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So, you have been operating as a Portfolio Executive.  You have gone through the process of identifying your clients. You’ve built relationships with them.  You have completed your initial diagnostic and now have won an engagement. 

How can you effectively onboard your client and ensure that the relationship will continue to grow? 

I suggest considering four onboarding tools that you ought to consider: 

Overcommit your Time at the Start

Even though you have a fixed-price contract, which is likely based on the assumption that you will work an average of two to three days a month, you should overcommit your time in the first three to four months.  One day a week allows you to gain traction, build relationships, remain visible, and begin demonstrating your impact.   

It also enables you to deliver value while developing a more comprehensive plan and understanding the business’s annual cycles. These include the budget cycle, the strategy cycle, the reporting cycle, the investor cycle, and possibly even seasonality related to clients’ propensity to plan and spend.   

Weekly Reporting 

In those early days, create a straightforward weekly report.  It helps to communicate clearly with the stakeholders you care about.  Some of these stakeholders will be those working alongside you as fractional employees.  Others may include the CEO and other senior executives, or even the investing company that sponsored you into the client.   

The weekly report should have at the top the goals for the month, and then underneath:   

• Planned, done 
• Planned, not done 
• Not planned, done 
• Planned for next week 
• Risks and issues 

This creates visibility into your activities and highlights what is preventing your progress.  If you’re only working one day a week, it’s easy for a client to overlook your efforts or fail to understand the challenges you face because other stakeholders are hindering progress. 

Quality Assurance Approach 

Your client wants you to make tangible differences, but there are also intangible factors that are important to your client and should impact your approach and style.    

At the beginning of the engagement, identify four or five quality criteria.  These could include timeliness, quality of communication, knowledge transfer, efficiency, and meeting budget expectations.  These are measures of the quality with which you deliver your outcomes.   

Ask your client — usually the CEO — to rate the importance of each of the criteria out of five.   

Suppose you have five criteria; four fives would total twenty.  Explain that the maximum total score they can allocate must be less than fifteen, so that they must prioritise.   

At the end of the first month, ask them to rate your performance out of five for each of the criteria and multiply the importance rating by the performance score.  Express the result as a percentage of the maximum possible score.  Once you’ve reviewed this, ask your client if they would like to reprioritise the importance for the next month.  A client’s understanding of what is essential and valuable in the relationship will change over time, so you regularly review your quality assurance criteria in order to remain aligned.    

Return on Investment and Risk Management Dashboard 

Start to demonstrate how your activity reduces cost, increases income, and improves risk management.   

When identifying benefits:   

• State whether it is a one-off or recurring cost saving.   
• State whether it is a one-off or recurring income gain.   
• Show how risks have been moved from high likelihood and high impact to lower categories.   

Explain the cost of mitigation or the potential impact avoided; this provides a ‘scoreboard’ of the return on investment for your work.  If a benefit is recurring, calculate it over the whole year.   

The real risk is that the client will recognise the benefit at the time but ‘bank’ it and forget by the time you seek to adjust your rate or expand your scope.   Maintaining this dashboard allows you to clearly show, for example, that for the £5,000 a month invested in you, you have delivered:   

• Recurring cost savings of £3,000 a month 
• Increased income of £10,000 a month 
• Improved net margin of £4,000 a month 
• Mitigated significant organisational risks for minimal cost 

You can then demonstrate compelling long-term value to the organisation.   

Summary 

In summary, consider these four client onboarding tools:   

1. Overcommit at the beginning 
2. Weekly report 
3. Quality assurance approach 
4. Return on investment and risk management dashboard 

They will allow you to demonstrate to clients, month in and month out, the value you are creating and the recurring value you are building for their organisation.   

Charles McLachlan is the founder of FuturePerfect and on a mission to transform the future of work and business. The Portfolio Executive programme is a new initiative to help executives build a sustainable and impactful second-half-career. Creating an alternative future takes imagination, design, organisation and many other thinking skills. Charles is happy to lend them to you.