166. Get So Many Leads It Feels CRIMINAL (Fractional CFOs)

How many clients do you really need to hit a million dollar run rate? Well, depending on your pricing, it could be as low as just 10 to 15 clients. But if you want to get to that million dollar run rate, you're going to have to prospect. And I get it. Prospecting sucks. But by the end of this video, you'll have a brand new weapon that will get you so many leads, it'll feel downright criminal. A weapon that has completely changed my firm and can do the same for you. And that secret weapon is the Battleboard. So what is the battleboard? The battleboard is a powerful visual accountability tool that tracks your daily prospecting and sales, forces you to do the work that gets you more clients. Why is it called a battle board? Because you're going to go to battle to get those clients every day. And frankly, it also sounds pretty cool. Now, you've probably heard of a vision board before. Pictures of the Ferrari, the mansion, or the dream job. Designed to help you manifest your dreams into reality. But here's the problem. A vision board shows you what you want, but it doesn't show you what to do. So after that initial burst of motivation and dopamine, you start spinning your wheels without making any real progress. At that point, the vision board isn't going to motivate you and it's going to haunt you. It mocks you, but the battleboard is different. It breaks down your daily tasks to keep you focused on exactly what you need to do. It removes the guesswork from prospecting and lights a fire under you. The battleboard is your eye in the sky and your North Star that keeps you dialed in on what matters most, numbers, actions, and results. I'll show you how to build a battleboard in just a few moments. But first, let's go over why you need a battleboard. Your battleboard is going to help you treat your prospecting like a P and L. If you're a fractional cfo, you clearly already know how a P and L works. You, you've got revenue at the top, money that comes in from different sources. Then expenses bleed out, like payroll, rent and taxes. All of that fun stuff. And what's left? Well, you're left with your profit. But here's the thing. Prospecting works in much the same way. Leads are your revenue coming in from multiple sources, like LinkedIn connections, speaking engagement, referral partners, affiliate programs. But just like the revenue on your P and L, not all leads stick around and turn into profit. There's a million different reasons why a lead would say no, they might ghost you because they're broke, because their books are a mess, or they don't have a team, or maybe they're just kicking tires. They're not really that serious about working with a CFO anyway. Whatever the reason, most of the leads go out the door. But what do we call those? Leads that stick around and say yes, we call those clients. So when you compare your prospecting to a P and L, just think about leads like revenue lost. Leads are your expenses and clients are your profit. Now you can start looking at it like margins and ask important questions. What's the percentage of leads that stick around? What's your net profit? How many leads are falling out of your funnel? How many leads do you need to get in the first place so that you can hit your client or revenue goals at the end of the day? So if you want to get more clients by the end of the year, you really only have two options. You can increase your close rate or the percentage of time you convert prospects to clients, or you can find more leads. And we call that prospecting. There are a lot of things you can do to increase your close rate that I've talked about in other episodes. But for most of us, even if we're an amazing closer, we still need to get more leads if we want to hit a seven figure run rate. And that starts with having more prospecting conversation. Think about it like a home run derby with unlimited at bats. The more swings you take, the more home runs you're going to hit. But when it comes to prospecting, you're going to. Most fractional CFOs step up. They take two swings and wonder why they haven't hit anything. It's strictly a numbers game. You don't need to be perfect. You don't even need to be that good. You just need to be willing to step up to the plate time and time again, consistently, every day. I know there are fractional CFO firms watching this video who haven't even had four or five quality conversations with prospects in the last three months. I know you're frustrated, burnt out and feeling stuck. I know that feeling because I used to be the guy that was just watching videos like this, hoping for a breakthrough. So here's my encouragement. I want this to be the last video you watch today because again, what you really need is more conversations. YouTuber Alex Hormozi has this anecdote that I think illustrates this point really well. In his early days, one of his mentors told him to put flyers in people's Windshields. To get more traffic into his gym, he put out 500 flyers in a month and got almost zero traffic. When he complained to his mentor, his mentor told him, brother, we put out 500 flyers before lunch. On a bad day, if you want to be at our level, you've got a 10x or a hundred extra numbers. And that's exactly what Alex did. And now him and his net worth have a bunch of commas and a lot of zeros associated with it. That's what it takes to be in the top 10% of our industry, let alone the top 1%. The bottom line is that most fractional CFOs aren't having enough conversations with potential prospects. We burn ourselves out by overthinking, over planning and over strategizing instead of using that time and energy to generate more leads. If you're watching this video and you haven't had 20 or 30 quality conversations in the last month, you probably need to do less planning and get more accountability. And you don't need a fancy app, you don't need another CRM or a funnel hack for more accountability. You just need the basics. Number one, know your numbers. We talked about that previously. Number two, you need to have an action plan for prospecting. And I would encourage you to give your plan a name, to give it some life. We call our action plan our Prospecting Power hour. Every single morning, no matter what's going on, we sit down, drink a cup of coffee, we get on LinkedIn and we start prospecting. When somebody's interested, we hop on a zoom. It's not rocket science, but you've got to hold yourself accountable. Accountable to make your plan work, you have to do the prospecting. If you don't do the basics, everything else will fall apart and you're not going to hit your annual goals. Your battleboard, though, will build accountability into your system. It's going to keep you disciplined and fire you up to hit those numbers every single day. And it's so easy to make one. Building a battleboard is simple. Grab a whiteboard, a poster board, or just a piece of butcher paper. I like butcher paper. Write battleboard at the top in huge letters. List your daily prospecting activities. Connection requests, follow ups, discovery calls and sales calls. Track your progress every day in big tally marks without exception. And I want to encourage you to hang it up where you can't ignore it and everybody in the room can see it. That's it. Simple but effective. You're ready to do battle for those leads. Somebody once asked me who am I battling against? Well, you're battling against the discomfort of prospecting. Prospecting sucks, and it's definitely a battle to get it done. But it is a battle worth fighting because your clients need you. They need you to go discover them. So what does it look like to use a Battleboard in real life? Let me paint the picture every morning. I know the drill. I've got to hit 20, 25, 30 prospects on LinkedIn. I've got to send connection requests and follow up with DMs the next day. And in the following weeks, if somebody's interested, we qualify them and then work to get them on a discovery call. Well, who are we prospecting to? We're reaching out to our deal clients and potential referral partners. I've talked about those types of relationships in other episodes. We'll link to those in the description below. But the magic of the Battleboard is that it puts accountability right in front of your face. Every day we look up at the Battleboard and the Battleboard looks back down on us. The numbers are right there. There's nowhere to hide. It keeps us in line, and it will do the same for you. Once we put up the Battle Board, it was like flipping a switch. We had clarity, urgency, and accountability. We had a consistent reminder of what we were actually doing and what we weren't doing. And I find that accountability is everything, especially when it comes to doing things you hate doing. But you know you have to do things like prospecting. And while the Battleboard is great, it's an amazing accountability partner. If you can find someone else to hold that accountability alongside you along with the Battleboard, that's even better. Scaling a fractional CFO firm is hard work, especially when you think about all the different tech platforms that are out there that claim to make your life easier. Most of them end up not working as promised, and you spend more time on them than they're worth. After running my own fractional CFO firm for the past eight years, I have found one platform that has been consistently delivering for us for years and years, and that is G Accon. G Accon is one of those platforms that works quietly in the background, day in and day out. In fact, Giacon saves my firm well over 40 hours a month, every single month. But how does it do that? Well, G Accon is a data connector that links accounting platforms like QuickBooks Online, Sage, FreshBooks, and Xero to Google Sheets. This data connector allows you to fully automate your custom reporting, consolidate reports, and even get live currency exchange rates. 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 Accom 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 Gicon for the first three months by clicking the link in the description below. And start saving time and money with GICON today. So what makes a good accountability partner? Well, your accountability partner can literally be somebody on your team, another fractional cfo. It could be your spouse or anybody that you can just check in with on a consistent basis. You can literally DM a friend or somebody you met at a conference and say, hey, let's hold each other accountable for our battleboards. Challenge each other to see who can get the most leads in a week. The loser has to pay for lunch. And you're not going to want to lose two weeks in a row because that starts to get expensive, especially with the prices at Chick Fil A today. I know this sounds a little cheeky, but it's also really powerful because that little bit of extra pressure can make all the difference. But don't take my word for it. Check out this bit of wisdom from my friend Jay Dotson who runs Prosper cfo. I spoke with him shortly after his firm hit a seven figure run rate.

Force yourself, I would say, even if you don't have a partner like being accountable to somebody to say, hey, this is my intention, this is what I've got going on. And I know for me to be the firm owner that I want to be, I know that I've got to go and bring in clients. And so that's gonna put me in some really uncomfortable positions. But I really would like for your help in this. I mean, my spouse, I would ask this of her. I haven't because I have Cameron. But I would certainly ask my spouse of this to say, hey, ask me how many people I talk to and how many business cards I got or how many what have you connections I made through the process. Because if it's just left up to me and just left up to us, we will often choose comfort. And so making sure that we put enough roadblocks in our way that force us to not choose comfort and to choose the hard thing because we know that the desired life is on the the other side of doing the hard thing and becoming uncomfortable.

So putting intentional accountability 100%. If you don't develop a system like the one Jay describes, even if it's just a two person buddy system, you're going to default to what's easy. Easy is never going to get you where you want to be. You have to walk through the mud in life if you want to get to the higher ground. The battleboard and your accountability partner will be the keys to keeping you away from your comfort zone and from avoiding the hard work. Because when you see the numbers, when you have to report the numbers to a friend, you feel the pressure to hit the numbers. And when you feel the pressure, you do the work. When you do the work, you hit the numbers. You get more clients. When you get more clients, things start spinning like a flywheel. You start to gain momentum, you start to get better at sales, and eventually you hire people to prospect for you. You start to see yourself actually getting closer to your big goals. But the choice is yours. You can keep winging it, dabbling with prospecting, hoping for more clients, or you can put up your battleboard, get an accountability partner, and crush your numbers, and watch your firm literally take off. Now, I know this work for you because it's worked for me and a ton of other fractional CFOs that I've coached. But once you solve the prospecting problem, you're going to get smacked in the face with a brand new problem. You'll need to learn how to close those leads at a higher level, which is why you need to check out the episode in the description below. 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.