Hey, I'm Cory.

I grew up in the coalfields of southern West Virginia and went to Bluefield State College for accountancy. Numbers always made sense to me. Not just the math, but the stories they tell. A balance sheet is basically a narrative. A general ledger is a timeline. If you know how to read financial data, you can see things most people walk right past.

After school, I took a job at LOEC, Inc., a tobacco distribution and manufacturing company. Started as an accountant. Over four years I moved up through Senior Accountant, then COO, then a dual COO/CFO role. I was running financial operations, managing processes across the company, and handling strategic planning through their growth period until the company was acquired in 2015.

That job taught me something I still think about almost every day: financial data and operational data are the same thing. When your financial systems are disconnected from your daily operations, you're making decisions with half the picture. And half the picture is dangerous.

After the acquisition, I founded Neese Consulting Group and spent the next ten years as a forensic accountant.

Quick clarification on what that means, because most people hear “accountant” and think taxes. Forensic accounting is investigation. My job was to follow money through complicated systems and figure out where it was going wrong. Embezzlement. Misallocation. Fraud. Operational waste that nobody realized was happening. I worked alongside multiple state and federal law enforcement agencies on cases that meant tracing funds across state lines and through layers of organizational mess.

The biggest case started with something that didn't add up in a set of financial records. I pulled at that thread and my findings triggered a multi-state investigation spanning $310 million in federal funding misallocation and misappropriation. That investigation ended with multiple states restructuring how they handle oversight and security of federally awarded funds.

I also led a platform and business valuation that came in at over $9 million. The difference between getting that number right and getting it wrong came down to how operational data was structured and tracked inside the systems running the business. Same data, wildly different conclusions depending on whether you actually understood the systems producing it.

I didn't plan on becoming a PSA consultant. It happened because I kept running into the same problems.

MSPs (managed service providers) run on platforms called PSAs. ConnectWise, HaloPSA, Autotask. These tools manage their tickets, track time, handle invoicing, and produce the reports owners use to make decisions. When the PSA works well, the business runs well. When it doesn't, every number the owner looks at is telling a story that doesn't match what's actually happening.

I started seeing MSP owners looking at dashboards showing healthy margins while their billing was quietly leaking revenue in a dozen places. Technicians spending 40 minutes a day wrestling with their tools instead of closing tickets. Agreement billing that had been wrong for years and nobody caught it because the reports never surfaced the problem.

I'd seen all of this before. In forensic work, it was money flowing through systems that weren't configured to track it properly. Processes that created invisible waste. Data telling one story while reality told another.

The only difference? In forensic accounting, you find problems after the damage is done. In PSA consulting, you can catch them before they cost you.

I started PaxRig in 2025 to bring that investigative mindset to MSP operations.

The name: “Pax” is Latin for peace and order. “Rig” means to build and configure. That's the job. I bring order to MSP operations by building and configuring the platforms they depend on.

The first big engagement didn't just tune up a ConnectWise instance. It produced a 275,000+ line custom platform with 14 independent services, 787+ API endpoints, and 29 user-facing features. Built and deployed in 4 months. All 109 employees at the client use it daily. Independent assessment put it at over $9 million in operational value. It created capacity equal to about 5 full-time positions, meaning the MSP could grow without proportional hiring.

I don't sell advice. I do the work.