Came up through accounting — the IRS, then firms large and small, then six years inside the books of real businesses.
The story and team behind WDS
Watase Diversified Services
01 / The firm
Built local
for locals.
Watase Diversified Services is a family firm — two brothers from Hawaii, working with businesses in Hawaii. Most of our work is with trade and construction, because that’s where the complexity lives.
A career spent teaching people to actually use the tools in front of them.
Businesses rarely fail because the work is bad. They fail for financial reasons — cash flow, tax debt, growing too fast to survive it.
We started WDS doing bookkeeping. The books were clean and the owners still couldn’t answer a basic question about their own business. Nobody was short of data.
That’s the gap we built the firm to close.
02 / Cody Watase · Financial data and strategy
Financial Data
Cody coaches the money side. He analyzes the financial data, sets the KPIs a business should be run on, and shows owners how a decision — a hire, a price, a job taken — moves the numbers before they commit to it.
He is an Enrolled Agent, and earned it after working inside the IRS conducting business audits, which means he knows what gets a small business pulled for review, because he was the one pulling them.
Six years in the books, and time at accounting firms from small local shops to large ones. He owns accounting quality here — every set of books, every close, every review that goes out.
03 / Sean Watase · Operations and technology
Operational Efficiency
Sean coaches the operating side. Once Cody sets the KPIs, Sean builds the operation that gets there — the systems that track the data as the work happens, and the technology that takes the busywork out of running it.
At Apple, teaching customers to actually use the devices they’d already bought. In tech startups as a developer advocate, teaching engineers to build on tools they’d never seen before. Then AI and operations consulting in 2023, while most businesses were still working out what AI was even for.
It’s the same job here. The numbers are the tool. Almost every owner already has them and can’t use them.
Ready to build and grow your business?
We build the numbers, show you what they mean, and tell you what to work on next. You run it. Thirty minutes, free.
04 / Meet the team
Financial Data and Strategy
Cody Watase
Operations and Technology
Sean Watase
Accountant