Episode 4: Transforming Financial Planning with Technology with Pat Gardner

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Rob Pyne sits down with Pat Gardner, Technology Lead at Collins SBA and host of the AdviceTech podcast on the Ensombl platform. Pat shares his unique journey from financial planner to tech innovator, highlighting the ways technology is reshaping the financial planning and accounting landscape. Together, they explore the integration of Salesforce CRM at Collins SBA, key software tools that have enhanced their CRM’s functionality, and how forward-thinking firms use technology to elevate client experience and streamline operations.

LISTEN

SHOW NOTES

Key Topics Discussed

  • Pat’s Path from Planner to Tech Lead: Pat’s unique journey and what inspired him to take on the task of overhauling Collins SBA’s tech stack.
  • The Power of a Custom CRM: Transitioning from traditional financial planning software to a tailored Salesforce CRM, built from the ground up to serve multiple divisions, including financial planning, accounting, and business coaching.
  • Integrating Best-of-Breed Tools:
    • Workato: For seamless integrations and automation across platforms.
    • Stripe and Xero: Automating billing processes and enhancing financial operations.
    • Annature: A cost-effective, Australian-compliant e-signature solution.
    • Fireflies AI: For meeting transcriptions, AI-driven insights, and streamlined client communications.
  • Building Internal Tools: Developing an in-house compliance manager within Salesforce to meet AFSL obligations and simplify data management.
  • Emphasising Workflow: Pat’s strategic approach to using CRM workflows to align the team and improve operational flow.
  • AI and OpenAI Integration: Using AI to draw insights from client data and improve both client and team experiences.
  • Overcoming Challenges: Navigating the technical and cultural challenges of integrating new technologies and managing change within a multidisciplinary team.
  • Future Technology Trends: Pat’s insights on the next frontier of AI in CRM systems, reducing manual data entry, and using data for proactive client insights.

Quotes

  • “A CRM should be where everything happens—it’s the system of record that holds it all together.”
  • “You don’t need complex coding skills; with tools like Workato and Salesforce Flow, we’ve built
  • “We’re focused on making technology a seamless part of our work—not just for us, but for our clients too.”

Takeaways for listeners:

  • The importance of a unified CRM that integrates all divisions for seamless client experience.
  • How to strategically choose and integrate tools that enhance CRM capabilities without overcomplicating the tech stack.
  • Insights into leveraging AI and automation for operational efficiency in financial services.

Resources mentioned

Connect with Pat Gardner

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 Advisor. In today’s episode, we’re joined by Pat Gardner from Collins SBA -financial planner turned tech lead who’s been at the forefront of transformative technology and financial planning and accounting. Pat has not only spearheaded Collins SBA’s journey with a customised Salesforce CRM, but also hosts the Advice Tech podcast on the Ensombl platform, making him the perfect guest to discuss all things tech. Throughout this conversation, we dive deep into Pat’s innovative approach to integrating best of breed systems from automating workflows with Workato and Salesforce flow to creating seamless client billing with Stripe and Xero. Pat explains how he’s used AI driven tools like Fireflies and Open AI to enhance client interactions, streamline operations, and improved team efficiency. He also shares the ups and downs of managing change, especially when introducing new technology to a multidisciplinary team. Today’s episode is packed with insights on using technology to simplify processes, reduce costs, and deliver an exceptional client experience. We’ll hear about Pat’s unique journey, his vision for future tech trends in financial planning, and how forward thinking firms can leverage these tools to unlock new capabilities. Whether you’re a financial planner, business owner, or simply interested in the evolving role of tech in our industry, this episode will give you a fresh perspective on what’s possible. So get ready for an inspiring discussion on the future financial planning and tech innovation with Pat Gardner.

Welcome, Pat. It’s great to have you here.

Pat Gardner:

Thank you, Rob. I’m very excited to be here and yeah, first time I have a cameo as a guest, so appreciate it.

Rob Pyne:

Yeah, no, great to have you Pat. I am an avid listener of your work on the Advice Tech podcast, so I don’t think there’s anyone better placed to answer the questions I’ve got lined up for you today. So again, appreciate you taking the time to have a chat. So we’ve known each other for a little while now and we were so impressed with what you’ve done at Collins SBA. We’ve been in fairly regular contact just to sort of keep tabs and see what we can learn from the developments that you’ve undertaken at Collins SBA, which is so impressive and certainly have excited some of our internal people who are focusing their efforts on our own tech stack. But perhaps if we can begin, pat, could you start by sharing what initially sparked your interest in taking on the task of building the tech stack at Collins SBA after making the move where you were a financial planner at the time? So what was it that sparked your interest to jump across into the tech space?

Pat Gardner:

Thanks, Rob. I mean, I always had an interest in tech in general, also known as sort of shiny object syndrome, but when I was still like an associate advisor, so this would’ve been six or seven years ago, I came across within the Microsoft Suite Power Automate, so Microsoft Flow and power apps and that sort of thing. And that was literally just you’ve got those sort of nine dots when you go into office home and it’s like I’ve got all these apps and then one day just appeared and I just got curious and started having a go. And it really is just, it’s just basic sort of visual automation. So no code where you’re just going, if this happens, then do this, this, this, and this, et cetera. And at the time we were using midwinter, so we had gone self licenced. This was before my time away from XPLAN onto to Midwinter or Advice OS, which was pretty popular and up and coming at the time.

And I don’t know, the financial planning CRMs are just really bad at workflow. It’s all really task oriented and it’s not automated, it’s not speaking to, at least back then it’s not speaking to other tools. And I was just like, well, why don’t we reimagine the SOA request process? So as an associate, you’re getting those requests and they’re coming through half baked and it just wasn’t a great process. So it was like let’s use a flow and use the tools within the Microsoft Suite. So use planner to automate task creation and the form and all that sort of thing and just make sure we can make it more efficient then. So we’re doing that and then maybe six or 12 months after that we started going down the CRM pathway. So we’re an accounting, financial planning and business coaching firm, but we didn’t have a CRM as I mentioned.

We had Vice OS on mid winters that was just financial planning, so just for financial planning. Clients accounting we’re using or they’re still use Xero practise manager. They were using some sort of custom built workflow tool that another team member had built who’s then gone on to build their own accounting software, totally separate to that. And business coaching, always just business coaching, doing their own thing, PowerPoints, word, all that sort of stuff. And we just did not have a CRM. You’d have three business divisions and the only thing that’s really making this look like one business was the facade of the building. You go in, it’s just the silos, et cetera. So went down the CRM pathway, had an external independent consultant come in and recommend HubSpot basically. And it was an objective recommendation. We’re about to go down the HubSpot pathway and then Creative Mass came along.

So I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the story of Creative Mass, but I believe it came out of the Macquarie VAN network and they were going to build the term was the future of financial services delivered today, and they were essentially just going to rebuild XPLAN a better way, but on the Salesforce platform, which to be honest still makes sense in terms of picking a best of breed platform, a blank canvas, and then building off that. So we were the first client or customer of Creative Mass with their Wealth Connect product, and that was just like, wow, this is power automate system on steroids. It literally, I didn’t know that tech that existed in terms of the enterprise world in terms of automation and the blank canvas sort of things. And immediately I was just like, wow, this is something we need to get behind.

You go down the welcome trailblazers sort of pathway where you’ve got all the conferences and all the shining lights in the capital cities and all that sort of thing. And I remember coming back from one of those as we were still in the thinking phase about do we go down this path? And it was just like we literally have to do this. There are so many businesses of such a high calibre on the platforms. You’ve got all your big four banks or all probably the big six, big eight or just most financial institutions are on the Salesforce platform or at least had that in the tech stack. And it was just a no brainer in terms of if we’re going to come together as a business, we need to use the right tools. Little did we know that the Wealth Connect product hadn’t been built yet. So being client number one, that was really the social proof and the capital that they needed to actually build the thing. So a lot of what we saw was through what’s called Adobe Illustrator. So they were just mockups of screens of what Salesforce looked like it was going to look like from the point of view of their re-imagined furniture planning CRM

Rob Pyne:

They’d have been pleased to get you guys.

Pat Gardner:

Oh, exactly. Then yeah, so we just went down that pathway of essentially building it with them for probably the first six to 12 months. And then what sort of came out of that was we realised we had really poor data. And that’s what happens when you’ve got 17 sources of truth in terms of you don’t have one way of doing things in a business for multiple divisions. You have clients that are clients of multiple divisions, so the accounting client, financial planning client, business coaching client, but there’s just all these separate systems of record, so how do you pick the source of truth? So that was one issue there. The other issue was that they complicated the heck out of it from day one. They went custom code and it just fell apart and it just never worked as it was originally intended. I think they also understandably lost focused on us as they wanted to move on to bigger and better things.

So as I said, we were that first client that enabled them to get that social proof to move on to bigger businesses and Covid happened as well. So we had this sort of great working relationship where they would come down and we’d all be doing it in person and then Covid sort of changed that. So working through that, and then I was a financial advisor at the time and once again having a play around inside Salesforce and worked out, they had the same or similar sort of tool to Microsoft in terms of the power automate style platform where they have this visual tool called Salesforce Flow. And in that tool you can literally do anything. And so what we did was whilst Wealth Connect or created Mass, were building the future of financial services delivered by the end of next week. For other firms, it was just me and a colleague doing workarounds.

We were just building things that were solving for our problems and releasing them within hours or days just building really simple things like it might be like a contact request form or this bit of automation that’s in the background and no one sees it, but it sort of surprises and delights you on the other side, you haven’t had to fill in 17 fields or create new records, et cetera. And that just kept building and building in terms of our own abilities in terms of internally on Salesforce is incredibly Googleable. As I mentioned, you’ve got the biggest businesses in the world that are using it, which means that everyone’s got issues and they’ve Googled it before and there’s lots of forums and they’ve got a great training platform in Trailhead. So we just skilled up and as problems came along, can we solve it within Salesforce?

And really just brought all the problems that Creative Mass weren’t solving and just started honing in on those to the point where it got to a stage where they had totally butchered the accounting workflow side of things. It was once again very custom. It wasn’t fit for purpose in terms of accountants don’t like tasks. I dunno if anyone likes tasks, but accountants work on jobs changing hands, not if this happens, then do this task and do this task and repeat 17 times. It’s like the threadification of XPLAN in terms of everyone’s got this hangover of this is how workflow is done. And so they were having a real hard time over in accounting and to be honest, Wealth Connect was never meant to be an accounting product, but it was sort of like, oh, you’re client number one, you’re not happy, let’s try and solve this problem as well.

But no, that got butchered and it was just like, well, it got to a point where there was almost a mutiny in accounting. We had two team members actually get up and leave the business because they were coming to work and not knowing where things are at or what they had to do for the day and just using this enterprise CRM, but absolutely hating it and just questioning everything really to the point where you had two team members left and it was like, well, okay, we’ve got a bit of a crisis here. And it was like, okay, pat, do you want to have a go at this and try and see if we can apply those same learnings that you and your colleague have been doing from the perspective of simple solutions? Are there integrations that we can pop in there and just reimagine this?

And so that was the first main win I think we had in terms of bringing back that trajectory of our CRM journey and it was just fixing accounting workflow and then it just all flowed on from there to the point where it was like, okay, you’ve clearly demonstrated that it’s possible without Wealth Connect, without Creative Mass, what else can we do and how can we go from there? And then in terms of now financial planning also used that same workflow rails or workflow system, so you now have the full business on the same architecture and then that links to proposals and all sorts of other things. But that was really where it all started and then it was like, okay, you’ve clearly got a keen interest in this. I obviously didn’t have, I didn’t have a full client base at the time in terms of financial planning clients, so that transition was as easy as it could be.

So I had about 60 or 70 clients and it was really just about making a decision on the future and it just really got me going a lot more than cups of tea and no change roas. And a lot of the things about that too is technology is far less regulated. There’s just the freedom to build things and have that direct impact. I dunno if it’s a bit of a control freak about it, but it’s a lot easier to control your own destiny in the tech side of things than it is to talk about fingers crossed markets or recover just wait sort of thing. So it’s probably just my personality, but that’s how it came to be. And then it’s been about two and a half, three years since we exited that relationship with Creative Mass Wealth Connect and they’ve since had their own problems and been sold off and I think there’s a private investigator looking for the original founder still dunno where he is. But yeah, having a good time on our own and choosing your own destiny,

Rob Pyne:

It’s quite a story. I mean actually as you say, there was a lot of excitement early there and you got to see what’s possible and obviously that really lit a fire under you to see what you could do directly even before things started to go south, you were getting in there and trying to improve things and make things better for your business as they were trying to build their product and sell it to other potential Collins SBAs out there that were looking for a solution. People think financial planners are very quant driven and we are numbers people, but obviously you’ve got a bit of creativity there pat as well. And you could see the creative flare pop out and thinking, how do I actually now utilise what I’ve seen and turn this into something that actually can work for us? So he obviously grabbed it with both hands and it became almost a necessity by the sound of it in some respects.

Things had gone so far south, you’d lost team members there and you thought, I’ve really got to, and obviously the team supported you to say, pat, help us here if you can really take a hold of this and try and get us through what was a pretty tricky situation. And obviously you just ran with it and started making some really transformative changes to what was at the time. Sounds like it was in a bit of a struggle street. So I guess Salesforce as you say, is such a world leading CRM and so many businesses are using it as you say, it’s very googleable, you can see a lot of what’s possible being so highly customizable. Can you walk us through some of those first major changes or customizations that you implemented that right back in the early days? I mean you mentioned a contact form. What were the first early wins that you were able to go as it flows, whatever it was saying, I reckon we can do this and I reckon we can make a real difference with our own efforts here. What were some of those early wins that you got?

Pat Gardner:

Yeah, I touched on it before around the workflow side of things and I’ve soon sort of realised that when you are rolling out a new piece of tech using Salesforce or enterprise CRM as an example, you actually have to start with workflow. Otherwise you don’t have many reasons for team members to be in that system. There’s no way that you can go live with A CRM and then everything’s turned on and working from day one, but you need team members in there for a reason. And so workflow was key there. I mentioned before around the accounting team coming on the workflow side of things. That was an absolute game changer for us. But the other thing too with that was workflow then became tied to engagements in terms of you would have a client sign onto a proposal and then that’s your press go for your workflow then beginning.

So that was a massive change in the business on client has agreed to something we’re then going to deliver on it, not we’re going to do this and fingers crossed the clients will then pay for it on the other side. So we had that there and then introducing that to financial planning along the same sort of mindset as well. And the whole point with workflow as well has been because you’ve got different templates in terms of the stages that workflow goes through all the different types of jobs. We call them jobs, but it’s really just a workflow. I can embed all the 17 other things you need to do within that workflow as well. So a team member can not only be in Salesforce using their workflow but without actually leaving that job, they can get their job done as well or that has been some of the first major stuff that we’ve done on the workflow side, we’re a self licenced business in the financial planning side of things.

And I mentioned we’ve got accounting as well. So a big focus as well as part of that initial stages was just getting rid of the reliance on spreadsheets. And that’s actually is all what a CRM is. It is just a spreadsheet that looks nice, but it’s also relational and with controls in place as well. So what we’re able to do is actually build our own A FSL compliance manager. It’s a separate app within Salesforce, but it’s all embedded as well. So all of our controls are in there. You’ve got team members assigned to those controls, so they’re reviewing them based on the cadence that’s required. So whether it’s monthly or quarterly, six monthly annually, et cetera. So all of your policies are in there too, but it’s then also the software register as well. So all the software that we use, making sure that that adheres to the Australian privacy principles and even things like using it as the CRM for who’s your BDM at this institution or this place or this tech, how much are we paying for that tech?

What currency do we pay for that tech in? All that sort of stuff. So that became a separate beast of its own and that was peak side of the desk stuff. In terms of, what I mean by that is when I was still an advisor, but also doing the tech stuff on the side, we would have monthly A SL compliance meetings, a full compliance overhaul, and it was really about mapping all of our compliance controls to the obligations that we have as an AFSL and also all of your registers as well. So other reasons why having compliance in your CRM is a great thing too is team members don’t need to get out of their flow of work to a, I don’t know, report a breach or report an incident. So I’ve just made it really easy for team members to, they’re in a job, they might notice something has happened, they can easily log that incident without having to leave their flow of work. And that was totally separate from the mandate of Creative Mass or Wealth Connect. Anyway, so that wasn’t even part of the original scope. I think SharePoint as well was probably one of, sorry Rob.

Rob Pyne:

I was just going to say there. So this is, this compliance manager software kind of created, embedded in Salesforce, so it was native in Salesforce and allowed people to make notes of issues that surfaced through their workflow so they didn’t have to sort of step out and try and record it somewhere else, but it was all embedded in there. So is that software that Salesforce have as one of the service offers? I mean I know they’ve got a whole range of different offerings or did you just using flows just build that as a native flow inside your, inside your CRM?

Pat Gardner:

Yeah, it’s totally custom. So where flows comes in is the user interface. So you control what users see and they do and what happens in the background. So that could be scheduled automation. So every night at midnight this happens. Or it could be a screen, like you mentioned that contact form example before. It could be a combination of things. So Flow is just like how you make it look nice, but also functional. But in terms of the AFSL compliance manager, that’s just totally custom through custom objects that you’re creating. It’s a bit like a tab in a spreadsheet, creating another tab in a spreadsheet that’s controls another tab for obligations, but then linking that all together through the relational nature of a CRM. Yeah, exactly. So totally custom but peak side of the desk stuff, but not overly complicated either.

Rob Pyne:

So you got to I guess begin to see what was possible. And so you really just started to build things you could see could be done because you understood the objects, you understood the capabilities of the CRM and thought, well we could do this, this, and this. Now that I know what’s possible, it’s going back to the first principles, isn’t it? You’re not just seeing what’s out the box and someone showing you showing an object. You’re seeing first principles, I know what this does, I know how it works, therefore it should be able to apply in these other scenarios. So can you remember some of the, I mean you talked about there, the bringing together of the accounting and financial planning immediately, that’s a massive win, isn’t it? A business, it’s multidisciplinary is running off different systems. You’re trying to operate like one business, but it’s just a facade.

So that made you one, but you were at the forefront of bringing that together as a true one business of one source of truth and overcoming all those sort of disparate system issues. So can you remember some of the challenges beyond that immediate, most immediate one that you actually were facing when you were trying to integrate Salesforce with other systems or tools that you used in the business? And how did you overcome those integration issues potentially with Salesforce now as the hub? What other potential challenges were there around other pieces of software that you had?

Pat Gardner:

Yeah, no, I mean there’s a lot of challenges, but I think the main problem is is that it’s Salesforce, but then it’s Salesforce plus plus plus plus plus. A lot of businesses are led to believe that this thing works out of the box from day one. And you’ve got all these bits of functionality that you just would assume would be there, either included in the licence costs that you’re paying for, sometimes annually in advance or quarterly if you’re lucky. But it’s a lot of the, it’s actually the blank canvas anxiety of we’ve got this tool that’s been thrust upon us where yes, it’s called Financial services cloud, that’s the cloud that we use, but it’s incredibly Americanized and I don’t think Salesforce have had the, I don’t know, the penetration if you want to call it that from A FSC in the Australian market that they have wanted.

And that actually opened up the opportunity for businesses like Creative Mass or Wealth to come in and to configure that for those businesses and build the Australian version of it. So there’s that side of things where you just go, wow, we’re now spending a truckload on this enterprise CRM, but now I’ve got to spend money on this and this and this and this, and it all adds up. A great example is document Generation. You’d think that that’d be quite simple, but now you’ve got Conga, which has had this 20 plus year stranglehold on Salesforce. I don’t know how, it’s probably because lots of big businesses use it, insurance companies and banks to generate letters that they’re still mailing out to clients and just the change management of ripping that and putting something else in is just not worth it. So somehow that business still exists, but you’re using late 1990s PDF, Microsoft Word merging tech and paying for it as well.

So it’s just like everyone needs a licence for this sort of thing, this additional thing, marketing doesn’t come out of the box either. You’ve got things like campaigns and emails and stuff, but you need to get an external marketing tool. And yes, there’s implementations or rather, but you’ve got to pick the right one. So you’re making all these decisions on a daily basis on what are we going to add to the stack and does it actually integrate? That’s the other thing. Not all integrations are made equal when you’ve got Salesforce, it’s enterprise tech. A lot of the integrations are built with the mindset that it’s just a business that’s selling to other businesses and the actual structure of how clients and accounts and all that sort of thing is set up is actually it’s based on companies and then companies have their VP and then they’ve got their decision makers and all that sort of thing.

And that doesn’t suit financial planning firms or I don’t know, accounting firms or just firms like you and I. So there’s that sort of challenge of, geez, we’ve got to customise this stuff that you would’ve thought would be quite basic. And that’s where you start to appreciate those sort of financial planning style CRMs because they are built in that way. I think one of the main challenges though is a lot of people say that if you are building your own CRM, so yes, we’re standing on the shoulders of giants, but it’s the same thing as living in a house that’s also being renovated at the same time. So you’ve got this perpetual change management where team members are coming to work the next day and this minor thing might’ve changed because maybe I’ve done that and gone, wow, everyone’s going to love this. And then instead they go, what the heck has changed? It might be so minor, but it’s just ruined my muscle memory of this is how I did this yesterday. So it’s just this perpetual challenge of keeping everyone motivated to say, we’re doing this for these three reasons and this is why we’ve made that change. So managing the change is actually harder and takes longer than building the customised functionality. So that is probably one of the biggest challenges. That’s a great

Rob Pyne:

Insight as you say there. Just to pause for a second there, I just want to dig into that because as you say there, you’ve just shared something which I think people would initially be quite surprised by that you said the integrations themselves, once you get into it, you can do a lot, but you actually have to kind of bring the team with you and not sort of inflicted on them so fast that they get change fatigue and start to wonder what it’s all for. And so that’s a really key insight, isn’t it, that to think that yes, the technology’s available, it can do amazing things, but you’ve got to try to make sure you bring your team with you at a pace they can cope with. And even internally our own business, we’ve experienced that where we ask about at our quarterly board meeting of our executive team, what’s working, what’s not working, and one of the things that the directors said is, I can’t keep up with the technology change and we’re not going as fast as you pat. So it is very much the pace of change is challenging, isn’t it? Because we who are trying to make things better for everyone need to acknowledge that people have got day jobs and they’re actually trying to accommodate those changes into their workflow and just say, make new muscle memory from the old ways of doing things. So it’s a really, really good insight you’ve shared.

Pat Gardner:

I’m totally with you and I think I was just going to say that it’s way easier, and this is why it was probably easier in the early stages, it’s way easier to roll out new functionality because you haven’t had a previous way of doing that, just new things. Whereas when you’re changing existing process and existing integrations et cetera, that is where it really hurts, at least in the short term. And then you really do see it on the other side. But you mentioned the question was around specific challenges. We also had the challenge of around integrations where you might have Sasso have this app exchange where you can jump on there and instal or download integrations essentially, or configurations or customizations, et cetera, but a lot of them don’t do, they might do six out of the 10 things you want them to do to the point where sometimes it’s not worth actually getting it because spending money on it and it’s actually not solving your problems.

And so what we ended up doing, this is probably about two and a half years ago now, it was now Pat, you are leading the tech strategy and the Salesforce side of things and trying to do it on config instead of code. And we got to a point where the mantra was and still is to try and keep it as simple as possible but possible where we need to integrate, try and find an off the shelf solution and then if not, try and build and plug that gap either through custom configuration or development, et cetera. So we went down this path of actually employing a contractor through India, so a Salesforce developer whose core focus was integrations and doing them in basically where we couldn’t do that in a retail way. So I’ve mentioned before about the power automate platform and Salesforce flow, et cetera.

It was really just when we need to extend that capability, can we get this resource, this person to actually build that side of things and do the funky stuff in say Xero for example. And that was great at the time because he was doing some incredible work on integrations that were highly custom and highly configured to what we needed, but all we were doing is were just creating tech debt because I don’t know how to code and he was building, he is using Salesforce Apex, which is the coding language that Salesforce uses. And so if anything happened with that without him there or moving forward as a business, we would need to essentially put out to tender or go and find a Salesforce developer to a look at this monstrosity that’s been built, understand what we’ve got there, redo it, et cetera. And it wasn’t scalable in terms of keeping up with the, as you mentioned, just the sheer pace of change.

So that was not a long-term strategy and so what we were able to do is at the same time that that same was also leaving that organisation, we were able to stumble across Workato. So I encourage you to listen to, you mentioned the Advicetech podcast, that was my first episode as host and I know you’re about to whip out the credit card Rob to actually purchase Workato after hearing it, but Workato has absolutely changed the game for us and it’s given me absolute superpowers when it comes to integrating other tools, extending those integrations and then being able to just orchestrate processes and just get things done. So Workato has really brought everything together from a tech stack perspective where we’ve been able to integrate those tools that maybe aren’t available on the app exchange, but then take them even further through custom API stuff as well. So yeah, without Workato and without Salesforce flow, we would be nothing. That is literally how our org or Salesforce instance has been built on and it runs on Workato and Salesforce flow.

Rob Pyne:

You are right. I did listen into that episode and I did get excited about the possibilities of Workato and obviously you are further down the journey than us. We’re not using native Salesforce FSC the way you are and we’re using fys as you know. But I did think this sounds like a pretty amazing software and clearly it is a very useful piece of software for your business and what you’ve been able to do with Salesforce. So you started a software with saying flows inside Salesforce, Workato on the laundry list of integrations that you’ve then got, let’s sort of run through them. What other things have you got there that are plugged into Salesforce by way of integration that Workato has helped you achieve and perhaps in walking through the laundry list of integrations just one of the time, help us understand what they do and what benefit they bring to your business?

Pat Gardner:

Sure. No, there’s more than 10. I think there’s 12 or 13, I’ll pick the most significant ones. Some of them are sort of microservices if you want to call ’em that, but I think Stripe is probably one of the most important and critical integrations that we’ve implemented. And in terms of some context of how we’ve come to using Stripe through Workato is we were using a tool that was previously called Practise Ignition. It’s now just called Ignition and I mentioned as well, we’ve got multiple business divisions, but the thing with Practise Ignition is you can only have one instance per entity and if you’ve got, you might have a nominees entity, but those sort of sub entities which are the business divisions still need to get paid separately. It just represents the engagement of that client. And so we need to have multiple instances of Practise Ignition and so that by itself does not support a integrated firm when you’ve got proposal systems, the same fricking tool, but send clients being sent proposals, accounting or from financial planning.

And so Stripe has been a game changer for us because it enabled me to actually turn what’s called Salesforce opportunities into a proposal itself. So if you think about opportunities, it’s really just like a deals object. If you use something like HubSpot, it’s just a way for classic sort of sales object where advisors or sales teams are tracking the deals, where are they in terms of their pipeline, how much is the deal, what are we selling them, et cetera. Traditionally even businesses like Salesforce will use opportunities and they’ll send you your DocuSign to sign your contract off the back of it sort of thing. But what we did was we were able to, with Stripe actually just put that sort of checkout screen on the end of the proposal. So clients are getting a proposal, which is really the just viewing a flow. They’re viewing a flow, which is a nice looking version of their client friendly version of their opportunity.

They’re viewing the scope of that proposal, the billing schedule, et cetera. That’s all custom that we’ve built. Then they get to this checkout screen and they can literally Apple pay their proposal if they’ve got an iPhone or Google Pay it with their Android device, and that is them actually checking out of a Stripe checkout session and that then kicks off your workflow that I mentioned before, so all your jobs and all your billings taken care of, and that then folds into Xero Blue. So invoicing, so all the invoices are created for that proposal all through automation, all through Ricardo. So what that means is in accounting in particular, you’re engaging clients for the financial year, but because we all care about cashflow, we don’t want to be a charging them one big lump sum on acceptance, but we also don’t want to be doing a do and charge where we’re doing that work in August and then charging them for the work that we’ve done and saying pretty please can you pay this invoice in January?

So what we do is you have the accountants that will do their proposals, a lot of ’em are done in sort of May, June, some in July, August for that financial year. Here’s the scope of work, here’s when we’re going to do it. And so they accept it and it creates all those Xero invoices all reflected in Salesforce. So I go into that opportunity and I can see exactly what the client has paid and what’s coming. So not only does that from a micro point of view, is that great, I can see what’s coming up, but it actually means we can accurately forecast to the cent what our revenue’s going to be because we’ve got all that Xero data inside Salesforce and then we can report on this advisors their target for the financial year, but also the business from the point of view how we’re tracking as a division, as a business, as a site, et cetera.

So that we’ve also got in terms of the last couple of weeks, was able to rip out DocuSign and put in Annature. So Annature is Australia’s leading e-signature provider and they also do what’s called ID verifications that is done through Stripe in their backend. But you have all the same features and benefits of DocuSign when it comes to legal agreements, but you also have more importantly platforms bloody accept them. There are so many e-signature providers out there that actually don’t accept your second or third tier E-signature providers. And so what we’ve been able to do is DocuSign has a Salesforce integration, but once again it’s custom. You can’t really configure it to what you want and it costs an absolute truckload. So we’ve actually been able to save that 80% on e-signature expenses. And if you think about the pricing model you’re paying per envelope, so it’s pay as you go. It’s not DocuSign where you put your finger in the air and go, how many envelopes am I going to send for the next 12 months? And if you get to that thousand or 1500 and you start to go over it, they will. If you don’t go through with an early renewal, they’ll start to sting you with overage charges and I don’t agree with that business model, but anyway we’ve been able to.

Rob Pyne:

Which of the platforms are you using that Annature is acceptable to? Because we have experienced the same issue where we’re all very keen to use electronic signatures and DocuSign is the one that seems to be most accepted but most expensive. We have it natively available to us in Box, which is a enterprise level document storage and box sign is a feature there, but it’s not widely accepted, which is a bit of a pain. So Annature are your experiences that that’s well accepted by the platforms and which ones are you using

Pat Gardner:

In particular? The top sort of three would be Netwealth, Macquarie, which is a big one, and BT Panorama, so they’re probably the main ones there, but they also are accepted by industry funds as well. So if you are got an Australian super account or Australian Retirement Trust, et cetera, they just have done it in a way where they’ve got the same security framework and the same, I guess, audit trail. I think a lot of what the providers care about is a quality certificate where it’s got that audit trail of here’s where they signed the IP address and the controls there. So yeah, we’ve just been really fortunate that Annature has got the same sort of security and the same level of acceptance, but I’ve then been able to build our own integration through Salesforce. So that is huge for us and it has led to, it is one of the examples of change where team members, it’s actually a similar experience when you’re configuring your envelope, et cetera, but it’s more so the change of how do I create that envelope and now it’s like, well, starting from today everyone you can do this in a job or in a workflow, whereas before a lot of them were doing it through DocuSign directly, just sort of things like that.

So that’s really powerful and infinitely scalable as well. I really love business models where you actually pay for how much you use, so it’s scaling with you and you’re not actually having that guess of how much am I going to send? Yeah,

Rob Pyne:

I’m with you on that.

Pat Gardner:

Totally Xero practice managers or Xero Green, that’s another one through Ocado that we’ve been able to use and extend, particularly for the accounting team. So accounting are using XPM on a daily basis to manage and lodge tax returns, but also activity statements and all that sort of thing. And that’s really beneficial from a Salesforce point of view is you’ve got that data, you’re just entering it once. So if you create an account in Salesforce or an account comes in through automation into Salesforce, that is created in XBM by default, so you don’t have to do that twice or manually thinking about meetings and transcriptions and if you’ve listened to the podcast, you probably notice that there’s 17 AI note taking apps out there, like everyone’s building their own AI note taking app. I have noticed it’s crazy and I think it must be because it’s crazy hasn’t it has, and I think it’s definitely due to the fact that because AI is so good at extracting information from text and from, it’s really good at transcribing in general, you can really build what you want pretty quickly.

What we’ve landed on for now is we were previously using Otter AI and it got to a stage with them where if they had a robust and well-working, Salesforce integration would totally still use them, but it got to a point where I had to pretend to be a new customer to actually get a response from their support team and it was just like, this is not sustainable and we’re using, this is pretty sensitive information that we’re putting through here in terms of client conversations. And so essentially found the equivalent similar price, but with an open API architecture that I can hook into called Fireflies. So Fireflies ai, and that means that advisors and team members, it might not even be an advice related meeting, it might be a team meeting or say a compliance meeting where you can just transcribe that meeting, but then that’ll automatically create that file note in Salesforce with all the AI action items and all that sort of thing. It means you can, it’s really a micro efficiency if you don’t have someone having to go, I’ve just done this in Fireflies or Otter, go into Salesforce, create my file note, copy the content over, it’s just a micro efficiency copy and paste exercise that we’ve alleviated there. But it also means that that can

Rob Pyne:

You build, sorry, jumping in there. Can you build the necessary training in Fireflies so that it knows what sort of file note you want and you’re not limited by because we’re using Otter, we are trying to work with the right prompt to get the best possible file note version out. Do you find that having used both Fireflies and embedded it in Salesforce as you have, you can teach it and it’s automatically built in that into your workflow. The prompt that gets that file note the way you want it

Pat Gardner:

In the backend, you can in Fireflies, so you can essentially tell it what to look out for, et cetera and have different types of meetings as well. I think the problem, and this is also probably why I’ve got 17 financial planning specific AO note taking apps coming to the forefront is a lot of those apps like Otter and even Fireflies, they’re just built for general note taking. So out of the box, they’re not really designed for those financial planning specific appointments that you’re having. But yeah, you can customise in the backend in terms of the prompts and the things to look out for. To be honest, I’m looking and watching the progress very heavily of Claris ai, so Stuart Riddle and the team there, that is probably one of the better financial planning specific AI note taking apps that I’ve seen. And it’s also just a really nice user interface and I’m really excited to hopefully one day to be able to use the tech of that, so the backend of something like a Claris and then have the Salesforce as the front end where you can actually go into a meeting with your Salesforce app if it’s an in-person meeting for example.

That’s another challenge is most of these apps like Otter and Fireflies are built for virtual meetings, whereas we all know we’ve got hybrid situations where you might have one, sometimes you might not even have everyone in the same location. You might have a couple of people online, but also a client partner might be online client in the meeting itself. So that’s what I’m looking at from the perspective of moving forward. But that has been also really critical because it means that advisors don’t need to, A CRM should be where the system of record where everything has happened and transpired. So if you’re taking away the risk, that advisor could leave a recording inside Fireflies or the said transcription app, if it’s not there, then it didn’t happen. So you need to make sure it’s coming to the CRM, so it benefits everyone. So you don’t have sort of selfish behaviour, which is not obviously on purpose, but you need your team to know what happened in that meeting too. It’s not just all about the advisor going, yes, I’ve done my file notes, you need that to come through into the CM.

Rob Pyne:

Pat, how do you think about the recording and retention of those records? Are you retaining the transcripts on the client file as well as the file note that flows from that? Because one of the things we know about AI is it loves information and the more information you can keep and teach it on more effective it becomes, have you thought that issue through as to what you want to do with the transcriptions and do you store them in full as well as a summary against the client file

Pat Gardner:

At the moment? In terms of what’s on the front end, it’s just the AI summary in terms of all the action items and the discussion points and all the questions, all that sort of thing. You’ve got a link straight to the actual Fireflies interface. But to answer your question around transcript, absolutely, yes. So through automation and through Workato, we’re actually grabbing that transcript as a file, creating a file from that transcript and popping that into SharePoint to be used at a later date. That’s the other good thing about Fireflies is because you’ve got that API, we can essentially extract that data as the transcript happens. So if we find that better tool, Claris is an example, it’s not going to be this massive exercise of probably with Fireflies pretend to be a new client to say, Hey, can we have our data please? So there’s that element of it, but that streamlines or segues really nicely into the next best of breed integration being OpenAI.

So OpenAI, obviously they’re behind chat GPT, but they’ve got all that same capability and ability through API. So that means that immediately overnight you can hook up your data source and start having conversations with it or using that data to get what you need. So it means that we can actually use Open AI. So through their API to as you’re sort of alluding to there with the transcripts, actually finding those nuggets of gold through conversations with clients, turning that into whatever we want from the point of view, whether that becomes marketing material or at the very least, generating a really comprehensive client summary. If you’ve got an advisor that’s being transitioned in terms of this new advisor is coming on or a client is changing hands, being able to go into that Salesforce record and literally click a button and see this is the 10 important things that the client has spoken about in the last 12 months, here’s what you should be worried about or here are the opportunities versus having to troll through file notes and listen to hours of recordings is a massive benefit.

Rob Pyne:

Okay, so here’s one for you. Everyone’s picked up the phone and spoken to a major corporate, and the first thing you hear is this call is being recorded for quality and training purposes. I think have you gone as far as recording calls, phone calls and giving people who are calling in a heads up to that effect and taking transcriptions from telephone calls as well as doing those in-person meetings? Because one of the things, the applications I think that could spring from keeping those transcripts is actually it’s a training opportunity. I mean, as you say, you actually can interrogate that information and see where perhaps there’s a better way things could have been said or done, but also in a quality sense compliance officers currently have a pretty terrible task of randomly selecting files and trolling through notes. But I imagine with your advanced thinking on this, you’ve already begun to think about how you could actually look for in a compliance sense how things are being done because everyone’s interested in doing things the right way. It doesn’t mean to say people don’t make mistakes. And so can you see that being an application for the capture of those transcriptions?

Pat Gardner:

100%. I think that we use Zoom phone for example, and to be honest, we should switch on the recording by default. We just haven’t. And that’s probably more of a change management and just an exercise of everyone being comfortable with that and just making that decision as a business. I think that that will actually sometimes probably have more benefit than the file note transcription because I don’t know, file notes always seem to come out as the polished version of the conversation, whereas a lot of the advice and a lot of the struggle happens on the phone in terms of having those hard conversations about do I implement this advice calling about markets? All that sort of thing. And I don’t know, it’s also just that balance of are we going to maintain that sort of raw relationship if the call’s being recorded, as you mentioned in terms of that disclaimer at the start. So I think that’s a real challenge. And so it’s probably just about the catch 22, isn’t it on can we build better relationships with you in the future because we have recorded this call or do we just have a great relationship point in time? I’m not sure

Rob Pyne:

I’ll share my own perspective on that one. We’ve had this conversation internally just recently, and I was using the example of people, I mean, I’ve heard that intro on a phone call so many times. It’s almost ignore it. I mean that it’s being recorded. They don’t be patchy like an old stockbroker thing used to do, used to beep at you tell you were being recorded still, but I think people forget very quickly and just become natural in that conversation. I was using the example, I got a bit of a laugh. I was always staggered. I wasn’t an avid watcher, but early days of the Big Brother house, when people were in there and getting video recorded on everything that we’re doing, I’m thinking, have they forgotten they’re being recorded because I couldn’t believe the behaviour. And I think that’s true of the way we all operate. I mean, you forget the cameras are there or you forget that you’re being recorded and you just operate naturally. And so I think that initial reluctance, perhaps some people have, I just don’t think people will change the way they interact with us if there’s a recording of that call. But it remains to be seen. We haven’t done it yet ourselves. We have Zoom phone, we’re testing it ourselves, and then we are looking to take those transcriptions and add them to that library of information we can use to improve quality and training.

Pat Gardner:

Yeah, no, I think that is a great analogy on Big Brother there. But you’re also right around in terms of using those apps in in-person meetings, you literally just press record on your phone, put it in the middle of the table, and you’re totally right. After a couple of minutes you forget and the sort of stiffness goes away from going, oh geez, I’m being recorded here. And the benefits do far outweigh the cost or the risk there. I think it is definitely something that we need to get on top of. But also I’d be really keen to catch up with yourself and Nick again on to see your findings on that.

Rob Pyne:

So you’ve given us a bunch of stuff there. I would like to just explore this question that we’ve had, and I know we’ve spoken a little bit about this. You mentioned contents there at one point, and I think I’m not sure that you use contents near still or some variation of that because capturing information for clients, making it easy for the client to give us their information. Can you tell us a bit about how you think about that initial onboarding process with clients and gathering all their information? How do you manage that?

Pat Gardner:

Not too well, I don’t think at the moment. So we went down the Content Snare path would’ve been a few months ago now, and it’s because I’ve been trying to essentially replicate what Content Snare does inside Salesforce. And so really what that is is you’re building, you essentially building a tailored form for every client. You can start from a template, but then you can build out additional questions. So clients can get this tailored style checklist essentially of information that we need. And you can sort of go from there. You sort of piloted the content area and I did a lot of work on building that Salesforce integration. Once again, they’ve got an API, so I was able to do it through Workato, and what we found was it was just taking so much more time to actually prepare the checklist or prepare what the client needed to provide.

And it wasn’t overly, it’s intuitive, but it wasn’t overly intuitive where you would go, wow, this is going to change our lives. And so to be honest, we’ve actually gone back to the drawing board on how we actually capture information and get information from clients. And I think it really has highlighted that we have done so much work on the backstage of our business on the practise management side of things. So building all that architecture so that we can then focus on the front stage now, because you can’t have a great front stage experience with clients if you don’t have that architecture, the frameworks in place in the backend. And so to be quite frank with you, it’s something that we’re still exploring to the point where this month I’m actually building out our going back to drawing board in terms of building out through flow, because what was too, and it’s crazy how things pan out, but loved content set from the point of view, it’s so customizable, but because it was so customizable, that became an issue for the team because everything became unique and bespoke.

And there are just times where you need that standard procedure, standard process where all clients go down this path. It makes it really easy from a process perspective in terms of what’s going to happen next, where data goes, et cetera. And so it’s really glad that we’ve explored and gone down that path. I’m disappointed that we haven’t got to a stage where clients are giving their information in a really nice and easy way yet, but also excited that we’re going to solve that at least in the next couple of months. But yeah, I think the next stage too is actually looking at a fully fledged client portal. This is the other thing in terms of, because we do have the ability and capability question.

Yeah, we do have the ability to anything and everything because Salesforce, that blank canvas, it’s the old adage that just because you can build something on Salesforce doesn’t mean you should. And it comes back to the mantra of looking out there to say, are there best of breed tools out there that we can integrate? So it’s really looking at are there those tools out there that can actually solve those problems? Mainly probably from a fact finding perspective, particularly from an open banking style experience, instead of having to manually enter information that stays static for however many months until you see the client again. But also that information and data collection, but also sharing as well. So yeah, an ongoing challenge Rob.

Rob Pyne:

Yeah, and so as you say, just because you can build it on Salesforce or use Salesforce’s tools doesn’t mean you should early stages from a portal standpoint, are you thinking it will be a standalone specialist piece of software that integrates with Salesforce that you will look to? I mean it might be too early to say, but are you thinking a standalone portal software that is integratable to Salesforce?

Pat Gardner:

Yeah, in the past, and we still have clients on it, so Myprosperity has been something that we used before we actually bought Salesforce and what it turned out was it was just another island of data. It wasn’t actually talk about integrated front stage backstage. It was really just this client area where you just have to remember to go in there. Obviously there’s a process issue there in terms of us going, this is where we use and really double down on using this for all clients, but we just didn’t get to that point. But I’m really interested in exploring Myprosperity from a robust Salesforce integration perspective. If we can’t get that, if we can’t come to an agreement with them, if they don’t have that, if we can’t integrate it in a way that sort of suits us from the point of view of workflow and visibility and just getting things done more efficiently and quicker, we just won’t go down that path.

But that’s the current avenue we’re exploring, as you mentioned, that sort of point solution but integrated with Salesforce. Salesforce has, it comes back to the original point around Salesforce plus, plus, plus plus in terms of they’ve got experience cloud, but that comes even more of a blank canvas than Salesforce itself. So you then got to build it yourself, you got to maintain it. I am not looking forward to the potential of having to build some sort of open banking integration. It’s not something that I think we should be doing from scratch. I’m confident on the document sharing and the content side of things, but I think it will fall down when we go down that open banking path if it’s not done properly and I want to do it right the first time, especially when clients are involved, you don’t want to muck them around. You don’t want to muck anyone around, but if you have a choice, you don’t want to muck around your clients in terms of portals and process changes and all that sort of thing.

Rob Pyne:

Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. And did you say, I mean what you are describing and clearly something that’s coming through is a really strong theme you Pat, is that you’re thinking about it being everything has to be sort of central and has to be able to come through the one system, the one operating system where everything must be, you must live inside the system if you have to go out to different systems, it sort of quickly falls down and as you say, when you mentioned a data island with Myprosperity, if you can find a way to pull everything back through the one source of truth, that obviously is the key and the thing you always, that is your core principle in everything you’re looking at is the ability to bring it back through the database and build it into our workflows.

Pat Gardner:

Yeah, I think the other thing too, Rob, is that that’s not the only data island that we have in an existing way and we always forget that product providers and platforms are actually, they’re part of the tech stack as well, just sometimes they don’t get put in the diagram or thought about. But we’re starting to see finally tools like CFS and Netwealth where they’ve now got APIs and I’m really excited about Netwealth in particular. They’re our, I guess you’d say preferred platform. We’ve got multiple platforms that we use, but Netwealth is just, it works well for us and the way that we I guess manage clients and recommend advice to clients, but I’ve been able to hook up Netwealth through their API through Workato to the point where, and obviously this podcast isn’t sponsored by Netwealth, unlike the Advicetech one where the experience is actually nicer inside Salesforce looking at a client’s Netwealth account than it is actually in the Netwealth platform itself.

Plus you’ve got the ability for, I mentioned OpenAI before, the ability to actually click a button to get a summary of what’s actually happened in that account. And that’s just in a reactive way. We’re now at a point where all Netwealth accounts are feeding through not just a balance from a balance perspective. I don’t know if you want to talk about bloody financial planning revenue management, but you’ve got all the transaction data coming through, which means you can see whether an advice fee has been paid and when it was last paid. You’ve got things like rollovers coming through or concessional contributions or pension payments. So I can easily use AI to ping an advisor and say, this has happened or this hasn’t happened through automation. So you’ve got all these abilities to just really enhance your platform relationship in another platform. It’s also bringing through things like CGT information, insurance stuff and just the financial holdings, all that sort of thing. It just opens up a whole world of possibility. And just going back to the original point, it is just picking your product or your platform provider can sometimes be as important as picking your client portal provider because dealing with ’em on a daily basis.

Rob Pyne:

Yeah, wow. I have a mixture of excitement and envy I’m talking to you, pat, because clearly you’re right at the cutting edge of what’s possible and seeing as you say thinking platforms, they’re a part of the tech stack and bringing data directly natively through from the platform makes a lot of sense that platforms base, it’s a huge part of what we do and the investment that those firms have to put into their software and into their technology to actually be able to support businesses like ours is obviously significant, but it sounds like I should say whilst this podcast isn’t responsible by, well, clearly you guys have really taken the Batten and run with it there and it’s impressive to hear. Just to go sort of to that question of what’s possible and what it takes to make decisions around technology rolling out, you guys are accountants and financial planners, so you’re pretty good at running the numbers on growth and profitability and some of those things clearly are going to make significant savings in time.

How does the business in advance, if it does it in advance, measure the cost and benefit of the improvements your tech stack brings to the bottom line? Do you sort of get a long leash to go, just go for it, pat, we’ll figure it out and decide if it’s worth it after you’ve figured it out? Or do you make a calculated choice at the front end to say, well, what is it going to cost us to do this? Do we actually even test it first? Because obviously there’s a cost to bringing on all these pieces of technology and adding them onto the Salesforce plus system as you described. So how do you guys approach that?

Pat Gardner:

Yeah, I mean I don’t think we’re particularly good at it from a science perspective or in terms of having a robust or rigid process on it. And I don’t think, as you alluded to, we have seen a lot of the benefit yet in terms of a cost and efficiency wins seen a truckload of the cost, but a lot of that benefit has still come and a lot of what we’re doing is micro efficiencies. I think this is probably more concerning than impressive, but in the last 30 days we’ve run 1.39 million pieces of automation just inside the Salesforce platform. So that’s the flows that we were talking about in terms of kicking off processes, creating records, updating fields, et cetera. And so what I’ve done in the past, and I need to keep doing this is I’ve got what’s called automation logs where it actually tracks when that automation is used.

So I can get really granular in terms of when this process was used, if I’ve been able to ascertain how long that process took before I can directly see how long it’s taking now, and then you can get that direct, direct cost of what’s this team member’s effective hourly rate and the time. It’s just a simple equation there in terms of whether we’re kicking goals from a process efficiency point there. We talked about tools like Annature before, that’s probably a rare example of massive cost saving but also massive team member delight in the long term, but it means that the experience is also better. So when you can save cost but also improve experience, that is an absolute no brainer. Where it becomes really challenging is when you might have this tool that is half the cost, but you know that the team are going to have probably a experience that is not as streamlined and nice as it is now.

So that’s always a challenge mentioned as well around a lot of the cost is actually indirect and it is actually based on the change management, it’s just slowing down before you ramp up and seeing the benefits of that. And a lot of that is actually where it actually takes away from my time and others’ time to actually train on the new way of doing things. So then that delays other tools, et cetera. I think the way that we’ve been able to use a tool like wado but also Salesforce is because a lot of those costs are fixed, like Wado will scale with you in terms of you’ve got this base cost, right? As you mentioned, the credit card limit might’ve been maxed out with the initial purchase for you Rob if you were going to go down that path. But when you ramp up that automation, it becomes a lot cheaper based on how hectic your businesses or sites are, et cetera.

So it means that you can actually gradually consolidate systems into say Workato and just actually simplify your tech stack in that way. I think from the perspective of I gave you that sort of Stripe and Salesforce example of being able to consolidate not only to practise ignition examples, but they also take a clip on say the Stripe side of things. So they’re making money on the transaction fees that clients are paying or that we’re in terms of, that gets passed on to us that we’re paying. So you’ve got the point where once again, you’re saving money but also creating a better experience. I think the reality is though for us as a Collins SBA as a site that’s based in Hobart with sort of 47 team members, that we were just too small to be spending that amount of money on both enterprise CRM and a full-time head of technology slash retired financial advisor.

So we’ve been able to cross that hurdle now through essentially our second site in Newcastle through a partnership with an accounting firm, but overnight be able to see if we think about headcount increasing. That’s how I tend to measure it is you’ve got what is our actual cost per user and what is the marginal cost of a new user coming on? If we can keep that below about 300 bucks a month, I’m happy. In terms of about this stage and we are seeing now the scale benefits of our Salesforce licences. For example, we’ve had to trigger an early renewal as this new site has come live. It means that tools like Workato, which are a big upfront cost can be spread across the multiple sites as well. And so now we’ve been able to cross that hurdle through an increased headcount. And so all that money that we’ve spent over the last three or five years, building that architecture, building that framework has meant that we can then scale and then realise that benefit over time.

But to answer your original question, I don’t think we’ve seen a lot of the benefit yet and it’s definitely not an exact science or formula to working out what is the actual benefit, and I wish we did more on that and I need to get better on it. And I think just in the last three weeks or so, I’ve actually started tracking my time to the minute. So using a time, that’s another integration actually use a time tracking app called Timely, which uses AI and actually tracks your activity so you can easily log a time sheet, but also rolling that out to team members as well to say, how much fricking time are you spending on this job? So not only can we accurately charge clients, but then we can work out really clearly what processes are taking the most time and then actually do that process that I mentioned before around okay, before versus after and just drive the productivity as simple as that. But we could do so much more, get so much better at it, Rob.

Rob Pyne:

Yeah, sure. I mean, you’ve frightened a lot of people there by saying you’re tracking your time to the minute. So you’ve talked a lot about Workato being a massive win Annature on document signing. If you had to pick one where you felt that there was one really big win in terms of positive impact on the business where everyone just went high five, pat, you’ve really nailed this and the client experience, so perhaps the clients, the team, the management team at Cols SBA all just said, wow, we’ve really nailed it on this one. What one would you put at the top of the list for you guys in terms of having that big win?

Pat Gardner:

I think it has to be, so it’s probably one and a half. So I think the accounting workflow side of things where when we were able to present that in terms of the finished product, started small, tried to start with a little team and just build and build and build to essentially unravel what Creative Mass had done with the butchering of the tasks and the workflow side of things and the team members leaving. I had to make accounting grade again hat on in the meeting. We had a literal team member in tears of happiness because we had just solved accounting workflow. I’ll never forget that in terms of the impact of everyone coming together to go, wow, this platform could actually do what it says on the jar. So that was a good sort of winning back trust on like, yes, we’re going down the right path, but also this CRM literally just been rebuilding trust in the Salesforce CRM platform for the last three or four years.

People didn’t know that it was created Mass or Wealth Connect that was butchering it. They just thought Salesforce was crap. So it’s just coming back on that journey. But the main thing, it has to be the proposal side of things. The ability for a team member now they can send out within a couple of minutes and they know that client exactly what they’re going to see. They know that that means that their workflow’s going to fire off. That’s pretty just clean, rigid process and a client has accepted that proposal in as quick as about 90 seconds. So the ability to be able to send out and take funds within in terms of client time and advisor time or whoever’s preparing the proposal time less than five minutes is I think unheard of in financial planning and financial services accounting as well. And the fact that I can, as someone who, as I mentioned, a retired financial advisor who does not know how to code but can use Ricardo to the point where we can charge clients via a p, I think that’s pretty incredible.

You can actually trigger a debit from someone’s bank account or card through API through Workato and that all then rolls through and reconciles in Xero, et cetera. We’ve been using that way of doing things for about 18, 19 months now. And I remember being so nervous this was something that we could not muck up if you are going from a tool that literally is proposal software to something that someone has without technological or technology experiences built and go, yeah, we’re just going to replace it with this and we’re going to start charging $8 million of revenue per annum through this wild and wacky tool that Pat’s built to see that actually work and come through and reconcile and not have as many issues as you thought. I was pretty proud of that to be honest, in terms of it’s quite simple on the front end, but in the backend there’s probably a bit of a spider’s web and lots of bandaid fixes initially, but I think to be able to use Flow and Workato to do something like that, had to have clients, apple pay proposal, workflow kickoff, all that sort of thing, I think that has to be one of the prouder moments for sure.

Rob Pyne:

Yeah, that would’ve been massive. And I love the story where you had an accountant in tears of joy to see workflows that actually worked, and as you say, they associated the problems with Salesforce, not the actual implementation of Creative Mass and the way they tried to roll it out. So well done on that. You actually won back the trust after it had been severely damaged by the sound of it to the point where we’d had a couple of staff leave thinking we can’t work with this. So yeah, very, very impressive my friend. Just as one final question then, if we can, and you may have touched on it a bit throughout the conversation, and I just as a wrap up question, just you are right at the very front edge of what’s possible here. You’re looking at all the technology day in day, you seeing what’s possible to make is more efficient client experience better. You’ve talked about the backstage being where you’ve focused your attention and your energy and done a lot of work on that, which has made the business internally a lot more efficient. And now moving more to front of stage, you’ve mentioned portal and the like. How do you see technology evolving within financial planning and accounting or just in your own business because obviously you are a multidisciplinary business head. What are the emerging trends or tools you are really excited to integrate into your system?

Pat Gardner:

I think it has to be using AI in a responsible but also beneficial way and just leveraging the data that you’ve got in your CRM. By default, I’m the gatekeeper of the information and the data in our Salesforce system, so can you create this report or this dashboard, et cetera. But we’ve been able to build through that Open AI API integration, all these prompt templates where someone can just click a button and get all the insights they need based on what they want. I think that’ll massively change the CRM landscape going forward. And I think it is critical, as you sort of talked to before around the recording of conversations, I think within the next sort of six to 12 months, we will see essentially hands off the keyboard in terms of you, you’ll have a conversation with the client or prospective client, you’ll hang up that call or hang up that meeting and then you’ll go and actually look at your CRM and it will have actually populated all the relevant information.

So whether that’s the fact find or their date of birth, like mobile numbers, just basic stuff where people are still re-keying or keying that information manually. I think data entry will go from the point of view of the CRM side of things there and CRM will become far more around proactive insights than reactive, looking for information you think you talked about sort of platforms before and tools like Myprosperity, all that sort of thing. I know they’ve come a long way since we were using them five or six years ago fully, but you still, and this is where AR really helped, you still have to look for those insights and look for, oh, client got paid or payslips a bit different this month, or concessional contributions is a bit different, et cetera. So a lot of that proactive stuff should be taken care of by ai, which will, as everyone sort of says, it’ll enable you to build deeper relationships with clients, et cetera, but it actually will, you’ll actually have the data there and the insights there.

You’ve got what is it, industry super funds now that are starting to charge less than a thousand bucks a year to provide advice. So it’s just so clear that what becomes more important or more important than ever is to just ensure that you have all your data in the right place and the tools in front of you to build and maintain client relationships and just to be proactive. It’s that simple. And in terms of going forward as a business from an integration point of view, we’ve talked about the client portal. I think that will change things dramatically, but also working on things like a direct a TO integration that’ll take it to the next level from, at least from an accounting point of view, but that’ll open up a world of opportunity for our financial planning advisors to get those warm referrals, those warm sort of introductions because we’ll have all that a TO data in the system as well, so you’re not reliant on a person to find those insights on page 73 of the financial statements from last year.

So I think we’re going to see a lot more proactive stuff happen and to be able to have that level of integration with something like an Open ai, we didn’t even mention that You can just swap out tools willy nilly. If I go into a recipe or a process and go, I want to swap out Stripe for another billing engine, I can just do that. It’s probably not as simple as that. I’ve definitely oversimplified it, but it’s possible. So I think there’s that, and I think that’s probably another point around technology moving forward and the landscape and all that sort of things is you’ll have tools where you’ve got the rise of orchestration technology, so Ricardo and Power Automate and MuleSoft and all those sort of things where you’ll hopefully it’ll become a bit like the states where you can just plug and play your tools and your data and you’re not beholden to say an X plan or a big CM that’s trying to do it all. Just the plug and play is just going to continue and become easier as well.

Rob Pyne:

I think it’s an exciting future to think about that you are a unique individual in that you have come from being a financial planner and therefore you don’t come from this as a technology person. You came from it from a practitioner standpoint, and then you’ve adapted to becoming a tech innovator. So being able to chat to you, someone who actually understands the side of the fence we sit on and not listen to someone who’s actually just got a technology hat that doesn’t understand the financial planning world. Very impressive. The work you’ve done, terrific to chat to you this afternoon. We could talk for a long time. I really feel like this is a conversation that could go on for three hours plus, but respecting your time. I know it’s a bit earlier where you are than where I am, but I really am so appreciative you’ve taken the time to over chat to me, pat. It’s very exciting times. We are living in the space that you are operating in day-to-Day in technology. So thanks again for taking the time, joining me on the Trusted Advisor podcast.

Pat Gardner:

Thanks for having me, Rob. I really appreciate it. And yeah, I had a great time chatting and all. Look forward to talking to you again soon. Cheers.

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