Entreprenuer

Chris Peters

Position: Founder
Company: GPS Consultants
What they do: Accounting consulting, specializing in forensic accounting
Revenue: Projected Six Figures this year
Next Goal: Build a team of experts

The "aha" moment

While pursuing his MBA at LSU, Chris Peters was a graduate assistant at the Louisiana Business and Technology Center and did consulting work for numerous startups and established businesses. “I helped them with research, accounting and finance,” Peters says. “My [LBTC] clients in total raised at least a million dollars.” He then moved on to accounting firm Postlethwaite and Netterville, where he mostly worked in “litigation support, forensic accounting and data analysis.” He says he developed a unique skill set at P&N, becoming well-versed in technology that allowed him to do in-depth forensic accounting work while developing his consulting experience. “IT doesn't understand the finance, and finance doesn't understand the IT,” he says. “The majority of the time they don't work together well.” While working next as the CFO of the local Window World franchise, Peters discovered the company was being overcharged by the supplier of its top-selling window. He was moving forward, but one day he realized he needed to get out on his own. “I just felt like I had more value to offer,” he says. Though his wife was seven months pregnant, he felt the time was right to start a specialized accounting firm.

R&D

At P&N Peters had been introduced to a variety of technological tools to help him find accounting errors or employee theft earlier and more efficiently. Although he can do standard accounting work, he wanted to expand with his ability to use technology to find fraud and savings. He founded GPS Consultants. Peters is “one of four integration partners” nationally for the software program IDEA distributed by Houston-based Audimation. What IDEA allows GPS to do, among other things, is automate repeatable accounting tasks, saving future time and money. “For example, a lot of hospitals manually work on a case-by-case basis to make sure that contractors are providing them the proper services, and that might take a half hour for each one,” Peters says. “So what we do is we build that logic, and it takes time to build, but then we're able to look at all the transactions.”

Hitting the market:

Peters knows that software like IDEA is useful in specific circumstances. “It thrives wherever you have a high volume of complex transactions, especially where they're contractually driven,” he says. “But you'd be amazed how many huge companies with these big risks aren't using this stuff.” He specializes in implementing the software in health care systems, and in oil and gas and manufacturing industries. He says that as more and more companies learn about the kind of services GPS offers, they're making room in their budgets to pay for it.

Peters says:

“Across the country they have these boutique forensic accounting firms. I knew I wanted to open one because fraud is such a problem.”

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