About Eric
More than once, I've been the most financially literate person in a growing organization — so I built the budget. Today I do that, along with the books and the taxes, for local nonprofits and small businesses.
Free first call. No obligation.
I've spent my career at the intersection of technology and financial services, up to the executive level. Much of that work came down to reading financial documents — tax returns and bank statements for families and small businesses — to understand their cash flow and how healthy their finances really were.
Along the way, I kept ending up with the numbers. I ran my own company, a six-person shop where the whole P&L was mine. At tech startups I owned the P&L for parts of the business, led teams of up to 17, and built company budgets — often before anyone in finance had been hired.
One assignment stands out: take half a million dollars of cost out of a business in six months. It was careful, line-by-line work, and it helped turn a company that was too expensive to back into one that could raise its next round.
Those companies grew into finance departments of their own. Most nonprofits and small businesses never will, and don't need to. What they need is someone who can build the budget, keep the books clean, get the filings right, and help read the numbers a few hours a month. That's the work I do now.
I've also provided free tax return preparation for low-income Bay Area families since 2014. It's the part of my year I look forward to most, and it keeps me honest about what matters: explaining someone's finances back to them in plain language.
The short version of why you can hand me your books, your taxes, and your budget.
Enrolled Agents are licensed by the IRS and hold unlimited rights to represent taxpayers before it. I prepare business returns, nonprofit filings, and owners' personal returns, and I'm a member of the National Association of Enrolled Agents. If a notice arrives or a question comes up mid-year, you already have someone to call.
Booth is one of the country's top business schools, known for the depth of its economics and finance teaching, and I studied both there. It's the training behind the fractional CFO work: reasoning from your actual costs, margins, and cash rather than rules of thumb — because your organization isn't the average one.
I was the one who thought calculus was fun, and it never wore off. Somebody should genuinely enjoy running your numbers. It's me.
The same skills I used inside growing companies, sized for an organization like yours.
Plain, forward-looking budgets built with the people who run the place — the kind you can walk a board, a partner, or yourself through.
Bank statements, tax returns, profit and loss — I can see where the money is really going and when cash is likely to get tight.
A line-by-line look for what you can stop paying for, without breaking what works.
No jargon. You should leave every conversation understanding your own numbers a little better.
My family and I live in Walnut Creek. I coach kids' sports, serve communion at my church, and play disc golf around Northern California whenever the calendar allows.
The organizations I work with are my neighbors — the programs my kids go to, the businesses down the street. That's exactly why I want to do this well.
For individuals and families, I also run Etu Financial.
A short call about how your finances run today and where you'd like more support. No pitch, no paperwork.
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