I met Tony Hernández Pumarejo at the NextGen Orlando networking event — one of those networking nights where you expect small talk and walk away with a new friend instead. Five minutes into our conversation, I knew he belonged in this series. He's a certified life coach, autism and mental health advocate, published author, and the founder of THP Life Coach. And like most of the entrepreneurs who will be featured here, his business was built on lessons nobody handed him. He had to learn them the hard way.
The Money Lessons No One Taught Him
Tony was born and raised in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. He was diagnosed with autism at age three and later, at seven, rediagnosed with Asperger's. He was nonverbal until he was four, placed in special education, held back a grade, and spent much of his childhood managing severe anxiety and depression on top of everything else. He tells the full story in his memoir, An Autism Unscripted Life, also available in Spanish as Una Vida Autista Sin Libreto.
But what struck me most in our conversation wasn't the diagnosis. It was what he told me about money.
“The education system when it comes to finances is a disaster,” he told me. “There's no financial literacy, and that's the reason we have so many problems today.” Growing up, the message he heard — from his family, from school, from the culture around him — was simple: go to college, get a good, safe job, and you'll be fine. When he mentioned a business opportunity to his father in college, the response was dismissive: “Don't waste your time on that.”
Sound familiar? It's a story I hear constantly from the business owners I work with. Nobody taught us how money actually works. We learned it — if we learned it at all — outside the classroom, usually after making a few expensive mistakes.
Rebuilding Through Personal Development
For Tony, the turning point wasn't a class or a mentor who magically appeared. It was books. During a stretch of his life marked by depression and anxiety, he started reading — Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad, Jim Rohn, Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy. Personal development literature gave him language for something he already sensed: that there was a version of his life beyond “get a job and stay in your lane.”
He's still working through student debt from his college years and saving toward his first home while he builds his coaching practice. That's not a footnote — that's the honest, unglamorous middle of most success stories. Financial progress rarely looks like a straight line. It looks like Tony: holding a full-time job while building his business on nights and weekends, treating both as pieces of one plan instead of choosing between “safe” and “ambitious.”
Building the Business (and the Confidence) Alongside It
Tony's coaching business — registered as THP Global LLC — is still young, and he's candid about what that feels like. We talked about imposter syndrome, about clients who try to negotiate you down before they've even seen what you're worth, about how easy it is to keep discounting yourself because you're new and eager for the win. Learning to hold a price and mean it is its own financial literacy lesson, one that has less to do with spreadsheets and more to do with knowing your value.
He's also doing the unglamorous work of building support around himself instead of going it alone. He's a client of Prospera, a nonprofit that gives Hispanic entrepreneurs across Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina free training on the accounting, tax, and legal fundamentals of running a business — the exact gaps in financial education he grew up without. We also compared notes on resources like the National Hispanic Business Women Association and his existing membership as a Gold Member of the International Association of Professional Life Coaches. Community, it turns out, is a financial strategy too — the people around you shape what you believe is possible.
Where He's Headed
Tony's coaching practice has sharpened its focus over time. Today he works with professionals who spend their lives supporting others — caregivers, healthcare workers, people in ministry and service roles — who've quietly burned out doing it. His own experience navigating autism, anxiety, and depression, paired with his certification through The International School of Coaching, gives him a way into that work most coaches simply don't have. You can see the full scope of what he offers on his coaching page, and follow his story on LinkedIn and Instagram.
What I Took From Our Conversation
Talking to Tony reminded me why I started Frequency Accounting Solutions in the first place. Financial literacy isn't a nice-to-have — it's the difference between building a business on a foundation you understand and building one on hope. Tony didn't get handed a roadmap for money any more than most of us did. He built his own, book by book, hard lesson by hard lesson, and he's still building it. That's not a weak spot in his story. That's the story.
If you're navigating your own version of that — running a business, unsure where the money's actually going, tired of guessing — that's exactly the gap I help close. Let's talk.