Client Onboarding Secrets

If you want to increase the lifetime value of your fractional CFO clients, then you've got to get really good at reducing what I call TTV or time to value. That's the amount of time that it takes for your clients to see for the first time that, oh my gosh, hiring you as a fractional CFO was the absolute right thing to do. And that all happens right inside the new client onboarding process. Today I'm going to share with you four things that you need to be thinking about during the new client onboarding process to reduce TTV and increase the lifetime value of your clients. Let's dive in. Hey, my friends, I am coming at you today from sunny Pensacola, Florida. My team and I are here onboarding a brand new client in person and I've got onboarding front of mind and I was thinking about the four components of a really healthy onboarding process in the reasons that they're there. And so I thought I would just turn the camera on really quick and, and share some of my thoughts with you about onboarding. I think a lot of people sleep on the onboarding process and they treat it as just this opportunity to get access to their ERP or QuickBooks or whatever their key accounting systems and CR systems they might have. And while that's really important, I think that if you stop there, then you're really reducing a lot of the value that needs to come from the onboarding process so that you can get things started off on the right foot. So if you are a fractional CFO that really wants to figure out how do I get my customers to stick with me from longer than six months or longer than a year, or longer than two years, I'm here to tell you that a lot of that really hinges on how well you navigate the onboarding process. So get out your pen and paper. I've got a lot of really important information for you today. So the first part of the onboarding process is actually, I think, not getting all the access that we talked about. We're going to talk about that here in just a minute. But I think the first part of a really good onboarding process is setting expectations. Expectations about the relationship, expectations about what they should expect from you, and vice versa. You know, I talk a lot about the importance of setting expectations and setting the scope clearly in the sales process. You want to do it then, but even if you just close the client, even if you just had that sales process 24, 48, 72 hours ago, I think it's really important to kick Things off and go over those expectations, the scope of work one more time. And so during this part of the onboarding process, I like to do exactly what you might think. Start off by talking about what was that scope of work. We're going to go through the scope of work for the onboarding and for the month to month services, line by line. We're going to ask questions to make sure that the client understands exactly what it is we do and what we don't do so that there's no questions later, there's no hard feelings later. What happens a lot of time during the sales process is there's a lot of adrenaline and dopamine and everybody's excited to get started. And sometimes clients lose a little bit of what you said you were going to do. They start reading and interpolating things. And if you're not careful about making sure that those expectations are grounded in the scope of work out of the gate, then sometimes things start off on a rough patch. And so one of the things, for example, that you might want to talk about during that expectation setting conversation is, hey, we don't do bookkeeping or we don't do taxes, or we do tax strategy, but we don't file taxes. I don't know what your scope of work is, but go through your scope of work and spend some time talking about what it is you do and what it is you don't do. Similarly, during that expectation setting part of the conversation, I think it's important, important to let the client know what you expect of them. I think it's important for you to let them know that you expect them to show up on time for the CFO calls, that you expect them to show up for those calls in a, in a professional quiet office, not while they're, you know, on their, on FaceTime, driving down the road in their car to make sure that they have the appropriate team members on the call, to make sure that they are prepared for the call. Giving them some ideas of the things that you need from them to do to be prepared for the call. Maybe you send your CFO report to them 72 hours ahead of time like we do, and you need them to review that CFO report ahead of time to bring questions. I don't know what it is that you need from your clients, but let them know in this very first part of onboarding what you expect of them. Similarly, I think it's important that you let the client know what they should expect of you. And now this kind of goes hand in hand with Reiterating that, reiterating the scope. But just let them know like, hey, this isn't just a free ride for me. What you can expect from me is A, B, C and D. And this is when you can expect it from me. So that they know very clearly, clearly what's coming and when they should expect it. So really start that onboarding process off with setting expectations. What my firm has actually been doing for the last four or five months now is we actually have an orientation call with our new clients. It's a 30 minute call where we just walk through a simple 6 or 7 PowerPoint slide deck where we walk through all of these things. We review the scope of work for onboarding and ongoing. We talk about what we expect from them, what they should expect from us. We talk about the things that we do and the things that we don't do. And then we give them the opportunity to ask any questions. And then from there we lay out very specifically what the rest of our onboarding process looks like. Your dates, deliverables, those kind of things, and then what the ongoing process should look like. So start your onboarding process by setting expectations. The second part of a healthy onboarding process is getting those accesses that we talked about earlier, those things that a lot of us know that we've got to just do anyway. And it's not a whole lot more complicated than that. In fact, on the onboarding call, we will transition from those expectation settings right into, hey, let's go ahead and log into Sage or NetSuite or QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks Desktop. Walk them through the process right there on the call to get them to give you the access that you need. If you've been in the game very long at all, you've probably been frustrated before with clients that you're asking for access to QuickBooks and they can't figure out how to do it. And then there's like this email back and forth and then you know, at some point you're like, gosh, nevermind, let's just hop on a zoom call and then you resolve it in like five minutes. So we found that it's just best to let them know, hey, on this orientation call, we also need you to have, you know, XYZ pulled up because we're going to need you to go ahead and get us, give us access. So you know, when you're thinking about access, just things like CRMs, sales platforms, accounting platforms, Slack or teams, if that's kind of the platform that you want from them. But it's great to go ahead and get that access right there on the orientation call or on the onboarding call, if that's how you do it. The third part of a really healthy onboarding process is before onboarding is done, I think that you need to deliver some sort of a CFO report, some sort of a report where you've got a review of the historic financials for some period of time. Maybe it's the last year, maybe it's, it's monthly for the last year. You figure that out, what's, what's right for your firm and your clients. But you need to have some kind of report with a review of historical financials for some periodicity. But also you need to have a report that's got some forward looking financials as well, some kind of cash flow forecast and projections. These don't need to be super dialed in at this point. In fact, I would argue that there's no way they can be really dialed in at this point because you haven't had many opportunities yet or enough opportunity to work with your client to understand what backlogs look like, to understand what the sales pipeline truly looks like. And so you might just take some rules of thumb, some general guidelines based off of historical trends and things that you've learned about the business during the onboarding process, to build some rudimentary forecast and projections, and to put those in place.

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What I like to tell clients is, hey, this first set of forward looking financials are going to be wrong. They're going to be very wrong. Perhaps. But I want you to look at this As a starting point for us to start getting into the business and start looking at the things that you know to be true, the things that you know are coming down the pipeline in the business. And then over the next month or two, we're going to start really working together with operations and with your existing accounting team to get those, those forward looking financials really dialed in to a place where we can start to work from them. I think it's so important that during onboarding before it's over, and I like to think of onboarding is really taking 30 days or less. I think you've got to get to the point that you can do all four of these things that I'm covering here in the onboarding process done within 30 days. We'll talk a little bit more about why that's important later, but by the end of that 30 days you need to have a forward looking set of financials. Now the other thing that I think you really need to do in this phase before the onboarding is over is you've got to get that client to what I call the aha moment. The aha moment is when they have that like light bulb moment where they're like, oh my gosh, this is why I hired a fractional cfo. These are the insights that I was looking for. And so you might be asking yourself, well, how do I get to that aha moment? What are some examples of good aha moments? Well, I think there's a couple of things you can do. You find an insight about the business that's valuable to them that they may not have recognized. You find a way to, you know, some low hanging fruit to increase profitabilities or cash flows. A great one that, you know, believe it or not, a lot of businesses get mind blown by is you might just pull their, their AR aging and you might see that they've got, you know, a significant amount of money. You know, that's somewhere in that 60 to 90 day past due range. I can't tell you the number of times we've worked with a client that looks like a really healthy business and they have a quarter of a million dollars sitting in the 60 to 90 day bucket of AR aging. And the CEO had no idea because you know, he just thought that the old controller, the bookkeeper or somebody else was keeping their eye on aging. And you know, you're like, hey, not only do you have this X amount of money that's just sitting there and aging, we can help you put some very basic processes and reporting in place. So those things don't go unnoticed in the future. And so you might even just set up an automated AR aging report in QuickBooks Online that gets mailed to, you know, whoever does invoicing for the company once a month or every 45 days. So it keeps it front of mind. So look for those opportunities to deliver that aha moment right there during the onboarding process. One of my firm's goals is to try to find enough value and enough savings during onboarding to pay for us for six months to a year, to pay for our full services for up to a year. Now we can't always do that, but we've got things built in process wise, some toolbox is what I call it, of things that we can look to that are common, low hanging fruits for us to come in and add that value right away if you can. If you can go in and show in the first 30 days how they can pay for you in savings in the first year, man, that's a home run. And it really builds trust from the client in what it is that you're doing. They're going to stick around so much longer when you can deliver that kind of value in 30 days. The final thing that I think you've got to do during offer, if you want to really increase the lifetime value and decrease that time to value in that first 30 days, is you've got to come up with some kind of goals with them and then put together a roadmap, a 30,000 foot view roadmap of how you're going to work together over the next six to 12 months and how you're going to help them accomplish those goals. Now this is really the hardest part of onboarding. It's really hard to get to this point in 30 days, but trust me, it can be done if you're intentional and deliberate about it. So what are we talking about here? Well, first, you know, I'm a firm believer that every fractional CFO client should have defined personal goals for the owners and for the major stakeholders as well as for the business. And you do them in that order. So part of our onboarding process is we sit down with the owner and the major shareholders or stakeholders and we have them go through this exercise of identifying their personal goals. Then we translate those personal goals into some sort of business goals. Into the extent that we can, we translate those business goals into something that the CFO actually cares about and something that the CFO can control. Now the reality is you're not going to be able to solve, solve all of those problems in one month, three months, six months, maybe even a year. And I think most clients are reasonable and they know that if it was that easy, they probably would have already figured out how to do those things before they hired you. But what clients want to see is kind of just those, that directional guideline on how you're going to help them get there meaningfully in six to 12 months. You know, what are the things that we're going to be working on together over the next six or 12 months that are going to help us get towards those goals? Now those goals might be five year goals, they might be three year goals, but don't stress about that, but just start to put that roadmap together on the things you're going to work on on the first quarter together the first six months in the first year so that the client knows, hey, I hired you to help me achieve the goals. Now I at least know that there's some kind of plan that we're working on together that's going to help us get there. Now, inevitably, as you work with the client longer, you're going to realize that those goals weren't the right goals or that the goals have changed or evolved. And so certainly your strategy is going to have to evolve. But where you give the client that peace of mind in the first 30 days during onboarding that you see them, you hear them, you understand what their goals are, you understand what their priorities are, they see that your goals and priorities are aligned with their goals and priorities and that you have a clue of how you're going to help them get there. Gosh, it just, it really elevates that trust. It really elevates your perceived value that you're bringing to them and it reduces again that time to value. You're getting in there and adding that value. You're giving them that clarity in under 30 days. So what have we done? Yeah, we got the access that we needed to QuickBooks or the ERP and the CRM. But we've also re outlined expectations. We made sure that we're all starting from the same place. We've put together forecasts, we've put together projections, we've delivered that aha moment where they can really start to see some value, some very specific tangible wins from hiring you. And then we've also got goals laid out on paper and we got a roadmap that gives the business owner confidence that you know kind of how you're going to steer them and how you're going to get there. Now I've Said a couple of times in this video, you really want to try to get that done in under 30 days. One of the things that I found is the longer it takes to check all of those boxes that we've just gone through, the longer that it takes to do those things, the less clients stick around, the longer it takes. If it takes you 60 days or 90 days to check all those boxes, client lifetime just tends to be a lot shorter. Why is that? You know, they start to ask themselves questions after the first 30 days and 60 days. Like, gosh, I'm not, I'm not really getting that confidence that I was hoping that I would have by working with them that this is going to work. They start every month, they're asking themselves questions, did I, did I really, Am I spending my money in the right spot? They may stick around for a little while after that, but once they start getting those questions in their head, the client's not going to be around longer. And I've just from doing this for eight and a half years now. I've worked with 100 some odd businesses and coaching hundreds of other fractional CFOs. I've just found that when you can get this onboarding process done and you can get that, that time to value down, they stick around longer. So what's the takeaway for this? Go back and take a morning to just journal about your onboarding process, to think about the onboarding process and ask yourself, am I just getting access to systems during onboarding or are there other opportunities for me to reduce that time to value and add actual value to the clients during that time? Now here's the cool part, here's the bonus. To the extent that you can process this out and you can explain how you're going to do these things during the sales process, that you can actually start charging more for onboarding. We recently signed a few new clients and we were charging 20 to $30,000. 20 to $30,000 for multiple clients for onboarding. And they're absolutely loving it. I mean, on the onboarding, they're thrilled to be working with us. Go back three years ago. I would never have imagined that we were charging clients this kind of money. But we're actually adding tangible financial value to the business during this time and so they don't mind paying for it. So there's a financial outcome for your clients at stake here, but there's also a financial outcome for your firm as well. I hope this was helpful for you today, my friends. See you next week.