In this episode of The Trusted Adviser, Rob Pyne is joined by Anthony Warr and Bianca Musico from Warr Hunt — a firm renowned for its leadership in mentoring, team development and succession planning. Bianca reflects on her journey to becoming the FAAA Certified Financial Planner of the Year in 2024, while Anthony shares the foundational principles that have positioned Warr Hunt as a multiple finalist for Professional Practice of the Year.

Together, they unpack the firm’s unique “diamond team” structure, their use of the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), and how they’ve embraced technology to enhance client experience. Bianca also opens up about her podcast Cracking Mum Maths and her mission to empower more women in finance.

Whether you’re mentoring the next generation, building your team, or rethinking your firm’s direction, this is an episode filled with practical insights and inspiration.

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SHOW NOTES

Topics discussed

Building a Sustainable Advice Practice

How Anthony Warr structured Warr Hunt for long-term success
The use of the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) for continuous improvement
Creating intentional frameworks for reflection, discipline, and growth

Mentorship and Career Development

The ‘Diamond Team’ model for internal mentorship and succession planning
Developing future advisers through structured training and feedback loops
Supporting advisers at different stages of their career journey

Recognition and Reflection

Bianca’s path to becoming the 2024 Certified Financial Planner of the Year
How awards and public recognition influenced her professional identity
Lessons learned through reflection and acknowledgment

Empowering Women in Finance

Challenges faced by women in financial planning
The role of Bianca’s podcast, Cracking Mum Maths, in building community
Advocating for financial confidence and independence among women

Technology and the Client Experience

Leveraging tools like MyProsperity, Fin365, Power BI, and Xplan
Enhancing transparency and engagement through digital platforms
Using technology to improve both operations and client outcomes

Balancing Work, Life, and the Future of Advice

- Bianca’s practical advice for working parents, including boundary-setting and self-care
- The importance of human connection in an AI-driven future
- How affordability and innovation are reshaping financial advice delivery

Quotes

“You can’t teach empathy and connection from a textbook. It’s about sitting beside someone and learning how to truly listen.” – Anthony Warr
“With knowledge comes power. Women should feel confident making financial decisions—and it starts with understanding the basics.” – Bianca Musico

Resources

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to The Trusted Adviser Podcast, where you get a deep dive into the world of financial planning with industry leaders who share their stories of winning and learning as they charted their path to success. This podcast is for the curious. Those of you that like to dig into the detail. If that sounds like you get ready to listen and learn.

Rob Pyne

Welcome to another episode of The Trusted Adviser today. I’m joined by two highly respected advice professionals, Anthony war and Bianca Musico from war hunt. If you’re in the financial advice profession, it’s likely you’ve heard of them, particularly because Warr Hunt has previously been a finalist for the AAA professional practice of the year, including in the year just gone and Bianca was recognised nationally as a certified financial planner of the year in 2024 a truly outstanding achievement. In this episode, we go deep on the building blocks behind their success. Bianca shares the personal journey that led to her award recognition and reflects on the importance of stopping to look back and take stock, a practice we often do for our clients but rarely do for ourselves. We also discussed the diamond team structure that Warr Hunt built to support internal talent development, their investment in structured career pathways and deliberate culture of mentoring and succession planning as positioning their firm for long term sustainability. Anthony opens up about what it takes to continually improve the role of process and discipline in business performance and their adoption of the Entrepreneurial Operating System EOS as a framework for clarity and execution. We also touch on the powerful work Warr Hunt is doing to nurture young advisers, particularly women in the profession, and the importance of patience, confidence, and structured feedback in developing great advisers. And in a particularly inspiring segment of our conversation, Bianca shares her work on the Cracking Mum Maths podcast and her personal mission to help more women feel financially empowered and confident making decisions about money, if you’re leading a team, growing a practice, mentoring young professionals, or just looking for inspiration on how to do business better. In advice, this conversation is for you. So, grab a coffee, pop in your headphones, and let’s dive in.

Welcome. Anthony Warr and Bianca Musico, to The Trusted Adviser podcast

Anthony Warr

G’day. Rob Good to see you.

Bianca Musico

Thanks. Rob

Rob Pyne

Good to see you both. We’re here to today talk about something which is very interesting to a lot of people. Your practice has been more than once appearing in the finalists of the practice of the year. And then this year just passed, Bianca, you picked up the certified financial planner of the Year award with the financial advice association. So, I really want to touch on that to begin with Bianca, and start with you, and just get you to share your journey, because everyone who sees people succeeding in this profession can learn a lot from others. You can share a lot of wisdom about what it takes to get to that level. So, I’m really keen to dig into that with you and ask you to begin today just by sharing the journey that led you to this very prestigious recognition as the CFP of the year.

Bianca Musico

Thanks for that, Rob. It is an award that is one of the ones that we look at, and we looked at from the start of the year, and sort of said, what are all the awards that are out there, and which ones are important to us? And this one resonated a lot with our firm. It resonated with me, and I was initially encouraged by quite a few people, actually within the firm and outside, to do it. So, I probably reluctantly threw my hat in the ring in all honesty, because I’m not one that likes to stand up there and have sort of that accolade or be the centre of attention. It’s definitely not me. But what I did find really impactful going through the process was actually getting to sit down and, as you said, reflect back on your career, because you don’t do that. Well, I definitely don’t, but I think most people sort of just get on with their life and their career and reflect back on what’s happened. So, entering the award allowed me to do that, which was interesting. It was actually interesting for family too, because they sort of look back and go, Wow. I didn’t realise that they’re all the things you do, or you did so effectively. It was allowing us to sort of go through that process. And the FLA puts a really good process. It’s a really rigorous process, by the way, and I encourage anyone to do it, but they really do hone in on the adviser, which is what we liked about the award, and what I liked about the award, it wasn’t one of those sort of those sort of bells and whistles. How many clients have you got? How much fun under management, it was really about, tangibly about the adviser and what they’re doing for the profession, and for that, I became really proud to be announced as the winner of that award. So, I think it’s more a reflection on what we’ve done over our life and over the journey of war hunt, and my journey as an adviser within Warr Hunt. So, yeah, I’d encourage anyone to follow that process and go through the awards, even though you don’t feel like potentially, it’s something that you want to be standing up there and winning, but it is. It is a great thing to be recognised later on as someone who has contributed quite a lot to the profession.

Rob Pyne

Yeah, there’s two things I take from that. One. Question is that you didn’t necessarily appreciate how far you’d come until you’d stop to take stock of that. And that’s something we do with our clients. Isn’t as advisers. We sit there with our clients. We show them how far they’ve come, show them progress they’ve made. And there’s something very affirming as a human being to see how far you’ve come at anything. And so, we’re used to doing that as advisers with clients, and to go through that process yourself, clearly was something that was very rewarding, both you and your family, to see how far you’ve come in your career, and to be recognised as the top CFP of the year nationally is a massive recognition. And I would just add to your point there about this award and the awards in general, from the f triple A practice of the year and surf our financial planner the year, we have a similar perspective that you just shared. Bianca, there are awards out there that will recognise how much farm you’ve got, and there’s different motivations for different firms, and they’re all valid. But for us, we hold this series of awards from the profession to be judged by your peers, which is to say, that’s the best sort of professional recognition you can get, in my view, which is to say your peer group is looking at you and saying, relative to your peers, you stand above you’re an outstanding example of what this profession brings. So, I can totally relate to the points you’ve made there. And as you say, for people who haven’t done it yet, it’s a great process just to actually just see how far you’ve come and reflect on that. So, Anthony, turning to you, you know, you’ve been at the helm of Warr Hunt since the beginning, and you’ve actually now been a finalist more than once, so clearly, the profession is recognising you as a practice that has done a lot of things right. What are the top three strengths you think Warr Hunt Bring, I guess, to these awards that people look at and say, this is a firm that really knows how to be successful in delivering advice to clients. What would those top three strengths of Warr Hunt be? Do you think?

Anthony Warr

Yeah, thanks, Rob. It’s interesting listening to Bianca just talk about stopping and reflecting. I’ve been working through this program, which I might share a bit on later, but one of the concepts raised with this thing of the gap and the gain, and that we often get stuck in the gap rather than focusing on the gain. Where have we come from and what have we achieved? And you beat yourself up a bit for the things that you haven’t done well, and you forget about all the things that you’ve progressed in. And I’ve always said to our kids that Winning is everything right, and I still believe that ultimately. But you know, you can’t have a journey without a destination, and you can’t get to the destination without a journey. So, in the end, you still want to win, but you’ve got to take the good that you get along the way, even if it takes you longer to win. And we haven’t won this award, Rob, we’ve been runner up twice, okay? And the reason I raised the gap and the gain, and the reflection is someone said to me, wow, you’ve done it. You’ve done it again. So, I look back and I think, well, what have we really done well? And what do we keep doing to get better? And we’ve been asked, are we going to go on this award again this year? Of course. And you’ll always start thinking, well, what better story can I tell? What other things have we done? You know, how can I be better than last time? And I think we asked that question last year when we submitted again. I remember sitting down with Bianca and going, how do we write more about this? You know, like, what little things? And all of a sudden we’re sitting there, and we’re talking about Bianca’s succession in the firm and becoming an owner and on our principal pathway. And so suddenly, there you go. There’s something else that we’ve done, that we’ve achieved, and initially we’re stuck in this gap, and we forget about the gain. But to go back to your question about the top three strengths, years and years ago, I started out with this sort of whole idea of goals, advice, knowledge, peace of mind. That was the four things. And some of the peeps in this firm, even Bianca, might not have even heard that. She might find it somewhere as she digs around. And someone asked me, you know, what do you do? And I said, well, we focus on goals. We give people advice, and, you know, in the end, we just want to give them peace of mind. And I think what we’ve done is we’ve got four points of difference in this firm, and we talk about understanding, designing, certainty and alignment, but really what it is we want to understand our clients better than anyone else. That is our goal. Now there’s other people out there that will have a crack at it, and they might be as good as we are. We don’t know, but our aim is to get to understanding our clients better than anyone else, as quickly as we possibly can. And then we want to design a plan that’s built around all that. And we have an investment philosophy that we believe has the highest degree of certainty achieving investment success, and we apply that across our whole client base. So, we don’t let clients pick and choose what they want here because we want to give them the ultimate certainty. And the other most important one to us is we’re independent, and the only way you can be aligned to your client is to be truly independent. So those four points of difference is one of our strengths. The other one is embracing help and advice. And systems, and that could be in part technology, but I go right back to 2006 I think it was 2005 I actually set up the business as a new business in oh three, and I thought I had everything right, and I contacted a fellow called Jim stack pool and joined a program called cultivating advice, and that’s how I’ve met some of the great peers that I have now and that we have as a firm and embracing cultivating advice was about putting in place a structure and a real robust process around what we were already trying to do or wanting to do, but we just didn’t quite have that robustness around it, and so cultivating advice was really critical of that, And I’m thankful to the time we spent with Jim, and then, more recently, we’ve embraced the Entrepreneurial Operating System. I’m gonna ask you, but shortly, I won’t go too much into detail, but that, again, it’s about embracing a coaching and embracing systems that will help us be better and recognise how we can be better, and that’s also been the early adoption of technology. We were in a dealer group in 2006 where we had everything supplied for us, including software. And we made a decision to go out and buy X plan independently of the dealer group. And x plan thought we were mad. The dealer group thought we were mad, but actually what we wanted to do was put the technology behind the system that we wanted to put in place to best manage and serve our clients. So that was really important. And the final one is we realised that in 2019, took us a long time, didn’t it that we really had to have a structured growth and development plan for people. I thought we’d done pretty well in mentoring. Maybe most of that was just coming from me, but as we grew, I realised that unless we started to map out what people’s futures could look like, we wouldn’t be able to get that buy in and that success and development. And I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to do with the growth and development of people. You know, some of them have moved on to completely different careers, but I look back at that and say, well, we actually shaped them to be the people they are, or when they left, that gave them the opportunity to embrace a different profession or a different career path. So that’s been really, really important as well.

Rob Pyne

Yeah, and on that point, that’s something that Bianca, you’ve been sharing a little bit of that as you’ve been traveling around the country to the AAA roadshow events, and you’ve spoken about supporting the growth of the professionals in your firm. Can you share with our listeners what Warr Hunt is doing there, and how that focus has shaped your interactions with the team daily at Warr Hunt?

Bianca Musico

Yeah, it’s a good question. Rob, so when I came back from maternity leave, I’m going to say 2019, so after I had my second, I remember going to ant and saying, We really need to understand what everyone in this firm wants to do with their life and with their career, and we really need to start putting some structure around their training and supporting them and developing them. Essentially, that’s where the head of advice role sort of evolved and was created. But the whole idea around that was essentially, we knew that the technical side was easy, right? Technical skills is somewhat easy within our profession to teach, but it’s giving these young guys, or the next generation, the confidence, and the ability to make their own decisions, because they’re quite young advisers right when they come in here, and as Anne said, they don’t know what they don’t know. So, for us, it was really about embracing them and starting to put some structured training around them and effectively allowing them to grow along with the business. So, the business was growing, and we needed them to grow in line with the business, but it was, how do you get that buy in? So, we have put quite a bit of structure around their training and development, and it starts sort of with a training and development plan that we have that we show all of our potential employees, if you want to call it them, our staff members, in their interview process, from day one, they sort of see that growth and development plan. They’re given that document so they can really understand what it means to work at Warr Hunt and what it means for them to grow and become an adviser. So, we start that really early. We have PDP sessions with them quarterly, where we run through those growth and development plans and really bring them back and line them up with what do they want to achieve, but what does the business also need out of them? So, to some degree, there’s milestones in there that they need to meet to effectively take them to that next level. And what we found was having those discussions and bringing them along with that journey. Effectively, one allowed us to sort of understand where they were at in their own personal development, but it gave them that buy in into the business, because if you were open and transparent with them, they effectively put in more they strive to become better. So we started with growth and development, and then we branched that out into what we call our ADP sessions, which is effectively our accelerated development program for these young guys, and it’s giving them that, again, that ability to cut their teeth in a safe space, because they really wanted to be able to interact with clients, but they were scared to they were worried that they were going to say the wrong thing, or they didn’t know what to do. So, it was providing them that opportunity. Through essentially role-playing scenarios. So, we run those fortnightly with them to allow them to sort of, again, run through those strategies, and therefore feel confident that they can walk into a client meeting and start those conversations early with clients. And for us, it was providing them feedback in the moment, because we found that we would give them feedback, but it would be every quarter at their PDPs, and they would say, oh, that would have been helpful if you had told me that a month ago or three weeks ago when we were working on it. So, we brought that into place where we would start to do what we call feedback, two by two feedback. So, two things they did well in that meeting, and two things they could do differently, so not necessarily what they did wrong. I think changing language is really important with these young guys. It’s supporting them and showing them that it’s not what you did wrong. If you just change those little nuances in meetings, you’ll actually get a lot further with the client. So, I think introducing all of those things was really important. It’s what’s allowed the advisers here, the ability to grow, as Anne said, and sometimes they take that on board and they grow within our profession, and other times they take that feedback and they go elsewhere, but we’ve shaped them into becoming really diligent, hard workers that listen to what the clients want, and that’s what we ultimately want here at Warr Hunt.

Rob Pyne

You’re helping them build better habits, irrespective of whether they go on to a stronger career with you or with in a different field? So yeah, I think the things that I can really connect with there is the fact that you’ve given your people a pathway. They know what it takes to go up a level or two, and so that seems like a bit of a no brainer to say it, doesn’t it? But if you don’t tell people what it takes to go up a level or two, they just don’t know what to expect of themselves or what you expect of them. So, giving them the clarity is so powerful, isn’t it?

Bianca Musico

Yeah, it’s funny. You say that Rob you, and I say that, but I’ve gone around the last three or so weeks with the f triple A for the road show. And the consistent feedback after that was we really need to have a growth and development plan. We sort of fly by our wings and just, sort of just see how we go and see where it lands. And a lot of firms don’t have that structure in place. So, it’s interesting to you and I, we go, yeah, it’s a no brainer, but a lot of firms just don’t, whether it’s they don’t have time or capacity to do it, it’s just not at the forefront of their mind. But for the profession, it’s really important that we start growing that next generation, because unfortunately, we’re losing a lot of advisers, and there’s more to unfortunately be lost, I think, by the end of the year, because of the education standards and requirements that have come into force, that we really need to hone in on the ones that we’ve got and make sure that they stay for the long haul, or this profession won’t be around for much longer.

Rob Pyne

Yeah, and I’m very familiar that two by two feedback that you mentioned as well, which is the two things that I could do differently and two things that I did well, and we have adopted that internally as well. It’s a familiar framework to us because you can’t overwhelm them with too much feedback. So, you keep it really nice and tight two by two frameworks. So, I love that. So, I mean, Anthony, just turn to you for a second on this. You’ve mentored young advisers throughout your whole career. You started the firm. You’ve brought a lot of people through to actually become strong advice professionals, what would you say to a young person, what’s the most important lesson for the next generation of financial planners looking to develop their career in advice?

Anthony Warr

There’s so many important lessons, but the one thing right now that stands out for me is be patient, and I raise that because I’ve come off a period of, you know, scarcity of people, terms of candidates and availability of people, and we’re going into an environment we’re already seeing it. Bianca and I was talking this morning saying, why have we had four or five resumes in this last week without putting an advertisement out of really high-quality people? And part of the reason for that is because there’s less graduate program places. So, I was saying we’re going to start seeing more of those people that fall out of those opportunities. But one of the things we’ve always felt is when we see young, aspirational advisers, is that their patience is something that is a real challenge. And the thing is, they’re smart people, and so the technical skills are sort of the easy bit. And this is what Bianca, and I always say, you can learn all this tech stuff, but what you can’t learn really quickly is the ability to deeply connect and understand clients, thoughts, and feelings. Some people will do it more naturally than others, but it takes time and experience to gain that strength. And so, for me, I know, if I sit and think about, you know, where was Bianca six years ago, seven years ago, to where she is now, I know that she is equipped to be met with some of the toughest and most difficult situations in a client meeting. You can’t teach that in a textbook. You just sort of teach that through experience and sitting beside someone and learning the way to go. And I often reflect on this when I sit with some of. Our young adviser, and they say to me, gee, you did so well. And I said, I’ve never had that experience before. I’ve never had a client with so much weight on their shoulders of that particular, but the experience is I’ve learned how to just sit back and pause and try and connect, to get them to give me more and tell me more so that I can better help them, and that’s the skill. It’s not that I’ve faced that before. It’s just that I’ve learned that skill, and I personally love nothing more than coaching and mentoring these young, up, and coming stars to be able to do that really, really well as quickly as they can.

Rob Pyne

Can I just dig into that question of patience for a second? Because I hear what you’re saying. I think what you’re saying here is that people are in a hurry. They’re technically strong because they’re intelligent, and so they want to be really spreading their wings quickly, be an adviser in their own right, serving clients in their own right at a very young age, and telling them just to, kind of like, just cool the Jets, be patient. You know you’ll be ready when you’ve had a bit more time in chair sitting alongside a senior adviser, learning how to have that conversation. So, you’re supporting their development, both in the technical early on, but also in that client communication skill, that ability to be patient and pause. Do you see a difference here between in talking to obviously, the recognised best financial planner in the country, who’s female? Do you see a difference here between men and women? Because I’ve found, personally, my experience, is that women sometimes are less patient with themselves more than patients about their career, because they’re kind of hard on themselves. They go, you know, but I’m not quite ready yet, and they tend to be more hard on themselves. Is probably the best way I can put it. I’m having this conversation with one of our team members recently, and they feel like I just don’t feel I got this down yet. And I think just be patient with yourself because you’re the person we want. You’re the person, your character, your personality, the way you bring yourself to work. All of that is stuff we can’t train. We can’t train that. You’ve got all that already. You’ve got technical skills. So be patient with yourself as well. Do you see a difference there between both the way women and men approach this question of their development?

Anthony Warr

That’s a really, really good question.

Rob Pyne

probably a loaded question. It’s just from, just from your experience, because we are seeing increasingly more women come into the profession, and they bring something else that men often don’t bring. And that’s not to say that both genders have a really strong role to play and advice, but just seeing Bianca here, top of the profession, we’ve got some absolutely brilliant superstar young females in our team as well. Do you see a difference, Anthony,

Anthony Warr

I think there is. What I’d like to think is that in the last three or four years, there’s young people emerging female that have got started to develop a greater confidence. I do feel that. I feel that in my travels, talking to those in their early 20s, I’m talking career wise, not necessarily advice, just falling out of university and where they’re at, and I feel there is a confidence that’s really, really great and something we can embrace. My experience in the past, we’ve employed a lot of females over the years, and I’ve really enjoyed that, because it does give you an opportunity to build their confidence and their belief in themselves. You’re right. Men can be sometimes a little hasty and need to slow down. And girls can sort of doubt themselves. But our leadership team has two very competent females, one, being Bianca, has come a long way since she first joined our team in client services. And, you know, I’m sure she would say that in the early days, and even more recently, there’s times where she doesn’t back herself. But I’d also say that in our firm, we want to encourage everyone to back themselves, and so we want to give them that opportunity to have the confidence to go forward and be ready, but if they’re not ready, to make sure they’re seeking the support and help and the guidance to get themselves ready, to prepare themselves. And I know Bianca has dealt with some really, really tricky situations recently with clients, and I’ve said, do you need me to come in or do you just need my ear? Do you need me to help you with how you’re going to approach things? And I’m really thankful that we’ve been able to have those conversations, but Bianca’s been able to go in there and just take that on herself, and I haven’t needed to go in there. Of course, I would go in and help, but if I don’t need to, that means that we’re giving her the support she needs to get that next level of confidence to move forward. Whereas you’re right, I think blokes will just go, Yeah, I’ll be fine. Yeah, I’ll be good.

Rob Pyne

Bianca I’d love to hear from you on this one. I’d like to hear you share your own personal experience of this question.

Bianca Musico

It’s a funny one, because people ask me, and again, it probably came about it because of reflection. When Anthony and Sam came to me and said, we’ve got this opportunity to buy into war hunt, I remember sitting there going, buy into war hunt. Why me? And it was always because, and it might be a generalisation, but I love what I do. I loved coming to work, but. For me, my husband was the self-employed person, right? He’s not in financial services, by the way, but he runs his own business. And I just sort of looked at my role as I go to work, I do what I love, but I’m just the constant that’s employed that brings in an income, in case, for whatever reason, his business is a bit quiet and it’s in construction, so obviously they go through ebbs and flows of being busy and not and I just saw that as my role. And I remember aunt coming to me going, we’ve got this opportunity. Are you interested? And my husband said, but you do all the work anyway. Do you not realise that you’re actually putting in the hard yards and you’re doing it, and they’re now coming to you saying, well, you’ve got an opportunity to be rewarded for that. And I think as females, we’re very much. We’re just doers. We just do what we need to do to get things humming, especially when you’ve got a family at home, you just want things to be consistent and stable, and you just do what needs to be done. And we don’t necessarily sit and reflect on the fact that we do have that ability to be rewarded, and we should be taking on those opportunities until someone puts them in front of you and says, hey, have you thought about this? And that again, happened, I guess, over the last sort of two years or so, as Anthony and Sam and I were talking about, well, what does that next step look like for me as an adviser and for me as an equity owner within the firm? But yeah, I think that’s just inherent in our nature, that we just like to make sure that things are okay, that we’re doing what we need to, to support whoever’s next to us, if there’s someone next to us, or at least, just keep life on track. So, I think it’s having those conversations early with females to say that there is that opportunity and that ability, and you can find harmony in the two. I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves as mums especially, to go it has to be one or the other ancient. And I were having this discussion about balance. There’s no balance at that word. It’s a silly word because you can’t have 5050, it’s one’s going to have more time or need more time at some point in time, and then that’ll flip. So, it’s a bit more of a harmony. How do you find that harmony between the two and make them both work succinctly? And I think that’s, again, the language point, right? We just need to change the language in the way we talk about returning to work as mums, but also that ability to step up and take a leadership role within any industry or profession.

Rob Pyne

I want to go deeper on that in a moment, about the harmony that you try to actually balancing being a mum and having a very rewarding professional career. Before we go there, though, you outside of Warr Hunt, are also involved in a group known as the Global Emerging Industry Leaders Group. So, you’re being recognised as being someone that the career is really on an upward trajectory now, just being recognised nationally as the best financial planner in the country. I’d love you to share a little more with our listeners about that group of global emerging industry leaders and the value you get from being a part of that peer group, if you like,

Bianca Musico

yeah, so it’s essentially a group of, as you said, emerging, in this case, financial advisers or practice managers around Australia and globally. And we meet every quarter to have round table discussions around what we’re sort of facing as a profession and what our firms are going through. So, for me, it’s a really interesting forum. It’s an amazing forum to be able to bounce ideas off others that are sort of at a similar level, potentially, or to that point, is helping others get to that level that I’m at or that we’re at. There’s quite a few of us that are helping sort of mentor the next lot of emerging leaders, if you want to call it that. So, for me, it’s a really amazing experience. We talk about the day to days of business, we talk about the practice and what challenges we’re facing, but we’re also encouraging each other to sort of strive for that next level of excellence, and to essentially shape the profession and to shape what financial advice is going to look like, because it is going to look very different in the future, under this next sort of generation, than what it looked previously, which is a good thing, so it’s not a bad thing. We’re not saying what was being done before was being done poorly or in a bad way, but we just need to bring the profession up to a standard that is acceptable and understood by a lot of Australians. So, I think for us, it’s a really valuable insight into what others are doing. It allows me to then come back to our firm and to Warr Hunt and say, right, what can we change? Or what can we do better to again, bring the firm to that next level and become one of the top advice firms within Australia. So, it’s really about ultimately improving the delivery of advice for Australians, because we know that Australians need to have access to advice, and it’s really hard for them at the moment to get access, for whatever reason. It might be barriers to entry by way of cost. So, we just really need to hone in and improve that quality of advice. And that’s what this forum allows me to do, and allows us around Australia to do, is come together, talk, discuss, and sort of bring ourselves all up to that next level of striving for excellence, essentially.

Rob Pyne

Yeah, I think it gets you to talk more of it in a moment, about that future perspective, about the advice profession and how it has changed just in the time you’ve been developing in your career, and what you see is coming, and what those emerging industry leaders are actually all sharing in that forum before we get there, though, Anthony, you touched on how one of the key strengths of your business has been very much about bringing process into the business to make sure there’s a way of doing things you talk to. About the career pathway you mentioned there the Entrepreneurial Operating System Eos, which was developed by Gina Whitman, covered in his book titled traction. Can you talk to me or walk me through how this was implemented in your business, and how you see it’s improved your practices, performance?

Anthony Warr

Yeah, so I tend to be one of those people that when I go down the path of embracing these programs, I like to do it from start to finish. As interesting, this was one that we didn’t quite do that, and we started with their what they refer to as a level 10 meeting. And a level 10 meeting is effectively, well, it’s weekly, that’s for starters, and then it follows a really defined structure around what we refer to as positive focus when we start. And positive focus is, you know what’s going on well, for the week, personal, professional, and how you’re going to use that to better the next week, month, year. There doesn’t always have to be an outcome. It could just be you’re sharing something positive success. But ideally, what we like to also see is how we’re going to use that positive focus. And then we go through scorecards, which is, you know, key metrics. Scorecards can mean anything. But for example, it’ll be, you know, how we’re going from a revenue expense point of view. So, we’re always looking at numbers every week in relation to performance of the firm. Then we’re looking at numbers in relation to advice delivery, and then we’re looking at numbers in relation to the next layer down, in terms of tasking and workflows and those sort of things. And all that’s doing is just making sure that every week you’re looking at the high-level scorecard and saying, is everything okay? Are we on track or are we off track, and then we have rocks, which are basically, call them projects, and projects that are all feeding into the business plan. Sometimes rocks appear throughout the year. They weren’t in the starting year business plan, but they appear, you know, in the tech space right now, there’s a really good example of rocks keep turning into boulders. So, it goes through rocks. We go through headlines. So, it’s client, headlines, team, headlines, so headlines, really issues. Are there things that have come up that we really need to just make everyone aware of? Doesn’t mean we have to solve them and work through them. Maybe we’re just letting people know that this has happened this week and we’re on top of it, and we’re aiming to get it all sorted for next week.

Rob Pyne

Can I just jump in there, Anthony, did you actually read the book and start to apply the learning from the book traction? Did you get a facilitator to come in and help roll out the program with a deliberate sort of focus of how to actually roll through the business in a structured way, so it wasn’t kind of drinking with a fire hose? How did you go about implementing the process?

Anthony Warr

This is probably the point about normally, I like to follow the process. We didn’t use an implementer with EOS. You can we did meet with an implementer, and we decided, for a number of reasons, to go it alone. EOS allows you to self-implement I think the bigger the business, the more important an implementer would be. We were pretty structured in things we did already. This just required some subtle but really important changes. So, we went it alone. So, we still do subscribe to the I think it’s called base camp with Eos, but what we’ve done with it is level 10. Meetings are now across our whole business. So, Bianca and I have a catch up every I’m going to say twice a month, week two, week four. I think we are, and that’s Bianca’s head of advice. Catch up and we follow that agenda, just with the two of us. We follow a structured level 10 agenda, and we have our Client Services team, our associates adviser, team, leadership team, everyone is always meeting weekly, and then some of the breakout groups, like with Bianca, I meet with Zoe, our ops manager, twice a month as well. We follow the same agenda, and what it’s done is just brought real clarity into the business. We’ve got to keep working on this. It’s no silver bullet, and if you don’t follow the process, it falls away. Can fall away really quickly. But the one thing with level 10, the whole idea is, from our point of view, was to follow a really clear structure so nothing got missed. Corridor conversations are terrible in businesses, for getting culture right, for getting implementation right for managing people clients. So, level 10 meetings are really designed to bring us together as a team, and get everyone on the same page and everyone on track, and make sure that people that need to know what’s going on,

Rob Pyne

what it sounds like there. I mean, just to jump in there, I think that there’s no drifting it. You don’t drift in your business, because you’re actually there’s a cadence of meetings and intentional focus about what are we working on? What’s the quarterly rocks this quarter? How are we progressing on them? So, there’s this regular cadence, this rhythm of meetings that’s really important to helping your business continue to be better, to actually, as you talked about the gap and the gain bridge. In the gap, really reflecting on the game, but always trying to improve. And that relentless focus on improvement is really only best achieved by that regular rhythm of media, isn’t it to sit down together and yeah, and look at what we can do better.

Anthony Warr

Yeah, that’s right. And our quarterlies are run the same our quarterly pulse as it’s called in AOS. It’s a bigger version of level 10 in a sense.

Bianca Musico

For that one, though, we do have a mediator, yeah. So just to that point, we just found it was that, as a leadership team, obviously, everyone has quite a lot of ideas, so it’s really good to have that third party in there, just to sort of, in a sense, be a mediator across the four of us, not that we’re always arguing or we’re doing, but it’s just good to sort of get the rhythm, because we can get bogged down in having discussions on things because we think it’s really important. And here important. And he gives us the ability to sort of move on quite quickly if we need to. So, for those quarterly pulses, we do have someone that comes in and assists, and that’s just a member of our board, not necessarily a paid EOS media,

Anthony Warr

It’s a paid role, but yeah, he’s effectively a call with our leadership team chair. So, in our quarterly meetings, he’s facilitating that, yeah,

Rob Pyne

still in the conversation. Because in reality, you can get deep on something and someone just keeps you on a thread, just pulls it back to sort of like, keep the thread tight on what you’re focusing your attention on. So, I want to speak about something that I know you spent a lot of time on. We’ve spoken about a little bit about career development pathway and the like, but team structure and talent development is really a one of the core strengths you’ve spoken about both of you. You put a lot of tension on it in your practice. Can you walk us through your team structure, how you’ve actually set your team up, and how you think it’s contributed to the success of your practice? And I’ll let either of you take that one.

Anthony Warr

well, I might pick up on the structure, and then maybe we can touch on a few other things, and Bianca can chime in, because she’s done quite a bit of work around the pathway element for younger staff. But we put in place a diamond team structure in the business, and basically what that is, you know, sort of call a senior adviser, and then within that diamond team, you’ve got a lead adviser, a junior and then client services. So, it’s the shape of a diamond, if you like. With that what we realised that as we grew and senior advisers took on more and more clients, you just can’t keep taking on clients and managing all the existing so what you need to do is have a structure that develops those people and brings them along. Now we’ve done that in the past. Before we put in place the diamond teams. We throw in a Bianca behind Anthony, and she starts taking over clients. So, we’ve done that by default, but what we hadn’t put in place was a really clear structure which then fed into the development pathways. So, having that diamond team allowed us to then have the pathway to, how do you go from client services to associate, to lead adviser, to senior adviser, and then from senior adviser to principal and owner in the business? And so, the diamond team structure sort of gave us the structure in the first instance to then create those pathways. And what we did in the pathway side of that was we picked up our growth and development guide, and we actually put in a really clear matrix, which said, here is here is a particular role that you start in, and here are the pathways you can go. So, it may be you starting client services, you’ve got the option to go to advice or operations. If you want to go to advice, what are the milestones you need to meet if you want to go to operations, what are they? If you go down the advice route and you want to cross back into operations, what do you need to do? And the other thing we built into that guide was time frames and remuneration. So it took a really big risk many years ago, but I actually think it’s been a really good one, and that is that try to set clear time frames, knowing that often people move quicker, but also let them know what the monetary opportunity is and those things and this feeds back into the personal development plans, where Bianca was touching on before, about we want them to be successful as people and individuals in their own world, in their family life and their personal life. We can’t do that without understanding where they want to go, both from a career point of view and a remuneration point of view. So, bringing that together, we said, let’s put that on the table so that gives them the ability to ask the question. Whereas previously, the conversation about remuneration, you talked about confidence with males and females, males are always happy to come in with I want a pay rise, usually without any reason why. Females Don’t even ask. They just accept. So, we just felt that we wanted both to actually have the same opportunity to look at that and go, okay, I now can see what I need to do to get there. Now it wasn’t deep, deep, deep milestones, it was just things like followed your PDP and done a certain amount of time and what qualifications you may or may not need, or. A willingness to go back to study in some form, because in operational roles, it’s not so driven by qualifications required. Rather, qualifications are going to help you do your job better. So that growth and development is really, really important, and all these things have just fed out of that team structure, because then that took us down to the pathway to principle, and that’s how we develop what we put forward to Bianca. Bianca talks about lots of conversations. There were many, many, many conversations before that guide was actually finalised, because we wanted to have that conversation to be able to help shape what that could look like.

Rob Pyne

So, in effect, Bianca was the Co-creator?

Anthony Warr

Yeah, yeah. And that’s sort of what I wanted to highlight, is when Bianca came to us in 2019 after the maternity break, and said, I think this head of advice role would be something she was interested in doing, and we have no idea what we’re going to do. But one of the things that came out of that was adviser pathways. How do you come into this firm with no experience and no qualifications and become an adviser that’s now mapped out. It’s actually doable. There’s a lot of work, but it’s doable. How do you come in if you’ve got an undergrad degree that’s not a qualifying degree, what do you need to do? What will we do? How long will it take, and how will we support you? And Bianca’s been a big part of shaping that in her role. And you’re right, the pathway principle. I certainly had a lot of ideas and thoughts that I would put into that, but the conversation reflecting on the timeframes and the work done with her helped shape what we will expect of the next person that wants to participate in that pathway.

Rob Pyne

Bianca, can you speak to this? Can you speak to your experience of this process of helping to sort of CO create this pathway, this pathway, that principle you being a part of that creation, how it looked?

Bianca Musico

Yeah, I think for us, it was really having those conversations early. So, Anthony gave me the opportunity to come in to understanding how the business ran really early on, which I think is different to a lot of other firms out there. A lot of firms will have their board of directors, and they’re generally closed meetings around what’s happening from potentially a financial perspective. So, he opened that door really early. So, while there might not have been initial conversations around what was happening, he obviously had an idea in his head. I had no idea at the time. I just thought, oh, isn’t this lovely? They’re opening the door to let me see what’s going on. But what I realised was that that was actually, to some degree, building my confidence and understanding of what the business, what was happening in the business, to then give me the ability to say, hey, actually, I want in on this to some degree. And again, it’s that buy in, right? Because once you have buy in, you then have the ability of staff buy in. I talk about here; you have the ability to propel the business to that next level. So, he opened that door up, which then made the conversations really easy, because there was no hiding of things. And I say this, if you can’t have really open discussions with the directors about what the business looks like and what the future of the business looks like, both from a growth perspective and a numbers perspective, then that’s probably a red flag in itself, because why don’t they want to have those conversations with you? So, I think for me, being able to see all of that and have those conversations early made the process really easy, so we could come together and build that plan and say, right in Anthony and Sam’s world, this is what it looks like. What does it look like in my world? And we could bring the two together and go, okay, this is how it sits now at the end of the day. And as we joke about all the time, I’m still a minority shareholder, right? They are in the majority of this business, so they will always have the ability to veto anything that I have to say. But I like to think that they take on board what I’m saying, and that factors into some of the decisions that they’re making, even though, I guess technically, they don’t have to, but you need to have that ability to have those open conversations early and take on the differences that everyone may have or the opinions everyone has. So that sort of helped us build that pathway to some degree, a lot easier. It was more flexible and easy to build. Whether or not it translates to the next guys down, I don’t know, and I guess we’ll know when the proof will be in the pudding, when we start to consider who those people are, and if we’re going to open that up to others. Because yes, I was in the business for 10 years, and I’ve been around for a while, and other guys may not have been there for that long, but it doesn’t mean we want to have to have to wait until they’ve hit 10 years before we start opening this up to them, either. So yeah, I think it’s really about just being able to one as a director, answer the questions that employees have of you openly and honestly, as best as possible, and as employees, I guess thinking about making that next step, ask the questions that you’re thinking about, because it’s a big step. It’s a big leap. It was big discussions that we were having at home personally about, well, what does this look like for our own personal life, if I buy into this business, does that hinder what we’re doing? And again, it comes back to that feeding of personal development. If we understand what the younger guys want to do, girls and guys, what they want to do, we can then help sort of put this. Support around them, shape the business and bring them on board, and that transition will be a lot smoother, whereas if we don’t know what they’re trying to do in their own personal lives, and that will make it a bit of a harder transition, because we won’t know if they can actually, to some degree, fall in line with what the business needs, but also if we can fall in line with what they need personally. So yeah, it was a very much a curry lad from that perspective. It started really early on with a lot of questions and a lot of answers.

Rob Pyne

That’s a key thing, isn’t it, the fact that the books were open, you could see what was going on. You got familiar and comfortable with what the business looked like at a numbers level, which is going to be crucial in those conversations. And so even before you’re contemplating being an owner, you’re actually privy to all the ins and outs of the business, and therefore you are going in with blindfold. You’re going in eyes wide open, and you can have open, Frank, and transparent conversations of what that means for you and your family. And so that is such a critical stepping stone, isn’t to becoming an owner and taking that ownership responsibility, even though you say to guys, have got majority ownership. I’m certain, knowing both of them, that they’re going to be very much listening to your point of view in every conversation.

Bianca Musico

Well, I make sure of it Rob. Don’t worry.

Anthony Warr

But you know, I think we’ve got the structure too that allows people to voice there. I mean, Bianca says we can veto decisions as shareholders. I mean, of course, you’re always going to have those legal things in place, and you’d be silly not to, from a governance point of view, but we don’t march off and make decisions that the leadership team aren’t part of making and now we’ve got three shareholders, and we will have more shareholders, we hope, within the next couple of years, you know they need to be part of those conversations, because otherwise, you know, you lose that connection and that feeling of being part of something that they signed up to be part of.

Rob Pyne

I want to just turn back for a second to this question about the confidence and building the confidence of advisers, and particularly female advisers. Bianca, you actually have a podcast called cracking mum maths. It’s designed to really empower women to take control of their finances. And you know, as a woman in finance who’s actually achieved a lot professionally now, what has been the most rewarding part of this for you, sharing your financial knowledge with women?

Bianca Musico

It’s a really good question. It’s actually the feedback that we’re getting back from our listeners, because unfortunately, for whatever reason, money and finances aren’t necessarily taught properly, I guess I’d say to young women, and that effectively means they’ve lost a whole part of knowledge that they really need to understand and know. So, for us, we started the podcast because we really wanted to, as you said, empower women, to start thinking and asking those questions and speaking about finance, because it’s sort of one of those things where they’re closed-door discussions and people feel silly to ask those questions. So, for us, it was all around with knowledge comes power. So, we want them to ask those questions. And it’s interesting the feedback we’re getting right now from females who are listening. And by the way, just because it’s called cracking my mouth doesn’t mean there isn’t some learnings in there for men, there are definitely learnings in there right now. But it is that feedback of oh, I’ve always wondered that, or I’ve heard that term, but I didn’t understand what it was, and I didn’t know who to go and ask all the way through to. I didn’t even know about that, and I didn’t know that that’s actually affecting me long term. And I think that’s what’s really important at the moment, is we’ve got this issue right now of social media portraying what young people seem to think is the norm and what life is supposed to look like, and without that fundamental knowledge around finances and money they’re making decisions that they don’t realise is actually going to affect them long term. So if we can sort of start to unwind that myth and start saying, okay, these actually important, that we start thinking about these things early and making that content, one easy to understand for women, but also really relatable, we think that encouraging them to educate themselves gives them back that power to make some really good decisions early, so that they are not trying to unwind really poor decisions later on in life. It’s funny, I was out for drinks on Saturday night, and this girl came over, and I’ve only met her a handful of times. She’s a friend of a friend, and she said, I’ve listened to every single one of your episodes, and it was just not someone who I thought would even be interested. And she was like, I’ve got so many more questions. And I was like, so it just shows the reach it has. And even mums at school come over and go, why didn’t you tell us you had a podcast? We stumbled across it, and it’s amazing, because they’re too shy to go and ask those questions potentially of their partners, and they find it as an easy way to pop the headphones in while they’re doing whatever they’re doing, and just start educating themselves about terms that they hear all the time. So it is that feedback and listening to females say, oh my god, it’s actually been really helpful, and I’ve made this decision or that decision because of it. That’s essentially what I find the most rewarding part of the podcast and why we. Did it effectively.

Rob Pyne

Yeah nothing quite rewarding is to hear people say how much they’re taking away. I mean, it’s in your role as an adviser you get that, but now you’re getting it now, and having a far broader reach, and having that sort of one-to-many impact, as opposed to one to one when you’re in your adviser chair. So, what a great investment in just financial education. Kudos to you for building that out, and it’s a great pay it forward type moment isn’t so how do I actually just make a difference in people’s lives in a broader way? You’re already obviously passionate about delivering advice and helping the individuals that you see, families that come to you one to one, but going further and going out broader market is such a great investment in education for people that tune in.

Anthony Warr

The other thing I was going to say, Rob, that’s been really good to watch from the sidelines is Bianca’s done this with a lifelong friend who’s not a financial adviser. You know, I remember when she first said to me, I’m thinking about doing this. I just said, I reckon it’s just so cool. Just go for it. And it’s been really, really, really good because you’re sitting down with someone that you’ve grown up with, been to school with one of your closest buddies, and you’re talking about something that you’re passionate about, and you’ve got someone there which who’s got a bit of a marketing and comms bent, which is really good. So, the two of you, I think it’s a great combination. Worked really, really well, and the intent behind it has just been, yeah, really, really good.

Rob Pyne

Yeah, we’ve got a young lady in our business who’s equally as motivated, has her own YouTube channel now as well, which I’ll put in the show notes, because it’s a great way just to connect with people and share the knowledge we have, which we take for granted, some of it, because we’ve been doing it a long time, and just to be able to have that impact, and just hearing those stories Bianca, where you someone comes up to you and said, but it’s every episode, and it’s, you know, it’s so good, I’ve got more questions. It’s just so rewarding to think you’re having sort of impact. So, congratulations on that. It’s amazing. So, I want to spend a second now to go back onto something I wish to know you’ve put some time into, especially in this last year or so. Anthony, when I spoke, maybe it might even be more than a year ago now, you were talking about making an investment in fin 365 which is the CRM platform built on the Microsoft Dynamics system, and you also are using my prosperity for your client engagement and service delivery. Can you just break down your technology stack for us? I’m particularly interested to hear how you’ve adopted those tools and what they’ve done for the process you talk about as being one of the key strengths of the business.

Anthony Warr

So I’ll maybe just take you back a few years, back to 2020 so we were on Google, but using Microsoft tools, obviously, like Word and PowerPoint and so on, but we’re on Google business, and so all our files were on Google Cloud, and we were using Iris x plan as our CRM, which is, you know, everyone will know that as a financial planning CRM and modelling tools and portfolio management tool. And we sat down in 2020 and had a bit of our call it a tech mind mapping session in our leadership group. It’s one of our first big leadership team meetings, I think, where we really sat down and threw things on the whiteboard and came up with all these ideas and thoughts, and might have been in amongst a couple of lockdowns where we’re allowed to get together for a week from memory, and we sat down and went through all the things we thought about from a technology point of view, and rather than worrying so much about the solutions, just what do we want to address? What are we trying to look at? So, we weren’t talking about my prosperity or fin 365 or Salesforce or anything like that. We were just saying, what are the real challenges we’ve got, and where do we think we need to spend some time? And we all concluded that our starting point had to be the client, because ultimately, that’s what we do. We can change our CRM, but in the short term, it’ll actually just be a distraction. It’ll be costly time that move all those things, so clients won’t see any benefit from a CRM move for some time. However, a client portal where they can see their world, they can get immediate benefit from that. And so, we decided that we needed to look at client portals. We’d been starting to utilise the x plan portal, and we just didn’t think it really gave us what we want, and that led us down to the path of my prosperity. And we launched that first so before we even looked at changing our document management solution, our CRM, or any other technology, we decided to embrace client portals, so we have all our clients on my prosperity. Why do we love it? We love it because we can securely share all the information, so we don’t send anything as email attachments anymore, unless we absolutely have to. If we do, they’re all password protected, or we’ll send them through other secure links. But ideally, everything is through my prosperity keeps a client record of those core things, so each year we have the. Their engagement letters, their advice, reviews, etc, all captured in the CRM. They have a full picture of their financial position, which we think is really, really empowering for them. They know where everything is.

Rob Pyne

So, can I touch on that for a second? Ant, full picture of their financial position. How much of that full picture of their position is manually managed from your end, or is it all of it being data fed from platforms and from bank accounts and the like,

Anthony Warr

the majority of it is data fed. So, all the investment related financial data is data fed. It has a cash flow tool. Not every one of our clients will sign up for the cash flow tool, which speaks for their banking, but the majority do. Anyone that’s really got concerns around cash flow management as part of their overall wealth plan will sign up for the cash flow tool, which we think is great. So, I’d say 99% of our clients are on that as clients need it less then we can drop that off. But yeah, that’s all data fed all the private assets where there’s things like property values pick up on data feed as well, but we can override them as well. So, some people want to put a certain value in because it’s important to them, but yeah, we can use that for data feeds. All the investment information from x plan. We can still link in x plan if we want we’re doing that less and less now. So yeah, it’s just been a really, really valuable benefit that we’ve given clients, and that was our first focus. And we spent probably the first year or two on that, just getting all our clients embedded on that, and now we’re using it even for review preparation, where they go and they fill in an online but a lot of the information that’s there we’ve already put in there,

Rob Pyne

sure

Bianca Musico

Almost like a form, yeah, goals and income.

Rob Pyne

Do you get engagement stats in terms of how often people are there, how long they spend on the call? Or do you get the sort of intelligence around? Is it something they’re using throughout the year, or is it only something they’re using, really in preparation for their upcoming meeting, or just after the meeting?

Anthony Warr

That’s a good question. There’s always going to be those clients that are looking at their investments constantly, but I would say the overwhelming majority of our clients don’t do that. They are using that portal for their annual reviews, for preparation, for communication, reviewing their advice. We send everything out three days before meetings, so clients get to review things, then we could walk through it in a meeting. So, they’ve got that access to that. But we probably find that the large part of what we do with it is the annual review, annual planning process, and then routine tasks throughout the year. So, we can set up to do’s within my prosperity. So, when it’s due, it’ll send them a message to say they’ve got to do this for us to then be able to do what we need to do. So, we can set all those things up as well.

Rob Pyne

Bianca, perhaps you can talk to the thin 365 implementation in the business, because x plan has kind of been the all in a box. You know, it does everything, sort of system for many businesses for many years, but we ourselves went away from it as our primary CRM some years ago, and you’ve done the same with fin 365 can we just talk through what that’s been like, the roll out of that, and what impact it’s had on the firm?

Bianca Musico

Yeah. So, Zoe did a lot of that. Our operations managers. Zoe did it was a big project to effectively assess what was out there. We ended up landing on fin 365 after a number of other software platforms were sort of, to some degree, looked at and then discarded from the option pile. Ex time was doing a great job. To some degree, the data was in there, but we couldn’t get the numbers out from a business perspective. So, for us, the move was actually more around the analytics of numbers from a business perspective, it wasn’t necessarily because the CRM for the client information wasn’t quite up there. We were very heavily embedded in x plan. By the way, all of our processes and systems are run through there, so all of our tasking and workflow. So, it was a big move. It’s been interesting to say the least. It was a lot of heavy lifting at the start that, as I said, Zoe Anthony and Marina do a lot of within our business to get it ready to the point where our advisers could take over. We’re quite lucky in the sense of, because of the size of our business and how nimble we are, we managed to pick it up fairly quickly, but it’s still got its teething problems. Obviously, it was a fairly big distraction for quite a few of us for a while, until we got it really down pat. But as I said, it was more around the ability to have at the touch of our fingers what was going on from a business perspective, that was really driving why we moved away from x plan, because we just couldn’t get that out of that CRM system. We still do all of our modelling for now, for the next maybe few months, via x plan. So, we haven’t been able to fully extract ourselves out of x plan completely. All of our insurance risk analysis is still done via x plan. So, there are elements of x plan that we will keep, and potentially have to keep for a little bit longer. But I would say if you’re thinking of a move, you really do need to do your DD to understand why. You making that move, because, as Anthony said, it’s not going to help the client. It might help us from an efficiencies perspective on certain things, but it’s definitely not going to impact the client in any way, shape, or form. So, it really needs to be considered carefully and just making sure that there is ample reason to move before you make that move.

Anthony Warr

Our DD on this was huge, though. It did go on for about 18 months. It went on for almost two years to get to the point of where we got to. So, we knew what we had to do. We knew what we were looking for, but we also knew the gaps. As Bianca said, you know, there’s been teething problems. There’s still things we’re working on, but we’re about to make a significant investment around Power BI and power automate, which is part of the Microsoft suite, which is going to be able to take us to that next level again in terms of our dashboards and our reporting and our gathering of data to help us make decisions. So, it’s been a long path, but a really, really rewarding one, in terms of where we sit at the moment.

Rob Pyne

As you shared when you got together as a leadership team, you started with, what problem are you trying to solve, rather than looking at software? So that’s the DD process, isn’t it? What problems are we trying to solve for here? And then you go through the process of looking at vendors, looking at the solutions they provide. Do they answer your questions, as opposed to them coming and giving your presentation? You really got your own pre prepared checklist of things you’re trying to solve for, and you ended up with more prosperity and fin 365, so I mean, technology has advanced a lot over recent years, and it’s still got a long way to go as artificial intelligence starts to come into our workflows and people using that as well. So as Tech has advanced over recent years, it’s undoubtedly provided more opportunity for work flexibility. You guys in Melbourne, you had to experience that more than most with COVID shut down and that whole ability to work remotely. Bianca, can I just ask you, as someone who’s been balancing family life and that word balance crept in there. But you know, the harmony between family life and demanding career and a rewarding professional career based on your experience, what advice would you give others actually trying to achieve that harmony between the demanding, successful career as well as family life?

Bianca Musico

Yeah, I think it comes back to that. We touched on it before it was, we put a lot of expectation on ourselves, I think as mothers and as career people, I guess you could call us that we need to get it all right the first time, and it’s just not going to happen. And I think once you drop that guard, and you drop that expectation that and the pressure you’re putting on yourself, you realise that it is a harmony that you need to find. And the only way I was able to do it is to effectively say no, which is really hard. I’m not someone that says no. I’m very much a people pleaser. I want to make sure I’m doing everything to help everyone, but it was really understanding that I just something had to give. So, I think for me, the key was you have to say no, but it’s not just saying no, it’s then defining, well, what am I saying yes to, and what am I actually willing to open myself up to because it becomes really easy to get that, what I would call boundary creep. You start to let people in slowly on that one day that you have off, or potentially the day you’re working at home, and it opens that door up. And if you don’t respect your own time and your own boundaries, no one else will. So, it’s sort of setting those boundaries really clearly from the start and making sure that you stick to those, but it’s also finding, what we would call finding your who. And again, by nature, a lot of us are control freaks, and we like to control that narrative. So, asking for help, we always look at it as a sign of weakness, but it’s actually a sign of strength, and you do need others around you to help you, and you need to find that who so who can you delegate to, or who can you trust to take on some tasks, and that’s outside and inside. So that could be professionally, or it could be at home, helping out at home. So, it’s finding that person that you can rely on and trust to help you along the way. They’re probably the key things I would say that you need to think about really early on when you think about going back to work after having kids, but the other thing is probably just again, trying to find that harmony. Don’t think it’s a balance because it’s not a balance. You just need to recognise that really early on, set times for you to have family time, set time for you to have professional time and again that can meld into one. But for me, it was really booking holidays and recharging batteries, which my husband does quite easily. And I’m always the one going, no, no, I don’t have time for that. I’ve got to go back to work and even Ant to some degree. To his credit, would always say you need to book some time off and go on leave. And I go, Oh, it’s just, it’s all too difficult. I’m just, I’m just going to keep powering through. But I realised that if you don’t have that time out, you can’t reset to some degree. You can’t rest, you just can’t continue to work at that same pace all the time and be creative and productive and efficient for everyone in the business and efficient at home. So, I think it’s a few things, but yeah, as I said, say no, find your who and make sure you recharge those batteries. That, all in all, just drop that expectation that you’re putting on yourself, that you can do this equally because you can’t. So, you just need to find that harmony between the two, and it’ll work. It’ll sort of just; it sort of unfolds and works to some degree.

Rob Pyne

That’s a really valuable firsthand account and insight. I think that boundary creep, I think local can relate to that. But really it’s just saying, being able to say no, which is difficult, being a people pleaser, we want to say yes and help people out but having those clear boundaries and finding your who I like that. So, it’s great insight there for others who will be either going through it themselves or will at some point encounter it and have to manage the professional career they’ve developed, as well as trying to be available to family and not sacrifice, you know, one for the other. But as you say, it’s a harmony that tends to move emphasis with one at certain times, and other times it swings back the other way. So, you get that sort of like pendulum swinging between the two at times and just recognising that’s normal. And that’s part of the process. Yeah.

Bianca Musico

Yeah and sometimes there’s some hard decisions I guess that you have to make either side of that, as that pendulum swinging, you sort of go, well, right now, work really needs me. So, what does that mean? And look, I think it’s not for everyone. And I think that’s probably another misconception that everyone thinks they can have their cake and eat it too. There are some really hard decisions that I’ve had to make, and others have had to make, which for some people, will sit Okay, and for others it won’t. So, I think you just got to stick by what you believe in and what are your values and what you really want to do, and recognise when you can’t, for whatever reason, potentially commit to that any longer.

Rob Pyne

That’s great Bianca, thanks for sharing that. So, guys, mindful of time, I want to ask you both the final wrap up question, and it’s really rolling back to that question about the future and how things have changed, but also what you expect to see in the way of change moving forward. Bianca, you mentioned being a part of that global Emerging Leaders Group. Anthony, you’ve been around this profession a long time like I have, and so we’ve seen a lot of change from both of you. What are your thoughts on the future of financial advice in Australia. I mean, we’ve got regulatory changes to navigate and so on, but how do you foresee the industry changing in the next five to 10 years?

Bianca Musico

I think for us, it is a big part of it is technology. I’m not necessarily saying that that’s the only way forward, but I think we do need to embrace technology and understand that we do have a generation who obviously have grown up with that from day dot I look at my kids and I think you know nothing else but an iPhone and an iPad, and therefore we have to, to some degree, understand that that’s just how their minds are wired now, whether it’s right or wrong. So from that perspective, I think we need to embrace it as a profession and make sure that we have the ability to do both, which is effectively still that client facing, which I love, and I think it’s more rewarding, and you can get more out of clients when you’re sitting one on one across a table, but at the same time, just knowing that that’s not how everyone works, and they want things that are quick and efficient and timely. And I think for the next generation, costs will become a really big thing for them, and they will be driven by cost, as opposed to necessarily the quality of the advice. So, I think we need to, again, change that mindset around what the cost of advice is, and try and figure out a way of being able to provide advice to certain subsections of Australia at a differing price point. And I think there’s plenty of advisers out there, and there’s enough clients out there to serve, we just need to allow everyone to thrive. So, I think technology is going to be a really big change for us and going forward for the profession.

Rob Pyne

Yeah, couldn’t agree more. Anthony, your perspective on the future?

Anthony Warr

Yeah, so I’d pick up on the tech. I think the technology is huge. We’re talking at the moment so much about what we’re going to be doing with AI. The biggest challenge is speed in which these things move. And you know, as even what was it 12 months ago, we couldn’t really get teams to do a proper AI recording. And now we’ve almost what we need to do and how we need to sort of run our meetings, and the sort of language we need to use to get a perfect meeting summary and those sort of things, what I see in that is not that we can do things quicker and more efficiently and necessarily reduce cost. I actually think it gives us the opportunity to spend more time doing the most valuable thing, which is speaking with clients. It’s seeing the whites of their eyes and being able to understand what’s really affecting them and driving them. That is where the value really comes in, is helping people and guiding people. So, when Bianca talks about this next generation coming through the tech will be really important. We know this. We’re already seeing this with the children of clients. We’re seeing is that getting them to engage online, getting them to use an online portal, getting them to tick off their to do list, they’re on it straight away. But the ability to get them there is still that connection and that human connection, and I don’t see that ever changing. So, you ask, what’s going to change? I think it’s how we deliver the human. Connection, because that’s the bit we do so well. That’s the bit that’s just so rewarding. That’s why I get up each day. Is because I want our business to keep doing that for as many people as possible. The other thing I was going to say about the industry with regulatory change, I just feel more than ever, independence is going to become a key point of difference. And I’ve said it for probably 10 years now, I think or more, but I actually feel it even more so, because we will see with regulatory change. I don’t think it matters which side of government are in. We will see a shift back to allowing certain institutions to provide advice, but independence is just going to become a really, really clear point of difference, and I think that’s a wonderful opportunity for us and the firm we have and the structure we have and mentoring and coaching and developing the people that we’ve got in this business and will have in This business in the future to serve their clients. So, yeah, I think that’s really, really key.

Rob Pyne

I couldn’t agree more. I mean, certainly legislation will change and there’ll be more, yeah, institutions back into giving advice effectively. They’ve got a product suites. They might be a superannuation fund or insurance company. Yeah, obviously they’re going to be somewhat constrained in what they can share. But I totally agree on the independence front, being able to represent your client, advocate for them, without fear or favour, looking at how you can make their lives better. But just to touch on what both of you said, there the planner who sits in front of the clients and listens deeply, remembers what they worry about, their fears, their goals, their family situation, not just their financials, and building that deep relationship with people. That’s something that artificial intelligence technology can never do, and that becomes indispensable to people, because we want to connect, we want to actually be understood, and we want people to truly understand us and hear our story. And so I couldn’t agree more that part of what we do already will never change, and the future is bright, because finally, I think regulators and legislators have figured out that we do fantastic work for human beings that actually are looking to become more secure in their financial lives, and it’s more power to us sitting in front of more people and trying to find a way to do that, because we know the impact that it generates, because we live it, we do it. And there are independent research studies done that prove it that the reinforcement that’s there when people have a plan and they get security around knowing they’ve got a path to follow, and we just know the impact we have, because we get to live it firsthand. More people getting that. That’s got to be everything, yeah. So, Anthony Warr Bianca Musico from Warr Hunt. Thank you so much for sharing your perspective insights today and for joining us on The Trusted Adviser podcast.

Anthony Warr

Thanks, Rob. Been a great opportunity.

Rob Pyne

Thanks for tuning into The Trusted Adviser. I hope today’s conversation brought you new insights and inspiration for growing your business. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on your favourite podcast platform, leave a review, and share it with others in the industry, and don’t forget to connect with us on LinkedIn for updates on future episodes until next time, keep building trust, embracing innovation, and driving success in your practice.