Owner-Operator · Greater Seattle Area

Maxum C. Smith

I build systems and then keep the books on them — rental property, in-house accounting software, and a decade of shipped engineering work. Everything on this page is measured.

mcs2269@columbia.edu linkedin.com/in/maxum maxumsmith.com

fig. 01 — the operator

Real estate

The properties

Acquired, renovated, and operated under Packwood Ventures. No property manager, no SaaS — leasing, contracts, capital projects, and the books, all in-house.

140 Bugle Lane

Rental · Packwood Ventures · Parcel record ↗

An overgrown Packwood parcel brought back to usable ground — trees and brush cleared, stumps ground down, debris hauled off, and the lot graded.

Entry — Bugle Lane
Gross revenue to date	$ —
Annual cash flow	$ —
Annualized ROI	— %

▸ Clearing the lot — 5 photos →

3017 Galvin Road Unit A living room, before renovation — bare room mid-demo, flooring boxes staged — fig. 03 — Unit A living room, before / after

3017 Galvin Road Unit A living room, after renovation — new plank flooring, staged and furnished — fig. 03 — Unit A living room, before / after

3017 Galvin Road garage, before conversion — stripped to the studs, bare concrete slab, exposed framing — fig. 03b — garage → Unit C, a third living unit, before / after

Unit C's private backyard — new cedar privacy fence splitting off a covered patio, opening onto the field — fig. 03c — Unit C's own fenced backyard and covered patio

3017 Galvin Road

Rental · Packwood Ventures · Parcel record ↗

The story of Galvin Road goes here — acquisition thesis, the work done, the result. The garage became Unit C: taken down to the studs and bare slab, then rebuilt with an insulated subfloor, framing, drywall, plank flooring, recessed lighting, and new windows.

Cash-flow events — Galvin Road
Down payment to purchase	$18,000
Cash-flow positive by	Month 3
New roof, year 1	$18,000
Garage → Unit C conversion	$50,000
Sold	$525,000

▸ The full renovation — 14 photos, plan to keys →

316 Noel Ave

Rental · Packwood Ventures · Parcel record ↗

An interior refresh: dated tile floors and countertops out, new wide-plank flooring throughout and butcher-block kitchen counters in.

Entry — Noel Ave
Gross revenue to date	$ —
Annual cash flow	$ —
Annualized ROI	— %

▸ The full renovation — 10 photos, before / after →

Built things

Projects

Ledger Suite

In-house accounting & tax system · hledger, Python, Node

End-to-end double-entry accounting and tax built from scratch for Packwood Ventures — bank feed reconciliation, deposit-to-invoice matching, amortization schedules, EFTPS handling, and a live dashboard tracking savings rate, runway, and withdrawal metrics. It does everything except call the IRS API. No SaaS products used, on principle.

Rental renovations

Capital improvements · zoning & permitting · project management

Full-cycle renovation work: zoning research and navigation, permitting (including working through a red-carded project and getting it done anyway), contractor management, and pricing. Septic design work included — drawings below.

Tax practice & EA track

Independent · Enrolled Agent candidate

Independent tax and accounting work alongside two years inside a tax firm — individual and business returns, entity questions, and the reconciliation work most people outsource. Currently sitting the EA exams.

Software, professionally

2018–2023 · Six teams, healthcare to fintech to energy

Five years shipping production systems — detailed below in the record. The consistent pattern: find the manual process everyone tolerates, automate it, and put a number on the hours recovered.

Philosophy

Doctrine

The principles the record above keeps demonstrating, stated once.

Own the stack.

Don't rent what you can own — the property, the software, the books, the equity. Manager-free rentals, in-house accounting, exercised options. Being a component in someone else's machine is the thing to walk away from.

ii.

Don't trust — verify.

A system isn't finished until it can prove itself correct. Double-entry books, automated economic tie-outs, traced dollars. The satisfying moment is always the same: the books balance, and can show it.

iii.

Leverage must generalize.

Leave work that ships bespoke exceptions for legacy systems; build the thing that scales, and put a number on the hours it recovers. Measured leverage or nothing.

Spend a quarter of your income. Reinvest the rest. Always — whether it came from your hands or your capital.
— the one rule, from the Income Trilogy

The record

Experience

2020 — present

Owner-Operator

Packwood Ventures

Built Ledger Suite: end-to-end accounting and tax, entirely in-house.
Rental management across the portfolio: capital improvements, pricing, contracts, project management, tenant relations.
No SaaS products used.

2021 — 2023

Software Engineer

ComboCurve — energy analytics

Owned the Project Transfer Service (Node CLI + Docker + Express on Cloud Run) for cross-environment data migration — roughly 2 hours/week returned to each developer and QA engineer, and resolved long-standing project-deletion tech debt by surfacing data collisions.
Owned Economic Tie-Outs: automated comparison of DCF and NPV outputs between app versions via GitHub Action, replacing a manual QA job on every PR and deploy — about 5 hours/week saved per QA engineer, and versioned evidence for customers that their well economics didn't drift.
Owned the CME Datamine integration: historical oil futures in GCS for fast pricing of project wells in NPV scenarios.
Deployed the GCP footprint with Terraform, including log-based monitoring dashboards.

2021 — 2022

Software Engineer, Product Engineering

Olive AI — healthcare automation

Owned the Minnesota Medicaid claims-processing workflow (Node + Selenium) — roughly one FTE of maintenance eliminated per hospital.
Owned the Waystar payments-portal integration — roughly three FTEs saved per healthcare facility.

Left for ComboCurve about six months before the downsizing: every hospital demanded bespoke exceptions, and I wanted to scale a small problem set rather than do custom development dressed up as product.

2019 — 2021

Software Engineer II

Axcess Financial — consumer lending

Owned the loan-history feature for the internal retail loan application (React, TypeScript, Node).
Owned customer & loan search on Amazon Elasticsearch — debounced matching on SSN, name, and loan number, replacing the query forms that cost retail employees hours per week.
Maintained Code Climate org-wide through the Java-to-full-stack-JS migration; audited weekly rollouts via Kibana as features toggled through LaunchDarkly.
Maintained microservices against Mongo and external credit bureaus (TransUnion, Experian), plus state-by-state compliance for checkngo.com — legal footers and max APRs used in underwriting.

2019

Software Engineer

Health Carousel — travel nursing

Owned the MVP scheduling feature letting traveling nurses schedule, assign, and track appointments themselves instead of by phone; interviewed nurses directly to shape it.
First developer role — Angular, TypeScript, C#, SQL, MVC.

2018 — 2019

Technical Services

Epic — Tapestry (Managed Care)

Point of contact for Loma Linda and Contra Costa; bug fixes in Caché, root-cause diagnosis, and triage to R&D.

Most of the job was translating customer requests into technical documentation for a legacy monopoly product. I wanted to create value rather than service a legacy system, so I left to become a developer.

Training

Education

Columbia University
B.S., Mechanical Engineering

2018

Maxum Smith at Columbia University commencement — Columbia-blue cap and gown among the graduating class — fig. 08 — Columbia commencement, Class of 2018