At Wanderwell, we value vacations and lunch breaks and occasional days of playing hooky.
Wanderwell is an advisory and accounting practice that helps values-driven leaders build small businesses rooted in care.
Success isn’t just about profit or growth for its own sake—it’s about building thoughtful, sustainable systems that reflect your values, transform organizational culture, and care for the humans in your orbit.
We provide your financial foundation through our bookkeeping and accounting services, and help you connect those dots to organize the bigger picture through advisory, coaching, and facilitation services.
Meet Our Team
Kate Tyson she/her
Founder & Advisory Services LeadAs the founder and director of Wanderwell Kate Tyson (née Kate Strathmann) has worked with hundreds of businesses, integrating financial expertise with an empathic, vision-forward approach. She leads with the belief that businesses can help create a new paradigm that centers people, community, and the environment.
An artist and insatiable reader & researcher with a punk heart, she’s known for balancing empathy and openness with sharp analysis. A calm, grounding presence, Kate helps leaders make better decisions, grow with sanity, and develop business ecosystems that support humans.
She is the author of the zines, The Radical Business Owner’s Guide to Profit, a reclamation of profit as a form of caretaking; [Im]Possible Business, an exploration of non-capitalist forms of commerce; and the cohost of the Whiskey Fridays podcast.
A Philadelphian by birth, Kate currently lives in the woods of Northern Vermont with her partner Kharina.
Mercedes Dalles-Steffen she/they
Practice Lead, Bookkeeping & Financial ServicesMercedes is an artist, volunteer, and accountant. She holds a B.A. in Accounting and is a QuickBooks Online ProAdvisor. Her professional experience consists of full-service accounting, payroll, and working with small businesses to improve their accounting processes and better understand their accounting information. She finds value in creative problem-solving, critical thinking, meeting everyone with understanding and empathy, and passionately working towards an equitable world.
Outside of her accounting career, Mercedes is an abstract mixed media artist and is involved with various volunteer opportunities including hospice visitation and Big Brothers Big Sisters. She resides in Seattle with her husband, son, dog and two cats.
Sara Reckahn
Client Accounting Manager, Bookkeeping & Financial ServicesAt Wanderwell...
Our work acknowledges and engages these tensions:
A business is both a vision and conjuring.
Creating and leading a business requires seeing into the future: looking around corners and through walls to envision something that doesn’t exist yet. There’s a touch of magic, a good dose of poetics involved. Artistry even!
At the same time, a business is a repeatable process that makes money. The financials of a business, the flow of money, are an essential feedback loop for business evolution and realizing a vision.
Finance is as much about storytelling and relationships as it is about spreadsheets and sound bookkeeping. In other words: numbers are shaped differently than words, but they tell a story too.1
Our work centers people, investing profit in alignment with values to support employees, owners, and community. Rather than a way to amass individual wealth, profit is essential for a resilient, abundant business to care for its people and systems.
At the same time, we know it’s not possible for an individual business to replace the social safety net or provide for all needs (health care, child care, housing, etc…). Not only is it not possible, but to attempt to replicate social care and systems as one business, alone, is to replicate the very individualist frameworks2 we seek to replace!
We support leaders to meet needs abundantly within the constraints of resources, thoughtfully evaluating and making trade offs.
There is no one right answer or way to be in business3, however there are common patterns and structures that act as business “laws of physics,” as certain as gravity. Working with hundreds of small businesses, we know that business challenges and patterns are less unique than most people think.
At the same time, we approach our work as eager students who will never know everything. We actively explore new ways of working and being in business that operate outside the status quo: leaning into experiments and uncertainty and collaborating with our clients on creative solutions.
We ground our work in a culture of inquiry and an open mindset, balanced with our deep expertise.
Wanderwell is a queer business4 grounded in social justice and liberatory values. We know that business and finance knowledge and skills have long been gate kept; that the dominant businesses structures channel resources to a powerful few by extracting from the many (hellloooo Capitalism!).
We have a particular affinity for working with folks who do not have traditional business backgrounds or skills and who have long been excluded from traditional business structures and advice— including BIPOC and Queer & LGBTQAA+ folks; artists and makers; as well as all kinds of self-described weirdos. We work with neuro-diverse clients and love to adapt our communication practices and tools to meet different styles.
We recognize that each of us brings our own stories, patterns, identities and lived experiences to our work in the world. We strive to meet people where they are, to hold space for the messiness that accompanies all money and business work, and show up with empathy and regard for our clients. We also seek to create spaces of accountability and support for leadership, recognizing that power is a complex thing to hold, and that it takes thought and intention to work outside of, and against, “power over” models.
