I didn't start in tax
I started by owning one. In 2003 I was CFO and owner of a manufacturing business in Simi Valley, California — which is a fast way to learn that the numbers on a statement are decisions somebody already made, and usually not the ones you'd have made.
Then I went into hotels, and stayed for sixteen years.
I ran the IT before I ran the finance
At the Chateau Marmont I was Assistant Controller and IT — one person, both jobs, because that's how it works at a property that size. Then six years as Director of Information Technology at The Fess Parker in Santa Barbara, before moving across the hall into finance as Assistant Director.
That's the part of my background people don't expect, and it's the part that explains everything I'm doing now. I spent years responsible for the systems a business runs on and years responsible for the numbers it produces. Most people pick one.
Then hotels at scale
Assistant Director of Finance at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas. Director of Finance at The Madison in Washington DC. Then four years as Director of Finance at Hilton Dallas/Plano Granite Park.
So when I tell you how a hotel P&L actually behaves month to month, or why a generic chart of accounts quietly destroys a property's reporting, that isn't a case study I read. I closed those books. It's also the entire reason Dayspring Hospitality exists — I got tired of watching good operators get served by people who had never worked a night audit.
Then I took on the practice
In 2022 I became steward of a tax practice with forty years of history, and founded Taxsmithing inside it. That lineage matters more than it sounds like it should. Four decades of watching money compound on real families does something to how you think — you start to believe, as an observed fact rather than a slogan, that the boring, repeated, well-kept decision beats the clever one almost every time.
My job has been to rebuild that practice for a different kind of client: the modern legacy builder. Same patience. New tools. In 2024 the proactive planning side of it saved clients over $1,000,000 in tax.
Now I run the businesses I advise
Today that's four companies across tax, hospitality, and software — and I feel the consequences of every structural choice in my own cash flow.
This is the central thing about how I work: I have skin in the game on every claim I make. When I talk about reasonable compensation, or a fractional-CFO cadence, or how a hotel P&L actually behaves month to month, it's lived knowledge. I've been wrong in my own books and had to fix it.
And now I build the tools
Here's where the two halves finally meet. The IT years and the finance years stopped being separate résumés and became one capability: I can see what a business actually needs, and I can build it.
The pattern repeated often enough that it became a company. I'd need something inside one of the businesses — a way to run the strategy method at scale, a way to make a hotel's numbers legible, a practice-management system that didn't fight me — go looking for it, and find nothing good enough. So we built it.
That's Dayspring IdeaForge, my AI creation company. Four platforms so far: Forge, the Taxsmithing apps, the tax toolkits, and a complete hospitality management platform. The first customer was always us, with our own money on the line, which is a very effective way to find out whether software is any good.
It's also become the thing I most like talking about. Not AI as a topic — AI as something you shipped on a Tuesday and had to fix on Wednesday.
And I'm honest about the in-progress
I host a podcast called Unfinished Empires precisely because I find the half-built more interesting than the finished case study. The polished after-photo teaches almost nothing. The messy middle teaches everything, and I'm comfortable standing in it in public.
So you'll hear me say what's working, what isn't, and what I haven't cracked yet. Not as a humility move — because it's useful.
What I'm not
I'm an MSCTA — a Main Street Certified Tax Advisor — and a fractional CFO. I am not a CPA and not an EA. I say that plainly because the alternative is letting you assume it. Twenty-five years across accounting, IT, and tax taught me a great deal about strategy, about systems, and about running the businesses that generate the tax; it did not make me an attorney or an auditor. When a matter genuinely needs a CPA, an EA, or counsel, I say so and bring one in.
I'd rather be the person who tells you the boundary than the person who lets you find it later.
Six things that
don't move
Operator's curiosity
I ask the question only someone who runs the business would think to ask — because the answer changes a decision, not because curiosity looks good.
Long-game discipline
I think in decades and prefer the durable choice. Unembarrassed about being unglamorous.
Texas-rooted, refined
Warm, plainspoken, hospitable — with the polish of doing serious work for serious people. No costume either direction.
Curious about the in-progress
The half-built is more honest than the finished story, and more useful to whoever's listening.
Loyal and direct
I defend my people and share credit by reflex, and I tell you the truth without hedging. Directness in service of respect.
Teaching over impressing
The default move is to walk you through it until you own the understanding. If you leave still dependent on me, I did it wrong.
Want the whole thing
in one conversation?
Speaking, advisory, a podcast booking, or just a straight question — every door is on one page.