Dan Heiland

Background

About Dan Heiland

As a finance manager for over 30 years, I have enjoyed problem solving and crunching numbers. On my first real accounting job, my boss sat me down in front of a computer (monochrome monitor, 286 processor, 512 KB RAM, 20 MB hard drive & 5.5 inch floppy drive running DOS) and put me in charge of the organization’s computer systems. Windows didn’t exist until 6 years later. I truly got to learn from the bottom up and it has helped me be successful with technology. I worked primarily for multi-company organizations. I had to learn to be organized in order to succeed. I was always doing my tasks multiple times, so by repetition my accounting aptitude was reinforced. It also taught me to keep things simple. Simple allows you to do the first task 25 or 30 times, then move on to each next task so I could complete my work for every company. I learned to keep things simple so I wasn’t the only one who could do a task. Otherwise I had to be there to do it or schedule around it. This can be very tempting to your ego, but reeks havoc on your work/life balance. Simple solutions can be used by someone else and you can be promoted or just be able to go on vacation without the phone ringing. If you spend all your time at work, you miss time with your family that you will never get back. Work hard while you are at work, but get the work done and go home to your family. My strengths of operational accounting and analysis gave me a lot of great experience with cash flow and budgets. This gave me the opportunity to work with a wide variety of people and skill levels. I also got to do a lot of training, including managers and accounting staff. Now I get to use my budgeting, cash flow and training experience to help small businesses learn how to budget and manage their cash flow. It has been an interesting transition. Fortunately, I have mostly worked for entrepreneurial organizations, so all the meetings with the sales staff that I got to attend every week were beneficial.