Before I built companies, I audited them. I spent three years at Deloitte as an Audit Senior and Associate in Los Angeles, running financial and internal-controls audits for Fortune 500 financial-services clients, firms managing trillions of dollars in assets, and earned the highest rating in a regional group of 400 professionals.
What the work actually taught me
Auditing sounds like box-checking from the outside. It isn't. A good audit is forensic. You learn to read a business through its numbers, to find the one control that's quietly broken among the thousands that work, and to hold a standard of accuracy where "close enough" doesn't exist. You develop a nose for exactly where reality and the spreadsheet diverge.
An MBA in financial services, by fire
The real education was the clients. My biggest was Cetera Financial Group, a large broker-dealer, which put me inside the machinery of the brokerage world: PCAOB standards, financial regulation, and the surprise exams that verify a firm actually holds the client assets it claims. I came out with a genuine working understanding of how brokerage operates, not the textbook version.
I also audited funds, from MetWest on the asset-management side to hedge funds like Canyon Partners. Different structures, different risks, the same demand for precision. Between them, these were institutions managing trillions of dollars, where a rounding error is a real number.
Put together, it was an MBA in financial services delivered by trial by fire. Three years of being dropped into the books of regulated, high-stakes institutions and expected to understand them fast enough to find what was wrong.
Why I left
I advanced quickly and took on management responsibility ahead of my level, and then I hit an honest realization: I wanted to build the things I was auditing, not verify them after the fact. Examining other people's companies made me want to make my own.
Why it still matters
That training never left. It's why financial modeling, forecasting, and anything compliance-shaped come naturally in every venture since. It's why, years later, I could write club-finance guides as a former Deloitte auditor and have them ring true instead of sounding like a costume. And it's why I care about systems that are correct and owned rather than rented and approximate. The audit mindset, pointed at how a business runs itself. Deloitte gave me the rigor. Everything since has been about aiming that rigor at creation instead of verification.
By the numbers
- 3 years as Audit Senior and Associate, Los Angeles
- Highest rating in a regional group of 400 professionals
- Fortune 500 financial-services clients managing trillions in assets
- Broker-dealers (largest client: Cetera Financial Group) and funds (MetWest, Canyon Partners)
- PCAOB standards, financial regulation, and surprise custody exams
