Meet Our Expert Authors

Mike Dion is a senior finance leader with over a decade of experience across entertainment and telecom, from global enterprises to high-growth startups. He’s led financial work that has unlocked tens of millions in value, and he’s helped finance teams reclaim over 150,000 hours through AI and automation. He’s also the host of the Excel at AI in Finance podcast, an instructor for The Delta by Nilus, a workshop instructor at the 2026 AFP FP&A Forum, and a contributor at Seeking Alpha. He started F9 Finance to share what actually works in practice, not just in theory. The tools, the workflows, the hard-won shortcuts that most finance teams are still figuring out on their own.

Mike Dion spent over a decade inside global enterprises and high-growth startups in Entertainment and Telecom, leading financial work that unlocked tens of millions in value. He was good at the job. But what he kept seeing on every team was the same problem: finance professionals buried in manual work, spending their best hours on tasks that were never going to move their careers forward.

That’s what F9 Finance is built around. Not just better tools. A different trajectory for what a finance career can look like.

Since founding F9 Finance, Mike has helped teams reclaim more than 150,000 hours through AI and automation. He’s led over 100 automation projects across industries, built financial models used at the executive level, and spent the last several years at the front edge of where AI is changing what finance work actually looks like day to day.

His books, The Financial Storyteller’s Playbook and The Ultimate Guide to AI Prompting for Finance, exist for the same reason this site does: to give finance professionals a direct path to the skills that matter right now, not three years from now.

Mike holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance and a Master of International Business from the University of Florida. He also works as a small business financial consultant and advisor for non-profits, where the stakes are real and the margins are not.

His work has appeared in top finance publications, and he’s known for making complicated topics clear without stripping out the substance.

Outside work, Mike is a husband and dad who takes cruising seriously and follows the market closely. He built F9 Finance because the gap between what finance professionals are capable of and what most teams are actually doing is too wide. Closing it matters. That’s the whole point.