About Paula

For several years in property management, I was responsible for the financial administration of more than 25 properties, including payments, bills, monthly financial reporting and helping condominium boards prepare their annual budgets. Somewhere along the way, I also became the person other administrators came to when they encountered a problem they couldn't solve.

I've always been curious about how businesses work. Every job taught me something — sometimes what worked, sometimes what didn't, and often why the difference mattered. 

I didn't always have the answer. Usually, I didn't — at least not at first.

But I ask questions. I want to know why something is happening, not just how to make the immediate problem disappear. And I'm stubborn enough that once something doesn't make sense to me, I have a hard time leaving it alone until it does.

I've walked into situations where the books were behind, paperwork had piled up, processes existed mostly in someone's head, employees were frustrated, owners were overwhelmed, or something simply wasn't working the way everyone knew it should.

Sometimes the answer was in the numbers. Sometimes it was a process. Sometimes it was communication. And sometimes what a business really needed was another pair of capable hands to get things under control.

Those experiences taught me that businesses are rarely as tidy in real life as they are on paper.

They are built by people. People get busy. Companies grow. Systems that worked perfectly well five years ago stop working. Responsibilities overlap. Things fall through the cracks. And very good business owners can find themselves dealing with problems they never expected to have.

I don't think there's anything particularly useful about standing on the outside and judging how a business got there. I'd rather help figure out what happens next.

That's eventually what led to Sorted Business Solutions.

After decades of working inside businesses, I wanted to put that experience to work in a broader way — not just keeping books or completing administrative tasks, but helping business owners understand what's happening, solve problems and build better ways of working.

That doesn't mean I walk into a business assuming I know the answer because I've been doing this for a long time.

Quite the opposite.

Experience has taught me to listen first.

I will ask questions. I will dig into the details. I'll tell you what I see and what I think, even when that isn't necessarily the easiest answer. If something is working well, I'm not interested in changing it simply to put my fingerprints on it. And if I don't know something, I'll say so and find out.

I take the trust people place in me seriously. Over the years, I've been trusted with payrolls and bank accounts, confidential employee information, difficult conversations, business problems and sometimes the things that keep an owner awake at night.

That's not something I've ever taken lightly.

Today, Sorted brings together the different pieces of my career — bookkeeping, payroll, administration, people, processes and problem-solving — and allows me to use them wherever they'll do the most good.

I still like getting things organized.

I still like a problem that needs solving.

And after all these years, I still believe some of the most important things in business are remarkably simple:

Do what you say you're going to do. Treat people fairly. Own your mistakes. Ask when you don't know. And leave things better than you found them.

That's how I've worked throughout my career.

It's how I run Sorted, too.