Life settlements. I was employed by a nationally-known life settlement company for 16 years. While fulfilling their computing needs you learn a lot about an industry. The life settlement industry is a bit like the wild west — sometimes you can’t be sure who you’re dealing with. Other times you find you’d rather not have dealt with them. I worked for one of the good ones. Maybe that’s why it was only mildly successful. But he was a good teacher. Cash flow modeling, mortality, optimizing premiums, policy purchase and management, contracts and regulatory compliance, to name just a few.
Photography and graphic arts. Over a 12 year span, as a vendor and as their employee Working for a full-service catalog production company. From vision to design and photography, copy writing and page layout to color separations. including job tracking, billing and payroll, you pick up a lot when the CFO and accounting department are your playground. (this needs work)
Industrial salvage. A client for 5 or so years, they needed a way to track their employees and what jobs they were working on. Job costing technologies that fed payroll to minimize duplicate data entry work. This was before smartphones and tablets. Today you’d have the employees check in and out on their phones or a company supplied tablet, saving even more time – but spending it on hardware and programming. The savings grow as your business grows.