Mission-Critical Numbers: How the U. S. Coast Guard Prepared me for my Career in Analytics

Mike Wohlfarth
7 days ago
5 min read

Since it's Veterans Day, I've been thinking about how military service sticks with you. For me, it's been a while since my U.S. Coast Guard days, but those lessons still show up in my work every day.

I served during 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, two of the worst disasters the US has seen. Both taught me the same thing. When everything's going sideways, you need people executing the mission AND people making sure the mission can actually happen. Two different jobs, same goal.

In the Coast Guard, I experienced firsthand search and rescue (SAR) operations, chasing down "go-fast" boats carrying drugs trying to reach US shores, and encountering homemade 40-foot sailboats packed with over 100 Haitian migrants making the multi-day journey to America, all surviving off a massive pot of rice. When I wasn't doing all of these activities, my main role in the Coast Guard was Storekeeper - the Coast Guard's accounting and supply management specialty. SAR and accounting. Seemed totally unrelated at the time. They weren't.

SAR meant responding to emergencies with half the information you needed. Assess fast, figure out what matters, cut through the chaos, execute. People's lives on the line.

As a Storekeeper handling accounting and supply? Same pressure, different form. Every budget call, every asset we tracked, every resource decision fed into whether we'd be ready when someone needed us. Screw up the data or miss a reconciliation? That wasn't just paperwork. That was the wrong gear in the wrong place when it mattered most.

Here's what I figured out...I liked the accounting side. Understanding how money moved, how decisions got funded, how the numbers told you if you were actually ready. It wasn't bookkeeping. It was mission enablement.

So I got my accounting degree and later my MBA. When I got out of the Coast Guard, I started my civilian career. I spent the next decade doing it in the civilian world. I started as a staff accountant, and worked up to accounting manager. Month-end close, reconciliations, financials, auditors. Same basic work, different uniform.

The Coast Guard gave me the discipline. They beat "attention to detail" into your head from day one, and it stuck. That mindset carried through everything that came after. Civilian accounting gave me the reps. Every close, every audit, every time I had to explain why numbers moved. I was building something most analytics professionals don't have.

When I transitioned into analytics in 2018. I wasn't leaving accounting behind. I was taking nearly 15 years of it with me. That's rare in analytics. And it matters.

Three years at Opportune building analytics for energy clients, same pattern keeps showing up. Every analytics question ends up being an accounting question. The Coast Guard started it. Accounting in the civilian world deepened it. Analytics let me scale it.

The Universal Language of Business

Building dashboards for pipeline ops, analyzing inventory, evaluating renewable diesel profitability. Doesn't matter what it is. Questions always end up the same: What'd it cost? What'd we make? Where's the variance? What's the ROI?

Finance isn't just a lens. It's the language. Revenue, costs, margins, capital allocation. That's the scoreboard. Everything else is commentary.

Why Finance-Grounded Analytics Wins

Here's what a decade-plus of accounting taught me. Data doesn't start in your storage terminal. It starts in journal entries, invoices, POs, accruals. Get that, and everything changes.

Close books month after month? You develop a nose for bad data. You've lived through systems that won't reconcile. You've chased missing transactions at 11 PM on close night.

You've explained to execs why numbers moved since last week.

It changes how you look at analytics. You ask different questions up front. You get better at catching accrual timing issues. You know when it's a data problem vs. a policy problem.

The Analytics Gap

I see this pattern constantly. Dashboards execs open once, never again. Why? Metrics don't tie to P&L. They don't explain variances. They don't answer the actual questions.

I've spent years automating financial reporting with software like Alteryx, Snowflake, Tableau, and Power BI. What works? Projects that solve real finance problems. Less reconciliation time. Earlier warning on variances. Clear line from ops to financials.

An accounting background helps here. When you've closed books for years, you think about data models differently. When you've lived through month-end, you design automation differently. When you've prepped board decks, you know which metrics matter.

From Coast Guard SAR to Data Rescue

Doing SAR and accounting in the Coast Guard gave me a weird view of how organizations work.

SAR is real-time emergencies. Incomplete info. High stakes. Assess, prioritize, act. Can't hesitate.
Accounting makes sure the mission can happen. Budget calls, asset tracking, resource decisions. All feeding into readiness. Sloppy data? Real consequences. Missed reconciliation isn't paperwork. It's wrong gear, wrong place, wrong time.

Both jobs, same core...precision under pressure. SAR, lives on execution. Accounting, lives on readiness.

With clients now, similar deal. Get critical financial intel there when they need it for decisions. Different stakes, related work.

Month-end breaking from bad reconciliations? Emergency. Leadership needs project visibility but data's everywhere? Rescue job. Ops metrics and financials telling different stories? Sort the chaos.

The Coast Guard taught me mission and mission support both matter. Every entry reconciles. Every variance explained. Not compliance BS. People making real calls based on your work.

Analytics, same mindset. Finance teams provide intel for what gets funded, what continues, what survives. Job's getting that out of messy data and into decision-makers' hands.

Tools changed (rescue boats, helicopters, and Coast Guard systems to softwares like Alteryx and Power BI). Principle didn't...right info, right people, right time.

The Path Forward

Analytics without finance background? It is worth getting some. You don't need CPA or MBA. But knowing how companies account for revenue, what's capital vs. expense, how they calc ROI, cash vs. accrual. I promise you, it will help.

Spend some time with your finance team because it matters. What bugs them? Why month-end sucks? Which reports matter? If you help with close once, you'll learn fast.

Good analytics comes from knowing what keeps controllers up at night and what CFOs need.

The Bottom Line

Nearly 20 years in:

The Coast Guard learning accounting.
Over a decade in civilian accounting.
Seven years in analytics, last three at Opportune.

Each stage built on what came before.

The Coast Guard taught me mission and support are both critical. Civilian accounting taught me how finance actually works. Analytics gave me the reach to use it at scale.

Every ops metric is a finance metric. Dashboards are just tools for better decisions. And you bring the same standard everywhere...accuracy matters, reconciliation isn't red tape, someone's counting on you.

On Veterans Day, I want to thank to all veterans for your service. The military teaches you things that stick. For me, it was learning that the work supporting the mission matters as much as the mission. I carried that from the Coast Guard through accounting into analytics. Different jobs, same core: get people accurate financial information when they need it.

Do I miss serving alongside my Coast Guard shipmates? Absolutely. But I've found that analytics lets me continue serving in a different way - helping organizations when it matters most.

Semper Paratus - Always Ready. That is the Coast Guard motto. It turns out it applies to analytics too. Being ready means having the right information before decisions need to be made, not after.