60. How to Avoid Hourly Pricing Discussions as a CFO

Foreign.

You get on a sales call with a prospective CFO client and they start asking questions like, how many hours a month are you going to be working to earn this money? Or what days of the week are you going to be working for me, this is so frustrating because I don't know about you, but I got into the fractional CFO game because I didn't want to have to worry about clocking hours for somebody else. I didn't want to have to worry about my payment being a component of the number of hours that I worked. I wanted it to be a reflection of the value that I created, not the number of hours that I worked. So it's so frustrating when clients start asking us questions about how many hours we're going to work. The good news is there's a way to work around this. My name is Michael King, and welcome to the CFO Report, where I talk about starting, scaling, and optimizing fractional CFO services. Today I'm talking to one of my inner circle coaching clients named Brad. Brad found himself in this situation where he was sending a proposal to a prospective client. They wanted to know what days of the week, how many hours per month he was going to be working for them. I gave Brad some killer tips on how to avoid getting into this conversation in the first place. What did I tell Brad? Let's find out. Thanks for being here, brother.

You bet. Happy to be on. A lot of times when I'm. I've got a proposal I'm working on right here, which is great. A lot of times my clients want to try to pin me down into, like, a time period of time per week or days per week or hours per month or something like that. I'm just trying to figure out how to talk with them about that or take that out of the proposal. People just say, oh, they have 40 hours a week, and if I'm spending this much and you give me a day, a week or, you know, those kind of things, can you talk me through, like, how to navigate that conversation a little bit?

Sure. And just for context, what services are we talking about?

CFO services.

Awesome. That's the context I was hoping for. Have you watched the sales training?

I've watched some of it. I haven't gotten all three, but is that part of it?

It's not even that. It's part of it. Right. It's the way that you frame what you do and how you do it on the sales call. It's not even going to enter the conversation kind of the way it works is you're going to like go through about a half hour with them asking about their challenges and their goals, dreams, aspirations, fears and uncertainties. Then you're going to shift over where you're talking about your background, your values and philosophies and how those shaped your firm, right? Then you're going to get into what you do. And then that's where I go and I share the screen and I show my CFO report and I'm like, so what does the CFO service look like tactically? What do you get? Then I share my screen with them and I walk them through the CFO report. We're going to go through your critical four and then your cash flows and then your budgets and your projections and your goals and blah, blah, blah. And every month we're going to have one call that's 60 minutes long where we're going to talk about these things just like I showed you. We're also going to do a bi weekly check in call. It's 30 minutes long. We're going to talk about X, Y and Z. Right? So you go through the whole thing and again, like, I can't stress this enough. Always tying back to their goals. Why are cash flows important to their goals? Why are projections important for some of the uncertainties that they have in business? We're always tying it back. And then you're like, and so we have this package, it's called Brad's awesome CFO program and it's $4,000 a month. You've already set the expectation is what I do, this is how I do it. This is what you're going to get. This is why you need it, how this is how much it costs. And so they're not in a position where they're like, well, how many hours is that? Or you know, what days is that you've laid out? This is the deal. Now that that deal maybe isn't for them. They want someone that they feel like is on the clock for X amount of hours. But I don't get the sense that that's the kind of firm you're trying to build. And so that's okay if they opt out at that point. Right. But by really leaning into it and telling them what the deal is, you avoid those questions about hours and what days and those kinds of things.

Okay, that's helpful. I appreciate it.

All right, my friend, that's it for this week. If you found this episode helpful, you might also want to check out my free newsletter. The 5 minute fractional CFO every week I deliver one actionable tip to help you start, scale, or optimize your fractional CFO services. Go to the cfoaccelerator.com blog to get subscribed absolutely free. In the meantime, I can't wait to see you back here next week, my friend. I'll see you then.