Making Her Own Door

When Sarah Queale grew tired of watching everyone around her get promoted, she decided to take matters into her own hands. Seventeen years after launching a successful accounting firm, she’s still paying it forward by creating opportunities for others.

Years ago, before she ever thought of starting an accounting firm, Sarah Queale was an office manager at a landscaping company in London, Ontario. Business was booming, and she watched as one male colleague after another got promoted. But even though her workload kept expanding, her title never changed. That’s when she started playing around with the idea of going out on her own.

Seventeen years later, Synergy Tax & Business Solutions employs eight women, sponsors their continuing education, and exists, in many ways, because Queale once decided she’d rather build her own door than keep knocking on the closed one in front of her.

I saw my male counterparts growing and getting promotions,” Queale recalls. “And I was kind of left back. There was nowhere else to go. And so, not seeing those opportunities available for me, I just thought, what better way to do it than to create it for myself?”

She left, went back to school for accounting, and started looking for clients. But while the decision to build something for herself was a personal one, the impact would ultimately extend far beyond her own life and career.

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Five Years Solo

Queale’s first client came from an online ad. She was offered a two-day-a-week gig right as she was deciding whether to commit fully to her own firm or stay safely employed. She couldn’t do both, so she chose to leap.

“I had to kind of jump in feet first and just hope for the best,” she says. “But work hard as well.”

For the next five years, she worked alone, out of her house—long before remote work was commonplace. She built a client base mostly through word of mouth, leaning on a handful of local accountants who were generous with referrals. She didn’t have a master plan or dreams of building something big. She was simply trying to build something that was 100% hers.

Then she hit the wall many solo firm owners eventually come up against: she started having to turn down business.

I reached that point where I had to start turning away clients or potential clients because I didn’t have the capacity to service them,” she says.

She was at a crossroads, forced to choose between staying comfortably solo or bringing on other team members. Once again, she chose to leap.

Her First Hire

Queale hired her first team member around year six. That same employee is still with her today, which tells you a lot about how she runs the firm.

She takes hiring very seriously. These are people’s lives, she points out, and the responsibility of bringing someone aboard is something she felt acutely from that very first job posting. She thinks of her team less as headcount and more as a close-knit group of people whose careers she has a hand in shaping. Every team member gets an annual continuing education stipend to spend on a training course, a book, a class—anything that helps them grow.

Learning is a huge part of my life, and it helps me help other people,” Queale says. “So if I can push other people on our team to take advantage of opportunities to learn new skills, then I will certainly try to do that.”

Knowledge, in her view, shouldn’t sit in one head. It should travel and compound. The more her colleagues learn from each other, the more the whole firm collectively knows.

“That’s an investment not only in that one person,” she explains. “It’s an investment in the entire team.”

For nearly 11 years, the Synergy team has worked out of an old dance studio on Adelaide Street South—a big, bright space with the firm’s logo on the sign out front. Their physical presence got them recognized in the community, drew them into local events, and gave the operation a center of gravity. Lately, though, Queale has been weighing a more remote model. Several team members are working moms and single moms, and she’s increasingly convinced that having the flexibility to pick a kid up from school at three and log back on after dinner is more valuable than a great location with nice lighting.

The firm has, by Queale’s own account, gotten smaller in recent years—peaking at 12 and now sitting at eight. Some of that contraction came from team members moving on to new opportunities, something that doesn’t bother Queale one bit. In fact, she celebrates it.

For those who we see move on, it’s been like we’ve been a stepping stone, which is something to be proud of as well,” she says.

Her MBA Era

In line with her love of education, in 2022, while still running the firm, Queale graduated from the Executive MBA program at Ivey Business School. She completed most of her coursework at night and on weekends, regularly commuting to Toronto while her team held things down in London.

Queale is not a CPA, and she says sitting in rooms full of designated accountants can trigger a particular kind of imposter syndrome—the feeling that everyone else has a piece of paper you don’t. The MBA was partly about quieting that voice, and partly about something bigger.

It helps with your imposter syndrome when you’re sitting in a room full of colleagues that may have more education than you,” she says. “But also just believing in yourself and knowing that you could do it is a big thing.”

After graduation, the cohort she’d spent two years in the trenches with—working on case studies, pushing through late night study sessions, juggling deadlines on top of deadlines—went their separate ways. The goodbye was unexpectedly hard, but it marked the beginning of a new era for Queale—one strengthened by the settled sense that she belonged in every room she walked into, no matter who else was in it.

Life Beyond the Firm

The firm has, over the years, made room for a life that probably looks different from what most people imagine when they picture an MBA-holding accounting firm owner.

Queale sits on the board of the Children’s Aid Society of London and Middlesex. She judges business case competitions at Ivey, including one for high school students. She volunteers at food drives and clothing drives, many of them coordinated through the team at Synergy. She’s traveled to 34 countries, with Botswana—where she went on a photography safari—ranking at the top of the list. A solo trip to Los Angeles the week before the world shut down for COVID taught her, somewhat to her own surprise, that she actually travels better alone than with company.

Solo travel is really something I think that everyone’s got to do,” Queale says. “You meet so many people when you’re on your own.”

At home, there are two Boston terriers—Elsa and Chloe—who keep the house lively. And there are numerous crochet projects scattered about—mostly afghans Queale gives away as gifts because she doesn’t actually need any more blankets. There are nieces and nephews and a recent Disney World trip with a best friend’s family.

None of it would be possible if the firm needed her to be everywhere at once. It doesn’t, because she’s spent 17 years making sure of it.

The Door, Held Open

The firm is growing, and Queale is about to hire again—carefully, intentionally, the way she does most things. The job posting will go up on the usual platforms, and Queale is confident that she’ll find the right person. When they start, they’ll find a continuing education stipend waiting, a team that values collaboration over competition, and an owner who will push them to prioritize learning—no matter how skilled they already are.

The team is the business,” she says proudly.

Because while Synergy is in the business of tax and accounting, Queale will also tell you they are in the business helping others find doorways to opportunity.

She built her own door because no one was holding one open for her. Now she keeps it open, on purpose, for those who come next.

Synergy Tax & Business Solutions is based in London, Ontario.

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