152. Raise Your Fractional CFO Prices Sooner…

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You have a call with a client coming up and you're like, I don't even want to get on this call. I really don't even want to deal with this person right now. When we feel stuck long enough, that will start to kind of translate into things like burnout. How many people have raised your rates in the last year? You're going to feel amazing. Even if the client says no. I see a lot of people that are stuck right now. A lot of people feel stuck. Does that resonate with anybody? Does anybody feel like you're, you're kind of in this spot where you're like, ah, I can't break through to the next level. I. I'm. I'm struggling to, to do the next thing. I've been there too. And what happens is when we feel stuck long enough, that will start to kind of translate into things like burnout. It'll translate into feelings of resentment. It'll translate into, I don't know if this speaks to anyone other than me. I get bored, right? If I, if I stay at the same spot long enough, I'm like, eh, this isn't really fun for me anymore. I get bored. And when we start getting stuck, we get into this point where we don't try as hard. We're not showing up the way that we know need to show up. You have a call with a client coming up and you're like, I don't even want to get on this call. I really don't even want to deal with this person right now. So as I talk in this blog post, there's three things that I commonly. Three kind of common factors that I was seeing on a lot of these one on one calls. Three things that were kind of lacking, that were driving a lot of these folks towards the burnout, the resentment, and the feeling of just general stuckness. So I want to talk about each of those three today and then kind of go through some things that you can do to break through. In fact, there's one big thing that I think all of us can do to get unstuck, to get out of the boredom, to get out of the resentment phase when we get there. So the first thing that I talked about is our revenue is too low. We're not getting paid enough. I think the reason for this is like, the reason we get the burnout from the revenue is we start feeling like the what we're getting paid isn't representative of the value that we're creating. We're working too many hours for the money that we're making. For me, that's when I start to get really burnt out, is when I'm like, I'm working all of these hours, I'm creating a ton of value for other people and I'm only getting paid. This, I think the thing that's important for me anyway. I don't know if this is true for you. When I start working too many hours and I start to have resentment over that, it bleeds into my marriage. It starts to have consequences with my wife because she starts to feel it too. She starts to see the number of hours that I'm making. She starts to feel the lack of energy I have around what I'm doing. And she's like, why are you spending all that time doing this and not spending more time with the family? And then once the spouse isn't on, on the on board anymore, the resentment doubles, the burnout doubles. Because we're getting it at home and we're getting it at work. And a lot of times when I talk to folks about raising their prices, this conversation comes up around. It's outside of my comfort zone to charge more. I'm just not comfortable charging more yet. And I'd argue that it's not a comfort zone issue. I think it's more of what I'll call an esteem zone issue. Less about comfort and more about esteem. When I think about esteem, the way that I define it is esteem is simply the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves. And if you think about it, that's normally what holds most of us back from raising our prices. Right? We have the imposter syndrome. And it's a story we're telling about ourselves. It's the I'm not good enough. I don't have enough skills, I don't have the right charts. I haven't been in business long enough. We're telling ourselves this story about ourselves that's holding us back. We feel like we're not worthy of the higher prices. We don't deserve to charge more when we have those feelings. The reality is we're not going to.

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How many people on this call, just show a show of hands. How many people have raised your rates in the last year? I know for me, we sent off a quote a couple of weeks ago for $8,000 for advisory services, you know, and I felt so proud of myself, of the team and where we had gotten when we were able to do that, to even be in the conversation about charging $8,000 a month. And so I want to remind you guys, you're going to feel amazing even if the client says no. Just getting a seat at the table where you can actually do that, the pride and the accomplishment that you're going to feel when you get there. I think for a lot of us, when we think about that esteem, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, what a lot of us fail to do, and I'm as guilty as anybody, we don't do this well enough. What we fail to do is we fail to put together that story of the arrows going up into the right. We fail to look to really quantify the impact that we're having on our clients. And when we don't take the time to see the forest through the trees to see, see how we're moving the needle for other people, it can be very easy to convince ourselves that we're not worth more. It can be very easy to keep our esteem in that lower level. So what I want to encourage you guys to do, and I want you to do this for two reasons. Once a quarter or twice a year at the least, block off time to do an analytical review of your clients, right? A very like a quantitative review of what's happened with your clients. How has their revenue changed? How has their profitability changed? How has their profit margins changed? How is their, how's their balance sheet looking Now? The trick here is it's not a one size fits all. Six financial wins for a CFO isn't going to be the same for every business. You know, you've got some businesses that are going to intentionally take out debt to do some big project. And so the balance sheet isn't always the right answer to judge success. Profit margins aren't always the right answer to judge Success for a given client. But you know, based on your client's goals, what they're trying to do. And so really look for those opportunities to quantify the successes that you've had for them. And like I said, it's going to do two things for you. Number one is it's going to help your esteem. It's going to help reinforce to you that you are worth charging more. The other thing it's going to do is it's going to remind your clients why they're paying you. A lot of times we don't remind our clients. We don't resell ourselves to our clients often enough. And I don't mean to go do it in a kind of a tchotchke way, but use it as an opportunity a couple of times a year to say, gosh, Gerald, you know, over the last last six months, I was just looking and we've done a lot of amaz things together. You and your team have seen such amazing progress. I wanted to point out three or four of the big wins that we've been able to accomplish together over the last six months. Right. And notice in there, we, we, we've done, we've done, we've done. We're part of the team. Right? It's the we. And just share that with them at the beginning your, your CFO call, spend five or ten minutes just celebrating some of those wins, you know, that they've had. And again, that's going to help them remember why they hired you, but it's going to help your esteem as well. That first thing is revenue without, without getting compensated provide. I think that there's, there's a high likelihood of burnout. All right, my friends, I hope you found this episode helpful. If you did, it would mean the world to me if you would leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you're listening to this episode. In the meantime, I can't wait to see you back right here next week. I'll see you then.