I Failed Grade 11 Math and Became a CPA. Here's What That Taught Me About Your P&L.
The story I almost didn't tell — and why it changes how you're allowed to look at your own numbers.
I failed grade 11 math.
Not "struggled." Not "got a disappointing mark." Failed. Red ink, the works. And in that moment, I learned the lesson that grade was really there to teach me — not algebra, but a story. The story went like this: numbers aren't for you. Some people have the math brain, and you don't. Pick a different lane.
I believed it. For a while, I built my whole sense of myself around it. And here's the part that still makes me angry on behalf of every woman reading this: that exact story has quietly talked countless capable women out of their own businesses, their own decisions, their own money. Not because it's true. Because nobody told them it was a lie.
The thing that changed everything
When I got to university, something shifted. I stopped seeing numbers as a test I was failing and started seeing them as something else entirely — patterns. Stories. Signals. A balance sheet stopped being a wall of figures designed to catch me out and started being a snapshot of a real situation: what a business owns, what it owes, what's actually left.
That reframe was the whole game. I didn't suddenly become a "math person." I became someone who could read what the numbers were saying. I went on to earn my designation and build a career as a CPA, CA and CFO — and later, to build and scale my own seven-figure business. The grade 11 version of me would not have believed any of it.
Your P&L is not a report card
Here's why I tell you this story instead of keeping it polished and hidden. So many business owners open their profit and loss statement with the same feeling I had walking into that math exam: bracing to be told they're not good enough. So they don't open it. Or they open it, feel the dread, and close the tab.
But your P&L isn't grading you. It's not deciding whether you're smart, or whether you deserve to run this business. It's a story your business is telling you about where the money came from and where it went. And you do not have to be top of the class to read a story. You just have to be willing to look at it without flinching.
That's the difference between financial fear and financial fluency. Fear says, "If I look, I'll find out I'm failing." Fluency says, "If I look, I'll find out what's actually going on — and then I get to decide what to do about it." One keeps you small. The other puts you back in the driver's seat.
You were never bad at numbers
You were taught that numbers were a test you might fail, instead of a language you could learn. Those are not the same things. A test is something that happens to you. A language is something you grow into, one word at a time, until one day you realize you're thinking in it.
I am living proof that the grade 11 story is not your destiny. If a girl who failed high school math can end up signing off on financial statements as a CFO, then "I'm just not a numbers person" is not a sentence about your ability. It's a sentence about who taught you, and how. We can fix the how.
