Let's Talk About the Stuff That Actually Keeps You Up at Night
Tracy Cooper offers practical financial insights for conferences, training, and executive sessions, minus the jargon.
About Tracy
Tracy Cooper is a CPA and Certified Fraud Examiner with over 30 years of hands-on experience spanning both sides of the business world. She has held senior executive roles at Fortune 100 companies, including Sr. Vice President at ALLTEL, and has owned and operated tlb services, her own advisory practice, since 2003. That combination of corporate depth and small business reality shapes everything she does on stage and in the room. She speaks from experience, not from a textbook.
She is a contract instructor with The Knowledge Institute and has delivered sessions independently at Scaling New Heights, the ARCPA Business and Industry Conference, the Mississippi Society of CPAs Annual Convention, and the New Jersey CPA Society Management Conference.
Her sessions are practical, fast-moving, and occasionally funny. Audiences leave with things they can actually use.
Topics
Practical AI for Business Leaders and Finance Professionals
AI is everywhere. The hype is deafening. And most teams have no idea what to actually do with it on Monday morning. This session cuts through the noise with honest, practical guidance on where AI delivers real value in financial and business operations, and where it will get you in trouble. No vendor pitches. No breathless predictions. Just a clear-eyed look at what works, what doesn't, and how to start using it without blowing up your processes. Designed for both finance professionals and business executives who want substance over buzzwords.
Available as a keynote, breakout session, or half-day executive workshop.
Excel and Power Query: The Functions You Didn't Know You Needed
Most finance professionals and business owners are leaving enormous amounts of time and capability on the table, not because Excel is hard, but because nobody ever showed them the right things. Tracy's sessions focus on the functions and techniques that land in that sweet spot: not basic, not intimidating, just genuinely useful tools that make people say "I had no idea I could do that." From advanced lookup and aggregation functions to Power Query automation, the focus is always on real business scenarios: the messy report, the data that won't behave, the thing your team spends two hours on every week that should take ten minutes.
Available as a breakout session, half-day training, or full-day workshop.
Fraud: The Usual Suspects and the Mistakes That Let Them In
Fraud doesn't happen to careless companies. It happens to busy ones. This session draws on real investigation cases to show business leaders and finance professionals exactly how fraud gets started, how it goes undetected, and what controls actually work to stop it. No scare tactics, no checklists nobody reads, just the patterns, the red flags, and the surprisingly simple things that make the difference. Tracy is a Certified Fraud Examiner with extensive forensic accounting experience, and every case in this session is real.
Available as a keynote, breakout session, or half-day workshop.
Advisory Sessions
Running a business is isolating. Most business owners and executives are making significant decisions about people, money, systems, and direction without anyone in their corner who actually understands the business side of what they're dealing with. For a lot of people, what they really need is a knowledgeable sounding board, someone they can think out loud with, and who will give them a straight answer.
Advisory Sessions are for business owners and executives who need a sharp, experienced, outside perspective. This is a trusted relationship with someone who has seen a lot of businesses, knows where the trouble usually hides, and will tell you what they actually think. Think of it as business coaching with real financial and operational depth behind it.
Sessions run on a monthly retainer basis, two sessions per month with email access in between. Topics are whatever is keeping you up at night: a decision you can't get off the fence about, a number that doesn't look right, a situation you need to think through with someone who gets it.
If you've ever said "I just need to talk to someone who knows this stuff," this is that.
