Rob explores how leading advice firms are harnessing AI, automation, and data to improve efficiency, client experience, and adviser performance with Nick Downey (Direct Wealth and Halosoft), Patrick Gardner (Collins SBA and Rubica), Stephen Bell (Captegra), and Glenn Elliott (Meldus)

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In this episode of The Trusted Adviser, host Rob Pyne reconnects with Nick Downey (Direct Wealth), Patrick Gardner (Collins SBA and Rubica), Stephen Bell (Captegra), and Glenn Elliott (Meldus) to explore how leading advice firms are harnessing AI, automation, and data to improve efficiency, client experience, and adviser performance.

From streamlining SOA creation to using AI-driven assistants like Meeting Ally, the conversation dives deep into how technology is reshaping advice delivery — without losing the human touch. The group also shares personal metrics that guide their performance, from tracking “time to submission” to maintaining creativity and connection in a remote world.

If you’ve ever wondered how the next generation of advice tech will help firms operate smarter, faster, and more profitably, this episode is a must-listen.

LISTEN

SHOW NOTES

Topics Discussed

• How AI tools like Meeting Ally are reducing adviser workloads and rework
• Streamlining the statement of advice (SOA) process with automation
• The importance of tracking “time to submission” as a performance metric
• Improving the quality of advice outputs while cutting processing time
• Using data and metrics to guide team decisions and identify bottlenecks
• The role of context and prompt templates in improving AI accuracy
• Building “learned knowledge bases” for scalable, brand-consistent outputs
  
• Maintaining creativity, connection, and collaboration in remote work
• Measuring qualitative success and adviser energy, not just data points
  

Episode Highlights

(Timestamps are  approximate)

• [00:03:00] – Nick Downey explains how Direct Wealth is reducing SOA submission time and improving adviser effectiveness through AI integration.
• [00:08:20] – Patrick Gardner discusses prompt design, context, and improving first-shot accuracy in AI-driven document generation.
• [00:12:45] – Glenn Elliott shares how his firm uses AI to build controlled, repeatable proposal frameworks that maintain brand consistency.
• [00:18:00] – The panel reflects on how qualitative success — connection, energy, and creativity — can be as important as quantitative data.
• [00:22:10] – Stephen Bell highlights activity tracking as the key to improving adviser productivity and understanding real workflow data.
• [00:26:40] – Rob wraps up with reflections on measurement, mindset, and how AI can enhance (not replace) the adviser’s value.

Quotes

• “If no P&L is static, why would we have a static pricing framework that doesn’t ebb and flow with changing conditions?” – Rob Jones
• “Our North Star metric is the time from client engagement to SOA submission — it tells us how effective both the adviser and the process are.” – Nick Downey
• “You can’t improve what you don’t know. Most practices have no idea what their team is doing day to day — that’s where activity tracking comes in.” – Stephen Bell
• “If I see someone taking notes in a meeting, that’s success for me. When both sides walk away with value, that’s time well spent.” – Glenn Elliott
• “It’s all about prompt context. The goal is to get over 90% of AI outputs right on the first shot.” – Patrick Gardner
• “Good conversations give you energy. If we could measure that, it would be the best metric of all.” – Rob Pyne

Resources & Links

• Direct Wealth: https://www.directwealth.com.au 
• Advice Intelligence: https://www.adviceintelligence.com 
• Collins SBA: https://www.collinssba.com.au/
• Captegra: https://www.captegra.com/ 
• Meldus: https://www.meldus.com 
• The Trusted Adviser Podcast: https://thetrustedadviser.com.au
• Connect with Rob Pyne on LinkedIn
• Follow The Trusted Adviser Podcast for more conversations with leaders in financial planning

Key Takeaways

• AI as an enabler, not a replacement: Automation tools like Meeting Ally reduce workload and errors, freeing advisers to focus on strategy and client connection.
• Data-informed efficiency: Tracking key metrics like time-to-submission and rework rates offers clear visibility into process improvements.
• Prompt design matters: High-quality AI results depend on context, templates, and training the system with firm-specific knowledge.
• Balance human creativity with digital tools: Staying connected and engaged fuels innovation and prevents tunnel vision in remote work.
  Measure what matters: Beyond numbers, qualitative experiences and energy are indicators of genuine progress and firm health.

TRANSCRIPT

Rob Pyne  

Welcome Trusted Advisers. This is the Podcast where we explore what it really takes to build, grow and sustain a thriving financial planning business. Every fortnight, you’ll hear candid conversations with the leaders, innovators and trailblazers of our profession, people who have navigated the challenges, embrace your opportunities and are willing to share what they’ve learned along the way. If you’re curious, ambitious and committed to raising the bar in advice, you’re in the right place. Welcome trusted advisors. Today, we’re bringing together four of the leading technologists in our profession, people who are not just talking about the future of advice technology, but actively building it, joining me are Pat Gardner from Collins SBA, who in Episode Four spoke about developing a Salesforce based CRM platform tailored for financial advice firms, now officially launched under the name Rubica. Nick Downey from Direct Wealth, who in Episode 11, shared his vision for Halosoft, an AI platform dedicated entirely to the practice of financial planning. Stephen Bell who, in Episode 20 unpacked his journey in creating Captegra, another Salesforce driven CRM built to help advisors streamline operations. And Glen Elliott from Meldus, who, in Episode 25 explained how he’s bringing AI tools and practical expertise to help advice firms scale more effectively. Between them, this group represents a powerful intersection of CRM innovation, AI development and practical implementation inside advice firms. In this round table, we’ll explore what’s working, where the bottlenecks are, and what the future might look like when technology is embedded deeply into the way advisors deliver value. Let’s dive in. Welcome Pat, Nick, Stephen and Glenn, I’ve said it in the order that you’ve all appeared as guests on the podcast so far. So welcome back to The Trusted Adviser podcast. Can I start by asking? I’ll start with you, Pat, giving you were first cab off the rank when we started these podcasts about a year or so ago. Tell me what you’re focused on now. When we spoke back in the day, episode four, I think it was, you were working on a Salesforce based platform, as I’ve just said in the intro, and you’ve since come out and called that Rubica. Tell me what you’re focused on right now and what you’re trying to put to the market with that software. Sure.

 

Patrick Gardner  

Thanks, Rob. And Hey everyone, I guess I’ll go back a tiny bit to give some context to it. So yeah, Pat, a retired financial advisor now head of tech at the Collins SBA group. We’re now, we’ve been running what is now multiple businesses on the Salesforce platform for just over five years now. So have turned that configuration integrations as well as the mistakes and the missteps, and therefore those lessons along the way into a separate business called Rubica. So that’s a combination of an advanced Salesforce overlay or package in enterprise middleware or Workato, which we love, delivered as a cost sharing model. So standing on the shoulders of multiple giants here to deliver something that gets businesses either up and running on the platform quickly. So it’s always a challenge to do that with Salesforce or just enterprise CRM so in a fully functional way as well, or just back on track if they’ve tried going at it alone and not got it to where they want it to be. So whether that’s through, you know, functionality, or just falling victim to that sort of Salesforce plus plus plus fallacy, and just to give some context to that fallacy, it’s just the belief that I feel, that it’s just one more add on, like you buy it, and then it’s the next add on that’s going to change the game for you and finally, make that platform deliver on expectations, when in reality, it often drives firms into that further unnecessary complexity and just spiraling costs. So trying to keep the cost down and just deliver something that actually works, but then use the power of the network as well to have the best idea win. And we want 10 firms to love it, not 100 firms to tolerate it. So I think that’s a key difference, too, trying to make sure that we have proper advocates of the platform. And yeah, just get these firms onto a platform that’s enterprise grade and get it working. And I can just stop doing pep talks about why sales is the right platform, and stop doing demos on you know, this looks cool, and how do we get it? So it’s finally a solution to that, and we spent a lot of money, a lot of time, and I feel that we’ve achieved that. So I don’t know if that answers your question, Rob, but hello to the three other guests on the pod. Probably give you just me a time.

 

Rob Pyne  

No, it does Pat and yes, the point you make there about having a best of breed tech stack. I know that Steven will have a comment about tech stacks. We talked about that at the podcast I recorded with Steve, but just the fact that you can really blow up your P&L too. There’s so much you can do with tech, and it’s just a matter of making sure you do something workable without exploding your technology budget going with you. Nick Downey, next to your former Iress and Xplan aficionado, you’ve jumped out into the world of financial planning, and now you’ve joined Direct Wealth, and you’re building out Halo soft, which is an AI platform, and you’re really dedicated to try and advance the way AI can become really highly productive tool for the purpose. Sources of financial advice, businesses and you guys have, really, as I understand it, have gone back to really granular, bare basics, like trying to rebuild the whole system from the ground up, using AI. So I’m really keen to get an update on where you guys are at. Nick give us

 

Nick Downey  

an update. Yeah, thanks, Rob. So yeah, I guess we’ve gone in a slightly different direction, and probably a fairly brave approach, I guess, is one kind of way of describing it in terms of, yeah, doing the DYI. So yeah, at Direct Wealth, we were looking at going in terms of some of the major existing CRMs, and yeah, we’ve decided to kind of tip our toes into going out a full cuts and build, which is led through AI, which is the kind of the genesis of the payload soft as a business, which is a separate entity now that we’ve set up outside of direct world. So the thing that we’re working on initially is this kind of stepping into market with a fairly simple solution, which is what everyone else has really been doing in terms of file note automation with AI, and that was really just to submerge ourselves into that space in terms of building something custom. But yet we’re now kind of shifting our focus into what has traditionally been the CRM functionality and starting to build out something which we call advice ally, which is, yeah, that approach in terms of really embedding AI into the workflow of advice, and so helping both back offers from administration tasks like file loading and account opening, form filling, and also assisting the advisor through the actual journey of the advice production. So as you’re collating data into that process in terms of meetings with the clients or phone calls or doing research, beating that into AI to help assist the journey of the advisor, and also doing your checks and balances as you go. So yeah, it’s really exciting. It’s definitely learning a lot in terms of building stuff from scratch. Obviously, my background like working with the Xplan and Coin and Adviserlogic, those kind of off-the-shelf solutions. So it’s been a really interesting experience. And yeah, bringing up the product to market, being Meeting Ally has been a journey as well. So definitely keeping us busy.

 

Rob Pyne  

I can say something about Meeting Ally Nick, because we have beta tested it, put us through its paces, and we like it. In fact, we had one of our young, bright, talented future advisors, who’s currently in an associate role give it a test drive. And really came out shining relative to what we were using, and were are still using, which I won’t name, but yeah, we’re pleased to see how much progress you’ve made with that only you went deep on it, and it’s come out looking absolutely schmick, so well done on that. Meeting Ally is is obviously a your first part to market, but we look forward to seeing the rest of it as it rolls out. Steve, over to you with Captegra. You’re another Salesforce, man, your Enzumo background means you’ve got an intimate familiarity and understanding with everyone’s pain with Xplan, but you’ve now gone and said, Well, let’s go and build something with Salesforce, which is a market leading CRM, obviously. And you were all about trying to make sure people’s operations were streamlined from end to end. What did you call it? Again? It’s called a technology process stack. Process stack. So it’s about having things run in a streamlined way, as opposed to sort of building things on top of each

 

Stephen Bell  

other, yeah, and getting your process right and then finding the tech to fit into the process, rather than a lot of groups go out and look for tech and then try and then try and build the process around that. So that’s kind of our view. And I guess our journey at the moment is very similar to Pat’s and Nick’s. We are using the Salesforce platform. We’ve built a lot of process automation inside there. And I guess our big project at the moment is very similar to everyone else using AI for everything you know in the file notes that meeting notes, the AI for SOA is an advice, but we’re creating our own presentation cloud so we can use that and pull in data from all sorts of different places into a presentation. So that’s our really big project on at the moment.

 

Rob Pyne  

Yeah, and Glenn, we spoke relatively recently, I think, only a couple of episodes ago, and obviously your time at practice as a CEO there and founder, and now you’ve stepped out. You’re still a board member there, but now you’ve built another business called Meldus, which is really about bringing AI tools and practical expertise to help advice firms. So really keen to get your perspective on what you’re working on right now. That’s helping advice firms really make hay with what the technology can now provide.

 

Glenn Elliott  

Yeah, absolutely, Rob, thanks for having me once more, and great to be here with with the rest of the panel. It’s good to see you guys as you know, I’m a nerd from way back. I’m a career technologist, unlike much in this industry, I’m not a former adviser. I’ve done an awful lot of work with advisers now for quite a long time, but really, I’m a nerd at heart, so from technical architect and CTO and UI designer and database designer right down to coding and test automation. And I love being across it all, and it’s been a great opportunity since. A just kind of pulling back from my management role, practically into a board level, to be able to get kind of back down to the tools and kind of go back to the art that that started it all off for me, and it’s been a fascinating journey to bring, I guess, all of that kind of founder led best practice to to the advice space. Here in Australia, there’s a level of kind of expertise and that I can offer, and there’s some fascinating projects going on that I’m able to now get involved in on a fractional basis, on a fairly lightweight basis, before firms go in and make huge technology investments, big commitments, long term projects, just being able to help them and advise them upfront around the best architecture, the best way to engage with technical partners, best way to evaluate them up front and of course, inevitably these days, to apply AI at every step in that in that architecture and in the development project itself. It’s a question that is still not asked often enough in vendor evaluations to ask firms, how are you guys using this internally? How has it streamlined your business in the last two or three years? And if it hasn’t totally transformed the way that they operate, then something’s wrong there, and you’re probably paying too much for them. So my job is to provide that sort of enlightenment early on in the in the budgetary deployment, so that it’s deployed for long term effect.

 

Rob Pyne  

Yeah, it’s a great question to ask, isn’t it? Because if people are rolling it out to others, they should be really having adopted it themselves and making their business so much more efficient as well. So when we have our quarterly board meeting at HPH, first question we ask, other than going around the table and asking personal and best business news over the past 90 days, the first question that we ask is, what’s working? What’s working right now? So you get that chance to take a step back and say, right now in the business, what’s really working really well for us right now, and taking that sort of appreciative inquiry approach, starting with what’s good before we go to what’s not working. Because everyone wants to go what’s not working. But for you guys, each of you starting going in the same order, Pat if you want to kick off. What’s really working for you right now in your business with Rubica and the Collins SBA team, what are you really nailing right now?

 

Patrick Gardner  

I think we’ve done a truckload of work on flows and automation and processes all that sort of thing. When it comes to using declarative tools in Salesforce and Mercado, I think what’s really worked is the big AI approach to integration, so being able to add those AI steps into those existing workflows, existing flows, existing processes, screens, etc, to really elevate them to do the things that they couldn’t do before, rather than having to go back and reinvent the wheel and buy another tool, as I talked before about the plus plus fallacy. But they can just embed that into the way that you’re doing things, so that you can either do things quicker or a lot of the time you don’t even realize that something’s happening in the background. That was a problem, maybe for me, not so much the actual end user. So maybe to give some a couple of real examples. So I think I’ll give an example in the accounting space. So every year that we’ve turned the opportunity object in Salesforce into a proposal itself. So users will add the line items, they’ll build out the proposal, put a loom video with it, and they’ll send it out without leaving the CRM. And it’s not this time of year anymore, but sort of May June, they will it’ll come to renewal time. It’s done based on a financial year basis, and they’ll go to clone that or renew that proposal. And we’ve had some issues where, because we’ve been so flexible with our billing and sort of emulated what practice ignition does with monthly billing, or combination of acceptance, recurring, et cetera, you’ve got some clients that are just bad payers, like the invoices just fail month after month, and we’ve got automation there to recollect it based on the error code for stripe. But it takes a lot of time for our team to go and say, hey, you know that thing that you signed on for that payments fail for the fifth time this year. Can we have our money, please? And it just eats into the actual margin and client experience, because it’s just, it’s just not a value adding exercise or a great experience for anyone. So as part of that, I guess, renewal or cloning process, you click one button, and it pulls together all of the context we have about that client the last 12 months in the CRM. So it’s just, you know, the invoice, the invoice status, the payment cadence, things like I mentioned last year Rob that we just rolled out timely, which is a time tracking tool. So accountants all the time entries against that client or household group where we might have not invoiced for that time. So are we writing that off? So, like it just gives you this pulse check of these 1720, data sources that, hey, you should probably think about these few things before you actually coin that opportunity or turn into a new opportunity. So you’re not having to context switch with the same frickin tool. So you’ve got the context switching in other apps or separate apps, but then you’ve got the context switching within Salesforce, which is a problem within itself, so just trying to consolidate that together, yeah, I think that’s that’s really changed the game for us and allowed us to implement AI, at least in the background, really quickly. And it probably lends itself to just the ability to, I guess, develop things internally as well, because you’ve got, once again, all the costs. Context, and that’s, I guess maybe one of the issues I take with some of these home grown file netting tools and Meeting Ally is an absolute exception, because you’ve got that API first approach Nick, but just the mindset that these products feel that advisers will just jump to this separate tool and go and have a play and upload their knowledge base or this context and be happy to do that, maybe they are, because net wealth research consistently suggests that we’re using 15 bits of tech in the stack. But do they want to add a 16th piece? I’m not so sure. But to bring it back to what’s working, it’s it’s definitely the ease of adding AI into an already sort of automated and existing stack, or process stack. As Stephen would

 

Rob Pyne  

say, Yeah, and I have seen a bit of a demo there. Pat, you’ve shown us of how you’ve embedded AI into your CRM Rubica, and it’s, yeah, it’s some pretty impressive stuff. I’m actually going to share a bit of that you. Hope you don’t mind this. Haven’t told you this already, but I’m gonna share a bit of that when I speak at the Fitzpatrick’s annual conference next month in Sydney. So it’s a pretty good demo. And I’m sure others will be like, Wow, that’s possible now. So yeah, it’s pretty cool tech you’ve built. There. Nick, what about you? What have you guys really now, we know, meeting allies working, because we’ve tested it and we’d love it, and we’re using it. So is that the one thing you can point to right now that you’re really smashing out of the park, or is there other things you’ve worked on that we haven’t yet seen that’s really going well for you guys? Yeah, I think

 

Nick Downey  

what really works well, I think from like, because I’ve worked with lots of practices over the years from a professional services perspective, and coming into Direct Wealth, what is unique about that particular practice, and what works really well for them is because they are actually quite low on their tech adoption. So it’s like because I look at Direct Wealth, and they are quite a high volume business, and do lots of acquisitions. And so a lot of people like, wait, what’s the secret sauce? If it’s not like something like a meeting Alliance or AI solutions like, what really works well for Direct Wealth, and it comes down to process. And what I find is, for Direct Wealth, they are very strict in terms of how the business operates. And even from an acquisition perspective, bringing in external businesses, the process is completely fine, like everybody knows what they need to be doing as part of the digging machine. What works well for that is that in addition to everybody knowing what they’re doing, is that they also have transparency on that process as well. So it’s okay you can look into the business and actually see that people are doing what they’re meant to be doing. Because I kind of talk about the pillars. It’s okay, it’s the process, it’s the transparency, and the last big piece is accountability. So it’s to making sure that, yeah, if people aren’t doing their jobs, they are called out. But firstly, if they’re doing a good job, they’re rewarded for it as well. So kind of start telling what Pat was saying in terms of injecting AI, similar to where we started with meeting Alli. And it probably goes into like, where firms get stuck is that, yeah, having really great process and building strong process that followed with a high level of accountability gives us the platform to start building AI on top of that. So, yeah, Meeting Ally, yeah, but there’s a very small slide there, and the bigger piece for us is advice Alli. But what’s working well for us as we’re starting to build out the components of, and I don’t like calling it a CRM, to be honest, so some little crosses term in, like, literally the last couple of days, where it’s a group from the US. They’re calling it relationship operating systems, and that’s where it’s the CRM is really just data gathering. It’s the system that you come to build relationships. And for me, that resonates really strongly. And so that that for us, is what we’re building out in the buy seller, but having the that process, that foundation from Direct Wealth. I think that’s what we’re doing really well.

 

Rob Pyne  

Yeah, and you’re absolutely saying the same things Steve will say in one second, because process, everything you said a moment ago, and he’ll repeat it, because that process has got to be nailed down before you add technology, isn’t it? Process first, technology second. So I love hearing that. And just just for some context for our listeners, before we jump to Steve, just give us some context about the volume of acquisitions that Direct Wealth have been doing. Just to give some context about how much that process has had to try and absorb.

 

Nick Downey  

Yeah, so Direct Wealth started in 2017 as a starting point with our founder, Simon combs. And from last count, it’s about 40 acquisitions that we’ve done. Yeah, next month we’ve got another seven advisers joining, and that’s probably the biggest constant, is that there’s always acquisitions happening at Direct Wealth. That’s what I say for Direct Wealth, the biggest problem, from a technology perspective, that I’m trying to solve for Pyne, ultimately, is creating capacity for the business, and that capacity is what allows the room to buy more books. There’s obviously lots of other like client experience and all that type of stuff, which is super important in compliance and everything else. But like, if I had to define it, it’s creating capacity. There’s obviously a lot of benefits that stem out of having room to grow.

 

Rob Pyne  

Yep, Steve, you love hearing that process, first tech, second. So tell. Us what you’re doing. Tell us what capteoras real strength point is right now in the market. What are you doing? That’s actually, you know, you’ve really got nailed.

 

Stephen Bell  

Yeah, I think this is another project we’ve got going on at the moment. We everyone knows we are process orientated. Nick, what you just said was music. We have a process mining tool that we’re working on, and we’re trialing with a couple of clients at the moment, because we can sit down and run all of these workshops with clients and go, you know, what’s your process at the end of the day, we all come out with the same thing because, you know, every practice is generally the same. Legally, we we have to do the same thing, but because in our inside Salesforce and our solution, you know, we’re doing every client communication, every file, note, every meeting. We have all this data that we can run through this process mining engine, and actually show a client or an adviser what their process is. And you expect to see something fairly close to the process that we’ve automated or the process that they’ve got on a workflow map, but 99 times out of 100 because clients, you know, always engage differently, that it’s this spaghetti of tasks and processes, no matter how much you try and automate. And that’s giving us really good intel, because now we know, okay, well, here’s the here’s a task that’s happening outside of your process, you know, 50% of the time. So let’s work out how we can use, you know, flows, automations, integrations, AI, whatever it is to try and either remove that through portals or, you know, some sort of other system. Or how do we make it more efficient so that, again, as Nick said, you can get more capacity, more productivity. And it’s amazing, like what we’re finding in all of these clients and what they’re doing. So it’s gonna be really powerful.

 

Rob Pyne  

Yeah, being able to sort of strip back and see what the process truly is, and actually such an art in that isn’t there, because everyone kind of builds this process. It becomes a Frankenstein. Over the years, you kind of get this cumbersome process, and everyone just adopts it, because that’s what they’ve always done. But to be able to strip that back and interrogate and say, what parts of this are adding value, what parts of this is just things we’ve done, because we’ve always done them. And and getting back to, first of all, finding what is the way we want to do this, in the most streamlined fashion, and then we can add tech to try and make it a bit smoother and more streamlined. So yeah, and continually improve, yeah. And constant consideration to improve it. Yeah. And Glenn, what’s working for you, other than the fact you’re getting some miles in now with your meniscus tear repair, and you’re getting running in which I see on LinkedIn all the time, you’re a regular runner. So other than that, what’s really working in your world right now?

 

Glenn Elliott  

Oh, man, I wouldn’t set the bar for success around my running career, that’s for sure. I’ve been really surprised at the cut through. We’ve kind of struck a chord, I think. Recently, I spent a long time in the US, very us oriented journey with practice over a long time, and just meeting and delivering solutions to hundreds and hundreds of advice firms there and here and other markets, and now just turning my attention back to Conversations and consulting and technology engagements here in Australia, I’m so surprised that the language that we’re speaking is resonating. I’m surprised at how open minded the market is. It feels different to me than what it did 10 years ago, when practice I started the launch that now I can go to an advisory firm, sometimes larger ones, smaller ones, mid size, and they’re much more open minded, and they’re very, very open to what they don’t know. They say, Well, we’ve got this tool here and this integration here, and this is a problem over here, but we don’t know what we don’t know. That’s so refreshing to hear. The blinkers are often people are open minded as to what’s possible, and I think that’s part of this AI journey that we’ve been on now for a few years. But people get their ears open as to what’s possible, and we’re in a really flexible and somewhat unique position to be able to show them what’s possible in a really lightweight way that’s unique to their requirements. Some will be more ambitious, and there can be little code deployment pieces where that’s the best fit. Others they need sort of Pyne click workflow automation tools that have aI oriented steps in them. Others need shrink wrap software in their architecture. They all have unique needs, but the ability, with the tools available to us now to move fast and be super nimble, not always require them to move holos bolus from this platform to that platform and go through major migration project, but to be able to say, Okay, well, you’ve got a core platform there. That’s not perfect, but we can now work with that far more flexibly than we ever could before. So rather than go on a huge transformation project, let’s be nimble. Let’s do that piece, and do that piece, and do the the automated file audit and the the early stage SOA draft with AI and the meeting notes and the file notes and and just piece these together in a very, very flexible and nimble way. I’ve just been so impressed at how open minded firms are to that in a way that I just don’t think they were 517 years

 

Rob Pyne  

ago. Yeah, it speaks to what Pat was talking about. There is just about the flexibility that the new tools and the architecture that you can actually put together now, how software is building deliberately with an open architecture model in mind, they’re trying to be an NJ. Us to play with piece of software so that they actually can become a part of an ecosystem, so they’re not trying to be an all skin or dancing software. So, and for me as a principal thinking about technology, spend the fact that, as you’ve just described there, Glenn, the fact you can actually just plug in certain elements of the process, and actually they’re low cost. You can be nimble, and you don’t have to kind of just go all right, I’ve got to do this big software transition from one big system to another big system, and hopefully it works out. Fingers crossed, because we’re doing this massive transition. So it’s a really nice time to think that technology can be playing nicely with us and not have to make enormous transitions necessarily. So where are then? I’m going to throw this to all of you, and so anyone can jump in first here. But where are firms getting stuck? Where do you see people what you’re saying? Glenn, people are open. They’re listening. They’re actually really ready to make change. Where are firms getting stuck in your respective viewpoints? Who wants to jump in there first? You’re also polite. Come on. Nick give

 

Nick Downey 

This probably draws from my experience working with, like Adviserlogic and Xplan and Coin prior to that. So come into a practice and say, okay, like, what’s not working? Like, why does this feel harder than it needs to be? And it’s the age old saying with advisers. Like, okay, I spent more time running back ops than I do seeing advisers. And I love seeing advisers. I hate doing the back ops. So like, why am I working 80 hours a week and not doing what I’m loving and so where I see it go wrong is that probably no surprise that is, it’s one, it’s the inconsistency in process. Yeah, like, Okay, people don’t really know what they’re doing. And I think that really resonates what you mentioned, Steve is the spaghetti. It’s like, okay, there’s one or two things. One, is no process, and you’ve got people doing things differently, and it’s like, okay, well, at the end of the day, we are doing a pretty similar process across the business, and if you allow for variances within that, that’s going to slow things down. And what I found from a software vendor perspective is that you have lots of advisers, even within the same practice, pushing on the software to try and get it to do different things. And so a lot of the time it’s the software’s fault. It’s like, well, no, we haven’t really kind of got consistency. We’re not building off a good base. That’s where I see processes from the starting point is not great. And so I guess probably it’s like we’re saying before. So Well, if you’ve got a bad process and you’re trying to meld software on top of that process, you’re going to get a bad outcome. So that’s one point. Probably the second biggest thing is going probably back to Pat point in terms of the technology stack, where it’s kind of described it previously as a technology Pyne, where you just like what practices will end up doing. I’ve literally seen this time and time and again. I believe the issue stems is from the incumbents, really not doing a great job, unfortunately. And be it though, I’m part of that problem, so I do carry some of the blame. But the issue is that practice law is okay. I have a friction point in my process, and they’ll look at that individual point and say, Okay, well, what’s the best debris thing that I need to jump into to solve that problem? But the issue is they don’t step back and look holistically, it’s okay, well, you’ve solved that little problem with something that’s really great and shiny, but you’ve actually made the whole process harder than it needs to be. And so it’s kind of like the debt by 1000 Cuts, where it’s like they’ve gone in and they’ve got kind of stuck in the day to day. And so when they take a step back, they’re like, yeah, you’ve got 15 different systems, or 20 different systems, and you’re duplicating this, all this kind of cross pollination that’s going on, and you’ve got no real single source of truth. So yeah, those who go bad process and trying to build something on top of that, your foundations are poor. And then probably Secondly, the big one is you tried to solve problems in isolation and throwing software at the problem to try and solve it. But you haven’t taken a step back and gone, you know what? You’ve actually made this holistically worse than what it is, than just solving that individual problem. So that’s that’s probably the two things over that the last 15 years that I’ve been caught up with that those that I see time in time out.

 

Rob Pyne  

I’m not the only one nodding my head here. Nick, that resonates, I’m sure, with a lot of people that will be listening to thinking we just need to look back at our process from first principles, rather just keep trying to solve little problems and creating this Frankenstein of processes. You guys will resonate with that point. The process is usually the starting point, and that’s where all the problems kind of stem from. Anyone else got anything to add there about what’s getting people stuck in practices?

 

Glenn Elliott  

Rob, I see them getting stuck on leadership advice firms are being pitched so much so often. They’ve been pitched by software vendors. They’re being pitched by software development firms to do custom pieces of work. There’s a bunch of consultants around. They don’t know what to make of all of these, and they don’t know what they don’t know. And I mean, I’ve done work recently helping advice firms understand these proposals, been given to them often. These are, say, from SaaS vendors with these modular proposals, saying, yes, you need this core platform, and you need this add on, you need this add on, and there’s a level of leadership and expertise required. Have to say, Why do you need that third one? And maybe you need the core but that third one, really, there are three opportunities out here that are way cheaper than that and far better. There’s just a direction there that the industry is so often missing as to what’s possible. It’s similarly with custom development work, there are still just too many dev shops, not just in the industry, but in the tech industry generally, who still have not moved on the game, they still got a bunch of folks that they need to feed. And so they get a sniff of a development project, and all of a sudden there’s a team of six to nine people that they have to put on there without the buyer understanding that AI should have totally transformed the way that they would deliver that project. We should pass on cost savings to them. There’s direction that the industry is missing as to what’s possible there and how to be a sensible buyer in this new landscape of what’s available.

 

Rob Pyne  

A lot of people would be nodding their head at that one too, because technology leadership doesn’t really exist much in financial planning. It’s really relying on vendors who have got a piece of software to sell to come and talk to you about what they’ve got. And it’s the most challenging part. Glenn, I think that’s the niche you’re kind of occupying now with your stepping out of the practice world as the CO CEO, being able to help firms navigate those questions, because it’s very perplexing. I mean, there’s so many choices. And I see that net wealth survey of all the different pieces of software that are available. I’m kind of like, How would anyone have any idea what to do here. It’s just so many choices, and so it is a challenging one, and you’ve got to step your way through, I guess, a bit of a matrix of questions. You want to have answered. You’ve got to have an RFP, a request for proposal. It just helps people get more clarity about what they’re chasing and whether the vendor or software can actually meet that need. But technology leadership is certainly something that’s a bit of a gap for advice firms, because we know how to give advice to clients on all things super and tax and the like. But technology is not typically a strong suit. But clearly that’s not the problem for you guys. What else are you seeing? If anything that’s kind of getting firm stuck Pat Steve, you got anything you’re seeing that’s routinely not around process or around leadership,

 

Patrick Gardner  

if we think about the big, chunky Conkey tool that most of the industry or profession is still using, the stack, ain’t integrated, and they want to use the tools around it or integrate with it, but you have businesses resorting to robotic process automation, or RPA, which I don’t think is a scalable solution versus modern APIs, or just using automation in the background. I just think that’s fraught with danger, but also you’ve got those or that big, chunky, clunky tool, which I won’t name or dwell on it, but I think they’ve stopped issuing new API keys, which is just incredibly concerning terms of being able to access your own data for the 10s of 1000s, sometimes hundreds of 1000s, dollars you pay to use that tool. So that clearly supports, okay, well, let’s try and find something separate, because we can’t integrate it anyway. Let’s try and do something off the side here, because we don’t have the confidence in our existing CRM or tool that’s being used as a CRM, and then that creates inconsistent process as well. And the issue that I find with when you’re building on an enterprise tool and you’re trying to cater for a lot of things is you always need to cater for the path of least resistance. So if someone has Outlook open all day, advisers in particular, my goodness, or people that are allowed to delegate stuff, just fling this off, circumvent the process. Can you do this for me? Email internally. Don’t go through the process. And so how do you use AI? Well, that’s what I’m trying to battle with. How can you use AI to pick up that slack so you don’t have to force people down a process that you process mine or go through this exercise of saying this is how we do things every time, which is freaking awesome, when you can get people to conform and do that, but it’s so much harder, it really stifles progress. So I think that’s, that’s where I’m sort of battling that there. And then there’s also the, you know, the analysis paralysis. So just overnight, we’ve had chat, GBT pulse, or plus or something. Really don’t know what that is, but I don’t think, I don’t think, I think they’re just throwing anything and just hoping that it will stick, because it’s just like, some of the examples I give are just, I know they’ve got the TAM is everyone in the world, but it’s just like, What is going on? Got Claude models now available in copilot. So you’ve got these businesses and people that are making decisions and then questioning them probably the next day going, well, this thing’s now changed, and this thing’s more advanced. Have I made the right call? And often you do nothing, but we know that more is lost within decision than the wrong decision. So I think it’s just so overwhelming, and it can just feel like a Rubik’s cube that you can’t stop twisting in your head, because it’s just so much happening.

 

Rob Pyne  

I could never solve the Rubik’s Cube myself, so I can relate. And as far as for our listeners that want to know what a tam is, there’s a total addressable market. There’s another acronym that means everyone in the world. You can use this. So there’s, it’s a big market. So hence why they’re throwing all sorts of different tools at us. So Steve, what have you got that doesn’t cover off on process, the complexity of different options and leadership in technology, anything that you’re seeing routinely, that people are getting stuck on.

 

Stephen Bell  

I think it’s always bright and sparkly. You know, AI is a bright and sparkly it has been for a while now, and now everyone’s thinking that it’s going to be the solution for everything. So we’ll often get emails saying, can we use AI to merge data into a letter? Well, we don’t need to merge data into a letter. We’ve been doing that for 25 years. Why would you. NJ, look at AI as a solution to what you’ve already got. So 10 years ago, it was the bright and sparkly Zoom meeting, you know. So now we’ve got a bright and sparkly of AI that everyone’s trying to focus on. And every LinkedIn post and every conversations about AI, and they think it’s going to solve everything, and then maybe it will, but it doesn’t need to be used for everything. There’s still other solutions that are cheaper, easier already there. So I think if advisers and users in general can stop focusing on the latest posts they see on LinkedIn and just focus on the one thing they’re still trying to solve from

 

Rob Pyne  

last week, yeah, it’s fair to say that most users of technology use only a fraction of what the technology can do typically, isn’t it? So in fact, I remember talking to you, Nick, back in the day, we were talking about taking on the plant production engine that Iris had purchased, which was pathways. They purchased it, and you called it model office and and I said, I’m not going to purchase that off you, Nick, until you give me someone that can implement it for me, because I know that I won’t get it right trying to implement that thing. So make sure you give me someone that I can actually put in place to help us execute. Because ideas are great, and software is great if you know how to use it, but you need someone to help make sure you get that adoption. So that worked exceedingly well. Bit of history for us, but certainly made it work for us. And actually there was more value from that gentleman, Sam Patterson, that you still work with today, that’s brought to our firm. So shout out to Sam again for the work he did with us. Guys. We’ve talked about what’s working what’s getting in the way. What should people focus on now? What’s the next thing they should do? I think I’ve got an idea of what you’ve all said that I would probably start with. But whoever wants to start on this one, but what should firms do? Very first thing, next thing they should focus on.

 

Glenn Elliott  

Rob, my advice on that would be to stop hesitating and dive in. Don’t be afraid to try something. Get some advice around where to start. That advice should be lightweight, and your first step should be lightweight, to build knowledge as to what’s possible. The best way to do it is to try. I’ve posted a few things recently around trying to give some guidance to the industry, around how to prototype and to do proofs of concept that are low risk or as close to zero risk as we can get it, things like de identifying any data before you pipe it into an AI workflow or an LLM at all, separating production environments from pre prod and test type of dummy environments, a little bit of setup like that goes an awful long way. And then experiment and prototype and try these things out, talk to a variety of vendors, do trials of these different tools. And so many of these AI oriented tools in the market are inexpensive to try, and they might have consumption based models or pricing that scales with usage and scales with number of users. It’s so easy to dabble now you’re just going to dabble safely and with some consideration, but just don’t overthink it. Get in, start trying these things, and you’ll learn an awful lot, very, very quickly, and can move forward from there.

 

Rob Pyne  

It makes me think of when you said dabble and go like, wait of the Jim Collins, five bullets then cannonballs. It’s in one of those books back there, Good to Great, or Great by Choice, one of those two, I’m sure which book it talks about, but it’s about, he says, fire bullets and get your calibration right before you start firing cannibals. Don’t go all in until you’ve kind of tinkered and experimented to make sure you’ve got the right range and accuracy on things. So that’s a good advice, Glenn, for people to think about, not trying to go from zero to 100 in one fell swoop, but but actually, just dabble and figure these things out and do it a bit on the side, as opposed to trying to upset the mothership, sort of do something, get a bit of a side project going in a sandbox environment, and try and figure things out before you go too far. What are the other guys got

 

Patrick Gardner  

great points. Glen, I think also, just from experience, you just start with a small team and also give them, rather than going straight to, let’s do ideas and we can’t visualize it. Everyone sort of finds a visual learners, or they need to see something to work out what’s wrong with it. So just build, build the MVP, build the prototype. Start with a small team, and then you actually work out what the real problems are. And then you can roll that out with confidence and have the internal buy in, rather than this thing being lumped on us by this person, rather than the actual my peers or direct timors of the same title have been using this and testing this and that input, and then everyone feels valid because they are and you actually build something that everyone will use because they actually had a part building it.

 

Rob Pyne  

Change Management, that’s a big part of it, isn’t it? Yeah,

 

Stephen Bell  

and maybe identified the most time consuming part of the business. Is it your file notes? Is it your scheduling meetings? Just pick one small area and really nail it, because you’ll find that’ll extend on there all the other areas.

 

Rob Pyne  

Good place to begin, isn’t it? Find the big, chunky bit that takes heaps of time and devote some attention to that, because that’s when you get the biggest wins, a lot hanging fruit, so to speak. So yeah, good point. Steve Nick, you got anything there about what someone should do very next thing?

 

Nick Downey  

Yeah, I think it’s not a sexy one, unfortunately, but like, nine times out of 10, like we said, everything’s AI now. And it’s quite interesting, because, like, if they’ve had a lot of advisers coming in saying, Hey, are you doing some AI stuff? Like, what should I do? And my first question is, like, Okay, do you have an AI policy? Because there is a level of risk tolerance. Yes, that’s okay, whether you’re self licensed or whether you’re able to sell, when is the data going to go? How’s it processed? What disclaimers do you need to give to your clients that you’re recording meetings like all that? Like I said, it’s not sexy, but I think that for me, that’s one of the things we did with Direct Wealth. It’s okay. When we started embarking with AI, it’s okay. Well, what is our tolerance with regards to AI adoption and putting in place clear expectations of the business, because we saw it’s like, people say, hey, I can chuck for some chat tbds. Like, no, you cannot. Like, that is a group. So I think before you even start the process, because I definitely agree with blend and Pat is that, yeah, just give it a go. But before you put your toes in the water first, it’s okay. Well, especially being self licensed, it’s like, Okay. Well, as an organization, what are we happy to implement? What do we actually have a core understanding about what we’re actually stepping into? Because there’s so much hype, it’s actually a lot of practices. So it’s like, I don’t want to be left behind. Like, I feel like if I’m not doing this, I’m going to be pushed away all this the other end, but people like the paralysis where it’s like, I just don’t just too fearful, but either end of the spectrum, it’s like, okay, well, let’s start and say, what is our policies? And then from there, does everyone actually know what? From an employee perspective, what we allow them to do and what like we don’t? So yeah, not the sexiest thing, but certainly I think that’s kind of the fundamental. And then I would definitely resonate with what everyone else has said. Is that okay? Well, yeah, what’s the thing that’s going to give us the best bang for our buck? And that’s like, what’s causing the most amount of friction? And then looking and making an assessment to say, okay, like, like saying, Paul, it’s okay. Well, how can we whip up a safe prototype to Glen in that point and say it may not be the most sexy looking tool, but it’s going to add value, and it’s going to solve that problem, because depending on different people’s competencies and how you can set up like there is a world of vibe coding where you can start making products, what put it in a secure spot. You can’t just whip it up on the old AI and off you go and deploy it into a practice that that’s probably going to be a no no. But we do now live in a world where you don’t need to be a developer to create software, which, for me is translate that into you can solve problems, and it’s kind of interesting, like, from my experience, it’s like, okay, well, we’re now in a world where, previously, to Glenn point where it’s okay, you’d have to go up and employ a custom development team to build you something, and it costs hundreds of 1000s of dollars and years of time where it’s okay. You might have someone that is like a power planner, or someone that may have a more of a technical inclination, but they don’t need to know Python. They don’t need to know how to code. They can whip up prototypes really quite quickly. But you obviously the caveat to all that is you need to know how to build it and how to deploy to practice in a safe and secure way, which is actually probably a lot more difficult than actually creating stuff through Pyne coding, which is kind of ironic, but that probably might pull out.

 

Rob Pyne  

Yeah, you can vibe code, but in a safe way. You’re right. It’s not sexy Nick but it’s actually sound advice. So it’s, it’s something that I can relate to, because, yeah, we’re a couple of our guys were early adopters, and they were thinking, Oh, I’ll take all the names out and I’ll just use chat GPT to my summary. And also, well, even with the names not in there, there’s a lot of context about that person situation. So not only putting that stuff in a chat GPT, it has to be a secure environment. So we quickly got ahead of that issue ourselves, and everyone’s very mindful of that, because obviously, privacy is a is the number one thing. If you don’t keep your clients data private, you are cooked. So not just from a compliance and legal standpoint, but just from a business standpoint, no one’s going to stick around as a client if you can’t keep their information confidential. So great point and well made. I want to wrap up, guys with a couple of quick fire questions for you all. I was going to hold that what’s next question over for the rapid fire? But we’ll do it this way. I want you to give me a rapid fire and what’s one tool you can’t live without? So it might be the LME using, whether it’s chat, GPT or Claude or whatever. What’s the one tool you can’t live without? Could be something entirely different. Could be an Xbox. I don’t know what’s the one bit of tech and your tool you can’t live without, and what’s one metric that you always track to know whether you’re on the right track or not. So what are you tracking? What’s the one thing you’re tracking to see if you’re actually making headway? So let’s go around with First of all, what’s the one tool who wants to go pat you wanted to kick off?

 

Patrick Gardner  

Yeah, I fly the flag a lot for wakato, but I’ve sort of said that one before, but I can’t live without that. Obviously, there’s your chat, gpts, etc, but I don’t know if I can’t live without it, but I’m really exploring at the moment. And it was recommended by Peter warnet for Neuro group, but also Daniel Donovan at verse wealth. So it’s a tool called whisper flow, which is, hopefully we can look at the show notes, but it just sort of sits on your device. And at first I thought, like, it’s just like a dictation tool, but it takes the actual context of what you’re saying, and you can just speak to it like you would be, you know, prompting an LLM, and it will put that in the right text box. So I can talk a lot quicker than I can type, and it just feels more natural, and it works really well, like it’s just pretty seamless. It’s actually a bit annoying, because it has this little like hovering thing in the middle of every screen, which I’m sure I can jump into settings, but it’s something I’m exploring. And right now, and having a lot of fun with it, sounds a

 

Rob Pyne  

cool tool, and also nodding around the room here, Pat, so whisper flow, that one’s worth taking a look at. Nick. What have you got that’s really exciting you and that the one tool you can’t live without.

 

Nick Downey  

I mean, from a software development sector, I actually probably would echo Pat in terms of whisper. So obviously, they’re different models, and like having the elements like that’s embedded in my I don’t go a day without probably spending more than 50% of my time in one of the models. But having whispered as a tool to be able to interact with those models is definitely helps me a lot, and it’s definitely changed my working style as well. It’s like the natural language in terms of speaking, I’ve actually found has given me better results than trying to type out my prompts. So it’s how the models interpret you to speak in even though, because with was great, like, because you go, okay, arm and R and you go different, but it actually kind of consolidates at 2k. Yeah, this is what just been said. So yeah, that’s probably my big thing at the moment.

 

Rob Pyne  

Tell me then. Nick, so just give me a run through of practically how that’s working for you, because I’m getting a sense of it from what you just said there, and obviously Pat’s very much on board with it, too. So exactly what? Because I know I’m used to talking to chatgpt. Glenn and I had a chat about this. When we’re on our podcast together, we’ll stick our AirPods in and we’re having a chat to chatgpt, asking questions and bouncing stuff around as a bit of a sounding board. So what’s whisper doing that is an extension to that?

 

Nick Downey  

Yeah, it’s because I’ve got it hot keyed so, like, I can be just doing anything, and then collect, okay, record, basically, and then to start talking. So I don’t have to kind of stop what I’m doing and go over to chat to me and start a conversation. I can just start recording, because you might see, like, behind me, but another desk that’s where Sam sits. He uses whisper as well, and it’s quite funny. He’ll just start talking, and it’s like, Hey, are you talking to me? Like, what’s the conversation solve? It’s like, Oh, we’ve been doing this for a while now together in this room, so kind of gotten used to when he’s talking to whisper versus when he’s actually asking me something. So yeah, I think it’s the experience of just being able to have like, go, okay, yep, got something I want to do, and just clicking your button and start talking.

 

Rob Pyne  

Yeah, right, Steve, you were nodding your head. Anything you got to add, there is a whisper for you as well, or is it something else?

 

Stephen Bell  

No, probably a bit boring, but we’re using zoom for almost everything now. So meetings, phone calls, SMS, documents like the document tool is really, really powerful. It’s nothing like what we’re used to word for the last 50 years. And just because everything’s in the same tool, and it integrates well with our solution being Salesforce, it’s really, really powerful, and just way more capability than I think I’ve seen in most of those communications. Dial tools tell

 

Rob Pyne  

us a bit about that Zoom documents, because we use Zoom too. We’ve got zoom phone. Mainly. We use teams for these virtual calls, but we use Zoom phone as our phone system. Now we’ve moved away from the VoIP we used to have, and Zoom’s kind of crossed the whole team now. And I’ve seen these other tools pop up, actually in the little menu bar, and I’ve not been familiar with how to sort of make use of them. How are you using it?

 

Stephen Bell  

Steve, yeah, well, look rather than emails for internal inside our business, rather than emails. And you know that form of communication, if we’re trying to got a project or something we’re trying to work through, we use Zoom Docs because you can kind of link in chats. You can link in emails. You can draw whiteboards and workflows in there. You can pull in spreadsheets and data and actually map it. You can even create forms and send questions at the clients and get all of that data put in there. So I guess you’d say, you know, it’s got AI, and it was kind of like spreadsheets, presentations, Word documents and a CRM all kind of in the one in a document.

 

Rob Pyne  

This is kind of a bit off the script, but did you see zooms released a reception function now where it’ll actually essentially performed like an AI reception greeting for people calling through, and so you don’t have to receptionist answer the phone, and no receptionist wants to be done that forever either. To be honest, it’s a bit of a challenging job, constant interruptions. Have you seen that? And have you kind of dabbled in that one?

 

Stephen Bell  

Yet we’ve seen it. We haven’t dabbled in it. We’re sort of looking at there. I’m not sure if it’s called a reception or something else, but where it listens to the phone call and schedules meetings for you. If you say, you know, Rob will meet you next week on Tuesday, it goes and puts it into the diary. So we haven’t rolled any of that out to clients, you know, we’re just playing around with it to see what we can

 

Rob Pyne  

use. Yeah, cool. Let’s see. You said it’s not very sexy, but actually, there’s lots going on. There isn’t this existing tool. Everyone thinks it does one thing, but now does a whole bunch of other things too. So that’s very cool. What about you? Glenn, what have you got? There’s the one tool you just cannot live without, other than your running shoes.

 

Glenn Elliott  

Look any tool that could just help me go faster. I’ve got a mission to deliver everything that I want to do as fast as I can possibly do it, and it is faster than ever before, but it has to stay on an upward curve. The tool I use routinely day to day. Is cursor because I’m a nerd, but I don’t just use it for AI powered code generation. I use it for writing proposals, for creating engagement letters, for customer presentations, brochures and flyers and web copy and new web page, whatever it may be, because I. I’ve been able to kind of build up a library of content about me and about malice and about the brand and all of our assets in that so every subsequent task that I need to do with it is just faster and oh, okay, well, there’s the logos, and there’s the style sheet, and we want to use that branding again, and we use that tone that we use there, and it’s just remarkably hands off and voice driven. And yeah, it blows me away. And I don’t miss doing any of that in sort of Word or PowerPoint or anything else anymore.

 

Rob Pyne  

I was gonna say I’ve just been building out a PowerPoint presentation. I’m thinking I should have been using cursor, by the sound of it. I’m familiar with PowerPoint, but it sounds like because it’s got all that history, and your graphics, your design, your language, the way you speak that, and the knowledge of Meldus, you don’t have to kind of re engineer that stuff. It’s kind of all embedded in in the system. Is that what curses doing for you, it’s kind of become this kind of learned knowledge base of what you’re doing. So when you build a presentation or proposal, it’s grabbing all that collateral that you’ve previously created. Yeah, you

 

Glenn Elliott  

basically say, right, I do a new proposal to a client has some similarities to that previous one. We want the same styling, probably the same table of contents, but it’s different service offering, and just to extrapolate from what you’ve done before to what you need to do next, I put a little bit of investment into corporate branding and styling to keep it tight, and I’d much rather have that in those lightweight, decoupled corporate assets than embedded in a Word template or a PowerPoint document, whatever that gets cloned by someone and cloned again by someone else. It becomes kind of source code control for us because they’re so important, and becomes much more rinse and repeat in a really controlled way, but still totally AI driven. It’s been fascinating.

 

Rob Pyne  

Yeah, that’s cool. Very cool. It’s terrific to be talking to people that have got really cutting edge tools they’re using. And I’m thinking, like, this is a super fun for me, this chat. And I’m sure others will be listening in, thinking, This is great. So I’ll finish on this one point, which is that, what is the one metric, you guys? I mean, there’s one concept of just what’s the one number you’re tracking, what’s the one metric you track to sort of determine whether you’re making is there one overarching, sort of North Star metric you track to see whether or not you’re making progress on the objectives of projects you guys set out to achieve?

 

Nick Downey  

I’ll jump straight into that one. So for us, obviously being very aligned with direct and this is obviously with work that Sam Patterson has done, is the time to submission on SOA. So from when a client first engages with an adviser to when that plan has been submitted to power planning. So that timeframe, or that metric, gives us a very clear indication in terms of the effectiveness of both the adviser in the process, but also in addition to that. So it’s not just one, there’s also the read work on that adviser. So it’s, it’s one, okay, if you just be very quick, but you’re passing, not so great work over to power planning. That’s not effective. So yeah, that’s kind of the North Star for us to say. Okay, well, as we start implementing tools like Meeting Ally, we’re seeing that number get lower and lower a lot. So the time from the advisers speaking to the client to a plan being requested, that’s what we’re really focusing on, to say, okay, yep, we want to see that go down. But then also, as we’re leveraging AI to augment the adviser, the quality is also going up. So we’re seeing that the rework rates are getting lower and lower as well. That for us is that one metric is okay? Well, if we see that, and obviously with Direct Wealth, that’s charted it, so you can see it over time, and it’s tracked per adviser, so you can see, as a practice, are we getting better? But then also, it’s interesting from an adoption perspective, with each adviser, we can see the ones that have been more early adopters onto many ally that wants it, because obviously it’s a bit of a process with adoption, but you can materially see the ones that are using our stuff and the effects that have been had on the business through that one metric. So that’s probably the thing that we focus on.

 

Rob Pyne  

I love that one. Nick and every adviser practitioner out there would love that one too. If that’s a game changer for businesses with where it’s a it’s pretty laborious process, isn’t it? So if you can get that number down and track that as your key metric, it’s a good one. What about the other guys? What do you guys tend to point to as your key metric? To know that you’re making some headway on the projects you’re on,

 

Patrick Gardner  

I’m giving personal ones. I’ve been on the road or working remotely overseas almost two years. Now, it can be very easy to sit in the corner, get the optimal desk set up and just crack on and not lose sight of reality, but you can feel a bit of FOMO from what’s going on at maybe HQ, even though there isn’t HQ anymore. Like you’ve got people working remotely, but in the same country, it’s more of a time zone thing. So I’ve been trying to spend at least 30% of the week in meetings, or at least just interacting with others, whether that’s through the podcast, in terms of the advising podcast, I mean, and also obviously engagements like this, and also trying to just work more in like, public or shared spaces, so your mindset just changes, like you just feel more open and more alive, for lack of a better term. And then maybe more on the tech side, I think. Have talked a lot about AI and I think the tolerance that we have for AI outputs is very different to that of a colleague. So if it’s not perfect, it’s wrong, if that’s an AI response, and so you don’t notice it so much if you’re using an LLM so chatgpt Or a Claude, because it’s very easy to refine it. And often actually gives you more context, like it actually makes you give a better prompt second or third time round, and often it gives you what you asked for, not what you wanted. So how to make sure that when we’re using these AI steps I mentioned before in flows and processes, that it’s giving that right answer the first time, so the team doesn’t have to actually go back and do it themselves. And that’s particularly prevalent or relevant in document generation or things where it’s just like, in the person’s mind, it should have come out just the way I asked for it. So that comes back to prompt templates and context as well. Like, it’s always about context, but trying to make sure that we have a highest percentage as possible. So over 90% of the first shot was the right shot, rather than having to go back to the drawing board.

 

Rob Pyne  

And I like the point you’ve made there earlier, Pat about just that creativity that comes from being around people in that open environment and and staying connected to people. Because, yeah, you can get in little tunnel, can’t you, if you sit there and coding all day and sort of developing software, but there’s nothing like getting that third party input. And this, obviously, this is what’s about for me too. Like listening to you guys talk, just being able to sort of open your mind a bit to what’s possible and hear from people’s experiences is a really wonderful way to sort of stay connected and keep your creativity rolling. So Steve Glenn, what have you guys got? That’s the metric that you tend to point to as the number one thing you focus on.

 

Glenn Elliott  

Well, having gone through my role at Practifi, being utterly driven by an array of metrics that we care deeply about that our investors care deeply about. Is there a but there Glenn? No, no, no. In Meldus now it’s different. It’s more qualitative. The thing that drives me at the moment is really making sure that we’re a right fit in a relationship, and it’s obviously a right fit where I have a conversation with a firm, usually the leaders in the firm, and if they learn something from that, I love it. If I see someone taking a few notes, as I’m talking, picking something up, which I really love. And similarly, if I learn something from that about the direction they’re heading, about who they’re working with, their aspirations, the whole bit, we both come away from that thing. Oh yeah, that was well worthwhile, and we’ve got a bunch of takeaways and notes off it. Then invariably, that’s a loose metric of success that that was time well spent for both parties. We’ll see where it goes from there. And I thrive on that. I love it. As I come bouncing out of those conversations, thinking, right? We both got something out of that. Maybe there’s something to work with here. And so the more of those conversations I can tick off in a given week, that’s a good

 

Rob Pyne  

week. I love it. Glenn, that’s actually we almost need, like an energy meter. Don’t we like something that tracks our energy levels and what we’re enthusiastic about, because when you have good conversations, you never come out feeling tired. You know, you actually come out with energy. It actually gives you energy. And you feel like, like, if you could measure that, we try and measure the qualitative experience our clients have with the financial advice we provide, and we do that in robust and rigorous fashion so we can measure that feeling they have around their finances over time, because there’s a measurement each year, the same measurement, and they are self assessing that change and how they feel about their finances. And I love the idea of measuring qualitative experience, not just about quant data too, but all of that. It’s really, really important. Steve, what about you? What do you think about what occupies your number one attention as far as metrics and tracking is concerned.

 

Stephen Bell  

Okay, it’s a common theme here with us, but it’s activity tracking. You can’t improve what you don’t know. And you know, for those of the listeners that are using something like Dynamics or Salesforce, they could probably do that, but unfortunately, the majority of the market is using a solution that just has no capability to do that, yep, but you can get so many free tools now, you know time trackers, or activity trackers that you can just load, not from a WIP kind of view of who’s doing what, but just to see where everyone’s time is getting spent. Because, you know, I would suggest that 90% of practices have no idea what their team are doing day to day in the eight hours or the 12 hours that they’re working every day.

 

Rob Pyne  

Yeah, that’s the truth, isn’t it? The Peter Drucker comment was about you can’t manage what you can’t measure. So measurements everything to know what you actually are doing, and trying to, first of all, if you know what’s happening, you can at least then try to pinpoint it and improve upon it. And I think Nick made that point really well the front end there just about how tracking that time from point to point to point to point, and actually know if that’s going down, that we know we’re making some headway. So I love that, and I’ve taken a lot of your time today, guys. I really appreciate you all rejoining me on The Trusted Adviser podcast. I know that Pat has a plane to catch, so I don’t want to take any longer, because he will be starting to fret about getting to the airport on time. So Pat, Nick, Steve and Glenn, thank you gentlemen for joining me again on The Trusted Adviser podcast. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Rob. Thanks Rob. Thanks everyone. Thanks, Rob. Cheers guys, good to see you. Guys. Thanks for tuning into The Trusted Adviser. 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.