In this special 50th episode of the Trusted Adviser Podcast, Pat Gardner turns the tables on Rob Pyne, stepping into the host’s chair to explore the story behind HPH Solutions and what it really takes to build, grow and sustain a successful financial planning business.

Rob takes Pat back to the early days of HPH, from his first roles at Asgard and National Australia Bank through to establishing the financial planning business that would become HPH Solutions. He reflects on the lessons of the Global Financial Crisis, the decision to become self-licensed, and why HPH moved towards a more diversified investment philosophy with Dimensional.

The conversation then turns to the decisions that helped shape HPH’s growth: moving Rob into the Managing Director role, building a business-first technology and analytics environment, moving to Practifi, divesting the insurance business through the HPH Life joint venture with MBS Insurance, and introducing the HPH Team Equity Trust to create an ownership pathway for the next generation.

Rob also shares the thinking behind HPH’s distinctive approach to leadership, transparency and team development. From the weekly Best Practice Forum to open access to business information, the firm’s philosophy is built around giving people the context, autonomy and opportunity to make the business better.

A major focus of the conversation is HPH’s client experience. Rob explains why the firm looks beyond traditional financial goals, how its Progress Update Report measures both financial and qualitative progress, and why tools such as the Wheel of Life, Life Transitions Survey and historical household balance sheet are designed to help advisers have better conversations with clients.

Looking ahead, Rob discusses HPH’s plans to partner with other advice businesses through a partner equity model, sharing the firm’s playbook around people, pricing, performance, client engagement, employee ownership and business intelligence. He also talks about HPH’s move from Practifi to Rubica and the opportunities that modern technology is creating for advice businesses.

And, appropriately for the 50th episode, Rob reflects on why he started the Trusted Adviser Podcast in the first place: curiosity, learning from others and sharing those lessons with the broader advice community.

LISTEN

SHOW NOTES

Topics Discussed

• Rob Pyne’s journey into financial planning and the early years of HPH Solutions
• Building the business through the Global Financial Crisis
• Why HPH became self-licensed in 2009
• The investment lessons HPH took from the GFC
• HPH’s long-term relationship with Dimensional
• Building a high-performing leadership team
• Recruiting and developing Nick Bordi and Zacary Leeson
• Moving Rob from adviser to Managing Director
• Why HPH moved away from Xplan as its core business system
• The role of Practifi and business intelligence in HPH’s growth
• Building strong foundations before pursuing growth
• The HPH Life joint venture with MBS Insurance
• Creating the HPH Team Equity Trust
• Using employee ownership to attract and retain talent
• Building an ownership mindset across the team
• Linking performance, remuneration and career progression
• Leadership as a behaviour rather than a title
• Creating a culture of openness and transparency
• The HPH Best Practice Forum
• Giving team members permission to challenge existing processes
• Co-creating business processes with the team
• Creating psychological safety for people to share ideas
• HPH’s holistic approach to financial planning
• Goal setting beyond purely financial outcomes
• The Progress Update Report
• Measuring qualitative wellbeing alongside financial progress
• The Wheel of Life and appreciative inquiry
• Using the Life Transitions Survey to improve client conversations
• Tracking advice history and client progress over time
• The importance of historical household balance sheets
• How HPH distinguishes useful innovation from “shiny objects”
• Keeping the client experience as the North Star
• HPH’s partner equity model for advice businesses
• Sharing the HPH playbook with other firms
• The role of technology in the next generation of advice
• HPH’s move from Practifi to Rubica
• How technology can accelerate business improvement
• The origins and evolution of the Trusted Adviser Podcast
• Lessons Rob has taken from previous podcast guests
• Why curiosity is such an important leadership skill

Episode Highlights

(Timestamps are approximate)

• [00:00] – Pat Gardner turns the tables and interviews Rob Pyne for Episode 50
• [00:55] – Rob’s journey into financial planning and the early years of HPH
• [03:20] – The GFC and the investment lessons that changed HPH’s approach
• [04:30] – Why HPH became self-licensed in 2009
• [06:50] – Recruiting Nick and Zac and building the next generation of leadership
• [09:50] – Moving Rob into the Managing Director role
• [10:30] – Why HPH moved from Xplan to Practifi
• [12:00] – Building the foundations for sustainable growth
• [13:30] – The HPH Life joint venture with MBS Insurance
• [14:30] – Creating the HPH Team Equity Trust
• [17:00] – Building an ownership mindset through transparency and data
• [20:45] – Rob’s philosophy: leadership is a behaviour, not a title
• [25:15] – How the Best Practice Forum works
• [28:00] – Turning team ideas into better business processes
• [33:45] – The Progress Update Report and measuring client wellbeing
• [37:30] – Appreciative inquiry and the Wheel of Life
• [38:30] – Using the Life Transitions Survey to improve conversations
• [40:30] – Why tracking client progress over time matters
• [44:45] – How HPH decides which trends and innovations are worth pursuing
• [48:30] – The partner equity model and HPH’s plans to help other advice firms
• [51:50] – Moving from Practifi to Rubica
• [54:20] – The possibilities created by modern technology
• [57:40] – Why Rob started the Trusted Adviser Podcast
• [59:20] – How previous podcast guests have influenced HPH
• [01:01:45] – Rob’s favourite podcasts and sources of learning
• [01:05:25] – What’s next for the Trusted Adviser Podcast
• [01:07:40] – Reflections on 50 episodes

Quotes

• “Leadership isn’t a title, it’s a behaviour.” – Rob Pyne
• “We just look at what looks logical to do for the reasons that actually is this going to serve our interests and our clients’ interests better than what we’re doing today.” – Rob Pyne
• “Focus on what makes your client experience better.” – Rob Pyne
• “The more information you can share, and that’s been very much our philosophy, one of our core values is in fact prizing openness and transparency.” – Rob Pyne
• “We want to help them achieve those ambitions in alignment with our own business ambitions.” – Rob Pyne
• “We believe in the value of advice like every advisor does because they get to experience it every day.” – Rob Pyne
• “I’m a curious person, always wanting to learn new things.” – Rob Pyne

Key Takeaways

• Build the foundations before chasing growth. HPH’s growth was underpinned by systems, processes, technology and a deliberate focus on building a better business.
• Ownership changes behaviour. HPH’s Team Equity Trust has helped create a stronger ownership mindset while providing a pathway for the next generation to participate in the firm’s future.
• Leadership is demonstrated, not appointed. HPH looks for people who are already behaving like leaders before giving them formal leadership responsibilities.
• Give people information and autonomy. HPH’s emphasis on openness and transparency allows people to make better decisions without creating unnecessary bottlenecks.
• The best ideas can come from anywhere. The Best Practice Forum gives people across the business a structured opportunity to challenge processes and contribute improvements.
• Client progress is more than investment returns. HPH’s Progress Update Report combines quantitative financial measures with qualitative measures of how clients feel about their lives and finances.
• Structure can improve the quality of client conversations. Tools such as the Life Transitions Survey help advisers uncover issues and opportunities that clients may not otherwise raise.
• Don’t follow trends for the sake of it. HPH’s approach is to assess whether an idea genuinely improves the client or team experience rather than simply following what the industry is talking about.
• Technology is an enabler, not the whole answer. Rob sees technology as a platform that allows good processes, data and ideas to be implemented faster and more effectively.
• Curiosity drives continuous improvement. The Trusted Adviser Podcast itself grew from Rob’s desire to learn from people doing interesting things and share those lessons with others.

Resources & Links

• The Trusted Adviser: https://thetrustedadviser.com.au
• HPH Solutions: https://www.hphsolutions.com.au
• MBS Insurance: https://mbsinsurance.com.au
• Rubica: https://rubica.au
• Connect with Rob Pyne on LinkedIn
• Connect with Patrick Gardner on LinkedIn
• Follow The Trusted Adviser Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

Rob Pyne  (00:03)

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 trailblasers of our profession, people who have navigated the challenges, embraced 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. 

 

Patrick Gardner  (00:34)

Welcome, trusted advisers. This is the podcast where I explore what it really takes to build, grow, and sustain a thriving financial planning business. Every fortnight, Rob Pyne sits down with business owners, experts, and industry leaders to unpack the ideas, decisions, and lessons shaping the advice businesses of today and tomorrow. But for episode fifty, we’re doing things a little bit differently, and I’m Pat Gardner. I’ve taken over in the host’s chair to turn the microphone around on Mr Pyne himself. And so, after 49 episodes spent learning from others. Rob thought it was about time we turned the tables and unpacked his own journey and the story behind building HPH solutions into the business that it is today. We go right back to Rob’s early days of advice and the beginnings of HPH, and impact some of the pivotal decisions that have shaped the business, from becoming self-licensed early on, changing its investment philosophy, to investing in tech and data well before it was fashionable, stepping away from advice to focus entirely on the business and creating the team equity trust to develop the next generation of owners and leaders. We also get into leadership, culture, client experience, the systems and disciplines behind HPH’s growth, how the business thinks about succession, and why some of its most important decisions have simply come from staying relentlessly focused on what’s best for its clients and its team. And fittingly, for episode 50, we talk about The Trusted Adviser itself. So why Rob started the podcast, what he’s learned from the first 49 conversations, and what he’s got planned for the next 50. And so, if you’re building an advice business, thinking about succession, trying to develop your next generation of leaders, or simply looking for ideas on how to build a better, more sustainable advice business, this one’s for you.  

Pat (00:01.738)

Alrighty. Welcome Rob Pyne to the Trusted Adviser Podcast. This feels illegal.

Rob (00:06.709)

Feels very different today, Pat. You you’ve grabbed host microphone today and we’re gonna talk a bit about the HPH business. This is episode fifty. So, we thought here’s a moment to probably turn the tables and be on the other side of it.

 

Pat (00:22.754)

That’s right. I’ve been I’m doing some research for this. I really appreciate this by the way. But one of your opening lines in the pod is where you explore what it really takes to build, grow and sustain a thriving financial planning business and genuinely you are the definition of that. So I’d love to just start with Rob, like the early years of HPH. I know didn’t start out like that, but can you take us all the way back to I guess how you got involved in financial planning and then starting the business

Give us, I guess, the cliff notes of the early years of the business, and we’ll go through all of those years until today.

 

Rob (00:56.671)

Yeah, sure. I’ll try and keep that brief ’cause it’ll probably bore everyone else. But I’d finished a science degree at uni and then I got a job at Asgard back in 1993. Asgard was growing like a mushroom and big employer in Perth and got a job there through a cousin of mine who worked over there. and then I got my first job as a financial planner in 1997, working at the NAB head office as an advisor. they were doing a big recruitment drive and again, picked up a good job there in the head office. And after five years there, learning and developing as an advisor, being mentored by another senior advisor in the in the business, John Zwart, who was a great help to me and a mentor. Shout out to John. He was just someone I could always turn to and ask questions. He was very technically oriented as an advisor and a great advisor. So, five years there and then left the bank, went to a business in West Perth, accounting business, wanted to set up a financial planning arm. And we were there for four years in that structure. were cross-owned, full financial planning and accounting ownership. and then the accountants went through a bit of a partnership split and we used that opportunity to split the financial planning at the same time 2006. and then two years later my business partner, the founding business partner with me, who was doing insurance advice.

wanted to split out ’cause the GFC had hit and the markets were pretty tumultuous to say the least. we lived through that and he thought, I don’t know, if we’re in this wealth game, I just want to get out and do the insurance work and he jumped ship and my brother Michael had bought in July of two thousand eight, just before Lehman Brothers clapped in September. So, you know, he is he was baptism of fire for him as an owner in a business that was going through a pretty world shaking event.

And we exited that business partner who was the insurance specialist in February two thousand nine and we kept on going from there. So it’s been a bit of a that was our first early years between sort of two the start and nine being when it was Michael and I and then we kind of built it from there.

 

Pat (03:02.125)

Totally.

 

Pat (03:06.573)

There were definitely some really early but pivotal things that you were doing all the way back then. Do you mind take us through a couple of those, or particularly around the GFC hitting how you changed your approach to investment as a business? Take us through the acronym of HPH I think as well would be a good one for listeners to learn. As well as, you know, you went self-licensed in thousand nine too, didn’t you? So that was well before it was very sort of trendy and popular.

 

Rob (03:31.646)

Yeah, well were licensed through a big dealer who had a platform and a product obviously on their suite of things that they did and we didn’t feel it was necessarily the right platform and product for our clients and as much as they couldn’t actually legally make us do that, put that five for a product together for our clients, we they certainly made it more difficult to do anything other than that. And so, we had to go through a dispensation process every sum every time we wrote a piece of advice, which is pretty painful.

So, it was the writing was on the wall. We knew their commercial imperatives, and we just didn’t think it was the right thing for our clients. So went through and got our license in August two thousand nine. But we’d made the decision earlier than that after seeing the direct share portfolios we’d been building wrapped around with managed funds, just taking risks we didn’t think worth taking. We were sort of enlightened by the GFC that perhaps, you know, buying a blue-chip portfolio of shares together with some managed funds wasn’t necessarily the right approach for our clients. We were thinking we could probably get as good a return with lower risk profile for our clients. And so went away from that and we began to explore better options for diversification. were you know we had clients who were Wesfarmers and Wesfarmers had bought our can in Canadand borrowed a ton of money. Our clients had Wesfarmers, they’d just bought Coles and borrowed a ton of money for that. I think they were at forty-five bucks a share and they raised capital at fifteen dollars twenty-five when the GFC hit and the bankers obviously said we want you to either raise more capital or sell some assets and Rio Tinto had bought Alcan in Canada, they were at I think $150 a share, and they raised capital at about twenty-nine dollars, so massive dilutionary events and were just worried about the risk were taking for our clients. So, we explored options, went ended up at a Dimensional Foundations conference in Double Bay in Sydney in October two thousand eight, right in the eye of the storm. And by March two thousand nine, which turned out to be the bottoming of the market, were investing money in a more diversified way that we felt was much more sustainable with Dimensional funds. So, we’ve been working with them since that period.

Pat (05:54.092)

That’s a well tenured partnership, 17 years, goodness me. And I imagine, yeah, that self-licensed moved as well would have given to this day as well, just an enormous amount of clarity as to just having that control over not only the business outcomes but client outcomes as well.

 

Rob (06:10.355)

Yeah, and some would s some would argue that why do you do something that really is not your core skill set? just focus on what you do best, give advice to clients and not distract yourself from the licensing obligations and I totally understand that point of view, but I also didn’t want to feel like there was something I didn’t know about the business. I wanted to know every nook and cranny of how it worked and what obligations I had, rather than just saying, that’s the licensee’s problem and they’ll figure out what I’m paying for licensing and PI and all that sort of. It didn’t really sit comfortably with me. So, that was one of the you know, compelling reasons we wanted to get our own license as well as the fact the licensee was trying to, you know, encourage us strongly to use their platform and products. Yeah.

 

Pat (06:48.333)

Awesome. And then as we sort of fast forward through, I sort of ask you about the acronym by the way, which may have been outlined on a previous pod, but as we sort of come into sort of 2015, 2017, etcetera, a couple of incredibly key and critical hires that are with you to this day, can you do you mind taking you through a little bit of how that’s transpired and just how you’ve built such a wonderful team there?

 

Rob (07:11.539)

Yeah, so we had a young lady with us at the time who was a real gun associate, going to be advisor and she was so good, she’d just come out of university a few years earlier and we said to her, who do you know that went through a uni with you that you thought was terrific? And she mentioned two guys. She said that these two guys I know, Nick and Zach and we said, if you were gonna hire one, which one would you hire? And she goes, I’ll actually say this. She said Nick and Zac will, he’ll hate that. He’ll hate hearing that. She said Nick, but she said, to be honest, you know, if you could hire both, you’d hire both. And so, we did exactly that. We hired both and what a pivotal moment that was because to you know, really high caliber people, at a values level, but also highly intelligent and super capable, young guys, really ambitious, but humble as well.

Some would argue Zach isn’t humble, but he actually is, he just pretends not to be. super you know, capable people. And they’ve just gone from strength to strength in our business. We just gave them the right environment to sort of flourish and Nick had to take off for a while and chase his now wife over over East and then circled back to Perth and we managed to coerce him back into the fold and but those two guys became part of our leadership group.

They’re not directors of our firm yet, but that will happen in due course. But they are part of our leadership team and have been for a number of years. Nick’s our CO now and Zac is our senior advisor that has the largest client group and across all the business, not just non-directors, but across the director group as well. So, he’s an outstanding advisor at every level. And so, we just had to make it attractive for the people of that caliber to stay around. So, we had to find a way to make sure they didn’t want to leave and go and do their own thing. As I say, Nick had to leave to go and chase Zoe and managed to convince her to come back west after winning her heart and which is great to see and Zac stayed, Macquarie nearly talked him out of staying. Macquarie nearly had him on the brink at one point, but he decided to stay and he looks back on that one and says, I’m glad I stayed. It’s worked out pretty well.

 

Pat (09:31.469)

And have you fast forward a couple of years just through that sort ofinancially 2015 onwards pathway, once again taking really early, non sort of not trendy at the time but really big decisions, particularly around the tech stack, what did you do around that sort of twenty sixteen, seventeen that now feels like it’s a no brainer for a lot of firms at your size?

 

Rob (09:53.758)

Yeah, I mean I came back from another conference, I’m not sure which it was, and we always come back from a conference with wonderful ideas on things to implement and we look around and think who’s gonna do it? You know, we’ve got clients to see and everyone puts clients first because there’s always a client matter to deal with and we decided that one of us should either step back from giving advice to clients and focus on the business and make some really important changes in our business to grow it, or we bring someone else in and we decided that it would be one of us and I handed my clients across to other advisors in the team, and by middle of 2017 I’d stepped into the MD role. No longer having client responsibilities and focusing purely on making the business better. And one of the first things we did was to move away from Xplan as our all-in-one solution. We just didn’t feel like it gave us visibility over our business. We knew it was built as a financial planning tool. It could do great modelling, product comparisons, risk research for our insurance work but we just didn’t feel like we could make decisions about our business. And so, the analytics piece of what we’re trying to build and we thought, we’re in business first, happens to be in the advice space, but we wanted the business tool and then we would just have a domain specific advice tool to do the advice piece, but actually focus on being a business first. And so went to Practifi back in 2017, until very recently, we’ve been working with Practifi on a Salesforce based CRM, which gave us much better insight into our business and all the metrics that help you make decisions.

 

Pat (11:23.213)

Love it. And you touched on the point there around becoming the managing director of the firm almost ten years ago now, and it’s really worth shouting out what your revenue was then versus what it is now. So I believe you told me Rob, $2.5 million now, almost $13.5 million or sort of growing day by day and growing into your growth. What is what are some of the levers or sort of factors that you’ve played a part in, obviously yourself and the team, that have contributed to that level of growth, but also with that stability that you also got at the same time over that sort of eight to nine year period of since you took over in that role and stepped away from advising.

 

Rob (12:03.433)

Yeah, well we started out thinking we just needed to build a better business upon which we could grow. We didn’t try and go out and try and do marketing first and rebrand, it was really about building better systems and Practifi was a key part of that at the time. Building processes, really embedding processes into the way we did everything, building a skeleton, and then the team helped build it out over time to s improve the way we did things. So, it was very intentional to I guess grow the business but start with the foundations. And so, by I guess 2021, were ready to start making some significant changes. We actually entered into a joint venture to divest ourselves of our insurance work with our great partners at MBS Insurance. That’s been an outstanding relationship for us. It helped us focus our attention purely on the goal setting and the wealth planning for our clients.

And not try and do something that we couldn’t be the best at. We initially did think we would try and get a the best advisor in town to come and join us and be our risk specialist in house. But when we found the best advisors doing it, they’d just started their own business. And so we thought, well, rather than trying to win them into our business, we’ll actually just work on a joint venture with them, which has worked, yeah, wonderfully well. So and the other thing that we happened at the same time, that year we started their employee share plan.

And that really speaks to what were saying earlier about attracting and retaining the best people and making sure make it so good that they don’t want to leave. and that’s that’s been, I think, above all else, the most pivotal thing we’ve done as a business. Because as much as it’s difficult, people when you talk to a lot of people about it, they go, I’d love to do something like that. How did you do it? And what’s the admin like and how did you set it up? But what we realise is that if you’ve really got great talented people, they can be anywhere. They can leave and go and do something else, because their opportunities are, you know, abundant. And you’ve just got to make it so compelling that they think, why would I go and leave and start something that’s got less certainty around it when I’ve got great certainty here and a pathway to their own wealth creation journey through equity. So, we’ve done that and it’s proving to be remarkably successful, both you know, in terms of retention, but also engaging our next generation in ownership so they can help us grow.

 

Pat (14:23.575)

Yes.

Rob (14:26.697)

The business and just get that level of ownership mindset in the team that’s been remarkable for us for our journey, yeah.

 

Pat (14:33.889)

I love it. I also I think it it well, it feels like definitely from the way that we work together, just how engaged or highly engaged your team are with literally every aspect of the business. And yeah, it is just it is just striving for excellence. That’s the only way I can really put it. And you’re solving problems or doing things properly and not in a half-baked way. I guess when you think about, you know, that period of you taking over, the employee is it the employee share plan is the actual formal name for it, right? In terms of,

Rob (15:05.813)

We call it the HPH Team Equity Trust. Yeah.

Pat (15:08.567)

Perfect. The Team Equity Trust. You showed me a chart where basically since rolling that out, the obviously the valuation comes as a result, but just the exponential change in the revenue of your firm, it’s it literally is off the charts. I assume that’s a big factor of or a big result of going down that path. And I just wanted to ask like what else do you think it impacts in terms of the day to day of the firm when it comes to how people show up, the way that you promote internally?

 

Rob (15:38.804)

Yeah. When we shared our Team Equity Trust that with our team at our off site back in April, it really just highlighted how impactful that ownership mindset has been on the way the business has grown. Not to mention we’ve actually folded some businesses in along the way as well that should contributed to that. But I know how the compounding growth has been and more than half of it has still been organic.

So it’s easy for an outsider to think, they’re just buying that growth. But in fact, if were just buying that growth, I would totally admit to the fact that it’s just been bought, but I know that the organic growth has been stronger year on year than even the inorganic stuff that’s contributed to our growth profile. So yeah, I think it’s been the employee share plan has just been the one sort of I think stake in the ground we made that has been the most impactful. And I encourage anyone to do it. We’ve obviously done an episode where our Nick our COO, Nick Bordi, has actually shared how the plan works and people have contacted us subsequently and prior to that, even how do you do that plan and what have you done? And we’ve really built it out to be a business plan, I guess, that can work for any business. It doesn’t need to be financial planning, even it works now for any business that wants to do succession in a way that brings the next generation through and have them own,

 

Rob (17:03.923)

Own a stake in the business and help it grow. So yeah, it’s been it’s been a wonderful part of our journey, and I can’t see it changing any time in the future. our team now owns I think about 27% of the business. and that’ll continue to grow as the founders get diluted over time.

 

Pat (17:24.429)

And do you think part of that too?, I’m just reflecting on you mentioned, you know, the 2017 push to more of being sort of analytics and sort of BI focused on data. Nick in particular, and yourself too, even on weekends, Rob, looking at dashboards, looking at where are we going, where are we heading, making sure the data’s right, etcetera. That flows through to the team, right? Everyone’s having everyone has that single view of where we are now, where we’re heading. It’s this really just so clear, isn’t it? Like you’ve got where we are right now, so at the moment we’re recording this in August, the team can see exactly what their target is as a business as well as advisors, individuals, and they know exactly what they need to hit, you know, on a weekly basis to get to where they need to go. Do you think that’s a big part of I guess having that, you know, the team equity trust vibe, but you know, then paired together, it’s just an absolute recipe for success or snowballs on itself.

 

Rob (18:17.875)

Yeah, I would say that I mean were doing that in a spreadsheet, as you know, Pat, until you built a great little component in your software, which we’ll talk about in a second, because we’ve just now embedded that into our CRM and so it’s visible at a group level, but also at advisor level, which is just an amazing way to keep people focused on what it is they’ve been set out to, you know, to achieve in that year. the expectations for them. People do want to know what their expectations are, and how we arrive at the numbers, and we’ve given them a formula-based method to know that so they understand what the levers are and what the inputs are, which means they can drive that decision because many people who don’t know the inputs would say, just give me more money, please, and more support, please. So, well, okay. We can do that, but here’s what that means in terms of what we’d expect you to be able to generate if you want both more salary as well as more support.

And so, we’ve created the model that allows people to make more selective judgment about what they want most because they might want to say, I don’t want to be a senior advisor, I want to be a service advisor, therefore I’m happy to be on the salary bands I’m on, I don’t want an associate. But some who might have started with that thinking of actually move to the model of thinking, actually, no, I do want an associate. I do want to grow the team and grow the next-generation advisor with me. That’ll help me elevate to being a senior advisor, which will help me move into the salary band above service advisor.

And so, they’re only going to get there if they support another associate coming through who’s the advisor of the future because they can’t get there on their own. They can’t get to be a senior advisor without supporting someone else. So, it’s really creating I guess a rules-based system that people know and once they know the rules of the game, they actually will just optimize for what works for them. Without us having to sort of tell them to do something. We’ll just say this is how it works and they can they’re very self-motivated people. They don’t need sort of much other than just give us the rules of the game and let us you know, go at our own speed. Some go super-fast and some are happier to go at a slower speed and we’re okay with that.

 

Pat (20:16.183)

Love it. You talk about sort of self-motivation there, potentially sort of, you know, being able to get out of the way or not have to, you know, crack the whip or have you know, different types of conversations. Can we talk a little bit about your sort of approach or philosophy to leadership, Rob? Like how do you as we mentioned, you’ve got great tenure and you’re promoting from within. How like it’s an incredibly difficult question I think to ask you, but how do you how do you manage, how do you lead? Like what’s your overall philosophy to leading the people within HPH?

 

Rob (20:47.549)

Yeah, I would say, and I do say this to our team, leadership isn’t a title, it’s a behaviour. And I think people who want a title of being a leader, we just say to them, you know, people behave like leaders. They think beyond themselves. They think about how they can serve our clients, our team, our community. They’ve eleved their elevated their thinking beyond their own self-interest and they start to think, how do I make everything better for people around me? And so we when we bring people into our leadership team, they’ve already demonstrated leadership qualities before they’ve actually been elevated to that.

So, because we don’t want to have a situation where someone is appointed to the leadership team and other staff members would go, why have they appointed them? You know, what’s what’s so good about them? It should be self-evident. It should be self-evident through their behavior that when they get appointed to the leadership team, people should go like, I can see why. Like that’s that person has behaved like a leader from everything I’ve seen. So, it seems you know, logical that they would have been appointed to the leadership team. And so, it encourages people to always think and behave like leaders at every level of the organization. We encourage people to share ideas and bring their best ideas forward and we have got a terrific group of people, no question. And there are leaders everywhere in our business that actually are demonstrating that behavior every day. We can’t have everyone on the leadership team every week, but what we know is that we’ve got five first-generation, you know, principals, you know, three of whom probably won’t be here within five years. So, we’ve already got four next-generation leaders on a leadership team and there’s more already in the team now we know that will rise to that opportunity when the availability is there for them to step in. So, you know, we feel very solidly, I guess, set up around not just the financial succession through the employee share plan, but also the leadership succession as well, which is something that people often overlook. They think about the money changing hands, but they don’t think about how do you actually make the business change hands into the hands of credible reliable and dependable people that others look to and go, yes, they are a leader and I can imagine me being led by Zach and Nick who are in their mid-to-late thirties. And I’ll go, yes, I can see those guys running the show when you aren’t around. Thankfully they’re not trying to push me out just yet. But you they’re actually building their leadership credibility every day.

 

Pat (23:01.771)

Yeah. definitely. And do you think part of that too in terms of enabling them, enabling the leaders, whether that’s by title or by behaviour, or both rather, like giving them good systems, like parameters to make their own decisions or to, you know, act with autonomy, information, it comes back to the data point around like if I’m a leader or a manager, I want to be able to see and objectively manage my team or others, that surely forms part of that philosophy too, right? In terms of like you’ve got all the access to information you need and you can execute on those decisions without having to go through someone in bottleneck each time.

Rob (23:34.996)

Yeah. You know, you don’t want to feel like all the information is held within the, you know, the confines of just a small handful of people. The more information you can share, and that’s been very much our philosophy, one of our core values is in fact prizing openness and transparency. We try and keep everything visible to everyone apart from your salary. You should know everything else about the business all the time. Weekly, all team meetings to share everything that’s going on, all the things we’re thinking about. So, we try and keep everyone fully connected to everything that’s going on and we can’t make anyone be awesome at their role, but we can give them, I guess, the environment. We can try and identify the right people and work hard to provide them with the best environment. The opportunity to realise their own personal and professional ambitions is with them if we just give them the opportunity in the environment to be to be the best they can be and realise their own ambitions. So, I think that’s the that’s the secret. It’s just giving them visibility over what’s going on, help them make decisions. I guess if they need some support around that. But I just I think we just try to remain as open with everything that’s going on so people don’t need to be treated like mushrooms. They are intelligent people, they’ve got their own ambitions, and we just want to help them achieve those ambitions in alignment with our own business ambitions, yeah.

 

Pat (24:48.045)

Just it’s a little obsession with mushrooms there, Rob. We’re either growing like a mushroom or we’re being treated by one like one.

You mentioned the best is it the best practice forum? You mentioned that sort of that team meeting just there as being one of the big ways that you stay connected with the team or you know, an all team all hands essentially. How does that like that really intrigues me and I want to chat a little bit about it. So how does that sort of meeting work? I know it’s every Monday. I’ve been in one myself virtually and everyone’s like packed to the rafters. It looks like you there’s not a standing room only.

There’s lots yeah, there’s what is there’s 70 people in there now, either virtually or in person. What is that how does that meeting run? Why is that important? You’re at the centre of it with the sort of clipboard and reading out everything? Like, take us through it.

 

Rob (25:29.001)

Yeah, well we use Microsoft OneNote. It’s a free agenda, it’s information to share, it’s questions that you want to post to the group, or it’s suggestions you wanna make to the group. So, the kind of three tiers of things we would encourage people to post on the OneNote. Everyone’s got access to the OneNote, everyone can post anything they want on the OneNote every week. And we see it as a really important ritual around keeping everyone fully connected to what’s happening in the business.

It doesn’t mean everyone will come away every week thinking I’ve got to implement that straight away, because sometimes there’s so much going on, we just don’t want them to lose a sense of what is happening and they might adapt to some of the things we’re sharing and they need to be reminded of some things too down the track. But yeah, it’s an important one.

We started it, you know where it started, Pat? It started when I first stepped into the managing director role and all of sudden, you’re the one person people can come to with all the things they’ve always wanted to get done. I thought, okay, this is quite a challenge. All of a sudden, I had no end of ideas and limited resources to execute on those ideas. I think many people could relate to that, if you’ve been in that situation. So, I said, I didn’t want people lobbying me for their own idea to win.

 

Pat (26:28.939)

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Rob (26:52.359)

It very quickly became obvious that I couldn’t possibly arbitrate on every decision you know, what they wanted to get done in the business and it was not possible physically to handle all the inbound ideas people had on how to improve things and prioritize them. So, I thought let’s put it to the wisdom of the group and say, which one of these so you didn’t have to just convince me, you convinced the whole team and guess what? If you get the endorsement of the team, guess what we’re doing? And the team could prioritize those items.

 

Rob (27:21.269)

So that’s how it came about, it was actually out of necessity, more than some philosophy, but it has become a part of our culture of just keeping everyone connected, to what’s happening and ask each other questions and share best practices with each other, yeah.

 

Pat (27:35.21)

Love it. Does that surely that’s also helped with I’ve got this syndrome, shiny object syndrome. Like save save the ideas, save it for that period rather than whenever it comes to mind and then you lose your agenda for the day or get distracted, etcetera. Are there any like real examples of like really, you know, using that structural format, like real examples of operational change that have come as a result? I assume it happens weekly, given the cadence of the meeting.

 

Rob (27:59.754)

Yeah. There have been let me think about the one in particular. I’ve got one for you. Give me a second.

 

Rob (28:24.391)

I thought, yeah. Perhaps the best example, I guess, is the way in which our business process’s function. When I first built the processes; it was a skeleton sticky note setup on a big wall in the office. Literally I sketched out the process, and we just used sticky notes to move things around and write on them and say this process happens here and then it was just a skeleton, but then when we embedded that into Practifi back in the day, everyone was bringing their ideas every week about how we could improve upon the process, add a step here.

And it really put meat on the bones. The team was bringing their ideas to that to flesh out the way the business should run because they were better placed than me at that point to decide how the processes should run. They were doing it every day, so they were living the experience of it. So, I think that’s an example of where the best practice forum really was shining at its best to bring the best ideas to make our processes better and we collaborated around that and it’s just become this sort of yeah, co-created version of how we do things at HPH because of the way people brought their ideas to the table at the best practice forum, yeah.

 

Pat (29:38.498)

Fantastic. And I love too how that’s evolved from the sticky notes too to every literally every process in your business is in I think it’s Lucid chart, isn’t it? Where I was on a call with Nick before and he was taking me through the exact process and where it’s maybe falling down in the chain, etcetera. But do you think it’s also a good test or experience for maybe your sort of junior team to get that sort of leadership or public speaking experience too? ‘Cause you’ve got the floor of the whole team and you can pitch your idea and it just it is a safe space, right?

 

Rob (30:08.787)

Yeah, I think that’s the key. I know there’s some research that’s been done on this, but every idea is worthy of being aired, and Nick is a bit of a lucid chart master on doing the, you know, process map. Yeah, he’s a wizard at that. He loves it. But yeah, we’re we’ve been really intentional about making sure that we give people the space to share their thoughts and when they aren’t necessarily initially inclined to do so because people are a bit reluctant and as the teams got bigger, perhaps some people are quite intimidated by saying anything in front of a group of 70 people in effect and there’s 50 in person and around 20 online usually or online remotely. But the more they get to see by example that they that people are heard and listened to, and people will comment and add thoughts to what they’re sharing, it just creates that environment people realise that actually, no, they can feel safe enough to share their thoughts as well.

I love seeing that. I’m really you know, that’s one thing I’m really immensely proud of the way our team this happened even, you know, yesterday we’re recording on a Tuesday and yesterday was Monday and we had our old team meeting and we talked about a number of things and there was a lot of contribution and thoughts shared from all over at all levels of the business. And not many people feel too shy to speak, which is a real testament to the just that environment of collaborative thinking and sharing.

So I don’t wanna sort of pump it up too much, but I really do feel it’s a it’s a great environment for people to speak. People who would ordinarily be reluctant to, but they feel confident they can in that environment ’cause we respect each other’s view and we’re always prepared to hear it.

 

Pat (31:51.79)

Love it. And as you’ve you’ve said to me previously that the best idea will win. So that also breaks down barriers as well, I can imagine. Speaking of sort of breaking down barriers and moving away from I guess or freeing, you know, releasing the shackles from advisors when it comes to things like the you know, the MBS JV, so HPH Life, which I know is the most successful JV of its kind in the country, which is fantastic. You mentioned the you know, the long term partnership with Dimensional, taking care of the specifics around the investment side.

Which really leaves I guess the qualitative part of the or the just the general advice process to be taken care of and really done right by your team. You capture an extraordinary not you personally, an extraordinary amount of goals or each advisor does. So it’s around ten goals per household. And then I think about you know, how that compares to say a typical Rubica firm, it’s actually double.

And as well, just doing some you know key data deep dives as well, the majority of them are not actually financial in nature either. So, 60% of your goals are actually qualitative or just don’t involve money at all, which is just yeah, pretty compelling in this sort of day and age. That links to as well I know the PUR or the Progress Update Report, which I know you introduced in sort of 2019 with a desire to measure qualitative well-being alongside the client’s financial position.

Can you take us through that? Because that you guys are famous for that and you’ve got you on the website still, right? The nice high-fidelity sort of pamphlet that people can go through. But also, it was like seeing the Sydney Opera House when I came to your office in Como, you’ve got the logo and the colours and the branding all over your building in Como, which is exactly the same as the front cover of that document as well. So, take us through the evolution of that document and why it’s important as part of the process.

 

Rob (33:45.354)

Yeah, well the Progress Update Report is the culmination of having those conversations with clients not just about their money and doing a Household Balance Sheet and doing projections and so on and doing some, you know, some number crunching for them, but actually talking about also what’s important to them and talking about, as you say, the qualitative experience they’re having around their finances and their life more broadly. So, you know, money’s just a means. We know that everyone knows that. We wanna just you know but we wanna know about our clients, what they want their life to be like.

We go through a goal-setting exercise around, yeah, finances for sure, but also family and health and leisure and learning and personal growth, home and community and work. So we actually are asking about all those domains of their life, all those facets of life and finding out where they feel is more work to do because money is a is a means to solving some of the problems that might surface there and sometimes not always, but we feel like that’s the space advisors operate in every day, but just not necessarily in a structured way. So we wanted to put structure around it, wanted to track the way people felt about their finances over time and also about their life more broadly and because we knew when we asked people what it was they valued, when they first came in it was about can you help me with my super and my tax and sort of you so it was more quantitatively financially, motivated, I suppose, but they become much more oriented, as all advisors know, around qualitative experience of having someone that knows their affairs and can support them through big decisions.

And so, when they say it’s confidence, peace of mind, security, lower anxiety around my money now, we don’t have to worry about it anymore, all those qualitative feelings, we wanted to capture and record that and actually start to quantify it and measure it. So, we’ve done that now for a number of years, and then we bring that together alongside the quantitative information inside the Progress Update Report so we can show people by their own measurement, by their own self-assessment, how much they’re feeling better than they were when they first started working with us.

Yeah, we’re really keen to do that. It’s working really, really wonderfully well to demonstrate to the client in their own eyes what they said when they first started and what they’re saying now. So we don’t have to tell them we think they’re feeling better about their money. They’re telling us they think they feel better about their money. So, and the Progress Update Report was something we commissioned a great friend of mine, who’s actually been an episode guest on this podcast, Sam Patterson. He’s over at Direct Wealth and now building out a group of tools that gonna help advise firms under the brand of Halo Soft. I sort of gave Sam a bit of an idea of what I’m trying to build and he spent nearly a year, I think it was, fly in fly out from Brisbane coming over and helping to code that up and design it and build it and he’s got a great brain for financial planning and systems and he was helping to create something we’ve been using ever since. So yeah. It’s been, it’s been a great,

 

Pat (36:36.727)

I love it.

Rob (36:38.815)

Great exercise to build that out and we believe in that more complete picture of the client’s life, not just about their money, yeah.

Pat (36:45.089)

No, it’s absolutely fantastic. And then like practically I’m just thinking about like the process. It goes to each, say you’ve got a client or a household there, a couple, they get their questionnaires sort of separately, so you’re not sort of doing it joint and the you the CF other household is sort of overtaking and saying, you know, we’re a five out of five here or a ten out ten here. It’s seems like it’s done independently or at least sent out independently. I’ve even got it up here, it’s even has the sound effects when you turn the pages, which is awesome. But then you come up with the,

Rob (37:08.159)

It is.

Rob (37:11.945)

Yeah, it is cool, isn’t it?

 

Pat (37:13.035)

The radar chart, isn’t it, where you’ve got the what you call the Wheel of Life, which Tom’s done a lot of work on I guess processing those former responses into that Wheel of Life, which is really cool as well. So that helps I guess visualise their how they’re feeling to the sentiment rather than what we’re sort of used to now with walls of text with AI and sort of qualitative vibes to it.

 

Rob (37:31.668)

Yeah. Yeah, and you know, it helps people to they’re going through a social goal-setting exercise in the end of that because they’re saying what’s working in their life really well, but also things that are perhaps not as strong as they’d like them to be. And so we’ve we’ve been counseled on how to do that effectively using that Wheel of Life, starting with the things that are working really well with clients, before you move into things that are perhaps not quite as strong. So it’s called appreciative inquiry.

And you start with what’s working and talk those things through and then say, well this one here is a six out of ten. Has it ever been higher than that? So, it’s a positively framed question or what would it take to take that up? I’m not sure to again positively framed question. You don’t say, why is that so low or why is that, you know, why are you struggling in that space? Like that’s a not the right way to ask that question. So, we’ve sort of gone through a bit of a process of understanding how to actually frame those questions and orient the client towards how to improve things but in a positively framed way.

So yeah, it’s a wonderful goal-setting exercise because it uncovers a lot of things.

Another cool one that I want to mention I really highly value is the Life Transitions Survey because as a young advisor and remember you know working with other advisors in our team who were sitting in with me and they sort of said, you know, how do I ever have a conversation like that? I you know, you’ve got life experience, you know a you know, questions to ask.

And I was thinking to myself, we need a better way to have our advice team, I guess, uncover the things that clients have on their mind without necessarily knowing what questions to ask and navigate that conversation. So the life transitions survey we have, which breaks up into work life transitions, financial life transitions, family life transitions, and also legacy life transitions. It’s just like a checkbox of all the things you’d co could possibly be going to encounter. And we just get people to check the mark check box whether it’s a short term, medium term, or longer-term issue. And then it what it tells the advisor is that this is what the client’s thinking is now or coming for them. So, all the advisor has to do is saying, you’ve ticked the box here about job restructure. Tell me about that. So, it’s as simply the client’s giving you a c a clue and cue up to what you should be asking them about. And we just ask good questions.

 

Pat (39:44.493)

Conversation starters.

 

Rob (37:31.668)

And people tell us the answers. They’re the ones we wanna listen to, not ourselves speak. So that’s works exceptionally well as well to uncover what’s on the client’s mind.

 

Pat (40:03.149)

It’s it’s fantastic and it just speaks to the structure and discipline of your of you and your team. What I also really appreciate about this document is I’ve seen it time and time again when a client either achieves a goal or it’s just completed. It like gets deleted. Like it literally gets removed from the list of whatever the advisor’s working on. But you actually have what’s called advice history and that goes in the actual progress update report too.

So you can remind them, I guess, every year, every time you meet with them, how far you’ve sort of come together or what you did recommend and they didn’t implement, I think it’s on there too.

 

Rob (40:37.631)

Totally. I mean, one of the great things that we all experience as humans is a sense of progress. Like if you get a sense of progress, it’s very reaffirming.

We wanted people to be able to see the things they have achieved over time, not just on their balance sheet, but also the goals they’d set that they’d achieved and they could reflect upon and whether it was a holiday or whether it’s achieving getting their kids into private school or, you know, whatever it was, getting a degree if they hadn’t gone back and they were mature age or something like that. So those are really meaningful things that have people in their life that they want to work towards, and we want to capture them, record them and be able to reflect upon them over time to say, remember that and that’s a great benefit of capturing it and keeping it over time. It’s a life h it’s a life history really. So, we think there’s actually a lot of value in retaining it and not just what the goal was and whether it was achieved, but also what the advice was that actually was there to serve that goal and connect the two and make sure we got the advice history over time captured and recorded as well for reference.

 

Pat (41:52.536)

It keeps going too, like you we mentioned we talked about I guess the financial aspects of it too. But you’ve got, you know, actual versus projected net wealth, which is a really nice chart. It looks very similar to the way that we do where you do your sort of ongoing fee reports. But as well my understanding is you have tracked so even before this was a sort of solid concept or the PUR as a sort of finalized package, you were tracking your clients’ financial positions

Every every time you met with them, right? So you were able to basically show them that growing chart or going the other way, basically how their fungi vision has improved to the literal cent since they’ve become or been a HPH client.

Rob (42:32.777)

Yep. Yeah, that’s right. The old Household Balance Sheet, literally capturing every single year and capturing all the history. So, we didn’t just plug it into Xplan into IPS or somewhere and then overwrite it every year and lose what was last year’s numbers but actually capture it historically. So we had this, you know, I mean I remember I was looking after clients obviously for a long time before I stepped back from it and I there’s clients that I remember looking at it was like year after year after year of like, you know, fifteen, sixteen years of actually history of what had happened and just to being able to look at that and show the house they used to live in and the cars they used to drive and how much money they had back then and I do it for myself personally as all of our guys do as well. We all do it, keep that sort of sheet. So, we can all update and keep a track record and a history of what’s what our situation looks like. So, and the banks will ask for it if you ever borrow money, so it’s a convenient way to sort of always pull it up and give it to the bank when they ask for where you’re at. So yeah, it’s something we’ve always done as a practice and what we love the fact is that your software, Pat, is going to be able to embed that into into our CRM and make that a live component that sits against every client record, not just sitting in a historical spreadsheet. But yeah we’re looking forward to that and excited about what’s possible now with modern technology and without having an open-ended timeframe and a big cheque book we can actually get a lot done with a much more reasonable time frame and an investment. So, yeah. That’s

Pat (44:07.783)

I’m with you. Sorry, So for some reason, my Okay. I was just gonna deviate into talking about that sort of proven knack for picking what become trends of the self-licensed move the Dimensional back then CRM 2017 and ask you that question if that’s okay, just to prime you for that. Cool.

Rob (44:43.829)

 

Pat (44:48.653)

That’s right. Yeah, sorry, I’m I am jumping all over the over the place as I definitely do. Yeah, me too. Yeah, absolutely. So, I guess Rob, one thing I’ve s said this before, but one thing that really stands out to me and I know others is that you and the business have i it’s genuinely a proven knack for picking either a trend or just being able to see which way the wind is blowing, often years before it actually becomes mainstream or the obvious thing to do.

So we talked about, you know, the move to Dimensional the back in twenty two thousand nine or so, as well as becoming self-licensed, the CRM move or the non sort of industry specific CRM move back in 2017, the team equity trust, like the list goes on. Like where does that knack exactly, MBS, sorry, I mean the list goes on, exactly. So I can’t even name them all because they’re just so many. Where does that come from? Like do you how do you distinguish between, apart from that Monday meeting, something that’s like genuinely important

 

Rob (45:32.607)

Divesting our insurance. Divice divesting our insurance to MBS, yeah.

Pat (45:46.549)

Or just like the latest shiny object or trend and does that change, do you think, as you continue to shoot the lights out with growth and team and more stakeholders come into the business?

Rob (45:56.202)

Yeah, I guess it’s easy for decision making to be influenced by what others appear to be doing in the market. If you’re sort of paying attention to the financial mediand articles specific to our industry, that can really shape your decisions. But I think we’re pretty good at staying true to what we think clients need, and trying to ignore some of the sort of the media. not to say that we completely ignore it. We read it, obviously, but and we sometimes take heed of what they’re saying and explore it further. But we need to put ourselves in the shoes of our clients always and ensure that what we do for ourselves with all that we know is the same as we do for our clients and everyone says that. But y it’s not just a narrative, it’s actually a really lived experience of saying, well, how would we make this better if it was our mum walking in or a dad or a cousin or a brother? and so

You know, many of our family members are clients of the firm because we live and breathe how we do things. And so I don’t know if it’s a knack of picking a trend. We just look at what looks logical to do for the reasons that actually is this going to serve our interests and our clients’ interests better than what we’re doing today. And we’re not I guess we’re not overly influenced by what others appear to be doing or not doing. We just look at it and say it makes sense.

Pat (46:43.5)

Yes.

Rob (47:06.887)

I heard Corey Wassell talk about it from Verse Wealthy talked about it as his North Star. He said the same sort of thing. It’s a if your clients, if you’re looking to get a better experience for your clients always as your North Star, I could relate to that the way he described it, then you can’t go far wrong, because that’s ultimately what’s gonna drive the success in your business. Focus on what makes your client experience better. and if you can make your client experience better by making your team experience better, because obviously if you can make your team’s work easier to do and more effective, they can spend more time with clients and do more things for clients, that’s actually a win. So, it’s working on always how do we make our teams life easier to do more work for great clients. Yeah.

Pat (47:47.596)

I love it. And then think about like I’m just thinking about more really transformational and significant things that you’re doing. So I know that your plan is to or you’re already doing it through your sort of aggressive and A, but the plan is to partner with other advice firms through minority investments. How like you talk about media, etcetera, how do you think that’s sort of fundamentally different or take you through that sort of approach because

One might say, you know, we’ve got the sort of Mr and Mrs. Moneybags out there that have all the capital ready to deploy and just have a board seat, please, and that succession. So do you mind taking us through I guess what you’re thinking about there, that sort offering that you’ve got and yeah, how I guess it yeah, is coming to be

 

Rob (48:35.389)

Yeah. Yeah. No, so the th yeah, th the thing we’re thinking about there is that we’re an advice firm, first and foremost, so all we think about is how to make the advice business better for us and our clients. And so

We’ve figured out a fair few things. We’re not we’re not the masters at everything, but we’ve got a lot of stuff figured out. Really I think, you know, we look back on the things we’ve kind of figured out along the way and we think like there’s some really important moments of things we’ve done that have been really shifted our business in a positive direction. So the learning we’ve had, we think well we could share that learning with others.

And we’ve done that, as you say, obviously with people that have joined into our business and folded in. We call that what we call that the primary equity model versus the private equity model. The private equity model is where you, you know, business is out there and they’ve got money and they come in and they’ll give you some capital and take a seat on your on your board and then help you with M&A potentially. And but it’s kind of more of a supporting guiding role, but not a day-to-day operational role. It’s a kind of a more of a mentoring strategy type role. that’s more the traditional private equity model and then you know the prime what we call primary equity model is where someone folds in fully, takes equity on the way in. but the one in the middle we’re talking about is a what we call the partner equity model, which is someone says, I want to actually learn everything you’ve figured out. I want to apply it to accelerate my own growth because I w I’ve only got maybe five, six, seven years to go. I don’t want to try and figure it all out in that time. I want to sort of like learn it all now, apply it now and accelerate my own development. So we’re in conversations with two firms right now along those lines.

Rob (50:13.804)

One’s in local and won’t see what the other one is just yet, but because we’re still in negotiations with them. But it looks like it’s going to be another really positive experience because they’re looking for exactly that. They’re looking for saying we don’t wanna we don’t want to take control of it either. We’re saying like you run it, you control it, you’ve got a great business. You don’t need us to come in and sort of tell you what to do, other than to say we’ll share our whole playbook on everything we do with you on pricing and people development with evidence-based reviews and salary bands and skills matrices that link pay and promotion to performance.

 

Rob (50:45.463)

You know, client engagement frameworks and the employee share plan, how we structure that, how that works, business intelligence dashboard dashboards for better decision making. So there’s a whole bunch of stuff we do there, and we’ve shown them all of that. Like, literally, just no holds barred shown them, and they’ve gone like, well, there’s top three things we’d love to do, we’d love to apply that learning to our business. So, looking forward to that phase where we can really help others to accelerate their growth and take a minority position and just really support their development. it’s just a way of leveraging our own impact because we believe in the value of advice like every advisor does because they get to experience it every day. So, if we can help others do more of that more effectively than they are today and achieve their own ambitions faster than they might otherwise and yeah, we’re up for that for sure.

Pat (51:33.185)

That’s it’s incredibly exciting. And do you think that, you know, asking selfishly, that extends to the overall sort of technology stack, not saying here’s a mandated stack you use, but as you mentioned the playbook before of here’s the systems, here the pro here are the part of the process, the tools that we use, that can work essentially turnkey for you without having to do too much on the change management side.

Rob (51:54.4)

For sure. Well, you know, to put on the record, yeah, we moved away from Practifi in March this year and we moved to Rubica, which is the business that you’ve established with your team at Collins SBA and it’s, the opportunities now, I’ve I don’t think there’s ever been a more exciting time to see what’s possible. And so, yes, absolutely, technology is a fundamental part of it. Everyone thinks it’s only technology, it’s not only technology, but technology isn’t an enabler. It’s just as a platform upon which everything you want to build can now be built and embedded in that technology. And I’ve been, to be honest, totally stunned with what you can do inside our CRM in the timeframe you can do it.

Pat (52:18.807)

Rob (52:33.459)

We had a couple of our team go away for a couple of weeks at the beginning of July and you sat down with me and said, Rob, what do you need? And I went, I want this and this and this and I was looking at spreadsheets we have and I want that inside of the CRM and I want that inside the CRM.

And the turnaround on that stuff was just like literally mind blowing. You know, you were knocking things out the da that afternoon or the next day you’re bringing something to me. And I’ve just gone like, holy cow, like, you know, what’s possible now? And and of course my mind started racing as to what’s now possible. All of an and we’ve got tons of ideas now. Like there’s almost this explosion of ideas of how we can actually leverage the tech you guys have got there at Rubica, what we can actually build in next generation,

Rob (53:13.107)

I guess technology to better help our team, to get better insights about our clients’ experience. I mean, I could go on and on about what we’ve got now planned. It would but it’s a very exciting future and so businesses that actually are partnering with us if that’s if that’s what they wish to do and we take a minority position, yes of course. We’re gonna say here’s what we’re using, here’s how we’re using it. Is it the only thing they would get? Obviously not. If they are a take or to leave it? No it’s not. They can say well it is like they can sort of say yep, we’ll take the technology as well, or they can say we’ll go the other things we’ve got, that we’ve that HPH bring, we’ll take those things, but we’ve got another piece of software right now we’re quite happy with.

But I do wonder over time as we show what we’re doing with you, how it becomes a really compelling proposition to fold their technology across as well. Not that it’s it’ll be mandated, obviously. As a minority partner, we’re just gonna help show them what we’re doing. But yeah, I d I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever been more excited now thinking about all the possibilities that with technology, you know, without having to say, as I said earlier an open-ended timeframe and a big checkbook, you know, now there’s so much more can be done in turnaround times I couldn’t have imagined, yeah.

 

Pat (54:27.613)

with you I really it really excites me that you’re excited and I think a lot of the reasons as well why we’re able to move so quickly is you’ve got that I’ve said this before, you know, really trusted foundations, the infrastructures there. We’re not building a something standalone that you’ll need to log into. But because you’ve got such great data, a lot of the time it’s just showing that in different ways or guiding someone down a really deterministic path and then we’re sprinkling AI on top as you’ve probably seen with some of the stuff that we’ve done. But as well it’s this as Peter Warren would say, you know, what a time to be alive in terms of basically AI coding tools have just made a lot of that possible a lot quicker than it normally has been, even with just mocking stuff up for you to say like, hey, is this what you’re thinking? Because this comes back to the way that you lead is you don’t you don’t tell or say exactly what you want. You give just enough information of what you’re thinking about to let that end user or end person use their own creativity or their own sort of self-determination to run with it.

 

Rob (55:20.127)

That’s exactly how I do it, Pat, because I know what I want to achieve and because you’ve got that domain experience and this sounds like a you know, a plug for you guys, but and it’s an unashamed plug for you guys because the reality is I just tell you what I’m trying to achieve and you understand it. You understand what I’m asking for because you actually have lived and breathed being an advisor and that now has a technology skill set that is extraordinary what from what I’ve seen. So, I just think I don’t need to try and explain chapter and verse to you because you’re a techie who doesn’t understand financial planning. You have domain experience. So it’s just easier. You and I just say this is what I’m trying to achieve, and you bring up things that I didn’t even think of. You just say, well, I’ve that and what about this and this and I’ll go like, mate, that’s like amazing, I didn’t even think of that.

So yeah, it’s incredible. So, it is it is as I agree with Peter Warren. It’s an amazing time to be alive and he was a great a great guest on the podcast previously as well. I got a great a lot of time for Peter. I love his podcast as well with Danny.

Pat (56:18.881)

Yes.

Rob (56:20.903)

He’s a great thinker, Peter. He’s really right on the cutting edge of and again, a domain expert. He understands financial planning and has the technology expertise. So a great deal of respect for Peter and what he’s doing.

Pat (56:33.491)

Absolutely. I yeah, I really appreciate what you just said there, Rob, and I think it also comes back to sort of talked about before the whether it’s picking a trend early or making those decisions objectively. And yeah, I really, really well we really, really appreciate how you backed us early. It’s almost a year ago since we sort of came together formally in terms of signing the thing. Remember I was the Shiktas in Istanbul, sort of jumping on the bed when I saw the amount come through. So, it was all like it’s all fallen out of that, fallen into place as a result of your support. A year ago, which we really, really appreciate. And you just mentioned the podcast there. This is a big reason why I’m here in terms of fifty episodes to really grill you and have that candid conversation. But when you started it, Rob, like talk us through why you started. It’s been almost two years now. what were you trying to set out to achieve with it? It feels like everyone’s got their podcast. No one can really see it through like you have in terms of two years. I had to crack at it and then haven’t done one since April which hence the rustiness. But talk to us about the evolution of that, the origin story of the podcast and how you’ve sort of found it and whether there’s anything that you’ve that’s fallen out of that like positive unintended consequences, et cetera.

Rob (57:40.074)

Yeah, sure. So I’m a, I’m a curious person, always wanting to learn new things and I was talking to people all the time and trying to learn from them and you know I always the motivation for running the podcast I guess was to learn from others and then share that more broadly if I’m gonna have the conversation anyway and it sort of came about where I’d been thinking about it for a while and my good friend Ben Calder, who was at Court of Wealth now part of the Coastal Advice Group, with Dan Brown, another good friend, they’re awesome guys and Ben said, tell me your employee share plan. I said, okay, man, I’ll do that, but can we record it? So, when someone else asks me about it, I’ll actually just tell them to listen to the recording. So, we did that.

That was episode number one. And so that was kind of the genesis of the of the podcast. But I’ll say that I was on a holiday down in Dunsborough with my family, and my wife had gone into shop at Coles, and I was sitting there on my phone and I was looking at ChatGPT. I said, If I wanted to start a podcast, what would I do? What platform would I use? And it gave me all these ideas. And so thankfully, were staying in Airbnb, they had good Wi Fi because guess what I did on my holidays? I started up building out the podcast on my holidays. And that’s very typical. My wife would just shake her head and go, Like, what’s new? You know, it’s sort of holidays is like R and D time.

 

Rob (58:51.997)

I built it out on the holidays and started it then and had some great first guests, you know, people that I’ve long respected and admired, like, you know, Tim Lane who does FinConnect with the pro with valuations of businesses and Richard Hernan at Broadleaf Financial Group. so, you know, some great guests along the way. Every one of them I’ve enjoyed talking to. I’ll share a couple that particularly were takeaways for us. Like we had Jerry Calagropolis from ePDM Assist on episode five and we started using ePDM Assist after that episode ’cause the other directors heard that episode and thought we should do that, shouldn’t we?

I didn’t have to convince them, I didn’t have to tell them, you know, I talked to this guy Jerry, they just listened to the episode and said, Yep, we should do that. So, we’ve been with ePDM Assist ever since, and we’ve got three team members in Vietnam now working with Aptium who are doing a great job for us. I really got a lot out of the Neil Kendall episode from Tupakos. Neil was showing us what he’s done in Salesforce as well, and he talked about Theta Lake he was using for I know that inspired me, and I talked about it with you and you said you’ve created something and you have Theta Lake inspired we call it but it’s called Interaction Insights which is just incredible at interrogating our entire database on every correspondence with a client, whether it’s a virtual meeting, an in-person meeting captured by way of Otta recordings, which we still use if it’s a phone call captured via Zoom, straight into Rubica.

 

Rob (01:00:14.967)

all that transcripts there or it’s an email going in and out and now we can actually interrogate all of that correspondence to see was there a or sentiment of that of that call or that email, that correspondence, was there anything said that probably we should help our team member understand they shouldn’t be saying. So, trying to get ahead of it before things happen and we don’t realise it ’cause random sampling of files, you know, or random sampling of a you know, client records is not a great way to do it when you’re at a scale like we are now and growing.

So that interaction insights inspired by Neil’s experience of using Theta Lake had been incredible. Richard Hunan obviously at Broadleaf Financial Group, you know, episode three, we’re doing some work with them, co-investing other financial planning businesses. They’re going to be a possible co-partner with us in some of the minority investing and of course we engage with, you know, had your episode, we talked about Rubica bringing next-generation technology to our team and for the first time ever I can see that you know everything we want to achieve is now possible.

So, I’m super excited. Tons more. Everything people tell me every day. I come away from podcast thinking I’ve learned something. I wouldn’t say there’s an episode, yet where I felt I didn’t take away something that we can apply. So, there’s just a few examples, yeah.

Pat (01:01:22.765)

Totally.

Pat (01:01:31.565)

Yeah. No, I love it. And then outside your own podcast, Rob, like when you’re not either working on yourself or the business or you know, recharging, what are you what are you consuming or sort of learning from at the moment, whether it’s other podcasts or other books or resources?

 

Rob (01:02:48.275)

Yeah, I obviously, as I say, a curious learner, so I’m always listening to either an audible book or listening to podcasts. I’ll shout out Michael Kitces, for those that haven’t heard of Michael Kitsis, you must be living under a rock. The guy is the biggest thing in terms of practice management in the US. He runs a podcast called the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, which has been going for a number of years now. And it was actually, you know, I’ve been an avid listener since he started many years ago. It was actually the inspiration for the podcast, The Trusted Advisor. I learned so much from what he and others shared.

On that podcast, I thought, why not replicate that? You know, I’m sure I can learn a lot along the way, like Michael does and what he shares. So, but less specific to financial planning, other podcasts I listen to regularly. The Know the Knowledge Project by Shane Parrish. I really like that podcast. Even when I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about things, it helps me sort of get my mind back into sleep mode ’cause he’s got a really calm voice, but he’s actually got a really great, I mean he’s just highly credentialed guy and one of the best podcasts going around the globe, I reckon.

So, the Knowledge Project. I love the Moonshots podcast by Peter Diamandis, and what he calls his Moonshot Mates. Real progressive, like very cutting edge thinking around technology, artificial intelligence, robotics. I just I’m very, you know, oriented around what the future might hold and I love his podcast. That’s an absolute winner. Lenny’s podcast, which when I mentioned that one to you and like Lenny’s podcast, what’s that one? It’s a very tech centric podcast. But it’s just talking to people that work at Anthropic, people that work at on the Google Gemini, you know, models and you know, just he’s talking about all the cutting edge

Pat (01:03:27.841)

Yeah. Really like product focused. Yeah.

Rob (01:03:30.74)

Yeah, very product focused, very technology oriented. And of course, many people will be listening to The Diary of a CEO by Stephen with Stephen Bartlett. That’s a favourite, so I go to that one a lot and listen to the book as well, which was great. And others that a couple of others that I dip into in and out of, one called Two Bobs, by David C. Baker and Blair Enns. I really like that one. They’re really understand the world of consulting and getting paid for I guess for knowledge work. They’re terrific, intelligent guys. Both of have written a ton of books. and also like many people, Huberman Lab with Andrew Huberman just on how to optimise health and well-being. So, they’re kind of my favorite go to’s of late. Yeah.

Pat (01:04:17.559)

Lovely, jubbly and of course you mentioned Peter and Danny before with the Futura podcast there as well. Awesome. Yeah.

Rob (01:04:22.355)

Yeah, I well it’s a fairly recent podcast that one, but I love listening to that. it’s definitely in our domain it’s one of the best now ’cause their thinking is right at the edge of what’s working and what’s not working. So, I only met Peter for the first time last year, actually. I’ve seen him before in speaking different engagements that he has, but I met him first at a conference where were both speaking and,

Pat (01:04:37.037)

Practical.

Rob (01:04:50.557)

And just a lovely guy, just super intelligent and thoughtful and articulate and we hit it off straight away and yeah, so I’ve got a great deal of time for Peter and obviously he’s been a guest as well on the podcast.

Pat (01:05:03.437)

Absolutely. Love ya Pete.

And Rob, I’m sure we’re definitely running out of time. But yeah, just wanted to say congratulations on fifty episodes of the Trusted Adviser podcast. Have you got anything different planned for the next fifty? Obviously, a fortnightly cadence. Have you got any anyone exciting coming up that you can share with us? What are your sort of thoughts on I guess the next evolution of the pod or how you’re sort of handling it?

Rob (01:05:27.933)

Yeah, I’m just gonna keep on, I’m usually inspired by guests, well, inspired by people I talk to. I’m thinking you’d be a great guest. Like so I’m talking to people all the time. It’s part of the job, obviously. The last episode was Scott Taylor and Ashley Pickett, from Everest Wealth here in Perth. Scott reached out and said, can I come have a chat to you what you’re doing and just learn from what you guys have been up to? And he came out and had a chat and I said, what have you been up to? And so, we had a chat and he was talking about how they’ve worked with Marlow and clawed code to build some stuff and thought that’s super interesting. Like, you know, I’m interested in that. I’m sure others would be too. So, because Marloo and Paradino and Clarice and others are in the market, sort of very visible.

And so it’ll be more of the same. Practice management is kind of the wheelhouse that I want to be remain. Technologies become a real strong theme throughout and the biggest episodes are some of the technology ones that we’ve done. As well as the employee share plan one. and I was I was pretty chuffed. I’ve known Cameron Parsmore from PW or Capital for many years. We met each other initially back at in Sydney. They had a global conference in Sydney back pre-COVID. and he was doing podcasting then. Of course, the Rational Reminder podcast shouldn’t go without saying that’s a brilliant podcast and super successful.

Based in Ottawand Canada, the guys from PWL Capital and they’ve now sold their business into OneDigital in the US, and they’ve done a podcast episode about that. But I spoke to Cameron and of all the people I’ve spoken to along the way that are sitting in the seat that I sit in and done the things that we’re doing, Cameron was an absolute standout in terms of I just felt like, man, it’s like a brother from another mother, this guy just thinks about things the same way, huge, great deal of respect for Cameron and what they’ve done at PWL. So, you know, more of the same practice management stuff is what I want to keep doing. But I think Cameron’s was probably the biggest episode download because their profile is just so huge globally, you know, well beyond Australia. Yeah.

Pat (01:07:42.507)

Love it. Well Rob, congratulations once again. Thank you for letting me host this. Thank you for your support and thanks for showing or taking everyone through what it really takes to build, grow and sustain a throwing future planning business.

Rob (01:07:53.493)

Well, let me say this, Pat. Thank you for hosting it. ‘Cause I asked you ’cause you’ve done this before. and you know, I appreciate everything you’re doing for us. So the feeling is mutual, my friend, and let’s continue to build the future of advice together.I’m excited about where it’s going.

Pat (01:08:11.555)

Let’s do it.

Rob (01:08:13.301)

Thanks, Pat.