“If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else.”
Yogi Berra
"You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don’t make money your goal. Instead, pursue the things you love doing, and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off you."
Maya Angelou
WELCOME TO ABLAZE FINANCIAL
Business Success Creates Freedom
Bookkeeping, accounting, and finance strategies that create clarity, cash flows, and confidence for humans with growing businesses and big dreams.
THE FOUNDER'S JOURNEY
This is YOUR Business, so we’ll follow your lead. Our mission is to help you understand where you are on the Founder’s Journey and how to chart the path to your desired outcomes. We do this by illuminating the time-tested mile markers along the way:
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Are You Playing a Game You Can Win?
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Do You Have Product/Market Fit?
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Do You Have Profit?
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Do You Have Cash Runway?
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Are You Working On or In the Business?
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Are You Properly Compensated?
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Are You Happy With Your Growth?
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Are Your Prepared for Exit?
Success Leaves Clues and We Help You Find Them
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
Peter Drucker
Thank You For Being Here
Hi, I’m Amy, the founder of Ablaze. After 25+ years in public accounting and as an executive for large, international public companies and start-ups, I realized how start-ups and small business owners were expected to know so much when they couldn’t possibly have all the training and specialization to run a business. This led me to found Ablaze to offer big business accounting and finance expertise to smaller growing businesses and founders.
MANAGING THE EMOTIONS
Generating revenue, making investments, and spending wisely—both in your business and personally—are very crucial life skills to master. Yet cash flows, accounting, and finance are skills so many of us are never taught but somehow expected to know. At their essence, these numbers measure where you are in relation to your goals and whether you are on track to achieve them. And because you own your own business, they are directly related to your personal finances and quality of life.
These factors make the journey full of intense feelings—particularly negative emotions like fear, anxiety, and loneliness. Negative emotions can cause you to lose perspective, creating short-sighted, impulsive decision-making. If left unchecked, they can also rob you of the joy found along the journey.
We work with you to help you turn negative emotions into positive ones so you can make better decisions. With our proven methods, you will move from fear and isolation to confidence and hope.
We Understand the Emotional Rollercoaster of Money
WHO WE ARE
Our expertise is all about your numbers - bookkeeping, accounting, finance, process, organization, and strategy.
Our superpower is our passion to care for YOU along the way as we help make your dreams your ever-evolving, new reality.
We understand that creating a successful business is one of the hardest journeys in life. No one truly understands it unless they’ve done it, too! That’s why it matters that you choose a team whose expertise and superpowers complement yours, a team that understands the motivation and the challenges that are behind your numbers.
Almost anyone can fill out a ledger; very few, however, can overcome the challenging obstacles and successfully navigate the Founder’s Journey to help you turn your numbers into the means to achieve your personal and business dreams.
Create a Better Financial Future
OUR APPROACH
We Meet You Where You Are At
At Ablaze Financial, we provide strategies tailored to achieve your personal and business financial goals. With those goals in mind, we deliver clean and accurate financial records, manage cash flows, and provide support for strategic growth. Our services are designed to help you confidently overcome the challenges to achieve your vision.
Our service offerings are delivered in stages. They build on each other to help you grow and learn along the way. A human and a business can only integrate so much new information and process at a time. Our stages are integrated on a timeline that is digestible and doesn’t disrupt you from the other important facets of running your business and having a life.
Stage 1:
Building the Foundation
We believe it is critical to build the right foundation so that you can grow and scale your business with more ease. This includes getting to know you, your business and your team; getting you organized and compliant; creating clean books; and orienting on where you are on the Founder’s Journey today and charting a path to your success.
Stage 2:
Process Review and Improvement
Once the Foundation is built, we work with you to ensure that your accounting processes like AR invoicing, AP processing and payroll are designed for ease and accuracy. This allows us to optimize your cash flow timing and remove any lurking energy vampires.
Stage 3:
Driving Cash Management
Once the Foundation and Processes are built, we work with you to drive improved cash management by doing weekly cash flow forecasting and helping you understand and improve your cash runway - i.e. how many months of cash do we have in the bank. This also functions as a mini-budget and helps us determine the inherent trade offs of what we can and can’t afford.
Stage 4:
Strategy and
Insights
At this stage, we start to focus on improving your profits, growing the business and planning for exit. It is through this work that you will achieve the ending steps of the Founder’s Journey.
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn”
Benjamin Franklin
FAQ
Have Questions?
We are here to help answer them. If you have more questions, let’s talk.
We understand cost is a concern, which is why we offer pricing models based on the size and complexity of your business to ensure that the right amount of time and attention is allocated based on what the business needs. Our services are designed to provide a high return on investment by improving your financial management and identifying cost-saving opportunities. Year 1 costs are often underwritten by identified tax savings in the first year, especially when we handle your business and personal books.
Our track record speaks for itself, with satisfied clients who have seen significant improvements in their financial health. In addition, we offer a satisfaction guarantee and regular performance reviews to ensure you see the results you're expecting. Building a business is challenging, and it takes time. We will always outline where we are and where we are going on the way to meeting the goals we set.
While in-house teams are valuable and required when you get to a certain revenue size, working with Ablaze Financial gives you access to a broad range of accounting services, expertise and strategic tools that would be cost-prohibitive to develop internally for most companies. We work collaboratively with you and your existing team to enhance your financial operations. As you grow and achieve gross revenues approaching $5M to $7M, we start to discuss moving to a hybrid in-house / Ablaze model and support you through that process.
No, but we partner with experts that do! Accounting and Tax are two separate specialties in finance. You will hear Amy say that it’s like asking your brain surgeon to do heart surgery. Both are surgeons, but you want the one that’s best at what they do to take care of you. If you are in need of a referral, we are happy to help you find a great provider, and we will partner with them as part of our services.
No, that’s also an entirely different specialty. Financial planners focus on personal wealth creation and they are an important part of the full team a founder will need as they grow their business. If you are in need of a referral, we are happy to help you find a great provider and we will partner with them as part of our services.
Your data security is our top priority. We use state-of-the-art encryption and security protocols to protect your information. Additionally, our team adheres to strict confidentiality agreements and industry best practices to ensure your data remains secure and private.
We understand your hesitation, and we’ve often been retained by clients who had those same experience with other providers. That’s why we start by focusing on building strong, trust-based relationships with our clients. Our personalized approach ensures we address your specific concerns and provide transparent, reliable service. By getting to know one another from the outset, we’re going to find out very quickly if we’re not a fit. We also encourage you to speak with our existing clients to hear first-hand how we've made a positive difference for them.
WHY CHOOSE US
The Ablaze Advantage
The Ablaze advantage lies in our unique blend of entrepreneurial and big-company expertise, tailored specifically to support and grow your business. We provide personalized, hands-on guidance to transform your financial practices, ensuring you have the clarity, cash flows, and confidence to achieve your business goals.
WE AREN’T JUST BOOKKEEPERS
While we start with customized, detail-oriented bookkeeping, our addition of proven accounting and finance principles, along with decades of operational experience, helps us create a full and accurate financial picture and the roadmap to your desired future. Our expertise and coaching empower your operations, and our accounting leads to confidence in decision-making that will help you sleep better at night.
BUSINESS AND PERSONAL
We focus on both your business and personal financials. While the two are emotionally and practically intertwined, they need to be separate for legal and tax reasons. We focus on both because for most business owners, what’s happening in one definitely impacts the other. So we start by meeting you where you are to understand your finances on a combined basis. This has the added benefit of helping us understand ways of developing strategies that maximize tax savings.
WE ARE PART OF YOUR TEAM
We go beyond being an outsourced service provider to becoming a valuable part of your team, no different than if we were your employees. We learn who you are, what you do, and all about your mission so that we become an extension of you. Our deep expertise then allows us to help solve the strategic, operational, and financial challenges you face. And, if we don’t know the answer, someone in our network does, and we will happily introduce them to you.
WE WIN WHEN YOU WIN
We care for your business as our own. We want you to become so successful that you reach the point that you need to hire your own in-house accounting and finance team. Our track record of transforming clients’ financial operations, helping them move from feeling fearful, disorganized, and overwhelmed to feeling confident, empowered and hopeful is the basis of our belief that we can help you succeed beyond your imagination.
“I can do things you cannot, you can do things I cannot; together, we can do great things.”
Mother Teresa
“Everything is hard before it’s easy.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
SUCCESS STORIES
Clients’ Success Journeys
We want you to hear from clients like you that we helped achieve their financial goals. From new entrepreneurs to established businesses, the testimonials we receive highlight our commitment to excellence and client satisfaction.
Kyler
"The team at Ablaze Financial has helped me so much. First, they figured out my books when another firm couldn’t and helped me work out some significant tax bills. Then, we focused on helping me understand and pay down merchant capital loans that I hadn’t realized were killing my cash flows. Now we are focused on my profitability so that I can grow my business to higher revenue and achieve the financial outcomes I desire for my family. It’s never easy to learn and grow, but it is so worth it."
Jed
“We hit the accounting lottery with Ablaze. It is so fun to work together on so much more than the numbers. We actually enjoy these meetings and find ourselves laughing together all the time. They are helping us chart a path to our dreams!”
Stevie
"When Amy and her team stand with me, I don’t have to worry. I initially hired Ablaze to help untangle the accounting and cash flows across my businesses and investments that several previous firms weren’t able to figure out, but it has become so much more than that. They are part of my team and are invaluable to my operations. I couldn’t build my companies without them."
Jeff
“Amy always has the answer to the questions that seem to come up every week. No matter how big or small, she figures it out so I don’t have to, or she will introduce us to someone who can help. She takes the worry away about some of the things I don’t understand so I can focus on building my business. And everything is organized. When I needed my EIN while I was at the bank, she responded to my text in less than a minute and gave me what I needed, even though she was at the beach on vacation. It was awesome.”
Anders
“Working with Ablaze, I was able to understand my financial statements and cash flows for the first time. Before that, I was trying to do it all myself, and I had no formal training. The team helped me understand what mattered and what didn’t, and they are now working to show me how to read and understand the economics of my business so I can continue focusing on my practice. Amy showed me that my business was doing better than I thought, and that gave me added confidence. We are now working on growing and scaling the business, and it's so exciting.”
Jenn
“Amy and her team helped me make sense of my LLC and personal books to allow me to get compliant with taxes. She easily saved me over 30% that first year. They made sure business spending moved to my LLC and personal spending to my personal accounts, regardless of where I spent the money. I learned so much about the importance of why I need to keep them separate. They also held my hand through some very lean cashflow periods. They always have my back.”
Anita
“I was so worried when I started my firm that I was going to screw up my trust account and wind up in trouble. As an attorney, we have very strict rules related to certain aspects of our accounting that we need to follow, and I wasn’t sure how to set up my accounting systems to make sure my practice complied with those rules. Working with Amy and her team, I got organized, everything was accounted for, and I didn’t have to worry anymore. I am also learning how to read my financial statements and how I am performing financially. Knowing all of that is taken care of gives me the confidence to turn my attention to representing my clients.”
Hunter
“I hated doing my books, so I always put that off. Amy came along and helped me to get organized. Now, working with her and the team, I don’t have those tasks hanging over my head. They work hard to ensure my business financials are always taken care of and I always know how my business is performing financially. She also ensures we are deducting everything we can and that the cash flows are strong. My focus is back to growing the business without the nagging feeling that something needs to be done.”
GET STARTED NOW
With years of experience, Ablaze Financial remains dedicated to helping the humans who own businesses realize their dreams and create a strong financial future. Having helped numerous businesses achieve financial stability and growth, we are ready to help you too.
Partnering with us allows you to spend more time doing the things that you love!
What Are You Waiting For?
Finacial Confidence Is One Call Away
WHAT WE DO
Ablaze Financial is different. We see our clients as humans, and those humans own companies. Between their personal and business finances, there are lots of financial numbers and data (the “numbers”) to compile, report and explore.
You did not start a business to have a job, but to create the freedom to achieve your unique goals and dreams. Your numbers are the key measure of your progress, and the most important indicator of the next move you need to make to arrive at your desired destination.
Using proven methods, we work hand-in-hand with our clients to create financial success in their business, thereby helping make their business goals and personal dreams come true.
We Transform Dreams into Reality
“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”
Henry Ford
“Guess what, nobody dies in accounting.”
Amy Spandau