167. Clients Overstepping? Set Better Boundaries

Do you have that friend that just doesn't respect your boundaries? You know the type. They're calling you or texting you morning, noon, and night. You know how it goes. They they just can't take a hint. And after a while, you end up getting so super annoyed and you just leave them on unread and low-key de-friend them. I can tell you clients can be the same way if we don't build and maintain boundaries early on. I'm about to share my three-part process for setting firm boundaries.

Maintaining them and recovering when things go completely off the rails. But first, let's go over why fractional CFOs suck at setting boundaries in the first place. The first reason we suck at setting boundaries is because we typically have a heart of service. We want to serve others and make the biggest possible impact. And we have big hearts, so we strive to be omnipresent for our clients and respond to every message as quickly as humanly possible.

We want to serve with excellence. The second reason we suck so bad at boundaries is because we feel like we have to be omnipresent or we'll lose our clients. This one is our brains, not our hearts. We worry that if we don't answer our clients immediately. They're gonna leave and tell everybody just how bad our service is. The third and final reason we suck at setting boundaries is because we simply don't know how. We never learned, nobody ever taught us, nobody ever talks about this.

This was my biggest problem early when I started my firm. I had no clue how to set boundaries. Over the years, things got so bad that I had to fire all my clients and rebuild my firm from scratch because the relationships were just beyond repair. Now luckily you found this video and you can learn from my mistakes. starting with knowing how and when to set boundaries. Now this first one might sound really odd, but setting firm boundaries begins before you even get on a sales call. Think about it.

When you get a message or an email from a prospect, how quickly do you want to respond? Immediately, right? Instinct is to respond as soon as possible to turn that prospect into a client, but it sets the wrong precedent. When you respond to a DM or an inbound email at eight PM on a Thursday, you're signaling that you're always available. I mean, would you expect the CEO of Nike to respond to your DM at three in the morning?

Would you expect Mark Cuban to take calls from you when he's on a vacation with his family? The people that we respect the most don't respond to messages at all hours, and your clients will respect you just the same if you establish your firm's hours for communication. I want to encourage you to fight the instinct to immediately respond and wait until during regular business hours. The next time to set boundaries is during the sales call. During your sales process,

Let the prospect know what your working hours are and when they should expect you to respond. You don't have to sound like some inflexible jerk. Just tell them in a natural, heart of service kind of way. Hey, this is when we work and this is how we communicate.

For my firm, I'll say on the sales call, look, I know you're gonna have questions outside of your monthly call. I expect you to, and I really hope you do, and we're here to serve. And then I'll lay out the proper channels for asking their questions and how quickly they will get an answer.

Again, for us, that's via email and we promise a one-day response time. If they have a bigger or more important question that requires a back and forth discussion, we provide them with a calendarly link and we're happy to schedule a call. Set expectations early on to minimize surprises down the road.

Every fractional CFO needs three things to be successful. You're gonna need a sound financial strategy for your clients. You're gonna need clients that are willing to listen and do the work, but you're also gonna need accurate and timely books. But if you're anything like me, you don't want your firm handling bookkeeping. You want to stay focused on high ticket advisory services, and that's why my firm uses decimal.

Decimal has built their entire company around providing world-class bookkeeping and financial operations while providing the best customer service and client communications that I've ever seen. Decimal handles everything from bookkeeping to AR and AP to payroll and invoicing. They even take care of taxes.

If you value accurate and timely books for your clients, but you don't want to do it in-house, then I highly encourage you to check out Decimal. My firm trusts Decimal for our books, and we refer all of our clients to Decimal as well. Click the link in the description below to learn more.

Finally, I highly recommend that you put these boundaries right in your scope of work. I mean, put everything in writing so that there is no confusion. Make it so that you're literally on the same page with your client when it comes to communication and boundaries.

And then later, if you need to rein things back in, you can politely point back to your scope of work to remind your client how you can best serve them. I think it's also important to remember to keep things positive and to never blame the client if those boundaries are violated. Your goal is to reduce friction and to be more efficient.

not to win the blame game. These time-based boundaries will easily solve 90% of your boundary issues. Now here's a couple of rules to follow to help you maintain those boundaries. Number one, don't break your own rules. When you break your own rules, things will spiral out of control So fast. When you get a call after hours, just don't answer it. The flip side is to make sure that you stick to your word and respond within the timeframe that you promised.

way back during the sales call and in the scope of work. I know if we start taking several days to respond to a client, we can expect them to start calling whenever they damn well please. And they have every right to do so because we dropped the ball. Avoid these issues by simply sticking to your word and delivering on your promises. Now you're also gonna need to make sure you have.

Clear systems in place when onboarding your clients. As fractional CFOs, it's on us to make sure that our clients have everything they need for us to serve them per the scope of work. Provide them with calendarly links, email addresses, Slack access, or access to whatever other tools you've agreed to. As promised.

Again, make sure that response times are clearly outlined in the scope of work so that your client always knows what to expect. If you follow these simple rules, it'll save you so much time, reduce friction, and keep that relationship running smoothly. Now let's go over how to recover when boundaries have been broken.

Sometimes boundaries have been crossed too many times and now the relationship is feeling extremely strained. When this happens, it's time to rein things in before it's too late. And that starts with having a professional adult conversation. Now I know adulting sucks and having adult conversations isn't fun. But if you don't, you're gonna develop resentment toward your clients and they will build resentment back towards you.

And resentment is never healthy and you can be sure that churn is soon to follow. When clients detect your spite, they start to wonder if they want to keep paying you all the big bucks every month. Don't let it get to this point. Just have an adult professional conversation. clearly letting them know that the boundaries have been violated and that you need to get things back in order. Now there's a few steps to follow during that conversation. Step one, take ownership.

Start with an apology, take responsibility for the lack of clarity, and then look towards the future. Step two, offer solutions, reestablish channels of communication and response times. Keep things positive, but be firm and straightforward when possible. Step three,

Reiterate and set expectations. Repeat what you've just gone over so everything is crystal clear. Most clients will realize that they've overstepped a boundary and they're gonna be on board with a fresh start. Finally, you've got to know when to walk away.

Not all clients are gonna respect your time even after having the adult conversation. Keeping these clients is gonna put a strain on your business and negatively impact your personal life. I mean think about it. Your spouse doesn't want you looking down at your phone and texting about

tax strategies during your spaghetti dinner. So sometimes the best thing you can do is just walk away. Now that covers the time-related boundaries, but there are at least three other common types of boundaries that you need to build and maintain.

Starting with values. In the book The Advantage by Patrick Lincioni, the author defines permission to play or pay-to-play values. These are the bare minimum bedrock values that you have and expect others, including clients, To uphold. If a person, even a client, doesn't respect these values, they're gone and there's no coming back. Clearly define your pay-to-play values and walk away when somebody, yes, even clients, violates them. Another type of boundary is professionalism.

Now there's surface level professionalism like how you dress for a big meeting, but then there's a deeper level, like how you treat other people. Have you ever had a client disrespect you as like a human being, completely cuss you out or talk down to you?

I hope that hasn't happened to you, but I know for some of you it has. If you allow that kind of behavior to go unchecked, you end up normalizing it and the behavior will only get worse. Take this example from Amber, who had to walk away from what seemed like a perfect client. Because she felt like a boundary was violated. Amber, can you think of any professionalism type boundaries that you've had kind of violated before?

Um, I'm still uh fairly new to doing this all on my own. It's my first year in, but yeah, actually I just had a client that overstepped one too many times and it is still hard for me to let them go, but it was it was a bad one and it all it It seemed great on paper, right? Like the perfect client on paper, willing to pay, had an amazing boy, all this stuff, you know, it was great on paper. Um, I had worked in the industry before, so I I knew it.

Really well. But they wanted one thing. I'd said over and over again that I wasn't offering those services. You know, I laid out really clear what I did. you know, bookkeeping and cash flow. And they just wanted more, they wanted full-blown CFO communicating with board of directors. And it was 24, 30 hours worth of communication just back and forth trying to re-explain.

And it felt like complete disrespect because I had laid everything out. She'd signed engagement letters. Everything was very clear, but it wasn't good enough. And so finally I just said, it's time to move on. You have to. Find somebody else. But it was a lesson learned because I should have cut it from the beginning. The first one or two times she did it, I should have really nipped it there, but I let it kept going thinking it was a new client.

In all my years of running my own firm and coaching other firm owners, I have yet to meet one person that has said, man, I let that horrible client go too soon. I should have kept them around for six or eight months longer before stopping the misery. There's a reason for that. When the message just isn't getting across to your client, be prepared to walk away. And then there's payment.

We've all been there. We send an invoice and we get crickets in return. One late payment almost always leads to two, and then two late payments turns into no payments at all. That first late payment needs to be a huge red flag and you've got to address it right away. Now I do encourage

everybody that's running a fractional CFO firm to use something like Ignition or QuickBooks Auto Draft to automatically bill on the first of the month for the upcoming month's work. Billing in advance instead of after the fact will eliminate these problems. All together.

Setting and maintaining boundaries is critical for your own mental health. And I know the methods that I shared with you in this episode work because they're the same methods I use in my firm every day. Now, once you've set those boundaries, The next step is to help your clients define clear, meaningful goals. Just like boundaries, having well-defined goals for your clients lays the foundation for a stronger, more focused relationship. That's why I recommend you check out this video.

where I'm going to show you how to guide your clients beyond arbitrary revenue goals and towards goals that are tied to their vision of the future. 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.