Founder & CEO, Multiply

Built from the fire. Built for founders.

The financial partner I wish I'd had when I needed one most.

15 years. Four businesses. One bankruptcy. And a front-row seat to every financial mistake a founder can make — including my own. That journey is exactly why Multiply exists.

The Entrepreneurial Story

I started my first business in a recession. That might sound like a flex, but it wasn't strategy — it was just timing. What it taught me, though, was that adversity has a way of either breaking you or building you into something you couldn't have planned your way into.

Over the last 15 years, I've built four businesses. I cut my teeth on a photography business and a co-working space. I learned how to hustle, how to hire, how to sell. Both of those early ventures taught me the fundamentals of what it means to run something.

Then came Citizen Supply.

Citizen Supply was a retail concept built around the idea that there was a market hungry for locally-made, design-forward products. I bootstrapped it from scratch — no investors, no safety net. Just grit, a vision, and a lease I had no business signing.

Year 1

$1.2M

Year 2

$1.6M

Year 3

$2.5M

Year 4

$3.5M

Year 5

COVID.

We'd built something real. The team was firing on all cylinders. Investors were starting to knock. And then — almost overnight — the world shut down.

I won't romanticize it. The math was brutal and simple: a major lease increase, new debt, destroyed margins, and evaporated foot traffic. We couldn't survive the math. We closed.

All those loans came calling. It drove me into bankruptcy.

The Bankruptcy

I want to be honest about this part because I think it matters.

Bankruptcy carries a weight that nobody who hasn't been through it can fully understand. There's shame attached to it that you didn't ask for. There's grief — over the team, the vision, the version of yourself that believed it would work out.

There's a surreal, disorienting period where you're doing the administrative work of unwinding something you gave years of your life to.

And then, slowly, there's something else.

Clarity.

In that fog — and it was a fog — I had to get radically honest about what had actually happened. Not the story I'd been telling myself, but the real one. And the real one had a financial thread running through all of it that I hadn't been willing to look at clearly enough.

I'd been an entrepreneur for years, but I was running on instinct and optimism. I had bookkeepers. I had numbers. What I didn't have was a financial partner — someone who could translate those numbers into a story I could use. Someone proactively in my corner, helping me see around corners instead of just recording what had already happened.

I made decisions I shouldn't have made. I held debt I shouldn't have carried. I scaled into a structure that was a house of cards, and I didn't have anyone in the room telling me that.

The pandemic didn't cause my bankruptcy. It just accelerated the inevitable.

Coming out of that — rebuilding credit, rebuilding confidence, rebuilding a sense of what I was actually capable of — changed everything about how I think about business and money. And it's the reason Multiply exists.

My Point of View on Finances

Here's what I believe, and it's informed by every hard thing I've been through:

A finance team should be a forcing function, not a filing system.

Most entrepreneurs have a bookkeeper. Some have an accountant. A smaller number have a fractional CFO. Almost none of them have a financial team that functions as a true partner — proactively in the business, connecting the numbers to the decisions, asking the hard questions before a problem becomes a crisis.

What they get instead is a reactive service. Someone who records what happened and hands it back. History, not strategy. That's not a financial team. That's a ledger with a subscription fee.

The job of a financial team isn't to report on the past. It's to help you navigate the future.

That means proactive insight, not reactive reporting. It means showing up in your business like a partner, not a vendor. It means being able to translate a P&L into plain English — into what it means for your next hire, your next product launch, your next quarter. And it means having the guts to tell you what you need to hear, not what feels comfortable.

You need authority over your numbers, but you don't need to become an accountant.

The goal isn't to make you love spreadsheets. The goal is to make sure you're never flying blind again. There's a difference between knowing what to ask and knowing how to build a financial model. I'll handle the model. You just need to show up to the conversation.

That's the relationship I wanted when Citizen Supply was struggling. A partner who spoke my language, understood the entrepreneurial experience from the inside, and helped me make the decisions that actually mattered. It's the relationship I'm building for every founder who comes to Multiply.

After the Dust Settled

The years after the bankruptcy were honestly some of the most formative of my entrepreneurial life.

I'd been a business coach for years — working closely with founders who were doing all the right things on the outside but feeling financially lost. And as I dug deeper into that work, I kept seeing the same gap: they had bookkeepers. Some had accountants. Almost none of them had the strategic financial layer that connected their numbers to their decisions.

I became obsessed with that gap. And I built Multiply to close it.

Today, Multiply serves 28 founders across creative agencies and e-commerce brands, with $33.6M in revenue under advisory. We operate as a fully fractional finance team — bookkeeping, controller oversight, and CFO strategy, all coordinated under one roof.

But more than any number, what I'm proud of is this: the entrepreneurs we work with stop fearing their financials. They start looking forward to their monthly calls. They make better decisions — faster, with more confidence — because they finally have the clarity they were missing.

That's the work. That's why I'm here.

Built from the fire. Built for founders.

The Entrepreneurial Story

The Bankruptcy

My Point of View on Finances

After the Dust Settled

If you're building something real and ready to stop flying blind —