A Featured Trajectory · Accounting as a Launchpad
The first trajectory to come in from the invitation — a second major nobody recommended, an automation that erased sixteen hours of manual work a day, and a job offer for a role that didn't exist yet.
I asked what accounting launched you into that you never saw coming. Chris Grimm was first to answer. His path runs from a "Computerized Accounting" class in the late '90s to CIO of two dental-services organizations to founding his own consultancy — and it turns on one line from a professor and one warning from an advisor who told him he was "begging for failure." In his own words. — DeWayne
In the late '90s, my Computerized Accounting professor at Sullivan University told our class: "The accounting professional who understands technology will be well ahead of the one who doesn't." I was already mildly interested in technology — I didn't have the terminology for it yet, but I could see that most of the finance functions we were learning would eventually be application-driven. Computers were already in every office, and the internet was becoming "a thing." It just made sense, and I wanted to get ahead of it.
So the following week I went to my academic advisor and told her I wanted to add a second major in Computer Systems. She told me I was "begging for failure" — that the two course loads were so different I wouldn't be able to keep up. I did it anyway. I graduated Magna Cum Laude from both programs.
Years later I was Director of Corporate Accounting at Glow Brands, a health-and-beauty franchisor, helping migrate the company from QuickBooks to Microsoft Dynamics GP. One of the first problems we hit was daily cash receipts. We had more than 250 location managers emailing in Excel spreadsheets of their daily cash, checks, and credit-card deposits, and two people in the office manually entering all of it into the accounting system and reconciling it against the bank statements. They were consistently days behind. The obvious fix was to throw another person at it. That never made sense to me.
Instead I learned simple VB scripting in Dynamics, then learned the back end of our POS system well enough to pull the numbers straight from its SQL database every night. I built an overnight import job, so when the cash team walked in at 8 a.m. the day's receipts were already sitting in Dynamics in a batch, ready to review and post. Sixteen-plus manhours of daily labor became twenty minutes for one person.
A few years after that I interviewed for an Assistant Controller position at Mortenson Dental Partners, thinking I was simply advancing my accounting career. During the interview, the CFO talked about the same kinds of problems we'd had at Glow — cash receipts, no automation, no visibility, weak internal controls — even though Mortenson already had one of the most sophisticated data teams in the DSO world. They were at about sixty locations and growing fast, and their back-office processes hadn't kept up. He brought the CIO into the room and we talked at length about it.
They called three days later. I hadn't gotten the Assistant Controller job — they'd hired someone else for it. Instead, they'd created a different role for me entirely: Accounting Information Systems Manager. They'd recognized they needed someone who could modernize the back office, and they didn't want that person tied down with month-end close and day-to-day accounting work.
We built automation and internal applications that modernized how that company ran, and some of what we built helped pave the way for innovation you can still see across the dental industry today. By the time I left in 2019 to become CIO at Dental Whale, Mortenson had grown past 140 locations and had barely grown the finance department at all — just one payroll assistant added the whole time.
Today I run ConsulDent360, providing fractional executive services, technology consulting, M&A integration leadership, AI-readiness consulting, and business transformation work for clients around the country. I still use my accounting background every single day.
Right now I'm working a fairly simple-sounding case for a mid-market DSO in Austin: the operations team wants to know at what point it's more effective, and more financially prudent, to bring IT support in-house instead of using a managed service provider. That sounds like a technology question. It's really an accounting question — but you can't answer it without understanding the technology implications, their appetite for tech investment, what AI-readiness actually requires versus plain technical support, and the growing complexity of healthcare compliance and risk. That kind of engagement is where I get to use everything I've got.
It's the same on the acquisition side. In due diligence, I'm not just looking at the current state of a target's technology — I'm looking at their processes. "How do we integrate them into our tech stack" matters just as much as "which back-office processes do we need to fold in quickly to avoid data loss or mismanaged cash." Understanding the core business the way a finance person does, while also understanding the technology the way an engineer does, lets me help buyers make integration calls that a pure technologist or a pure finance person couldn't make alone.
In 2016 I added a PMP certification, which brought project management and Six Sigma principles into the toolbox too.
— Chris GrimmPresident, ConsulDent360
A featured trajectory in Accounting as a Launchpad, a 12toKNOW series. Have your own? Share it here — the best get featured and credited, the way Chris's was.