HELPING YOUR CLIENTS’ CASHFLOW
Understanding your client’s cash flow and business goals can help you make better marketing decisions, demonstrate your value, and strengthen long-term client relationships.
Chances are, as a FMO, your responsibilities are not likely to be tied toward optimizing the client’s cashflow. However, as many of us have found out the hard way, businesses need to bring in cash in order to survive. Whether your assignment is geared directly toward bringing in revenue for your client or not, it helps to have an understanding of their overall needs.
Your content and contributions are most likely geared toward attracting new customers/clients and to better serve existing ones. Either way, you should be thinking about how it benefits your client by helping them to retain them. If your role is more of a Fractional CFO, you already understand growth planning, risk management, forecasting, pricing strategy, and expense control as it pertains to the client.
Whether the content or project you are hired for reflects it or not, it helps to understand the overall structure of your client as much as you can. The CFO (or General Manager) likely has to deal with monthly or quarterly reporting and forecasts. They may be dealing with bidding to and from outside vendors, whether to reduce costs or prepare for an upcoming or ongoing project.
Depending upon your client’s company or corporate structure, management and ownership may be facing doing presentations to a Board of Directors. These often involve demonstrating client/customer trends and sales reports. Sometimes there are fundraising campaigns needed, or the need to present opportunities to investors.
Knowing more about how your client operates and what their specific goals are can help you when you are working to engage and increase their customer base. Think of it as protecting your investment. The more profitable your client becomes, the more job security your business creates. If you can show a client how much their cash flow has increased since hiring you and your business, you also gain something to show your potential clients!
