Christine Salvatore started a bookkeeping firm from a hotel side table in the middle of a six-week road trip across America. Five years and 25 clients later, she’s still mapping her route forward—and that’s exactly the point.
By the spring of 2021, the world had been in and out of COVID-19 lockdowns for the better part of a year. Millions of people had spent months staring at the same four walls and hanging out with the same handful of people—their lives confined to an increasingly claustrophobic bubble. Everyone was itching to break out and explore again—aching to feel some semblance of freedom.
Christine Salvatore and her husband Jack decided to chase that feeling all the way across the country. They loaded up their car in Los Angeles with no itinerary, no planned stops, and no specific vision for what came next. They’d just get up each morning, drive until they got tired, book a hotel, and repeat. If a certain town felt right, they might stay an extra night.
Somewhere between LA and Boston, with a laptop balanced on her knees and a fledgling idea taking shape in her mind, Salvatore started building the business that would become her life’s work. She just didn’t know it yet.
The trip was supposed to be a honeymoon of sorts—they’d gotten married in 2020 but never had the chance to celebrate properly amid all the pandemic travel restrictions. Plus, they were both working remotely, something that had been unthinkable pre-COVID, and they figured this might be the only window they’d ever get to travel for weeks at a time while still earning a paycheck.
So they pointed the car east and went. They visited national parks, stayed with friends and family, and talked to strangers in dive bars. During the evenings, Salvatore and her husband Jack, a former child actor turned screenwriter, caught up on their day jobs—Jack ghostwriting novels and Salvatore doing production accounting. But her mind often wandered, silently chewing on a question she’d been avoiding for months: Do I really want to go back to being on set for 14 hours a day when all of this is over?
The answer, it turned out, was no. And the alternative announced itself on a side table in a hotel room in Ohio.
The Side Table in Ohio
Salvatore had always wanted to run her own business, even if she’d never said it out loud. She’d spent years hopscotching between jobs in the entertainment industry—never staying longer than six months to a year, always hungry to learn how the next operation ran. She’d worked for startups, production teams, and post-production houses, absorbing everything she could about how these businesses operated from the inside. But she’d only ever been a W-2 employee, and the leap to running her own thing felt, as she described it, preposterous.
But on the road trip, something shifted. The openness of it—no plan, no destination, no rules—made the idea of striking out on her own feel less impossible. One day, she signed up for Upwork, created a Gmail domain, threw together a Squarespace website she didn’t even like, and started replying to every bookkeeping posting she could find. That same day, she got two responses. Both became clients.
Those first two clients were worth maybe a few hundred dollars a month combined. It was not, by any rational measure, enough to justify leaving a steady job. But on the last night of the trip—right before they drove back to LA—Salvatore told Jack she wanted to quit her part-time remote position and go all-in on the firm. She knew that if she kept a safety net, she’d be too tempted to retreat back to her comfort zone.
“I think subconsciously I thought I’d end up being like, ‘I’ll just keep this easy money instead of pursuing my own thing,’ which is definitely the harder path,” she says.
So she quit. And immediately afterwards, she and Jack looked at each other with a mixture of regret and disbelief plastered on their faces.
“We were both like, ‘No, why did I just do that? What did I just do?’” Salvatore says. “So it was instant regret, but I had made the decision. I wasn’t gonna go back, and so that was the start of it. There was really no option to fail.”
A Hidden Niche
Salvatore didn’t set out to specialize. She’d grown up around the entertainment industry—her parents are both musicians, she was homeschooled, and she spent her childhood making little movies and music videos with other kids around the neighborhood. Originally, she wanted to direct. The accounting degree was just a fallback.
discovered that production accounting was a real field. From 2015 to 2020, she worked on set, handling the financial side of film and television productions. But when the whole industry shut down during COVID, she lost the thing she’d built her career around—or so she thought.
As the entertainment world slowly came back to life—and Salvatore slowly started to amass clients—she realized just how unique her combination of expertise really was. She could speak the language of bookkeeping and the language of a film set, and almost nobody else could do both.
Today, In Line Management serves roughly 25 clients across the entertainment industry—including directors, photo agents, indie production companies, and talent agencies. They recently handled the production accounting for the Rory McIlroy documentary on Amazon Prime Video. Nearly all of her business comes through word of mouth now, a far cry from the early days when she cold-emailed thousands of production companies she had compiled in a spreadsheet and got maybe five responses that turned into clients. Those five, though, knew other people—who knew other people, and so forth.
“Business owners know business owners,” Salvatore says. “They are active producers and line producers, and they’re out there in the field every day. And then they hear of someone else with an accounting need, and they have me on their mind. So all that early work was worth it, even though in the moment I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, my return on reach-outs is so low.’”
Midnight on Tuesday
If there’s one thing Salvatore wants people to understand about running a firm, it’s that the freedom is real—but it’s definitely not free.
“My biggest pet peeve on the internet is when you see people who are like, at a coffee shop, and they’re like, ‘I’ll teach you how to make six figures if you just comment,’” she says. “That drives me insane.”
For example, she recently found herself at a park with her two daughters—a three-year-old and a ten-month-old—on a Wednesday afternoon. As she watched them play in the sun, she thought, “How cool is this?” Then she immediately remembered that she’d been up until midnight the night before, answering emails and reconciling accounts, to afford herself those extra hours during the day.
The hard parts have, at times, been really hard. She’s had nights full of tears and self-doubt, moments of staring at LinkedIn job postings and thinking about walking away from it all for a predictable paycheck and fewer problems that are hers—and hers only—to solve.
She once had a client ghost her entirely—just stopped responding and fell off the face of the planet. She took him to small claims court and won, but the judge told her she’d have to track him down herself to collect. The money he owed ended up coming out of her own pocket, because he was nowhere to be found, and her team needed to be paid regardless.
“That was a big lesson,” she says. “Now I’m more strict about getting a retainer upfront.”
It took three or four years before her income as a firm owner surpassed what she would have made at a traditional job. There were stretches where the math simply didn’t make sense. But she kept going, and she’s learned—slowly, and through experience—that the rough patches are temporary. For example, she had a large client leave in January of this year. By April, she’d landed her biggest client ever.
Team Above All
The thing that steadied her most through all the midnight scrambles, unpaid invoices, and moments of doubt is her team. Her first hire started as a contractor and grew the firm alongside her from the ground up. She’s now a full-time employee. Two other team members have since joined, including her husband, who came on board to manage his own roster of clients—allowing him to earn a full-time salary while preserving the hours he needs to pursue screenwriting.
Having Jack inside the business changed more than the org chart. Before, when Salvatore wanted to talk through a problem, she’d have to walk him through the entire backstory. Now they have a shorthand. She can say, “this person sent me this email,” and he understands instantly why it’s a problem. It’s made her feel less alone in the work—less like she’s running things from an island.
“Before, the only people I could talk to were other business owners who were usually my clients, or my employees who were being paid to talk to me,” she says. “So where can I brainstorm? It’s been very helpful to have that.”
Salvatore is fiercely protective of her team. She learned early—from a mentor, and then from experience—that a good team member is worth more than any single client. So, if a client becomes high maintenance or seems like a poor fit, and a team member flags it, Salvatore listens.
That philosophy extends to compensation, too. She cites a client—a business owner she admires—who recently told her: I want enough to pay my bills, but I want to be generous enough to also pay my team. Salvatore aspires to the same. Keeping good people, she’s learned, is crucial to doing good business.
A Confident Identity
For a long time after starting In Line Management, when people asked Salvatore what she did for a living, she hedged. She’d say something like, “I have a few clients and I’m trying out bookkeeping—we’ll see.” She didn’t tell friends or family about the firm for months. And even when things picked up and the business was growing, she couldn’t quite bring herself to embrace her new identity.
But now, five years in—with 25 clients and a team of four—she’s finally comfortable saying the words out loud: this is her job, this is her firm, and this is what she’s doing.
She’s also in the midst of planning what she calls “chapter two.” The family is moving to North Carolina—a state she and Jack fell in love with on that road trip five years ago. She envisions a future where the firm is automated enough to run without her constant involvement, freeing her to eventually return to production set work in some capacity. In the meantime, she carves out whatever time she can for running, creating Instagram reels about organizing her home (her account, @csalvss, just hit 20,000 followers), and parenting two small children alongside the person she started all of this with in a random hotel room in Ohio.
She wants her daughters to see all of it—the freedom and the hard work, the park on Wednesday and the laptop at midnight. She wants them to know you can build something real without following a traditional path.
“The rules are made up,” she says. “We’re all just people floating on a rock.”
As she prepares for her next cross-country journey—this time with a family in tow—she’s still building, still betting on herself, still choosing freedom (even when it costs her the occasional Tuesday night). She doesn’t know exactly where she’s going to end up, and she’s learning to be okay with that.
In Line Management is based in Los Angeles, California.
