Amanda Westenbarger
Sales & Marketing Administrator
Amanda Westenbarger is the Sales and Marketing Administrator at First Steps Financial. She is a dedicated specialist in customer service and is committed to ensuring a seamless onboarding experience for our clients. With several years of experience in marketing and business development, Amanda brings strategic insight and a client-first approach to every interaction. Her unique blend of skills enhances the way clients engage with First Steps’ services.
Experience/Education
- 1+ years accounting experience
- 20+ years sales & marketing experience
- Business Degree, Colorado Technical University
Certifications
- Intuit Certified QuickBooks Level 1 ProAdvisor
Areas of Focus
- Client onboarding and support
- Customer service and communication
- Sales and marketing operations
- Business development strategy
- QuickBooks Online assistance
Our Latest Insight
Article 2 ended with a question. What would you actually see first if this relationship started breaking down inside your business? Here is the answer. You would see five things. If you are like most owners reading this, you are already looking at two or three of them. None of the five announces itself as a communication problem. Each one shows up as friction inside your accounting systems, wearing a perfectly reasonable disguise. That is the difficulty. On the surface, none of these looks like a broken relationship. Each looks like something else entirely. A busy month. A tough quarter. A personality difference between two people who were never going to be friends anyway. Every one of them gets explained away the first time you see it. That is exactly what makes them expensive. This article does not fix any of it. Article 4 does that. The job here is naming what is already sitting in front of you. Most owners walk past these signs for years without recognizing what they are looking at. Part 3 of a 5-part series on the COO-Accounting relationship
Article 1 ended with a question. When does your COO actually talk to Accounting before a decision gets made? How long did it take you to answer? Immediately? Minutes? Maybe you could not think of a single example. Bills get paid, projects keep moving, and financial reports show up. Nothing feels obviously broken, so you conclude everything is fine. If that question made you uncomfortable, you are not alone. Here is the part that keeps this problem alive. You only know what good looks like based on what you have already lived through. Most owners have never worked inside a business where Operations and Accounting were intentionally built to function together. So they measure their company against their own status quo. This article gives you a different reference point. You will see what the relationship looks like day to day, what rhythm it runs on, and five things you can check this week. None of it requires scrapping what you have built. The people are already in the building. The data already exists. What changes is how the pieces are arranged, and how much leverage you get out of the company you have right now. Part 2 of a 5-part series on the COO-Accounting relationship
"Accounting is a stick in the mud." "I'm not really sure what a COO does all day." "The CFO just plays around with their little Excel sheets." You have probably heard one of those lines. You may have thought one yourself. They sound like harmless office humor. They actually point to something expensive. In most growing service businesses, nobody has ever defined how operations and accounting work together. The people who produce your financial reports sit outside the very decisions those reports are meant to inform. That gap costs you every single month, quietly, in profit that should have been there. Part 1 of a 5-part series on the COO and Accounting relationship
