Bookkeeping Tips: 5 Lessons I Learned From Pivoting My CFO Offer

This story starts in the fall of 2020.

 

Thanks to the onset of pandemic life and all the changes it brought along with it, one thing that truly took off was online business. So many of my clients were suddenly finding themselves making more money than they ever had before…and while this was amazing for so many reasons, it also brought along a whole host of new problems to tackle. Problems that, at the time, my offers weren’t fully designed to solve. There was a need there for my clients that wasn’t getting filled by my service, and while I could have let it stay that way, I made a different choice: I started trying to figure out what it would look like to support my clients even more. While I didn’t have the capacity to do it for everyone who was interested in my services (so this certainly wasn’t made into a PUBLIC offer), I did feel confident that I could make room to go that extra mile for the clients I already had.

 

With some help from my coach, I put together my first CFO offer and presented it privately to my clients. In the end, about a third of them accepted, which was fantastic! I got everything arranged, got excited, and launched right into it. But it quickly became apparent that there were some things that needed to be adjusted, and through the process of pivoting that offer to be a better fit for my clients, I gained a few new bookkeeping tips for anyone looking to build a new offer. You might have heard some of these bookkeeping tips before outside of the context of new offers, but I want to shed new light on them today. Without further ado, let’s jump into five lessons I learned about building an offer so you don’t have to!

Most problems don’t come with one-size-fits-all solutions, but don’t let that intimidate you! Don’t give up on your offer—get creative and start studying it from all angles to find the best solution. Sometimes you may have to throw the whole thing out and begin again from scratch, but most of the time, you’ll only need to adjust a couple facets rather than the entire offer. Don’t be afraid to get creative and shift pieces around until they fall into place—and don’t be afraid to change it up more than once! Not every problem can be solved in one or two tries, but if you keep pushing forward and challenge yourself to look at it from new angles, you’re sure to eventually untangle the knot. This applies to bookkeeping tips, of course, but it applies to a lot of other things in business, too—creative thinkers always excel! Trying new things could lead to your offer transforming into something you never thought it could be.

 

 

Fear of failure is real, and failing publicly even more so. But when something isn’t working, changing your approach isn’t a failure—it’s proof of your adaptability! So the next bookkeeping tips on my list? Don’t be afraid of failure, and don’t be afraid of change. Clients are far more likely to appreciate your willingness to stop, reassess, and revamp than they are likely to lose trust in you because an offer has to be adjusted. This ties back in to listening to your clients. By having the humility to stop and acknowledge that something isn’t working, you prove to your clients that their experience matters to you, and that you want your offer to be the best that it can be for them. This might even make them more likely to accept other offers from you in the future, knowing that there’s room for collaboration and adjustment and they won’t potentially get trapped in an offer that doesn’t work as well as they hoped. One of the most important tips for bookkeeping is to build trust between you and your clients, and this is one way to do that!

 

 

Big-time bookkeeping tip: your clients lead busy lives, and sometimes it can be easy for things to get lost in the shuffle. If getting them to complete a task is taking too long, don’t be afraid to take charge! For instance, instead of asking them to tell you a time that would be good for them to meet with you, what time they have available to jump on a call, etc., try choosing two or three time slots and offering those to them. By taking away the broad spectrum of possibilities and narrowing it down to two or three options, you still allow them flexibility, but you take away the open-ended question and replace it with a concrete choice that they can make very quickly. This might feel pushy, but trust me, it’s not! Your clients are still free to choose which option works best, and if nothing you offered them works, they’re more likely to come back with an alternate suggestion right away. One of the best bookkeeping tips you can take advantage of is simply to take charge when you need to.