About the Founder

I grew up in a family of 9 children, the 3rd oldest of 7 girls and 2 boys.  My parents were immigrants from Holland and came to Canada when they were in their early teens.  When I was 8 years old, my parents bought a restaurant in Norland, ON – it was called the Norlander back then and it was on Hwy 35 on your way to cottage country in the Minden and Haliburton regions. It was known for it’s home cooked meals, fresh baked goods and most importantly, great customer service. 

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I was always a people person and told my mom that I wanted to work in the restaurant and help out.  I started waiting on tables at the prime age of 9!  I loved it – I also had an internal competitiveness to make sure that even though I didn’t get paid a wage like our employees, that I was still going to make more than them by being the best waitress and getting the biggest tips!  I’m sure most people just felt sorry for me because in the first couple of years I could barely see over the counter.  Being the daughter of hard working immigrant parents was never something I considered a problem.  In fact, the opposite, I loved that my parents taught us all the value of the dollar and the value of hard work and ethics.

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My parents sold the restaurant when I was 15 so I took other jobs to make sure that I could afford to pay for college when I graduated from high school.  I moved to Toronto when I was 17 and was going to go to Ryerson for business, but then after getting two very good job offers in my first week, I decided that maybe I should work for a year and earn more so that I knew I could afford my living expenses and school.  Well that was in 1976 and I’ve never looked back.

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I started Bredet Services in 1983 and it began as a bookkeeping firm.  Over time, we had a lot of customers and I thought it would make more sense for us to take those customers and teach them how to do their own accounting.  We started with Accpac for DOS – yes now I’m aging myself.  The strategy paid off and we were very successful in transitioning those customers to Accpac (now Sage 300) and teaching them how to do their own payables, receivables and month end work.  

Today Bredet continues to be one of the most successful and long term Sage partners in North America.  To build on our strategy of our own growth and that of our customer base, we added Microsoft Dynamics AX to our portfolio around 2009.  Dynamics AX has transformed us to be a leader in helping the smaller entrepreneurial companies benefit from a solution that only the big companies could afford.  The way we’ve done this is to keep our size manageable, grow cautiously and have a team of like minded individuals that work hard to develop ways to bring the implementation costs down using technology.

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In 2019, I sold the business to a large partner and after fulfilling my commitment to work with them till December 2022, I left the company. 

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I worked with another start up for about a year and then decided that I love what I do but will not do it for someone else so started Debbie Breuls & Associates in October 2023.  I also made the decision that the Microsoft Platform was the way I wanted to go forward and that reason is because I truly believe they have the best solutions in the marketplace. 

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Bredet Services started because I saw a need and had a passion and after 41 years, how many people can get up every day and say “I love my job”.