Amory Bodin and the numbers that follow a life

In 1980, Amory Bodin captained a football team that finished with ten wins, no losses and no ties. A year later, he graduated with an accounting degree. There is something pleasing about that sequence: first a season with nothing in the loss column, then a profession in which every column must be accounted for. At the University of Minnesota Duluth, Bodin was both a running back and a punter. His working life would eventually become equally difficult to squeeze into a single job description.

Today, his name belongs to a Miami accounting business, Bodin Company, and to Bodin Capital, which researches small public companies. Between the football field and those businesses sit six years at KPMG Peat Marwick, a technology-company CFO job, a move to Florida and a Republican primary campaign. The football record is an inviting way into this life. The accounting work is where the story spends most of its time.

Ten Saturdays, no defeat

Bodin came to UMD from Duluth Central High School. His college football years ran from 1976 through 1980, and he led the Bulldogs in rushing in each of his three seasons as a starter: 1977, 1978 and 1980. That last year, with Bodin as captain, UMD completed its first unbeaten, untied season. Under coach Jim Malosky, the Bulldogs went 8-0 in conference play and finished ninth in the national Division II rankings.

The team was built around the ground game. Its season totals included 613 rushing attempts and 3,073 rushing yards, compared with 104 passing attempts. Bodin led the rushers with 1,057 yards. Tom Stoll, another future UMD Hall of Fame member, shared the backfield. The numbers describe an offense that kept coming back to its runners. Bodin's success belonged inside that shared machinery, alongside the blockers and the other backs.

His scoring total was 116 points over ten games. The NCAA's historical tables record 19 touchdowns and two extra points, giving him an average of 11.6 points a game, making him Division II’s scoring leader that year. Nineteen touchdowns account for 114 of those points; the other two are a small reminder that his duties extended beyond carrying the football. A running back who could also punt offered his team two distinctly different uses for the same pair of legs.

Punting had already produced a notable season in 1977, when he averaged 43 yards per kick. His career punting average was 39.6 yards. At the time of his Hall of Fame induction, UMD identified both figures as school records. Those averages measure distance surrendered by an opposing team before its offense even gets to work. The touchdowns are easier to applaud. The punts make their contribution a little farther from the spotlight.

Recognition arrived in several forms: all-conference honors, All-American honorable mentions and the team's most valuable player award in 1978 and 1980. By the end of his college career, he had accumulated 2,662 rushing yards on 498 carries. His degree followed in 1981: a B.A. in accounting. Football also brought tryouts with the Minnesota Vikings as a punter. The lasting professional occupation, however, would be accounting.

The CFO job behind the company name

The early business chapter took him to KPMG Peat Marwick for six years. His work there included tax planning and compliance, management consulting and systems design. Those are different assignments with a common practical requirement: understanding how an organization records what it does. Tax work examines obligations; consulting examines decisions; systems work examines the processes that connect the two. Bodin's subsequent responsibilities would draw on all three.

He then became chief financial officer of Access Technology. During his tenure, the startup grew to more than 50 employees across multiple states. His responsibilities included supervising senior staff, reviewing technology and acquisitions, overseeing auditing and tax compliance, and preparing financial statements and their footnotes. The footnotes deserve their place in the sentence. In company accounts, the explanation attached to a number can matter as much as the number itself.

Bodin Company's corporate history reaches back to December 2000. The business now offers tax services and fractional or virtual CEO/CFO work. Its executive-services menu is unusually concrete: bank relationships, payroll, budgeting, cash-flow forecasts, financial reporting and accounting systems. These are the tasks that sit beneath a company's public ambitions. An expansion plan still needs a cash forecast. A new hire still needs to appear correctly on the payroll.

A fractional role makes that expertise available for part of the working week or for a particular stretch of time. Bodin Company describes assignments involving a transition, an executive's leave or a specific project. That arrangement puts the emphasis on a business need rather than on maintaining a permanent seat in an executive office. It also explains the two titles on the service: sometimes the question concerns the finances, and sometimes it concerns how the whole business is running.

“Relationships built on trust.”

Bodin Company's stated approach

A Florida ballot, a different score

In 2012, Bodin took his business background into electoral politics. He challenged incumbent Erik Fresen in the Republican primary for Florida House District 114. His campaign emphasized public spending, the state budget, workforce education and the regulations facing small businesses. He presented accounting experience as a qualification for examining government finances. The argument was direct: someone accustomed to inspecting business accounts should have a place in the discussion of public ones.

One campaign remark caught that proposition neatly: he wanted more CPAs examining the budget in Tallahassee. The primary result on August 14 was equally clear. Bodin received 2,468 votes; Fresen received 6,268. Bodin's share was 28.3 percent. His bid ended there. An unbeaten college season and a defeated political campaign belong in the same biography, without either being made to explain away the other.

The following year brought a different public occasion. In September 2013, UMD inducted Bodin into its Athletic Hall of Fame alongside five other former athletes. The banquet took place in downtown Duluth, with recognition at the football game the next evening. More than three decades after his final college season, the university gave that part of his life a permanent place in its athletic history. A career can move south while its old records stay put.

A one-year assignment that became a home

Bodin and his wife, Carrie, had moved to Miami in 1997 for a consulting contract with Johnson & Johnson. The assignment was expected to last a year; it lasted five. They settled in Little Gables. The lengthening contract supplies a modest but consequential plot turn: a temporary work arrangement became the setting for a family and a business. Their children are triplets, which adds a rather different sort of scheduling problem to an accountant's household.

His local involvement has included the Little Gables Neighborhood Association, where his LinkedIn profile lists board service beginning in January 2013. It also lists service at First United Methodist Church of Coral Gables beginning in 2000, including finance and staff-parish committee work. His company biography includes involvement with Boy Scout Troop 76. These commitments place him in the everyday institutions of his adopted community, where the work continues between elections.

His own description of client relationships includes a small, specific practice: he hand-delivers tax returns to some older clients and spends 15 to 20 minutes talking about their lives. That is a different measure of an accountant's work from turnaround times or the number of returns completed. The visit makes room for a conversation after the paperwork has been finished. For a business that talks about relationships, it is an intelligible example.

Small companies, long conversations

Bodin's investment interests take him toward the smaller end of the public markets. Bodin Capital is described as a research firm for microcap and small-cap companies. He also belongs to MicroCapClub, a forum whose focus includes companies trading in the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia. His tax practice and investment research examine businesses from different directions: one concerns what must be reported, while the other concerns what a company might be worth.

His investment work has its own chronology. He passed the Series 65 examination on December 12, 2013. He held an investment-adviser representative registration with Elisea Frishberg Advisory Group from May 2014 to April 2015, with Bodin Financial Group from April 2015 to October 2018, and with Black Pearl Financial Services from January 2019 to April 2020. These were separate registrations during distinct periods. The dates matter when describing an accounting career that has also included investment-advisory work. Researching a public company, preparing a tax return and holding an adviser registration describe different activities. Bodin’s professional record includes each of them. His current company biography identifies him as Bodin Company's CEO and Bodin Capital's president. Outside work, he lists sailing and golf. There is also Cheeky, a stray dog that, in the family's telling, found them.

That dog is a useful place to leave a biography full of carefully counted things. A perfect season, a scoring average, a payroll, a primary tally: each has its own rules for keeping the record. A family dog arrives with fewer reporting requirements. Bodin's story accommodates both the formal totals and the ordinary attachments, from the university that remembers his football years to the Miami clients whose returns he sometimes delivers by hand.