Three ways to correct it in the first meeting without losing the account
The kickoff has started, and the CFO has just requested that someone in the room make sure the coffee is ready. You lead the engagement. Seated beside you is your associate, a man of 29 with his laptop already open, and across eleven minutes the CFO has aimed each substantive question at him rather than at you. The associate keeps glancing your way. The CFO never does. Once you respond regardless, the CFO offers a polite smile and turns to your associate to ask whether he concurs.
Mishandle that correction and you forfeit the account, or you forfeit the room, which ends up costing you the account more gradually. Handle it skillfully and you gain a client who will entrust you with three years of future work. If you do nothing, every meeting from here on becomes this meeting, and your associate turns into the lead in the client's mind. Eventually the client asks for him by name, and your firm, which bills on the strength of the relationship, gives the client what it asks for. Truthfully, the coffee was never the real problem. The next three years are.
The turn
The CFO has made no real decision yet. He is operating from a default, and in a first meeting a default can be rewritten far more easily than it can in a fifth. He is not your opponent. He is an assumption with a budget. You do not need to come out ahead in the argument. What you need is to displace the assumption before it hardens into habit.
Why it has nothing to do with your presence in the room
According to Women in the Workplace 2025, women leaders are two times more likely than men to be mistaken for someone in a junior role. That is a documented pattern, and it says nothing about your demeanor or competence. Senior women are running into it at client tables across Las Vegas and beyond, and most respond by working twice as hard in the second meeting. The client interprets this as evidence that the associate generated the ideas while the lead simply brings the enthusiasm. Staying silent is the choice that costs the most. The cheap response is one sentence, said in the first eleven minutes, before anyone has settled on a story.
Three fixes to apply in the first meeting
Step 1. Reclaim the question calmly and without hesitation. "I'll take that one. "This one falls to me to decide." Then give a complete answer. Say it once, warmly, and watch the room reorganize around you.
Step 2. Redirect the coffee. Look at your associate and ask, "Could you go check with the front desk about the coffee?" Assign him the task in the same even tone you would use to hand him a spreadsheet. He is an associate, and small errands are part of that role, and the client has just seen you delegate one.
Step 3. Define the structure before the meeting ends. "I will be running the weekly check-ins with you directly." "He will own the data workstream and report to me." In saying this, you have laid out the org chart aloud, and the client heard it from the person who sits at its top.
None of these three is a confrontation. Each is an everyday sentence a lead would say, and that is exactly the purpose. A person who has been taken for junior ends the misreading by behaving like the senior person, openly and without justifying it.
In Clark County, the CFO asked you about the coffee. Next week he will bring the forecast to you, since on day one you made clear who he should be asking.