Financial coach and bookkeeper Amber Joy Pietrangelo never planned on having her own business after business classes in college completely turned her off from entrepreneurship.
After struggling through multiple career and business shifts, Amber discovered her “magic sauce,” getting financial data organized and then helping clients truly understand what the numbers mean for their future decisions. What started as a search for purpose after personal struggles has evolved into her own authentic business model.
Listen in to hear how finding your own path, even when it’s messy, leads to both personal fulfillment and a thriving practice that genuinely serves others.
- Embrace your unique combination of skills rather than forcing yourself into a single professional identity.
- Trust your gut when building your business; the sooner you listen to your intuition instead of following others’ formulas, the faster you’ll find your authentic path.
- Connection beats promotion. One-on-one relationships and referrals create more stability than aggressive marketing tactics that don’t align with your natural style.
- Your business model should make you feel good; if juggling multiple roles drains you, it’s unsustainable, regardless of what the numbers say.
- Is your approach working? Ask yourself “How does this feel?” instead of just “Is this profitable?” to build a business that energizes rather than exhausts you.
- Businesses achieve longevity through embracing change, not by rigidly following initial plans when they no longer serve you.
- The magic isn’t in getting the numbers right—it’s translating those numbers into meaningful insights that help clients make better decisions.
Read Our Q&A Here:
Question: I want to start with focusing on your business model. You have two services, bookkeeping and coaching. The first thing I want to know is, does a client need to do both coaching and bookkeeping with you, or can they do just bookkeeping or just coaching?
AMBER: Yes and no. I really feel like when you get me as a bookkeeper, you can’t just get me to do your books—you get a coach along with that. I’m a coach 100% of the time, except maybe when I’m just behind my computer screen doing the books. So for me, it’s hard to separate the bookkeeper from the coach. But definitely, I coach people without doing their books necessarily.
Question: What is the split, percentage wise, between your businesses? Is it 50/50? Is it mostly bookkeeping? Is it mostly coaching?
AMBER: At the moment, it’s probably majority bookkeeping, maybe 60/40, and it kind of ebbs and flows. My bookkeeping clients are recurring. Once they’re with me, they stay with me ongoing. Coaching clients may be just a single session or a program that lasts a few months, so that ebbs and flows more than the bookkeeping.
Question: How have you found it best to market these services? Do you market them both simultaneously? Do you start with one and then it leads naturally into the other?
AMBER: My services have a natural flow depending on where somebody is in their business journey. If they want to start a business, they don’t have it yet, or they’re just getting going, and they’re saying, “I don’t even know what I’m doing with my own money,” then it’s probably just going to be coaching. As their business grows and they realize they need help with their books, I do what I call QuickBooks consulting. I’ll sit side by side and help someone do their own books if they’re not at the point of being able to invest in an ongoing bookkeeper. Then it can transition to where they hit the point of “I want to focus on what I’m good at and let somebody else take care of the books.”
Question: Did you ever feel torn between these two services? Did you feel pressured to choose just one? Or did you ever feel conflicted from an identity perspective?
AMBER: There definitely was a struggle there, but it wasn’t with the bookkeeper identity. It was with the coach identity. I started my business back in 2019 when I did FCA, and it has gone through all sorts of different stages and phases. I’ve had two babies since then, and my life has changed in so many ways. During COVID, after I had my daughter, I was ready to just give the business thing a go, jump into it full time. And it didn’t work out—I was not bringing in enough money. I had to get a job.
I love coaching people, I love being a coach. That’s when I got the job I’m currently in as a CFO. I started out as their accountant, then realized I have a huge talent for QuickBooks and getting everything impeccable in the books, but I also had a talent for taking all that information to our board and bringing it to them in a way that they could actually understand what was going on. I love that. I realized that’s kind of where my magic sauce comes in. I’m really good at getting all the numbers straight for you, and then helping you understand what they mean. It’s not just spitting out reports.
When I started my day job and realized that bookkeeping became something I really wanted to offer. My husband was even saying, “you should just be a bookkeeper.” To him, he saw the coaching didn’t work out. But for me, I really feel like you can’t get me without getting coaching. Anybody I work with on the bookkeeping, it’s “here’s your reports, and this is what I’m seeing, and is this what you’re experiencing, and what does this mean for you? What decisions can we make with this information that we have now?”
Question: I saw your business shift over the years. This embrace of your own style—I saw it happen in your messaging. How and why did that shift occur?
AMBER: When I decided to jump into my business full time, I had signed on with my own coach that was a life/business coach. I’m actually working with the same coaches again now, reconfiguring my offerings. I can see how much I have changed and how much I’ve surrendered or allowed things to be what they are.
When I first started FCA, I was looking for something to give myself a purpose, but I was also in that mindset of “this is what my business needs to be.” I made the mistake of idolizing your system and the way that you did things. I thought, “I’m just gonna do it exactly like Kelsa did, because she did it and it works, and that must be right.” There are still key things from FCA that I still use. While QuickBooks is my tool, I still love the Plan Ahead Method, and I actually do a fun sort of blend of Plan Ahead and Profit First.
In the beginning, I was very logical about how my business had to be. There’s a right way to do it, and I’m going to do it the right way. Then I started to learn how to actually pay attention to how I felt and what my gut was telling me. I knew that I wanted stability in my business, and I’m not a big marketer. I don’t really do traditional marketing. I’m a projector in human design, so waiting for an invitation is very natural to me, and that works better for me than trying to push it and put myself out there. One-on-one connection with people is a huge part of how I market. I decided to try offering daily money management to clients and I thought, “This is a piece where I can get that stability of a recurring client that I know I’m going to have for the long term.” I tried it, didn’t love it, but there was always that want of stability, and then bookkeeping has been this beautiful coming together of what I really do like to do, what I’m really good at, and what I want my business to be.
Question: Had you done bookkeeping before FCA?
AMBER: No. I have a bachelor’s in accounting, so bookkeeping wasn’t a strange thing to me. I have all of that accounting background. I’ve worked in banking. So I knew in theory what bookkeeping was, but I never actually did it hands-on until I started this day job and actually started doing the books beginning to finish and realized how much I like that. It’s a great big puzzle you get to put together.
Question: You were part of the very first or maybe second round of FCA total, right? This was when we were doing it live?
AMBER: Yes. I actually went through it twice. When I first signed on, I did the self-paced because it was more affordable, and I was kind of dipping my toes into that whole thing. Up until that point, if you had asked me, I would have told you absolutely not, I’m never gonna have my own business. Business policy class and business law completely turned me off.
Question: Were you ever nervous about what people might think when they saw you doing these pivots—now offering daily money management, now offering bookkeeping?
AMBER: Absolutely. I still get nervous about doing a live online. Part of it is, when you’re talking to the world at large, you’re not always talking to people who get it. Whereas if I’m talking to somebody who was referred to me or reached out to me directly, I know that they’re my people, they’ve picked up on my vibe, and it’s going to be a good conversation.
There’s always that fear of putting yourself out there, and there will be people who just don’t get it. That has never changed. And talking about pivoting, I also had started out with a business name, and I have since shifted into just showing up as me – Amber Joy Pietrangelo LLC. You just get me. It doesn’t have to have a name on it to be professional.
Question: Were you ever nervous about what I might think if I saw your posts or something like that?
AMBER: I don’t think I’ve ever been nervous about what you think, because I feel like I just know that you’ll always be proud of me for just showing up. Especially in the live FCA, it was so emphasized to just take messy action, just do it and put it out there, and you’ll get better as you go. So no, you don’t make me nervous. It’s other people who don’t get it.
Question: Are there any specific aspects of FCA that were most helpful to you initially in your journey? And are there any that you’re still using or still tapping into?
AMBER: When I started FCA, I never even thought I would have a business, so the fact that it takes you from square one—literally, you have nothing else, you have no business experience, you’ve never done anything like this—and gives you all of those basic core pieces that you need to have a business, not necessarily be a financial coach, but just to be a business owner. In the beginning, that was huge, because anything unknown is scary, especially something like a business that has tax implications. Just getting those core pieces in the beginning was super helpful.
I do really like to revisit FCA and watch videos. No matter what section I go to, whether I’m looking for a specific exercise or just something in general, I always feel like I come away from your videos or your content feeling educated and energized. Whether I just need a pep talk or maybe need a specific exercise, it’s great to have that to go back to.
Question: What were some of the initial challenges you faced that FCA helped you to identify and overcome or avoid, not necessarily from a business perspective, but from a coaching perspective?
AMBER: Being a coach, especially getting into the world of COVID when all of a sudden there’s a coach on every Facebook page that you pop up on – everybody showed up in force as a coach. What I really appreciate about FCA was, I didn’t have any background as a coach. I definitely had interest – I took classes around psychology, sociology, I was always very interested in how people thought and behaved and how that played into things. What I really loved is how you really show people that you don’t have to have some kind of a certification.
You can really just start where you’re at, being somebody that has the experiences that you have, and use that to help other people, but that you work on that, and that you work on that mindset of a coach, and you work on becoming better at guiding people to what’s right for them. Having my own coach plays a huge part in me being successful. I would not be where I am in my business without FCA, but also without having a coach that I am regularly meeting with myself.
Question: Beyond the financial metrics, what aspects of your coaching bring you the most fulfillment, or what do you consider an element of success for you in your coaching business?
AMBER: When it comes to success, I’ve very much leaned away from numbers. It is very easy to fall into numbers. I’ve really leaned into allowing things to be what they are in my life. For me, how I feel almost trumps everything else. People ask, “You have a full-time day job, you have a business, you have two kids – how do you do all of that?” If I didn’t feel good in it, I wouldn’t be able to do it. But because it helps me feel good, and I feel like I’m giving back, I love that. I recently shared this thought on Facebook about how when you work with me, you get a bookkeeper, you get a money coach, but you also just get somebody who earnestly wants to help you. I just love helping people. I have a lot of knowledge in the realm of numbers and money, and that’s usually where it starts, but that’s not where it ends. That’s what fills me up – being able to give back to people in whatever way I can.
Question: What piece of advice would you give to someone just starting out in financial coaching?
AMBER: There are two pieces to it. The first piece is to really listen to your own intuition, your gut and what it’s telling you, and give yourself permission to follow it. In the beginning, I would get these nudges where my gut was telling me “this doesn’t feel right,” but then my brain would override it and say “other people have told me that this is great.” When I really started leaning into that feeling of “this doesn’t feel right” and asking why, what do I need to shift, what can I do—I think I probably will always be shifting with things like that in business. That’s how businesses have longevity, by being able to embrace that shift and allow things to change. Things will change, and that’s okay.
About Amy Joy Pietrangelo
Amber Joy Pietrangelo is a financial coach and bookkeeper who lives in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. After joining the Financial Coach Academy® in 2019 while searching for more purpose in her life, Amber has built a unique coaching practice that combines her accounting background with intuitive coaching. She currently works as a CFO for a local nonprofit while supporting women with service-based businesses through her coaching and bookkeeping services. In this interview, she shares insights about her business model, her journey of finding her authentic coaching style, and advice for new coaches.
