127. How to Drive Action With Your Clients on the CFO Call

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For those of you that are familiar with kind of the model that I teach, you know that the CFO report, it's kind of like the deliverable on a given month. It's kind of the super bowl, right? It's. It's the thing that we've all been preparing for. It's the. It's the reason that we're all here. This is our modality to deliver value to our clients. This is also a place that we get a lot of times in important updates from our clients. This is the place that we go to tell the clients what the financial story is, what's happening in the finances, what's coming with the finances, and then we connect that story with the client's goals, right? On the CFO call, this is where it kind of all comes together. This is where you've been with your finances. This is where you're at with your finances. And based on your goals and your priorities, the things that you're trying to accomplish in your business, this is the roadmap. This is where we need to focus. This is the areas of concern. These are the potholes that might be coming. And then on the CFO call where we're delivering the CFO report, that's where you're able to talk with your clients and collaborate with them to figure out the action plan, to figure out the next steps, both in terms of strategy and tactics. No surprises there. But this is. It's kind of a big deal. When I think about the CFO report and the CFO call, for me, the most important part about it is this is where we drive action. This is the place where it all kind of comes together and the client says, oh, this is what I need to do different next month. These are the few important things that are going to help me move towards my goals and ultimately have the impact that they want to have. And I would just say that if, if you've got a CFO call or a CFO report and you're not beginning the process of delivering the CFO report with driving action in mind, then you need to revisit the entire underlying principles of what you're trying to do. And so for those of you that have been around, you remember my fundamental truth. I call this the fundamental truth. For fractional CFOs, simplicity is everything. Because when we take all of the different data points, we take all the different metrics, the financial statements, we take the forecast and the projections, and we simplify them down to the critical few things, those things that are going to be the most meaningful for our clients in pursuit of their goals and their dreams and their aspirations. When we simplify it down, what ends up happening is our clients have a very clear understanding of what they need to do and why. And, and this is counterintuitive a lot of times. For those of us that are data driven people, for those of us that love the details and look, I'm nuclear engineer, love the details, love the data. But when we have too much complexity, we have too much data, it starts to muddy the waters. It starts to muddy the picture for our clients on what it is they need to do and specifically is what actions they need to take. So that simplicity leads to understanding of what needs to happen and why it needs to happen and what those outcomes are for our clients relative to their goals. And when that, then our clients will take action. I mean, how many times have you teed things up to your clients on things that they need to do? They don't do anything with it. Month after month, they're still not doing it. And I'm like, normally the reason for that is we haven't simplified it enough or we haven't helped them understand why. And I know a lot of you are in here driven for similar reasons as my team and I are driven. It's because we want to have impact. But if our clients aren't taking action, then we have no impact. And also is a guy that's been burned by this. If we have clients that aren't taking action long enough, they aren't going to be our clients very much longer because they're not going to see the value. Look, what am I paying you for? Nothing's changing. It's like, well, no shit, nothing's changing. You're not doing anything. But a lot of times when our clients aren't taking action, it's because we haven't done a sufficient job of helping them understand what they need to do or we haven't done a sufficient job of simplifying things down. We're overwhelming them with too many things. The reason I bring the fundamental truth back up today is because as we get into the CFO report, I want you to have this idea in mind that the impact of the report is not in the complexity and in the fancy charts, in the graphs, in the KPIs, in the ratios, in the benchmarks and all the other things. Those things are all great for us to look at on the back end as fractional CFOs, but in the report itself, the power comes from the simplicity and keeping it very narrowly focused on the specific things that they need to understand to drive action.

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