I thought I'd be a traditional accountant. Got my degree from Oklahoma State, passed all four parts of the CPA exam on the first try, and figured I'd spend my career working with debits and credits.
Then I got lucky. I landed in a consulting group at PwC where I discovered, or more accurately, remembered, I loved problem-solving. Shortly after I started, PwC began pushing a tool called Alteryx to automate tasks. While most people saw it as just another software to learn, I saw something different: the possibility to eliminate hours of boring, manual work. Mostly for selfish reasons, I learned to use Alteryx to eliminate the boring and repetitive parts of my job.
I got really good at it. Good enough that I became a leading resource in our Houston office for building these systems. I built automations that saved one project over 150 hours and $50,000 annually. Another system I developed made it possible to handle data volumes that would've been impossible otherwise. Work that contributed to a successful delivery of a million-dollar project.
But here's what really got my attention: our clients kept asking questions, requesting tweaks to deliverables, sending us messy data that required hours of cleanup. I realized they needed these same automations I was building, but most of them didn't use tools like Alteryx.
So I pitched an idea to a few internal folks at PwC. "What if we packaged these automations and sold them directly to clients?" The feedback was swift: intellectual property concerns, licensing complications, too risky.
Like I always do, I solved the problem. I suggested we provide optional add-ons to a few of our recurring engagements to provide quicker turnarounds by allocating additional resources. Clients loved it. Who doesn't want a faster close process? Those additional resources were our internally developed automations.
That was my first real "aha moment" about these tools. People would pay for the value offered by my automations.
When ChatGPT launched in 2022 and suddenly everyone was talking about AI and automation, I wasn't scrambling to catch up. I'd been thinking about this business model for years. The AI boom just made automation accessible to firms that could never afford enterprise-level tools or that didn't believe in the value of a code and logic-based automation.
I realized I had something unique: deep consulting experience across many industries, hands-on technical skills with automation tools, and most importantly, the ability to see inefficiencies that others missed, even before AI made it trendy.
Memorial Ridge exists because too many smart business owners are spending their time on work that could be automated, while consultants sell them on AI buzzwords without actually building anything that works. Memorial Ridge exists to solve others' problems, teach those that want to learn about AI and automation, and to entertain my belief that AI and automation can help businesses achieve things they might not have thought were possible.
