163. Steal My Exact CFO Pricing Strategy (Proven ROI)

Not in the task that you perform. This sentence is the biggest pricing unlock your firm will ever have. When you make this shift from task asks to result, it opens up another zero at the end of your pricing. It's a literal game changer, especially when you understand that the results you offer come in three distinct forms. Financial ROI,

strategic ROI and emotional ROI. Now we'll break down each type in just a few moments, but first let's look over why this framework will make your services irresistible to the right client. First, it's important to understand that results beat tasks Every time. Your clients do not care about the task.

tasks that you perform. Let me say that again for the people in the back. Your clients do not care about the task that you perform. They only care about the results that you can help them achieve. This cannot be understated. I was stuck justifying tasks for years. It was brutal and a waste of time for me and for my clients. But when I finally made that shift to outcome based pricing.

It was like this weight was lifted off my shoulders. I mean, think about it. When you go to the cancer doctor, do you care about all the little things that the doctor is gonna do? Or do you care that you're cancer free when you walk out the door? I mean, do you seriously want to hear about all the meetings the doctor is gonna have, the medical journals he's gonna review, and the diagnostics that he's analyzing? No, you don't. You want results, and so do your client.

They don't care about your late night Excel marathons, your pivot tables, or how hard you're gonna work to create the custom dashboard so they can see how their client churn is correlated to ice cream sales in Manhattan. Clients want more profit? They want more cash and less stress and they want that with you on their side. They care about results, so sell them the results. To do that, you'll need to stop telling them what you're gonna do and start describing what they're gonna get.

With you in their corner. Give them a vision of what their business and their life is gonna look like with you as their fractional CFO. They want the promised land without the 40 years of wandering. They want the finish line without the rat race. And the right client is gonna pay for that difference. And when you start to signal that difference,

It creates a pull instead of a push. You become a magnet to the kind of clients that you want to work with. You'll notice that your conversations start to go smoother because ROI focused pitches minimize objections. And when you get really good at it, They can eliminate objections altogether. The problem is, most fractional CFOs don't realize how much value they actually offer, and so they oversell the task.

And undersell the results. The solution is to incorporate the three types of ROI that I mentioned earlier.

To maximize your sales potential. Let's break them down starting with the financial ROI. This is the easy one. Fractional CFOs tend to think of things in terms of financial returns. It's in our DNA. Financial ROI includes all the ways that we can help our clients make more. or save more than they're paying us. You know how the thought process goes.

If I help my client increase margins by 5% on a$10 million in revenue, then I've just added half a million dollars in value. If I help them restructure debt to save$100,000 in annual interest, There's a big fat return. If I help them avoid a$200,000 tax surprise, boom, there's an ROI. If they pay me$5,000 a month and I help them retain$300,000 in cash over a year,

That's a 5x return. We all know how to calculate that kind of ROI. And while it's important to nail down, it's not gonna help you stand out. Every fractional CFO is offering some type of financial return. To stand out, we have to emphasize the strategic. Strategic ROI. Strategic returns are the decisions clients can make with you on their team that they couldn't have made before. You can also think of this as a time-based ROI. Here's some examples.

They might be able to hire at the right time because of a forecast that you provided. They might finally be able to open a second location based on their improved cash flow. Or they might feel more confident turning down a really bad project because you've shown them that they have enough profitability without that bad apple. This is strategic clarity and there is a huge ROI in that. We often undervalue strategic clarity that we deliver our clients and just how much that can deliver.

faster, better, and more profitable decisions for them. This is where your clients will recognize that you bring so much more to the table than just reports. You're bringing things like executive level leadership. executive level accountability and executive level support to big decision making. And there is a massive ROI that comes along with that. Think about your own business or teams that you've worked with in the past.

How many times have you been stuck spinning your wheels instead of making a big decision? Normally that's because there's some element of uncertainty. There could be uncertainty about timing or affordability. A lot of times, even right now, there's uncertainty about the market. You just wish that you had somebody else walking alongside you to give you perspective and a solid data backed recommendation, but you don't have that.

And so you push the decision off for another week, and a decision pushed off for a week can end up lingering for six months or longer. Suddenly, you're running out of time. you're in too deep and then you start the blame game and everybody's at each other's throats is the ship is going down. The opportunity cost from all that wasted time is massive.

And the clarity you can provide for your clients in those situations is invaluable. Each decision that you expedite saves them resources and opens new doors. The benefit goes far beyond a simple percentage. It's exponential. Right now there are clients desperate for this kind of a strategic partner. You might be surprised to hear this, but there are a ton of eight-figure businesses that don't have anybody else in the C-suite other than the CEO. They're doing it alone.

They don't have another executive on their team that will hold them accountable and help them think clearly. When you capitalize on the opportunity to be that person for them, you unlock the real game changer.

the emotional ROI. Now I know some of you just rolled your eyes at me, but stick with me because we as fractional CFOs absolutely deliver an emotional ROI. The stress, the uncertainty, and indecision that you're gonna remove for your clients cannot be understated. Don't sleep on this. Don't be the guy I was just a few years ago. I used to sell strictly on the numbers. I focused on the cold hard figures and expected the client to make a rational decision. This was a huge mistake.

Dale Carnegie warned against this almost a century ago in his book How to Win Friends and Influence People. He said, when dealing with people, remember you're not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion. The fact is, humans are emotional before they're rational. We buy based on emotion first, and then we justify the purchase with logic after the fact. When my firm started factoring these emotions into our sales,

Our close rate started to explode. Here's an example. Late last year, I was on a sales call with a business that had grown from nothing to twenty million dollars in just four years. And as I'm listening to the CEO and his wife talk,

I can tell that this guy is massively stressed out. So I look at his wife and I asked her, was all of this financial stress bleeding over into the home? And instantly her eyes welled up, her face flushed, and there was a desperation in her voice as she said, yeah, he's not the same husband he was before we started the business. He's not the same dad, but

He's always stressed out. When he's at home, he just wants to sleep. And then he's shorter with the kids. He's shorter with me. I just want my old husband back. It turns out that the stress of scaling a$20 million business that fast had cost him his peace of mind. Imagine you being able to give that back to him, back to his family. This is as real as it gets, folks. This is real life stuff. And you get to deliver that peace of mind and quality of life to your client.

You get to do that because you're a fractional CFO. And so I hope you're starting to see that it's not just numbers all the time. If you can learn to speak to that emotional primal level, you're gonna resonate. so much more than a spreadsheet. I know how hard it can be to build a fractional CFO firm. We spend our entire careers learning the technical side of things, but not enough people talk about how to build a business around it.

The work is hard and I know that it can get lonely. And if we're not careful, we can end up losing our passion for the work and ultimately we just burn out. For me, I realized that I needed three things in order to get my fractional CFO firm.

To the next level. I needed next level training from somebody who had been there and done that before to show me how to get my firm off the ground and how to scale it up. I needed to be around a community of other fractional CFOs that shared my energy and passion for the work. And third, every so often. I just needed a jolt of energy, a a fresh spark.

to reignite my own passion for building a fractional CFO firm. If you're looking for that next level training, the amazing community, and that jolt of energy to get your fractional CFO firm unstuck and on a new trajectory, then I'd like to invite you to join our industry's only conference in the world.

The 2025 CFO Accelerator Live happening in Orlando, Florida, May 21st through 23rd, 2025. Over three days, you'll hear from me and some of the other most successful fractional CFO firm owners as we share the lessons that we've learned in building and scaling firms. You'll get to network and collaborate with hundreds of other fractional CFOs from all over the world. Firm owners that serve every niche you can think of and with every type of firm business model you can imagine.

You'll walk away from our three days together with a renewed passion and excitement to get you back to your office and start scaling your firm and your impact. Click the link below to grab your ticket. And here's my promise the price shown in that link is the absolute lowest price we're gonna offer. If you wait,

You will pay more. So grab your tickets today and then join me in Orlando, Florida, May 21st through 23rd for the CFO Accelerator Live. If you have any questions, just text live to 1-469-515-800-250.

87, I cannot wait to see you in May, my friend. So you might be asking yourself, which of these ROIs should you focus on? Luckily, you don't have to choose because they all fuel each other. Better strategies give more clarity, make more money, and save time. More clarity, money, and time save creates peace of mind. Peace of mind leads to even better decision making. It's this ongoing cycle of value with you at the center of it. And to signal that value to your clients,

You need to just answer a few basic questions. First, to determine your financial ROI, you need to ask how you can save them or make them more money than they're paying you. To calculate your strategic ROI, you just need to determine what decisions they can make with you on their side. And for emotional ROI, You just need to ask what stress, uncertainty, or indecision can you remove for them? That's it. No need to complicate things.

If you can simplify these outcomes and make it as easy as possible for your clients to pay you, you're gonna win. My bet is that you're already delivering this value. You just need to learn how to sell it. Remember, this pricing approach is a signal and a filter more than just a persuasion tool.

As long as your value is clear in your messaging, you should attract the right clients and filter out the curious bystanders. If a prospect wants to charge per task and they're not interested in results like these, then they're probably not the right client for you anyway.

It's that simple. Now, one of the questions that every fractional CFO asks is how do I package that massive ROI into a scalable scope of work that has an equally massive ROI for me? Which is why you need to check out the episode in the description below.

All right, my friends, I hope you found this episode helpful. If you did, it would mean the world to me if you would leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you're listening to this episode. In the meantime, I can't wait to see you back right here next week.