I spent nearly twelve years at Loveland Ski Areas, starting as the controller and eventually running the entire finance operation as CFO. Loveland is a mid-sized business with real complexity — multiple revenue streams, seasonal cash flow swings, capital improvements, a full HR and payroll function, and the kind of financial management that requires getting your hands into every part of the operation. That's where I learned what it means to be the person responsible for all of it, not just the person who reviews the reports.
After Loveland, I took the Finance Director role at Keystone Science School, a nonprofit in Summit County. The work was different — fund accounting, grant compliance, donor restrictions, board reporting — but the core skill was the same: accurate, hands-on financial management that leadership could trust without a second thought. Working inside a nonprofit taught me how much these organizations need senior financial talent and how rarely they can afford it full-time.
I started Shirey CPA to bring that depth to small businesses and nonprofits on a fractional basis. My clients get the kind of accounting and financial management they'd get from a full-time controller or finance director — month-end close, reconciliation, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, tax planning — without carrying a full-time salary.
In 2025, I started building customized AI work environments for organizations using Anthropic's Claude platform. The idea came from my own practice: I'd built an AI system that understood my clients' financial operations, and the productivity gain was too significant to keep to myself. Now I build those same systems for other organizations — configured around their departments, their documents, their workflows, and the way their teams actually communicate. The CPA background is what makes these environments effective. Understanding fund accounting, chart of accounts structures, board reporting requirements, and month-end close processes means the AI system I build reflects how financial operations actually work.
I'm based in Breckenridge, Colorado. Shirey CPA serves organizations throughout the Colorado high country — Summit, Eagle, Lake, Clear Creek, Grand, and Chaffee counties — and remotely across the United States.
The accounting work is hands-on. I manage the close, reconcile the accounts, write the financial narratives, and build the budgets. This isn't an advisory practice where I review someone else's work and make recommendations — I do the work.
The AI consulting is the same philosophy applied to a different problem. I don't hand a client a strategy document and wish them well. I learn how their organization operates, build a working AI environment around it, and train their team to use it.
Both sides of the practice start from the same belief: the most useful financial professional is the one who understands the details well enough to handle them and the big picture well enough to explain them.