Meet one of our Assistant Controllers, Pete Dovey! Pete has been a valuable part of Kranz Consulting for 7 years. His years of experience and passion for finance have allowed Kranz and our clients to succeed and thrive. Get to know his story below!
Hometown: Half Moon Bay, California
Alma Mater: San Francisco State University
Favorite things to do outside the office: Snowboarding is one of my favorite pastimes. But in summer, I enjoy doing water sports, everything from stand-up paddle boarding to learning the new sport of wing foiling, a form of windsurfing. I also really enjoy gardening and spending time with my 13 year old daughter.
How has your background impacted your experience as a consultant? Having strong accounting, FP&A and payroll roles in my past has been very helpful when wearing many hats in the consultant role. Being able to look at an issue from different reference points has been invaluable.
What’s a typical workday like for you? No day is typical but every day starts with a plan regarding what needs to get done, allowing for the unexpected. I assess all my client’s immediate and longer-term needs, prioritize accordingly, ensuring deadlines are being met and communications are effective.
As part of a team that works 100% virtually, what technology or collaboration tools do you use to make your work life easier? Aside from the standards like Zoom, Teams, Slack Etc., I also rely on focus music from the Headspace app. The upbeat no lyric music in blocks of 1-2 hours really helps me when you need to tune out all the distractions. I am also a fan very large dual monitors, one portrait, one landscape.
What motivates you to wake up and go to work every day? Kranz consulting has been one of the most engaging jobs I have had in my 23-year accounting career. The opportunity to learn and the exposure to different companies always keeps things fresh. I enjoy helping start-up companies get to the next level at any stage in the journey. Working for such a great company with an excellent work life balance, it doesn’t take much to get motivated. Also, I am a single parent, raising my thirteen-year-old daughter independently. She motivates me to work harder and be a better person every day in my personal and professional life. Our family also has an extremely food motivated miniature pinscher who is better than an alarm clock. She demands food and a walk as soon as the sun is up. After that, my daughter is up and on her way to school. Then I start my work day.
What kind of work have you been doing? I have clients in a variety of industries, ranging from Web3, SaaS and semiconductor development. The work has consisted of everything from maintaining day to day accounting functions, monthly close processes to assisting with FP&A work, as well as clean up and process improvement.
Where do you see the benefits? With exposure to a variety of industries at various stages, it allows for a deep understanding on where to focus my efforts for maximum return, tuning out the noise and getting right to whatever issue or task that needs to be solved.
Linking data to finance and accounting, explain environments that have had a lack of reporting infrastructure/inefficiencies and how you have brought organization, solutions and implementation: I am currently working with a SaaS company that has significant operations in Chile. While preparing their international consolidation and reviewing the Chilean entity, we discovered a disconnect in the reporting of revenue. Working with the CEO and the Chilean accountants, we were able to review each individual contract for 2021, properly recognizing revenue, along with reconciliations of deferred and accrued revenue receivables.