Cathryn Vidal built Crema Bookkeeping one careful decision at a time—and she’s not done yet. But she also knows bigger isn’t necessarily better.
There are empty offices at Crema Bookkeeping right now, and Cathryn Vidal is in no hurry to fill them. The Canada-based firm just moved into a new space in Nanaimo, BC—bigger, more prominent, on a busy street with signage people actually notice—and Vidal’s vision for growing into it is characteristically intentional: fill the building slowly, carefully, and only with the right people.
She has a maximum size in mind (somewhere around 10 to 15 team members), a culture worth protecting, and a horse named Larry who needs her at the barn four to six times a week. For her, empty offices aren’t a signal that Crema’s growth is lagging behind plan. They are the plan—proof that at Crema, the beat of the business and the rhythm of a full life have always moved together as one harmonious melody.
That idea—that a firm can be built to fit a life, rather than the other way around—has guided every decision Vidal has made since she started Crema five and a half years ago. The size of the team, the clients she takes on, the Fridays her employees have off all summer—none of it is accidental. It is all, in her words, 100% on purpose.
The Shove
Vidal never planned to start her own firm. She had been a staff bookkeeper at an accounting firm in Nanaimo for nearly five years—working her way up to senior bookkeeper and learning to manage multiple clients, deadlines, and workflows. And as far as she was concerned, that was where she would stay for the foreseeable future.
Then a new office manager arrived, her boss stepped back from the day-to-day, and things went sideways—fast. The office manager was confrontational, and Vidal felt bullied. With her boss increasingly unreachable and the new manager controlling the floor, there was no clear path to address the tension. After a couple of months, she’d had enough.
“Life has a funny way of kind of turning the tables,” Vidal recalls. “I didn’t realize that I needed a good shove, but it got me started.”
When people ask why she went straight to starting her own firm rather than joining another practice, Vidal gives an answer that says a lot about how she’s wired. She’d reached the ceiling of what a senior bookkeeping role could offer, and she had no desire to move into accounting—it had never interested her the way bookkeeping did. Plus, she suspected that landing somewhere new as an employee would just reset the clock on the same limitations.
With that realization, her mind was made up. She started Crema from nothing, forming the name from her husband’s and daughters’ initials—C for Cathryn, R for Ryan, E for Ellie, M for Maddy, A for associates—and got to work.
Built from Scratch
Her first few weeks as a firm owner were, by her own admission, nerve-wracking. She was truly starting from scratch, with no clients, no track record, and no roadmap on how to get to where she wanted to be.
To help get things off the ground, Vidal reached out to several accounting firms in the area—people she’d crossed paths with over the years—and let them know she was open for business. A couple said they’d keep her in mind, but one took her on as a subcontractor—providing a steady base of hours while she built out a full book of business.
Her client roster grew steadily from there, largely through referrals. She ended up raising her rates several times—starting from the $30 to $40 per hour range one of her accountant contacts had suggested, but climbing quickly as her team and overhead grew.
Pricing conversations with those early clients were rarely comfortable, but she learned to hold the line. Now, when people call and hang up as soon as she tells them her pricing—something that still happens occasionally—Vidal just brushes it off, because she knows they wouldn’t be a good fit for her anyway.
“The thing about bookkeeping is, you can’t compare one bookkeeper’s price to another, because our processes are different—and maybe it takes me a third of the time to do the same thing that somebody cheaper can do in a different amount of time,” she explains.
Hiring presented a different kind of learning curve. With no background in managing employees, Vidal made some early missteps—bringing on people who overstated their abilities or never quite clicked with the team. She had to quickly learn how to have the hard conversations, sometimes leaning on her husband Ryan, a former chef with years of team management experience, the night before a difficult meeting. Over time, her instincts sharpened.
Eventually, Ryan joined the business full-time, transitioning out of a restaurant career he’d grown frustrated with during the pandemic. He went through two bookkeeping courses, trained hands-on alongside his wife and her team, and brought with him a chef’s discipline around numbers—having once been responsible for every single line item on his restaurant’s budget. He now handles client-facing financial conversations with the same analytical focus he applied in the kitchen.
As for how they balance their work life with their home life, Vidal chuckles as she explains the divide the way her daughters have observed it. “If you were to ask my kids, they would say that I’m the boss at work and he’s the boss at home,” she says. “Unless he’s being mean—then I’m the boss at home as well.”
Down the Hall
Walk through Crema’s new office on a typical workday, and what you’ll find is a team of six people who chat face-to-face on a daily basis and genuinely enjoy each other’s company.
The culture Vidal has built at Crema is, in many ways, a direct response to the one she left. She doesn’t tolerate bullying—full stop. She extends to her staff the same flexibility she values in her own life. Summers mean four-day weeks: Fridays are open, a flex day for anyone who wants to come in and a free day for everyone else. This much-loved arrangement is possible because, as Vidal sees it, what matters is that deadlines are met—everything else is negotiable.
For Vidal, flexibility runs deeper than scheduling. She has two daughters—Maddy, 13, and Ellie, 11, the latter currently presiding over a collection of approximately 50 hand-sewn dragon puppets (and counting). Being able to leave early for a soccer game, to take an afternoon off when the week demands it, or to dip out on a summer Friday without the business falling apart—these things matter to Vidal, and she wants her staff to enjoy the same level of work-life balance.
Pristine Books
The warmth inside Crema’s walls translates directly into how the firm serves its clients. Vidal is selective about who she takes on, because she wants the relationship to be a positive one for both parties. So, before drawing up a proposal for a prospective client, she takes the time to sit down with them, listen to their history, and ask about their pain points with previous bookkeepers. Then, she makes an honest assessment of whether they can work well together.
Clients who go silent—missing emails, ducking calls, constantly stalling on delivering the information needed to do the work—eventually receive a disengagement letter. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that the relationship only works when both sides show up.
For the clients Crema does take on, the firm delivers something the local accounting community has taken notice of. Vidal’s time inside a full-service accounting firm gave her a front-row view of what accountants actually need when year-end arrives—and she built her bookkeeping processes around that. The result? Books that are complete, clean, and ready to go come tax season.
Larry the Horse
A few weeks ago, Vidal was at her parents’ house when her dad produced a stack of old notebooks—schoolwork and journals from when she was a kid. As she flipped through the pages, she noticed a recurring prompt: what do you want to be when you grow up?
Her seven-year-old self answered consistently: ride horses and own lots of animals. Bookkeeping was not on the list, she reports with a smile.
While she hadn’t thought about those notebooks in decades, the life Vidal has built around Crema has, almost by accident, made good on at least one of those childhood ambitions. Two and a half years ago, with her daughters a little older and some breathing room in her schedule, Vidal picked up riding again after a long hiatus. She took lessons once a week. Then a horse became available for lease—twice a week—and she said yes. Then that horse went up for sale, and she’d already fallen for him, so she said yes to that, too.
His name is Larry—a shortened version of his show name, Laredo. It’s a ridiculous name for a horse, Vidal admits, and also perfect.
She rides four to six times a week now—sometimes as part of a structured lesson with her coach, sometimes just her and Larry working through homework from the last session, sometimes an easy ride on the trails surrounding the barn property. Recently she walked him into a small pond on the grounds for the first time. He was nervous at first, then got into it—nosing around in the water and kicking up splashes. She pulled him out of the pond when she started to get wet, and her coach later told her he’d probably been angling for a roll. She was glad she hadn’t waited to find out.
Away from the barn, summers belong to the lake. Vidal, her husband, the girls, and the family dog pile into the car each Friday—the trailer already parked at their spot—and stay through the weekend, filling their days with kayaking, paddleboarding, swimming, and cooking campfire meals. It’s the kind of slower pace that the workweek doesn’t always allow.
As for what the future holds, Vidal is committed to saying yes to the right opportunities—the clients who care, the hires who click, the work that fits. She’s open to growth, but she’s in no rush to make it happen on any kind of timeline. Instead, she’ll fill Crema’s unoccupied office space gradually—intentionally—until the firm gets big enough that her team is leveraging their capacity to the fullest, but still small enough that she still knows every name, face, and file.
That, she says, is the “sweet spot”—the result of growing with purpose and building a firm that can support the pace of a full life with plenty of space for horseback riding. Seven-year-old Cathryn would probably approve.
Crema Bookkeeping is based in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Learn more at cremabookkeeping.ca.
