155. Stop Losing Clients Over THIS (CFO Onboarding Secrets)

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If you have ever been frustrated by your clients during onboarding, this is going to fix the problem right here. How many of you have ever had a client call you from their iPhone while they're driving down the interstate? Yeah. Crazy. It happens. We will get on calls with you. We will do forecasts, we will do projections. We will do this. We will do this. We will do this. Here's what we don't do. Be very clear. In order to get the goal behind the goal, then got to trust you. They got to trust that you're not the lady or the guy that's going to judge them because their wife wants them to take home another 15 grand. All right, Onboarding. Oh, man. Onboarding. If, If I could just describe onboarding in one word, it is that onboarding is frustrating. Why is onboarding so frustrating? Well, it kind of starts on the sales call in a lot of ways. Because if you have been doing CFO work and you've got more than, let's say, one client, then you know that good onboarding, like really good onboarding, it takes a lot of time, like to really get in and do the analysis and be really, really thorough. It's, I would say it's probably the most time intensive period that you're going to have with a client through their entire life cycle, barring any crazy projects that might come up. Well, why is that frustrating? Well, it's frustrating because it's hard to price it where it should be. We know that onboarding is really important and there's a lot that goes on and we want to price it. But when we get on the sales call and we're telling our clients what the price is, they, they're used to onboarding being kind of down here, relatively speaking, and like, well, well, what am I? Why is onboarding so expensive? What am I, what am I really paying for? And it's frustrating because we don't really have the tools in our toolbox to articulate that. Don't worry, I'm going to help you with that today. But for me, that's why I was frustrated with onboarding for, for a lot of years in the sales process. Once you get into the process of onboarding itself, it becomes more frustrating a lot of times because what happens, we close a client, the dopamine is pumping, the adrenaline is pumping, we're feeling great, we've got a new client, all the great things are coming, and then it ends up taking days or weeks. And I'll from firsthand experience, sometimes it takes months to get a client through the onboarding process. Sometimes it takes weeks just to get them to add you in QuickBooks the right way. And so it's so frustrating because we want to get to work with the client, we want to add the value, and we can't even get into QuickBooks. And what ends up happening when onboarding ends up taking days, weeks and months longer than it should, that means the first CFO call happens weeks or months after it should. And a lot of times, if you're like me, where I bill automatically at the beginning of the, of the cycle, we're still screwing around with onboarding. The client gets that first bill or that first invoice, and now they got a bad taste in their mouth. Even if it's their fault, normally it feels like onboarding. The delays are the client's fault. They didn't get us what we needed, and now they're bitching and moaning because they got the first bill and you haven't even finished onboarding yet. So everybody, you know, we've got this exciting thing. New client. I'm the new cfo. I'm excited to get all the answers. What comes out of the end of that bad taste in everybody's mouth? And God forbid, if you get access to QuickBooks and they have bad books, that can blow the whole thing up too, what do you do then? We're going to address that later today. We are going to talk about that on the call. Over the last eight years, I have onboarded roughly a hundred clients. I was looking in QuickBooks, all the clients I've worked with, it's around a hundred clients. Over the last eight years, I have run into all of these issues, all of the issues that we just talked about. I run into them more times than I care to share. I have screwed up onboarding more times than I want to admit. But through all of that, I have learned four really important lessons about onboarding. The first one is that the time to value is. The time to value decreases. The lifetime value of the client increases. Let me say that again. Time to value decreases. Lifetime value increases. Let me explain what that means. The amount of time that it takes for you to get to what I call the aha moment, where you. That's that moment that you first add value and the client goes, oh, shit. That's why I hired Tiffany. That's the insight that I was looking for. Amazing. Time to value. When you bring that time, the time that it takes to get to value down the lifetime or the amount of time that a client stays with you. Goes up. I've seen it time and time again. The quicker you can get to value, the longer the client sticks around. It is so important that you add value as quickly as possible so that the lifetime of that client is longer. It's hard enough to get leads, it's even harder to close sales. We've got to keep the client with us as long as possible. We've got to find reasons to add value as long as possible. First and most important step in that is getting the time to value down. We're going to talk about how to do that here in just a minute. Number two is you've got to learn how to sell the onboarding process, otherwise they're going to balk at the price. We focus a lot on selling our CFO services. The forecast, the projections, the executive level presence going to help you navigate. Maybe we're going to do the books for you as well, or tax strategies, whatever your scope is. We spend a lot of time and energy learning how to sell that during the marketing and the prospecting and the sales process. But when was the last time you really stepped back and said, I got this huge thousands of dollars onboarding process that I'm going to slide in there during the sales call. When was the last time you really put some thought into how to sell that and to really show the value that they're going to get out of it? It's something I under indexed for a long time and then it was just kind of awkward on the sales call. And then we're back to the price nagging. Number three, goals. Alignment during onboarding is like everything. I'm going to give you a story here in just a minute about a client where this is like in the last year, our firm didn't get aligned during the onboarding process on what their goals were and they left. They left us. So you've got to get really intentional. I would say more intentional than anything else during onboarding is get to the goal behind the goal. Like what's the for real, real goal that the client has for their business? You got to identify that quick during onboarding. And number four, onboarding is the single most important point in the entire customer life cycle. I'm going to beat that dead horse multiple times today. I'm not even going to apologize about it. This is so important, so important. I have started thinking about onboarding like a pyramid, a layered approach. And as we go through this, I want you to keep something in mind as you go up the pyramid is your firm does more and more of These things, it's going to increase the value that you deliver to the clients, which will allow you to increase the price that you charge to your clients for onboarding. It's money we leave on the table a lot of times. And in terms of, you know, cost of goods, cost of services, it's high margin work. But the trick is, you gotta figure out how to add more value. You can't just increase the price. You gotta add more value, and you have to learn how to sell it. So here's where most of us start in this process. Most of us start right here on the second level of this pyramid. What do we do during onboarding? We ask for access and we ask for information, right? This is where we say, hey, can I get access? I need accountant access to your QuickBooks. I need to see your last three years of tax returns. I need to have view only access to your bank. Maybe I need to look at your, you know, Ein documents. Whatever it is that's in your onboarding process, we need access and information. Now. If you're like me, this is where I stopped. This was my onboarding for like three years. This was it. I had a checklist of things that I needed access to. We sent it off and list was like, way too long. I'm going to talk about that here in just a minute, too. But I had this long list of shit. And I would say that the number one factor in onboarding dragging out too long is this part right here. Because what do we do? We send this long list of things clients don't know. They look at the list, they immediately identify one thing. They don't know where it is, I don't know where my Ein is. And what do they do? They stop with the whole rest of the list. Like, they use that as the excuse to just stop dead in their tracks, you know, like, hey, I still don't have quickbook access. And like, yeah, I looked at your list. I don't know where my Ein is. Well, you don't need the Ein to give me QuickBooks. Well, I guess that's true. Well, we'll get. We'll get you the QuickBooks access here in just a little bit. And you're like, oh, my gosh, it took you two weeks to tell me you don't know where your Ein is, And that's why you don't. We haven't got QuickBooks access yet. It's so frustrating. So for those of you that don't have it, if you look at the Academy, the CFO Academy, and Playbook 4. We've provided a list of all the things that are on our list that, that we need to get started and we've prioritized them by high and low, you know, but what are we, what are we looking at on here? You know, QuickBooks access bank credentials, introductions to key people on the team like bookkeepers and CPAs, auditors, tax accountants, whoever those people might be. CRMs are another important one that we need to get access to. What are some other ones? You know, if you're working with companies that are looking for investors or have investors, cap tables might be important. If they've done any work before on like forecast and projections, it's great. If you base your work off of their stuff org charts. Another important one, who are the key players on their team? A lot of times people will say well what should I have on my checklist? I'm like, well I don't know because it a lot depends on your scope of work, your client and what industry they're in. You know, we don't work with many companies that have investors or looking for investors. So we don't ask for the cap table because our clients don't, just don't have them, they don't need them. That might be really important for you. There might be some things that aren't on here that are really important for you and your scope in the, in the clients you work with. But what I think is important is having the scope of work and then prioritize it for your clients. And then if you notice up here on the QuickBooks one, this is a free hack. This is worth your time today if nothing else. And it's so simple. QuickBooks has a video on their website with step by step directions on how to add someone with accountant access. I don't know how many times we have had clients that just add us as a user and then I can't do anything with that like no, we need accountant access. So we just include the link that walks them step by step through it. I love video. We don't even have to record the video. So that might be worth it to you just to know that you can. If you Google how to grant QuickBooks accountant access. The number one thing is the video. The link. The step by step link from QuickBooks. There you go. You're welcome. Now I want you to keep one key thing in mind here. The more you ask for on this list, the longer it will take your clients to respond in, the more overwhelmed they will get. Less is more essentials only like Ours right now for my firm, I think. What's it down to, Lauren? Like three or four things. Two or three things, maybe four things at the most. Because we just found the fewer things, like the fewer things that we ask them for, the more likely they're to get them in a timely manner so we can get started. Number one is we need access to the books so we can get GCON set up, so we can start getting the CFO report built out so we can start doing our analysis, we can start asking questions. I would say if your list is more than five or six out of the gate, I'd really encourage you to try to trim it down and not to say that you won't get the rest of the things, but just ask for those things that are required for you to get to the, to the aha moment. The time to value, you know, so a schedule of prepaid expenses with supporting invoices probably not going to get them to value any quicker. Let's ask for that later. If you find content like this helpful, then I'd like to invite you to join my Inner Circle program. Inside the Inner Circle, you'll find a highly engaged and highly supportive community of 300 other fractional CFOs. Many of them are just getting started, but many of them have been in the industry for years. You'll find a great mix of all experience levels. It's super collaborative and super supportive. I also go live on Zoom every month and share the latest lessons, insights and best practices that I've learned over the last nine years of running my own fractional CFO firm, KFE Solutions. Just click the link below to try the inner circle 100% risk free for 30 days. I hope to see you inside. Access and Information is where most firms start and stop. But there's a lot more to a good premium onboarding experience than just access information. And I think, and I know that there's actually an even more fundamental level than just access and information and that is expectation setting. And I'm going to go through some stuff here, but before I do, I want to give just a huge amount of credit. And thanks to both Pam Jordan and David Richter. They shared some really good stuff during our last Mastermind meeting around how they do this. And I was like, mind blown. I'm like, God, I've been doing this eight and a half years and I haven't thought about this stuff yet. And so we've already started incorporating it into our onboarding process. The stuff I'm going to share with you so thank you, David and the team at simple cfo. Thank you, Pam Jordan, for sharing some of these things. No hyperbole. It's really changed the way that I think about and approach onboarding with what they've, they've shared. Because if you have ever been frustrated by your clients during onboarding, this is, this is going to fix the problem right here. So if you've been checked out, come back, get your pen and paper out and let's pay attention. Because this expectation setting thing is the key to getting rid of all of those frustrations. If you've ever had clients that don't show up on time for your CFO calls, that don't show up prepared for your CFO calls, the clients that push boundaries, they're always pushing, asking for a little bit more. The ones that have crazy expectations. This is step one to fixing that problem before it even begins. So what do we include in the expectations portion of onboarding? Number one, introduce them to your team. If you've got a team, who are the major players on your team? Maybe you've just got an executive assistant. So, hey, you know, my name is Alf Raz. I'm going to be your fractional cfo. I want to make sure you know, you know Ben, Ben is my executive assistant. Then explain to them who they should be reaching out to and for what on your team. So look, if you've ever got questions, if you ever need to reschedule one of our calls, reach, reach out to Ben. Ben's going to take care of you. But if you've got questions about X, Y or Z, I'm your guy. You can reach out to me directly and then tell them what those modalities of communication are that are. Okay, look, I know you don't text me if you've got questions about your CFO report because I don't even look at my text. I've got like 39 unread texts right now. If you have questions about CFO stuff, Slack me or email me or message me on teams or maybe you're okay with text, I don't know, whatever your thing is. But this is the point. To talk about who's on the team, what to reach out to them about and what the proper method of communication is for that. And I would really encourage you to say what's not okay. If they have your cell phone number and you don't want them texting or calling. This is another great time to tell them that. And you can make it humorous like I did. Don't, don't text me. Gosh, I don't even want to see all the unread tests. And I know that your questions are important, so make sure you email me at XYZ email address. Next thing for setting expectations, let's review the scope again. A lot of times people get hyped up during the sales process and they go and they're not paying attention to the details because they just want some of the forecast swag that you're about to lay down on them. And sometimes they forget some of the details of exactly what's going on. So go over the scope again. Lakeisha asked, is this during the kickoff call, once we go through this pyramid? Great question. I should have probably said this earlier. Lakeisha, once we go through the pyramid, I'm going to show you a timeline with the different calls that you might have and what's covered on which call. Right now we're just going over the theory of all the things like the overall onboarding experience here. In a couple of minutes, we're going to go over the call by call timeline. I think that's going to serve you well. Keisha, great question. But to answer your question directly, this is a specific call. Yes, you might call it the kickoff call. This would all be done on one call. Next, go through the timeline for what's coming up. So through the lens of this is like a kickoff call or a first call, an expectation setting call, or David Richter calls it an orientation, which I think is great. Go through the timeline and just let them know, like, okay, right now we've got our orientation call. Once we have access to X, Y and z, maybe it's QuickBooks, CRM, whatever. My team is going to get to work, and then we're going to schedule your next call about a week from today. And then we're going to do this and do this and do this, but lay out that timeline. Because here's what you don't want. You don't want somebody that just paid you, you know, maybe 5, 6, $7,000 for onboarding, which is what we charge, by the way. It's not crazy. You can do it, too, if you do it right. If you get the value there and the first month's payment, maybe. So you might have just had a client pay you $11,000 or more. And they're like, okay, now what? That's a horrible feeling. Have you ever worked with a vendor and you pay them and you're like, well, what now? It's a horrible feeling. This is the time for you to lay out that timeline so that they know and they're not messaging you and saying, okay, now what, boss? What's next? Lay out the timeline next. Go through meeting expectations. Print. I think the way Pam does this is brilliant. I want you as you're talking about expectations out loud so verbally and also on the screen, like, Pam has some slides. It's actually a PDF that she uses on that slide. And out loud, Pam's talking about. And that this is what we do now too. How will your calls be delivered? So probably via Zoom. How long are your CFO calls going to be? Should they have the their camera on? What kind of environment should they be in? You should be in a quiet place. How many of you have ever had a client call you from their iPhone while they're driving down the interstate? Yeah, Crazy. It happens, you know, I mean, that is so for me, it's frustrating and it feels like my what I'm giving them is devalued because they're not present, they're not paying attention. But the truth is they are also actually devaluing it in their mind. They're not going to get value out because they're trying to make sure that the Ford F250 in front of them that just cut them off doesn't get to that exit ramp before they do. Screw them. I'm getting back in front. So set those expectations right here on this, on this orientation call, this kickoff call, whatever you want to call it. Tell them on that expectation portion, what do you need from them so that they're prepared for the call. Look, when you show up to your bi weekly checking call, when you show up for your monthly CFO call, I need you to come with a couple of questions written down. I need you to come with any concerns that you have. I want you to come written down with any hiring decisions that you're thinking about making, firing decisions. You're thinking about making investments over $5,000 that you're thinking about spending. Really get detailed here and let them know how to be prepared. A lot of times we get frustrated when clients, they tell us about the big spins after the fact. Hey, girl. Just want to let you know that we hired a new whatever two months ago and that's eight grand a month. And you're like, well, shit, that just blows up the entire set of projections that I made and all the recommendations that I was going to make. And now you got to go back and fix it. And then heaven forbid, if it was a bad decision that they can't afford now, we're just looking in the rearview mirror saying, wouldn't it have been great if they had told us so? Set those expectations right here, right now. One of the things that David talks about Richter is he uses this time to set the tone. And specifically the thing that he talks about that resonated with me was letting his clients know that they need to be ready to have hard conversations. Just know that when you get on with my team, there are going to be hard conversations that come up. We're going to push back. We're going to challenge you. We're going to ask you hard questions. And I think that that's such an awesome point to make because we should be doing that from time to time as a cfo. We don't want to shock them. I talk about it during the sales call. I was on a sales call last week and I was like, look, just go ahead and be ready because we're going to push back on. On some of the things that I've heard you said, we're going to push back. And he was like, great. That's what I want. I need somebody to push back. No one else on my team pushes back. They just tell me my poo poo doesn't stink. I think it's a great thing here to point out that you're going to push back or the CFO that you're going to assign is going to push back so that they're not surprised. Here's a great one. That would have saved me so much stress. Tell them again, this is related to scope, but be really clear on what we do and what we don't do. Hit on those common things that the clients ask you to do that are clearly out of scope. I've been so frustrated so many times when people. The things that clients have asked before. Hey, Mike, would it be okay if the big one, the one that was like the straw that broke the camel's back when I fired all my clients? Would you call our merchant processor and deal with their risk management department and see if you can get our credit card processing turned back on? Okay. Okie dokie. Hey, our bookkeeper hasn't got the books updated. Could your team just get the books updated one time for me? Well, how far behind are they? Just like six months. Six months? Maybe eight. Could you guys. Could you guys just update, get the books updated? We don't do books. Under no conditions are we going to do your books. We've got a great partner at decimal that's good at doing books. They're world class at doing books. Here's what we will do. We will get on calls with you. We will do forecasts, we will do projections. We will do this, we will do this. We will do this. Here's what we don't do. Be very clear to what is Dave Ramsey say? To be unclear is to be unkind. Lay it out here in this call what you do and you don't do, what kind of common questions come up, Address them right here. You guys have all been around long enough. Most of you know what the the common asks are. Set those expectations right now. Here's another great one. Let them know what to ask of their cfo. These are the things that I want you to ask your CFO so you can get the most value out of the relationship. Hiring decisions, firing decisions, marketing spends spins over X dollars. Maybe your CFOs are great on taxes. You can ask them about tax strategies, you can ask them about sales tax, you can ask them about, you know, whatever, S Corp elections. We've got some people in here that also have law firms. You can ask XYZ legal questions. But there's so often that we get the frustration because they didn't come to us, they didn't ask us ahead of time. And I'm like, look in the mirror. And I'm like, gosh, I never really told them what to ask. And one of the things that's not on here that I would be remiss if I didn't include is make sure that you communicate what you expect of them as well beyond just how they show up. You expect them to update the income lines, the revenue lines on the projections. You expect them to manage the day to day of the WIP report. You expect them to have budgets updated in a timely manner. You expect them to update expenses. You expect them to work with the bookkeeper for transaction classification. So if there's questions about, hey, was this meals and entertainment or travel, I'm not going to interface with your bookkeeper to answer those questions. You need to do that, whatever your things are. And so I think the rule of thumb here is if you're ever frustrated by clients doing things they shouldn't, not doing things that they should, put those into your expectations, setting, briefing. And then the last one I think is great too is just talk about what mistakes clients have made in the past that you wish they wouldn't have made. You know, what are those things that you know, this is the mistakes that I see our clients make that could have been avoided. And just be really clear about this. Because we don't want our clients to be successful. So why not point out the obvious mistakes that they might make? This is a great opportunity to do that. 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Best of all, it eliminates the manual work like repetitively copying and pasting data. You know, the kind of work that nobody really wants to do, but super prone to errors. Yes, G Accon does all of that for you automatically, anytime you need it. If you want to scale your firm without adding a ton of additional technology or labor expenses, you need to check out G Accon. Get 30% off G Accon for the first three months by clicking the link in the description below and subscribe. Start saving time and money with G Accon today. So we've got expectation setting fundamental. If you do nothing different about your onboarding process as a result of this, my ask is that you go back and you really look at how you can set better expectations. Expectations, access and information. That's the minimum to do like a mediocre onboarding experience. So next, that third tier. Value up, price up. This is where you get into reporting in the aha moment. That's the time to value. Oh my gosh. This is what they they hired me for. You might present the first draft of your of your report, right like your CFO report based on the data you pulled from access and information, you got access to the QuickBooks, you got access to their budgets, you got access to their CRM. Now you're delivering some kind of a report. I think that before you can call onboarding like done, I don't know what done is for you. But before onboarding is quote unquote done, you've got to deliver them Some sort of a tangible thing. And that thing is the milestone that marks onboarding is complete for us. For a long time, that thing was the CFO report. We still do that, but now it's a little bit different. We've. We've turned it into a product. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later, but I think you've got to have that thing, you know, here we're going to deliver your CFO report. We're going to go over the rough draft. That's when we're done with onboarding is after. After that call. With that, though, you've got to be really intentional about finding a way to deliver the first aha moment again. What's the aha moment? Oh, my gosh. This is why I hired him. This is why me and Daniel. This is why I'm paying Daniel the big bucks. Right? They're looking. They are eagerly seeking a reason that will validate their decision to have hired you. They're looking for it. You don't have to pull a rabbit out of a hat. They're just looking for something to feel better about their decision. They're looking for that confirmation bias. Tee it up for them on a silver platter. The sooner you can do this, the better. Because again, like, avoids that uncertainty that will come around the time that that first month's invoice hits. Gosh, when is this thing going to pay off? Did I make the right decision? And when you have clients that are pulling those strings and asking those questions on month one, it's hard to recover. That's why the lifetime value goes down. Bad onboarding, you might only have a client three, four months because you have a bad onboarding of onboarding that goes too long the whole time. They're going to be nitpicking, looking for crap. You hit them with that aha, though right out of the gate. That validates. Now, they're looking for reasons to. Obviously, I'm the smartest guy ever for hiring Jennifer. Oh, look, there's another reason. Oh, look, there's another reason. It just changes the whole mindset. They stick around. Jay and Cameron at Prosper, you guys probably saw my YouTube interview with Jay. They do a vendor expense evaluation during this process that I think they pulled pretty much right out of profit first and then just made some trademark tweaks to it. But basically, they're looking at every vendor in every expense in the books during onboarding, and they're categorizing them. Are these expenses profitable, replaceable, or unnecessary? Altogether? Is their Whole goal is to uncover enough cash during onboarding to pay for them. Like that's their whole goal during onboarding. My goal is to pay for our existence during onboarding. EOS has a tool called the Seven Cash Flow Drivers. You can go find YouTube videos on the Seven Cash Flow Drivers. Drivers. Walk through that exercise with your clients. Maybe you do that during onboarding. We're talking about doing it twice a year with our clients now because it's so easy and there's so much benefit to it. But it's basically like this circle and then you've got seven different kinds of things that drive cash and you just go through one by one asking questions, how can we improve in this area? We did it during for the CFO accelerator company a couple weeks ago and what Gretchen, we came up with like 38 grand or something like that. There was like we do this stuff for a living and we found 38 grand a year in additional cash. And so you think about a client that doesn't think about this stuff like we do. Think about all the low hanging fruit that's just sitting there. So maybe look at that. Seven Cash Flow Drivers. Change the name of it so that you don't have a trademark in front. Oh, it's the eight Cash Flow Drivers. I suck at life. I'm not a details guy. But find those opportunities, bake them into your process to get to that aha moment. How cool would it be if you could pay for yourself for a year, a full year of your services during onboarding with your client? You think they're leaving in a month or two? Heck no. And then once you figure what that is for you, once you figure that out, start to sell it during the sales process like it's something you do. During our onboarding. I take you through the, you know, the, the crazy cash flow saver process, trademarked, you know, copyright 2024 that my firm does. It's our proven process and our goal in that is to pay for our first month's, our first year's worth of service with you guys right there. Now I can't guarantee you we're going to find it because you know, I haven't looked at your books yet, but our goal is to, you know, find you X amount of saving things, you know, right during onboarding. Well, gosh, you know, now if you tell them onboarding, seven grand, but you're going to adjust that, you're going to do the work during that $7,000 that's going to pay for you for a year, do you think they're going to bitch and moan about the $7,000 onboarding fee anymore? Not as likely. So again, find that tangible product, some kind of report, some kind of an output item, and find that aha moment. I'm going to be honest. I've worked with probably pushing a thousand other firms now. I don't see a lot of people doing this. A lot of people are just the access and information, maybe the expectations, most of them. Not most. It's just access and information. This is a great differentiator for you. It's huge. And then finally, this is really the top tier stuff here. During onboarding, you got to get to the the goal behind the goal. And I think it's best practice to have a roadmap in place. Let me explain a little bit more on both of these. The goal behind the goal is the thing that makes them tick. A lot of clients are going to say, you know, oh, my goal is to hit $10 million. $10 million at, you know, $11,000, $11 million of expenses, you lose a million dollars. So really, $10 million isn't the thing. What does $10 million unlock for you? How does it change your life? What are you going to do with it? Are you going to reinvest it in the business's growth? Are you going to bring it home? Why do you want to bring it home? What's going on there? What are you going to spend it on? You've got to do a lot of work during onboarding to start figuring out the goal behind the goal. Let me give you an example of goal behind the goal gone wrong for my firm. I'm glad you guys can benefit from the $100,000 mistakes that I just keep making time and time again. We had a client about a year ago. Maybe a year, I don't know, a year. It all blurs together. You get a kid and like all of a sudden, time doesn't is nothing anymore. Anyway, we have a client, things are going well, we've got a good in place, we're showing really solid margin improvements, and then we get fired. Like, what the hell? What's going on? Well, it turns out all of our strategies were around building their company. They had hires that needed to be made that were causing problems in the business. Those hires unlocked opportunities to increase revenue and decrease cost. Awesome, solid fractional CFO strategy, if I do say so myself. Oh, but we didn't get to the goal behind the goal. Come to find out, business owner has wife at home, pregnant. They're about to have their fifth kid. I think it was right or wrong. Wife wanted him to bring home $15,000 a month more because that's what mama wanted. Approximately or exactly zero of our strategies had anything to do with him taking home more money. We had him spending more money in the business to hire more people. He's dealing with stress at home from his spouse. She's wanting to know, when are you going to bring home more money? We're giving him less money to bring home. And so that caused issues with them. And so, like, one of the questions that comes up is like, well, why the hell don't clients tell us that? Well, I was having a coaching call yesterday with a firm owner, and I said I had a kind of an epiphany. I said, you know what I think the reason is? A lot of times there is a level of guilt that's associated with the goal behind the goal or embarrassment. And so, like you take this example I just shared with you. He thought it was silly that his wife wanted him to bring home another $15,000 a month. When I talked, I called the guy, I said, hey, why'd you fire us? What happened? And he was like, you know, to be honest, Mike, I feel greedy taking home another 15 grand a month because, like, I already pay myself a lot, and I probably should have told you guys, but it. It just. I felt greedy even saying it out loud. You know, it's kind of a stress point with me and my wife. And so he didn't tell us. So I think a lot of times there's emotional connections with the why behind the why, and clients don't want to tell us. That's why it's so important to build trust and rapport with our clients. In order to get the goal behind the goal, they've got to trust you. They got to trust that you're not the lady or the guy that's going to judge them because their wife wants them to take home another 15 grand. They want to trust that you're not the one that's going to be snooty with them when they say they don't understand. They want to be able to trust that you're not going to be the one that talks down to them when they ask you to explain something again. They want to trust that you're the one that's going to push back when 15 grand doesn't work. So it's so important that we're building relationships and building trust with our clients to get to the goal behind the goal that begs the Question. How do we get that trust and rapport built during onboarding? Well, it depends. Depends a lot on the client. It depends a lot on you. A lot of times, founders, the CEOs, we've got this like, swagger to us that makes us good CEOs. That gets people to trust us a lot faster. A lot of times maybe people on our team don't. Maybe you don't have that. Well, one of the things that we've been testing for several months now is we're doing two day onboarding in person. Because I think when you sit across the table from somebody and you have a cup of coffee or a meal, you spend a day with them, that trust and rapport gets built faster. Now, I know that's not possible for everybody. It's not even possible for us with all of our clients. The client that we just landed up in Bend, Oregon, it's not even on the table. We can't do that with them. But we're trying different things to try to build that trust and rapport. What does Brene Brown say? The number one fastest way to get people to trust you is show vulnerability. That's why I try to tell you guys all the time, I don't have all the answers. I made a lot of mistakes because I know it elevates your trust with me. And it's the same thing with you. Those of you that tell me when you need help, I trust you more. I'm more likely to lean in and help you. And so this is just, this isn't a CFO thing. This is a human nature thing. And so I would ask, like, how can you show vulnerability more with your clients during onboarding? Well, a simple one is when you don't know the answer. Say you don't know the answer to stuff. Gosh, I don't know. I should know. Let me find out. I've got somebody in this community that I'm in that I can ask. I'm not a tax guy, but I know some people I can reach out to and ask. Just starting by saying you don't know things is a great way to start showing vulnerability and building trust in the next one. Here is the roadmap. This is something that we've got to work on in my firm. This is like delaying the game plan of priorities with your client for the next six to 12 months. You've gone through the access and information. You got the report. You found the goals behind the goals. A rough timeline of what your priorities are with the client over the next six to 12 months so that there is consensus through collaboration with your clients on what the focus areas are. Consensus through collaboration of what the next six to 12 months are going to look like. And that gives you and the client direction on where to focus in a lot of times. Even more importantly, that gives you the anchor point when they veer off track or when they get distracted by shiny shift. Hey, when we started working together four months ago, and correct me if I'm wrong, but X, Y, Z were the priorities. Now I understand priorities change. Sometimes I just want to make sure that that's what we're saying is that the priority changed because I want to make sure that my strategies and my tactics are aligned with your actual priorities. And a lot of times the clients will be like, yeah, you're right, you know, we got to get that credit card paid off. I'm going to hold off on investing in the new marketing campaign or whatever it might be, but lay that 6 to 12 month roadmap out. High level, big priorities, big goals. That gives you or your team clarity on what to focus on each month, month in and month out for the first six months to a year. And it keeps the client on track. Now, like somebody had asked in the DMS earlier in the chat, how do you structure all of these things? This isn't a one call, this isn't a one shot thing. This is part of the overall onboarding process. So I'm going to walk you through what that looks like. So first, you know, we get in there, the contract is signed. And let me say this, before we get through it, I want to, I want to really challenge you to have this entire process I'm about to walk you through done in less than 30 days. Impress me and figure out how to do it in under 21 days. We're striving for 21 days. That's like our internal goal. But I say you've got to know what done is for you. It's for onboarding. If you don't know what done is for onboarding, then that's your, that's your mission defined, done for your firm when it comes to onboarding. Okay, so contract gets signed, then you're sending some sort of a welcome video or welcome email within one business day. If you can do it within half a business day or even immediate, even better. And this is simple. It's just an email or video that explains next steps and what to expect short term. Hey, Bill, Mike here from KFP Solutions. We're so excited to get started with you. I Want to let you know that Greg, your new cfo, he's going to be reaching out by end of day today to introduce himself and to ask you three questions. Xyz. And then he's going to schedule his first call with you right there. Boom. So short and simple. If you've got any questions about the process, hit respond to this email and I will clear them up or my EA will clear them up. Again. My team's humbled and excited to work with you. See you shortly. Boom. That's it. Send them something though. Right away. So again, they just spent 11 grand or however many grands it is, and they're like, all right, what now? Nothing. Have something set up. It triggers you, it notifies you automagically. And then you've got either an automated thing that goes out, I like a custom thing just to show that you're truly excited to work with them. But that's up to you how you want to do that. Next you're going to get that intro call, schedule the orientation call, the intro call, the whatever you want to call it call on that call. What are we doing? We're getting access to QuickBooks. I recommend that you get access to the accounting on the call because how many times have you had issues with where again they give you the wrong access or they get locked out, they don't know what to do. There's two factor authentication, all the crap that comes up, you got to get the QuickBooks access, make it easy for them, get access to their CRM, all that kind of stuff right there. On the call earlier we talked about expectation setting. Do that here. What questions do you have so far? Ask them right here. Start discussing goals here. Hey, I remember from our sales call that you had mentioned XYZ goals. Let me just, I got a couple clarifying questions I want to ask. Come up with clarifying questions. You want them talking and thinking about goals, Hit it here, right on the intro call. Then you're going to go do the nerdy analysis in drafting the CFO report, crunching the numbers, reviewing the key documents, setting up G accom. If you use G icon, you're doing all this. What's next? You got a second call. You're going to have questions from your analysis. You are going to make some assumptions in your drafts. I recommend that you have a cash flow working cash flow forecast and set of projections based on historicals. Both of those are going to be wrong. Get their feedback high level on the things that are coming down the pipeline and start making updates to the projections in the cash flow forecast right there. Start getting it dialed in. What else are we going to go over? We're going to go over goals again. Then you're going to go back and do some adjustments, some tweaking based on their feedback. You're going to get your first CFO report ready to go. Then you're going to have your final onboarding call. Which is what? You're going to present the CFO report. You're going to do the full song and dance. You're going to make darn sure you hit that aha moment. Look at me. We just saved $32,000 together. Yay. Exciting. You're going to lay out the roadmap, and you're going to get buy in. Hey, what I'm hearing, I just want to make sure I've got this right. Theresa. The four priorities for Acme Inc. Over the next 12 months is boom, boom, boom, boom. We got to get you paid $15,000 a month more. We need to hire a new dispatcher, and we need to get that S Corp. Election done or whatever. Is that. Am I tracking okay? Is that. Okay, great. Oh, no, not the S Corp. Election. Not that. We got this other. Whatever it is. Get consensus, get buy in, and then you're onto your monthly cycle. You're onto the monthly CFO cycle. Try to get this under 21 days if you can. Certainly under 30. Listen, don't be a victim of slow onboarding. You've got to be the driver. There's so many things that aren't, you know, it's not my fault. The client, the client, the client. And I'm like, look, it cannot be your fault. And then you can still be broke. Wasn't your fault, but you're still broke because you don't have that sweet, sweet revenue coming in from that client. Now you got to go find more leads. You know, how many leads does it take for you to get a client to land a client? I don't know. If you close half of your sales calls, you need at least two leads. How hard is it to get two leads? Harder than I want it to be. Don't lose the client. You can use those other two leads for new revenue. So here's some ways to increase the perceived value of your onboarding. And I want you to be able to charge 5, 6, $7,000. So the first one is have a physical thing. You don't have to do any of these. I'm just sharing with you some of the things that I've learned. Have a Physical thing that you give them if you want to charge the most. We started doing these Financial Health accelerator. We call our onboarding the Financial Health accelerator process now, right? This book's like What Lauren? Like 50 pages. They love it. It's awesome. The feedback is stupid. I'm like, I should have been doing these longer. So maybe turn your thing into your onboarding. Your you're done is a physical thing. Number two is turn it into like a proven process. When you're on a sales call and you talk about I'm going to do my financial health accelerator process, right? We don't even call it onboarding, right? We've got our proven process which is where our sole mission in life is to pay for our full year service in the first 30 days. And we do this process, right? If you want to know what a great example is, go to eos. Go to the search up the EOS proven process. Then do some R and D, rip off and duplicate. Change it around. Put in your, your logos and your swag in there. Change the words, don't copyright, infringe, switch it around. But when you're selling it, if you, you're selling them a process instead of just onboarding, perceived value goes up. And when you can connect that with an outcome, it goes up even more. And don't call it onboarding. Horrible name, onboarding. It's just so generic. It's so generic. So if you can come up with something other than onboarding. Five grand, right? If you put Financial Health accelerator five grand, first month CFO service, five grand. It just hits a little different. I'd rather financial health. It's got some mystique to it. I want my financial health accelerated onboarding. Boo Boo. 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.