Coaching, advisory and consulting with Nicole Barbano, Founder, Hunter Ambrose & Co.
I believe opportunity isn’t found — it’s created.
For more than two decades, Nicole Barbano has guided leaders and organizations through pivotal moments: recruiting executive talent, building businesses, developing executives, strengthening leadership teams, and advising professionals through defining career transitions. With more than 1,000 placements across executive, emerging leader, fractional, and specialized staff roles, her work has reinforced one belief above all else:
Whether you are leading an organization, your career, or your next chapter, pragmatic and ambitious self-awareness determines what happens next.
Hunter Ambrose & Co. (a Hunter Ambrose Int. organization) is now a coaching and consulting firm built for leaders who believe a well-crafted career is part of a life well lived.
While our foundation was executive search, our work today is focused on coaching, advisory, leadership development, career strategy, and organizational consulting.
Whether you're leading through change, investing in your team’s growth, or preparing for your own next chapter, you’ll find thoughtful guidance, honest conversations, and strategies grounded in real-world experience — not theory.
Let’s create opportunity. Deliver results. And build what’s next.
To view client testimonials and follow, visit me on LinkedIn.
Welcome. I'm Nicole Barbano. Book a Discovery Meeting and let’s start the conversation.
Nicole has worked with a wide range of executives, organizations and emerging leaders.
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Corporate Coaching
Develop exceptional leaders. Strengthen your organization.
High-performing organizations invest in their people. Hunter Ambrose & Co. partners with CEOs and executive teams to develop leaders, improve communication, strengthen accountability and refine workflow.
Our coaching work supports emerging and current leaders across sectors. For newly promoted leaders, high-potential professionals, and executives ready to level up, one-on-one coaching offers a more targeted and practical investment than a workshop or conference.
The result is stronger retention, better performance, deeper engagement, and leaders prepared to contribute at a higher level.
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Executive Leadership
Even the most accomplished leaders benefit from a trusted advisor.
Executive coaching provides a confidential space to think strategically, navigate complex decisions, strengthen influence, and lead with greater clarity and confidence.
Our work includes working with entrepreneurs, and leaders in the public utility, healthcare and rural sectors.
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Emerging Leaders
Prepare your best people and yourself for what's next.
The transition from individual contributor to leader—or from manager to executive—requires new skills, new perspectives, and greater confidence. We accelerate leadership growth through coaching that builds judgment, influence, and executive presence.
This may be an individual coaching relationship or an employer-sponsored coaching engagement.
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Career Coaching - Built for a rapidly changing world
Over 5 million people start a new job every month in the United States. And, over 100 million people click job boards every month and wonder why they never get the interview.
Whether you're pursuing a promotion, navigating a career transition, or redefining your professional brand, we'll develop a strategy that positions you for meaningful opportunities and long-term success.
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College Graduates & Early Career Professionals
Start your career with purpose—not just a job.
The first five years of your career shape the next twenty. We partner with students, recent graduates, and early-career professionals to build confidence, develop a professional brand, and make thoughtful career decisions from the very beginning.
Nicole is a Mother to three adult children. She has navigated the pressures, pivot points and strategies of children graduating from Ivy League Universities or pursuing a portfolio career.
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The Professional Pivot
When success no longer feels like success.
Not every career transition begins with a layoff. Sometimes it begins with burnout. Sometimes it's the business you've always wanted to build. Sometimes it's the realization that your next chapter looks nothing like your last.
The Professional Pivot focuses on what better looks like, in the next 100 days and in the next 18 months. And then reverse engineering that pivot that is realistic and focused on your next chapter.
Nicole has worked with nurses, physicians, CFO’s and professionals who want a partner to discover opportunity and options and create a plan to get there.
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Executive and Career Coaching Services
Executive and career coaching grounded in the belief that work should be an exceptional, sustainable experience.
We focus on pragmatic resilience, intentional career design, and the day-to-day decisions that shape long-term trajectories.
Nicole has worked across several sectors include healthcare, public utilities, finance, legal, academia and rural America sectors. With over 1k placements throughout her expertise is on-point and results oriented.
Who We Work With
Whether you're leading an organization, growing your career, or preparing for your next chapter, Hunter Ambrose & Co. provides strategic coaching, advisory, and consulting for people who believe there is always another level to reach.
Organizations
Develop stronger leaders, elevate performance, strengthen culture, and prepare your leadership team for what's next. From executive coaching to organizational advisory, we partner with companies committed to building exceptional workplaces.
Executives & Senior Leaders
Leadership can be isolating. Executive coaching provides a confidential space to think strategically, navigate complex decisions, strengthen executive presence, and lead with greater confidence and influence.
Emerging Leaders
The transition from managing people to leading organizations requires a different mindset. Build the judgment, communication, and leadership skills that accelerate your growth and prepare you for greater responsibility.
Career Professionals
Whether you're pursuing a promotion, navigating a career transition, building your personal brand, or redefining what's next, we'll work together to position you for meaningful opportunities and long-term success.
Leadership is personal. So is my work.
I'm a wife, mother of three adult children, entrepreneur, author of The HIRE, podcast host, executive coach, and lifelong student of leadership.
I founded Hunter Ambrose in San Diego, California, in 2006. Since then, my work and life have taken me through San Francisco, Puerto Vallarta, Chicago, and now Kansas City, Missouri.
Living and working in different communities has shaped how I understand people, opportunity, leadership, and work.
Building a business across different regions and industries has given me a broad perspective on leadership, opportunity, and the evolving world of work.
I've learned that great leaders can come from anywhere, and great ideas aren't limited by geography, education or a CV.
For more than two decades, I've worked alongside organizations and professionals during defining moments in their careers and businesses.
I've built companies, advised executive teams, conducted more than 1,000 leadership placements, and coached emerging and executive leaders.
Along the way, I developed the 4F Method—a practical framework that helps leaders view their careers through the lens of putting themselves first so they can better serve others.
My coaching is grounded in experience, not theory. It's shaped by years of sitting across the table from executives, founders, healthcare leaders, and professionals making some of the biggest decisions of their careers.
Outside of work, I try to build each day, week, and quarter by asking my future self what success looks like—and then reverse-engineering the path to get there.
Right now, that means structured days, clear KPIs, fitness that strengthens both mind and body, 5 a.m. writing sessions before the sun comes up, finding the best small towns in America to visit, and spending time with my husband and family.
I believe everyone deserves a career and a professional life that feels limitless and full of opportunity.
The HIRE
The story of how humans have hired—and been hired—for centuries.
Long before LinkedIn, résumés, applicant tracking systems, and AI, people were making decisions about trust, talent, and opportunity.
The HIRE traces the fascinating evolution of hiring—from Leonardo da Vinci's résumé, the guilds of the Middle Ages, and why the church became one of history's earliest recruitment networks, to the Manhattan Project, corporate America, and the modern hiring process.
Along the way, it asks an important question:
How did we make hiring so complicated? And how do we pivot?
Drawing on more than two decades of executive search, leadership advisory, and career coaching, Nicole explores both sides of one of the most important conversations in business—the person doing the hiring and the person hoping to be hired.
The HIRE is a career book for leaders, hiring managers, executives, students, and professionals who want to better understand how opportunity is created. It offers a candid look at why culture clichés, keyword matching, and conventional hiring practices often prevent the best conversations—and the best people—from ever finding one another.
Because when we understand both perspectives, we make better hiring decisions, build stronger organizations, and create better careers.
Create Your Next Opportunity
The future belongs to people who continue to learn, challenge their thinking, and invest in their growth.
Whether you're leading an organization, preparing for your next career move, building a business, or simply asking "What's next?"—you don't have to navigate it alone.
Hunter Ambrose & Co. is more than a coaching practice. It's a community of leaders, professionals, entrepreneurs, and lifelong learners committed to creating opportunity—for themselves and for others.
Your next chapter starts with one conversation.