Image by Ed Brennen Business alum Otavio Mayole '20, co-founder of DeCypher Financials, points out some of the online creators his company provides services to while speaking to students at the Manning School of Business Industry Days last spring.
Vanessa (Chen) Moynihan ’21 wasn’t quite sure what to make of the two aspiring accountants sitting in her boyfriend’s apartment.
It was 2022, and Moynihan had recently graduated from UMass Lowell with a degree in computer science. But instead of pursuing a career in the field, she was making a living as a fashion content creator, eventually building an audience of more than 7 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat.
The two accountants — Manning School of Business alumni Otavio Mayole ’20 and David Crueger-Cain ’20 — thought she could use some help managing the income she was earning through brand sponsorships, advertising and affiliate marketing.
There was just one problem: Moynihan wasn’t convinced she needed help. She and her boyfriend (now husband), fellow UML computer science alum Jason Moynihan ’21, were managing the business together.
“We were like, ‘Wait, so what exactly are you offering? Can’t we do our own taxes?’” Vanessa recalls. “But we had no idea what we were doing.”
Mayole and Crueger-Cain were figuring things out, too. Moynihan was their first real pitch to a content creator, and they saw her business as a pilot for their idea.
The pitch worked. After restructuring Moynihan’s business and applying new tax strategies, Mayole and Crueger-Cain helped her save six figures in taxes that first year.
Four years later, that pilot looks like the start of something big.
Mayole and Crueger-Cain are co-founders of DeCypher Financials, an accounting firm built specifically for content creators and digital entrepreneurs. Along with co-founder Natalia Muniz, they have grown the company to more than 150 creator clients and a dozen employees, with projected revenue of $2 million this year, according to Mayole.
Their clients range from fashion and fitness influencers to streamers, chefs, actors and professional wrestling personalities.
Image by courtesy Computer science alumni Vanessa (Chen) Moynihan '21, left, and Jason Moynihan '21, second from left, pose for a photo with Otavio Mayole' 20 and his wife, Julia, in New York City's Times Square in 2024. They were there for the launch of a billboard for RAYN, a women's clothing line that the Moynihans co-founded.
The creator economy that DeCypher now serves was just taking off when Mayole arrived at UMass Lowell in 2016.
Born in Brazil, Mayole immigrated to the United States with his family when he was 3 and grew up in Methuen. A first-generation college student, he majored in business with a concentration in finance. Mayole immersed himself in campus life as a commuter student, playing club volleyball and serving as president of the Finance Society.
He met Crueger-Cain, an honorsaccounting and management student from Lowell, in class. The two began studying together and became friends.
“The most important aspect of college is the people that you meet along the way,” Mayole says. “I don’t think I’d be where I’m at without those connections.”
After completing three summer internships with Ernst & Young, now EY, Mayole joined the firm full time after graduation.
A health scare then upended his perspective.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mayole was hospitalized with ankylosing spondylitis, a chronic inflammatory form of arthritis. Fearing he might die, he began reconsidering what he wanted from life.
“Did I really live my life to the full potential?” he remembers asking himself.
When his health improved, Mayole resolved to take more chances and live without regrets. The emerging creator economy presented an opportunity.
Still, taking the leap didn’t come easily. A self-described risk-averse accountant, Mayole spent about six months weighing the decision to leave EY and pursue DeCypher full time. His wife, Julia, helped support them financially while he got DeCypher off the ground.
Image by Ed Brennen Speaking to students at the Manning School's Industry Days last spring, alum Otavio Mayole '20 recounts how a health scare convinced him to quit his accounting job at EY and launch DeCypher Financials.
Moynihan, meanwhile, had started posting fashion videos from her family’s home in Pelham, New Hampshire, during the pandemic lockdown. She was bored and looking for a creative outlet, never expecting it to become a career, she says. Her timing was fortuitous: TikTok was taking off, Instagram Reels was new, and far fewer people were creating short-form videos.
“It definitely snowballed pretty quickly,” says Moynihan, who created content under the name Vivacious Honey.
Mayole’s connection to Moynihan came through Jason Moynihan, whom he knew from Methuen High School. While they knew how to build an audience, the Moynihans knew little about the financial side of self-employment. They didn’t have an LLC or understand tax strategies.
“It was just way over our heads,” Vanessa says.
Mayole realized Moynihan was hardly the only creator building a lucrative business without the financial know-how to manage it. DeCypher stepped in as their outsourced finance department, handling everything from business formation and bookkeeping to tax planning and strategy. According to DeCypher, its clients save an average of nearly $23,000 a year in taxes.
This past spring, the company brought dozens of its clients to Miami for its first creator summit, a two-day event combining financial education and networking — furthering Mayole’s goal of building a community around creator finances.
Today, Mayole focuses on sales, marketing and recruiting, while Crueger-Cain leads the company’s client onboarding team and Muniz oversees tax strategy. The biggest challenge, Mayole says, is finding the right employees to keep pace with DeCypher’s growth.
“To get to six figures (in revenue) is relatively easy. To get to a million is hard,” he says. “But to be able to scale to $10 million, you need the right people, because you can’t do everything anymore.”
Image by Ed Brennen Otavio Mayole '20, left, chats with students after his Manning School of Business Industry Days presentation last spring at the Pulichino Tong Business Center.
“I treat it kind of like a video game. How can we collect more tokens? How can we unlock more characters?” says Mayole, who designed the DeCypher website with that aesthetic in mind. Employees are listed as “operatives” with codenames, while services such as tax filing, bookkeeping and LLC formation are presented as different “nodes.”
Moynihan says DeCypher’s appeal goes beyond understanding the unusual finances of creators. Mayole and his team took the time to understand her business, she says, and the relationship never felt transactional.
The business relationship eventually grew into a close friendship. Mayole was a groomsman in the Moynihans’ wedding, while his wife, Julia, was one of Vanessa’s bridesmaids.
Moynihan has since stepped away from content creation to focus on family. She and Jason recently welcomed their first child, a son.
Looking back, Moynihan marvels at how far Mayole and Crueger-Cain have come.
“It’s so cool to see the transition from ‘Who are these two random men in our apartment?’ to now seeing the incredible company that the two of them have built,” she says.
Mayole, who runs the remote company from his home in Maynard, is already thinking about the next levels. In 10 years, he hopes DeCypher could have an executive team and generate up to $30 million in annual revenue, giving its founders the option to sell — but not the need to.
Mostly, he wants something that goes back to the promise he made himself during his health scare.
“I just want to work on cool stuff with cool people,” he says, “and build a life worth living.”