How To Get On Stage As A Fractional CFO (Simple)

If you'll just say, hey, would it serve your audience well if I talked about X, Y or Z and have like that really small list for them to pick from? Just go and ask. They will say yes more times than they say no. If I could go back in time, I don't know that I would advise myself to start a second company. I've beaten the hell out of myself repeatedly over, gosh, I did not expect it to take this much.

So what do you think are some of the biggest keys to being able to. To get onto stage for some people who are looking to take the next step there? How do they get on stage?

Ask. Ask for the opportunities. Until you have a really well established brand, personal brand, or business brand, and people know you as the the guy or the gal that gets up and CFO stuff, there's a near 0% chance that people are going to come knocking asking you to please get up on their stage or on their podcast or their YouTube channel or their webinar or their mastermind group or their coaching program and talk about the things you talk about. They're just not going to do it. No matter how great we think that we are, they're just not going to do it. It's not that they don't want you to. Most people just don't know that you would even do that. They don't even know to ask you to do that. And what I found time and time again over the years is if you'll just say, hey, would it serve your audience well if I talked about X, Y or Z and have like that really small list from them for them to pick from and just go and ask? They will say yes more times than they say no. Because there's not a lot of people in our industry that are out there saying, hey, I'd love to talk about this. Would you like me to so compare that to, hey, would you like me to come talk to your audience about mindset? Would you like me to come talk to your audience about the importance of physical health? Would you like me to come talk to your audience about the importance of saving for retirement? There's a million people out there clamoring to talk to every audience about that stuff, but there's not that many people that are like, hey, I would love to talk to your audience about the importance of a cash flow forecast and how to make better decisions in your business based off of a cash flow forecast. Or I'd love to talk to your audience about the critical four financial metrics that every entrepreneur needs to know to be successful or whatever your stick is, right? It's, and it's normally around cash flow management, what numbers to look for, what do the numbers mean? We don't have to get into these. Like, you know, I want to talk to your audience about the importance of managing the cash conversion cycle in the three levers that they can pull to, you know, increase their cash conversion cycle from, you know, X to Y. Like no one wants to hear about that crap. So keep it super, super simple, but just ask for the opportunities and people will say yes. And over time, as you get more and more of those opportunities and people see you on stage, or they see you on webinars or they hear you on podcasts, they're like, oh my gosh, I would really love to have them come talk to my audience about that. But I've been doing it pretty consistently for probably four years now. And I'm just now to the point where people are asking me to come and speak to their audience and those are even few and far between. But it just started in the last year or so where people are like asking me to come. And so it takes more than you think it will take. But if you want the opportunity, just swallow that fear that people are going to tell you no, it's in and know that some of them probably will. But my guess is more will say yes than say no. If, if you go ask and you're clear on what it is you want to talk about.

Yeah, no, that's great. I think it's really great practical advice for where a lot of people are today. Do you see any one of any number of these being more certainly profitable but more worthwhile for producing those leads?

Well, the ones that you do are way more worthwhile than the ones that you don't do. So if you're one of those people that you're like, well, gosh, should I do podcasts or webinars or should I do masterminds or should I speak on stage? Should I do big stages, smaller stage, like, it doesn't matter. Just, just try, just do, just do one of them and just get in the game. Now if you're at a point where time starts to become an issue and, and you're equally comfortable across all of them, and there's certainly being on a zoom call with five people is way more comfortable than being on stage with 500 people. But if, you know, all things being equal, then I would say always take the in person on stage opportunities. Hands down, that has the biggest return on investment of both money and time compared to any of the other opportunities that will like, are likely to ever present themselves.

How to maximize when you're on stage.

Once you get the opportunity to get on stage, it's really, really important to that you make the most of that opportunity. And so the question becomes, well, how do I go about doing that? So there's a couple of things that I've learned after speaking on stage a bunch of times now. Focus on having one, maybe two keynotes that you give. Don't try to come up with something fresh for every single audience. Now that said, I think that every time you get on stage, it needs to be tailored to that audience, to that industry, to, to those circumstances. But let's just take the idea of maybe your keynote is on the importance of cash flow forecasting and maybe like the five steps to creating a cash flow forecast. Sure, the, the, the meat of the keynote is, is those two things. But what industry are you talking to and what is that industry going through right now that having a cash flow forecast is so important? Or maybe the theme for the conference is marketing. And so you might put the spin on it around, well, look, marketing is really important, but if you don't know how much cash you can afford to put towards your marketing spend, then you could be underspending or overspending and both of those can be catastrophic for your business. And so your spin might be when it comes to calculating marketing spend, here's why it's so important to have a cash flow forecast. What a lot of people try to do is come up with something unique. And one thing I've learned is it takes a lot of reps of giving the same keynote in front of a live audience to really get comfortable to the point that the keynote's delivered and it really feels like a home run. So if you're trying to every time come up with a brand new keynote, you're probably going to struggle to get traction with it. The other thing that I would say is, and this is something you've got to coordinate with the host of the event ahead of time, is what is your call to action at the end of the keynote. So there's typically a couple different ways that this can play out. One is they say, hey, you are forbidden contractually from pitching your services in any way, shape or form from stage. And I understand that. I'm the same way with my conference as well. I'm not trying to bring a bunch of people in pitching their wares. It's all about adding value to the audience. And that's okay because when I get off stage, I make sure that it's okay that I'm available to answer one on one questions if people have them. And the amazing thing is there will be a line of people waiting for you even if you do a mediocre job on stage, wanting to talk to you about cash flow forecasts in their business and how can they do that and is that something that you could help with as a fractional cfo? So that's the first situation is you're forbidden from selling anything on stage. The second one is, hey, I don't really want you selling. But if you want to give the audience an opportunity to connect with you, you could put your email address or you could use a QR code that put sends them to a contact me page. That's a great option. And then the third one is sometimes people just allow you to overtly sell from stage and oftentimes if they do that, they will want, you know, some kind of a rev share or a commission or something off of those sales. So I would say before you go and speak, whether it's on a small group or if it's a big group on stage, talk to the host that's invited you there and get really clear on what's, what's inbounds and what's out of bounds for that. But make sure that you've got some kind of a plan to capitalize on, on that audience's attention and the notoriety you're going to get that five seconds of fame that you're going to get while you're there. Or it may be a lost opportunity. And if none of those things are in play and you're just getting started, then maybe it's okay for you to not have any of those things be in play and just get some reps. Getting on stage and getting the butterflies out. And that might serve you as well. But just be clear ahead of time on, on. What's in it for you? Is it just a rep or is there one of those three opportunities for you to do biz dev at the end of it?

Yeah, I think that's so well said for speaking engagements. What would you say to someone who is struggling to identify what they should talk about?

If you're struggling to figure out what you want to talk about on stage, here's a couple easy questions to ask yourself. What do you wish every client knew before they worked with you? Like if, if every client knew this or these two or three things before they started working with you? What would make your life easier? And then talk about that? Well, why is that so great? So what are the things that we all, as fractional CFOs wish our clients knew? Because it slows us down. It limits the things that we can talk about on a CFO call. So a basic understanding of the financial statements and what are the key numbers that they need to understand. What's the difference between gross profit and net profit? It's mind boggling how few business owners that have even been around some years or decades understand the difference between gross profit or net profit, or the difference between net profit and cash. I mean, how many times have we heard that conversation like, well, my business is profitable, but I don't have any cash. And when we spend our time as fractional CFOs on our CFO calls, answering that time and time again, we're not talking about a lot of the forward looking things and the strategic things because we're having to answer those building block questions. Another thing would be if clients understood what a cash flow forecast was and how to use a cash flow forecast, they're not spending all of their time saying, hey, is it safe for me to go and pay for this? Is it a good decision for me to go and do this? And we get caught a lot of times in those very tactical kinds of questions with our clients. So think about, like, what do you wish every new client knew before they started working with you? And talk about that. Another question is, what do you wish all of your former clients knew after they finished working with you? Like, what are those things that you say, gosh, when I'm done working with a client, my hope for them is that they walk away understanding this one or these two or three things at a level that they didn't understand before. And maybe that's the importance of, like, goal setting. Maybe that's the importance of, hey, you've worked with me for a year. I hope you know now how important it is to block off time every month to look at your numbers and to ask yourself these three or four questions about the numbers. And so I think that those are, those are two really simple questions that you can start in determining what to talk about again, whether it's on stage or on a podcast or on a webinar. Because those are fundamental things that everybody probably needs to know anyway and it'll make your life easier as the fractional cfo.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that. I think whenever I was starting to develop my keynote, I was struggling to find my Voice in all of it. Right. Like you think, you know, as someone who has, like, lived and breathed this, worked with, you know, forecast, et cetera. And you can be very technical in nature. You can feel like this is just so basic. Would anybody really. Anybody really value this?

Would you say to that, well, we all suffer. And there's a term for it. I think it's the tragedy of wisdom or something like that. But it's just we forget a lot of times that the thing that we're involved in, the topic that we're involved with and in the weeds with every day, we take for granted that not everybody knows those things to the extent that we do. And so we, we. We start with this assumption that they already know that, or that they'll think this is too basic or I need to talk, you know, this about this advanced thing for them to get value out of it. And the reality is that's simply not true. We grossly underestimate what, what people know. And there's also something to be said for the idea that common sense isn't always common practice. And so one of the things that I'll build into my keynotes, if I'm worried for a given audience that some of the things I'm gonna talk about are too basic, one of the things I'll build into the keynote is, hey, I know a lot of you may already know this, but let me ask you this. How many of you are actually doing this? And so if you're listening, you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, Mike, I already know that. Well, if I were to challenge you to say, show me your calendar where you're actually doing this, my guess is you're probably not doing all of these things. And so I want to encourage you, even if you think you already know some of these things, I'm going to tell you, use this as an opportunity to calendar, reflect, and say, am I doing those things? Am I serving my business well with how I'm leveraging this information? And my bet is there's going to be something or a couple of things I'm going to share with you today that you didn't know you had a misconception about or you're not doing at the highest level. So get out your pen and paper, put your phone on, do not disturb, and let's dive into this.

Yeah. And I think that that, like, increases your credibility and authority from stage all the more that you're able to be aware of that. That really the pitfalls are in the execution and most people likely aren't aren't coming through on that end, so. That's so.

Well.