Melissa Kiddy of McCay Kiddy

Melissa Kiddy is not only into numbers but she also has a crazy love for Mickey Mouse, which, at one point in time, inspired her to run marathons and half-marathons at Disney World. She said, “We love doing Disney races. We just have a good time with it — I’m not fast at all.”

When not running marathons, she runs the client accounting services team of the CPA practice she owns with her husband, Justin Kiddy.

Kiddy knew early on that she wanted to become a CPA. “I figured out I liked accounting very young in life. My high school offered vocational courses, and I fell in love with accounting.” After college, she worked for a Maryland CPA firm, performing both tax and audit services. One year, during tax season, she drove to work despite a 48-inch snowfall. In 2004, she wanted to get away from the cold and relocated to the Lowcountry where she landed at a large CPA firm in Summerville. Kiddy continued working in the audit department there until joining her husband at McCay Kiddy in 2009, stepping into her partnership role four years later.

Kiddy credits her firm’s success to making good hires and having a knowledgeable staff to provide client services. “Both myself and my husband have high expectations of ourselves; therefore, we have high expectations of the people around us. We have really great team members,” she said of the firm, which currently has 21 employees and five interns. Kiddy noted the importance of the firm’s team environment: “We all do it together. It’s certainly not me by myself.”

In addition to bookkeeping and chief financial officer services, McCay Kiddy provides fiscal management for charter schools, taxcompliance work and consulting, audits, forensic accounting and business valuations. These services are tailored to suit each client, some needing cash-flow analysis, forecasting or budgeting, while others need help with accounts payable, payroll or general ledger management. In addition to being licensed as a CPA, Kiddy is also a certified fraud examiner. She finds that work interesting because, “I like puzzles and figuring things out.”

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