Indianapolis, IN

Ian Zelgowski, MBA

Lead Senior Financial Analyst Healthcare finance leader, automation builder, and systems operator

Finance by profession, builder by temperament. I like taking complicated systems — budgets, operations, infrastructure, automation, even family finances — and making them understandable, reliable, and actually useful.

United States flag Poland flag Dual citizen · American & Polish
Ian Zelgowski
Current Focus
Healthcare finance + automation
Lives In
Indianapolis, IN

Who I am

I'm a finance operator with a builder's brain. My day job lives in budgeting, forecasting, and financial analysis, but I get most energized when I can turn messy systems into something clearer, faster, and more useful.

Most of my professional work has lived in healthcare, banking, and government — environments where details matter, process matters, and bad assumptions get expensive fast. That tends to make you practical, analytical, and pretty hard to impress with buzzwords.

Outside of work, I build the tools I wish already existed: financial dashboards, automation workflows, homelab infrastructure, smart-home systems, and scripts that solve annoyingly specific problems well enough to become permanent fixtures.

I'm based in the Indianapolis area, and when I'm not buried in data or infrastructure, I'm usually tinkering with hardware, self-hosted services, or some new AI workflow that seemed like a good idea at the time.

The short version: I like useful systems, honest data, and tools that pull their own weight.

4
Career chapters across banking, healthcare, and government
2
Degrees: an MBA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor's in Marketing from Penn State University
60+
Docker containers running on the homelab
Projects created because off-the-shelf tools annoyed me

What I do well

A mix of financial discipline, operational thinking, and technical curiosity — which is a polite way of saying I automate things when they annoy me.

Financial Analysis & Budgeting
Multi-million dollar budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and turning executive-level ambiguity into something measurable and actionable.
Financial AnalysisBudgetingHealthcare FinanceBusiness Intelligence
Healthcare Finance
Revenue cycle analysis, financial operations, audit-minded thinking, and process improvement inside highly regulated environments.
Revenue CycleForecastingComplianceBusiness Intelligence
Automation & Python
I build scripts and dashboards that earn their keep: financial modeling, data extraction, task automation, and tools that quietly remove repetitive work.
PythonFlaskAPIsAutomation
Homelab & Self-Hosting
Unraid, Docker, networking, service orchestration, and the general principle that if a service matters, I'd rather own the stack.
UnraidDockerLinuxTailscale
Smart Home Systems
Home Assistant, ESPHome, Zigbee, energy monitoring, and practical household automation that solves real problems instead of showing off.
Home AssistantESPHomeZigbeeEnergy Data
AI & Agentic Tools
Hands-on work with OpenClaw, persistent AI memory, model routing, automation workflows, and turning LLMs into tools instead of toys.
OpenClawLLMsAgentsPrompting

Things I've built

Mostly personal tools, infrastructure, and experiments that started with: there has to be a better way to do this.

Personal Finance Dashboard
Live
Custom Flask dashboard pulling live Monarch data with Monte Carlo success rates, scenario save/load, phased spending, and one-time expense planning. More useful than generic calculators because it actually knows the portfolio.
OpenClaw AI Stack
Live
Persistent AI assistant with memory, heartbeats, cron jobs, model fallback chains, Discord delivery, and custom tools. Equal parts assistant, lab rat, and force multiplier.
Unraid Homelab
Live
Host running 60+ containers for media, security, development, smart-home integrations, and internal tooling. If it can live on my hardware, I usually make it.
Smart Home Energy Monitoring
Live
Real-time utility monitoring with AMR2MQTT, Home Assistant dashboards, gas/electric cost visibility, and energy-aware automation.
Profile-to-Website Pipeline
Live
A reusable workflow that turns professional profile data, photos, and curated copy into a polished static site without rebuilding the whole thing by hand every time.
Retro Hardware Restoration
Ongoing
Old consoles, neglected electronics, and the kind of restoration work that rewards patience, parts bins, and stubbornness.

Career highlights

The professional through-line: finance, analysis, operations, and making complicated things behave.

Experience

Indiana University Health
Lead Senior Financial Analyst
2024–Present
Leads budgeting, forecasting, and financial planning work in revenue cycle operations, translating complex financial data into decisions leadership can actually use.
City of Noblesville
Deputy Financial Officer / Budget & Financial Analyst
2022–2024
Directed municipal budget planning and compliance across 24 departments, strengthening financial discipline, transparency, and executive reporting for a $116M annual budget.
Indiana University Health
Business Analyst → Senior Business Analyst
2017–2022
Improved revenue cycle performance through audit, process improvement, and revenue-protection work, identifying savings opportunities and helping reduce operational risk.
Busey
Treasury Operations Cash Management Specialist → Risk Management Analyst
2013–2017
Built early depth in treasury operations, commercial banking, and enterprise risk management, with a strong foundation in controls, reporting, and regulated financial environments.

Education

Gies College of Business — University of Illinois
MBA
Graduate business education at one of the top-ranked public business schools in the country.
Penn State University
B.S. in Marketing
Top-tier public research university with one of the largest alumni networks in the country.

What I care about

The overlap of finance, technology, self-reliance, and hobbies that probably got a little more serious than they needed to.

📊
Finance & Investing
🏥
Healthcare Operations
🏠
Home Automation
🖥️
Homelabbing
🤖
AI & Agentic Systems
🛠️
Tinkering
🔧
Hardware Restoration
🇵🇱
Polish Heritage
👨‍👩‍👧‍👦
Family
📈
Building Better Tools

Let's connect

Best place for the professional version is LinkedIn. Best place for the direct version is email.