An accountant who left the ledger for the leaderboard has a workout plan for business owners to get in financial shape

Matt Wilpers on how his years as an accountant set the foundation for his next act, and his advice for business owners and the accountants who serve them as they strive for success.

Hundreds of thousands of riders and followers know Matt Wilpers as the fitness world's data guy. As the brains behind Peloton's Power Zone Training, he helps riders turn metrics such as heart rate, output, and functional threshold power into concrete training plans. As a senior instructor, he shows up on screens around the world every week, guiding athletes of all stripes through their at-home workouts.

Matt has spent the last decade-plus growing his training business from $25-a-class gigs to global partnerships, but before he was coaching riders toward their next fitness milestone, he was running analyses and wrangling data of a different kind as an accountant. Despite his training as an accountant, when he shifted gears and fitness became his day job, Matt was using spreadsheets to run his business. Once he realized that spreadsheets were not enough to keep up with a growing business, he turned to QuickBooks to help him keep pace with how his business was running underneath the debits, payments, and bank balances. He also added a bookkeeper to the mix to bring in the trusted guidance that only comes from having a human in the loop. Using QuickBooks makes it easy for Matt and his bookkeeper to work together on a single, unified platform.

The accountant behind the instructor

“The power of the accountant is that you’re on the ground floor," said Matt, who spent time at a top public accounting firm before going in-house at an investment bank. "If you're in audit, you're seeing how things make it from the point of transaction all the way to the financial statements. And if you're on more of the bookkeeping or controlling side, you're performing analysis to help leadership make better decisions." 

Matt loved setting goals, solving problems, and guiding decisions, but he didn't love the repetitive, manual desk work it often took to get there. When he started moonlighting as an athletic coach, that tension only grew more obvious. 

“My passion was really in the fitness space. I was coaching at 5 in the morning in Central Park—it could be rain, snow, you name it—and then getting dressed at the gym to go to the office,” Matt recalled. “At work, they all thought I was crazy.” 

But those early mornings were building on Matt’s accountant background, not bucking it. “In accounting, there are many parts of the job people don't necessarily see.”. 

The ability to communicate, for example, was paramount. Whether he was writing emails or documenting processes and procedures, he needed to translate complex financials into something business leaders could actually understand and act on. "That's a skill I learned on the job when I was an accountant that I value today," said Matt. "When I'm coaching clients, I need to clearly communicate goals, track their progress, and plan for their future milestones."

From spreadsheets to the leaderboard

When Matt finally took the plunge into full-time fitness coaching, he was still doing the same thing he'd always done: giving individualized advice, and building systems for consistent, compounding gains. 

"When I left my career in accounting, it was like jumping off a cliff," he said. "You put so much time, schooling, and energy into becoming a CPA. Leaving that identity behind was difficult."

But shedding the identity didn't dull the instincts underneath it. His "consistency over intensity" philosophy, creating small, sustainable habits instead of sporadic sprints, is really the same principle behind a clean monthly close. The emphasis on getting the fundamentals right has kept showing up as he's built his own business. "As soon as I identify something that works, I make it a routine. I immediately try to figure out an efficient system or process to deal with it, and then I rely heavily on those established fundamentals going forward."

Freedom to focus on growing

Turning that same disciplined lens on his own business finances is what eventually led Matt to look for the right system.

"When I started my own business, managing my financials in spreadsheets quickly got overwhelming; I did a bunch of research on accounting systems, and QuickBooks was absolutely the place to go," he explained. QuickBooks gave him a financial foundation he could actually trust and eventually hand off.

"When the growth of the business started to outstrip my ability to keep things organized and under control, it was really easy to hand my bookkeeper everything I'd already done in QuickBooks. Bringing on a bookkeeper and knowing I had my right-hand person there to show me how it was actually going gave me the freedom and confidence to focus on growing."

Why accountants matter

That freedom didn't come from stepping away from the numbers. It came from trusting someone who understood them as well as he once had. It's the same instinct underneath Matt's whole story: Good accounting doesn't just protect a business; it fuels it. Accountants aren't just the people checking the math after a decision's been made. They’re the ones equipped to help shape the decisions and achieve the vision that inspired the business in the first place.

“If I had to do it all over again, my first hire would absolutely be the bookkeeper,” said Matt. “You have to know where you’ve been to know where you want to go.”

Freeing people up to do their best thinking is what’s driving the new AI capabilities available in QuickBooks. With Intuit Intelligence, Intuit’s unified platform that delivers intelligence and automation to businesses and accountants, QuickBooks can complete repetitive tasks customers such as Matt used to spend days doing.

The result: Entrepreneurs, accountants, and innovators have more time to ask good questions, spot what's changing, and guide a business toward what's next. Matt's path from accountant to Peloton is one story of that shift. With the help of QuickBooks and Intuit Intelligence, Intuit is committed to helping write a lot more of them for the accountants, entrepreneurs, and innovators building what's next.