Three ways to correct it in the first meeting without losing the account
The kickoff has barely started, and the client's CFO has just requested that someone in the room make sure the coffee is ready. You lead the engagement. Your associate, who is 29 and male, sits next to you with a laptop open, and for eleven minutes the CFO has sent every substantive question his way. Your colleague keeps turning to look at you. The CFO never does. You answer anyway, and the CFO gives a polite smile before turning to your associate to ask whether he agrees.
A clumsy response could cost you the account outright, or it could cost you the room first and the account later. A composed response earns you a client willing to hand over the next three years of work based on your judgment. Ignore it and every meeting from here on will be this meeting, and your associate will become the lead in the client's eyes. Someday the client will ask for him by name, and your firm, which bills on relationships, will hand over exactly what the client requested. The coffee was not the real problem, not in Salt Lake City or anywhere else. The next three years are.
The turn
The CFO is not weighing options when he makes this kind of move. He is acting on a reflex, and a reflex is much easier to reset during the first meeting than during the fifth. He is not your opponent. He is an assumption with a budget. You have no need to win the argument. You only need to swap out the assumption before it hardens into fact.
Why this has little to do with how you show up
In Salt Lake City and along the Wasatch Front, Women in the Workplace 2025 found that women leaders are twice as likely as men to be taken for someone junior. That describes a repeated pattern, and it says nothing about how you carry yourself. It happens to senior women at client tables across Salt Lake City, and most of them answer by working twice as hard in the second meeting. The client takes it to mean the associate came up with the ideas while the lead just brings the momentum. Waiting is the expensive option. The simplest fix is a single sentence, delivered within the first eleven minutes, before anyone in the room has formed a story about you.
Three approaches for setting it right during the first meeting
1. Take the question back calmly. "I'll take that one. It's my call on this engagement." Then answer it fully. Speak once, with warmth, and watch the room reorganize itself around you.
2. Redirect the coffee. Face your associate and ask, "Would you check with the front desk about coffee?" Assign him the task in the same easy tone you would use to pass him a spreadsheet. Associates usually fetch the errands, and the client has just seen you assign one.
3. Lay out the structure as you wrap up. "I'll be the one leading the weekly check-in with you myself. He'll lead the data workstream and report directly to me." With that, you have spelled out the org chart, and the client heard it from the person who sits at the top.
None of the three requires a showdown. Each is an ordinary sentence a lead says in the normal course of a meeting, and that is the point. Someone mistaken for junior ends the mix-up by acting senior, out loud, without justifying it.
The CFO raised the coffee with you directly. Next week he will direct the forecast to you, since on day one you made clear where it belongs.