123. Where Is the Best Place To Find Clients As A Fractional CFO

You've had a couple of people leave your firm and take clients with them.

That's 100% true. I don't know that there's, there's a way around that necessarily. I do think that there is a way to mitigate. How do we get more referral partners to tee us up quality leads? One of the things that I've learned in business is it's so much easier to leverage somebody else's audience than to try to build your audience from scratch. One of the questions that I get asked is what channel's working the best right now to get consistent quality qualified leads in time and time again. And I think it's a split between speaking opportunities and referral partners. Referral partners continues to be the winner. I'm privileged to have access to hundreds and hundreds of fractional CFO firm owners around the world. And like time and time again it's how do we, how do we get more referral partners to tee us up quality leads? One of the things that I've learned in business is it's so much easier to leverage somebody else's audience than to try to build your audience from scratch. It's going to take so much more time if you're trying to build your own audience and that's your only way of doing business development. And so the question I'm always asking is, well, who else has a pre existing audience that I can go and get access to whether it's directly or indirectly? So let me, let me give you a couple of examples because it doesn't have to be a huge audience. Well, let's say I have one hour to do business development and I have three ways that I could invest that hour. And so the first one is I could have a one to one call with somebody that might be interested in our CFO services. And so I reach out to you on LinkedIn, I convince you to get on a call. I don't even know if you need CFO services or not, but I'm doing a one to one reach out to, to you to try to get you to become a fractional CFO client. So that's opportunity one. Opportunity two is I could spend that hour talking to a commercial lender that has a portfolio of 200 clients that may or may not need services. So I invest that hour telling that commercial lender about my firm and what we do and how I can make his life easier and get his deal flows going through faster or open up more opportunities to save him time and effort and to make him more Successful. So that's, that's choice number two. And choice number three is I could get on stage for an hour in front of 500 people and talk about cash flow forecasting or financial metrics or whatever. You know, I would always pick the speaking opportunity is number one. I would speak. The opportunity to speak to the banker is opportunity number two. And then the one to one call is opportunity number three. Because I'm just magnifying, amplifying the number of people that can hear my message and how I can serve them and help them is so much higher at option, option three. So I'd encourage people like, if you have a finite amount of time, ask yourself, how can I take that same hour or day or whatever and get in front of as many people as possible and work kind of in reverse order? Like I want to talk to the most people and take it, take it down. Now the only caveat I would give to that is you want to speak to qualified and interested people first. So now take that same scenario and say, well, if there's somebody that has said, hey, I need a fractional CFO and now it's a sales call, I will take that hour every time over speaking to 500 people. Right. So if you've got a hot lead that's qualified, you know, it was somebody that referred you, I'm going to go do that all day long because like that's just somebody asking me to take their money. So you've got to balance, you know, if you've got an audience of 500 people that are unlikely to need your services, or you could do a webinar with five high seven figure business owners that are committed to growing their businesses. I'm probably going to pick that over the speaking engagement. So there's, there's a little bit of nuance to it, but those are the two factors that I would weigh into kind of deciding where I want to spend my time.

Yeah, no, that's great. And I think that for so many people, it can be, it can feel like, well, the first place I'm going to go is just try to go find my client. And it's in reverse from what you have recommended here. So I think that's such a good word for our industry.

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You've had a couple of people leave your firm and take clients with them. How do you plan to overcome that in the future?

That's 100% true. So first let's talk about why, why it is that it happens and then what are we going to do about it? I believe that if you are serving your clients with, well, as a fractional cfo, you develop a very trust based relationship with them. For whatever reason, when a fractional CFO decides that they want to go and work somewhere else, which, which is an inevitability, a lot of times the client relationship is with the CFO and not with the firm. I don't know that there's, there's a way around that necessarily. I do think that there is a way to mitigate the, the aftermath of that if it does happen. So one of the things that I have done a poor job of historically is I've always done the business development, I've always done the sales calls. We're working to make that not as true, but as soon as that sales to operation handoff happens, I have been fully removed and everyone else from the firm is fully removed with the exception of the fractional cfo. And so, you know, for sometimes years and years and years, four years, sometimes or more, the only contact the client has had with the firm is that fractional cfo. And I recognize, you know, now in hindsight that that is, that is a miss on our part. There's gotta be somebody else from the firm that's, that's communicating along the way. Not just in the event that the fractional CFO leaves, but gosh, what if they have a medical emergency or a family emergency or they just want to take some vacation? There's got to be some other touches along the way between the firm, quote unquote, and the client. And so We've built in several different things, including starting at onboarding, where it's a two person approach to onboarding, to having somebody from leadership and management, however you want to call it, that's doing like periodic check ins with the client and hey, how are things going? And maybe just being a part of a couple of the CFO calls to offer some additional perspective or ideas just so there's some other touch points beyond the cfo. A lot of people have said, hey, why don't you put legal things in place? My opinion, I reserve the right to change my opinion on this one day. But right now I'm like, you know, at the end of the day, am I really going to sue the fractional CFO that left for whatever reason for taking a client, or am I going to go to a client and say, you're not allowed to leave, you've got to stick with us. All I think that does is it creates negative energy. It's a negative return on time investment for doing that. So I think for us, ultimately the best path forward with that is have more people involved more often from the firm. Again, it's not just the mitigation on if somebody leaves the company, but it's also vacations and medical emergencies so that the client knows, hey, there's actually a team back here that's watching out for us, not just one gal or one guy. And so will that work? Well, it took me four years or five years to realize the other one was a big mistake. So time will tell on how it works, but to be determined. All right, my friends, I hope you found this episode helpful.

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