My interest in business and bookkeeping started long before I ever considered it a career. When I was ten years old, I started my first small business breeding and selling sugar gliders. What began as a way to earn money while caring for animals I loved quickly became a lesson in entrepreneurship. I was responsible for tracking income and expenses, balancing my books, maintaining records, and making sure everything stayed organized—as well as paying back the initial investment provided by my backer, aka my dad.

That early interest in how businesses operate never really went away. Over the years, I’ve worked with businesses in a variety of industries, and I’ve always been especially drawn to the kind of accounting work that requires digging into the details and figuring out how everything fits together. I’ve stepped into small businesses where the books had fallen behind or needed significant cleanup, sometimes involving multiple years of transactions and financial records. Working through that history, identifying discrepancies, reconciling accounts, and ultimately getting the books accurate and manageable going forward is the kind of work I genuinely enjoy. There’s a particular satisfaction in reaching the end of a difficult reconciliation and seeing everything balance to the penny.

As my career developed, my accounting experience branched into the legal field, where I gained hands-on experience with law firm bookkeeping and operations as well as paralegal work involving probate, estates, and trusts. My experience has included billing and collections, accounts payable and receivable, operating and trust account reconciliations, financial reporting, fiduciary accounting, and estate and trust administration.

I found myself particularly drawn to probate, estate, trust, and fiduciary work because it brings together many of the things I enjoy most—reconciliation, organization, problem-solving, and working through complicated financial records—with the opportunity to do work that feels genuinely meaningful. These matters often arise during sensitive and emotionally stressful times, and I value being able to help bring some clarity, order, and peace of mind to the financial side of the process.

After an unexpected career transition, I found myself thinking seriously about what I wanted the next chapter of my career to look like. Rather than simply looking for another position that used only part of my experience, I decided to build something that brought together the work I had enjoyed most over the years—bookkeeping, reconciliation, problem-solving, business operations, paralegal work, and my experience with estate and trust administration. That decision became Blue Ridge Back Office, giving me the opportunity to bring those different areas of experience together while focusing more intentionally on work I find rewarding, challenging, and genuinely interesting.