I'm Abby Joseph.
YOUR NEXT CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER
Within the rich tapestry of womanhood, seamlessly embodying the roles of mother, believer, daughter, sister, and aunt, I, a passionate accountant and finance guru, share a warm invitation to join me in a journey—a narrative of overcoming negativity, navigating doubts, and discovering strength in authenticity. Explore with me the chapters where passion converges with purpose, and authenticity gracefully triumphs over conformity.
Where it all started...
Growing up with my father being a business owner in the real estate industry, he loved building houses from scratch. My desire was to go to medical school, but I didn't like the medical terms. Honestly, I wasn't really good at it. I later discovered that I was very good in economics after taking my first economic class in high school.
I knew that I would be an amazing accountant and fractional CFO.
So I obtained my bachelor's degree in business management and I completed my master's in accounting.
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Later, in my last semester of the master's program, that same professor read my thesis and came back to me to tell me that I was going to be an amazing accountant exceeding the other accountants through my relationship approach. He said, "You are very bubbly. You are a people person and that is going to make you stand out amongst the normal accountant."
I knew I didn't want to be the accountant that just sits behind the desk and the computer. I knew I wanted to be "the relationship accountant" that values relationship over a transaction.
When you become a client with us, you are becoming part of a family.
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I built my business from scratch.
I got a divorce and after my divorce, I had to put the big woman pants on. I did not want to miss one day of my daughter's life. I didn't want anyone to pick her up for me from school. I didn't want to miss ballet class. I didn't want to miss anything out of my child's life. I sold my home. I purchased a townhome in order to lower my cost of living.
This is why budgeting is so important.
My best friend and I would go get Chick-fil-A breakfast every Tuesday and we would drive around the city looking for an office. When I finally found my office I knew it was mine. It was small. It was perfect. It said all over it: "this is just the beginning".
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Starting my business was a team effort. The phrase "the team makes the dream work" is a true statement for me—it was a team effort. My friend had the paintbrush, my brother helped me find the desk. So it was community effort and that is why I'm so big on community. I'm so big on relationship. So for my business, I literally quit my job. I sold my home. I lowered my living expenses and I opened my first firm in December, literally the week of my birthday in 2004.
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Story Behind
The Name...
I literally had every name you can think of when it came to naming the firm. I remember my daughter and I was sitting in the living room. We were in our town home and I was coming up with names that were catchy and the term generational wealth came to mind. When I thought of generational wealth, I thought what is better than to start off with your first generation—which is my daughter.
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So Serenity Financial is named after my daughter and what was also amazing is that the word "serenity" has a prayer and it was very aligned to what was going on in my life. If you have ever read the serenity prayer, it literally says, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.
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When you're opening a business, what do you need? You need courage, you need wisdom. At the time when I opened the firm, the prayer was perfect and it was aligned with my daughter's name. To my daughter's surprise, she didn't find out the name of the business until the grand opening where she saw it and her jaw stayed open forever.
She was really little, so she didn't know better. She didn't even know what was going on. And that's how Serenity Financial Services came to life.
I'm here to help you grow.
I love to help businesses grow to their highest potential. I want them to transition them being an entrepreneur to a CEO. I do that by helping entrepreneurs understand their entity, their business language and speak that language realistically through bookkeeping, through the accounting process, through taxation, through planning and through wealth management.
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Where business owners struggle: is the backend of their business. Most of them go into business because they want to do something impactful. Since most of their focus is on the front end, business owners struggle with managing the business—they don't want to do the backend.
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This is where Serenity Financial Services comes in. We want our clients to fully and solely focus on running their business while we, in the backend, help them manage it. When you have those two together, it's impossible for you not to succeed and meet your financial goals.
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