Welcome to our Financial Coaching Success Story series, where we spotlight coaches who have found their unique path to success in this rewarding field. Today, we’re thrilled to bring you an interview with Emily Maclin, founder of Think Legacy Financial Coaching.

Emily’s journey from corporate finance to financial coaching is a testament to the diverse backgrounds that can lead to success in this industry. With 22 years of experience in the corporate world, Emily now helps women master their money and create lasting financial legacies. Her story is one of personal growth, professional evolution, and finding fulfillment in helping others achieve financial success.

In this interview, Emily, a graduate of the Financial Coach Academy®, shares her experiences, challenges, and insights. From overcoming the fear of showing up online to transitioning her analytical skills into empathetic coaching, Emily’s story offers valuable lessons for both new and experienced financial coaches. She also discusses her exciting new venture into fractional CFO services, demonstrating how a coaching business can evolve to meet changing market needs.

Whether you’re just starting out in financial coaching or looking to take your practice to the next level, Emily’s journey offers inspiration and practical advice. Join us as we explore the path of a successful financial coach who’s making a real difference in her clients’ lives.

Emily: Not only have I spent the last 22 years in corporate finance, but like many people, I found a level of dissatisfaction in my work. That’s what led me to really go deeper with one of my personal passions, which was personal finance and helping people be better with their money. I have had my own share of success with finance, but I’ve also had timeframes where I was not successful with money. Sometimes, thinking about those things when you had failures with money, or you weren’t as successful, sometimes you can disqualify yourself, but I think that’s one of the things that makes me qualified, because I can relate. I can relate to having debt, I can relate to having a low credit score, I can relate to not having savings and being able to help people through those tough times with their money.

Emily: I’ve been a coach for six years, and in my maybe fourth or fifth year, this has been the most successful thing to me in my business, in my eyes. I’ve had coaches along the way. And one of the things that having coaches gives you is insight on how to make decisions, how to do things, how to learn about business, but about the fourth or fifth year, I felt like I had a level of autonomy and knowledge about my business to make my own decisions and not wait on the coach to tell me, this is how you do this. This is what you should do. I was making decisions because I knew my business and I knew what to do. That has been the most successful thing in my business for me.

Emily: It’s not always about having a certain amount of savings. It’s not always about paying off a certain amount of debt. Because I work with clients for six months, we may not build an entire emergency fund or pay off all of your credit cards in that time frame. When I see them and hear them talk differently and think differently, I am quick to jump on it and say, “Hey, you worked through this challenge, and you didn’t lay down and cry about it. You didn’t just tap out and say, ‘Oh, I can’t do anything about it.'” Whenever they start to show a level of just independence and where they would previously have negative things to say, or they were sad about mistakes, but when I start to see them think and talk differently about their money, that is success to me.

I just had a client that I worked with this week, and she told me she’s an entrepreneur. She had a big month, and she just was sad about, “Well, I didn’t make progress on what I wanted to make progress on,” but I’m like, “Think about what you would have done a year ago. Do you see how you are different? You are different. This is success. You didn’t blow that money.” So just being able to see clients and see them think differently and talk differently and feel differently about money and what’s going on with their money, that’s really success for me, and that’s really the success I want to see for clients. That motivates them and really helps them really shift their own perspective about the progress that they have.

Emily: One of the things that I have learned is you gotta try stuff in business and not be afraid to try stuff. So even now, as we speak, I’m shifting things in my business, where, traditionally, in the last six years, I’ve served one-on-one, usually corporate women who are making six figures, and not seeing the success that they want to see. But most recently, I’ve decided that I want to utilize that 22 years of business finance that I’ve had in corporate and I want to serve business owners. So this year, I’ve worked with several business clients, and I’m like, I want more of this.

My offerings going forward are going to be coaching solopreneurs and entrepreneurs in their business financing with financial coaching, which is focused on the behavior and leveraging their business profits to build a personal financial success. But I’m also leaning more into my experience, and I’m going to offer fractional CFO services to entrepreneurs who really want to leverage this business financial insight to grow their businesses and get more structure in their business finances. I’m excited about that. I am learning how to market that and how to really utilize and lean more into my corporate experience with this new niche that I’m working on. But I’m gonna keep the six month coaching one-on-one, and also offer the fractional CFO, kind of on a month to month basis. I’m still figuring it out. I’ll be honest.

Emily: Number one was just showing up. I was just terrified of showing up and talking about business, talking about myself, talking about coaching, that was my number one struggle. It took me a really, really long time to get over just showing up, just getting online, making videos, making posts. I wasn’t a huge social media person before I really got serious about my business, so just showing up was the biggest struggle.

I think understanding a second struggle is that, even as I had coaches, I still struggle with understanding the language of business, like what lead generation was, or what marketing is and what content creation is. When I started to not only understand how to coach and understand how to coach people, but getting the language of business, understanding how business works, and how it worked in my business in particular, that’s when I really started to just feel like I was doing this thing in a way that I could see long term success.

Emily: It was the experience of coaching people. I’ve had this mindset of, you go into coaching, having your own set of biases and thoughts about what coaching is, until you get in it and you actually start doing it. Same way with running a business from a part time perspective to a full time perspective, you learn more when you get in it, and you’re doing it 100% of the time. So it really shifted from just having conversations with people. And while I had all these fancy spreadsheets and these things that I thought I would use with coaching, people don’t necessarily need all of that. A good conversation that shifts their perspective or shifts how they feel about something is more valuable than my fancy spreadsheets everywhere.

Emily: It is literally having clients just having those aha moments, or having those moments where they realize they’re better with money than they thought they were, or things are better than they thought they were. I can’t even put it in words, but it’s really those tiny moments where clients just feel better about money that brings me so much joy. I will get off of these calls and I will be dancing in my hallway when we have a session where the client has a major “aha,” or even a tiny “aha,” or just if they say, “Okay, yes, I got this.” And just to know that I had a hand in supporting them in that makes it all worth it. Those are the moments that really bring me joy being a financial coach.

Emily: Just keep going. Keep learning. Stay engaged with people who are where you are, and learn all that you can from them. Don’t work on building your confidence and your courage more than you work on building spreadsheets or you work on building your program. Work on those things so that those things that are tools and processes in your business, you’ll one day be able to execute them with confidence and without doubting yourself. So work on your confidence. Work on your courage. Keep going. Stay engaged with people that you’re learning from, and just don’t give up. Don’t give up.

About Emily Maclin

Emily V. Maclin, founder of Think Legacy Financial Coaching, empowers women to master their finances and build a proud financial legacy. With 22 years of Corporate Finance experience at Fortune 100 companies, Emily brings valuable insights to her role as a Personal Finance Coach.

Her unique approach blends faith and finance, focusing on building financial confidence, competence, and consistency. Emily’s coaching addresses Mindset, Skills/Knowledge, Behavior, and Stewardship to help clients thrive financially.

As a wife and mother of three, Emily aims to teach clients to become the CFO of their financial lives, managing money wisely and educating future generations.

Holding a Bachelor’s in Accounting and an MBA, Emily has run her online coaching firm for six years, serving professional women and solopreneurs nationwide. Originally from Tennessee, she’s been based in St. Louis since 2002.