Hi, I’m Mike.

I’ve spent more than a decade in corporate finance and FP&A. As a new manager, I was good at my job. I was also, without fail, the last one to leave: fixing a model that should have been automated three years earlier, rebuilding the same report from scratch for the fifth month in a row, writing variance commentary at 11pm while a perfectly capable AI assistant sat unused in a browser tab.

Then I had kids, and something shifted. Late nights stopped being a badge and started being a cost. Every hour I gave to work that could run itself was an hour I wasn’t getting back with them.

So I stopped grinding harder and started building smarter.

Power Query, Power Pivot, then AI tools as they became real enough to trust. Reporting that used to take days dropped to hours. Commentary that ate whole evenings could be drafted in minutes. The quality went up. The stress went down. My time started feeling like mine again.

I began sharing what I was learning on YouTube and TikTok, for free. Tens of thousands of finance professionals showed up, all asking a version of the same question: how do I actually learn this without falling further behind?

That’s why I built F9 Finance. Not a blog or a tips list, but a structure you can hold: real AI skills applied to real finance work, in the margins of a day you’re already busy living. If we haven’t met yet, I’m glad you’re here.