Do THIS to Stop CFO Clients From Leaving

What is the number one sign that a client's getting ready to leave your fractional CFO firm? It's a lack of engagement. In today's episode, I'm going to share with you five pro tips that you can implement in your firm to keep your clients more engaged and less likely to churn. Let's dive in. Let's face it, the cards are stacked against us as fractional CFOs. Finances are a very, very personal topic for the vast majority of business owners. And so feelings of fear and uncertainty and doubt can creep in on any given CFO call. And so what CL will sometimes do as a defense mechanism is they'll stop engaging or worse, they'll stop showing up for CFO calls altogether. And when they do that, it's usually a sign that they're getting ready to cancel their services, which means that we've got to do everything that we can to keep them showing up and keep them engaged. I've found that there's five tactics that work wonders with helping with engagement, and the first one is to simply have an agenda for your CFO call. What I found is if clients don't clearly understand what to expect, then they're likely to find other things to invest their time in. Now, your agenda doesn't have to be overly complicated or complex. It could be as simple as starting off by talking about urgent questions or urgent items that they want to discuss, then moving into a review of the finances, getting into cash flow forecast and projections, and then wrapping up with action items and goals that they're going to focus on between now and the next call. Sending the client an agenda before the call reminds them why it's so important that they show up. This drastically improves the show rate and it results in clients showing up for the call with smarter questions. Another great engagement tactic is to start every call by asking the client if they have any urgent questions or topics that they want to discuss. Honestly, this is a huge miss for the vast majority of fractional CFOs. Why is this so important? Well, let's say that your client's sales are down 25% year to date. They're completely stressing out over it. If you start the call by launching into talking about tax strategies, do you think that they're going to listen to anything that you're talking about? Probably not. You have to create a space for them to ask their questions and be heard. Frankly, sometimes clients just need an opportunity to vent. It's important to remember that you don't have to answer all their questions or address all their concerns right there on the spot. Just let them know you hear them set expectations around when they can expect to hear back from you on those questions, or when they can expect resolutions on the things that they've learned. Product when it comes to generating CFO reports for my clients, my firm has two non negotiables. The process has to be accurate and it has to be efficient. That's why my firm only trusts Giacon. At its core, Giacon is a data connector between accounting platforms like QuickBooks and Xero and Google Sheets. But G Accon is so much more than just the data connector right out of the box. You're going to get hundreds of templates for all the reports that CFOs and accountants need to run for their everyday workflows. Everything from balance sheets to P Ls to AR aging reports. Or you can use G Accon like my firm does to create our custom CFO reports every single month. My favorite part about gfcon is that you can set it up to automatically create all of these reports. That means every month I'm getting fresh reports with fresh data ready to deliver to my clients. And because G Accon is automated, that has completely eliminated the need for my team to download data from QuickBooks, upload it into Google Sheets, manually, apply formulas. All of those things that take up a lot of time and are prone to errors. In fact, G Accon has completely replaced all the other tools, services and workflows that we were using to generate CFO reports. G Accon is literally our one stop shop for making all of our CFO reports automatically every single month. If you're ready to start saving time and reducing errors, then you need to check out G Accon right now. Be sure to use the link in the description below to save 30%. That means you can get started with GFCON for as little as $28 a month. Join my firm and over 10,000 other firms and try Ghan today. Another great tactic to increase engagement is to celebrate the wins. Let's be honest, our industry tends to focus too much on what's going wrong and not enough celebrating the things that are going right. The reality is our clients sometimes need somebody to cheer them on and celebrate the great things that are happening in their Another reason this is so important is because if we're negative all the time, a negative Pavlonian response is going to start to develop. In other words, if every time the client gets on a call with us, we're just sharing doom and gloom with Them, they're going to associate those feelings of doom and gloom with our CFO calls, which is going to lead to them not showing up for calls and them not being engaged. And again, after a while, they'll cancel. Remember, there's always wins that you can celebrate. Another important engagement tactic is to make sure that your advice and suggestions always points back to at least one of their goals. When a client can't clearly connect the dots between what you're suggesting and what their goals are, they feel like the work that you're doing isn't connected to their success, and they ultimately start to check out. Here's a great example. Let's say that you've got a client and they need to have a 60% gross profit margin, but they're currently sitting somewhere around 45%. So you start beating the drum every single month about things that they've got to do to increase their gross profit margin from 45% to 60%. That's great advice, right? But here's what ends up happening. The client doesn't hear that. What the client hears is, oh, my gosh, I've got a wedding come up, and I need to free up a bunch of extra cash every month from my business to help pay for the wedding. All I'm worried about is the wedding, and my fractional CFO is over here talking about gross profit margins. He doesn't understand me. Obviously, increasing gross profit margins are going to help the client increase their cash flows, but clients don't always connect those dots, so it's important that we do that for them. Instead, you might want to try considering this approach. All right, client, I know you've got a big wedding coming up in July, and I know that in order for you to pay for that, you're going to have to bring home an extra, extra $50,000 out of the business. Today, our gross profit margins are pretty low, and we need to focus on getting them from 45% to 60%. If you can do that, that's going to increase the extra $50,000 a month in cash flow that you need to pay for the wedding. Let's get started and figure out what we can do to get those margins up. Notice the difference? It's subtle, but important. When you nail this piece, clients are eager to talk to you because they see you as the person that's going to help them achieve their goals. The next engagement tactic is simultaneously the most simple yet the most impactful thing that we can do to increase in client engagement. And that's to just want to be there. I'll be the first one to tell you that the work that we do as a fractional CFO can be tough. The work is stressful. We're chasing never ending deadlines. We have clients that have shifting priorities. We have clients that sometimes don't even do the things that they say they're going to do. This can all have a tremendous impact on our energy and it can even impact the tone that we speak to our clients in. But our clients still need us to show up with positive energy. They need us to show up like we actually want to be there. Because the truth about leadership is that it's not about how we want to show up, but it's about showing up the way people need us to show up. So I want to encourage you before every CFO call, set your intention for your energy, for your tone in the intention, for the messaging that you want to deliver to your client. I found that there's a direct correlation between my energy and my client's engagement. In other words, when I act like I want to be there, my clients want to be there. Listen, if you notice that one of your clients engagement is starting to drop, maybe they're showing up late for calls or not showing up for calls at all, or maybe they're just showing up to the CFO calls completely under prepared. I want you to ask yourself, is there anything on this list that you can do differently to start driving that engagement back up? Because remember, at the end of the day, if client engagement drops and they end up canceling your services, then you can't have the impact that you want to have. Take a proactive ownership approach to engagement and your clients will stick around longer. If you found this episode helpful, I'd love it if you'd share it with a friend. In the meantime, I can't wait to see you back here next week, my friend. I'll see you then.