85. Fractional CFOs: Avoid THIS Calendar KILLER

Foreign.

Have you ever had a fractional CFO client that you absolutely love working with? But it seems like every month their CFO calls inevitably go over the allotted time. That one hour call becomes a 90 minute call or even a two hour call and then your entire day, your entire calendar is just blown to bits. If you've been struggling with this, you're not alone. In fact, I was recently having a conversation with one of my inner circle members who's been struggling with this for months. What advice did I give her so that she can avoid going over on the these CFO calls again? Let's find out.

I just have a quick question and you know, I'm transitioning still in this and I am struggling to define my scope of work because I have some customers, but I don't know, they seem to be asking for a lot of things and I don't know how to manage that and not to damage the relationship. You know, I don't want to say no in a rude way, but how do you manage that?

Let me ask you a couple of questions to get to where we're at. So the, the best answer is you manage that through the sales. Like you really gotta set that scope and boundaries and expectations in the sales process. You reinforce it during the onboarding process and then you've gotta be disciplined about saying no during ongoing. Okay now so my question is, are you talking about with like you're struggling to get the scope now like before you bring clients on or is it after you've got clients you're fighting scope creep?

Yeah, already with customer, for example, I have one hour session and it can go up to three and I'm like, how do I get out of this.

You know, and being rude, Best way to do that. And like this is more art than science. So just know that like this is something you got to like feel in the moment and do. The best way to do it when you find a client that's like constantly going over on calls, is lay out the itinerary at the head at the beginning of the call or even before the call. So today what we're going to talk about, first we're going to go through critical four, then we're going to talk about cash flow forecast, then projections and we're going to get into your goals and we're going to lay out some things that we got to get done next month. Can we agree on that? Uh huh. And then you go through the call and that's why I have our CFO report in those specific tabs because it keeps the itinerary kind of on the screen and we know what we gotta get through. And then as they start rabbit holing on whatever thing, say, hey, this is a great question. Let's table that for a slack discussion or an email discussion or if we need to schedule another call, we could do that. But I wanna make sure that we get through all the stuff that we gotta talk about that was planned for the call today. And I think you can do that in a really nice way, but a firm way that lets them know another thing you can do that I think a lot of people just expect today is like, okay, hey, we're kicking off today. I just want to let you know I do have a hard stop at the end of the hour so I can make sure that I'm serving my other clients well. I do have to stop at the top of the hour or 60 minutes, 90 minutes, whatever that is, to really, like, set that boundary. Well, I always talk about, like, there's two things you gotta think about. You gotta set the boundary. That's the easy part. Then you gotta maintain the boundary, and that's where you gotta have the discipline to keep that call structured and moving along. As you can see, with just a little bit of intentionality and structure, you can make sure that your CFO calls don't go off the rails and end up eating up your entire day. 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.