About

Why Reporting Secrets exists

Reporting Secrets was born from a simple frustration: most small business owners don’t need another dashboard, another BI tool, or another spreadsheet. They need to know two things — where they’re trying to go, and how far off they are right now.

Founder Joe Christensen has spent the last 14 years building corporate reporting systems for companies ranging from under $2M to over $2B in revenue. The patterns that work for the enterprise — declare a target, model the path backwards, monitor relentlessly, course-correct — almost never make it down to Main Street. We think they should.

So we built Reporting Secrets: the SMB incarnation of the same reporting discipline that runs the world’s largest companies, stripped down to what an owner-operator can actually use on a Tuesday morning.

What we believe

  • Start from the target, not the data. A run rate is a destination. Everything else — the P&L, the dashboards, the ops cadence — should be reverse-engineered from where you’ve decided to land.
  • Monitor, don’t just measure. A back-of-the-napkin model is easy. The hard part is plugging it into the business so it travels with you, day after day, and tells you when you’re drifting.
  • Owners shouldn’t have to be report specialists. If you can read your own bank statement, you can run Reporting Secrets. We handle the plumbing.
  • AI is a tool, not the product. We use it to compress the cost of building custom monitoring for businesses that could never afford it before. That’s it.

What we do

We work alongside small and mid-sized businesses — car washes, laundromats, HVAC, pest control, plumbing, electric, smart home, manufacturers, and the rest of the operators who make America run — to:

  1. Set the targets. Top-side Reporting Secrets the owner actually believes in.
  2. Reverse-engineer the path. What has to be true about revenue, cost, and cadence to land there.
  3. Build the monitor. A lightweight system that pulls from your existing tools, compares actuals to targets, and tells you what to do next.

Alongside the engagements, we publish on YouTube — reviewing real businesses, doing the numbers backwards from their targets, and showing the work. The channel is the field manual; the engagements are where we roll up our sleeves.

The team

Joe Christensen — Founder. Corporate reporting since 2012. Has built reporting systems for businesses across the full size spectrum and across nearly every industry vertical. On a mission to drag the best of enterprise reporting down to the businesses that need it most.

Nico DeLaO — Product & engineering. Builds the software that turns the Reporting Secrets methodology into something an owner can actually run. Translates Joe’s frameworks into apps, dashboards, and the monitoring layer that ties it all together.

Where we’re headed

Reporting Secrets is a methodology, a software product, a YouTube channel, and a traveling workshop — in roughly that order of importance. If you’re an owner who knows their business could be doing better but can’t quite point to where, you’re who we built this for.

Come find us on the road, on the channel, or get in touch directly.

Reporting Secrets
About Reporting Secrets

About

Who we are, how we work, and the story behind turning your data into something worth reading.

Why Reporting Secrets exists

Reporting Secrets was born from a simple frustration: most small business owners don’t need another dashboard, another BI tool, or another spreadsheet. They need to know two things — where they’re trying to go, and how far off they are right now.

Founder Joe Christensen has spent the last 14 years building corporate reporting systems for companies ranging from under $2M to over $2B in revenue. The patterns that work for the enterprise — declare a target, model the path backwards, monitor relentlessly, course-correct — almost never make it down to Main Street. We think they should.

So we built Reporting Secrets: the SMB incarnation of the same reporting discipline that runs the world’s largest companies, stripped down to what an owner-operator can actually use on a Tuesday morning.

What we believe

  • Start from the target, not the data. A run rate is a destination. Everything else — the P&L, the dashboards, the ops cadence — should be reverse-engineered from where you’ve decided to land.
  • Monitor, don’t just measure. A back-of-the-napkin model is easy. The hard part is plugging it into the business so it travels with you, day after day, and tells you when you’re drifting.
  • Owners shouldn’t have to be report specialists. If you can read your own bank statement, you can run Reporting Secrets. We handle the plumbing.
  • AI is a tool, not the product. We use it to compress the cost of building custom monitoring for businesses that could never afford it before. That’s it.

What we do

We work alongside small and mid-sized businesses — car washes, laundromats, HVAC, pest control, plumbing, electric, smart home, manufacturers, and the rest of the operators who make America run — to:

  1. Set the targets. Top-side Reporting Secrets the owner actually believes in.
  2. Reverse-engineer the path. What has to be true about revenue, cost, and cadence to land there.
  3. Build the monitor. A lightweight system that pulls from your existing tools, compares actuals to targets, and tells you what to do next.

Alongside the engagements, we publish on YouTube — reviewing real businesses, doing the numbers backwards from their targets, and showing the work. The channel is the field manual; the engagements are where we roll up our sleeves.

The team

Joe Christensen — Founder. Corporate reporting since 2012. Has built reporting systems for businesses across the full size spectrum and across nearly every industry vertical. On a mission to drag the best of enterprise reporting down to the businesses that need it most.

Nico DeLaO — Product & engineering. Builds the software that turns the Reporting Secrets methodology into something an owner can actually run. Translates Joe’s frameworks into apps, dashboards, and the monitoring layer that ties it all together.

Where we’re headed

Reporting Secrets is a methodology, a software product, a YouTube channel, and a traveling workshop — in roughly that order of importance. If you’re an owner who knows their business could be doing better but can’t quite point to where, you’re who we built this for.

Come find us on the road, on the channel, or get in touch directly.