Our Board Treasurer on fear, financial freedom, and why one month is never enough.
Ramona Cedeño is warm, sharp, and disarmingly direct. When asked to describe herself, she laughs softly and leans in.
“It depends on who you talk to,” she says. “If you talk to my family, they’re going to say Ramona is so much fun and she’s always trying to bring people together. And if you talk to someone who has worked with me, I hope they are saying that I’m someone who takes my career seriously.”
Then, without missing a beat: “I always think about what is going to be said about me and the work that I do when I’m no longer present.”
“I do what I do because I love it and I do what I do because I want to have an impact.”
She almost didn’t become an accountant. At 18, she was searching for a room to rent in the Dominican Republic — somewhere to live while she figured out college. The woman who opened the door happened to be an accountant. They talked. Something shifted.
“I think I went into finance and accounting almost by accident,” she says. “But when I think back, it probably wasn’t an accident.”
That conversation sent her through Time Inc., Bloomberg, and a tech startup — and eventually to FiBrick, the firm she launched to apply that same rigor to the businesses that need it most: small business owners navigating their finances largely on their own.
Ramona came to Ascendus through a mutual contact at Mastercard who said: you should meet Paul Quintero. The call was scheduled for 30 minutes. It ran for nearly two hours.
What she found was an organization that matched her own conviction — that financial knowledge, delivered with heart, changes lives.
“There is so much heart that’s put into everything that you guys do. I see it during the meetings. I see it on social media. I see it when I talk to people about the work you’re doing.”
As Board Treasurer, she brings to Ascendus what she brings to her clients: financial rigor, practitioner credibility, and an unflinching view of what’s actually happening on the ground.
THE GAP IS REAL. AND IT STARTS LONG BEFORE THE BANK ACCOUNT.
Ask Ramona what she sees most consistently in small business owners, and the answer is not what you’d expect. It’s not a lack of talent. It’s not the market.
It’s avoidance.
“A lot of business owners — intentionally or not — neglect financial management. It might be that they don’t have the time. They are overwhelmed with just operations and servicing clients and taking care of what’s not working. And a lot of times financial management, even bookkeeping, separating personal transactions from business, filing taxes — all those take a back seat.”
The root cause, she says, goes deeper than busyness. There’s a belief — absorbed early, often cultural — that some people are simply not built for numbers. And once that belief takes hold, avoidance becomes the default.
“And that fear just turns, makes us turn our head away. And instead of facing the problem and trying to find the solution — which takes just a few steps at a time — we just decide to put our head in the sand and focus on something that we really enjoy.”
The result plays out in real time, in real businesses. Two owners. Same industry, same neighborhood. One thriving, one not. The difference, more often than not, comes down to financial management — and the willingness to look.
THREE PLACES TO START.
Ramona doesn’t believe in waiting until you feel ready. She believes in scheduling the discomfort.
“I would say take a few minutes a week — schedule them, 15 minutes, 30 minutes — and dedicate them to your accounting, financial analysis, planning for a loan application, whatever it is.”
Pick three areas that are causing pain. Pricing. Sales. Collections. Spend those first sessions understanding what the data is actually telling you, not what you fear it’s saying.
And then ask yourself the question Ramona asks every new client:
“Do you really know how much money you need to run your business for a month? Like, do you really know how much you need to spend in payroll, supplies, insurance, all that? If you do not know that — that is where we start.”
One question. One number. Everything else follows.
ONE MONTH IS NOT ENOUGH.
We asked Ramona why Financial Literacy Month still matters. She answered — and then raised the stakes.
“We have to make it a financial literacy year, not just a month.”
Financial stress isn’t just a business problem. It’s a personal one. It sits in the body. It shapes decisions. It compounds silently until it doesn’t.
“Financial stress, financial problems cause a lot of anxiety and emotional issues for people. And a lot of us don’t want to talk about our financial challenges or lack of expertise or skills in that area.”
A dedicated month creates a window — a permission to pay attention, to check in, to act. But the goal, Ramona says, is never just awareness. It’s action.
Her advice to CDFIs and funders is equally direct: don’t measure impact only at scale. Find the first-time learners. The business owner who finally opens the bank statement. The founder who applies for their first loan after years of assuming they wouldn’t qualify. That’s where the work lives. That’s where it starts.
Ramona holds four professional certifications — CPA, CFP, PFS, and CGMA. She is an MBA, a keynote speaker, and a published author on personal finance and taxes. She has guided more than dozens of startups through funding rounds, mergers, and exits. She built FiBrick from the ground up as a tech-forward firm — one that uses automation and real-time dashboards to give founders the visibility they need to make faster, better decisions.
She has also sat across from small business owners who were afraid to open their own bank statements.
Two decades of corporate finance. One conviction: the people who need financial clarity most are the ones least likely to get it.
Ramona is here to change that. #ThisWayUp
