradition that passed knowledge by mouth and by hand without a textbook anywhere in the room. You watched. You did it badly. You did it again. One day somebody put the tool in your hand and stood back.
Then it came to money, and somebody decided a pamphlet would do.
I have been doing this for over fifteen years, mostly under the radar, for small businesses who could not afford anyone else. Doing it in the open would have cost me the day jobs that kept my family fed.
Findlay Financial Services. Findlay Wealth Solutions. Fourth World Solutions. FWS Enterprises. Different names, same work, the whole time I was building finance departments for firms that would have fired me for what I did on my own time.
The names were cover. The work never was.
CPA candidate / MS CyberAccounting
Porch & Main, in the United States.
Osusu Innovations, in Canada.
Two approaches. One foundation. Neither one built to keep anybody out.