Deciding to change is the easy part

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

That’s something you tend to hear more in politics than business. In fractional firms, it’s more like a road to purgatory paved with change announcements that lack follow-through.

I’ve seen this dozens of times throughout my career. A higher-up makes a big deal about a new process or initiative, enthusiasm builds, and then a few months later…nothing’s really changed.

That’s because making the decision to change is the easy part. Actually owning the change and seeing it through is much harder, and something fractional firms tend to overlook.

In my last post, I made the case that getting more efficient can quietly hurt fractional FP&A firms if you don’t reposition the work around it. I laid out a few ways to get ahead of that: giving managers real visibility, sharing best practices across the team, talking about your software partnerships like they’re part of the product/service your firm offers, and reframing client conversations before they get reframed for you.

Maybe you read that and thought, “yeah, makes sense, we should do some of that.” Great. You’ve gotten to step one.

Now comes the harder part: owning the change and seeing it through after the initial enthusiasm wears off.

Here’s how to actually implement lasting change.

First, find your Morpheus

In The Matrix, Morpheus doesn’t force Neo to accept a new reality. He offers him the choice. He builds the belief, then helps Neo develop the talent it takes to make it real.

Stay with me for a second—I promise this is the only Matrix reference and we’ll connect it back to the topic at hand.

Let’s say you’ve decided to make a change. Maybe it’s a new client onboarding process, or a new framework for how you run BvAs. Could be a new standard for how your team uses AI internally.

What happens next is what determines whether the initiative lives or dies. If a partner simply sends an org-wide email and assumes adoption will follow, it probably won’t. People might try the process out for a couple weeks, but then more than likely will go back to how they were already working.

The change initiative dies of indifference rather than resistance.

Many leaders think this is a process problem. “We just need a better rollout strategy and way to hold people accountable.” Some of that can help, but at its core, this is a people problem: you need a designated person who will own the change, translate why it matters, win over the skeptics, and keep the team accountable when the initial enthusiasm fades.

Or, to borrow one more line from Morpheus: “I can only show you the door. You’re the one who has to walk through it.”

That’s the job of the change leader.

What a change leader actually owns

In the fractional CFO/FP&A space, every meaningful change initiative needs someone who owns three things.

1. The why

Change is disruptive, even when everyone agrees it’s necessary. So the change leader has to make the “why” obvious. Why does it matter to the future of the firm? Why will my clients care about this? How will it help the employees who need to change how they work? 

There’s a big difference between “we’re rolling out a new BvA process” and “we’re creating a consistent BvA process so every client gets the same quality of insight, managers can coach the team more effectively, and we can scale without reinventing the wheel every month.” The first sounds like a hand-wavy directive from the top, while the second sounds like a well thought-out business case.

People don’t usually resist change because they’re stubborn. They resist change that feels vague, arbitrary, or disconnected from the work in front of them.

The change leader’s job is to connect the initiative back to something people actually care about: better client work, less manual steps in doing the work, fewer one-off fire drills, clearer expectations, or more leverage across the team. And they need to do it in concrete language, not abstract strategy-speak.

2. The skeptics

Second, they own the skeptics.

Every firm has people who are going to push back on just about any meaningful change. And that’s not actually a bad thing.

The skeptic is usually the person saying what other people are thinking but won’t say out loud:

• “My clients are happy. Why do I need to change anything?”
• “I’ve done it this way my whole career.”
• “This sounds like more internal process that slows down the client work.”
• “Is this actually going to help me, or is it just going to create another thing I have to maintain?”
• “Is everyone going to have to do it the same way, or is X person going to get an exception?”

Those people are not the enemy. In many cases, they may be some of your most senior and credible voices in the firm. Which means if you ignore them, they can quietly slow the whole thing down.

But if you bring them in early and actually listen, they can become your strongest advocates.

Here’s the key: instead of lecturing them, show them how the change will make their life easier. Maybe the new BvA framework means managers spend less time reworking analyst output, for example. Focus on that piece instead of how it’s going to improve the firm’s bottom line.

3. The dip

Third, they own the dip. Every change initiative has one.

The first few weeks of a new process are almost always bumpy. You’re still finding edge cases—figuring out how to handle the clients that don’t fit the new workflow. You’re training an analyst to do something you could have done faster yourself, and documenting steps that used to live in someone’s head.

It’s hard. And it’s when people start to wonder if the change was worth it.

This is make-or-break time—without someone holding the line, the firm will inevitably drift back to the old way before the new way has had a chance to prove itself.

I tend to think about this in roughly 30, 60, and 90-day terms:

• In the first 30 days, expect friction. Don’t expect perfection. The goal is steady usage, feedback, and surfacing the places where the process breaks.You will learn and iterate based on each piece of feedback from the team.
• By 60 days, you should start seeing some efficiency gains. People know the workflow better, and the obvious fixes have been made. The team is spending less time asking basic questions and more time seeing where the new process helps.
• By 90 days, you can usually tell whether the change is actually working. Not based on vibes, but based on whether the new behavior has become part of how the firm operates.

The change leader’s job is to recognize the dip as it’s happening, and act as a counterweight. Remind the team that early friction is to be expected. Separate real process problems from ordinary discomfort. And to keep leadership from declaring victory too early or abandoning the initiative too soon.

How to put this into practice

Here’s how to make your next change initiative stick:

Name the change leader before you launch the initiative

Decide who this will be before the announcement goes out. Someone that has the appropriate leadership backing and resources to see the change initiative through.

It should go without saying, but be thoughtful about who you tap for this role. Don’t just default to a senior person at the firm. Instead, filter your candidates for widely-trusted people, even if they’re more junior. They should also have a holistic understanding of how the firm operates—a good litmus test is asking some sample questions they’re likely to get from skeptics and seeing how they respond.

In a fractional CFO firm, that might be a senior associate who naturally helps other people troubleshoot their work, or an ops-minded partner who pays attention to how work moves through the firm. The title matters less than the trust.

The person leading the change should help shape the rollout, pressure-test the plan, identify likely objections, and think through what the team will need in the first 30 days.

Give them a clear mandate

“You own this now” is not a mandate. Set clear, quantitative goals. What does success look like at 30 days? At 60? At 90?

Are you trying to get every client onto a new onboarding checklist? Standardize BvA templates across all managers? Get the team using an approved AI workflow for variance commentary? Reduce rework? Improve visibility into capacity?

It can’t be all of these things at once. Be specific enough that the change leader knows what they’re aiming for, and the team knows what good looks like at each checkpoint.

Create a real feedback loop

The change owner is going to receive a LOT of feedback in the first couple weeks. You’re going to want to systematize how that feedback is captured and acted upon.

That could be a weekly working session, a Slack channel, office hours, manager check-ins, or some combination of all of the above. The format matters less than the fact that people know their feedback has somewhere to go.

And again, there will be plenty of feedback. More of it isn’t an indication of failure—it’s all about how you respond. The worst thing you can do is treat that feedback like resistance. Most of the time, it’s the team showing you where the rollout needs to get sharper. You should embrace this feedback, talk about how you are implementing changes as a result, and call that a success in front of the entire team.

Feedback without a place to go turns into backroom complaining, which turns into resentment, which makes the initiative DOA.

Give them visible sponsorship and protected time

Change management is hard. And it takes time. It’s unrealistic to expect that the change leader can keep their existing responsibilities and shepherd the change properly.

This cannot be a side task layered on top of a full book of client work. That’s basically guaranteeing either the initiative or the person will burn out.

Instead, make a plan to offload some of their client work for a few weeks. Give them the time and authority to pull people into working sessions without making it seem like they’re asking for favors.

Then, reinforce your backing of the initiative and the change leader publicly. Mention it in all-hands meetings, and celebrate early wins. Don’t disappear when the dip happens.

A lot of initiatives fail because leadership is loud at the launch and silent during implementation. The team notices. And whether it’s fair or not, that silence tells them how much the initiative really matters.

Make your next firm-wide change stick

Plenty of good ideas flounder without the right implementation strategy. Assigning an owner to see it through the rough patches, and giving them necessary support, is what’s required to ensure they stick.

This is all the more important right now as the pace of change in the fractional space ratchets up. Client expectations are being upended. Efficiency is changing the economics of delivery. And who knows what’s around the corner with AI.

Standing still isn’t an option. But simply deciding to change isn’t good enough either.

Up next in this series, I’ll get into the topic sitting underneath a lot of these conversations whether firms want to talk about it directly or not: AI, and what it actually means for the way fractional firms operate.