I'm karine.
I've been working with business owners my entire career.
Across industries, across stages, across every kind of challenge — the ones that show up on a spreadsheet and the ones that don't. I've sat with business owners in their best seasons and their hardest ones. And I've learned that the work of building a business is rarely about what it looks like on the surface.
It's about clarity. About having the courage to choose a direction and move toward it. About building something that actually fits the life you want to live — not just the business model that looks best on paper.
I've lived it.
In 2025, I started going through something that reaffirmed my beliefs. I was diagnosed with an oral cancer, and in the subsequent months, completed complex surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, and spent a significant stretch of time on the sidelines. I had to stop. I had to trust the people around me. And I had to sit with the very real question of what I wanted to come back to, and how.
The answer was clear: this work. These conversations. The particular thing that happens when someone finally stops running long enough to hear what they already know.
I came back with a deeper belief in the VACAY framework — not just as a planning tool, but as a way of moving through life and work with intention. And a deeper commitment to helping the people I work with find not just strategy, but meaning and joy in what they're building.
I've built it.
A significant part of my experience was spent running my own agency — a downtown hub serving hundreds of clients across Canada and the US. Branding, web, strategy. A creative team I built and led. Real businesses, real stakes, real deadlines.
It was also where the VACAY framework took shape — long before I ever called it that. Season after season, I was helping clients do the same thing: step back from the noise, get honest about where they were going, and build a plan they could actually live with. I was guiding people through the practice before the practice had a name. Before it was a book or a framework or a methodology — it was just how I worked.
That history matters to me. Because when I say the VACAY framework comes from true experience, I mean it in the most literal sense. It was built in the field, with real clients, over more than a decade. Not designed — discovered.
