Three ways to correct it in the first meeting without losing the account
It is the kickoff, and the CFO across the table has just asked you to make sure there is coffee for the room. You lead the engagement. By minute eleven of the meeting, the CFO has routed every substantive question toward your associate, who is 29 and male and typing away on his open laptop beside you. The associate keeps looking at you. The CFO does not. Should you respond regardless, the CFO offers a courteous smile and then turns to your associate to ask what he thinks.
Handled badly, this costs you the account, or at least the room, and losing the room costs you the account more slowly. Handled well, you earn the trust of a client who will hand you the next three years of work. Left alone, every meeting from here on looks like this one, and your associate becomes the lead in the client's mind. At some point the client requests him specifically, and since your firm earns its fees through relationships, it gives the client exactly what it asked for. Hot drinks were never really what mattered here. The next three years are.
The turning point
The CFO is not making any decision here. Assumptions like this sit on autopilot, and autopilot is much easier to reset in an opening meeting than after several rounds together. He is not your opponent. Across the table sits an assumption, quietly holding the budget in Florida. Winning the debate isn't necessary. What counts is interrupting the presumption before it hardens into fact.
Why this has little to do with how present you are
According to Women in the Workplace 2025, female executives are roughly twice as likely as their male peers to be mistaken for a subordinate. Such a finding points to a recurring dynamic in the room, not to any shortcoming in your demeanor. It happens to senior women at client tables across Florida, from Jacksonville to Miami, and most respond by working twice as hard in the second meeting. The client reads that as proof that the associate had the ideas and the lead has the energy. The costly move is to wait. A single sentence spoken within the first eleven minutes, before the room has settled on an interpretation, is the low-effort fix.
Three approaches for correcting course during the opening meeting
Step one. Pull the question back to you, steady and unhurried, as Tampa Bay leaders do. "I'll take that one. "I'm the one leading this engagement," then give your full answer. Deliver the line once with warmth, and the dynamics in the room shift on their own.
Step two. Redirect the coffee. Glance at your associate and say, "Could you find out from reception whether they can bring coffee?" Give him that task in the same easy tone you'd use to assign him a spreadsheet. He's an associate, and running small errands comes with the territory. Still, the client has just seen you hand out that task.
Step three. Make the reporting lines clear as you leave the room. "I'll personally take ownership of our weekly check-in." "He'll manage the data workstream and report directly to me." With that, you've spelled out the org chart aloud, and the client heard it straight from the person at the top.
Not one of these three moves comes close to a standoff, even in Sarasota or Boca Raton. Each one is a plain line any engagement lead might say, and that ordinariness is precisely what makes it work. Those mistaken for junior staff end the misperception by behaving like the senior person they are, stating it plainly rather than justifying it.
It was the CFO who raised the coffee topic with you in Orlando. Next week he'll bring the forecast to you, because on day one you made clear whom he should be asking.