For more than two decades, Mike Pocrnich has built a career translating financial complexity into something non-profits, schools, and government agencies can use to fulfill their missions. His path runs from a Minneapolis childhood through major regional accounting firms to a company he built himself, and now to a role guiding the finances of organizations that exist to serve others.
On one audit early in his career, Mike Pocrnich walked into a barn. It was not a metaphor: a small non-profit had been keeping years of physical financial records there, receipts and ledgers stacked alongside hay bales, the kind of storage decision that made sense to someone at some point and then simply never got revisited. Pocrnich and his team spent time sorting through it, reconstructing a paper trail so that an organization built to help people could keep proving it deserved to. It remains, by his own description, one of the odder moments in a career spent almost entirely inside the finances of institutions that exist for something larger than profit: non-profits, charter schools, government offices, the donors and grant officers who need the numbers to hold together so the mission can keep moving. The barn was unusual. The instinct that sent him in to fix it was not.
That instinct, an insistence that financial order is not bureaucratic overhead but the thing that lets a mission survive, has carried Pocrnich through more than two decades of work with non-profits, government entities, and educational institutions. It has taken him from a childhood in the Minneapolis metro area to a degree in accounting, to the audit floors of a major regional firm, to founding his own accounting practice, and now to advising the finance offices of some of the same kinds of organizations he started out auditing.
Roots in the Twin Cities
Pocrnich grew up in the Minneapolis metro area, where an early interest in numbers and problem-solving set the direction his career would eventually take. He went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in Accounting from St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, a program that shaped how he came to think about the field. It was not, he has said, only about learning to compute figures correctly. It was about understanding how financial systems could be built and used to help organizations achieve their goals, a distinction that would define the rest of his working life. That foundation gave him both a passion for accuracy and an early sense that strategic financial management was a form of service in its own right.
Learning the Discipline of Audits
Pocrnich’s professional life began at CliftonLarsonAllen, where he worked as a Senior Auditor managing audits for non-profit organizations. The role required him to develop internal controls, train junior staff, and deliver financial presentations to leadership teams, work that taught him early on that precision and accountability mattered most in exactly the organizations that could least afford to get them wrong. An audit, in his view, was never simply a matter of checking boxes. It was a way of confirming that an organization was financially healthy and transparent enough to be trusted with the responsibilities it had taken on.
From CliftonLarsonAllen, Pocrnich moved to Beltz, Kes, Darling & Associates (now BerganKDV), where he served as Controller and led audits and financial compliance work for a roster of clients. A colleague from that period has described him as someone with a knack for making complicated financial regulations legible to people who did not have an accounting background, a skill that made a real difference in the success of the firm’s audits.
Building Anton Group
In 2013, Pocrnich founded Anton Group, an accounting firm based in St. Paul built specifically to serve charter schools and non-profits. It was, by his own account, the hardest thing he had done professionally: leaving the structure of established firms to build something of his own, with sleepless nights in the early going as he and his team worked to build a client base from nothing. He got through it, he has said, by staying focused on the firm’s goals, leaning on the experience he had accumulated, and trusting a small team that shared his sense of mission.
The firm grew. Under Pocrnich’s leadership, Anton Group came to represent one in five Minnesota charter schools, including Noble Academy, and generated three million dollars in annual revenue by 2021. A former client has recalled that Pocrnich went beyond simply managing numbers, that he cared about the client’s mission and worked to help the organization succeed in every dimension of its operations. For Pocrnich, the reward was never the revenue figure alone. It was watching proper financial management translate directly into the quality of education a school could offer, evidence that balancing the books and serving students were, in the right hands, the same project.
A New Chapter at Element Financial Advisory
Pocrnich now serves as Finance Manager at Element Financial Advisory, where he provides CFO and Controller services to a portfolio of clients that includes non-profits and government organizations. His work there draws on the same expertise built over two decades: financial forecasting, grant management, and audit preparation, applied to a wider set of clients navigating increasingly complex financial demands. The job, as he describes it, is about strategic guidance that goes beyond the ledger, aligning an organization’s financial strategy with its underlying mission rather than treating the two as separate concerns.
Internal controls remain a particular area of focus. Pocrnich emphasizes segregation of duties, clear documentation, and regular monitoring as the basic tools that protect organizations from fraud, mismanagement, and the kind of quiet inefficiency that can undermine an otherwise well-run operation. Colleagues at Element Financial Advisory have pointed to his ability to see the larger financial picture while still paying attention to every procedural detail, an approach they credit with helping clients navigate complicated financial challenges with more confidence than they might otherwise have.
Life Beyond the Ledger
Outside of work, Pocrnich is deeply engaged in his community. He volunteers regularly with the Animal Humane Society, sponsors animals through Happy Tails Rescue, and has sponsored a Syrian family, a reflection of a broader belief that he has a responsibility to contribute to causes beyond his own household. A volunteer coordinator at the Animal Humane Society has described him as someone who shows up consistently, not only for the organization’s larger events but for the ordinary work in between.
At home, Pocrnich spends much of his free time outdoors with his family and his dog, June: hiking, walking, or simply spending time near the water. He has described this time as a way of recharging and staying grounded, a counterweight to the demands of a career built around other people’s financial pressures. When asked what trait has mattered most to his success, he pointed to adaptability, the ability to adjust to new challenges and changes, since no two organizations he has worked with have ever been quite the same. He has also said that when negative feedback comes his way, he tries to treat it as an opportunity to improve rather than something to take personally, stepping back to analyze the situation and look for ways to do better.
Mike Pocrnich’s Next Chapter
Looking ahead, Pocrnich’s focus remains where it has been for most of his career: helping organizations build financial systems sturdy enough to support their missions rather than distract from them. He has said he wants to keep empowering non-profits and other organizations to thrive financially, so that they can concentrate on serving the communities that depend on them. That ambition, translating audits and spreadsheets into something an organization can actually use to do more good, has carried him from a barn full of old receipts to the finance offices of some of Minnesota’s most mission-driven institutions, and by his own account, he is not finished yet.
