“What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.”
— C.S. Lewis
Most people who do financial work fall into one of those two categories.
So what do we call someone who falls into both?
As someone who’s had the privilege of working alongside Becky, I’d advocate for “gem,” “rarity,” maybe even “unicorn,” if we want to be playful about it. But playfulness aside, there’s a reason Insightful Financials’ clients all seem to say the same thing: working with Becky is different from any experience they’ve had — in the best kind of way.
A look at where Becky has been helps explain why. Her professional and life experiences bring a perspective that bridges domains most businesses keep on separate islands.
And Becky has been on both sides of those islands. She started where most bookkeepers do — in the trenches, as it were. But as you’ll learn in working with her, understanding only one part of the picture was never an option. For nearly two decades she expanded her expertise, moving from bookkeeper to financial controller, and eventually operating in a CFO capacity. In that role she became the trusted set of hands for forecasting cash flow and for navigating a company’s most vulnerable substrate.
There are few things that require more professional trust than letting someone advise you based on an organization’s most sensitive dataset — their numbers. For twenty years Becky earned every drop of that trust. Rather than settling for the analytical view, relinquishing her judgment to rows of spreadsheets, she made it her practice to experience an organization’s finances the way its owners do. That position mirrors itself in every aspect of Insightful Financials. Becky hasn’t just made it her goal to understand how her clients’ companies actually work — she’s made it the foundational core of how her own company operates.
When the time came for Becky to shift gears professionally, teaching is exactly where her years of operational and financial knowledge translated — not just into teaching, but into designing curricula for it. Any bookkeeper or CFO could probably translate a P&L well enough to train an apprentice. But to shape a curriculum that helps people think about money as a cog within a complex system, not an isolated asset, takes a depth of understanding most never reach — from both a finance perspective and a systems-thinking one.
How many times have you picked up an article on first-principles thinking and thought, that’s great, but getting from “I have a problem” to “I’ll solve this from the ground up” is quite the leap? Now imagine having someone teach you not just how to do that once, but how to do it within financial literacy, corporate budget cycles, and risk analysis. That’s a person you’d hire on the spot, just to have someone to think alongside.
That’s exactly who Becky became for Synthesis, an education program with roots in the SpaceX community. Her insights helped shape the curriculum that allowed thousands of students to grasp concepts most consider too complex — in ways they could actually understand and apply. She used the same approach advising senior leadership in her role as Senior Consultant to Operations.
There’s a common thread running through these accomplishments — the ones that, for Becky, are just another day at the office. You cannot help someone understand something you don’t deeply understand yourself.
Plenty of people know their work well enough to be experts in their field. What makes Becky stand out is that her field of expertise is insight — and the wonderful thing about an ally whose expertise is insight is that insight has no preferred medium. Insight into your specific situation is simply the only way Becky’s expertise knows how to show itself.
She may have taught first-principles thinking, and anyone paying attention can see it in how she works. But as an observer, I’d point to a different set of principles underneath everything she touches — and it might be the closest I can get to explaining Becky’s particular brand of outstanding.
Across every part of Insightful Financials — from the company’s ethics, to its client-forward approach, down to the detail in every report and suggestion that crosses a second set of eyes beyond Becky’s own — four things are always present, in a way that is unmistakably her.
If she speaks, it’s from [Knowledge] — proven facts, figures, quantifiable data.
If she advises, it’s with [Understanding] of how that knowledge applies to the situation she’s invested in.
When she offers a suggestion, it’s laced with [Wisdom] — developed across roles most people would never stitch onto a single résumé.
And when knowledge, understanding, and wisdom are the metrics you operate on, seeing the underlying truth of how it all connects isn’t something you occasionally manage. It’s the only way you know how to work.