It's a great question because it has been an interesting path that has brought me to where I am right now. I I am. I have my own forensic accounting firm. I regularly serve as an expert witness and ideo fraud investigations on those those types of services. But that's not where I started, what I came out of college, my master's degree. I went to work for one of the big, big sex at the time. I'm showing my age, but I went to work for Deloitte in their out of practice in Phoenix, and I had every intention of becoming an audit partner there someday. And I was working real hard in my career path to do that. And I was promoted to manager, your early and all those things and as Ah, I was a brand new manager in 1 4002 It was very interesting time because we had a lot of things happening. Obviously we had 9 11 that was reshaping a lot of elements of the economy, but we also had big issues in terms of the accounting profession related to Enron and the collapse of Arthur Andersen and uh, that combined with, uh, you know, my final busy season. I My dad passed away and you know these personal things and these professional things kind of all came together and I felt like, Gosh, I don't know that this is really the path that I want to pee on. A zai was watching things change in public accounting and, uh, what the future might might look like. Eso actually, um, left Deloitte after five years, and I have nothing but good things to say about that firm. It was a great opportunity and learned many, many great things, but actually spent the next three years in academia Ball thinks I was an adjunct instructor at Arizona State University. I was teaching introductory financial accounting while I was working on getting into a doctor program and, ah, plan to a few programs, and I was accepted down to the program at the University of Arizona, down in Tucson on I moved my family down there a year later, and I started my doctoral studies and a couple of years into that, um, you know, I it was a tremendous experience, and gosh had taught me a heck of a lot about critical thinking that I had never thought of before and and ways of looking at data and and other people's work and that kind of thing. But family circumstances made that. I really needed to be back into Phoenix soon around them later. And so I chose not to finish the program. And when I did that, I started looking for, you know, opportunities and found that because of Sarbanes Oxley, that there was a whole boutique industry of forensic firms out there and I found one that was hiring. You know, I kind of raised my hand and said, Hey, I was in on it. Manager I know how to handle work papers and projects and manage people. And, you know, I was. I was in academia and I was teaching brain dead college sophomores. Introductory financial accounting. That seems like good prep for a jury. And, you know, I learned how to critique other people's sophisticated work and that seems that good prep for being an expert witness. You know, why don't you give me a shot? And ah, that was 15 years ago, and I have been doing forensics ever sense, you know, changed employers couple times find trying to find myself a home. But, um, that's the That's the short version of how I got to where I am. And you know, the interesting thing in forensics. It seems like there is just a real variety of stories on how people ended up doing doing what we dio. There's very rarely a direct path, you know, straight from college into, you know, staying in this for the rest of your career. It tends to be one that a little bit wind the road. But for me, um, you know, it was the right road. It worked out really well.

So, um, you know, I'm gonna answer that in two experiences because they're so very different. My first few weeks as a za brand new auditor at Deloitte, um was a lot like, you know, as you hear the phrase drinking from a fire house, I thought I knew everything about accounting. And it turns out I knew next to nothing and, ah, about auditing. And I had no idea what I was doing. Ah, And so I spent a lot of time just watching other people learning what they did trying to connect inside my head. Everything I learned with what I was experiencing and just trying to get to a point where I felt comfortable enough to feel like I was. I had a good foundation and I was in and I could learn, just focus on learning and doing. And, you know, it was, you know, the transition from college life to, um, work in 50 60 70 hours a week was not easy, but it was It was a really, really crucial time. T get me to learn how to be a good professional and be good at being Ah, no solid in my craft. Um it probably took a good few months before, you know, I could look at, ah, work paper that I was assigned as a new auditor and say, I know I know why I'm doing that first times, Like I don't know what I'm doing them, but I'm gonna do it. Ah, but after. But, you know, you took a few months and I got got to that point now, I kind of hit the reset button when I started into forensics and, um, had that experience that kind of all all over again, even though I was a manager level person at a consulting firm. I was learning the ropes, you know, as faras forensics. And so, you know, fortunately, I had a good background behind me to help me, you know, shorten the learning curve. But it was certainly a time period where I was having to learn, you know, Ah, new jargon. And you know, the ways we dealt with clients and ways we dealt with legal process. I was not something I ever learned is an honor was worrying about the legal process. And now in forensics. That's mostly what I'm worried about was the legal process So, uh, it was again a lot of trying to dio watching other people and then doing some studying up on my own taking time, you know, Maybe wasn't doing my work day. It was my personal time. I was just sitting there trying to learn about what I had taken on and try to make myself better, so that when I step back in to the shoes the next morning, I I felt like I could be better at my job and better equipped to really serve your clients.

you know, with forensics, it's all gonna depend on what kind of case you're working on. So, you know, a big chunk of my time right now is actually just involved and functioning as an expert witness on financial matters and a complete wide variety of, um, of cases and usually civil cases right now. Now, you know, I do get involved in fraud cases, and I'm a fraud examiner and all that, but just kind of restricting the discussion first to kind of civil cases. It could be something as simple as a present value calculation on some future damages. It could be, you know, interpreting a contract and figuring out what would might have been earned under a contract, something along those lines and functioning as a damages expert. It could be standard of care. I've been asked to apply in a few times about what auditors have done. Um And then when it comes to fraud, whether it's civil or its criminal, you know, the things that you're working on and the approaches that you're taking are also very different. So the tools that you're using in each of those areas tend to be somewhat specialized. Uh, whereas, um, it'll become It's no surprise that Excel is my best friend, right? I spend a great deal of time analyzing data, pulling data into excel, converting it, filtering at pivot tables, so on and so forth. And it's really no. It's very, very important for students and for new consultants and new auditors, a new staff to get their skills up to a very, very salt level in Excel, for example, because it is so widely used and it is so important. You know what I'm working on fraud case. I might pull out Ah Binford law model and trying to apply that to a population of payments, for example, to see if I have a pattern there that I need to investigate in terms of, um, you know, our our amounts being entered in as payments in a way that is non random and that, you know, exhibits a pattern whereby we might find out that someone is actually writing themselves checks, for example. So I pull out a tool like that if I'm working on something really simple, like, you know, I get I get hired from time to time by insurance companies to look at claims made against them. For, um, people lost income in injury claims and wrongful death and those kind of things. And I'm gonna plot a tool that we're gonna be looking at. You know what someone's income is is likely to be over their lifetime. I'm gonna have to draw from government sources and pull these inputs and drop them in. Ah, and so against the specialized tools and models on pulling on pending that case specific. That being said, a lot of times I'm making my own model. You know, I'm taking the circumstances of the case. I'm sitting back and saying, OK, what do I think this would have looked like? You know, I had a case that went on for I mean, the case itself went out for seven years. Uh, and it involved a civil dispute over ah, business that just started and had a 30 year lease and and had 2 10 year extensions, you know, at their option. And what would have happened? It had this dispute not not arisen. And when you're sitting down and trying to build a model for a business on 30 and 40 and 50 time here, you know periods. There's no plug and play model out there. This is This is something where you're gonna be doing all the research yourself, and you're gonna be building this and you're gonna be the one who's got to defend every single assumption. So financial modelling becomes extremely important for what I do in terms of the civil cases when I'm working on damages, Um, so, you know, I wish I could say there was a nice little package you could pull off the shelf to do it. If there was, I'd love to have it, but I have not found it yet, so it's It's it's Ah, we are still in that position with what I do, what we're doing. A lot of work from the ground up, which in some ways is fun. As sick as that sounds, it's fun toe. Actually build your own model sometimes and really figure out where you think this thing would go. Um, I mean, you have to take great care because it's gonna get scrutinized and it's gonna get picked on. Uh, but it's also an intellectual challenge. That's when I