Since high school, I new I wanted to get into accounting and finance. I ended up graduating with my Bachelors of Science majoring in Accounting from Lake Erie College in 2011 (small private school near Cleveland, Ohio). From there, I worked in a few financial analysis and bookkeeping roles for the Auto Repair and Security Alarm industries. During that time I did some minor real estate analysis.
I didn't make it long working in a normal office setting and after a few years I decided to go out on my own. There were some twists and turns, but I landed on the the freelance sites called Elance and Upwork, which is where my skills were truly developed in relation to financial models. I took any possible job that I could find in Excel and Google Sheets. This helped me learn about clever logic structuring required to build useful things for planning and decision making. I still am fairly active on Upwork, even today.
My focus and expertise started with building real estate templates / cash flow waterfalls. Over time it was natural to also build general startup financial models as well as helpful business logic / tools. By taking on 100's of jobs on Upwork, my skills just kept getting more refined and I became more and more efficient as well as knowledgeable about what is helpful. My accounting background helped with a general understanding of financial statements and generally accepted norms of this space.
In the middle of everything that was going on, I decided to build smarthelping.com and list templates that I thought would be useful. What you see here now is the culmination of many 1,000's of hours of work and even more thought. I plan to do this for the rest of my life. I love it.
Learn More About Working with Me
Contact: jason@smarthelping.com
Custom Financial Modeling Work: https://www.smarthelping.com/p/contact_27.html (I work weekends and all hours).
You can buy all financial model templates and tools from smarthelping.com in one large bundle here.