Every year, my family takes a summer trip when all of my siblings and I are out of school. It has been a family tradition for as long as I can remember. Usually, we would choose somewhere warm and sunny like Florida or Hilton Head, South Carolina, but on special occasions like major birthdays, graduations or things like that, my parents would splurge and choose somewhere more exotic like Hawaii, Aruba, Jamaica. I had just...

The life of a consultant can be exhausting. For the past 3 years, I have been traveling from Chicago to Stuttgart, Germany once per month. A manufacturing company hired my company during the acquisition of a small startup. What started out as a “quick and easy” evaluation of their profit and loss statements and valuation estimate turned into a more elaborate chore once we realized just how messy their books were. The flig...