As a chartered professional accountant, Ray Fitzpatrick spent years inside big corporations like Irving Oil and McCain Foods, running analysis that tested the assumptions of multimillion-dollar decisions. In those settings, numbers were a compass guiding every move.

But when Fitzpatrick shifted into the startup world, he found that compass was missing.

“There’s a million reasons why you won’t get funded. We make it so your finances aren’t one of them.”

“It didn’t seem like accounting expertise was trickling down into small businesses, or at least the startups that I was investing in,” he said.

The trend continued throughout his time as an investor with the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, where he backed dozens of young founders across the region. He encountered founders who knew t

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