To become a CFO who can quickly get to the root cause of your business client’s wants and needs requires you to become a secret agent. You’ll need accounting experience for sure and an MBA could be a plus. The main thing is to think like a secret agent and become a CFO who possesses tricks and tips that’ll help you break through any challenge that you’re financial coaching client will face.

Maxwell Smart Agent 86 and his female side kick Agent 99 in the 1960s sitcom Get Smart never failed to save the day. You have to become a Secret Agent on several levels who coaches the CEO to avoid financial missteps and how to get his business out of financial hot water.

What Does It Mean To Become a CFO Secret Agent?

You’ll have to be like a fly on the wall in your financial coaching client’s life. Reading through the lines and hearing what’s not being said is critical to influence the CEO and board to take action which will keep them alive in business.

Once you become a CFO, you’ll be the Secret Agent for coaching your clients through financial strategy, setting up accounting systems and policies, financial reporting, and financial relationships with bankers and investors. Mel Brooks was the original author of the Get Smart story. Brooks described the premise for the show they created in an October 1965 Time magazine article:

“I was sick of looking at all those nice sensible situation comedies. They were such distortions of life. If a maid ever took over my house like Hazel, I’d set her hair on fire. I wanted to do a crazy, unreal comic-strip kind of thing about something besides a family. No one had ever done a show about an idiot before. I decided to be the first.”

You’ll need to coach your executive clients to plan how they can be the first at something like Mel Brooks did with the Get Smart sitcom to help them grow a business. You’ll need to help them think out of the box during and after your coaching sessions and get into your clients head and understand what they want and how best to help them get it.

In financial coaching the most important thing is that you ask the right secret agent questions so you don’t give your business clients misleading financial advice.

4 Questions You Need To Ask To Be A Financial Coach Secret Agent

The two questions you must be able to get to the bottom of to become a CFO who’s able to uncover your business coaching client’s goals and mission include:

What does the CEO want and what’s preventing him from getting it? In this article I give you 4 questions I use to quickly find out what financial coaching clients want.

1. What do you want to feel? They might want to feel different in that situation where they might be presenting a new plan or strategy to the board of directors or investors.

2. What do you want to do? What action do you need to take? Or what action do you want to get yourself to take in that situation?

3. What do you want to have? There might be a specific thing they want to have. Or a specific situation they want to have externally.

4. What do you want to be? Or who do you want to be more specifically. What identity do you want to take on? Who do you want to become. What role you want to take on. What do you want to achieve in who you’re becoming.

You’ll need to be like a secret agent at asking these 4 questions to become a CFO who hears what’s not said and who sees what’s not obvious. These questions are different ways to ask “what do you want.” What do you want is the key question.

While your coaching client is talking you can get a much more specific idea of what realm of their business is this wanting happening in. Is it happening within them emotionally in terms of what they want to feel in this situation? Is it happening in terms of what they need to do behaviorally speaking? Or is it something they want externally. Or who they want to become.

Once you get a sense of what area your financial coaching client really is focused on then you can ask them the specific question your client is focused on for his wants. Now there’s probably going to be an answer to all of these questions at some level and that’s great, but you’ve got to have a place to start.

Look for the first area that the CEO really is focused on. Get the answer to that first. Then you might expand it depending on what you’re really trying to create financially with your client.

Remember, the first question is what do your business clients want and the second question is what’s preventing them from getting it. Next time I’ll give you some secret agent financial coaching tips to become a CFO who can drill down even more on what’s preventing your business coaching clients from getting what they want.

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Financial coaching communications begins by acknowledging that people communicate differently and it’s your job to coach your business clients so they understand this fact about themselves and the people they communicate with in business. Your financial coaching will coach Chief Operating Officers to be more affective with bankers, investors, customers, and their suppliers when communicating about financial matters.

Mastering the 4 keys to communication below will help you be far more affective as a financial coach. You will be more powerful at enrolling more financial coaching clients because you’ll know what it is you need to do so CEOs and board members understand your value and what you can offer their business.

4 Financial Coaching Communication Styles For CFOs

Your client’s primary communication style will usually be one of the following or a combination of two of them. You need to learn to coach from all 4 perspectives because the more you can put business clients at ease, the easier it’ll be to work with them on preserving cash, making investments, and growing their businesses.

1. Dominant CEOs: They will be all about the bottom-line. Less details and getting straight to the point will work best for this style of communicator. Your Financial coaching should coach clients to give this type of communicator the facts that are necessary for them to make a rapid decision and no more details than that or you’ll risk frustrating them and loosing rapport.
2. People Oriented CEOs: This person is all about getting to know you and wanting to know who’s involved and what was said. They look on the bright side of things and they focus on their power to influence others. Financial coaching helps your client realize the potential financial downsides of their behavior and decisions and put their optimism in proper place.
3. Steady minded CEOs: Change and making rapid decisions isn’t usually welcomed with open arms with the slow paced communication style. Financial coaching for this style is to give this type of communicator time to ask questions and get comfortable with you or they may shut down. You may need to meet with them several times before they settle on a financial direction.

At the same time, their inflexibility can cause the firm problems in crisis and pivotal financial negotiations.

 4.  CEOS who play by Rules and Regulations: To get this person to take action and move forward, they need to know the boundaries. This communicator wants detailed facts and figures before moving forward. Financial coaching is to help them feel comfortable that they’re following all the rules and no policies or procedures will be violated. Ensure you come prepared to answer questions regarding financial charts, reports, and your financial analysis.

Many financial coaches naturally focus on the details and rules. That’s what makes finance work. Realize this fact and adopt the other financial coaching communications styles so you can be more effective in business communications.

Keys to Financial Coaching For CFOs

These 4 communication styles you encounter are the keys to successful CEO financial coaching. As a financial coach, you need to first know your primary communication style.

Then coach your client in realizing how they primarily interact with others. The most valuable thing you can do as a financial coach for your clients is to coach them so they understand each of the above distinct communication styles.

When you and your clients can flexibly communicate with bankers, board members, investors, and customers who have different styles of relating than your own, your communication effectiveness will rise to new levels.

As you become a more agile communicator and coach your business clients to do the same, you and your CEO clients’ financial bottom-line will increase dramatically.

Call today for a complementary financial coaching session to learn how you can more effectively coach your business clients to respond to the financial urgencies of their companies bottom-line.

Donald R. Hunter, MBA, CFP

Certified CFO Coach

How To Become A Chief Financial Officer  

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The reason I say that financial coaching resembles the coaching practices that Phil Jackson goes through when he coaches Kobe Bryant is simple. Phil can see what Kobe can’t see on the court. And I can see what my clients like you can’t see on the court of life and business.

You know financial Coaches Are Your Eyes And Ears On the Court of business, career, and life. And my goal in this article as a Master Coach is to show you how your destiny is simply an accumulation of every moment of your life. So read on.

Financial Coaching helps you to

• Relate to investments and money in empowering ways by uncovering and transforming your negative beliefs about money
• Helps you identify the people in your life who negatively and positively influence your financial decisions and behaviors
• Works with you to create a plan of action to ease financial stress in your business, career, and life and get on to the road of creating the wealth championship you deserve

Coaching Helps You Minimize Your Negatives and Increase Your Positives

As we grow older in the game of life, we take on beliefs which may have served us well in our younger days. But those same beliefs are causing disruptions now in our business, career, and life — especially financially.

You’ve got to stop and pay attention to this sneaky one. Because it creeps in and corrupts your life in ways you couldn’t even imagine. So that thing we do is innocently believe what we hear in the news or read on the Internet. And we subconsciously begin to form beliefs about how the world is without critical evaluation of these ideas because they come from so called experts and our favorite politicians. . We want to:

Personally:

• Stop living month-to-month
• Pay off debt and cut-up your credit cards
• Make investments which creates wealth for you rather than disappearing on you when you most need good returns

Business and Career:

• Grow our sales
• Cut marketing costs
• Find stable employment
• Earn a promotion and increase our salary

But you don’t get what you want because you’re in conflict with beliefs from your past, including current negative beliefs about the economy. And many of you are working 60 hours a week now when you should be enjoying traveling to exotic places, driving a brand new car, and helping to invest in your children’s and grand kid’s education.

I know you understand the whole world has been impacted by the slowing economy. And this is the time when we really need to get a grip on our negative beliefs about the economy and business, career, and investments so we get back on the road of living our dreams.

Do you know What the negative beliefs are you have about money? Financial coaching will help you uncover and transform your limiting beliefs.

Phil Jackson gets into his player’s heads all the time. Phil thrives to prevent limiting beliefs from forming and causing his players to go cold on their shots. Phil can’t prevent every negative belief from taking hold in a player’s mind, but his coaching abilities keeps his players performing at a high enough level to win championships.

As a coach, the negative beliefs I’m hearing from people who are stuck today financially include:

• You know there’re no jobs out there
• I’m not good at sales
• It’s a bad time to start a business
• Banks are not lending so I can’t get a business loan
• I should wait until the economy gets better before purchasing anything
• I know the economy isn’t going to get any better for the next ten years
• The democrats are spending our future on “big government” and I just need to vote in the republicans
• And many more limiting beliefs are out there…

Limiting Beliefs Block Your Progress

I don’t know if you share any of these beliefs, but the fact is these beliefs have very little to do with what you need to do to make your personal future brighter. Just having one of these convictions or any negative idea as a core belief for you could lead your life in the direction you most want to avoid.

I say this because limiting belief such as the ones I just mentioned stop you from taking forward action. They block your progress when your almost about to make the “three pointer” in your business, career, and financial decisions.

And they snatch the ball right out of your hands because you allow other people in your life to distract you from your dreams and goals.

And the sad fact is many times you’re not consciously connected to what’s really going on in your life because these convictions live at the subconscious level in your mind. And if you know what’s going on that’s holding you back you tend to not want to do anything about it because you don’t want to offend the people who are in the game of your life: bosses, customers, employees, partners, spouses, etc.

Life gets really complicated sometimes as you already know. And you get stuck playing a game you know you can’t win without coaching.

Well my goal here is to share with you how your beliefs control every thing you do in life, what you have in life, and what you ultimately become in life. Your core beliefs creates your destiny: day by day, hour by hour, and minute by minute. Your destiny is simply an accumulation of every moment of your life. This is the key point to remember from this article.

Now in the next article, I will continue this very important and timely discussion with the two game points I sited above which included:

• Identify the people in your life who negatively and positively influence your financial decisions and behaviors
• Create a plan of action to ease financial stress in your business, career, and life and get on to the road of creating the wealth championship you deserve

Stay In the Game

I have two ways you can get more information:

1. I offer no obligation financial coaching sessions for you to get more information on how I can help you get ahead financially. It’s easy. You can call me at (866) 323-9123 or email me right now to schedule your complementary session.

Or go to my complementary consultation page to enter your contact information and I’ll contact you to set-up your consulting session.

2. For business owners and real estate professionals, you can get my complementary financing report here: The Business Survival Report

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