Anne-Marie Kaden spent her early career mucking stalls and working in vet medicine. Three years into running her own bookkeeping firm, she’s still serving the industry she loves—but her days are filled with math instead of manure.
A woman in Scotland had just lost seven of her pets and everything she owned in a house fire. And there she was, on her phone, trying to piece together her pet-sitting schedule and make sure all of her clients were covered—not just for that day, but for the next three weeks.
When Anne-Marie Kaden saw the story pop up on her social media feed one morning, it nearly brought her to tears—because that is exactly who her clients are. And it’s exactly why she built her bookkeeping firm around them.
She would know. For years, she was one of them.
Horse Stalls and Spreadsheets
Working with animals, Kaden says, might sound like “puppies and kittens and fun all day.” But the reality is often far from that warm-and-fuzzy fantasy. It’s 100-hour weeks in show season, 4 a.m. alarms, and 10 p.m. clean-up. It’s standing with a client in the worst moment of their life while their pet is being put down. It’s the pet sitter in Scotland trying to patch her schedule together from her phone in the midst of tragedy, because her clients and their animals are counting on her. As a former pet-sitting business owner, Kaden feels all of it on a deeply personal level.
Her path into accounting was less Kentucky Derby racetrack and more winding mountain trail. Growing up as a horse-crazy kid in Virginia, Kaden applied to exactly one college—Virginia Tech, for animal science—and spent her twenties mucking stalls at an equestrian show barn and working in equine and small-animal vet medicine in Maryland and North Carolina.
When her kids were small, she stayed home with them for several years, but once they were old enough not to need her as much, she got the itch to step back into the professional arena—preferably with a role that would work around her schedule as their primary caregiver.
But none of the opportunities she found offered the flexibility she wanted. So in 2017, she decided to create one for herself by launching The Pet Professionals, her North Carolina-based pet-sitting and dog-walking company. What began as a way for her to earn her a little bit of vacation money on the side quickly grew into a full-fledged business.
“And then it was just like, now what do I do?” she says, laughing.
She rode it through the pandemic—which, counterintuitively, sent the pet-care industry into overdrive as a wave of newly-adopted dogs met a surge of pent-up travel demand in 2021 and 2022. But then, with the post-pandemic world opening back up and two teenagers about to hit middle and high school, she and her husband Ian decided to pack up the family and move from North Carolina to Colorado.
She sold the pet-sitting business and, like a lot of entrepreneurs in transitional moments, promptly stepped into two new endeavors: starting a small pet-sitting outfit in Colorado, and, on a bit of a whim, taking a bookkeeping certification course. She’d always done her own books, and she’d always liked numbers. Plus, specialized accounting was a noticeable gap in the industry she’d just left behind—and she figured she might be able to fill it.
She blew through a three-month self-paced course in two and a half weeks. And once she started posting about her services in a few online pet-sitting groups she was part of, it wasn’t long before business was booming. Her bookkeeping work quickly outpaced her pet-sitting work: by the end of 2023, she had 30 clients. By the end of 2024, 60. Today, she has 102.
The Reframe
When Kaden first started down the bookkeeping path, she almost talked herself out of the whole enterprise. In her head, accountants were synonymous with suits and ties and buttoned-up personalities—pretty much the exact opposite of who she was.
She did just that, leaning into the parts of bookkeeping that actually lit her up—the puzzle aspect of it and the conversations with business owners about what their numbers were really saying. She named the firm Tiny Paws Bookkeeping. And she decided the warmth, compassion, and trust-based relationships she’d forged as a pet sitter were exactly what she wanted to bring into the financial side of the work, not something she needed to leave behind to be taken seriously.
Fluent in Pet Care
About 60% of Tiny Paws’ clients are pet sitters and dog walkers. The rest are scattered across the broader pet industry—dog trainers, pet photographers, boarding and daycare facilities, and adventure hikers. Nearly half of her employees come from pet-care backgrounds themselves, whether as pet sitters, boarding facility managers, or vet techs.
That fluency, Kaden believes, is her firm’s defining asset. Pet-care entrepreneurs are used to having to defend their work as real—to explain to a skeptical outsider that no, this isn’t a hobby, and yes, it is a functioning business. With Tiny Paws, they get to skip that step—which can be a huge relief.
When a client orders 200 pounds of dog treats, nobody at Tiny Paws bats an eye. When a client calls sobbing because a dog they’ve known for years has just passed, everyone at the firm inherently understands exactly what they are going through. Nine times out of ten, Kaden has been in her clients’ shoes—and when she hasn’t, one of her team members probably has.
A Team That Feels Like Family
That same attunement is what Kaden has spent three years trying to bake into her team. It started with Kim, a mom-friend from the PTA in North Carolina who had moved to Georgia around the same time Kaden moved west to Colorado. Kaden needed a first hire, and Kim needed some hours. Kaden pitched it like an experiment: let me figure out how to teach somebody this business—you can come be my guinea pig.
Fast-forward to today: Kim is still there, and the firm has grown to ten people total.
Kaden hires for culture over technical experience—she can train pretty much anyone on the technical skills required for the job, providing a six-month onboarding process, a tuition reimbursement program, and plenty of opportunities to shadow veteran team members in live client meetings. What she can’t teach is the ability to tell when a client’s eyes are about to glaze over, or to hear what someone isn’t saying about their business. She’s developed a keen sense around which candidates fit the bill, but one of her managers also sits in on every interview to ensure that hiring decisions aren’t made in a vacuum.
The clearest illustration of the culture Kaden is intentionally building is the annual company retreat. Her team is fully remote, scattered across nearly as many states as there are staff members. Last year, she booked a big rental home in Colorado and flew everyone in for a long weekend.
Her operating principle is simple: “Treat them as people first and as employees second.” When illness or a family emergency collides with a busy season, Tiny Paws makes it work. Life comes before work—always.
Growth, With the Brakes On
The numbers tell a pretty clear growth story. Tiny Paws tripled their client base in just three years, adding 22 new clients in January and February of this year alone. Kaden says a lot of the firm’s recent growth was fueled by her speaking engagements at pet-industry conferences, where she positions herself as the rare bookkeeper who actually understands the people in the room. But she’s also honest about the limits of the approach that got her here.
“We’ve kind of run roughshod the first three years, just kind of riding a wave of momentum,” she says. “It’s gotten us here, but it’s not going to carry us to the next step.”
So now, she’s focusing on the less glamorous kind of growth—the functional, operational, systems-building kind. Standardized workflows. Centralized communication. Weekly Tuesday staff meetings. A thought-out, documented month-end close process. She wants Tiny Paws to get bigger—eventually. But she wants to do it smartly, purposefully, and without losing the warmth that made the firm what it is.
Regardless of what the future holds, Kaden is proud of how far she’s gotten—and grateful for where her firm is today.
Full House, Full Life
For Kaden, the best part of running her own firm is getting to enjoy the life it supports. That life includes Ian, who works in agricultural software; her kids, Riley and Noah, who are the reason she wanted the flexibility in the first place; and two dogs, Rosie the golden retriever and Poppy the beagle—the latter of whom came to Kaden through one of her bookkeeping clients in South Dakota. The family hikes in the Colorado foothills whenever they can. In a few years, when the kids are both in college, she and Ian plan to camp to their hearts’ content.
It’s a good life. It’s also the kind of life she’s trying to make possible for her clients—the solo dog walker out in freezing rain at six in the morning, the boarding facility owner trying to figure out whether she can afford to hire her first employee, the pet sitter scrambling to cover her schedule after a personal emergency. They give until there’s nothing left. Kaden built Tiny Paws as a way to stand beside them—to show them that they aren’t alone, and that there’s someone who cares enough to walk beside them for the toughest legs of the journey.
Tiny Paws Bookkeeping is based in Colorado. Learn more at tinypawsbookkeeping.com.
