JAMES MILLER · CPA · CEPA

I've seen what good data infrastructure does to a company. Most companies don't have it.

Founder of Motion AI Systems. M&A advisor with $550M+ deployed across 70+ acquisitions at Vital Records Control, where I rebuilt the company's reporting infrastructure from Excel spreadsheets to a Power BI environment running on 100M+ rows. This is the work I want to do for more companies.

Why this exists

I spent the better part of a decade looking at small and mid-sized businesses as acquisition targets. Hundreds of them. Across industries, geographies, ownership structures, and management styles.

One pattern showed up over and over: none of them had their data hooked up correctly. The data was a mess. Owners didn't know what their company was worth. They weren't running things efficiently. They knew they had a problem — they just didn't know what good looked like, or who to call.

"AI is the easy part. The data underneath isn't. Most companies don't have the foundation, and no one's telling them the truth about it."

At Vital Records Control, I had a chance to do something about it. When I arrived, the team was running the business on Excel spreadsheets — bumping into row limits, losing context, rebuilding reports every month by hand. I built out databases and Power BI models. Today, our data model runs on over 100 million rows and is used by everyone from operations managers up to the CEO, CFO, and board of directors.

That experience clarified something: my purpose here is to serve other people. The companies that need this most — growing mid-market businesses, CFOs trying to prepare for an exit, founders who built something real but can't see clearly into their own numbers — they deserve to have what enterprise companies have, sized to their reality. That's what Motion AI Systems exists to do.

Track record

$550M+
Deployed in acquisitions advised
70+
M&A transactions executed
100M+
Rows in production data model
20+
Years across finance, IT, and accounting

What I bring

Where I'm showing up

I do a lot of speaking, programming, and community work — because the only way the mid-market gets better at this is if the people who know how share what they know. Some of the recent and upcoming work:

JUNE 8–11, 2026 · UPCOMING
Building data foundations CFOs can trust
AICPA & CIMA ENGAGE 2026
ARIA Resort, Las Vegas
JUNE 8–11, 2026 · UPCOMING
Telling the story with data — making numbers persuasive
AICPA & CIMA ENGAGE 2026
ARIA Resort, Las Vegas
ONGOING · COMMUNITY
Memphis Data Professionals — Chairman
Took the group over when it had gone dormant, resurrected it, and formed a formal board. Now serving as chairman. Programming runs in collaboration with Microsoft, the FedEx Institute of Technology, and the TSCPA.
ONGOING · LEADERSHIP
Crews School of Accountancy Advisory Board — Chairman
Chair of the advisory board at the University of Memphis Crews School of Accountancy — shaping curriculum and connecting academic preparation to what the profession actually needs.
ONGOING · LEADERSHIP
Tennessee Society of CPAs — Past President & CPE Programming
Still heavily involved as the programming lead for CPE events across the state — coordinating speakers, topics, and curriculum for thousands of working CPAs.

A life beyond the dashboards

Husband, father of five, frequent visitor of zoos with very loud opinions on which animals are the best. In quieter hours: complex puzzles, nonfiction, Mozart, and artisan loose-leaf tea. I believe the work matters most when the people doing it have something real to come home to.

Let's see if we should work together.

30 minutes, no pitch deck. Tell me what's slowing you down. I'll tell you whether Motion AI Systems is the right fit — and if it's not, I'll point you toward who is.