Help Fractional CFO Clients GROW (Here's how!)

Differences between a competent fractional CFO or a competent coach and a great one is their ability to facilitate growth.

If we are trying to help people grow or to use the language you use, facilitate growth, we've got to start with information and then we can get on a path for winning. But more often than not, what we've seen is we are able to facilitate growth at a much more rapid rate because we've created a system for ongoing evaluation, improvement.

A lot of times one of the differences between a competent fractional CFO or a competent coach and a great one is their ability to facilitate growth on the other end of what they're doing. And so it becomes less about displaying your competency and more about leveraging those soft skills to have those outcomes. Like you said earlier, it's, you know, it's not about the answer, but it's about how do we ask better questions so that they arrive at the answer. Again, it's the difference between self serving and other serving is if we can get our clients, regardless of industry, to be able to think differently and come to the answers on their own. Well, now all of a sudden we're in a very elite group of trusted advisors on their team.

That's so good. There's so much that you mentioned in that that's so powerful. But specifically you, you highlighted one of my favorite words, the word growth. Right. And this word is in the name of our company. Right. I, I have dedicated my business and a large portion of my life to helping people experience healthy growth. And, and I'd love to share just a four part framework that we have on man, if you want to grow in any area or you want to help someone grow in any area, like how do you go about doing that? Right. Well, there's four p have found in my own growth journey, but also in studying people that have applied the topic of growth to a wide variety of areas from athletics to ministry to academia to the marketplace. It's like there's always these four elements included, right. And so number one is information. Obviously you've got to get people the basic information that they need to be able to make decisions, to be able to understand where they are. And you also need to get the information from them to say where, where are we at today? This connects to what we were talking about earlier in this conversation. It's a Max Dupre quote where he says the first responsibility of leadership is this define reality. Right. And so let's just get our head wrapped around the facts because the good thing about facts is they don't really care about our feelings, which is a really powerful thing. So we start with information. Then the second piece that we so often forget is from there we move to representation. So. So it's one of the things that I see in your content on LinkedIn or even in some of your webinars and things like that that you do is you never just tell people, just trust me, right? I'm just asking you to blindly trust me that what I'm telling you works or that this is how you do it. You are always referencing testimonials and case studies and that's so powerful because success leaves clues and human beings are imitative creatures. So if we are trying to help people grow or to use the language you use, facilitate growth, we've got to start with the represent or we've got to start with information, right? Make sure that they know the base level knowledge that they need. But then we have to give them a representation that, hey, if you do these things, if you follow this path, if you exercise this framework, it's possible for you to experience success. And I've got living proof right here. So information representation evaluation. So often we follow Stephen Covey's advice and we start with the end in mind, but then we don't have a system for ending with the end in mind. And we never ask the question with ourselves or with our customers, did we do what we said we would do? And man, if you're, if you do not have a system for consistently and deliberately evaluating, how did we do compared to what we said we would do? I guarantee you, you are leaving both opportunity for impact and dollars on the table without a shadow of a doubt. And then finally, never ending improvement. So information representation, evaluation and improvement. And that's how we say, okay, based on what we said we were going to do and what we did, how do we just get better? Because the best practice can always be made better.

I think in my firm and in the CFO accelerator as well. Huge opportunity that you just said. You kind of kicked me in the shin. I'm like, ah, that's me. And just thinking through so many of the firms that I've worked with, the opportunity to be better at evaluation is clear and present. Can you give some ideas, practically speaking or tactically speaking, on are there some questions that you should be asking of yourselves or of your clients, or is there something data wise that you should be looking at to evaluate, to make sure that you're delivering at the level that you had hoped?

This is. You already alluded to it this is, I believe, the number one area where people are leaving opportunity on the table is a rhythm for effect, effectively reflecting and evaluating on performance so that we can engage in a process for never ending improvement. The first thing that want anyone that's a fractional CFO to understand is that for effective evaluation to occur, you have to start with a standard, right? What is a standard? It's a clarified benchmark of what winning looks like. It's what success is. Now at Path for Growth within our company, the tool that we use is called success statements. And what I always tell our team, and this is what we help business owners around the country implement is we say what are success statements? They are for every role, project, meeting or bulk of work that your going to undertake. Three to five statements that define what does winning look like. And so this is us starting with the end in mind, right? So for me and my role, right, Success statements, the vision is clear, communicated and being executed upon the or the cultural health of Path for Growth is healthy, vibrant and maturing, right? Path for Growth's finances are managed and profitable, right? So we're setting a statement of what success looks like for my role. Now we also have success statements for every customer call that we do. We have success statements for every customer engagement of six months, 12 months, 18 months. That we do, right? And we say at six months we want these three to five statements to be true. What that represents is in a is a standard and without a standard you can't have effective evaluation. But what's so cool is with a standard, right? Then you create the framework necessary for intentional evaluation. Because we're establishing intent, we're establishing our decided aim. And then on the back end or even in the middle we can say, okay, red, yellow, green, red is that statement is not true. Yellow, that statement is inconsistently true. Green, that statement is consistently true. And we just evaluate where are we at compared to where we said we wanted to be. And what's so cool is our coaching manager, Olivia. You know Olivia well, she implemented in our business customer health checkups with our customers because we were like, we're actually operating on some assumptions of we're saying the customer's all red, yellow, green, green. But what if we, this is a novel idea. What if we just asked them like how are we doing compared to what we both agreed we said we wanted to do. And what's crazy now is on a once a quarter basis, the customer and their coach engage in a customer health evaluation where they read yellow, green. The key indicators of success for that relationship. And what's wild is the result of that is alignment. Right? And we say, even if we're not winning right now, it's okay because we both can name that and then we can get on a path for winning. But more often than not, what we've seen is we are able to facilitate growth at a much more rapid rate because we've created a system for ongoing evaluation and improvement.

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This genius. And it's one of those things that for me, falls into the bucket of, well, this is all common sense. But the reality is common sense isn't always common practice. And so I'm like, this is full, full vulnerability here. I'm like, well, of course you should do that. But also, as you and I talked about before, like, we've fallen short on that in my firm a lot of times. And you know, what can end up happening is as a fractional cfo, we think that we're all green in all of the areas, but we haven't had that opportunity for alignment with our clients to make sure that that answer is an all green for them. And then you get shocked when they say, hey, this isn't working out Any longer. And I think there's a, sometimes there's frankly a fear of, you know, I don't want to know that the baby's ugly, you know, kind of thing.

Well, you're going to find out.

You're going to find out. And, you know, so what I, what I like to say a lot of times is, yes, it's going to be awkward to have that conversation and find out that there's misalignment, but it's also awkward to find out later when the client comes and they're dissatisfied and says, I'm going to take my money elsewhere. Pick your awkward. Just pick your awkward.

So good.

So, yeah, can you give. One of the questions that I have is when you're thinking through the monthly or quarterly or annual success statements, are those success statements that you're then taking to your clients and asking for them to reflect on does, do you as the CEO, or you and your team figuring out what those are, or do you come up with those success statements kind of individualized for each client, where they say, hey, success for me each month, each quarter, each year would look like this. And then you're kind of collaborating and agreeing on them or how do you approach that?

Yeah, so good. Our, our team has drank the success statement. Kool Aid is what I say. We have success statements for the way we write success statements. Right. Like we, we just believe so much in the power of establishing intent for the things that you're going to do. And we've seen it, I mean, transform the way that we do business and the way we scale our business. What I would say is yes, is the answer to your question. So we have standardized success statements that we want to be true for every coaching relationship that Path for Growth engages in. Obviously those are going to be a little bit more broad. They're going to be a little bit more principle based and value based. And then every coaching engagement and even every coaching call often has individual success statements that are way more customized and catered to the individual and what they're focused on. But I mean, it, it was one of those things that after I figured it out, I was like, you knucklehead, what have you been doing for the past year and a half? Because when you enter into a call and say, hey, I've got three success statements for today's 90 minute call. If we accomplish these things, will this call be a home run for you? And then you read them, one of two things is going to happen. They're going to say yes, and then it's like an open book test. It's like, okay, well this is what we're going to accomplish today. Or they're going to say, you know, no, actually I don't really need to focus. And this actually probably happens. I don't know, I would say 30% of the time they're going to say, actually that's not as big of an issue for me right now. I actually would really focus on this. And our coach will go on the call with them and rewrite that success statement. And what you say, whenever a person says, actually that's not a home run, I'd like to change the format of the call to focus on these outcomes. You say, thank God that's the proper response. Because it's like, man, we could have just spent 90 minutes on something that you didn't actually care about. And what I found is that people will go along for the ride and you won't find out that they didn't care about it until they're canceling four months later. And it's like, man, if we could just front load and get proactive about the things that we have been reactive on. It changes everything in terms of our ability to serve them.

Do you, do you have your coaches send those success statements ahead of the call to give the coaching client the opportunity to reflect and say, yeah, this is great or no it's not or are you presenting them for the first time on the coaching call?

So I would say it varies. And part of this is like I would love to be hyper standardized and say 48 hours before the call the customer is getting success statements and I think eventually we will move towards that. We're a four year old business and I'm constantly learning how we can improve this. But then also the success statements are based on a prep form that the customer receives a week before. And we work with business owners, right? There are times where you and there are people that their personality type is, I'm going to submit my prep form a week before and it's going to be like a long, drawn out, thoughtful journal entry of the five pages of what's going on in my business. And man, we love this piece, people. Those people are epic because they give us what we need to win and they make it really clear there's some people that they send their prep for five minutes before the call. Right? And that's okay, right? We never, we are here to serve that person. So we're never going to tell that person, well, you know, this could have been more valuable. It's like, we're here to meet you where you're at, and hopefully we can buy you some margin to where eventually we could schedule the prep form being sent in, you know, even a few days before. But as a result, success statements are always going to be built based around the prep material that we have, because we never want to again build a vision of success that's solely based on assumptions. It's got to be built in some ways on the ongoing communication we have with them.

So what I'm hearing you say is the success of the call is determined in the preparation before the call.

We. We train our coaches on agenda setting, and we train our coaches on how to create agendas, how to communicate agendas, and how to execute agendas. And that's the type of thing that you could think to yourself, like, oh, why would any competent, highly capable person need training on that? That's just, like, a commonly used skill. Our coaches are unbelievable. Every single coach in our business has owned or run a business themselves. They are wildly competent people. And what we always see is, man, I've never thought that coach thinking about creating and then communicating an agenda could be so intentional. And so, so often, really effectively building a business just looks at a. Looks like a business owner saying, we're going to spend 90 days to dial in. How do we document what this looks like when it's done right? Not how do we do this? How do we document what this looks like when it's done right? There's been times where you've created an agenda and you've done it on the fly. And like, you. You. You know, you're, like, scrambling to get it all together. We're not going to document that. Right? What we're going to document is that time that you, like, got really stoked about a call, and you're like, I'm gonna really get this ready, and I'm gonna do all my homework, and I'm gonna make sure I show up feeling confident and prepared and engaged. I'm gonna have some questions already documented that I'm gonna ask this person all of that. Whatever your process was there, that's your recipe, and we're going to document your recipe, and then we're not going to. So many. So many. Oh, my gosh. So many business owners are operating like celebrity chefs that have all these secret recipes. It's like. But they want to scale their business. It's like, get rid of all your secret recipes. You should be Nestle Toll House in terms of sharing your recipes, right? Like, you should be so upfront about what your recipe is, because that's going to help people win.