Why Memorial Ridge Exists

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. Maybe make be a partner at a public accounting firm, maybe be a CFO somewhere. Retire comfortably. A pretty standard playbook.

Then I got lucky.

I landed in a consulting group at PwC where I discovered, or more accurately, remembered, I loved problem-solving. Not the textbook kind of problem-solving they teach in accounting classes, but the messy, real-world kind where the answer isn't in the back of the book and nobody's quite sure what the question even is yet.

Why I Got Good at Automation

Shortly after I started, PwC began pushing a tool called Alteryx. It was a better way to create something similar to Excel macros. While most people saw it as just another software to learn, I saw something different: the possibility to eliminate hours of boring, manual work.

And I had plenty of boring, manual work.

There's this thing that happens in consulting where you spend hours reformatting data, cleaning up messy Excel files, copying and pasting information from one system to another, and rebuilding the same reports month after month. It's not particularly difficult work, but just annoyingly boring.

So, mostly for selfish reasons, I learned to use Alteryx to eliminate the boring and repetitive parts of my job. I wanted to spend my time actually thinking and solving problems, not copying and pasting for six hours straight.

Turns out, that selfish motivation was the best thing that could have happened.

My Brain is Wired a Certain Way

I got really good at Alteryx. Good enough that I became a leading resource in our Houston office for building these systems. People started coming to me with their problems, and I'd build automations that solved those problems.

I built automations that saved one client over 150 hours and $50,000 annually. Another system I developed made it possible to handle data volumes that would have been impossible otherwise due to Excel data limitations. It ultimately contributed to the successful delivery of a million-dollar project.

Then, I noticed our clients kept asking questions. They'd request tweaks to deliverables. They'd send us messy data that required hours of cleanup. They'd want slight variations on reports we'd already delivered. Every single one of these requests was predictable, repeatable, and, most importantly, automatable.

I realized they needed these same automations I was building, but most of them didn't use tools like Alteryx. They didn't even know tools like Alteryx existed.

The Pitch That Failed at PwC

So I pitched an idea to a few internal folks at PwC. "What if we packaged these automations and sold them directly to clients? Not as a service where we run it for them, but as actual software they could use?"

The feedback was swift and predictable: intellectual property concerns, licensing complications, too risky. Who owns the code? What happens if the client modifies it and breaks it? What if they resell it? What about Alteryx licensing requirements?

All valid concerns, I guess.

Damn, I’m Smart (Sometimes)

Like I always do, I solved the problem.

I suggested we provide optional add-ons to a few of our recurring engagements. The language was beautifully corporate (ew): "expedited delivery through enhanced resource allocation." What we were really saying was "We'll do this faster because we have automations doing most of the work."

Clients loved it. Who doesn't want a faster close process? Who doesn't want quicker turnaround on deliverables? Who doesn’t want to no longer have to manually clean up their data?

Those "additional resources" were my automations. Clients were essentially paying us extra to use automation tools that made our work faster and better. They were paying for the value, even if they didn't fully understand what they were actually buying.

That was my first real "aha moment" about these tools. People would pay for this value. They didn't care about the technology. They cared about getting better results, faster, with less pain.

I Guess AI is Cool

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. I'd already seen firsthand that firms would pay for automation, it could provide value, and that most businesses had no idea where to even start.

The AI boom just made automation accessible to firms that could never afford enterprise-level tools like Alteryx or that didn't believe in the value of code and logic-based automation. Suddenly, you didn't need a $10,000 annual license and a team of developers. You needed a $20/month ChatGPT subscription and someone who understood your business well enough to build the right prompts.

The hard part was seeing the bigger picture and understanding the business problem well enough to solve it correctly. There are a lot of inefficiencies that most others learned to ignore.

And that's where my combination of skills became valuable in a way I never expected.

This Could Work

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.

I wasn't a software developer trying to learn accounting. I wasn't an accountant trying to pretend I understood software. I was someone who understood both the business problems and the technical solutions well enough to build systems that actually solved real problems.

And I'd already proven it worked. Not in theory. In practice. With real clients. Saving real time and real money.

Why Memorial Ridge Exists

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.

All to often I see others try to sell "AI transformation" and "digital enablement" and other impressive-sounding phrases that mean absolutely nothing. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the slide deck if they can’t deliver results.

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.

But mostly, Memorial Ridge exists because I got tired of watching smart people waste their time on boring, repetitive work that could be automated by someone who actually knows how to build these systems.

I already proved this works. Now I'm just doing it for people who deserve it more than enterprise consulting firms do.

And honestly? I'm having a lot more fun doing it this way.