Episode 179 | The Marketing Funnel That Books CFO Advisory Calls With Charles Leikauf

If you want to rapidly scale your business, you need the right marketing funnel. Michelle Weinstein is joined by Charles Leikauf of the Profit Surge Group, a corporate finance professional turned fractional CFO, who explains what it takes to pull off the right marketing strategies to secure the most qualified leads and sell the right outcomes to the right potential buyers. He discusses how to hone your messaging according to your target market and get your paid advertising on the right track. If you have created a firm, but it still feels like a job that you cannot escape, now is the time to create the right systems in place and make a significant shift.

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Episode 179 | The Marketing Funnel That Books CFO Advisory Calls With Charles Leikauf

We have a very special guest. Our special guest, who is a corporate finance guy turned accidental fractional CFO after he was restructuring a $2 billion business and serving as CFO for another. He escaped the corporate world since then and has helped tons of companies as their fractional CFO. In addition to his CFO corporate job that he escaped, he turned that finance skill into a business that’s allowed him to have time, location, and financial freedom. When he’s not serving as a fractional CFO to clients, he’s helping other accountants and bookkeepers do just the same thing for themselves through his coaching program at Profit Surge Group where he creates funnels for the marketing front end process to get leads.

Before we welcome Charles to the show, if you help your clients manage their finances, books and taxes, but when it comes to your own cashflow, pricing and profits, you feel stuck or even ashamed, you don’t have to face it by yourself. Most firm owners have never learned the skill to sell, to position their value and have confidence with money conversations with their clients and with themselves. It holds them back.

Here at the Abundant Accountant, I help you feel empowered, confident, and not awkward on any sales calls. You’ll learn how to convert premium clients, raise your prices, and finally take home the pay you actually deserve. If you’re ready to stop avoiding the financial side of your own firm and your own P&L, head on over to TheAbundantCall.com to book your free strategy session now.

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Welcome, Charles, to the show.

Thank you so much for having me here.

Yes, I am super excited to have you here on the show because we are going to talk about a very hot topic because Charles when I ask prospects what’s the biggest challenge with your sales in your firm, they always say, “How do I get leads for bookkeeping,” or, “How do I get leads for CFO advisory,” or, “How do I get leads for tax planning?” I’m like, “That is not a sales process problem,” but we’re going to talk about that in a second. Before we dive in, for those people that do not know you, can you give a brief overview of who you are and what you do in 30 seconds. I always think it’s a little better to come directly from you.

I appreciate that a ton. Huge difference between marketing and sales, we’ll get into that in a second. My name is Charles Leikauf, I own Profit Surge Group, I also own Ecom Profit Group. I’m a current Fractional CFO, prior full-time CFO. We’ve been doing CFO work, like I said before, since 2017, and over the last couple of years, I’ve started helping people start their firm and grow as a fractional CFO as well as getting leads and getting clients. What we do here at Profit Surge Group is helping you start, offer and scale fractional CFO services, including the marketing part which we’re going to talk about here.

How come, Charles, when I ask people what’s their biggest challenge in their firm as it relates to their sales, they always say, “I need leads?” Why do they say they need marketing help when I just asked them about their sales problems? Can you elaborate the difference and why a firm owner would think that that’s a sales problem?

Our friends in the accounting and finance field, myself included until I became educated, we don’t really delineate between sales and marketing. There’s a very clear difference and you know this, hence the question, but marketing is what happens before the sales call. Whether you’re on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok or YouTube or on the radio or whatever else, marketing is the messaging that you put out there, what happens and then it’s the messaging to bring someone to a conversion event.

Usually, the conversion event is sales and it’s usually a sales call over the phone or over Zoom or meeting in person. Marketing is bringing the people to the sales call and the sales call is walking them through their problems, the solutions and turning that into hopefully a credit card or a deposit or starting them on as a new client. Marketing and sales, two separate things. They should be thought of as two separate things completely.

We need to delineate that. I like that word you used and I like how you said marketing is the stuff that happens before you have a conversation with that prospect, it’s the messaging that you put out there on your social media, on your Facebook, on your website, on your advertising, and sales is a conversion event. That’s the part where you convert to get paid, that all becomes the sales process and what you say in order to collect the payment and get a new client. Do we get that right?

Yes. Our favorite part is the conversion event. Convert that prospect into a customer.

Two Biggest Marketing Mistakes Firm Owners Make

We’re going to talk about the marketing side of things on how to get leads because that’s what Charles does at Profit Surge Group. He helps with marketing and creating a funnel. I’d love it if you could share, Charles, like where do you see most firm owners, especially those maybe even getting started out or they’ve built their whole business on referrals organically and now they’re like, “I want to scale.” What do you see as the biggest mistake that many firm owners do when they’re first starting out to do marketing, to get their messaging out there before they get someone onto a sales call so getting their interest and presence known?

When I think of one of the biggest mistakes when people are just getting started with marketing, there’s really a couple and I’ll walk you through them here now. The one is the medium and then the other one is the messaging. The medium is a lot of times, people will do something that’s not scalable or doesn’t make sense. They mistake networking for marketing.

They’ll go to their local BNI meeting and drink the crappy coffee and show up at the local Chamber of Commerce and do all the things like that and they’re like, “I’m going all over the place, I’m doing the marketing.” How effective is that. Is that scalable? Does that make sense from a earnings per hour perspective? Probably not really. They mistake networking for marketing. Networking has its place, but you got to be in the room with the right people.

Number one is they try and do more of the same. They try and generate more referrals and can be useful is usually not as scalable. We like to point people towards getting clients on the internet. If you have Zoom and you have a phone, you can serve anyone around the world, but usually mostly United States for probably most of my clients and most of yours. Number one is the media or the medium instead of being in person we want to move over to the internet. That’s problem number one.

Problem number two is the messaging. This is really important. Business owners don’t buy financial services. What do I mean by that? If I talk to someone at a Christmas party and I’m like, “I’m Charles. I’m an accountant,” that’s going to be the world’s quickest conversation. They’re like, “Okay, cool.” They’re either going to ask me a tax question or they’re going to politely excuse themselves from the conversation because accounting is boring. They don’t care.

Marketing Funnel: Business owners do not buy financial services.

What they do care about is more time with their family, more money in their pocket and doing the things that they love to do which is doing the thing or selling the thing, sure as heck not the finances of the thing. If you’re selling financial services instead of an outcome or result, that’s your messaging and it’s probably why people aren’t showing up to your sales calls and you’re making the conversion event of the sales call a lot harder. You need you need volume and quality and the right messaging is what does that. If you sell something people don’t want to buy, it’s going to be hard. That those are the two biggest mistakes that I can see someone make.

Those are really big mistakes and I think I’ve heard as well when I ask a firm owner what’s the challenge you’re having with your sales and stuff like that, they’ll be like, “I go to BNI events and I go to my Chamber events but I’m not getting any new client.” Again, that’s not sales and it’s really not real marketing. It’s called networking. It’s not a scalable way to consistently attract new opportunities for you to have a conversion event which means a sales meeting.

Something that’s reliable, consistent, repeatable. Every time you go to BNI meeting, it’s nothing that’s going to get you 10, 20, 30 clients a month or whatever your goal is for your firm. I love that you preach this and that you’ve become so educated, Charles, since 2017 because I feel like I’m talking to myself when I talk to you. People buy an outcome. If they want to buy an outcome, then we have to speak at all times during our marketing and our messaging in outcomes and what somebody wants.

As you said you people don’t buy financial services. If you went to a Christmas party and talked about how you do CFO advisory work as your career, I’d be like, “What the hell does that mean?” It’s boring but it also doesn’t convey the solution and the problems that you solve for your clients. You could possibly be talking to your ideal client at a Christmas party.

However, because you’re not speaking in pain points, in emotions, in outcomes, in deliverables and what you would do like they would have less time working, they’d have less paperwork, they would know exactly how their business is running, they would be able to leave work at 4:00 and go to soccer games and spend time with the family having dinner every single night at the table without having to worry about an inbox, now you’ve got someone’s attention, but the other way around you’re just talking into thin air.

They don’t want to listen to that at all. I like how you specifically mentioned the word outcome. On one of our coaching calls, they were putting together some of their marketing material and they’re like, “You’ll have clean financials,” and I’m like, “Dude, what does clean financials mean to a guy who owns a plumbing company? Do they not have poop on them like he’s a plumber?”

You’ll have more money in your bank account because you’ll know your numbers.

I was trying to explain it to them and I came up with a with an analogy like this. Have you ever heard of the conversation if you want to sell the drill you talk about the hole, like the outcome? That’s correct but when you’re selling CFO services, you’re not selling like a $50 drill. You’re selling a $500 drill and so there’s a slightly different way because sometimes people talk about features, “This is what you get.”

Benefits is like you do a month end close of five days instead of 20 days or that’s the benefit how it helps you. Now instead of talking about the outcomes, I don’t like to talk about the hole when I’m trying to sell a $50 drill. If I want to sell a $500 drill, I talk about how when I walk home and I open my front door and I look to the right, there’s a photo of my family hanging there.

I’ve got me, my wife, my daughter and I look at it and I smile. That photo is hung up on a nail that’s in a hole in the wall. I talk about how good I feel when I come home knowing that I get to look at a photo of my family and I get to smile and how that makes me feel. If I’m trying to sell a $500 drill, I’m talking about the feeling that it inspires, not I have a hole in the wall that I can put hang stuff on.

I’m talking about the feeling that it inspires when I look at that photo and I think of my family and I think of how I want to be a good husband and a good leader of my household. I like to talk about the emotional outcome specifically, so more money in your bank account, which allows you to and like you hit the nail on the head spend time with your family. Go to the soccer games, shut the laptop, sit down at dinner. Be present. It’s hard these days to actually be present. If you can help your small business owners do that and convey that, it’s a lot sexier than you’ll have consolidated financials.

This is all in the messaging that we’re talking about, I mean this is also part of an element when you’re doing your enrollment and your sales call but it’s even more important on the front-end side as you’re attracting to get your ideal clients to talk to you and your ideal prospects and the opportunities to have these sales conversations with.

In the messaging and in the marketing, it’s really important because now, we’re talking about how do I get leads for my CFO services? It sounds like one of the first things we need to do is change the way we speak. Instead of financial services and the things that you do, start talking about the emotional outcome.

I like the emotional outcomes. When we’re off her doing financial services I like to think about the person that I’m impacting. A good example, a fractional CFO client who started working with us and he was on the brink of having to close down and he was close to missing payroll and we had to get some him emergency financing here.

When I’m thinking when I’m working with clients, it’s not just like, “Am I doing financial services for them?” That gentleman had 27 employees and he was this close to not making payroll and eventually not even having those employees and having to get rid of them. I once did a site facility tour and one of the guys on his team, I won’t mention his name, but he has a pregnant wife at home.

I know that I saved him by getting that emergency financing, that he wasn’t going to have to go to the guy and say, “We’re not going to make payroll,” and that guy’s not going to have to go home and be like, “John just didn’t pay me on Friday. Our mortgage is due on Monday.” Saving them from that type of conversation.

I think when I’m doing marketing, I’m doing fractional CFO services like I’m changing lives and I want to talk about how are you dreading the fact that you might have to have a conversation with your employees that have been with you for ten years that you might not make payroll? That’s a big outcome. That’s also a big emotional thing and if you talk in your marketing like that instead of I’ll give you a reconciliation, how much easier is someone going to show up to a sales call to have that conversion event?

Very likely because if you can get them out of the dread and the doom of that, I personally been in that situation with my last company so I know exactly how that feels and if you came and told me that you can help make sure that payroll will clear and that that guy doesn’t have to go tell this person on his team that has a pregnant wife at home that he didn’t get paid on Friday and they won’t be able to pay their mortgage, you just saved him a bunch of dominoes. When you have all your dominoes standing and you push the first one down, that’s about what all of them would have gone down with 27 employees.

That’s 27 dominoes that you just kept standing versus them all falling. He felt relief, he felt peace, he felt a sense of freedom and probably a sense of possibility that there’s a way to make this happen instead of having his business closed down. I wish I had you when I had my last No, probably not, because I wouldn’t be doing what I was doing now. I think one of the most crucial things is communicating our messaging if you’re trying to get new leads for your CFO advisory services or your bookkeeping, it doesn’t matter what the service is.

The Right Way To Get Qualified Leads

The way you communicate in your messaging and in your marketing is the number one thing that’s going to attract the right people to you for the solution that you provide. With that being said, Charles, what do you think is another important element for firm owner to think about and consider when they say and they come barking up your tree or my tree saying, “I need more leads. I need to get more leads how do I get more leads?”

A couple of things. We delineated between the media and the messaging before, so the media on the internet, Facebook, Instagram typically, sometimes LinkedIn. The messaging, outcome focused, high pain because if someone doesn’t have a big problem, they’re not going to write you a big check. The next thing we need to look at is like leads are fine but we want qualified leads, so we want the right people.

If I’m just targeting people in my messaging say my Facebook ad and if you’re any HVAC owner who’s struggling financially, does that guy have the ability to pay me $10,000 for my fractional CFO services? Probably not. I like to be specific on the who’s showing up. Are you an HVAC owner who’s doing over $1 million a year? That’s a lot more specific they have the high chance of being able to afford CFO services so there’s a call out who’s struggling with cashflow margins and profitability.

Those are some things that CFOs can fix right they’re not if I’m not looking for tax clients. I’ll talk about tax problems. I’m talking about the problems that I want to fix. If you don’t want to mention like HVAC companies doing over $1 million a year, there’s other proxies for qualification that you can use in your call out. HVAC owners with more than 4 trucks on the road, HVAC owners with 15 employees, HVAC owners who do commercial installations only. I’m guessing on that one.

You can do proxies for targeting because you provide fantastic sales training for them and someone can show up. If the right person doesn’t show up to the call, it makes it a lot more challenging but if you have the right person in the right stage who’s qualified because more leads isn’t the thing it’s more qualified showed calls. Qualified to me is they have understanding, interest, belief and desire. Belief is broken down into three things. It’s belief in us, belief in themselves and belief in the vehicle.

If you can get most of those things, interest, understanding, attention, belief and desire on a sales call with financial qualification, it makes your process a lot easier on the on the conversion event side if you get the right person. That doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed but it makes it a lot easier so you need more of the right leads because if I fill your calendar with eight sales calls a day but they’re all the wrong people, you’re wasting a lot of time and driving yourself crazy. “Go hang out with your family instead of taking eight crappy sales calls a day.”

Marketing Funnel: If you can get the most interest, understanding, attention, belief, and desire on a sales call with financial qualification, it makes your process a lot easier on the conversion side if you get the right person.

I think the key thing that you were talking about as far as messaging and communicating in your marketing effort so you get qualified people is I like to call it being more specific on your niche because you’re speaking to HVAC owners but I loved how you said you’ve got three trucks on the road. That means if an HVAC owner just is a one man show, they’re probably not going to say anything or respond to your ad or post or whatever because they’re like, “That’s not me.” The whole time, when we’re qualifying leads even on the sales side but specifically on the marketing, we’re putting things out there that will tell a prospect, “That’s not me,” so they self-select out.

It’s funny. It’s more important who you tell to go away than you tell to come here.

We want to get as many people to go away as possible and I think you did that with the number of trucks on the road, the number of employees you said, revenue. If you’re not doing $1 million a year in revenue. I even like, in my messaging, to say, “This is not for you.” Just getting really specific because people want what they can’t have but more importantly, people want specificity.

The more specific you are then they’re like, “Charles doesn’t work with all HVAC companies.” If someone slips through the cracks but they’re qualified lead but maybe they have 2 trucks on the road versus 3, that’s your decision to say, “I want to meet with them and have a sales meeting and go to that next step.” That’s up to you. On the front end, how can you be more specific and reduce the amount of quantity to get to a higher quality?

It makes a massive impact. I’ll say there’s also cost savings associated with this and I’ll break this down. I’m a fractional CFO. I serve eCommerce brands. I do that outside of the coaching program here at Profit Surge. I only service Shopify store owners who are doing over $1 million a year. I didn’t say eCommerce, I said Shopify.

Shopify is a different back end and if all of my clients have the same back end, my administrative time and cost per client is lower. Not only am I being more specific, which will give me higher quality qualified leads and makes the sales or the conversion event easier, it also costs me less because it’s the same type of style of implementation. It can even save you money on the on the side so your staff or your team can be more efficient.

The specificity of the platforms they use can be helpful based upon the industry. That’s like a specific example of mine and I like to service people who have inventory and so that makes me hyper-specific. That brings someone on who’s like about to make a $200,000, $300,000 inventory decision. If I could solve that for $10,000, would that be worth it? Okay, let’s get started.

I love it. You’re on your CFO firm, you’re niching even more specific so we have eCommerce, then we have software there specifically using Shopify. We have a revenue niche factor. We have inventory so you’re only working with businesses that have inventory on their balance sheets and focusing Shopify or whatever. For the firm owner reading, it’d be whatever specific platform.

I know for restaurants, you could do restaurant and only work with restaurants that use Toast as the POS system and get really good at that because like you said, it’s going to be a same style of implementation across the board for all clients. I did have a client who specified that. When you put that in your messaging or your marketing, people who use Shopify will also see you like, “Charles is an expert in this area. He’s speaking to me.” You’re also increasing your credibility with that audience.

It makes it a much more powerful transformation. It makes it a lot easier. It makes the sales event easier, it makes higher quality people come up it makes the cost of getting those people there less because at cost of advertising is a function. You want to be as specific as possible. Sometimes I have coaching clients who are like, “I want to target everyone.” I’m like, “Hold on. Let me explain to you why that’s not a good idea.” They’re like, “I don’t want to limit ourselves. It’s like, “Actually, you are limiting yourselves by not limiting who comes to you.”

You can be ultra specific and still earn several million dollars a year. When you get to that point, let’s be ultra specific on a different niche. You want to do HVAC, cool. All right you want to go into something else after that, cool. Let’s hit Medspas, let’s hit construction but we need to have four ultra specific funnels not just like, “I’ll help everyone and their dog,” because guess what? Everyone and their dog will show up and they are not going to be worth your time.

How Does A Funnel Help You Get Leads

You just said a keyword, funnel. Can you give a definition of what that is for a firm owner that might not understand what that means? Do you mean like funnel cake at the fair? What is a funnel as it relates to getting leads for your firm or your bookkeeping firm or CFO advisory firm or tax planning firm or tax firm or accounting firm? Insert specific firm after but what does a funnel do to help you get leads?

A funnel to me, and there’s two ways to think about it, a funnel to me is a with marketing there is conversion the conversion is they book a call with you. On the sales call, the conversion is you convert them into a client. A marketing funnel is designed to lead someone through a process and this process is the solution awareness process. The funnel is looking to take someone aware, they’re unaware, they don’t know anything about you to they know a little bit about their problem.

They a little bit know about your solution. They know a little bit about how you solve the solution and then they’re interested in in getting a little nudge to take some further action. A good funnel, so think of maybe a series of web pages. An example is like if you go to Profit Surge Group, there’s an opt-in page and then there’s a six-minute video you watch. There’s an application and you fill out the calendar. That’s an example of a funnel but really, it’s any process designed to move people through the problem awareness journey and to generate a conversion which is to generate a sales conversation.

That’s what a funnel looks like. Most of the things that we do for our clients is there’s a page where you fill out your information on the internet. It takes you to another page where you watch like a five-minute video and then you fill out some information about yourself like an application to work with you and then they book a call and then that’s when it transfers over to the sales process.

Separate process. It has nothing to do with the funnel. Funnel is not sales, is that correct?

Funnel is not sales, is not marketing is not networking. All completely distinct things. The better you get at differentiating between those, the more cognizant of those you are, the better you’re ever you are to pull the different levers. If you’re really good at marketing you’ll get high-quality affordable calls on your calendar all day, but if you suck at sales, it’s still not going to be good.

Your funnel is part of your marketing efforts because you’re putting your messaging out there and they’re going through your funnel, those different pages that you were talking about. A funnel is a series of web pages where they’re going through the process of you’re putting the solution in front of them. You’re giving them awareness.

You’re showing them that there might be a process to solve that problem. If they take those steps to get through your funnel, that outcome of the funnel is I’m going to book a phone call with X firm owner. I want to learn more, I want to know more. That part then turns into the sales process. Completely separate process. The funnel is part of your marketing effort.

I have an interesting question to you. When someone books a sales call, we’re getting into semantics here but when do you think it goes from marketing to sales? Is it the second they get on the phone? Is it the second the call is booked and the sales person is confirming the meeting and pre-phrasing the meeting? When does it start for you?

For me, it starts when that phone call is booked then the sales process begins because sales is about confirming your appointments, getting them some information before the call to have them do any due diligence you need, maybe review some case studies, testimonials, your website, your LinkedIn profile and getting them prepared to have that conversation. The second that phone call is booked is when the sales process starts.

I like that because a lot of people look at their sales process and they just show up to the call and they don’t have a sales process they maybe they’ll just install a marketing process and they won’t install a sales process and they’re like, “The person didn’t show up to the call.” It’s like did you confirm, did you send a little homework, did you give them a call the day before and be like, ‘Are you going to show up?’”

That’s all part of a sales process. We’re delineating a lot of definitions , Charles, so this is very good.

D’s all over the place, all right. I like that.

Scaling At A Reasonable Speed Using Paid Ads

We were talking about the funnel and that the ones that you help firm owners build are solution awareness process built funnels. We’re talking about how that can help get more leads to book phone calls because that’s where the marketing process ends. Are there any other things or next steps that a firm owner would need to do in order to get qualified leads?

A couple of different things. We delineated between the media and the messaging before, so the media on the internet Facebook, Instagram typically sometimes LinkedIn. We’ve got the right messaging on the media, we’re bringing them to a funnel, so hopefully there’s some series of education we’ve framed it correctly. Now one of the things we see is typically, we like to use paid ads. We like to bring people into that funnel we talked about with paid advertising.

When I think about getting leads, there’s really two main ways on the internet: there’s organic so that’s like posting on Instagram, posting on Facebook, Facebook groups, manual outreach on LinkedIn, maybe posting on LinkedIn. There’s a lot of work behind that. It can be useful because you really understand your target avatar because you have to spend time doing it and see what works. It’s a lot slower unless you somehow get lucky and go viral. If you’re reading this, you’re probably an accounting nerd like me and so you probably aren’t going to go viral tomorrow.

We like the other route which is the paid route. We go to Facebook or LinkedIn and we say, “I’m going to give you XYZ dollars. I want eyeballs or attention to this advertisement.” If you want to scale with any reasonable speed, paid ads is basically a requirement. The cool thing is you don’t have to go dance on TikTok or harass people who don’t want to talk to you via cold message or anything like that or cold call. The idea is we pay Facebook and Facebook brings us people leads, eyeballs to that funnel and the funnel does the heavy lifting.

A really good example is if I put an ad on Facebook that says, “If you’re an eCom store owner who’s doing over $1 million a year, you’re struggling to scale, not sure if you’re going to be able to sell out through your inventory or even how much inventory to buy, I’ve created a system that fixes all of that and it can show you how to scale confidently with tons of cash so you can get your life back and not have to stress.”

“All you got to do is click the link below and it’ll take you to a webpage fill out your information there there’ll be a short little video. If it makes sense, book a call with us.” That’s messaging I just came up with at the top of my head, it’s not far off of what our ads are. I can put that in front of tens of thousands of people a day and I don’t have to do all the manual work. It becomes very scalable and some people reading this might just be starting out and want like 2 or 3 sales calls a week.

Some people reading might have a sales team of 5 people and they need 8 sales calls for each of those 5 people every single day. The cool thing about paid ads is you can spend a little bit, $10, $20. You could spend $20,000 a day, it’s up to you. Understanding the paid ads and realizing that every dollar that you put into paid ads will turn into more. If I gave you a little box and it had a little spot for you to feed dollar bills into it and if you put in $1 and it spat back out $5, how many dollar bills would you put into it?

A lot.

You’d grab a shovel and you’d take as many dollar bills as you could and then you’d shovel them into them as fast as you can. When you figured out paid ads and paid marketing, it gets real fun real fast.

How Can Charles Help You With Marketing

That might be really scary for someone reading right now and say, “I don’t know where to even begin.” I’d love it, Charles, if you could share how you help people do this where if they put $1 in a box, they get $5 to $10 back. You have the confidence to help firm owners implement that just like I help implement sales processes because that’s the other element.

You can get all the calls booked but if you can’t close and you can’t do that conversion event to turn that interest of a sales meeting into money in your firm and your bank account then that’s a different challenge. What about even just getting the first part built out? As you said a many firm owners are introverted, they love doing their numbers and this is like speaking Japanese to them. They’re like, “I’ve heard this a million times and I don’t even know where to begin,” or, “I’m going to just do radio ads.”

How does this compare to radio ads? If they want to have a conversation with you, Charles, how can they do that? I truly believe that getting leads is a place in your business that you should get help with and outsource. It’s like your sales process. You weren’t taught this when you were getting your CPA, you weren’t taught how to have relationship-based enrollment conversations where people pay you in the first meeting and you get signed engagement letters because otherwise, you would have stopped being getting ghosted by clients and all the other problems that you have and you have AR, so clearly, you were never getting paid up front anyway.

I think what Charles is talking about, none of this you’re going to get taught. Charles has spent years learning how to do this and developed a program and a system for firm owners, which I truly believe is a great one if you want to spend money to make money. How do they connect with you in order to get a conversation going to see if that’s something they want to do for their firm?

Sure. I appreciate that you mentioned enrolling sales calls and one call. I love that. I wish more people did that, I know you do that. First off, you can’t see me clapping but hats off to you guys. Second off, if someone wants to learn more about how to get more qualified leads showing up for fractional CFO accounting bookkeeping, all you have to do is go to ProfitSurgeGroup.com/hello or check out Profit Surge Group on Instagram.

Those are the best places to get a hold of us. You can look about what we do. I say take a look at our marketing and see because the exact system that I use for us is the same system that we teach you. High level is that is we can get your ads marketing funnel messaging the right media all set up in 14 days and you are taking calls on day 15.

That way, instead of spending years of trial and error, you can’t press skip, there’s no skip in life but you can press fast forward and get that all started so that way you can start turning $1 into $5 or $10. Use those sales skills especially if they worked with you to really use them with the volume coming in. The best place to get a hold of us is ProfitSurgeGroup.com/hello or reach out to me on Instagram at Profit Surge Group. Those are the best spots.

Thank you so much, Charles, for being here with us on the show. Is there anything else that you wanted to share that maybe we didn’t talk about that would help firm owners get leads if they do not contact you?

You know what, when you’re starting out, advertising can be hard, advertising can be scary. We didn’t go to school for it like you said, I went to school for finance. I will say this. Just because it is new doesn’t mean it is impossible. There was a time where I didn’t know how to walk or I didn’t know how to ride a bike. I can do both of those things now. It sounds dumb to compare doing something like marketing to something simple like that.

Once you learn how to do it, I promise you it’ll change your life even if you decide to not be an accountant or a bookkeeper or tax professional tomorrow. Marketing and sales skills will make you more money regardless of what the heck you do and it would be a shame to not invest in yourself because you already went to college and all that for it anyhow. My one piece of advice is learn a new skill.

Marketing Funnel: Marketing and sales skills will make you more money regardless of what you do. It would be a shame to not invest in yourself.

It is not impossible. Even if it’s scary or hard, you have someone like Charles to walk you through the process. On the sales side, I’m here for you for that. Thank you again for being here with us on the show, I think this was really great distinctions and delineations of the differences. All the D’s.

Thank you so much for having me.

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Thank you all so much for joining Charles and I on another amazing episode. As he said, you can’t hit rewind but you can definitely hit fast forward. If you’re ready to fast forward and scale and get your messaging right, get your media right, get your funnel created, get your paid advertising on the right track so you don’t waste money but you can actually make money, then make sure to reach out to Charles. He does great for his clients for paid advertising.

If you’ve created a firm but it still feels like a job that you can’t escape from because you don’t have systems in place and you don’t really have a plan for freedom, then it’s really time to make a shift. You shouldn’t have to hit burnout to get to your next revenue goal. You don’t need more clients. You need better quality ones like the ones we spoke about with Charles. You also need a sales process to close, also known as enrolling them into your practice, so getting paid, getting a signed engagement letter and getting them to say yes to hiring your firm.

Here at the Abundant Accountant, I show you how to package your services, raise prices, get paid your worth, charge premium fees, and work with high margin clients who respect your time and your value. Book a free strategy call at TheAbundantCall.com and let’s lay out a roadmap that turns your firm into a real asset, not just a glorified job.

Should you choose to want to implement what we talk about on that call, we’ll guide you through the process and if not, no hard feelings. We’re here to support your success regardless of the path that you take. Just don’t let indecision hold you back. Take the first step towards a more prosperous firm by scheduling your call at TheAbundantCall.com. We look forward to talking to you and I’ll see you in the next episode.

Important Links

• Profit Surge Group
• The Abundant Call
• Contact Profit Surge Group
• Profit Surge Group on Instagram

About Charles Leikauf

Charles Leikauf is a corporate finance professional turned accidental fractional CFO. After helping restructure a $2 billion business and later serving as a CFO for another company, he chose to leave the corporate world and build something on his own terms. Since then, he has worked with numerous companies as a fractional CFO, using his finance expertise to help them grow and operate more strategically.

He found a way to step away from the traditional CFO career path by turning his financial skill set into a business that provides time, location, and financial freedom. When he is not serving fractional CFO clients, he helps accountants and bookkeepers do the same for themselves through his work at Profit Surge Group.