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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 BCBUSINESS 59 BCBUSINESS.CA E N T R E P R E N E U R O F T H E Y E A R 2 0 2 1 20 21 W I N N E R S Catherine Dahl + Reza Sanaie C O - F O U N D E R + C E O / C O - F O U N D E R + C T O B E A N W O R K S n Catherine Dahl found herself out of a job back in late 2011. Bean Services, the startup she'd joined as COO and CFO the previous year, had just been shut down after its investor pulled all of his money. "We were like, Oh, my God, what do we do?" Dahl recalls of the business, an early developer of accounts payable ( AP) automation soft- ware. "We had revenue, we had customers, and [founder] Jarrod [Levitan] was like, I can't keep going, but I think you guys should." So six members of the small team formed a new company, Beanworks, over Christmas, then spent 18 months negotiating a deal to inherit its predecessor's intel- lectual property and customer base. They also began tackling another challenge, Dahl explains: "The idea was good, but we needed to rebuild the platform completely." Dahl, who was born in Hali- fax and moved a lot as a child because her father was a navy officer, had joined the account- ing world in an equally round- about way. After completing a BComm at Ryerson University, Dahl eventually moved to Vancouver, where she held jobs ranging from finance manager with Canadian Broadcasting Corp. to business manager of the Italian Cultural Centre. Along the way, Dahl realized that she liked process management and accounting, so she went back to school for her certified management accountant ( CMA) designation. Searching for a software developer to help rebuild their product, the Beanworks team soon met Reza Sanaie. Born PAID IN FULL Dahl and Sanaie recently sold their accounting soft- ware business for more than $100 million