Sometimes people look at what I do and have opinions about the combination. An accountant who also works in technology risk does not fit the shape most people expect, so they fill in the gap themselves. Some say it out loud. Most just decide quietly that I could not pick a lane.
I look at it more as being adventurous, and using my life as a lab. Eventually everything converged into a beautiful whole.
When I left corporate, I had an LLC that I had created, and I had skill sets. But the challenge initially was what should I really spend my time building.
As someone who had quite a lot of things to concurrently take care of, kids to raise, bills to pay, parents to look after, there was always an uneasiness that created a fear of failure. What to settle into. Whether it would be a waste of time. Whether it was even worth my time.
Coming into business with both accounting and technology skills, a little bit of indecision set upon me, and that was pretty painful to go through. I was trying to look at two things that, at the time, I thought were incompatible.
I was listening to a whole lot of gurus about just doing one thing, and I never really took massive action to settle down on one thing. I spent the first year paying for every mentorship I saw, even though none of them had a magic pill to offer. I wasted time in meetings and walkthroughs when the solution was always within me, and it involved taking massive action. So at some point I decided that if it was going to be, it was up to me.
It also did not help that I had a phobia for the back end of things. Tools, computers, anything that meant opening the hood. This showed up during my technology audit days. Auditing code and back end configurations was always my least favourite audit activity. It means reading a code snippet or a configuration and then opining on whether the code is doing the right thing, or whether the configuration is appropriate.
That phobia had a reason. When I started my education in Sierra Leone, technology was not on the menu. I didn’t get to touch a computer until I was in university. The first time I turned a computer on was in university, and even then, this was in the two thousands, and these were computers that were quite archaic.
So when I immigrated to the US, I wanted to move closer to technology, because at heart I’m a technologist.
Wanting it and doing it are not the same thing. I genuinely had a fear of anything that looked too technical. So I spent a good amount of time chasing people to help me build tools, and spent quite a lot of money on that too. I was very nervous about committing to one thing, and that created a whole lot of issues.
Until I discovered Claude Code.
When I discovered it, I realised it shortens the time from idea to testing. I was able to rapidly test a lot of things, clearly not perfect. But with that, I was able to start building my site. I was able to start doing the actual work itself. It did not give me back the tens of thousands I had spent trying to buy entrepreneurial success, but it helped me feel competent to try things on my own.
Claude Code is my orchestrator, the main thing I use. Codex sits alongside it, and other models do research, because none of them are perfect on their own and the output has to hold up.
Because it doesn’t matter really how intelligent you are. It doesn’t matter how dedicated you are. If you don’t get to the doing part of business, it’s all just theory. It’s all just philosophising.
Being able to shorten that time between ideating and putting something out there that you can get feedback on, that made it easier for me to implement on my ideas.
I did not want to compete in a field that is generic, that has a low barrier to entry. I wanted to compete on quality. I was not going to compete in a very generic niche that somebody can get a single dose of training and claim to be in that profession.
Because of that, it took me a while to nail down a niche I could confidently dedicate myself to and build a business around. Calling my business a bookkeeping business, for example. The label was too wide to stand on.
But when I found government contracting, and saw that I could bring my skills from both a technology perspective and a financial perspective, that gave me the assurance that we could build a business long term. It would take some time to upskill in a couple of areas. Once we are there, it would take somebody else the same time to catch up.
So now the niche we operate in is federal compliance. We offer both bookkeeping services and technology services, to federal contractors and to the federal government directly.
Nailing down that niche took work. It was not only about identifying demand. It was about fit, and about the medium to long term rather than the next quarter.
And eventually, it was not data that drove me. I did not do an analysis of how many people are demanding this service, which everybody will advise you to.
I would rather create my own niche, and I believe I am equally competent in both fields. Most of the clients who benefit from our services benefit from both the technology expertise and the financial expertise.
I wasn’t really prepared to listen to what the so-called online business guru would say. I wanted to make this work, and I spent a lot of time figuring it out, because I know that succeeding in this particular niche will create a lot of opportunities for a lot of people.
My mission, ultimately, is to encourage more people to pursue entrepreneurship. Because corporate is all good, but that is not something you can pass down. In corporate you’re kind of in a straitjacket. You’re only allowed to deal with the things that are important to the company, not the things that are important to you.
So if you are that kind of person who wants to really work on things, you want to test the breadth of your skillset, try entrepreneurship. Pick something you like. You might have to climb down off a high horse, spend sleepless nights wondering how to pay your bills, face the wrath of people whose caricature of you is not aligned. But you will be doing yourself a favour.
Way more intelligent people say that many people go to their graves with dreams they never dared to pursue. Never be that person.