I've been the CFO of a $2.6 million organization and the CFO of a $250 million one. Most of what Trellis does comes from having made the trip between them.

Denison Ministries. My career started at Deloitte, but I moved to Denison Ministries not long after and stayed six and a half years, the first three as Director of Operations and Finance and the last three and a half as Chief Financial Officer. I was the senior finance person on the leadership team the whole time, and the title caught up partway through. Revenue was $2.6 million when I arrived and close to three times that when I left, with finance, accounting, development, and IT reporting to me and a team of eight. That's the size where the CFO designs the system and then personally runs it, where every process you build you also operate, and where a single soft month is genuinely concerning. If you're somewhere in that range, I'm not guessing about what your week looks like.

K-LOVE. Four and a half years. I arrived as Director of Financial Analysis and Treasury, was promoted to VP of Finance, and served as Chief Financial Officer for the last three years, with accounting, tax, FP&A, treasury, and procurement reporting to me. The organization runs roughly $250 million in annual revenue against $1.2 billion in assets, with 550 employees and operations across all fifty states.

I arrived in the middle of a cross country headquarters relocation, and most of the finance staff didn't make the move. So the department had to be rebuilt rather than managed. I rehired the team, restructured the roles, replaced the ERP, put in a new FP&A platform, and redesigned the budget process, all of which is still running today.

That kind of systems work keeps finding me, and it isn't an accident. My graduate degree is in Management Information Systems, so ERP selection, planning platforms, and the integrations underneath them are what I studied. When a finance function isn’t keeping up, the cause is often in the systems rather than in the people.

I also led the finance side of a nine figure headquarters construction project. We were prepared to finance it with debt and instead timed the cash to fund it outright, so the organization carried no interest on the building at all. And I led the organization’s acquisition function with more than 120 station acquisitions totaling over $150 million, plus the acquisition and integration of another nonprofit with 25 employees and a $3 million budget.

What I learned across both is that the technical accounting is rarely the hard part. The hard part is that the people responsible for an organization are usually making decisions with dated financial information, or without it at all. They're not bad at finance. They just don't have timely, useful information at the moment they need it.

I've seen the same pattern in nearly every organization I've worked with since. A leader who knows her programs inside and out can't reconcile what she knows with what the statements say, because the statements were never built to answer her questions.

I left K-LOVE because the team and the processes had reached a point where they needed maintaining rather than building. Building is the part I enjoy, so I went looking for organizations that still needed it.

Trellis exists to close that gap and come alongside leaders to build the systems that let them make the decisions.