My last “real” job was with a multi-billion (with a B) dollar oil & gas company. I was hired as the very first member of a brand-new team. I had the good fortune to be partnered with an efficiency master and Excel wizard. He showed me how to streamline and automate as much as possible, which allowed us to create processes, build reports, and pull together information from ten different departments on a monthly basis. It wasn’t enough to report the numbers, we also needed the operational reasons for those numbers. In this role I learned the analytical skills required to investigate why a business performs the way it does and turn it into useful information for decision makers.Within two years, we had built a system that could be run by only one person. I left that team and moved to Internal Financial Reporting. I started preparing the consolidated financials statements for the company’s global operations – a company grossing $5 billion a year. I was still turning numbers into actionable business knowledge, but now it was on a much larger scale. When I arrived in that role, the methods they were using to produce their financial statements were atrocious – they took five days to prepare. Within a year I had completely redesigned and streamlined the process with what I had learned in my previous role. When I left, the financials statements could be prepared in 10 hours. Again, I’d worked myself out of a job.Instead of moving to another part of the company, I quit and started my own business. Now I use the skills I learned working in big business to help small business owners get more out of their company.