Three ways to correct it in the first meeting without losing the account
The kickoff meeting has barely started when the client's CFO turns to you and asks, quite casually, whether someone could arrange the coffee. You are the engagement lead. Seated beside you, your associate, a 29-year-old man, has his laptop open, and across eleven minutes the CFO has routed every substantive question to him alone. Your associate keeps glancing your way. The CFO does not. You respond regardless, and the CFO offers a courteous smile before turning to your associate to ask if he concurs.
Mishandle this moment and you may forfeit the account outright, or you may forfeit the room, which will cost you the account more gradually. Handle it with skill and you win a client willing to entrust you with the next three years of engagements. If you let it slide, every meeting from here on becomes this meeting, and your associate starts to look like the lead in the client's mind. One day the client asks for him by name, and your firm, which bills by the relationship, gives the client what it wants. The request for coffee was never the actual difficulty. The next three years are.
The turning moment
The CFO has not yet decided anything about you. He is operating on habit, and habits are much easier to rewrite at the first meeting than at the fifth. He is not your adversary. He is an assumption with a budget. Winning the argument is not required of you. What you need is to replace that assumption before it hardens into fact.
Why this has little to do with your being in the room
According to Women in the Workplace 2025, women leaders are two times more likely than men to be taken for someone in a junior role. That reflects a pattern, not a verdict on how you carry yourself. It happens to senior women at client tables across the country, Greater Cincinnati included, and most of them respond by working twice as hard in the second meeting. The client reads that as confirmation that the associate had the ideas and the lead supplies the energy. Hesitating is the expensive choice. The cheap move is one sentence, delivered in the first eleven minutes, before anyone has settled on a story.
Three corrections to make during the first meeting
Step A. Reclaim the question calmly, without any visible reaction. "I'll take that one. "That decision is mine to make on this engagement." Then give the complete answer. State it one time, with warmth, and watch the room reposition itself around you.
Step B. Redirect the coffee. Glance at your associate and say, "Could you check with the front desk about the coffee?" Assign him the task in the same easy tone you would use to pass him a spreadsheet. He is an associate, errands come with the job, and the client has just watched you assign one.
Step C. Lock in the reporting structure as the meeting wraps up. "I'll personally run the weekly check-in with you." "He'll lead the data workstream and report directly to me." You have just laid out the org chart aloud, and the client heard it from the person at its head.
Not one of these three steps is a showdown. All three are the ordinary sentences a lead says, and that is the point. Someone repeatedly mistaken for junior staff ends the error by behaving like the senior person, openly, and without justifying it. Cincinnati's business community is well connected, and a reputation for clear leadership travels. Organizations such as the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber and the Women's Fund of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation are good places to sharpen these skills and build the peer support that makes them easier to use.
The CFO originally asked you about the coffee. Next week he will bring the forecast to you, because on day one you told him exactly whom to ask.