48. Avoid a Communications CATASTROPHE!

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To the CFO Report, my name is Michael King. If you're new here, I talk about starting, scaling and optimizing fractional CFO services. If you've seen me before, you might have seen us with our old name. We used to be called the Connected Accountant, but we did a little switcheroo, got a new brand refresh in place, and now we're called the CFO Report. So you're absolutely in the right place. Today we're talking about how to use stuff, Slack as a communications tool effectively, both internally with your team and externally with your clients. Now take it from somebody that's done this wrong. If you're not intentional about how you use internal and external communications, it can turn into a complete chaotic nightmare. But the good news is with a little bit of intentionality and with some good expectations and communications in place with both your clients and your team, Slack or teams or whatever platform you choose to use can be so much more efficient than messing with emails, text messages or phone calls. So let's go ahead and dive in. Carlos and I are going to talk about how to use Slack internally and externally with maximum efficiency. Let's check it out.

All right, Jonathan Sturgeon, my question is.

In regards to how do you guys have your slack structured for internal communication? We had tried to implement it earlier, but it just felt so chaotic using it specifically internally that I didn't feel like we were getting really any amount of value out of it. But at the same time time, a lot of people use it probably just got it structured wrong. So I'm curious to hear how you guys have yours structured to help kind of curb that chaotic feeling.

You're in good company. We, we, we struggled with the, the.

Chaos for a while too.

So a couple of thoughts. And Carlos, like, gets a little more passionate about communications than I do. I'm, I'm normally the one that causes the chaos. So I'll, I'll let him talk on it. But a couple of high level things to, to think about as somebody that's got a community. And then we've also got Slack. I mean, gosh, we have slacks for everything. Big lessons that I've learned is start with as few channels as possible and then only add more channels as necessary. Okay. Start with as few as you need. So maybe I don't, I don't know, maybe you're offering like bookkeeping, tax prep and CFO service. Maybe you just have internally for discussions about that. We like having, for internal use only, we'll have a couple of like channels that are just strictly for, like, our business and things going on. But then we have a channel for discussion about clients. So we might have Acme and, you know, awesome.com and books.com, like a channel for those. And then as we're talking about the clients internally, that helps keep it organized. And then we use a separate workspace for the clients. That way we're not ever worried about clients accidentally getting access to a channel inside our firm where there could possibly be sensitive information or they're reading something we don't want them to see. So we actually have a separate workspace for each client. Everything's on the free plan except for the. Our firm's plan. We pay for that one. So you don't need to pay for anything, you know, with your clients. And then we just have one channel. We, like, have like the. The CFO channel with our clients.

Right.

So we're. We're not in their whole Slack. Most clients already have a Slack, and we say, hey, create a channel and call it like KFE or CFO or whatever. And then just invite us in as guests so that, that way we don't see all the other. The other crap that they have going on. Then the other. I'll let Carlos speak to this. The primary chaos is not having kind of like clear expectations around communications as a team. You want to talk about how to set those expectations.

I think that a lot of the chaos starts when we're trying to talk about tasks and projects within those channels. And then all the comms kind of lose because it is sequential. Right. So you might have replies and stuff like that. But where in that thread that we discuss this or that? Right. So what we did is kind of clearly establish what gets communicated in. In Slack versus what gets communicated in a project management tool like Carbon. Right? Or like ClickUp, whatever you're using. Right. But work communication should live in the project management tool. So if we're talking about, let's say we're doing bookkeeping and there's a task for bookkeeping, all of the comms related to the bookkeeping for August or October or November or whatever should live in that task. Right? It should not be in Slack because the chaos comes. Where do we say that? Did we say that in Slack? Did we say that in ClickUp? Did we say that somewhere else? Everything around client work should live in one place. Now, stuff like Acme Inc. Wanted to have additional services to the package that could live in Slack. That could be a conversation that we have in Slack and we can go back and forth on that. But work items should live in whatever project management tool we're using, billing things.

Or there's a project coming up for the client that they're interested in. You could, Mike, could you quote that those things are all great for Slack.

The exception that we have to what.

You just talked about is if there's something that's time sensitive, it's really urgent, right? So you may not be just like hovering around in carbon or ClickUp all the time and you're getting ready to hop on a call with a client and you're like, oh crap, what's, what's going on with this? You know, and it's relative to tax or booking, whatever it is, then it's okay to, you know, DM somebody or put it in the channel and at them. So I, I think the message that we would send on that, Jonathan, is just get really clear with your team about how you want the communications to flow. You know, is it okay to AT people? Is it okay to at channel? You know, those things that just tend to add all the chaos and then model the way, set the expectations, but then manage them. If people start straying, you know, slap their hand. He gets me out like, Mike, knock it off. I get too many alerts in here.

It's like messages. I mean, I don't like to write, I don't like to message back and forth. Mike, he loves to write and he writes really quickly, so it's not an issue for him. But I write slowly, right? So what I said is if there's something that takes like more than five or seven messages back and forth, let's just pick up the phone and call or open up a Zoom meeting or whatever. You might set up a communication policy that looks like that, right? So either the conversation is too extensive, let's just have a meeting. Like I said, work related items live in the work task. In whatever project management solution that you're using, I think that takes the chaos out of it, most of it.

Does that answer your question, Jonathan?

Yeah, that's great. I had never. We've never really utilized the communication inside of our project management software. Looking at a way where we can practically implement that there and then using Slack for everything else makes a lot of sense.

GIFs and memes are always okay too in Slack. So anytime somebody's got some clever GIF or a meme, we want to make sure that everyone feels safe posting those.

Right? So.

All right, thanks.

Thanks for being here, Jonathan. All right, my friend, that's it for this week. If you found this episode valuable, it would mean the world to us if you would leave us a review. We love the thumbs up, we love the five stars. But if you could actually leave a review in the comments section, it would really help get the word out about the CFO report. It would mean the world to us. In the meantime, I can't wait to see you back right here next week. See you then.