Welcome to another installment of our Success Stories series, where we shine a spotlight on financial coaches who have turned their passion into thriving businesses. These stories are designed to motivate and encourage both aspiring and established coaches, showing that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to success in this field and that you get to forge your own way.
In today’s episode, we’re thrilled to introduce you to James and Amberlee Rich, a husband-and-wife team who have crafted a unique path in the world of financial coaching. Their journey is a testament to the power of authenticity, innovation, and staying true to one’s values. As you listen to their story, we invite you to consider how their experiences might inspire your own coaching journey.
Whether you’re just starting out or looking to take your practice to the next level, the Riches’ insights offer valuable lessons on building a business that not only serves others but also aligns with your personal goals and lifestyle.
James: We’ve been married for 15 years, have two kids, and we homeschool. I started right out of college as a marketing director for campus food service and a campus pastor with Chi Alpha. In those roles, I found myself constantly helping students with their finances. Even within that and after that, I was painting houses, selling jobs, I was always going back to helping the people I was working with about their finances. And I love that. So we thought we should just get rid of the whole work thing and do what we were doing in our free time.
Amberlee: I was a teacher, teaching art at the middle school level. I would teach classes on finance for teachers and for other people, and I realized that I was more passionate talking to them about money than I was with my students teaching them about art. And so I was starting to notice things inside of myself like, “wow, I’m more passionate about this, I’m seeing that this is a really big need,” and it’s really changed from there.
Amberlee: For us, success is having the freedom to live the life we really want to live, and be able to have an impact. I think those are two big milestones of knowing that we’re going in the right direction, and we’re able to homeschool our kids and travel and still help a lot of people. For our clients, in each session we have, we go through their wins that they’ve had since our last session, and we write them down, and we have it all documented. I love that we have a session where we go through every single one of their wins, and almost every client is in tears or just so moved because they see where they were at in the very beginning, when we first started working together, and then seeing all the progress that they’ve made.
James: What’s cool is the evolution of the wins. So it starts off with “I was able to pay my bills this week” and all the way to “I realized this last month, I used my credit card, and not once did I call myself an idiot.” That’s the evolution of change. Seeing that play out in a timeline fashion is really cool.
James: It first started out that we were coaching everyone together as a couple, and then we realized we were scared, but we also didn’t have as many clients at the very beginning. When we added more and more clients, we realized that we’re going to have to divide and conquer. There are some married couples that we like to coach together if they need to see what good communication looks like. We can model that as a married couple in front of them, and do that for a few weeks, and then one or the other of us takes over.
Amberlee: We each have a pretty similar load of clients, and we meet with them individually. Some clients we work together with, but a lot of them we’ll have a conversation and work together on that, but we’re not always physically together during the client sessions.
James: We just launched Steward Lab, and we’re in the beginning stages of that. We found that I have a hard time. I want to give away my services for free; it’s just who I am, and I know we can’t do these trips. We can’t support our family if we do that. We understand that there’s some clients that are not ready to make the decision to pay for one-on-one coaching, but we wanted to have an opportunity for them to get in and get something going, and so we created Steward Lab, a low ticket offer.
Amberlee: I think having weekly rhythms, like we have so much crafted for our family, like Monday night is project night. Tuesday night we have date night with our kids, so we’ll just switch off. Wednesday night, James helps with the youth group, and I have the kids, and we do reading time. And then on Thursdays, we have a date night. On Fridays, we have a big Sabbath meal, and we do 24 hours of rest where we don’t do work, we just do anything that’s life-giving, and I don’t have my phone. We are completely unplugged. I feel like having that Sabbath has been really transformative in our lives. Also, we don’t use the word “busy,” and I feel like that has helped me to really prioritize what I need to say yes to, and what I need to say no to.
James: On the technology side, we’ve been testing this new AI software that helps you set up your tasks. Amberlee and I will sit down once a week, we’ll say, these are all the things that we need to do. Then we’ll prioritize. We’ll say, these need to be done by this date, then AI just looks for spots in our calendar. The calendar is our boss. That’s the one hard thing about being an entrepreneur is you don’t have somebody saying, this is your next project to work on, and I want you to do that. In the first week that we implemented this, AI telling us this is what we were doing next, was probably one of the most incredibly productive weeks we had ever had.
James: I would have to say that, we started our financial coaching business, and before we even got our first client, before Amberlee even quit her job, before I even quit my job, we were introduced to you. What it did was fast-forward our progress by five years. Getting in there, we were able to go through and we didn’t have to think, okay, “what do we do next?” We just said, “Okay, what’s the next module?” We worked our way through the modules and the lessons. I’ll say that a lot of our stuff doesn’t look exactly like yours. What it gave us was a framework, and so it wasn’t one of these things where it’s like, here are your baby steps that you have to tell everybody and work on. That’s what I’ve loved about this; a lot of times you’ll give multiple iterations or multiple options.
Amberlee: When I was a teacher I was just creating my own curriculum. I loved not following other people’s rules, and so being part of FCA to begin with, I just wanted to do my own thing, because I love creating from scratch, and I feel like I can bring from one place to the other. I struggled at the beginning with it, and I have really enjoyed just seeing what you had out there. I feel like it’s the same with a recipe. I’ll look at a recipe, and it doesn’t even remotely look close, but it gives me inspiration to make something new.
Amberlee: Posting frequently. I did Reels quite a bit a while ago, but I haven’t been enjoying that as much as writing. I think it’s been an evolution of figuring out more of who we are, and not just trying to be like other financial people and standing out and being real. I think being honest about the experiments that we have been doing and trying things out and being transparent about it. I was originally worried about stepping on toes, especially being Christians in the financial space. The biggest voice is Dave Ramsey and I didn’t want to sound like I’m bashing other people. I didn’t want to sound like we’re better than other people, or anything like that. But I also wanted to share the differences in a way. I think I’ve given myself permission to just be honest. And I’ve been surprised that when I am more honest and more vulnerable and more real about what we’re about, people are really interested and we’re getting clients from it.
James: The problem with us acting and being like you, Kelsa, in our marketing, is that we attract people that would be a good fit for you, not totally a good fit for us. We’ve realized that I’m quirky, I’m weird, I love it, embrace it. I just have to be who I am. And authenticity is my love language. I love somebody who is authentic. Give me some authenticity, even if you’re a weirdo. I would so rather be a weirdo that’s just a weirdo by nature, than somebody who’s uptight, straight laced, and that’s just not who they are.
James: Steward Lab is an individual group program, where individuals can go through and get the information. We have self-paced courses, and we kept them very short. Each lesson is short. We want quick wins, and so they’ll be able to go through that and then we’ve also implemented an aspect of live coaching so they can submit their questions. We can get on with them, and we can walk through the process. We have them submit their questions and two possible solutions, because we don’t want to be a coach that just gives them their answers. We want to coach the whole person.
We also have an accountability call, which I think is going to be phenomenal. We’re using a technique called body doubling, which came out of the ADD/ADHD world. We’re creating a space where we can all get on together and Amberlee and I will be available. We’ll have breakout sessions if necessary, but let’s say we have 30 people on every post and say, “this is what I’m working on.” And then we put ourselves on mute, and we just start working away. If somebody gets stuck, they say, “I need help, can I have a breakout?” So we’ll get in and we’ll say, “Okay, let’s walk you through.”
Amberlee: We’re coaching almost 30 pastors right now, and so we have been noticing, from having so many conversations, this need in the Christian community to have another option out there to help their congregation with their finances. We didn’t have a plan originally to go and create a group coaching program. It’s evolved by seeing this need and feeling like this is something that we could meet and help a lot of people along the way.
James: We’ve had a lot of our pastors just simply ask us, “What are some other resources that are out there? What is currently available?” Because we’ve heard this term multiple times: The things that are out there have run their course, and we’re at a place where it’s not working anymore in our churches, and we want something new and fresh. That’s when we realized this might be people poking us and saying, “We need something.” And so that’s what we’ve been developing over the last nine months.
James: I think a lot of people think imposter syndrome is a stage, but it’s actually a season. And what happens with seasons is they come and they go, but then they’re going to come again. So I think the exciting thing is, if we are constantly looking for how can I get to the next imposter syndrome season of my life, then you know that you’re actually making progress in life, making progress in your business. So my mindset on trying to make sure that I’m growing in myself and my business, is that I’m constantly just one little tick away from the next season of being an imposter. So I don’t see that as a bad thing. I see it as an exciting thing showing you growth.
Amberlee: I look back at my previous career being a teacher, and I’m seeing all of these skills that I didn’t even think would be useful in financial coaching. I created my own curriculum for five different levels of art classes, and I’m creating my own curriculum now. I’m doing the same things, but it’s just in a different subject. I feel like all of these things that I’ve done in the past are not just, “Oh, I was a teacher back then. I don’t need any of those skills.” I’m still using those skills today.
James: It’s so easy to look back and think, “Man, I should have done this first out of college. This should have been my career, being a coach,” and you kind of beat up on yourself. But the reality is, you’ve been preparing to be a coach. Everything that you’re doing is preparing you to be a better coach. When I was a marketing director, I learned marketing skills. When I did SEO, I had websites, I did technology stuff that prepared me to implement that in our business. And the last job I had was selling and managing projects for painting. And so I learned how to sell, I learned how to show value, and so we have all these things that have prepared us to be the very best coaches that we are right now.
James: I take a transcription of our time together with our clients, and we plug that into an AI software that we use. I’ve trained it. I said, these are the things to listen for. Listen for emotional language, listen for repeated themes, listen for wins, tasks, all of those things. And I tweak it as I go, but basically I get the transcript, I copy it, I paste it, and in 10 seconds, I have a complete outline of everything we talked about, the wins and the successes. Copy that, paste it into their CRM and make adjustments. Read through it, make sure. And then it’s so great because the next week that we meet with them, or the next session, I can jump in and I can remember exactly where I’m at.
Amberlee: For the wins, we use Upcoach as a portal for all of our content and our meetings, and we have a place where we put all of the wins, and so we have a separate list, and I write them in there and submit them every time I hear a win in the session.
Kelsa: Thank you so much, James and Amberlee for sharing all of your insights. It was so wonderful, and I love the business that you’re creating for yourselves. Thank you for taking the time to be with me today and for the positive impact you are having on people’s lives each and every day with your business.
About James & Amberlee Rich
James and Amberlee Rich are financial coaches who have been helping people with their personal finances for over 18 years.
In 2018, James and Amberlee launched the Debt Dump Challenge, inspiring over 60 families to join them in taking control of their finances. Through coaching and monthly challenges, the Debt Dumpers successfully paid off over half a million dollars in debt. James and Amberlee also achieved their goal of becoming 100% debt free by paying off their home during the process.
The Debt Dump Challenge inspired James and Amberlee to fully dedicate themselves to helping people with their finances. As a result, they have established their own financial coaching business and launched an online group coaching program for Christians called Steward Lab.
James and Amberlee are driven by their passion to assist Christians in fully embracing the life God has destined for them, free from financial constraints. Understanding the pervasive impact of money in our lives, they believe that by purposefully addressing financial matters, every aspect of life can be significantly better.
