Angela Jenkins built her bookkeeping firm on the belief that financial clarity is something everyone deserves—and she’s been proving it, one client at a time, for nine years.
Angela Jenkins has been counting dollars and cents since before she can remember. As a little girl growing up in Philadelphia, she’d wait for her father to come home from work, listen for the jingle of change hitting the table, and get to work—sorting coins into piles of ten, rolling them neatly into little paper wrappers, making order out of chaos one penny at a time.
Her dad always found a way to have money, she’ll tell you—even when finances were tight. And her mom made sure everyone understood the importance of saving some of it. Together, they gave their daughter something that no business school course could replicate: the belief that money, handled with intention and care, can be the foundation of the life you want to build for yourself and those you love.
Decades later, Jenkins is still doing essentially the same thing, just with higher stakes. As the founder of Mindfull Money Matters—the double-L is intentional, and yes, she will notice if you spell it wrong—she takes the financial disorder that keeps small business owners up at night and turns it into something far more useful: understanding and knowledge.
Her clients are almost entirely women business owners and entrepreneurs of color—communities she believes have been historically shut out of the financial literacy that others take for granted. And for the last nine years, operating out of Philadelphia with a small, all-women team and a carefully constructed client roster she guards with care, Jenkins has been doing something about that.
From Coin Rolls to Boardrooms
The path from coin-rolling to professional bookkeeping wasn’t exactly linear, but in hindsight, Jenkins says the universe was always pulling her in that direction. While studying business at Temple University, she took a real estate accounting class her senior year—seemingly by accident. She needed the credits to graduate, and despite having other course options, that’s the one she chose.
“My advisor said, ‘Of all the courses you could take, you took a real estate accounting class?’” Jenkins recalled.
After graduation, she spent years moving through finance-adjacent roles—accounts payable, operations, inventory management—at companies large and small, nonprofit and for-profit. She had a habit of ending up in rooms with CFOs and vice presidents, not because she sought them out, but because she kept noticing things that were out of place financially—and she couldn’t not say something about it.
She also had a habit of helping people for free. Friends who were starting businesses would call, and Jenkins would show up, build their accounting systems from scratch, make sense of their numbers, and hand everything back over—clean as a whistle, without ever sending an invoice.
After hearing the same thing from a friend who worked at the Chamber of Commerce, Jenkins finally got serious about figuring out pricing and officially launching her business.
“We just started playing with it,” she says, thinking back to how she developed her first pricing structure. “Like, what did it look like?”
As she started looking more closely at why people kept coming to her, she realized the common thread wasn’t just that their books were a mess. It was that they were afraid. The mess was just the symptom.
A Tale of Two L’s
The name “Mindfull Money Matters” came to Jenkins the way most good ideas come: through conversation and iteration. Well, that and a yoga instructor friend who wasn’t afraid to tell her the first version of her firm’s name—“Chaos to Calm: Minding Your Money Matters”—just wasn’t working.
“She said, ‘That feels really messy. You’ve got to get rid of that,’” Jenkins recalls with a chuckle. So, they focused on the second part of the name—“Minding Your Money Matters,” which eventually morphed into “Mindful Money Matters.”
Still, something felt off about the spelling. “Mindful” with one L didn’t quite capture the firm’s essence.
It’s a small detail, but it’s also a perfect encapsulation of how Jenkins operates. Everything is intentional: the name, the clients she takes on, and even the clients she turns away. Word of mouth has driven nearly 100% of her growth, and she is deliberate about making sure the people she chooses to work with are the right fit.
“When I’m really selective and I’m being intentional and purposeful, it works great,” she says. “As soon as I get knocked off that square, where I have a conversation and it doesn’t feel right and I take the business anyway, inevitably I realize this was not the client for me.”
Nine years in, she has about 15 clients. She reviews that list regularly, thinking carefully about who she actually wants to retain—which clients she wants to grow with and which have run their course. Against the backdrop of the “grow at all costs” culture that has permeated much of American business, that might seem overly restrained. But Jenkins sees it as hard-won wisdom.
The Clients at the Core of it All
If you ask Jenkins who her clients are, she’ll answer quickly and plainly: businesses owned by women and people of color—every single one. While it wasn’t a strategic decision she made on day one, it quickly evolved that way, as most of her early referrals came from the women she’d already been helping. In the years that followed, though, it became a defining characteristic of her business.
The reason is both personal and historical. “Women are not really taught about finances,” she says. “It’s not a field where you’re seeing a lot of women in executive positions, on boards.”
And for communities of color, the gap runs even deeper.
She says this not with bitterness, but with the weight of someone who has thought about it seriously and decided to do something about it.
What that “something” is, concretely, is helping her clients succeed and grow. Not just organize their books—though she does that too, sometimes unraveling years of tangled financials that entrepreneurs did themselves in a misguided effort to save money—but truly grow. She meets with most clients monthly, works through projections and profit-and-loss statements, and keeps them connected to what their numbers are actually saying.
Her father’s lesson (that there’s always a way to have money if you’re resourceful and intentional), and her mother’s lesson (that having it means nothing if you don’t manage it wisely) both shine through in the work she does every day with these clients. It’s generational wisdom, paid forward.
Yoga Mats and Balanced Books
Beyond her obsession with balanced books, there’s another type of balance that has shaped the way Jenkins approaches all things in life: balance in mind, body, and soul. She’s been nurturing that balance by practicing yoga for more than 20 years, and in 2018, she got certified to teach it. Her philosophy in yoga—discernment over judgment, presence over reaction—maps almost perfectly to the experience of helping someone confront their finances.
“When you start talking to people about money, their shoulders will start to raise, or they’ll start twitching, or the answers come very quickly and clipped because they just want to get it out,” she says. “And for me, it’s more like, ‘Let’s take a step back and see what’s happening. How can we make this easier?”
Her favorite part of a yoga class is the savasana at the end: the moment where students lie still on their mats, eyes closed, reconnecting all the pieces back to center. That image—of helping someone exhale, release, and come back to themselves—isn’t all that different from what she does for clients who walk in convinced that their finances are broken beyond repair. The through-line, she says, is resisting judgment.
A Quiet Epiphany
But even someone who has built her entire practice on grace and equanimity has hard days. Last fall, Jenkins had eye surgery, and for a stretch of time she really couldn’t do much of anything. No client files, no spreadsheets, no managing her team or troubleshooting systems. She couldn’t even watch TV. She was left with only stillness—the kind her yoga practice had taught her to seek but that her work schedule rarely allowed.
In that stillness, a thought surfaced that she hadn’t let herself consider before: Maybe I should sell the business.
“Maybe I just sell it and come on as somebody’s director of ops or something,” she says, recalling the internal debate she had with herself. “Because it’s too hard. It’s too hard managing people. It’s too hard putting in systems. It’s too hard getting the work done. It’s too hard when I have these conversations and people still don’t respond.”
She sat with it. She thought it through, the way you think things through when you have no other option but to sit still. On the other side, she found the answer to the question she’d really been asking—which wasn’t, “Do I want to sell?” Instead, it was, “Do I trust myself?”
She spent the next four months revamping her team, recommitting to her systems, and realigning her client list. “I’m finally on the other side,” she says. “I know this is what we’re doing. This is how we’re growing. This is what’s about to happen.”
Audacious on Purpose
And what’s about to happen, by her own description, is audacious. Jenkins is building toward a version of Mindfull Money Matters that functions as a full financial partnership for its clients—not just bookkeeping and tax prep, but also monthly strategy sessions, cash flow projections, hiring timelines, and long-range business planning. She wants clients to be able to walk away from a meeting and say, with confidence, “I know I can hire another employee in two months, because Angela and I worked it out.”
“It’s a big, audacious goal,” she says, grinning. “And I’m okay with that.”
In between building the firm of her dreams, Jenkins travels whenever she can, laptop in hand, passport accumulating stamps. (Favorite destinations include Italy and London.) She still rolls out a yoga mat when the week starts to feel heavy. She still gets her best thinking done when she lets herself be still. And she still believes, as her parents taught her with a pile of coins on a kitchen table in Philadelphia, that money handled with care and intention can build something meaningful—not just for the person who has it, but for everyone in their orbit.
conversation at a time. The stakes have gotten bigger since her days counting coins as a kid. But the work is, at its core, exactly what it always was: helping people understand what their money is saying, so they can build the life they deserve.
Mindfull Money Matters is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Learn more at mindfullmoneymatters.com.
