About

Our Clients, Our Founder, Our Story, Our Journey

The who, when, what, where, why and how behind Wat If Solutions, LLC

Our Clients

We work with professional services firms — CPA and business advisory firms first and foremost — most of whom will be wrestling with many of the same foundational challenges listed below. Right now, that means we are focused on a specific kind of client…

Every US state shown as a labeled tile; California, our home state, is highlighted in dark teal, six neighboring Western states are highlighted in lighter teal as our current target region, and all other states are shown in gray

Perfect Customer Match

  • SMB & Mid-Market — small to medium-sized firms, typically under $500M in revenue
  • Professional Services Industry — CPA and consulting firms, owners and investors first, extending to adjacent industries over time
  • Western United States — California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, and Utah
  • Preferred Technologies — Microsoft Power BI, Copilot, Fabric

Typical Industry Challenges Our Solutions Address

Firms are facing very real, imminent and sometimes existential challenges in this new AI world, yet most small to mid-sized firms are still working through some of the same basic, foundational challenges that have faced the industry for the last 15+ years.

  1. Time & Materials Business Model
  2. Pricing Hours (Scoping, Costing & Value Pricing)
  3. Performance Monitoring (Utilization & Realization)
  4. The “Book of Business” model - “Our Client” vs. “the Firm’s Client”
  5. Customer Profile incompatible with Growth Desires
  6. Visibility into Renewals, Sales Pipeline, Forecast and Pricing
  7. True Backlog & Rolling Forecast (Booked yet Undelivered Work)
  8. Billing & Collections
  9. Well-established KPIs
  10. A true Health Score for the Firm

It’s time to catch up, it’s time to get ahead…let’s grow, evolve and transform…together, we can go farther, faster!

Our Founder

John Horner is the founder and owner of Wat If Solutions, LLC, combining 20 years of CPA and consulting industry experience with 30+ years of data, analytics, business intelligence and data warehouse expertise.

Core Experience

John was a partner with Armanino for 15 years, from 2011 to 2026, after merging in his own successful data analytics consulting business. John was instrumental in leading the team to achieve significant growth in that client-facing service line through 2020.

In 2021 John transitioned to an internal transformation leadership role, collaborating with other strategic leaders on many of the firm’s most strategic initiatives during a period of significant change.

Across both roles, John worked on the questions firm leaders and their investors ask most: how pricing, utilization and realization, billing and collections, renewals and workforce planning add up to the true health of the firm.

Key Differentiators

  • Proven track record: 15 years as Partner with Armanino, 10 years leading client-facing growth and 5 years leading internal transformation
  • Deep industry expertise in the nature and challenges facing CPA and professional services firms and the investors behind them
  • Subject matter expertise across data, analytics, business intelligence, reporting, data warehousing and AI
  • An entrepreneurial, logical problem-solving approach built on a strong foundation of common sense radar
  • A strong communicator who leads from the front, across cross-functional teams and vertical integration

BSc Business Information Technology, University of Northumbria, UK.

John Horner, founder of Wat If Solutions

Our Story

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.”

— Anonymous

Our Genesis

After 15 years with Armanino followed by a 6-month hiatus that took in some travel, enjoying the grandkids, watching almost every game of the world cup and playing some golf, our founder felt he still owed something back and still had more to give.

Feeling compelled to participate in what may be the most exciting yet daunting period in data analytics of his 30+ year career…

WAT IF SOLUTIONS was born.

WAT’s in a Name?

Our name and logo are the result of an experimental cocktail of ideas. Some obvious data, analytics and AI terminology and imagery, with some less obvious and minor but deliberate tweaks incorporating a Cambodian heritage, which acts as a tribute to our founder’s wife, growing family and community.

Firstly, it is an obvious play on the “what if” element of data, analytics and AI but with a minor but deliberate spelling tweak. The “WAT” references the famous Cambodian temple of Angkor Wat. The teal highlights on the A and I in the name act as a constant reminder for us to continually ask: “how might AI help us with this?” Similarly, our logo is a healthy abstraction, inspired by common data, analytics bar chart imagery, earthquake, Richter Scale imagery to represent the seismic nature of the current AI era and famous pictures of the Cambodian Angkor Wat temple.

The “Solutions” element speaks to the core purpose behind what drives us as a firm…we did not form WAT IF to simply provide “Services”, we formed WAT IF to provide “Solutions”. We recognize that there are many small to medium sized firms that are facing daunting challenges and who are very likely confused, scared and paralyzed about what they should be doing to address these challenges. We believe we can help, we want to help and we are focused on successful outcomes for our clients.

It won’t be easy and we don’t claim to have all the answers, but we intend to make ourselves available to help as much as possible to help them navigate this brave new world and achieve successful outcomes and bring transformation.

Wat If Solutions logo

Our Journey

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

— African Proverb

With our genesis in mind, we will unapologetically leverage AI in every possible scenario, with an unquenchable thirst of curiosity to continually ask “how might AI help us with this?” We expect (no…we demand) that this will help us to think deeper, go farther, faster and achieve outcomes that will amaze our clients, all while maintaining our distinctively human leadership, critical thinking, judgment and empathy qualities. AI works for us; we do not work for AI.

For years now I have marveled at the simplicity and power of Google’s interface, while lamenting how complex and feeble most corporate data & analytics solutions that I have been involved with have been. How is it possible, that for more than 25 years, Google has been able to provide a deep diverse set of responses / answers to almost any question that anybody across the entire world can think of all from one simple search box and all at sub-second response times, to become one of the most widely used platforms across the world…and still have the time to become a verb? Yet, when we mere mortals head to work each morning, we do not have access to that same simple interface, nor do we possess anywhere near the same powerful capabilities to query our own corporations and data assets in a similar way. This has always felt wrong to me but also like it should have been solved already, yet to date a resolution has remained elusive. However, I remain equal amounts puzzled, frustrated and excited by this challenge and I am convinced that, in this new-age AI era that we find ourselves in, now is the time to solve the challenge.

If you have shared in some of these thoughts over the years, are facing current challenges or frustrations with your data & analytics adoption or have similar visions of a brighter, simpler future, please feel free to connect with us, we would love to learn more and have you accompany us on this journey, this crusade!

— John Horner

Purpose & Core Values

PURPOSE

We succeed as you succeed, we are dedicated to the relentless pursuit of delivering positive, transformational outcomes for our clients. Without our clients we have no purpose, without a purpose we cease to exist.

CORE VALUES