178. My EXACT Onboarding Strategy to 10x Retention

Onboarding is the most crucial part of the entire client lifecycle, but it's also one of the easiest to screw up. One small mistake can ruin the relationship and cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue and profit. But don't worry. I've spent the last 10 years developing what I call the bulletproof onboarding system that I'm going to reveal over the next 15 minutes. It's the same four phase system that my firm uses to onboard eight figure clients month after month, and it's proven to maximize client retention. This system will allow you to take control of the onboarding, set crystal clear expectations for your clients and give them that aha moment that makes them think, oh my gosh, this is why I hired you. If you need an onboarding system that will keep your clients engaged for years to come, then let's get started with phase one, the orientation call. The orientation call is the foundation for the bulletproof onboarding system and it has completely changed my relationship with my clients, allowing me to double the lifetime value of my clients, all while massively reducing headaches along the way. When it comes to the orientation call, there are seven points you absolutely must cover, and I'm going to go over all of them with you in just a moment, so stick with me. But first let's go over why the orientation call is so freaking important. If I think back to all the clients that I've lost over the last five years, and that gives me a ton of anxiety to think about, and I sit down and do a true like root cause analysis, really digging deep and asking, where did things go wrong? Almost invariably I can point to one thing. We didn't start things off on the right foot. When you lose a client, most of the time it's because you and the client weren't on the same page during those first 90 days. Typical problems include things like scope creep, does that ring any bells? Or crossed boundaries? Hello. Misunderstandings about the services that you provide, or misalignment around timelines. These issues have almost nothing to do with the quality of your service, but everything to do with with your services not matching your client's expectations. And when reality doesn't immediately meet your client's expectations, buyer's remorse starts to creep in and they wonder, did I just make a giant $5,000 a month mistake? That doubt is likely a ticking time bomb and it's only a matter of time before things go wrong in the client churns. So when I look back and I ask if I could do this all over again, what would I do differently? It almost always comes down to this. I would have just done onboarding better. And that's where the orientation call comes in. It's a call that takes place within the first 48 to 72 hours of signing a client. It's typically like 45 minutes, maybe just 30 minutes long. And it prevents most of the problems that arise during onboarding by making sure you and your client start off on the right foot. The orientation call allows you to set expectations, establish ground rules, and reduce the friction that leads to buyer's remorse. This leads to a much smoother onboarding process and a huge spike in client retention. Now, I could do an entire video just covering the orientation call. In fact, if you'd like me to do that, please let me know down in the comments below. But for today, here's a brief overview of how I run the orientation call at my firm, point by point. First, we start by setting a clear agenda for the call. Next, we give a brief overview of our company. I include things like when we started, why we started, what our mission is, and our core values, things like that. From there, we talk them through the four phases of onboarding. These are the same four phases that I'm teaching you right now. This makes sure that they know exactly what to expect from us over the next month or two. The fourth point of the orientation call is a simple scope review. This makes sure that we're all in alignment as to exactly what the client signed up for in our agreement. The fifth point, and this one is critically important. This is where we set expectations. We let the client know exactly what they should expect from us. Equally importantly, though, we let them know what we expect from them. Things like showing up on time, not taking calls for our monthly strategy meetings from their car, things like being prepared for meetings and being proactive about communicating with us. From there, we make sure they know the key players on our team, how to reach each of us, and most importantly, what to reach out to each of us for. As an example, we make sure clients know that their fractional CFO is their primary point of contact for just about everything. But if they're ever unhappy with their services or they need anything additional, they're they can reach out to me or the leadership team directly. Finally, we get them to start thinking about personal and business goals, and we solidify the dates for the onboarding meeting. We'll be covering that meeting later in this episode, but now that we've completed phase one of onboarding, we're now ready for phase two, which is evaluation. The evaluation phase is where we gather all the information that we need to understand the financial health of the client's company before we move on with the onboarding phase. Now, during this phase, we do a deep dive into everything that matters about the company. We analyze their ERP and CRM systems, we're reviewing tax returns, studying their pricing models, evaluating their org chart, and we're combing through their key contracts, things like that. If it has any impact on the business's financial health, we want our hands and eyes on it. The evaluation phase exists to give us the clearest possible picture of how the business operates before we get into the next phase. But this phase isn't just about understanding the business. It's also about forming really informed questions. What are the gaps in the data? What are the inconsistencies that we're seeing? What assumptions do we need to gut check? The evaluation phase takes about a week. And we bring the questions from this phase into phase three, the onboarding meeting. The bulk of the onboarding process happens here during the onboarding meeting. Now, for my firm, we like to do our onboarding meetings on site because I found that it helps to build trust and rapport with the client even faster. And as a side note, also found that when we do our onboarding meetings in person, it really increases the perceived value of our onboarding process, which is a big reason that we've been able to increase our onboarding fees from $2,000 to in some cases, 30, 40 or even $50,000. Now you might not do on site visits for your onboarding meeting and that's completely fine. You might do yours via Zoom or some other digital platform and again, that's fine. We used to do the same thing. But the structure that I'm going to share with these onboarding meetings now applies regardless of which way you do them. During the onboarding meeting, we like to meet with the owners and the rest of the leadership team. We talk to the controller and the accounting team, and we work through our early projections with sales and operations. If you do these meetings in person, you might also like to do what we do. We like to walk a job site or two or to see the manufacturing facility just so that you can get a better sense of what their day to day operations look like and kind of further build that understanding of the company as well as the relationship with the client. From there, we like to work through our findings and address some of our questions. So we might say something like this, hey, is weave a evaluated your P and L here's what the last 12 months of those P&Ls are telling us. This is what looks strong, this is what's concerning. And here are the things that just don't make sense yet. Walk me through abc. Next, we like to visit goals. Not just the surface level goals like more revenue or grow team, but the real goals that are normally hiding beneath the surface. Those goals might be things like, listen, my wife wants me home more for dinner, I'm working way too many hours, or I'm really afraid of burning out, I've got to figure out how to get some more, some more energy back into my life, or I want my business to stop owning me. It might be something like, I want to be able to sell this stupid thing in the next five years so that I can finally retire. But getting good goals in place can be kind of tricky. Often our new clients don't really have real goals identified, and you may find that you have to help your clients articulate those goals. So if your clients are struggling to identify goals, you can use what I call the New Year's Eve scenario. And this is how I use it. Tell your client to imagine it's New Year's Eve. They're raising their glasses to toast to an amazing year in business, and then ask them, what is it you're toasting to? What would need to be true in your business over the next year so that you would have to be toasting to an amazing year? I found this exercise to be remarkably effective in getting the wheels turning when it comes to goals, especially when a client's just had a hard time articulating them. Okay, this next piece is a crucial part of the onboarding meeting, especially if you want to maximize retention and validate your client's purchase decision to work with you. In fact, this is arguably the most important moment of the bulletproof onboarding system, period. Before we wrap up phase three, we make damn sure that we deliver what I call an aha moment to the client. That validates to them why they hired us in the first place. In my experience, phase three is the best place to deliver this. If you wait until phase four, you've kind of allowed too much time to pass between signing the client and giving them some kind of tangible value. And that gap allows too much time for buyer's remorse to creep in. So hit them with a quick win here during the onboarding meeting to shrink the time to value. Now, when it comes to this aha moment, this deliverable that you're trying to find, that shows them why they Hired you was such a great idea. Keep it simple. Look for ways to increase revenue, look for ways to increase gross margins or net margins or cash flow and then deliver that value to the client. And so it might look something like this. Hey, during the time together today, I was reviewing your onboarding process and, and what I realized is there's this gap. And if you were to make this specific change, that should increase your net margins by 0.5%, which is $130,000 per year. And just like that, you've paid for yourself in the first month. Now, instead of buyer's remorse, the client is realizing how much return they're going to get on their investment with working with you, your CFO services just became one of the best purchases they've ever made. And so make sure that you take the time to identify and deliver that aha moment. And that wraps up phase three of bulletproof onboarding system, which means that we've arrived at phase four, the strategy call. The strategy call is all about deliverables. This is where we stop talking about onboarding as a process and hand the client real tangible assets that they can build their strategies around. This is where we execute the client's first CFO report and deliver a clearly defined set of personal goals, business goals that serve those personal goals. A working 13 week cash flow forecast that shows the client exactly how much cash they're going to have. At the start and stop of each week, we're going to deliver a 30, 60, 90 day plan and a 12 month roadmap that's going to help get them towards those goals. Now, when it comes to this 30, 60, 90 day plan and 12 month roadmap, I didn't start delivering these until a couple of years ago, but they've become an essential part of our onboarding process. Those two documents make sure that your priorities and the client's priorities are completely in alignment. And you've spelled out exactly what you're going to focus on over the next three months and the next 12 months, which puts everybody on the same page and keeps you in laser clear alignment with your client. And here's the kicker. The 12 month roadmap quietly kind of cements the idea that you're going to be working together for at least a year. And when the clients sign off on this 12 month roadmap, you're essentially locking in that relationship. When the clients see and agree with that long term roadmap, they tend to stick around a lot longer. And that wraps up phase four of the onboarding process and Honestly, that's it. Those are the four phases of the bulletproof onboarding system. And so to recap, the four phases are the orientation call, the evaluation phase, the onboarding meeting, and then the strategy call. These four phases offer clients far more than what most other fractional CFO firms are delivering onboarding. Most fractional CFOs do the bare minimum, frankly. They get access to QuickBooks or the ERP, they crunch a few numbers and then they move on. But not with this system. By the time your onboarding system is complete, here's what you've accomplished. First, you've developed meaningful trust and rapport with the client. You've set and managed expectations. You've delivered that aha moment that shows them how they can increase revenue or gross margins or cash. You've clearly defined the client's personal and business goals. You've delivered that 30, 60, 90 day plan and a 12 month roadmap so that the client knows exactly what you're working on together over the next three months and year. And most importantly, you've mitigated, if not eliminated, the fear and uncertainty and doubt that leads to buyers remorse and resentment and ultimately results in churn. Your clients should feel confident about their purchase and stick around for years to come. And if you want to make sure that your onboarding system has everything it needs to be successful, check out that free onboarding checklist down in the description. It has all the key points that we just went over. It's easy to follow, completely free, and will help make sure that your first 90 days or bulletproof 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.