The Secret To The Perfect CFO Call In 2024.

I argue that being prepared for a CFO call is actually a two headed monster because you've got to be prepared for the CFO call. But I also believe that the client has to be prepared for the CFO call as well. And so I want to touch base a little bit on how do we prepare our clients for the CFO call. I believe that preparation for our clients comes from us sending a great agenda before the call. As you are doing your preparation on week two, one of the outputs of that preparation is I want you to come up with a thesis for the CFO call. Well, what's a thesis for the call? Well, it's the same thing that a thesis was back in college when we were writing reports. What is the central message? If you had like one sentence, maybe two sentences, what's the central theme or message or big idea for that month? And then when you send your clients the agenda, I want you to start that email off with the thesis. Hey, I'm excited for our call coming up on Thursday. The thing that I really want us to focus on is figuring out how do we get gross profit margins from 32% to 36%. That's going to help with XYZ cash goal we have or whatever. What's the thesis? The main message that's important to do because when you send that to the client, if the client has some other big thing going on, they're going to let you know right now. So as an example, I used the revenue drop earlier, right? If your thesis is on improving gross margins, but your client just lost a big client, they lost a big contract or they had a key employee quit, or they had a major safety thing happen at work and they're shut down because of OSHA or whatever it is. They're going to see your thesis and if it's out of alignment with what's important to them, they're going to be like, that's great, but that's not what we're talking about this month. Having a thesis will also force you to get your shit together. Together ahead of the call. You've got to do a bang up job on preparation to know what the thesis is. And so it becomes an accountability tool for you as well. Also in the agenda email, I want you to include a no shit agenda for the call. On this call we're going to go through the critical four, we're going to review the P and L, we're going to get into the forecast and projections. Then I want to spend X amount of time talking about gross Profit margins. I've got three or four ideas for you, but I want to get your input on that as well. Then we're going to talk about goals, action items, and wrap up the call. And for each of those things, I would put in parentheses, like a rough time estimate for how long you want to spend. So that serves a couple of purposes.

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Number one is again, it makes you get your act together. But two is when we get on the calls. Have you ever had like those calls where you get frustrated because your client's rabbit hole in on something that's contrary to the thing you know you need to be talking about. You know you need to be talking about gross profit margins and they're stuck on some other thing that's maybe important, but probably not as urgent as this thing. If you've got that agenda with the rough timelines, you can use that to anchor off of to say, hey, that's a great question, but we need to get moving on to talk about the gross profit margin ideas we had. Can we circle back to this on our check in call next week? Or if this is really important, maybe let's schedule a 30 minute call offline to talk about it. It gives you like a neutral grounding point so you don't feel like an asshole when you tell them. We're not talking about that right now. So include an agenda, four or five bullet points max with some rough timelines in between. That's it. Next is ask them what else, what else do we need to talk about? Is there anything I missed? Is there Anything new in the business that I need to be aware of? Is there anything that come up that I haven't thought of, anything you want me to dive into? So just ask them what else? What else is there? Then include questions that you need answered before the call. I'm as guilty of this as anybody. I'm doing the prep. I come up with some questions for the client. Hey, can you. Can you tell me what happened with this? Then we get on the call, and I asked them the question, and now they feel like they're put on the spot or they don't know the answer, and so they're slacking. Let me ask my sales manager what happened with that? Let me ask the operations man. And so now it becomes this whole thing that just sucks a bunch of time out of the call. Let them know what questions you need answered before the call. And I can tell you from experience, one of the last things you want to do with a client is ask them a question that makes them feel stupid for not knowing the answer to or put on the spot because it erodes trust really quick. I'll give you an example. I had a call one time with a client, very creative type, and I wanted to talk about some updated goals on the call. And I asked her on the call, can we recenter on your goals? I want to make sure I'm tracking with them. And she lost her shit. She didn't know what her goals were. And then she felt stupid because we're on a call with some of her team, and I just asked what their goals were, and she didn't have a good answer, and she lost it. Emotional response. But we're humans. We're emotional beings. So if you've got questions, ask those. If you want answers or to give them the opportunity to do some homework ahead of time, then set expectations for the calls. These are those things that will drive us nuts. Right? Be on time. If you need to reschedule, please do it 24 hours in advance. If you get on the CFO call from your car, then we're not going to have the call include any data, documents, or whatever you need them to bring, but just set expectations for the call. And maybe you're not as crass as I just was about it, but I think we've probably all at some point had clients that weren't prepared, they didn't show up well for the call, and then that makes us feel diminished in value and taken for granted. And honestly, if they're taking our CFO calls from the car, then there's a problem because they're clearly not taking it seriously enough. And that means they're not getting the value, and we need to figure out why. So, again, just some nice resetting of expectations. And I suggest that you Send the Agenda 3 business days ahead of time. That means you can't wait till the last minute to prepare for the call. But the three business days gives them time to ask questions, think through it, get you responses and those kinds of things. All right, guys, that's the CFO call. That's the CFO report. Very, very important. But you can't look at it in a silo. You can't look at it in isolation.