Enny Gibson

The best career advice I've ever received is 'Trust But Verify,' which is essential for finance professionals. When you receive financial data, it's just data to start with. Someone on your accounting team might tell you that you have $100,000 in cash, but how do you know that's accurate? You're not going to distrust or be overly skeptical about the data, but you do have to verify that it's accurate and complete. That's the job of finance - making sure the data presented in front of you is what you've been told it is, that the story somebody brought on a financial summary is true. You verify through processes of reconciliation and similar methods. Trust but verify is a good principle that helps you remember that anything that gets in front of you, you should trust, but you should verify somehow.

I would say be passionate about what you do, because finances are not necessarily what is going to drive your passion, but who you're doing finances for is what should drive that passion. If you like trees, you should go and do nonprofit organizations that are caring for the environment. If you love the production of goods and produce, go into finance for farmers. If you have a passion for wine and beverages, go and do finances for those industries. You learn so much along the way, because even for doing cost accounting for those industries, you have to learn the process of how the wine or beverage is produced. So if you have a passion for something, pursue it along with a passion for finance, and it's just a lot more smooth. And do not put the eggs in one basket. I think that diversifying your portfolio of what you do in your career is extremely important. At one point in my career, I was gearing towards 70% of my portfolio being nonprofits, and now it's shifting back to 50-50 for-profits and nonprofits. I do have a passion for helping and saving the world in many senses, and I learned how nonprofits help governments and other regulatory agencies to do what they're supposed to do. I really love that nonprofits have a high level of compliance, which I love to geek out about. Basically, diversify and do it with passion. That's what I will tell young ladies who are starting finance.

I guess the biggest challenge is that there are just a lot of firms now doing what I started doing in 2019. When I started doing it, it wasn't as popular, and I don't think I ever met many people doing what I was doing. So I just figured it was great, but now a lot of people have figured this out, and the challenge is to compete with larger firms that now have a subdivision doing what I'm doing on my own. So competition, in a nutshell. The beauty of it, which is the other side, is that for me, doing consulting offers an opportunity to help a large array of businesses do what I love the most, which is automating and integrating systems. I help teams remain focused on what really matters, which is how the business is doing. If there's analysis that needs to be done to grow the business and take it to the next level, the finance team is ready to do it because they're not burdened by simple calculations or things that are more menial to the human brain. When you automate manual tasks and make processes more efficient and compliant, then we have the human utilizing their brain to its biggest potential, which is creating and elevating the basics. I love and enjoy doing that for my clients.

Transparency is most important to me. Just having the ability to disclose something before it's asked is one thing that I love about the work I do. It's contagious anybody that's working with me wants to disclose and tell me stories that are going to help the business improve.