We were lucky to catch up with Kristen Ricupero recently and have shared our conversation below.

Kristen, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

The urge for starting a business began when my son was born late 2016. I had been working for an incredible family business, but I wasn’t fulfilled in my role. Having my son brought out a variety of emotions, and one of them was this feeling that I wanted more for myself and our family than going to work 9-5 daily. I wanted to make a greater impact on the world and I also wanted to have more flexibility in my schedule than I had with the company I was with.

I think most new parents will share that as soon as their kids go to daycare, they (and you) are suddenly sick all the time. Our case was no different and I felt horrible at how often I had to call out, go in late, or take him to work with me and I found it becoming really stressful. I felt like I was letting my company and the owners down all the time (I’m sure I wasn’t, but I always felt a strong loyalty to them and they had become like family). It was the perfect storm between the feelings of wanting to make more of an impact in the world and feeling bad all the time about not being dependable to start thinking about what I could do or start as a business. This is what projected me forward, but it was a scary idea and a huge risk.

I was passionate about personal finance at this time because I had walked through my own mess in 2013 being overwhelmed by debt, finances, and a lack of management. I was in debt and drowning with more than $26,500 in consumer debt. I had zero clue where my money was going. I made decent money, yet I was broke and living paycheck to paycheck and beyond.

I thought a budget was laying out my bills. I had no clue how to do a real budget although I’d had plenty of experience with corporate budgets. I thought in terms of payments. Famous last words – “I can afford that payment”….until I couldn’t. I hit a breaking point and decided it was finally time to change. In 15 months, I paid off all my consumer debt. In 24 months total, I paid it off and jointly cash-flowed our wedding and funded our full emergency fund.

Getting our personal finances in order made such a huge difference in my life and I was helping other family and friends get theirs in order also as people would ask for help, knowing what I had accomplished and things we were doing. It kept nudging me that maybe I could start a business doing this, but of course, the fear was – how do I charge people to help them with their money?? Can I seriously make money doing this?

After a few months, the idea got stronger and was consuming my every thought. I started Googling in every spare moment I had about this. Did I need to be a financial advisor? An accountant? Nothing seemed right until I stumbled on my now mentor’s Facebook group, and learned the term Financial Coach. It was definitely a newer industry at the time, but there was a name for what I was doing and what I wanted to create a life around and this was the beginning of Financial Fitness Coaching being born.

Kristen, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I know I answered just before about what propelled me from my own life changing experience, but it started out slowly as a side hustle ‘just to see’ if I liked it. I started a Facebook page in lieu of a website, started making posts about money and invited family and friends to like it. What started out as a side hustle, I took full time in late 2018 after maternity leave with my second, my daughter.

I started as a personal finance coach, discussing budgeting, cash flow management, debt paydown, savings and more personal finance related items with clients. However, as I grew, more and more of my clients were couples where one was a traditional employee and another had their own business. And so when we would be talking about income on the budget early in the meeting and I would ask about income, it often looked like this. W2 earner – shares their income and frequency so we can add it in. But the business owner would look at me blankly. 9 out of 10 times, they would share that they didn’t really ‘bring money home’. They would buy things out of the business as needed, contribute to groceries sometimes or even worse, they simply didn’t make money in their business.

THIS is where I realized the immense need for people to get more help in their business. Your business should be supporting your personal life and too many people are working harder, but not making more (or anything) as a business owner. And so I started to add business financial coaching to my services, to help people with both their business and personal finances as a holistic approach. I believe this is something that really sets me apart from others – even other financial coaches tend to focus on business or personal, but I believe that if you’re a business owner, it’s critical to focus on both of them. We can’t just learn to make more money and then dump it out the other end. Owning a business can be one of your greatest wealth building tools and I help clients to bridge those gaps.

With both personal and business finances, we work with clients on making financial decisions based on both their goals and values so that they learn to love managing their money because it propels them toward something they’re excited to achieve. It’s not about spending less, it’s about spending money in the right places for you, your family or your business.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I used to think that the only way to have more money was to be cheap or go without things. I thought that we had to sacrifice mercilessly in order to get ahead. Even early in my career, I thought that I would be a great coach if I could teach people just how to spend less. And while frugality (not cheapness) is an important skill, the truth is that in order to build wealth, we need to focus on so much more.

As I developed my coaching skills, I realized that sacrificing is different for everyone. But we need to only learn to sacrifice the things we don’t value as much, so that we can really enjoy and spend on the things that we do. We don’t have to change our habits necessarily, but we have to change the way we think and the questions we ask ourselves when it comes to money.

It took me a while to learn how to spend and be ok with it, to actually enjoy it – it’s a skill I now know that I need to introduce to clients right from the beginning and so we dig into value based spending early on, so that people can truly learn to enjoy money, not be afraid of it.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

I started as a side hustle in late 2016 and it was late 2018 that I took the business full time and left my job. I look at each stage that I went through as seasons, and each season has been a stepping stone. (I use the same analogy for your financial seasons). When you’re in it, it feels so hard and you’re going through growth pains, but looking back, it was only a blip on the radar in time. I love to reflect on growth.

One of the key milestones was doubling revenue every year since beginning. And although the first few years were quite small and didn’t require that much to double, this was where I realized that the side hustle could go full time, if i could dedicate full time to it.

Another major milestone for me was when I was at full capacity on my full time schedule that I was consistently booking 6-8 weeks out. At this point I continued to add various subcontractors on my team to help with administrative work so that I could take more clients. And when it got to that point of still booking 6-8 weeks out and I had a full support team behind me, I knew it was time to hire my first associate financial coach and to begin truly growing the company to create a bigger impact.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://financialfitnesscoaching.com/
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/financial.fitness.coaching
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/financialfitnesscoach18
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristen-ricupero/

Image Credits
GossBoss LLC