Become a CFO with Experienced Executive Mentorship
Here is a long-form email which was part of 4-email sales sequence I wrote for the CFO College. The client was offering a mentorship program as part of an upsell for the core CFO Bookkeeper high-ticket course. I didn’t want to write too many emails that offered little value to the prospects; such an approach will make the client seem needy, desperate, and disrespectful of his prospects’ time. My primary strategy was to establish the client’s expertise by tying the benefits of his program to current events and containing the buyer’s natural skepticism by listing the pros and cons of alternatives to our offer. By framing the sale this way, I am “teaching” prospects how to buy.
COVID hasn’t just isolated our communities from each other. It has also sucked the life blood from our clients’ businesses. Here are some thoughts I have for our profession to help staunch the bleeding going into the new year.
More than 70% of Fortune 500 companies offer mentoring programs. The impact of these programs are, frankly, unimpressive. A study of 3,000 professionals across industries shows that only about 50% have ever had any mentoring in their jobs and, among those who have, only 25% had formal mentorship arrangements. Furthermore, the results from formal mentorship and community support programs are lukewarm: some people find valuable nuggets from their mentors but a huge number do not.
I’ve found a way to address this problem. The core CFO Bookkeeper program gives bookkeepers tools and knowledge to transform into a “CFO Bookkeeper”, but access to me puts an award winning CFO in their back pocket for support and mentorship. In addition, these mentees also get access to my elite team of marketers and tax specialists. This is why I am confident when I say that the CFO Bookkeeper Badge Program is a one stop shop for all the needs a CFO Bookkeeper might have in this COVID economy. This is something their competition simply does not have,
Bookkeepers with competent mentorship support can accrue higher income, greater morale, stronger confidence, and higher satisfaction in their careers. The CFO Bookkeeper Badge Program is a community carefully designed to maximize the potential of anyone who is in it.
In my 25 years being in the accounting business as an award-winning CPA and CFO, I’ve had a long time to test what makes good and bad mentorship programs and professional communities. The CFO Bookkeeper Badge Program is my attempt to help.
It’s very easy for courses to offer mentorship and support. The challenge is in executing these programs well. One of the biggest ways for accounting professionals to fail is through mediocre mentoring. Oftentimes, this is usually a consequence of creating support systems where the mentors are too busy, disinterested, or are simply not suitable for the role. I’ve seen many “programs” where the mentor either has no real client acquisition and service experience, or very little.
We’ve seen a lot of expensive courses where online gurus go through the motions of setting up Zoom meetings, answering questions within the limited time box of the call, and leaving it at that. Several of these same course creators congratulate themselves on setting up an “inner circle” for paying students which turns out to be nothing more than a private Facebook group.
This type of limp-wristed support is simply not sufficient for somebody running a high-paying, high-stakes CFO Bookkeeper business.
Furthermore, course creators mistakenly assume that if they were successful as experienced accountants, then they can mentor effectively with barely any training. A lot of these guys never had mentors themselves and thus don’t know what good mentorship looks like.
Their approach to the art of mentoring can be summed up along the lines of “let me fake it until I make it.”
You might be forgiven for assuming that a little bad mentorship is better than no mentorship at all. But the opposite is true, according to research.
The evidence has shown that poor mentoring can be worse for students than no mentoring at all.
These same gurus, in addition to not really knowing what they’re doing, are also extremely busy. As entrepreneurs, they have meetings, projects, deadlines, new businesses that all drain on their time. To keep up with it all, they often cut corners.
If you want to find good mentorship and support to help you in your journey to be a highly-sought after financial management consultant, here are the steps I’d recommend:
1.) Network with the right people. The COVID situation has moved a lot of people online, so start looking for groups, thought-leaders, and courses virtually. Connect with people who have a track record of success and whose message resonates with you. Don’t try to fake expertise when you talk to them, just be upfront with your questions and concerns.
2.) Leverage your network of fellow bookkeepers. If you took an accounting class with someone, ask them about people who they know that might take your bookkeeping career to the next level. Additionally, make SURE you find networks that have ALL skill-sets (in other words, just being in a bookkeeping group won’t help you learn CFO skills).
3.) Teach or give a presentation. Obviously, limit your presentation to what you already have expertise in. Better yet, host a virtual event and invite expert speakers. Doing this will draw the right people to you and grow your network.
These things work but they take a whole lot of time. Nobody knows more than accounting professionals that time is money. A better way is to leverage a mentorship and community support system where the mentors and support specialists are:
a.) Competent–The point of mentorship and community support is to help you get better, after all.
b.) Centralized–You don’t have to juggle a rolodex-worth of subject matter experts
c.) Properly incentivized– They can show up and give you their full attention
This is why I created the CFO Bookkeeper Badge Program. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had good mentors in my long career as CFO.
But my goodness, I wish I had something like this badge program when I was younger!
Once you are a paid member of VIP Community for 90 days, you will be issued a Blue VIP CFO Bookkeeper Official Member digital badge which you can use on your website, social media, and any other place you need to show off a little bit of professional swagger.
More than being a marketing gimmick, however, having this Blue Badge means you get these 6 mentorship and support benefits:
1.) Access to new work-papers and tools I add to the program. I will continue to update the core product, but new tools will only be available to badge holders.
2.) Live office hours with me at least 2 hours per month, where we can dig deeper into your client or program questions.
3.) Live monthly Q&A marketing support calls, where I pay out of my own pocket for marketing experts to be available to you. Here, you can get answers to any marketing questions you can think of: sales funnels, SEO, blogging, social media, paid ads, CRM… the list goes on
4.) Live Q&A with tax preparation experts who I also pay to be there for you. The goal is to get you access to one of these sessions once every 2 months at launch.
5.) Additional marketing materials you can use to help find and close clients.
6.) Ability to “purchase” hours of time with our expert marketing team at discounted rates, to focus on your specific issues: website, social media, ads, content, etc.
I’ve also created our premier Black “CFO Bookkeeper VIP Pro Official Member” Badge Program.
But not anyone can get into that program.
I’ll talk about it another time but whoever has enough grit to get into the Black Badge program will definitely have earned it, I’ll say that much.
Like I said, if I could turn back the clock, I’d enroll in something like CFO Bookkeeper Badge Program based on my 25 years of leadership experience in financial management. But I’m not your manager and you can do whatever you want.
If what you want is access to my award-winning CPA/ CFO brain, the brains of my tax and marketing experts, AND a steady stream of tools developed by me to accelerate your CFO Bookkeeper career, sign up here:
Best Wishes!
Andrew
References
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123301451869117603
https://online.olivet.edu/research-statistics-on-professional-mentors
