Courtney Provino, CPA
The companies Courtney works with have usually outgrown the systems holding them together. What worked at ten people strains at forty, and the questions get harder: what does it take to run like a mature business, how do we model a pivot without guessing, what does a clean exit actually require. She builds the financial architecture and processes that answer them, at companies that had none of it before.
She spent five years as controller at a fast-growing startup, through the messy version of growth rather than the tidy one. That included a second entity and the reporting behind the sale of one of them, which is the point where books either hold up to a buyer's scrutiny or don't. Before that, private credit and the finances of a major financial institution, both places where the standard for accuracy is set by people with no patience for surprises.
Some of her most useful work happens away from the ledger. She sits with the revenue, marketing, and operations teams and connects what they're doing to what the numbers say, which is how daily execution ends up pointed at where the business is actually trying to go. Her career started in audit, which is unglamorous training and the reason she reads a set of books the way a reviewer would rather than the way the person who prepared them does.
Ariel Boyle
Ariel builds the forward-looking half of a finance function. Founders bring her the questions their books can't answer. Can we afford the next hire, how long does the cash actually last, what will these numbers look like to an investor. She builds the budget, the model, and the cash forecast that answer them, and she has done it at companies that had none of the three.
She spent years in venture capital, working closely with the financial models behind high-value VC-backed startups. That is a useful education in which assumptions hold up under scrutiny and which quietly fall apart, and it means the questions an investor will ask are ones a founder has already worked through with her. She has also helped founders protect their cash through a banking crisis and plan runway after a raise.
She has carried a company through IPO readiness, building reporting and governance to public-company standard. Most growing businesses will never go public. But nearly all of them eventually face a lender, an investor, or a buyer asking hard questions, and that is the same test at lower stakes.
Why it works: most firms give you either clean books or big-picture advice, because the people who do one usually don't do the other. We've both done both. Your accounting and your strategy never stop talking to each other, because there's no line between them to cross.