Over the course of my career, I have witnessed a great deal. Even today, after five or six years of walking myself through my own inner alchemy, turning my own fire into water and finding my way back to my original, authentic self, much of what I saw still holds true. And I have come to accept that I no longer fit inside it.
This is a different kind of article from me. It is personal, and it explains why my work is changing, and why my work and my life turned out to be teaching me the same lesson.
What I was told
For three decades I have worked in financial software, technology, corporate structures and workflow processes, much of it in a mostly white man's world. Throughout that time I watched the feminine struggle inside those structures, and I lived it. I was questioned, ridiculed, silenced and pushed to the side because I am a woman. I didn't arrive at that conclusion on my own. I was told, many times.
I was sexually assaulted, once in an elevator on the way back to my hotel room. I was offered “opportunities” to advance my career if I would join someone in his room, or for drinks at the hotel bar. I came back from sitting at a desk with an end user to find my belongings pushed onto the conference room floor. A mentor once told me, “You can't do it without me.” What he really meant was that he couldn't make money off me if I went out on my own. I carried more than one male business partner along on my coattails. And as a CEO, I was told plainly that if I were an older white man, I would have had funding by now.
Those are just the highlights.
The chase
Ah, the corporate world of software. Always in competition, always chasing the next level, the next skill, the next customer. Attached to outcomes and roadmaps, profits over people, the next shiny object. And yet I fully participated, right up until now.
I attached myself to one software product for far too long. I became an expert in it until there was nothing new left to discover and no new joy in the discovering. The competition wasn't especially fierce. It was the same two or three people we had all been trying to play nice with in the same sandbox, for far too long.
So why did I stay? Because I was chasing everything: the competition, the clients, the money, the knowledge, the experience, the recognition. My last marriage even gave me the last name Chase, which I gracefully let go shortly after the divorce. Underneath all of it, I was chasing one thing. I wanted to be seen and accepted, fully, by my peers.
What was underneath
Over this last year, through hundreds of hours across hundreds of modalities, I released heavy emotions that had been held in my body and my subconscious for a very long time. I came to know, deep in my bones, that I am no longer the same person. Looking back, it was the first honest assessment I had ever done on myself.
The turning point was one transformational month of living alongside others, crying like a baby and feeling the pain move physically through my body. In that month I finally understood that they had never seen me at all. All that attachment, all that chasing, all those expectations, and what had they brought me? They brought me the biggest lesson I had to move through to find myself: to see and accept my own worth, my confidence, my courage and my grace.
More recently, I uncovered a childhood wound I had never named. Once it was seen, heard and released, I had the biggest “aha” moment of my life. As a small child, as an adolescent, as a young adult and as a grown woman, I had been chasing the same thing the whole time: to be seen, and to be accepted as me, my authentic self. The chase in my career was never really about the career.
Where this leads me now: the whole fixed asset lifecycle
So where does this leave me in my career? I no longer need a software product to attach my knowledge to. I no longer need competition to do my work with joy. And I no longer need to shrink myself to fit into a construct that consistently places profits over people.
At the end of the day, what I carry was never one piece of software. It is the experience and expertise I have lived and embodied over the course of my life, across every piece of the capital puzzle. Over thirty years I have worked alongside the people who budget for capital, approve it, track it through construction in progress, place it in service, depreciate it, insure it, report it for property tax, defend it in an audit and finally dispose of it, and every other aspect along the way. I know how each of those hands touches an asset and where the handoffs break down. No single vendor's product holds all of that, and I was never meant to fit inside one. (I mapped those hands out in Design to Disposal.)
What that experience shows me is that every stage of an asset's life tends to sit with a different department, a different system and a different spreadsheet. After nearly three decades, most organizations I walk into still have software, spreadsheets and people whose data never meets. Meanwhile accounting turnover keeps rising, and the people who knew why an asset was recorded the way it was are walking out the door with that knowledge.
Why fixed asset data cleanup comes before AI
What has finally changed is that AI, used well, can connect those pieces inside the organization itself. Used well is the important part. When I talk with finance, tax and fixed asset teams, the same three things hold them back:
- Their data isn't ready, so the results disappoint.
- They aren't sure how to ask AI for help or where it fits in their process.
- They are rightly wary about trust and security, and about making sure a person stays in control of the decisions that matter.
I wrote about those three in more depth in We Bought the AI. Why Is My Team Still Checking Everything? The short version is that dirty data in is still dirty data out, now delivered with confidence and good grammar.
That is the work I am turning toward. Through Fixed Asset Consultant, I now come in alongside a team to assess where their data and processes stand, clean up what needs cleaning, and build the AI workflows and tools with them, often using AI licenses they already pay for. The client owns what we build. From there they can build more, keep me on for support, or walk away owning both the tools and the understanding of how they work. My knowledge is no longer attached to someone else's product. It goes into your organization and stays there. There is more about how we work on the site.
A health assessment for fixed asset records
I am also building FAHA, the Fixed Asset Health Assessment. It automates the part of this work I know best: finding and cleaning up the data problems that build up in fixed asset records over years of system changes, acquisitions and staff turnover. It connects to the systems a company already uses rather than replacing them, and checks the data against what I have learned to look for over thirty years. It is designed for every person and department that touches the lifecycle of capital and fixed assets, whether or not they have a background in tax rules or accounting standards. It points out what looks wrong, explains its reasoning, and leaves the final decision with a person, because a human checkpoint is what makes people trust the answer. It is not lost on me that I named it a health assessment in the same year I finally did one of my own.
Still here, differently
I am still in this industry, and I still love the work. Fixed assets are the physical record of every decision a company has made about its future, and getting that record right matters more now, not less. What has changed is why I do it. I am not chasing a product, a competitor or anyone's approval. I am building things people can own, with people who want to understand their own data.
Somewhere in this past year I noticed how closely the two journeys mirror each other. An asset is acquired, placed in service and carried on the books for years. Along the way its record picks up errors, outdated assumptions and entries nobody remembers making, until the books no longer reflect what is actually there. The fix is never to pretend the history didn't happen. It is to assess honestly, clean up what is wrong, and bring the record back in line with what is true.
That is exactly what I spent the last several years doing with my own life. I had been carrying old entries for decades: other people's judgments of me, the roles I took on to be accepted, and a wound I picked up as a child. I had let them set my value. Assessing them, clearing them and letting them go brought me back to my original self.
For a long time I wanted to be seen. It turns out the person who needed to see me was me. Everything I build from here starts from that.
Where does your fixed asset data stand?
If your fixed asset data has been handed from one system, spreadsheet and person to the next for years, and you are wondering whether it is ready for AI, let's look at it together. Start with the free AI readiness checklist, or reach out and we'll begin with an honest conversation about where your data stands today.
Angela Bolton is the founder of Fixed Asset Consultant. She has spent close to three decades in fixed asset and capital project work. This piece was first published on LinkedIn.
