About this site

If you're a few years into a finance career and you quietly suspect everyone else got a manual you didn't, this one's for you.

Margin Notes is a biweekly newsletter about two things that turn out to be the same thing: doing the genuinely hard parts of a finance career, and building the systems that make those hard parts survivable. The courage to take the harder path, and the infrastructure that keeps you upright while you're on it. Most career advice gives you one or the other. The pep talk with no plan, or the productivity system that never admits the reason you need it is that the work is actually hard.

I'm Brandon, a CPA and a finance manager at KPMG in Chicago. Before that I spent nine years in financial services at TIAA, Nuveen, and Heitman, and then made the slightly terrifying decision to join a Big Four firm at 30 as an experienced hire, which is a polite way of saying I started over somewhere I had to relearn how everything worked. I'm not writing this from the summit. I'm writing it from somewhere in the middle of the climb, while it's still happening, because the real-time version is more honest than the cleaned-up one you get in a LinkedIn success story.

Every other week I send one note from that middle. Sometimes it's a system I actually use to keep a month-end close from running my life. Sometimes it's the specific decision behind a hard career move, or what I'm currently failing to understand about SQL (the honest answer right now is: a lot). And sometimes it's just the real version of how the work is going, the one a notch deeper than "fine."

I build systems because the alternative, for me, is a low hum of anxiety running underneath everything, and a good system turns that hum down. I think a lot of people in high-pressure finance roles are quietly doing the same thing without ever saying so out loud. This is me saying so.

There's no thirty-day framework here and no promise that any of this gets easier. Just notes from someone a few steps up the same climb, written while the ending is still unknown. If that's the kind of company you want on the way up, the subscribe box is right below.

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