In this episode of The Trusted Adviser, Rob Pyne speaks with Peter Worn from Finura Group about the critical role of technology in financial advice. They discuss the importance of navigating conflicts of interest in tech consulting, the opportunities and risks associated with AI, and how to maximize existing technology investments. Peter emphasizes the need for a structured approach to technology decisions, including understanding the jobs to be done framework and the importance of choosing the right document management system. They also touch on preparing a business for sale and identifying leadership issues that may masquerade as tech problems. The conversation concludes with key takeaways for advisors looking to enhance their tech strategies.

LISTEN

SHOW NOTES

Topics Discussed

Technology as a servant to business strategy.
Jobs to be done for advisers and clients.
Industry platforms versus enterprise CRMs.
When Salesforce and Dynamics make sense.
The law of diminishing returns in small firms.
AI use cases that are working in advice today.
File note automation and paraplanning support.
Copilot agents and workflow standardisation.
Document management decisions.
SharePoint versus Box.
Data structure and governance.
Cybersecurity as an acquisition signal.
Technology decisions in M&A readiness.
ROI frameworks for tech investment.
When technology is the wrong problem to solve.

Episode Highlights

(Timestamps are approximate)

[00:00] – Introduction to Technology in Financial Advice
[02:44] – Understanding Finura Group’s Role
[05:37] – Navigating Conflicts of Interest in Tech Consulting
[08:24] – The AI Landscape and Its Challenges
[10:55] – Evaluating AI Solutions and Avoiding FOMO
[13:55] – Maximizing Existing Technology Investments
[16:33] – Streamlining Tech Stacks and Reducing Duplication
[18:52] – Jobs to Be Done Framework in Advice Practices
[21:40] – Deciding Between Industry Platforms and CRMs
[28:45] – Tech Sanity: Navigating Technology in Business
[29:20] – AI in Advice: Transforming Content Creation
[31:37] – Effective Client Communication with AI
[33:00] – Data Management: The Role of AI in CRM
[34:09] – Leveraging Copilot for Workflow Efficiency
[37:07] – Document Management: SharePoint vs. Alternatives
[40:55] – Understanding CRM Implementation Costs
[46:32] – Evaluating ROI: Cost vs. Impact
[49:46] – Preparing for M&A: Technology Considerations
[53:56] – When Technology Isn’t the Solution

Quotes

“Technology should serve strategy, not dictate it.” – Peter Worn

“Most firms already own tools they are not fully using.” – Peter Worn

“AI makes confident mistakes.” – Peter Worn

“The risk reward ratio for SOA automation is not there yet.” – Peter Worn

“Clean data beats clever tools.” – Peter Worn

“Tech problems are rarely tech problems.” – Peter Worn

“Polish your shoes.” – Peter Worn

“Meetings per adviser is one of the most powerful productivity levers.” – Rob Pyne

Key Takeaways

Technology is a critical part of financial advice businesses.
Conflicts of interest in tech consulting can lead to poor decisions.
AI can enhance client communication and content generation.
Maximizing existing technology is often overlooked.
Understanding the jobs to be done can streamline processes.
Choosing the right tech solution depends on business size and needs.
Document management systems should be chosen based on integration capabilities.
Preparing for a business sale involves standardizing technology.
Leadership issues can often masquerade as tech problems.
Self-awareness in business decisions is crucial for success.

Resources & Links

The Trusted Adviser: https://thetrustedadviser.com.au/
Finura Group: https://finuragroup.com/
Connect with Rob Pyne on LinkedIn
Connect with Peter Worn on LinkedIn
Follow The Trusted Adviser Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

Rob Pyne

Rob 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 back to The Trusted Adviser Podcast. Today. We’re talking about something that can either quietly turbo charge your advice business or quietly strangle it your technology and more specifically, how to bring some tech sanity back into a world of noise, fads and very expensive mistakes. My guest is Peter Worn, co-founder of Finura Group, an independent technology advisor and software firm that works exclusively with advice businesses and licensees. Peter started his career as a para planner, has worked with hundreds of advice firms, and now sits in that rare seat where he sees the patterns, the pitfalls and the genuine opportunities in advice, tech and AI every single day in this conversation, we get really practical. We talk about why tech consulting can feel like the wild west and the hidden conflicts you should be watching for with managed service providers, software vendors and AI agencies, who might just be re badging cheap tools and selling them back to you at fire watering margins, how to sanity check AI projects avoid FOMO and use Peters. You only get to pick one thing, ROI lens and squeeze the lemon approach before you add yet another app to your stack. And the difference between a genuine tech stack and what Peter calls a tech pile and the common duplications in task tools, communication platforms and file stories that quietly add risk and complexity without adding any value. Also the big fork in the road, staying on an industry platform versus moving to an enterprise CRM like Salesforce or dynamics, including the real implementation and maintenance costs that often get overlooked, and then DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT realities, SharePoint versus dedicated tools, how Copilot changes the equation, and what good data hygiene actually looks like in a modern advice firm. And there’s a big payoff if you listen right through to the end Peter shares, how buyers really look at your tech when you’re preparing to sell, including why using weird and wonderful proprietary systems can hurt your valuation, why your cyber security posture is the polished choose test for acquirers and the red flags that tell him a firm doesn’t have a tech problem at all, it has a leadership and business model problem, and why in those cases, he’ll actually send them to a practice coach before he’ll touch a tech project. So if you’ve ever wondered, are we overpaying for Tech Under using what we’ve got or about to make a very expensive mistake, this episode is going to give you a much clearer, calmer way to think about it. Let’s get into my conversation with Peter Worn.
Welcome Peter Worn to The Trusted Adviser podcast.

Peter Worn
Thanks, Rob. Really good to be here.

Rob Pyne

Really good to have you here. We met formally for the first time, only a few weeks ago now, at the Fitzpatrick’s annual conference in Sydney, and we were both speaking at that event, and I’d seen you speak many times. You’ve been fairly regular on stage at different events, and I’ve always appreciated the kind of insight you’ve provided, but in a really just calm down everyone type of approach, the way you talk about technology, which I really appreciated. And when we got to meet for the first time, it was a great conversation we had then, and I’m looking forward to having this one today.

Peter Worn

Yeah, thanks, Rob. I suppose, as you can well imagine, Tech’s a really noisy world, and lots of fads come and go. And maybe as I’ve gotten a bit older, I’ve probably learned that, you know, my role needs to be to tell people to calm down a little bit. But at the same time, you know, I really want positivity. I mean, tech is amazing. I mean, now look at how our lives now can be and what they were 20 years ago. But at the same time, I’m also really careful. I don’t like seeing businesses make mistakes they can avoid, so that’s probably something that keeps me passionate. I know something keeps advisors passionate about their clients as well. So I think we’re just of similar values from that point of view.

Rob Pyne

Yeah, for sure. So for listeners who don’t know, you, tell us about Finura group and what an independent technology advisor to advice firms does day to day.

Peter Worn

So Finura Group has two parts to it. So we have a software development business which is building some apps to the industry, which is really interesting, and we have a services business which provides, as you said, consulting services to the IFA and licensee market. We’ve only been going five years, and someone actually said to me the other day, Gee, I don’t know why no one had done this before around technology. And so my colleagues, we had a background doing XPlan development, so we all worked in another company a long time ago, and then for a whole bunch of reasons, we decided to start something new. And I just said to the team that I felt that technology was becoming such a big part of an advice business’s lives. But. Really wasn’t an ecosystem of people that can help them get the best out of it, from that perspective. So for why don’t we sort of look to create a model in the same way that an asset consultant provides a Chief Investment Officer support model or something along those lines? Why don’t we create a technology model to do that? And the critical element, and what’s unique about us, probably, compared to other technology consulting services is our firms pay us directly for what we do. We’re not resellers of Microsoft or Salesforce or as other things. Unlike our industry Rob. The technology industry is riddled with conflicts and shelf space and volume payments and all these sort of things. And I think ultimately small businesses just want practical advice. And I think the secret sauce for us is that all of us, including myself, have worked in advice at various times in our career. So my first job was a paraplanner in 2000 at Suncorp bank. So that’s how long I go back. So you are from the industry, therefore your technology understanding is very domain specific, which is why it’s a real strength, clearly, of your business, and you in particular, Peter, and I know your colleagues are there as well. I met Simon Betchley, one of your colleagues, at the Fitzpatrick conference, as well. And Simon reminded me we first met talking about Olicc. I reckon, I don’t know where that was, but that’s like in the 2000s sometimes. Yeah, Simon’s probably got a richer software background than even I do, but he spent a lot of time working with he’s probably working three or 400 device businesses now, over the last few years, and same as Danni and the rest of the team. So you add up the collective knowledge, or scar tissue, we’ve got to call it, there’s some real learnings there. So we’re really blessed. And I think technology is a bit like advice. You know, I’m in constant admiration for financial advisors who have to be across the general practitioners of the financial world, they’ve got to be across all the legislative issues, the compliance, the investments, the clients, behaviors, the tech and run a business, and so that is so challenging. And even with tech, it is really hard for us to have a whole bunch of all rounders who are great at everything. So what we’ve really tried to do is build up a team who have areas of expertise. And I think one of the value adds that I think we add for our clients, and things they tell us is it’s nice that you can bring in the right people we’ve got a problem, and I think great advisors do that too. Yeah, yeah, to have the diverse skill sets as a great credit to your firm that what you’ve been able to build there. So when we did a quick pre episode chat last week, you made a point that tech consulting can be a bit of the Wild West. It’s perhaps not as regulated as we’re used to in financial planning, as you know. So what conflicts of interest do exist in our space? You mentioned there a moment ago, just about technology and how there are things to be very aware when you’re actually buying technology, when you’re talking to vendors, what should advice firms watch out for when selecting a tech partner in that context? About conflicts? Yeah, well, I mean, it’s like everything. I think everyone has conflicts. It’s how you disclose them, it’s how you leave with them. So, you know, certainly, if a business, when they’re approaching you, when they don’t volunteer what some of their conflicts are up front. So we do that in our about for neuroscience, we talk about our software business, we talk about how we manage conflicts. In that that’s always, often a good red flag, because I just think every, I mean, you have an FSG which talks about how you manage all things. So I just feel we should be the same. So that’s probably just the golden rule for us, but I think the nuances and the things that people need to be aware of. So let’s talk about managed service providers, for example. So managed service providers are your IT guys, for lack of a better term, that provide all the Microsoft and hardware support. Now, a lot of them are remunerated in different ways by providing volume to certain providers. So I came across an instance. I had recently joined the board of a business and advice business, and for some reason, this business wasn’t using SharePoint. It was using some other weird, wonderful bit of infrastructure to store its data. And I just knew, hands down this IT service provider was getting a kicker on it. So they were gone pretty quick, I can tell you, after we discovered that. And the thing that was annoying for the advice business, they were never told. They don’t mind if there’s something there. But when you’re not told, it really frustrates people. So there’s that side of it. They do resell hardware. So a lot of them get kickers for recommending certain laptops over others. So Lenovo, HP, they provide incentives to resell providers. Even I caught our IT guys, we have it guys ourselves that manage all that stuff, and they were trying to sell me some new laptop. And I said, guys, you’re talking to the wrong guy. I’m not going I know what you’re up to. You know, in other industries, this is how business gets done, but our industry is now different, and so I don’t think it’s unreasonable that an advice firm wants to hold its suppliers to the same level of standards that they have to adhere to. So that’s probably the big one, those sort of things. And I think for me, you’re never going to get rid of those conflicts, because in many cases, like managed service providers, often those conflicts hold their business models up altogether, bit like the mortgage broker industry or, you know, like those commissions, those things are actually really important for them to be viable. But there are probably other areas where we find conflicts are not disclosed. So in the startup world in particular, we do come across increasingly where we do due diligence on startups who are looking to enter this space and sell software to advisors or industry people that they often don’t disclose their other business interests. We often find that software has been recommended by. Third parties to advisors, and it’s not been disclosed that that person’s a shareholder or an investor in that business, like just those little human type things, I suppose, Rob, which are generally pretty big red flags. Yeah, absolutely, even that managed service provider point you just made, that’s a really good piece of insight that I think many people would not be at all aware of. In fact, I kind of had my suspicions, to be honest, because we’ve got an MSP, like pretty much everyone does, and I always just get that sneaking suspicion. I’m thinking, This doesn’t sound always like it’s thinking about what we need. There is something else going on here. I won’t go into detail, but they’re a great provider. They do a great job, marvelous work. And I won’t say who they are, but they are doing a terrific job for us. But I did get the sense there was some other stuff going on there that we had to be mindful of, and you’ve just probably pointed to the issue, so it’s good to be aware of. And they’re just strategies that often the big enterprise software companies use to grow distribution. They incentivise their distributors to do things. And as I said, I have no problem with it. All I expect is disclosed. That’s it.

Rob Pyne

Yeah. Just be upfront. Yeah, yeah. The other thing that we must talk about, because AI is the topic that everyone wants to hear about. You noted when we chatted a proliferation of AI agencies building things that are often pretty much off the shelf elsewhere, but they’re building something specific, and if you like bespoke, what are the common ways you’re seeing practices getting taken for a spin, and how do they sanity check the vendor claims this is an area you’re kind of very familiar with. I saw your presentation at the Fitz conference, and this is kind of something you’ve really got your teeth into. So give everyone a bit of a sense of what they should be thinking about when you’re thinking about how they deploy AI in their business.

Peter Worn

Yeah, so there’s a lot in there, so the first part of the question really was around agencies. So I’m not talking about AI app developers. So your file note apps, those kind of people. They’re software developers. In my opinion, we’re here talking about businesses that effectively come to you and they say, Hey, we can solve a really bespoke business problem that you’ve got using AI, and we’re going to build some technology for you to do that. That’s kind of what they pitch. In some cases, there may be validity to what they’re saying, and that’s fine, but in a lot of cases, what we actually find is all they are really doing is just configuring some low code third party apps and putting a bit of a sticker on it and selling it to you and saying, Here’s your beautiful custom AI product. The realm that we are seeing the most proliferation of these approaches are is in actually a marketing so claiming that they can do automate lead generation, website scraping tools, you name it, that sort of thing. And I suppose it makes sense, because they are the areas with AI in particular where it’s not really industry specific, you know, to do those things, you don’t need knowledge of how to do an SOA, if you’re an AI provider, for example. So they tend to sit more in that realm of marketing, productivity, type tools, I would say. And what I have found is we’ve seen a number of businesses that have gone down those paths, in many cases, signed up to 10, $15,000 a month type subscription fees. And really, all they’re buying for a third party is a bit of software that might cost five, 600 bucks a month, and it’s been margined up heavily by a “configurer”. So we have come across those instances. We’ve also come across instances of agencies who have built custom software, because that’s how they get paid, is building custom software where something off the shelf would have easily done the job, or they’ve built custom software prematurely. So we often say AI is a wave, and it is a big, long wave. And so a lot of features that, I mean, people were buying apps for chat, GBT, not so long ago, to upload PDFs and things now that stuff does it out of the box. So we’re big on saying don’t go prematurely on some of these easier, because that app you’re spending money on will probably just be standard in six months time. And so that’s probably the area we just really caution our firms on, and not because we don’t want them to do things, but it’s just that, ultimately, all of us are small business owners, and you just don’t have the capital to be throwing away money on things that are really not going to work from day one. So that’s probably why, you know, if you’re an S p5 100 company, then you can afford to lose a few million bucks on something that never sees the light of day.

Rob Pyne

Yeah. So the word of advice there is, don’t fall victim to FOMO. Just cool down a bit. Just make sure that you’re making careful decisions. What’s your approach for cutting through the hype and helping people stay focused on what matters? Clearly, your firm does this, that people can come to you and you can kind of help them navigate these questions. Do you have any advice for anyone, just more general in nature, that how would they sanity check what’s being offered to them. How do they try to cut through that hype and stay focused on what really matters?

Peter Worn

Yeah, so I think always be really clear on what’s the likely return on investment for what’s been proposed. And so that’s often the golden rule. And even in any business, I wouldn’t say cost is the big constraint. It’s often time. And so my business partner, Aaron’s got a great saying when a client’s wasting a lot of time debating as to what we should do and all the different initiatives, he’ll often say, Guys, you get to choose one what’s it going to be this year? We get to pick one thing. And that often sharpens your focus a lot. And you may find out that that marketing. Thing you thought would be really cool, from an AI point of view, is a lot less important, perhaps, than streamlining our review process to do something boring like that, or, you know, cleaning up our client data so we’re ready for AI next year, all those sort of pieces. So I find that that’s probably the foundational piece when it comes to where do we make AI investments, and how do we sort of do that? I think the golden rule for us is always make those AI decisions with the greatest proximity to your data. So we believe that in most of the enterprise systems that devices use, whether it’s Microsoft or Salesforce or in those global CRMs, there are already AI features in those platforms you’re probably not using today. So we’re really big on Hey, well, let’s just squeeze the lemon there for things that we’re probably paying for and we’re not utilising fully and almost earn the right if we have proven beyond reasonable doubt that those solutions can’t do that job, then we’ll go and look for something else. So we still see a lot of businesses have never even touched co pilot agents don’t know how they work. And again, things that you can do for free run experiments you can get people are asking to help you get there faster, and that’s fine, but that’s a time cost. It’s not a software cost. It’s not adding a new thing to the tech stack, which may or may not be there in three months time. It’s actually just getting to learn and use the systems you already know really, really well. And I just think they are good investments of time and money, because these are things you’re going to be using for the next decade. I’d suggest,

Rob Pyne

Yeah, that’s great. That framework, that kind of almost mental model, to say, if you get to choose one thing, what’s the ROI thing that they said right at the start there. I think that’s a great framing to think about things, and often use that internally when we talk about things, we’re looking at saying, if we could do just one thing, what would be the single greatest thing we could do that would move the needle the most, and it does help narrow the focus on what’s the best ROI, and I love that, so I really think that’s a great takeaway. And that point you just made again. Then about squeeze the lemon you’ve got, because actually a lot of what’s already there that people aren’t really utilising, and that’s true of almost every technology that people have in this in their business, they’re not maximising what they already have, and they’re looking for something else. And you’ve got this great line about tech stack versus tech piles. What are the most common duplications you’re seeing people have gone off and tried to solve another problem that probably could have been solved with what they already had. We’ve got Teams and Zoom people using for virtual calls like this one, people are using Trello and Planner. You know, Microsoft have got Planner and Trello is very commonly used. And so how do you unwind people in that tech pile space, when they’ve kind of gone bolting all these things on, where that possibly could have been a bit more streamlined.

Peter Worn

Yeah, I should say, was my colleague Danni that came up with tech pile, I think in a in a moment of frustration A while back, it was just caught on.

Rob Pyne

Is there a tech pile emoji? I know there’s a pile emoji.

Peter Worn

She might use the poo emoji. So what’s a pile? A pile is just a bunch of stuff that’s put together with a logical my kid’s room, right? It would be a pile. And so I think a pile happens. Generally. A check pile happens because either people are just left to their own devices. And what I mean devices, I mean, did you know they’ve got to find a way to solve a problem? I think covid played a role in this in this in the eastern states, particularly where everyone had to rush home, and they just, I don’t know, they had more time maybe, to just sort of explore different apps and things that they could use to solve problems. And when we meet a new client, I love to walk into their office, and not just the front nice bit. I want to see the whole office. And I’ll go around. I’ll just take little mental screenshots of what people’s are on people’s screens. It just tells me what people are using. And it’s just amazing, because if you were to see that and look carefully, and you saw one day you walk past and someone had Trello open, and so why isn’t that? Hang on. How did that happen? But if they’re at home, you don’t see that. So that’s probably those things, but you’re quite right. The tech duplication is definitely, probably more in the realm of the productivity apps that people use. So they are definitely in the realm of task management, workflow and communication. There may be reasons where businesses have maybe merged, and we haven’t had the courage yet to get one team off another, and that’s a lot of the work we do. Rob It’s a bit like marriage counseling or something like that, where you got to get two businesses together and agree on one, and we’re brought in to be the counselor, to work out the plan. And that happens a lot post merger, I would say where we go, oh, what’s happening with the tech? So those things are really obvious ones for us, and the reason why we try to get rid of that duplication is it’s not even a cost thing, because often these tools aren’t super expensive. It’s a complexity change management thing for us is secure from a data point of view. So they’re all the reasons we often go, Hey, Trello versus planet. It doesn’t really matter which one you’re on, but we’ve got to have good reasons why we went with one over the other is probably the main one, certainly not cost. But equally, we have found instances, in many cases, we’ve almost paid for some of our justified our consulting fees by people having excess licenses on systems they’ve never looked at before. We had one very, very, very large client. We should have charged them an ROI fee. We basically covered 2x our cost, because this was a very large company, but their actual managed service provider was charging them almost 300,000 a year, more than they were supposed to be, and no one picked it up. It’s the old story. You know, businesses tend to just accept the reality as it is each year and just say, Oh, well, that was the fee. Last year, let’s just keep paying the same next year, and they don’t look at these things. We also find Rob very few businesses can produce an itemised data set of all of the software they use, the licenses they have, who are their licenses assigned to, and what’s the billing cycle for those licenses. That is a really important piece to do a to track the replication assistance. But also SaaS companies, as you’ve probably worked out, they’re pretty clever with how they do their renewals and things like that, and often these things just tick over annually before you have a chance to even do that as well. So we don’t just want to see a line item on Xero. We want to see an itemised list of everything that’s been used, and also the usage

Rob Pyne

Good, avid reader of business books and management books, when we were chatting there at the conference, and we were talking about different books, and I saw you putting your hand up for things that I’ve read that you’ve read. So we kind of are on the same wavelength about things that would kind of interest us about productivity and how to improve business in general. I mentioned the Clayton Christensen book, Innovator’s Dilemma, and he talks about this jobs to be done concept, which I think many people have heard of. How do you map the core jobs in an advice practice, you know, you’ve got document storage, you’ve got plan production. There’s a whole host of different functions, if you like, that have to be met by some form of technology, hopefully supporting it. How do you stop people just going for the shiny object, you know, going for that shiny tool that looks great, that doesn’t really solve the real problem? And go back to that. What are we trying to solve for here? What are the core jobs, and how do we actually make that the most streamlined and efficient that we can tell us about? How you go through that with the practice?

Peter Worn

Yeah, so you’re quite right. The jobs to be done. Framework has been with us from day one at Finura. It’s something we certainly anchored ourselves to and the main reason was that we sort of identified that despite the fact that every advice business has different value propositions and different ways of doing things, that fundamentally, we all kind of do the same things only because we’re highly regulated. So, you know, there’s often not a choice. So by definition, those jobs to be done are quite consistent across the business. It’s just that we’ve literally seen 1000s of different iterations of how those jobs are done and those iterations are not often deliberate decisions. They’re just legacy. They’re just people with over time have all had their little hands on the process and found a way to do things. So our role in that is to really boil those jobs to be done down to their essence. What are those core things? Identify, what is the process and who should be doing those jobs? And if it’s not a who, it’s what, what system should do it and make our decisions that way backwards, rather than people coming to us go, oh, is it dynamics or it’s a sales source? What do we do? That’s not the right question, in our opinion. And there’s also another set of jobs to be done that often doesn’t get considered, and that’s the client’s job to be done. So what are the jobs to be done for the client? So that’s jobs that they need to do as clients. They’re jobs that we need the client to do for us, like signing things and sending us things. And look at all of those things in their totality, because that way we can often make some better decisions about well, rather than replace a bit of software, maybe we can just kill a process altogether, because we just don’t need it. It’s just of no value anymore. We don’t even know why we do it. One of the things I do, I’m on a few boards, and I always say to the CEOs, look, how much time do you spend putting together those PowerPoints to these board meetings? And I’ll get some answers, and I go, can we kill that? I’m more than happy for you to send us the Excel spreadsheet and a nice little whiteboard with some screenshots and a bit of a commentary or a loom video. That process is not required, you know. So I think it is a business wide discipline. I don’t think you need a tech consultant necessarily for that mindset and that philosophy. I think that’s something that should be in the DNA of every business owner, that they are constantly questioning those jobs to be done in the business, and working through that all the time, saying why we do and you hear that all the time, but ask the question, why it’s really why we’re doing that job, and if we still need to do that job, why are we doing it that way?

Rob Pyne

Yeah, it’s a great framework that jobs to be done thing, I think, because when you think about it, and as you say, you’ve brought that approach to everything you do in the business consulting world, in technology, to be able to look at those component parts of the advice process, because we are a regulated industry, therefore everyone’s doing essentially the same things. There is plan production, there is document stories, there is document stories, there is product comparisons, there is cash flow modeling. All these component parts can be isolated to say, Okay, what is the right method to get those jobs done? As you say, but you also make a really good point there, Peter, which is about the clients jobs to be done too, because there’s document signing and I’ll just reflect on the fact you said, when businesses merge, a business merged with us a few years ago. Now, when they had DocuSign, was their primary digital signing tool, and we had another version. We’re using Adobe. And for a good while, I reckon at least a year or more, we were using two versions, because there’s habits that have been formed, and it took a little while to, kind of like, navigate which of those we’re going to work with moving forward. And I don’t think either of them is probably the best solution now, even so, you know, it’s always challenging that question as to, what are we doing and why we just do it that way. So that’s a really good framework. And something else you spoke about when we chatted last week, you talked about this first fork in the road that businesses should consider when they’re thinking about whether they stay with the mainstay industry advice platform, keep it tight. Stick with one where they go bigger and go with a Salesforce or a Microsoft Dynamics CRM. There’s a few in the market now, on both sides. How do you decide which side of the fork a firm is on, whether they stay tight mainstay platform, versus starting to branch off into maybe another, more CRM centric business model, if you like, for technology

Peter Worn

It is a critical question and so one of the things we really try to do up front, before we start work with any businesses, get to know the owners quite well. And you know, we’re not business coaches, but we do need to know where the business is going strategically, because tech should be in service of that, not an inhibitor. And so if a business owner looks me in the eye and says, Yeah, look, it’s probably unlikely someone’s going to succeed me, I’ll probably sell this business the next five to six years. That’s going to inform heavily some of the tech decisions we make for that business, which maybe aren’t optimal for the next you know, day to day, like there’s probably always a better way and those things, but I see it as our job to make that business sale ready, potentially, I would hate for something that we were to recommend that business to do to make that sale process more challenging, or impact evaluation of those things. And you’re an acquirer of businesses, rob you surely must look, when you’re doing your due diligence, look at a business and work out this is going to be hard, because they just using all this weird, wonderful stuff that I’ve never heard of. How are we going to migrate them to our operating system?

Rob Pyne

Yeah, if anything, it’s actually almost the benefit of there being a really dominant platform in the technology space in Australia. I was talking to another guest on the podcast that’s coming up in a week or so now about the same question, and he’s looking at the strengths and weaknesses of the technology industry in the Australian market. Australian market. And he said perhaps the strength because he was struggling to find one. Because, you know, you get people going off to the US and seeing all weird, wonderful tech ideas trying to come back to the Australian market, thinking there’s lots of things can be done. But he said perhaps the one strength is that there is at least a pretty uniform approach to how people are operating tech so when you are integrating firms, unless they’ve really gone off the reservation, there is usually a consistent approach to how technology is being run. So that’s an interesting observation that you know, we’ve got to try and find ways to bring firms together, but navigate that technology question and knowing full well in advance, as you say, what the intention is for the business, because that obviously is a big bearing on how you would advise them in terms of what they do. On the tech front, is there a threshold there as well that you think about over that fork in the road?

Peter Worn

So let’s say the business owner can’t answer that question with any conviction, then you start to look more at the size and scale of the operation. And so we still have this view that most people in any role can maybe handle two or three systems well to sort of know them really, really well. And I’m yet to meet many people that, for example, who are all over Salesforce and all over explain and are experts on both. And we know Pat quite well, Collins SBA, and you know, he’s probably learning new things about Salesforce every single day, right? And he’s been in it a long time. You could say the same thing about anyone that works with Microsoft Dynamics or HubSpot or anything. So I feel that, traditionally, smaller businesses probably do struggle to use some of those tools. Now there is some interesting work going on with a few providers to sort of somewhat dumb down some of those capabilities to make them easier to adopt for a business. But even if you do that, you know Salesforce And Microsoft, as much as they may look superior to some of the industry specific tools, they are still very complex beasts to get your head across. And I mean, for a real user, a person that’s really going to use this thing every day. And so I would say there is a law of diminishing returns for a small business going too heavy into those enterprise CRMs, because firstly, they’ll never maximise their full potential. That’s probably the first thing. So they may just be overpaying for something they don’t need. Don’t need. I think, more importantly, I just feel that it will just create an added level of complexity that will never get the return on investment they’re looking for. These tools have been built for companies with hundreds of 1000s of employees, millions of customers. You know, as much as we think we’re really special in our industry, we’re not in that realm where I do find good implementations of those CRMs is probably in two key areas. So definitely where businesses have quite sophisticated marketing lead generation strategies, where they’re quite bigger businesses, and they’ve got lead management, they’ve got sophisticated engines that running those things, and they are great because they’re really, really well classed at that, and the industry tools don’t do that well. So if you’re big on client experience and lead management, then you’re probably gonna end up there the other areas, I think, if you’re multidisciplinary, if you are accounting, lending, financial planning, it’s really hard to get those tools to talk to each other. So we almost see those tools as like the canopy over the top, and they were going to have their individual pieces. And then this is just a scale thing, I suppose, where, if it makes sense for a business of your size to have an in house person who can run those systems well and understand them, and you can afford that, then you will get benefit. A lot of firms probably buy things like Dynamics and Salesforce, and they underestimate the maintenance they don’t budget for. It doesn’t come with the support package that we would expect. And. it can be almost double what you spend on licensing just to keep these things maintained, a bit like yachts.

Rob Pyne

We’ve labeled this episode tech sanity, and that’s, I think you’ve just nailed it on that one. Just that’s a really useful way of thinking about how to actually, you know, approach the technology question, just to give people some sort of guideposts as to where they should be thinking, and perhaps just be more intentional about what your business is, where it’s at, and what it’s most going to get its use out of software. So don’t go too far too fast, because, as you say, even the software they have probably isn’t being fully utilised. So it’s pretty good guidance, right there. So let’s go back and talk about AI again for a second. You were seeing a lot of advice firms. You’re meeting with a lot of firms and seeing what they’re doing beyond basic file notes and doing the file noting, what are you seeing is getting real traction out there in the market right now.

Peter Worn

So in terms of advice, businesses, definitely on the marketing content generation side, I’m seeing a lot of advisors using AI to help avoid the blank page anxiety that we have when we’re asked to write an article or a blog or prepare for a podcast, dare I say yep, and so I think it’s wonderful for that. And so I’m loving seeing more and more content on LinkedIn for advice firms. That’s great, because we’ve got to compete with the AI slope of the FinTech influences, right? So the more we do that’s actually credible content, let’s keep going with that. So that’s been excellent, definitely seeing firms using for their investment research, using sort of more research agents to maybe rely a little less on what the fund managers are providing us, and use those as inputs, but actually do some of our own market analysis and come up with some own charts of our own that we want to tell a story. And I remember even back when I was in advice businesses, my dad was an advisor too, and I remember he always had two charts in his office. He had the big van. He had the big Vanguard one, everyone that was awesome. And think perpetual had a really good one as well. But you could sort of build those now yourself and do ones that are specific for your business and your brand and identity. So I’m loving just seeing firms trying those ideas. And the other area that I’ve, you know, to be positive about things. I’m loving seeing firms who are using, you know, agents and tools to help communicate with clients more effectively. So we have a habit of putting jargon in our industry in our communications with clients. And one of their private wealth firms, we look after, they have a lot of very wealthy clients in the many, many 10s or hundreds of millions of dollars. And they reminded me the other day that a lot of our clients lot of our clients were just small business owners that sold their panel beating shop to a roller for $100 million they’re not sophisticated people. They don’t want to read about sharp ratios and all these other bits and pieces. So they are using AI to help communicate with those people more effectively. So I think they’re great examples in terms of advice specific. I still think we have a long way to go before we’re ready for full SOA type things. And I would only say that because the regulatory risk, the risk of hallucinations, is there, and I would say the risk reward ratio is probably not optimal for that right now, I just think I read this morning that a king’s counsel and a solicitor have been sent to the federal courts, sent them to the Law Society for a slap on the wrist, for AI hallucinations in a federal court submission here in Australia, that’s starting to happen. I fear we’re going to have some of that next year and advice in Australia, unintended consequences, and now look, to be fair, those mistakes were made by paralegals, by younger people, but that’s what’s going to happen. So we are sort of encouraging businesses to sort of keep that maybe out of the stuff that’s going to probably get you in trouble if it goes wrong, only because there’s so many other areas that you can actually get value from that aren’t going to cause you problems. The big one that I’m really hoping to see more of, and I think the enterprise CRMs will lead the way here, is on data management. So what I mean by that is that a lot of the more contemporary CRM tools, and now have AI capability that’ll sort of make it easier to ingest data, update client information, just be better at that, and structure data better in a lot of work we do, Rob is just cleaning up crap data for businesses, and so AI is pretty good at that. So I know some people are doing some good stuff with Dynamics and sales source to sort of update client data more effectively and have less humans doing that part of the role. So honestly, if business doesn’t solve that, we are so far ahead of the game compared to where we were three years ago just on that alone.

Rob Pyne

Yeah, it’s great. When you presented at the Fitz conference, you showed us some workflows that you’ve created using Copilot, which is now, you know, there and available. And in fact, even at the FAAA Congress a couple of weeks back, when someone was on stage asked who was using AI, all the hands, you know, pretty much went up. And what were you using most? Number of hands was for Copilot. So people are actually adopting Copilot now that it has really come along in leaps and bounds. Because I think as soon as it was launched, it was pretty underwhelming at the time versus the retail competitor ChatGPT, even though they were using the same LLM, supposedly. But Copilot has come a long way since then, and you showed us some pretty cool workflows you’ve helped build. Can you just share two or three of your favorite workflows that you’re working really well in practices you’ve helped create for businesses to get them a little more efficient on the way they process their client

Peter Worn

files? Yeah. So if we have built some effectively agents on Copilot, which basically most people know what an agent really is, it’s just an advanced prompt with a bit of workflow that’s got a very specific job to do. So one of the challenges with using the generic chat bot type things to do jobs like even just the generic Copilot interface is that it’s going to be different every time. So what you want to do is build some repeatability. So what we do is we look to build some agents which are specific for tasks, and you can share them across the business, and everyone uses the same thing. So we’ve definitely used them for creation of file notes. So we have had quite a few businesses who have maybe tried some of the off the shelf file noting tools that are out there. But those costs can add up quite quickly for some businesses, or they just don’t want to add another thing to the tech stack, so they sort of say, Can I do it in Copilot and then, and certainly it does cost money to develop and deploy these things, but for larger businesses, it makes sense to do this in house. So that’s definitely of value. We’ve had success building things like implementation checklists of reports, so the ability to consume a statement of advice and give a really structured implementation checklist to your back office team according to a workflow, and then even be able to create some workflow off the back of that through the power platform, creating tasks and things inside of your Microsoft environment has been really, really successfully adopted as well. And the other big one is standardisation of paraplanning requests. So larger businesses often struggle with this element. And so what we allow is the advisors. We’ve sort of created agents which will ingest file notes, technical strategy, content and some modeling, and will allow the advisor to almost just verbally dictate in what they want to happen with the client. And there’s advisors of all different ages and skills, and so even if they provide quite unstructured guidance, it will then put that into a nice, structured file note, paraplanning request so a third party paraplanner can then actually, go ahead and do the plan with some level of confidence. So for me, they are really good, useful things. And why are we doing sort of specialised configuration? It’s just that every practice has its own way of working. And so there are some cases where we can just use AI because it is just simpler to use AI than try to get the practice to change everything on that. And what we’re finding with those businesses, once they adopt those things and get it going, and I think it takes a few months to get those things fully adopted, then they start saying, oh, what else can we do with that? Or we come back and talk to a few months later, and they’ve built some other things they’re trialing, and you go, it’s kind of cool. It’s like learning to ride a bike. You just need mom and dad to just hold the handlebars for a little while at the start, and then eventually they’re flying down the hill.

Rob Pyne

I love that last one. In fact, all those three make so much sense, but especially that last one you just mentioned around the paraplanning request, and having an advisor essentially dictate in their thoughts as to what they want to have happen. And they ingest the work papers and actually puts together a pretty neat paraplanning request, because there is quite a bit of time and effort that goes into that work for an advisor or an associate to an advisor, preparing that for a paraplanner to write. So let’s talk about document management. It’s a big one document management. You’ve mentioned SharePoint more than once in this call. How should firms think about this? Knowing it’s already included in the office 365, suite SharePoint. There are also other enterprise grade business solutions like we’re using, we’ve used Box now for since 2017 so eight years, and it’s a highly sophisticated enterprise grade document management system. It’s got all the things we would want. And when we first looked at SharePoint in 2017 it wasn’t where it is today. I haven’t really spent the time going back, because I haven’t got the technology skill to do it anyway, but comparing SharePoint to box, for example, because Box comes at a cost, SharePoint is included. So it’s clearly a decision point for businesses to make sure they’re making the right choice around the document management. So how do you think about that with businesses that you’re consulting to around document management?

Peter Worn

The main event getting people onto SharePoint now is the way Copilot works, specifically. So most of the Copilot features will only perform at their best if your data is inside of SharePoint so simple as that. So using the more advanced version of the Copilot now, it can basically comb through all of your SharePoint information to get contexts on the job that you’re trying to do. So that, in itself, has probably been a great push to get some firms who, frankly, we still have found people using data on premises and all sorts of when one of things happening. So don’t beat yourself up about box and people still using Dropbox, and please don’t use data that sources which aren’t domiciled in Australia. There’s a whole bunch of things like that. So it’s given people that nice little push along to start using SharePoint. From that point of view, I would also say too, depending on how it’s configured, that the collaboration features inside of Microsoft are important. So obviously, by using SharePoint, it’s going to make co authoring of documents and all those things work a lot more effectively. On that side, the main tricks and things to be careful of is make sure you structure your SharePoint data correctly. So for example, at the neuro we have certain clients where confidentiality is super important to them beyond anything else. So we’ll have separate SharePoint structures to them, just to make sure our Copilot doesn’t access that. We advise businesses, I suppose, to have certain information like salaries and sensitive employee data in a separate SharePoint folder structure. So Copilot is configured to not do that so, and even the fact you can do that with the Microsoft suite just gives you a lot of power and flexibility on that side. The other big one is backup and recovery. So I’ve only had one incidents where this happened, but I completely butchered a report with a client. We had all sorts of stuff happen, and I didn’t realise that Aaron just said, Oh no, I can pretty much go back any second of the day and recreate what you did, because we’re way ahead of SharePoint built so that sort of in built resilience to the data is pretty incredible when you see it happen and it validates your decision. You went that way. Look, I think for you, or anyone else who’s using Box, or any sort of really superior tools themselves, I mean, Box works particularly well with Salesforce, right? So that’s I see a lot of that, yeah. And so maybe for you, the benefits of that actually outweigh any disadvantages of not being on SharePoint, you know. So it’s like everything it’s in your case by case, nothing’s going to be perfect. But certainly if you don’t fit in that category, if you’re just pretty much using Microsoft and XPlan or Intelliflo or something, then you should be on SharePoint. No questions asked.

Rob Pyne

Yeah, there you go. Everyone. Bit of free advice and good advice at that. And you’re right. Box does integrate extremely well with Salesforce, which is why we went there and which is why we went there in the first place. And speaking of all things, CRM, when we chatted, you talked about this kind of bit of the Lego reality of going for enterprise CRM, and you said it there a few minutes back now as well, just about be prepared for what you’re getting yourself in for, because it’s implementation, configuration, ongoing maintenance. How should owners who are thinking about that budget so they don’t get surprised about what they’re up for when they decide to get in the path of using a CRM. And it could be Fin365, because obviously they’re in the market with Dynamics. It could be what we’re doing, we’re with Practifi at the moment, and looking at our alternatives as well. So yeah, just so that people aren’t surprised when they decide to go away from XPlan as the be all, end all. What should they prepare themselves for?

Peter Worn

Yeah, so I think the first thing is that let’s just use that scenario that I want to lead XPlan, and I want to go to Microsoft Dynamics, whether it’s Fin365 or something else. The reality is that you will not have all the same features and capability that you have with XPlan, so you will still need pieces of the puzzle to produce the advice. So whether it’s Salesforce or Dynamics, they were never built to be advice tools. And we have absolutely seen businesses go off the rails and things fall over. Who have tried to almost rebuild XPlan inside of Salesforce, all of those things, it becomes really complicated. So we’re actually quite big on potentially saying, Look, I want to move into that from an enterprise point of view, but I’m probably going to keep some industry specific. Industry specific tools like an XPlan or advisor logic or something to do the modeling and the research and the advice creation, because the pain of trying to rebuild that inside of XPlan just doesn’t make sense for us, and just try to get those two to talk to each other. So that’s probably the first thing, just from a mental model point of view, around that when it comes to if I’ve made my decision that I really want to go with an enterprise CRM, then obviously there’s two ways you can do it. You can go buy your own directly and just configure it. We do work with larger companies, some ASICs listed ones that have gone down that path. You are looking at three, $400,000 Directly with Salesforce that they need to one case we saw where there was a three year contract signed annual payments in advance, and the business was still 19 months in, still not using it. So they were still paying for like, just completely inexperienced on that side, and Salesforce didn’t care. And they said, if you don’t pay your bill, we’ll sue. So I would say some of the advantages of those third party relationships is if they’re going to manage the Salesforce contract for you? Yeah, I think that’s a win, personally.

Rob Pyne

That’s a great piece of advice, too. I think, as you say, going direct, you are dealing with a very big organisation that isn’t really thinking about the end user experience. Always, it’s out of the box, and we’ll try and sell you what we can get you to agree to. So, yeah, cautionary tale for everyone who’s thinking about going down that space, you know, you talked about there just thinking about getting that last 25% you know, people get most of what they want pre configured, but they just can’t get their last bit. You talked about this ROI quadrant, sort of set up the cost versus impact quadrants. You know, what’s high cost, low impact. What is low cost? High impact? Obviously, that’s the ideal scenario. Can you talk us through the decision making framework that you bring to the table there, and making sure people are making the right decisions around the ROI they might get from the investment they make?

Peter Worn

Yeah. So, I mean, it’s a pretty foundational consulting concept, I suppose, where you work with a client to decide, here’s all the things we’d like to do, here’s all the things we need to do, here’s what the costs will be, here’s what the benefits will be of doing those things. And we did that process, firstly, because a lot of firms don’t have the necessary experience to understand firstly, what the costs are, it also then allows us and the firm to stress test the benefits. So to really say, are we capturing those benefits? You know, there was one example where a CEO rightly said, Well, that’s great. It saves us 1000 hours. What are we doing those 1000 hours? And I’m like, well, that’s up to you. I said, I can create the time, but I know humans. I am one, and if you free up an hour of my day, I’ll fill it with some crap, that’s for sure. So I sort of feel that even if those benefits are not hard dollars, and there’s two types, there’s hard savings. There’s strict cost savings. You can just capture it done. The softer side of it is the hours and capacity side. And I think all we really want to do is to call those out to the businesses, to say, this is actually what you should be tracking, and just saying, Well, if we’re not doing that anymore, what have we replaced that? Times with my dad, long time ago, taught me about Parkinson’s Law. You know, this sort of work will always expand to occupy the time allotted for it. He was a small business owner all his life, and used to drive him nuts. And I think it’s true, it’s human nature. We give someone a week to do a job, it’ll take a week. And so I do worry a little bit that we don’t do a good job capturing those things. And one of the things we like to do is we do have ongoing relations both our clients, so we’ll often track that stuff and sort of say, well, what has happened to that time? And this is probably the big unknown with AI, right? You know all these advisors that are saying they’re saving hours a week doing file notes, are they seeing more clients? Are they doing more meetings? And I think, as a business owner, I would put it to you that let’s just come up with one metric that we want to track on the other side that proves whether we’re doing a better job, and whether that’s our revenue or our I like the idea of average meetings per week per client, per advisor, because I just think advisors and a lot of businesses don’t do enough meetings with clients. Yeah, if we increase the number of meetings an advisor does per week with client by three, for example, that’s 120 extra meetings a week. Now I just think as an industry, that’s a great way to improve our capacity. So maybe it’s as simple as that,

Rob Pyne

That’s gold. I agree with you. It’s a great metric to track, isn’t it, meetings per week, average meetings per week per advisor. Because I was actually just reminded, as you were saying, that of a research report that Michael Kitces has put out talking about the major drivers of advisor productivity and client facing time was one of the top four. And just putting people in front of their clients more often, giving them support. To do that is a critical lever. So getting people in front of their clients more often meeting times is a good one. Now, I mean I could talk to you all day, Peter, I’m going to ask you two more questions, because I got to respect your time here, because I love this conversation. When I first put a question set together, it was a long, long list. I thought we here with three hours with Peter, but I’ll ask you two more, if that’s okay. Sure. The first one is about M&A. People are out there looking at acquiring firms. But also there’s firms, as you mentioned earlier, they’re thinking about, well, I don’t have a solution here, internal succession. I don’t have the next generation leader coming through. I am going to be looking to at some point sell. They might be in their 50s. They might be a couple of years away. Thinking about, how do I prepare my business as best it can be to sell to someone? How should they think about setting standards around technology, knowing they’re going to sell at some point to make themselves more attractive and perhaps more acquirable through the tech choices they’ve made. Yeah.

Peter Worn

So the it’s going to be an unpopular opinion, Rob, but it’s probably going to be orientate your technology that you sit on towards the most commonly used ones. Yes. So for a lot of businesses, that may be XPlan, and only because that’s their platform, they’ve got a lot of experience Honestly doing XPlan migrations every day, and I just think from an integration point of view, it will tick a lot of boxes for an acquirer to go. Okay, I’m really comfortable with that, also, from a data security and all those other things point of view, if you are using something weird and wonderful no one’s ever heard of. So right now, we’ve got a live engagement with a couple of clients who are acquiring a business at the moment that has proprietary technology. So they haven’t spent a lot of money with us to do due diligence, because rightfully, their board has said we don’t want to inherit a problem that we’re on the hook for from a tech point of view. So there’s all those little things that you know, you go, gee, was it really worth building that custom CRM, because now you’ve got to get people like us coming in, poking around, and it may not end well. So I just think there’s a lot to be gained by that. And then obviously, I think the other important elements, too are just getting their house in order with how the Microsoft environment is locked down and use cybersecurity processes and standards as well, so cybersecurity issues can bubble away in the background before they come to light. And so if I was acquiring businesses right now, I’d want to see how long have they been adhering to the essential eight for what’s their track record on this. And even as a business, I would be documenting those things at a board level, having a almost a paper trail of this is what we’ve been doing on cyber for the last years. And I know it’s not going to get you a better price necessarily, for your business, but Bloody hell, it takes some risk off the table, doesn’t it? Yeah, a bit like other things. One of my teachers always said you got to polish your shoes. Pete, because generally, if people will assume, if you’ve got if your shoes are polished, there’s a lot of other stuff in order. Yeah, I think the cyber is a good one for that, that if you can actually show the cyber stuff, you’re going to be pretty confident as an acquirer to go, gee, well, I reckon the HR stuff be pretty good. Like, you know what? I mean, it’s that sort of thing. So I just think there’s a lot of benefit there.

Rob Pyne

I totally agree. In fact, I was listening to a podcast this morning on my morning run, which is why my face is all red. I was listening to Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy, and he was interviewed by Shane Parish, who was the knowledge project podcast, a brilliant podcast, yeah, that’s on my wait list to listen to that one. Yeah, today, it’s a cracking episode. I’ll give you one little tip that he shared in that podcast. He said, If you turn up to buy a car from a private seller and you knock on the door to the seller, and you’ve had a look at the car, it looks good, you know, looks at bodywork, everything. And knock on the door and a female vicar answers the door, you’re probably going to be prepared to pay the price that she’s asking or maybe even a touch more. If you knock on the door and someone opens it in his underpants, you’re probably not going to pay the same dollar. So it’s just that human judgment, that heuristic, I suppose it is. And you said, like Peter, shine your shoes, because it’s just a heuristic people use to determine, are they well organised? Is it something of value that I can rely upon? I like the heuristic. And we all, we all do it. We all make judgment calls about what we because we’re trying to ascertain, is this a real thing, and cyber security would be a perfect way of indicating, is this firm in good order? Because they’ve been following essential eight and they’ve got that nailed down. It’s a pretty good indicator. I would think that they are well in order, in the way they run their business. So yeah, it’s a good one to think about for people. And no doubt you’re doing these DD exercises for firms where they’re looking to make acquisitions. So one more question for you, the last one, when is tech the wrong lever? What are the signs that perhaps the business has got a leadership or a business model issue, that they think technology is a problem. And when do you refer to a practice coach instead of a tech project exercise?

Peter Worn

It happens more than you think, and that’s probably just been a bit of accumulated wisdom on our part to sort of identify those things. And that’s sort of why we’ve had to really consciously hire quite mature experience people in our business who can pick up on those things, because it’s got instinct. The red flags are typically that they’ve actually tried some other things in the past from a tech perspective, and it hasn’t worked. And I will often ask the question, have you worked with other tech consultants before, or have you done other tech projects? Can Tell me about how they went, and just a very general question, and that answer will usually tell me everything I need to know and not It’s not to be critical of the business. It’s just to say, hey, look, I’ve seen lots of businesses work with that vendor or that company and had great outcomes. And you will often hear stories, well, I went to these guys and we tried these guys didn’t work, and you sort of go, okay, sooner or later, the mirror has to come into the equation. Why those things aren’t working? Yeah, and they are very rarely purely tech issues. They are always people issues. And I know that our business, if we don’t have the people thing, right, we’ll never be successful. So that is a question that’s challenging one, because sometimes you have to put your big boy pants on and talk to the business owner. But I do try to talk to them as a fellow business owner and go, mate, I’m just picking up on some stuff and I think, to be fair, of we don’t want to start a project with a client where it’s destined to fail from the start. That’s not good for us or for them. It’s not enjoyable. You know, it’s a terrible way to make money. And we don’t have to, we don’t have to run a business in the same way. There’s probably certain clients that come to you rob that you just know you can’t help, right? So, but what I would say is, we have a wonderful network of consultants and people out there in the industry that I think nail this stuff, that we gladly refer to. And it goes both ways. There’s plenty of consultants that go, Hey, I saw this tech issue, so I’m having dinner, actually in Melbourne tonight with the group, and tonight we catch up quite a bit. We have a little private WhatsApp going, and there’s absolutely a lot of collective knowledge in there. The thing that unites us is we actually really care about these businesses, but we have all. Learned that we can’t be successful unless the conditions are right. And so I had a prospect, actually the other day, who almost was apologising to us because they decided to pause a project till June next year, but they had some critical people issues blow up. But I was so pleased to hear they’d brought in a consultant who I know really well, who’s good at managing those situations, is going to help him through it. And I said, mate, don’t apologise. You’ve actually just gone straight to the top of the list of a client I want to work with, because you’ve shown the self awareness to know this is going to work. So we’re all business owners in the day, and I’d like to think that if someone felt that way about working with my business, I’d rather them tell me,

Rob Pyne

yeah, absolutely. As I said before, there is lots we could talk about today, more than we’ve covered, but in the interests of your time, Peter, I just want to say it’s an absolute delight talking to you. You are a very clear thinker and communicator on this issue, and I think people who are wanting to kind of navigate this big question around technology and AI and what systems should we use, and should we go? CRM, this is an absolute golden episode, so I really appreciate taking the time to join me today on The Trusted Adviser podcast.

Peter Worn

Thanks Rob, thanks for putting tech on the agenda. Always appreciated, and would love to come back somewhere in the future.

Rob Pyne

Thanks again. Peter, much appreciated. 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 favorite 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.