Rob Pyne speaks with Jerry Kalogeropoulos, the founder of Aptium Assist, a business specialising in outsourced back-office support for financial planners. Together, they explore the growing trend of outsourcing in professional services, specifically focusing on tasks such as paraplanning and client administration within financial planning. Jerry shares insights from his experience on the benefits, challenges, and operational nuances of outsourcing, offering financial planners a comprehensive look at what outsourcing might mean for their business.
LISTEN
SHOW NOTES
Key Topics Discussed
Introduction to Aptium Assist and the Outsourcing Trend
- Jerry explains how Aptium Assist began, stemming from his own financial advice practice and the need to retain a key team member.
- Overview of tasks commonly outsourced, including client service administration and paraplanning.
The Advantages of an Integrated Team Approach
- Jerry discusses how Aptium Assist takes a team-based approach, focusing on embedding into a client’s existing processes rather than handling isolated tasks.
- The importance of workflow continuity, reducing key-person risk, and aligning team responsibilities.
Onboarding and Workflow Management
- Rob and Jerry dive into Aptium’s onboarding process, which includes mapping each financial planning firm’s workflow into Aptium’s system (monday.com).
- Jerry explains why they document workflows in detail to ensure a seamless handoff of tasks and backup support for every role.
Communication and Coordination for Seamless Operations
- Strategies for maintaining effective communication between onshore and offshore teams, using platforms like Microsoft Teams for quick and direct interactions.
Balancing Security and Efficiency
- A deep dive into data security and confidentiality measures, including client portals, centralized workspaces, and ongoing cyber security training for staff.
- How Aptium complies with regulatory standards to provide a secure outsourcing experience.
The Financial and Operational Benefits of Outsourcing
- Jerry outlines how outsourcing with Aptium Assist can increase profitability and capacity for high-value work by reducing the administrative load on local teams.
- Real-world success stories demonstrate how outsourcing has helped firms enhance client experience and grow sustainably.
Best Practices and Key Considerations for Outsourcing
- Jerry shares advice for firms considering outsourcing, emphasizing the need to start with clear goals and testing the service before committing fully.
- Discussion on tasks that are best kept in-house, such as direct client communications and certain transaction functions.
Long-Term Impact on Business Structure and Client Relationships
- Rob and Jerry discuss how outsourcing enables financial planners to focus on core functions, improving overall client satisfaction and staff job satisfaction.
- Jerry emphasises that outsourcing can lead to a collaborative ecosystem where best practices are shared across firms.
Quotes:
- “We treat outsourcing like a black box. Our clients send us the work, and we make sure it gets done, removing key-person risk entirely.”
- “Data security is paramount to us. We ensure our team is constantly trained, with all work done from secure, company-issued devices in a centralised office.”
- “For financial planners, outsourcing isn’t just about reducing costs—it’s about freeing up capacity to focus on high-value client work.”
Resources:
Listen to this Episode if:
- You’re a financial planner considering outsourcing parts of your back-office operations.
- You want to understand the benefits, challenges, and practicalities of outsourcing in financial planning.
- You’re looking to improve client experience and profitability by streamlining operations.
Connect with Jerry Kalogeropoulos
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the Trusted Adviser Podcast where you get a deep dive into the world of financial planning with industry leaders who shared their stories of winning and learning as they chartered their path to success. This podcast is for the curious, those of you that like to dig into the detail, if that sounds like you get ready to listen and learn.
Rob Pyne:
Welcome to The Trusted Adviser Podcast. Today, we’re exploring the rise of outsourcing and financial planning, a trend that’s reshaping how many businesses manage their back-office operations. In recent years, financial planners have increasingly turned to outsourcing for tasks like paraplanning and client administration, but how do you decide if it’s right for your business and what can you expect from this approach? In this episode, I sit down with Jerry Kalogeropoulos, managing partner at Appium Assist and outsourced back office support provider specialising in financial planning firms. Jerry shares valuable insights on how outsourcing can transform operations, reduce key person risk, and allow financial planners to focus on higher-value tasks. We dive into how Aptio assist integrates with financial planning practises by embedding their team into existing workflows rather than treating tasks individually, the onboarding process and workflow management strategies, including documenting and optimising workflows for smoother operations, security measures and confidentiality practises that ensure data protection crucial in today’s regulatory environment, the financial and operational benefits of outsourcing from boosting profitability to enhancing client experience and best practises for starting small with outsourcing and key factors to consider when deciding which tasks to keep in-house. Whether you are new to outsourcing or looking to improve your existing approach, this episode is packed with practical advice and insights that will help you assess how outsourcing could benefit your business. Let’s get started.
Welcome Jerry Kalogeropoulos to the Trusted Advisor podcast.
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
Thanks for having me.
Rob Pyne:
Today, Jerry, we’re going to dive into a trend that’s been really reshaping professional financial services firms in recent years. The trend towards offshoring or outsourcing some of the back office functions that we operate inside our financial planning businesses, whether it be paraplanning, whether it be client services, administration work, it’s something that you at Appium assist have begun to do in the business you’re currently in, but beyond your business and offer that service to others. Though we’re not using your services yet, I’m very keen to explore it further with you.
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
Yeah, thanks. I mean, first of all, congratulations for doing this podcast. I think this kind of thing from practitioners to begin with is such a cool thing given that you are in there in the trenches doing it day to day and taking time out of your day job to give something back to the advice community, and I think the nature of this sort of podcast is such that you’re going to be asking pretty similar questions to many of the advisors listening in. So well done for that to begin with. But yeah, so thanks for having me. Again. I run apti assist and we’re a little bit of a unique, I’ll say outsource provider in that as you kind of intimated, we never set out to build an outsource business. We were an advice business to begin with. We had a scenario that I think many listeners might have faced over the course of their working lives where key people left or were at risk of leaving our business and they were critical to getting work flowing in our practise and we couldn’t afford to lose them. So that was the catalyst really for us starting an outsource business. We had a key person that was moving back to Vietnam for family reasons. He wanted to start his family, but we offered him that opportunity to continue on as an employee of the practise and that led to one thing and another from there.
Rob Pyne:
Okay, so obviously you’ve got a bit of experience with this in the business at Aptiom and now for other businesses. What specific tasks have you found are the most efficiently handled by your offshore team in Vietnam?
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
It’s a good question and one that look from my perspective probably helps to differentiate the different categories of outsource providers. I think on the one hand most outsource providers at things from that perspective, from a very task driven point of view of you want a plan done an SOA or an ROA fill in your order form, there’s a task job done, you want some admin done, okay, well that’s something different. We’ll get a person to do either implementation work or general admin or whatever else it might be. We’re different in that we came at this from a very, very advice focused point of view in that we didn’t really think about one task or the next sitting with one person or the next. We just knew that we had to get our advisors ready for a review and out the other side, so there was work that needed to be done to get an advisor prepped for a review meeting or a new client meeting and there was also work on the other side of it. And at the end of the day, being an advice business, we don’t have time for order forms or saying, okay, well this person just does this task and that person just does that task. We kind of need a team to be getting stuff done together. And so from our point of view, I mean any task can be offshore if you’ve got the right people doing it and if it’s organised in the right sort of way.
Rob Pyne:
Okay, so different in the sense that you instead of focusing on a task by task specific approach, you really have thought about we just need them to be a part of our team and we’ll build our processes and they will form a part of our team to support those processes. So can you walk us through a typical workflow then between your team and say a local financial planning business, how do you ensure that communication and task management is seamless? Not that it’s ever seamless even when people are in your office, but how do you work with your team offshore to make that communication effective?
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
Good question. I think the starting point is really to understand any client that we take on, we spend a really good long while their current workflow to begin with. We take the time to actually document their workflow in our own workflow management system and the reason we do that, that’s a bit of duplication right there. And from a practice’s point of view, you might be scratching your head going, well, hold on, we’ve already got our workflow documented. Why would you copy and paste that in a different workflow management system? Well, the reason for that is that we need our staff to follow your bouncing ball and not just one staff member, but we need a backup to the backup to the backup. If someone gets hit by a bus or if they need to take a holiday, we need to know that every process is documented.
So that’s step one. Step two is we make sure that there is never a key person risk or dependence on one person that’s working with one practise for a similar sort of an obvious reason. The best example I can give you in terms of how the workflow would work is, okay, advisor needs to get ready for a review meeting clients coming in next week, they would let our team offshore know that they’ve got a review meeting on Thursday next week. That’s it in terms of what the advisor needs to do. I’ve got a meeting, it’s happening on Thursday, guys, get me ready. Now, typically one of our staff members would, and this would be a paraplanner that would do this, they would go and subject to the workflow processes that that advisor has got us to subscribe to. They would, for example, get your platform reports ready for the advisor for the client coming in.
They would potentially do some product comparisons in terms of platforms. They would look at the research ratings of any direct equities and things like that to understand what’s changed prior to the client coming in. They would get their fee forms ready in terms of platform if that’s how you charge or direct fees, if that’s how you charge whatever it might be, and so on and so forth. So they would do literally everything it takes to get that advisor prepped and what we call that review pack would be ready for them to inspect prior to the review. The advisor would then go into the review prepared and once they’ve done a reasonable file note, and I stress reasonable because we’re not mind readers, but if there’s a reasonable file note they’re on file, we will pick that up and produce advice from that. Now that in and of itself is quite different in the sense that we’re trying really, really hard to not be order takers and we are certainly trying to get advisors to not be order makers because that process of actually documenting what the advice you want is can be pretty time consuming for advisors.
They’ve sort of gone a third of the way to producing the advice themselves. So yeah, once that advice has been prepared in whatever form the advice practise needs, that paraplanner, so the same person is following this review process all the way along here. They would know the advisor is ready, the advisor has said, yep, happy with that. They would go in there and implement the new contingent on the sort of fee model and whether it’s fixed term agreements or whatever else it might be, they would get into XPLAN or whatever software you’re using and tie off that case is what we term that and begin the new case for that client for the next year. They’d make any changes to X plans or updating income address, whatever else it might be and sort of tie off that end to end review process. So basically do everything other than implement the advice.
That’s probably a bit more similar to I would say if you now it’s not exactly the same. I’m not going to pretend that we’re the same as having staff, but what we’re trying to do is get our team over there to mimic what it would be if you had someone in the office. So if you had a paraplanner in the office, I mean it’s up to you as the advice team what you want that paraplanner to do. You’re not going to get your paraplanner to give you an order form to fill in to reduce advice. You’re going to expect that that person understands enough that they can produce advice off fairly minimal instructions that they’re there for you if you want to have a chat and talk strategy at any given moment in time that it’s not a rigid sort of relationship. And given that’s how we started our outsource business, they were our back office because we’re an advice business obviously to begin with, we kind of pass on that level of expectation to every practise we work with.
Rob Pyne:
Okay. Jerry got a tonne of questions off the back of that. First of all, the onboarding, you talk about taking our process or taking the businesses process that you’re going to be working with and putting it into your practise management system, your workflow system. Can you first of all tell us which system you use and tell us about what sort of investment is someone making for that? Because obviously you are doing a fair bit of a lift there to get someone else’s process and put it into your system much like a financial planner would prepare a plan and be a fee for that plan, and then there’s an ongoing service fee Beyond that, do you charge for that onboarding process or is it one flat ongoing fee and the onboarding is kind of just built into that process? And so I’ll let you answer those two questions before I ask the rest in my
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
Mind. No, that’s okay. I think there were three there. So I’ll try and tackle all three in order. So the first was what do we use? So we use monday.com as our workflow management tool. There is nothing fancy about it. They’re a listed business. They’re going to be around if we needed to move to a different workflow management system, it’s not a drag for us. So we use monday.com specifically and not XPLAN for example, because XPLAN just is not good at workflow. I think most people would agree at that. Excellent for projections and modelling and the rest. It’s just not a workflow management system. So we’re not a big fan of tasks and threads. A lot of the work we do is helping practises to get off that system of workflow if they choose. So we use Monday, do we charge for onboarding? No, we don’t.
We back ourselves to deliver value upfront and most, I’m going to say nine out of 10 of our clients, we don’t do sort of 30 odd plans a year. They don’t sort of send us their overflow or just their new clients or just their risk only clients or whatever it might be. We run their business, we do everything. And that I guess is another difference in terms of your typical outsource business, I think you’d get a bit of a hodgepodge of the sort work that they do, whereas we’re a lot smaller but a lot deeper in terms of the sort of work that we’re doing with practises. So we work with fewer practises, but we basically run the majority of their back offices and that means you have to invest upfront in getting workflow, right? Part of it’s, I mean monday.com is, like I said at the beginning, it’s nothing special and we’re not doing anything that is difficult here.
All we’re doing is taking the time upfront to do the little things right and set the foundation right in whatever system you choose, whether it’s Monday or Asana or whatever else, it doesn’t really matter. The thing that we’re doing right though is that we are executing it. So we’re getting processes right upfront. We’re getting communication, so we will have, if need be, we’ll have daily catch-up meetings with practises. We’ll set them up on teams preferably. So if you’re a Microsoft business, that’s great for you. If not, we’ll use whatever else you prefer. But ideally, teams will set up a group. So quick chit chat between your onshore and your offshore team is really, really easy. They’re accessible all the time, and the key is once you’ve vetted down processes and you’ve got that follow the bouncing ball kind of model built, it’s just all about communication and executing from there. So hopefully that answers your questions.
Rob Pyne:
Yeah, for sure it does. And do you find businesses need to have someone on site locally to be the contact point for the offshore team? Do you find your client services managers perhaps built into the local financial planning business? They have their back office team and they’re the ones doing the primary connecting.
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
I advocate for that, so I think that is the better way to do it. We do that in our own advice business whilst so I’m general manager of the outsource business, but I’m also GM of our advice business, completely separate hats and that’s how we choose to do things actually in our advice business, we do look after some sole operators that just prefer to deal with no one. They don’t like employing staff and that’s a unique example, but I’d say for any business of any substantial size, the best model in my opinion is to have your, I would call them the air traffic controllers on shore. They’re the people that we can liberate of basically all work and get them focused on coordinating between the advice team in your business and us offshore. They can focus more on clients, do more proactive work with clients, and we’re not about making people’s roles redundant. I think the whole idea of just outsourcing is a fallacy. I think there’s a really good hybrid model which you’ve just sort of touched on,
Rob Pyne:
And we spoke a month or two ago, maybe a couple of months ago. Now Jerry, you, myself and your business partner Phil, had a chat about what you were doing and at the time asking you how do people normally onboard with you? And some people go the whole way from go to woe, but you also suggested that some firms initially begin almost towing the water. They start to do some component parts. There’s maybe an overflow, but what you found is that the more they got used to and comfortable with what you can do that you’ve actually found that the services then expand. They’ve taken more and more of what you can do for them. Can you give us a bit of a perspective on that and how businesses have perhaps started by testing the waters and how that’s developed for those businesses?
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
Yes, so again, I’m an advocate for not going the whole hog, but testing any outsource provider, whether it’s us or anyone else. I would never suggest that a practise say, well, do you know what? I’m just going to outsource all my paraplanning tomorrow and off we go. Fingers crossed. And having said that, I’ve seen my first example of that happen within our own outsource business. So we just went to month two now of working with a practise that decided that they wanted us to manage 320 of their clients end to end. So doing all of their review, prep, all of their plans, they’re holding onto admin in-house for now, but they’re sort of talking about getting some support for that in the new year as well. So I’ve never seen that before. That’s the first example I’ve seen of a business sort of flicking the switch and saying, right, we’re just going to go the whole hole now.
It’s worked okay. It hasn’t been perfect. I would still say that the to in the water first is a better way to do it. This was a bit of a unique scenario, but I’ve now seen it all. I’ve seen that and it can be done, but it’s not ideal. So almost all of our practises that we look after started off in a variety of different scenarios. So it could have been that they got us doing admin only, so just a dedicated admin person. It could have been that they got us doing a portion of their plans, see new clients or I think the most common example would be new business. I think there’s a perception out there with advisors that that’s the most heavy lifting. Heavy lifting, they’re the most difficult plans to put together, so we’ll give you that stuff and that’s fine. We’re not fussed about that. But yeah, I’d say eight or nine out of 10 of our clients that started off that way, we now more or less do everything.
Rob Pyne:
Is part of that perhaps preference to sort of onboard not just a preference for the firm to dip the toe in the water, but also perhaps a preference on your end? I mean you said you’ve just done one that’s a three 20, the whole shooting match in one go, but is part of that preference on your end as well because you’ve naturally got resource that, and so how do you resource something with that forward planning when it’s going from where you are to plus three 20 effectively in a short space of time, you’ve been able to do it, you’ve clearly got the ability to adapt to that. So can you share a bit about how you resource on your side and how do you train the next generation of people coming through in Vietnam to make sure there is resourcing there?
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
To answer your question honestly, absolutely, yes. So it is my preference to do it sort of towing the water first because I think it’s better for us and it’s better for the advice business. It’s definitely better for us, not in terms, not in the sense of we can’t resource it, we can resource it. So this 320 client, we did that just fine and we are employing in the order of three to four people a month in Ho Chi Min City. But the reason it’s better for us is different. It’s not about can we do the work? Can we do the work to the standard that I want to do the work? And so our in-house training system is pretty simple and a bit surprising I would say. Some people look at it and go, you guys are mad for doing this, but the way we work is we will take on new employees and we will unleash them on our own practise.
So our advice business is the training ground. Now we don’t mind if people get things wrong on us because we’ll fix it, we’ll sort it out. We’re not going to get cranky people getting things wrong and it’s part of the cost of what we do. So all of our new staff get unleashed on our practise. Once we get them to a sufficient standard that we think they know what they’re doing, then they’re fine to be released onto other businesses. So there’s an immediate level of competence that we’re assessing in-house first, and then invariably we lose our staff to other businesses. That’s just the way it goes.
Rob Pyne:
Wow, that’s a big sacrifice you’re making there for your own financial business.
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
It is. It is. But I mean we’ve got at any 1.9 people just in the paraplanning team working just on our practise, so we’ve got like 550 clients now. Those nine people are not working full-time on our practise. They’re all working mainly on our practise, but then on one or two others as well. But there’s that core team that’s there that allows us to get on with our work and our expectations are high. I mean, our practise is no cookie cutter advice business. We’re not doing throwing clients into a master trust and then not looking at them for another 12 months. All of our clients basically, except for a hundred of the smaller ones sitting in wrap accounts with bespoke portfolios, a combination of direct equities and ETFs and managed funds and whatever else, and they all look a little bit different, we’re reviewing them sometimes more than once a year. So there is complexity in the advice business, and that automatically means that when new staff get unleashed on our business, they’re going to learn really quickly. They don’t have a choice. So the learning curve is steep and needs to be fairly quick,
Rob Pyne:
And as you said there, you’re not going from zero to one to zero. Again, you’re going from a team that’s adding people in and some are progressing through. So speaking of zeros and ones, how do you manage that question that everyone will have around data security and client confidentiality? Obviously we’re working with an offshore team and that’s not new. That’s been done for many years by major corporations and now much more recently and extensively by small and mid-market, financial planning, accounting, mortgage brokers, like how do you handle that question when people say, how does we do ensure our data secure and how do we not just ensure it’s secure, but how do we prove that it is secure? If we ever get queried around how we’re managing privacy,
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
That’s probably the number one question we get from people. To be honest. Look, there’s different ways to answer that question. You could say, oh, we subscribe to an ISO standard around data security and therefore we’re okay, or whatever it might be, or we’ve got these wonderful cyber standards. The truth of the matter is there are a couple of very practical things that you need to be doing first and foremost, in order to, irrespective of whatever policies and standards and whatever else you subscribe to, there are basic things you need to be doing regularly. The first is using client portals, not emailing client information back and forth as much as possible. Obviously you’re using the source of truth being X plan to save documents to, so you’re not actually emailing anything or using OneDrive or whatever secure software you’ve got in terms of not moving data anywhere other than it needs to go where it needs to go, I should say.
The second is really testing our staff constantly. So peppering them, and I’m talking every month here. I’m not talking once or twice a year, but peppering them on basic standards. So knowing not to click on suspicious links, knowing how to look out for really basic phishing attacks or whatever else it might be, understanding what a scam actually looks like because I’ve worked in a previous life in practise management for 15 years and I’ve seen advisors get it wrong. I’ve seen pretty smart humans click on the wrong thing. I’ve seen email accounts hacked and hackers tracking emails back and forth and then communicating to clients pretending they’re the advisor and getting funds diverted and all sorts of stuff. So I think if you’re getting the basics right and you’re diligent around that, that’s step number one. Then in terms of the policy stuff and the measures we’ve got, obviously all of our staff have got companies issued devices.
They’re working from the office, they’re not sitting in some random place at home on their own laptop. So our staff sit in a centralised location in one office in Min City. We have constant monitoring of all of their devices. They’re disabled obviously for thumb drives and the rest, we’ve got a security team that are looking at our stuff on site. So I’ve got a teams grouped with the security team and we’re constantly back and forth on variety of matters. We also, because our heritage is from a big licensee, for many of your listeners there that are self licenced that have come from licensee land, you probably know that the requirements of big licensees these days in terms of cybersecurity are extreme. So there have been court cases where licensees have been caught out by ASIC on breaches of data security, and as a result of those, they’ve come down like a tonne of bricks on the sorts of measures you need to have in place. Now, as an outsource business, we are an approved provider to one of the biggest licensees in the country, and we’ve had to go through a pretty rigorous spend all management process to show that we are fit for purpose. And so there’s stuff like that that just by the course of things and the way that we operate and the fact where we happen to be licenced with a big licensee, the standards we operate to, I’m going to say probably higher than the vast majority of your listeners in terms of what you think needs to happen.
Rob Pyne:
And so obviously there’s privacy and data security, but also just within our industry there are so many changes to the way in which advice is being delivered, legislative change, the forces that upon us and the compliance requirements that go around that. How do you help keep your team up to speed with the back office sort of service standards that are going to meet the regulatory environment that we work in? What’s the process you follow there?
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
A similar sort of answer to the previous question. The fact that we happen to be an advice business as well is very, very helpful. So I’d say most outsource providers that they’ve been formed in order to provide a service or a widget or a whatever to financial advisors, they would probably have a harder time than we would keeping up with legislative change because it’s part of what we do day to day as advisors as well as outsource providers. So yeah, it’s a pretty simple process there. It’s a hand in glove scenario between the advice business and the outsource business. And of course we do work across multiple licensees and self licenced businesses. So some of what we do, a lot of, I guess what we work with as an advice business is templated. So the change is in fact managed by the big licensee, whereas for self licence businesses, you’ve got to do that yourself and you need to have someone, be it your legal firm or whoever you’ve got helping you run your licence to keep up with change. Yeah, it’s a bit more of a no brainer on my side.
Rob Pyne:
Yeah, for sure. That makes perfect sense. So from your experience both at aptiom, your business as well as now seeing it for other businesses that you’re supporting through Optum Assist, what are you seeing as some of the key benefits planners experienced when they outsource back office functions? You talked about profitability when we caught up, so do you want to just talk to that question? So what are you seeing people get as a benefit from this process of offshoring and outsourcing some of those core back office functions?
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
I think a starting point for a lot of advisors might be that I want a cheaper way of doing things. So chasing profit is just one reason why people pursue outsourcing, but I actually think that the better benefit from what I can see is that advisors, once they’re using an outsource business that works, it can be us or anyone else, it doesn’t really matter, but what it really means is that you can go to sleep at night not fearing, gosh, what happens if so-and-so quits. What happens if someone gets hit by a bus? It’s that management of key person risk. It’s the knowing that the staff member that you’ve got that is a little bit discontent doing some work that they don’t enjoy doing, suddenly you’ve given them back the capacity that they want to do high value work. It’s all of that sort of stuff.
And then from an efficiency and a profitability point of view, I think over time what I’m seeing, I just had a client this morning text me and say, look, thanks for giving me that advice to do a client experience survey. He had like a 44% response rate and 89 NPS in his survey results and his clients are loving the work that they’re doing for them. But we’ve been working with this practise for about four years and we’ve gotten them to a point where now they’ve got that day-to-day capacity because of the heavy lifting we’re doing to really focus on their clients and get that client experience. And you can talk about profitability all you like, but as far as I’m concerned, if you’re doing the right thing for your clients, your business tends to grow and everything kind of looks after itself from there. So yeah, I feel like we’re doing that sort of backend stuff and the top line and front end stuff seems to take care of itself over time, which is what I love seeing.
Rob Pyne:
Yeah, it’s not just a profitability improvement potentially, but as you say, it’s a capacity release to actually do higher value tasks and perhaps do the things that actually you’ve always wanted to do and can enhance the client service experience and consequently you’re getting higher NPS scores for those sorts of firms.
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
I’d also add to that a lot of what we do is challenge businesses as to whether what they’re doing is adding any value at all to their clients. So much of what we do is actually observing a process and going, well, I wonder what would happen if you didn’t do that. Would a client even care? And so part of what we do is taking on tasks that advisors don’t want to do or we can do more efficiently or whatever, but another part of it is in fact pointing out things where they could be doing something that is a complete waste of time and just challenging them a little bit on things like that.
Rob Pyne:
So a bit of business coaching creeps in there because you’ve seen what businesses are doing, it’s working. So you’re actually through lived experience, your business and others, you’re actually able to perhaps just help other firms see the best practises that you are seeing and apply those to improve their own business.
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
Absolutely, and it’s whether it comes from us or whether it comes from connecting some of our clients with each other, some of what we do is pairing people off and saying, well, you’re telling me you want to be better at this, that or the next thing. But I know Joe Smith over there is actually great at that one. You have a chat there and see where that goes.
Rob Pyne:
Yeah. Great. So obviously it’s working well for you and other businesses. So what tasks or aspects of the business of financial planning should really be always remaining in-House rather than being outsourced? What do you do and what do others do that you think really is sacrosanct for the internal team?
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
There’s immediately a couple of things that stand out for me. So one of the things I’d say is, yeah, of course, anything client related. So picking up the phone, booking in client appointments, anything related to the relationship with the client in my opinion is better served onsite by whoever. The other area I would say, which is in my opinion I think is better on shore, is the actual transacting. So the placement of transactions in terms of implementing advice from a governance point of view, we’ve taken a position as a practise to do that part on shore. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have the confidence that could be done offshore. We know it can, and many of our clients do get our staff offshore to do that, but when you’re running a larger business with 600 odd clients and complex portfolios and lots of transactions every single day, we’ve simply taken the view that, you know what? We can do that on shore and we feel more comfortable knowing if we make a mistake, it’s on us. Yeah, I’d say that’s the other obvious area where people make choice on how to
Rob Pyne:
Do things. Okay, great. I’m sure that certainly resonates with me as well. So you talked a bit earlier about the fact that what perhaps makes your business at Apio assist a little different to others is that you really are not trying to just compartmentalise tasks and just pick those sort of very finite jobs and do them, but really become an embedded part of the team. So can you perhaps just expand on that a bit more about how maybe your service proposition differs from other providers such as VBP and five Elk and others that are in this space that have been there a little while as well. Do you have a sense of what those others in the market are doing relative to what Aptiom is doing?
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
Very much so. Absolutely. So a lot of the work we pick up is people have worked with others that didn’t work out or whatever it might be. So look, we can deliver the same services as everybody else, and that’s fine. So if people just want financial plans done, so that’s fine, we can do that, and we do do that for the odd client also, administration is very much similar to our competitors. If you want a dedicated person, that’s fine, we can do that. It’s the little things where I think we do them quite differently. So a good example is let’s say on the admin side, if someone wants an admin person dedicated, often what the case is with our competitors is you get given a person, you get charged a flat monthly fee and then good luck training them and off you go. And then a year in they might get promoted and suddenly the cost has gone up or they’ve been moved on and you’ve got a new person or whatever.
That’s a really typical scenario. We look at that and go, how can you run a business like that? It doesn’t work. I mean, being an advice business, if we had a person that got substituted out because they were promoted or another business, I mean, it just doesn’t make sense. So for us, we say, right, we will take on the training of new staff. So if you want an admin person, that’s fine. We’ll have someone ready for you in two weeks and you just give us a task list and let us know what you need done, and they’ll do it from day one. Now, of course, they’re not going to do it because they’re not trained to do it. So what we do is we bring in one of really experienced team leaders to buddy with them for a period of time that could be three months, six months, whatever it takes, and our team leader will get your work done on day one and train the staff member on the job.
And that way you’ve constantly got two sets of eyes on a business. So if anything ever happens to that admin person, you’ve got the team leader that can step in and train someone else and do it and provide that sort of continuity. So that’s the first really big difference I’d say, is it’s fundamental to us. This concept of key person risk and completely removing it is fundamental to everything that we do. So we ask practises to treat us like a black box. You will give us the work and it will get done, and you won’t have to concern yourself with who gets it done. We’re just going to manage that from training to execution. So that’s conceptually I think how we’re different in terms of no key person risk. The other area is organisation and how we organise work. So I mentioned at the beginning that our paraplanners are skilled in a whole lot more than the production of advice stocks, and most of our clients actually take up this kind of offer.
So there’s a couple of benefits of doing things in a way where your paraplanner or paraplanning team are the people that get you ready for your reviews and reduce your advice and do the post presentation clean up in xplan and all that kind of stuff. The first obvious benefit for that is advisors don’t have to worry about the review process at all anymore. That’s just done by a team, and you don’t have to worry about is it a, or is it admin or is it a complex plan or a simple plan, or how long is it going to take me to fill in my SOA order form or whatever it might be. It’s just go and see your client and we’ll do the rest. So that’s a pretty cool way of organising the work. But the benefit for us as an advice, as an outsource business is that our staff not getting bored churning through SOAs.
We’re getting them focused on one or two businesses, but they’re managing the entire review process. So they’re doing bits and pieces of work that make sure that they’re learning constantly. They’re getting a bit of diversity in terms of the work that they’re doing, and they’re critical to those advice businesses. So our sort of pod structure of paraplanners, they’re really ambitious guys. Most of these guys are degree qualified. They’ve either done degrees in Australia and moved back home to Ho Min City or they’ve got local degrees and they want to do something in life. So we’re giving them that opportunity to do stuff that is really not dog’s body work. We’re encouraging our staff to be thinkers to spot holes in plans and think about strategies the advisors and thought of. And yeah, so we’ve got a couple of CFAs, believe it or not, in the team, not CFA three, they’ve done their CFA one level one, we’ve got two of those. And yeah, I’d say that’s the biggest difference is the quality of our people, the way we organise the work, and then the fact we try and avoid key personal.
Rob Pyne:
Yeah, for sure. Can you share perhaps a real world success story of a firm, a financial planning firm, that significantly sort of improved their business by our sourcing to you, whether it’s your own business, obviously you were the first cab off the rank, but perhaps another and share a little bit about what were the key outcomes for that business?
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
I’ll try and make it really fast and do two. So I can think of two totally different examples. The one I can think of the earlier one timeline wise was a sole practitioner where he was at that point in time, he lost his only staff member. He was a great planner, great advisor, sound advice, but just disorganised and at risk of being, let’s say, exited by his licensee. And so by taking on basically every back office function, so everything from paraplanning to implementation to the space of one year, his business was unrecognisable, his ex plan was unrecognisable. We had every client with all of their data fields updated, so it was completely squeaky clean, and compliance was no longer an issue for him because we were helping him follow the bouncing ball. So that was probably the earliest example I can think of. But in terms of a larger business and more recent, so in let’s say September of last year, we had quite a large client, three advisors, about 400 clients, Melbourne based, and they at that point in time, were getting us to do 30 just their overflow, the new clients basically 30 plans a year.
And that was it in September or October last year, we were at a conference with them. They tapped my business partner Phil on the shoulder and said, listen, we’ve just lost two staff at the same time. Can you go from 30 to a whole business? And that was like a Thursday or midweek some point, and by the Monday we were running their whole business. So they’ve still got onshore staff, but we are doing all of their review prep, all of their advice docs, their implementation actually they’re doing in the Philippines. So they’ve got two staff in the Philippines. They used to be with Five Elk, who you mentioned before, but they’ve been with them for many, many years, like five or six years. And again, that’s something that we’re entirely okay with. Sometimes you’ll outsource with two different parties, and we’ve got to work out a way to make that all hang together. And again, when you’re diligent around workflow management and you’ve got that codified in something in our case monday.com, it makes that pretty seamless.
Rob Pyne:
Yeah, great. Wow. Can you think of one of the more surprising or unexpected benefits that a client of apdi Assist has shared with you having made the journey to outsource offshore some of their support services?
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
I’d say the more surprising benefit is for integrated businesses. So we look after a accounting and advice business, and it’s really, really interesting to see them shift their focus and go from just using us for paraplanning to actually, you guys could be running everything. So all of our outsourcing for the accounting and the advice business. Now, we don’t do outsourcing for accounting at all. We’re getting requests for that from some of our clients. But yeah, that’s surprising to us that people are asking for services we don’t even provide yet.
Rob Pyne:
Yeah, that’s great. I mean, obviously you’re doing something right if people are saying, can we just do more than you’re already doing? And trying to think of ways they can utilise the service, you’ve given us a really good understanding of just how effective outsourcing through optimists can be. Jerry, I’ve just got one final question for you. I guess, and it’s a bit of a wrap up question. Financial planners that are considering outsourcing, what do you think the most important factors that a planner should be thinking about or evaluating when determining if it’s right for their business?
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
I think the first thing is be really, really clear about what problem you’re trying to solve. What is it that you are trying to get done? Is it that you’re trying to be more profitable? Is it that you are trying to not have the burden of managing staff or replacing key staff or supporting existing staff? I think if you’re really clear about your why to begin with, that helps to answer everything after that because there is always a compromise. There’s always a compromise. You could say, okay, well actually I’m just trying to save on costs. I’m really at a loss here and I need to cut somewhere. If that’s the case, that’s fine, but you typically will get what you pay for. And so the quid pro quo, there might be in fact that you are saving a bit and you’re getting cheap plans, but in fact, you might find that the quality of the plans is inconsistent or you’ve got someone fantastic today that they get switched out in six months time and the next person’s a blank slate kind of thing. So I think, yeah, there’s a real clarity that you need to get to in terms of understanding what you’re solving and why. And similarly, I would say we are not necessarily for everyone. So there are practises that we’ve spoken to where they sort of say, the cheap plan is really all I want. And we can’t look at that and go, that’s okay, and we can do cheap plans, but actually we can add so much more value in a different way that it’s not a great source, it’s not a great utilisation of our resources. We can do a better job elsewhere. So we are okay saying occasionally no to respective clients.
Rob Pyne:
So really know why you’re going in initially at least having a wire at the front end if you’re going to consider outsourcing. But as I think you’ve outlined very effectively today, once you do begin to outsource some functions, people will often be thinking, I can now see more of what you could do for me. And so it is, you might have an initial wire but becomes more than the initial premise before long, they’re actually doing a lot more with you. That is perhaps not what they originally approached you for.
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
That’s right. And yeah, you’ve just got to test things. I think going all in is okay, it’s not impossible, but you’re taking a bit of a risk as an advice business that you’ve chosen the right partner. So if I was in their shoes, I wouldn’t do it. I, I’d absolutely want to validate that the choice I’ve made is the right one, and I can see the benefit of partnering with anyone. But yeah, the other thing I guess is none of this stuff is a one-way street necessarily. I think as an advisor, I’d encourage people to do something. Doing something and testing something is better than doing nothing. I think being open to what could be is a great mindset general in business. And yeah, we certainly employ that in our own practise. We’re doing different things all the time. We’re not assuming we know best. We learn from some of the practises that we work with. We exchange information all the time, and being open-minded is a good thing.
Rob Pyne:
Yeah. Great. Thanks, Jerry. I really appreciate you spending some time today to illuminate a little bit more about your service and how it might support financial planning businesses like ours, like you are with others already. And appreciate taking the time to give us a bit of an understanding of that. And thanks for joining us on The Trusted Advisoer podcast.
Jerry Kalogeropoulos:
You’re very welcome. Thanks for having me.
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